Come a Stranger

by Cynthia Voigt

  Mina heard her family gathering in the dining room and she heard the slow summer rain start plopping down outside. She looked at the plates of food standing ready on the Formica table close up to the wall. The kitchen wasn’t any too large, and it wasn’t any too fancied up, but the air was warm and filled with food smells, the meaty smell of beef stew and the bready smell of biscuits and, lighter in the air, the smells of vegetables. Mina felt so snug in there, among shelves of glasses and dishes and food in cans and bags and boxes, she almost didn’t want to go out to the table. In a fit of contentment, sharper for thinking of Miss LaValle, Mina brought down the honey jar. Louis loved honey and butter mixed together to spread on his biscuits. She’d sit next to him and show him how to mix them, so Momma wouldn’t have to worry about him making sticky messes.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mina got back in touch with Kat that week. Kat didn’t ask her for any apologies, but she made a brief one anyway, and that was that. Through Kat, she got back in touch with Rachelle and Sabrina and all the rest. They were a little standoffish with her, but she figured that wouldn’t last long. They didn’t ask her about what had happened, except for Kat, privately. To Kat she said quite honestly that it turned out she had the wrong build to study ballet, and the wrong color. Kat didn’t say anything, but she kept her eyes on the ground and her lips pursed up just a little, so Mina could guess what she was thinking, that it might have been better, after all, not to have been the one chosen. Mina didn’t say so out loud, but she sort of agreed. Anyway, she told Kat, absolutely honestly, she was glad to be back home.

  They went to the beach every day, where they horsed around with the boys and girls there. Kat was crazy about Lije Wilstrum. Lije worked on his uncle’s boat during the summer, so he’d show up around midafternoon, after the mornings haul of crabs had been taken care of. Kat would eyeball him from her towel or go down to the water’s edge and sit alone, making holes in the sand, hoping Lije would go in for a swim and say a word as he passed by. He was a couple of years older and Kat looked like a little girl, so she didn’t get much of his attention. He knew she had a crush on him, though. Mina could tell that by the way he made sure to strut by close to where Kat was. If he came over, it was Mina or Rachelle he’d talk to, but he’d keep an eye on Kat. It was fun on the beach, with the radios going and a bunch of people around and the sea nettles just starting to come in, so you could still swim without worrying if you’d get stung. Once you’d been in the water to cool down, the heat didn’t seem so bad. The beach was a long, narrow strip of dirty sand, and it was black people exclusively who used it. They stretched out along the sand, kids at one end, families in the middle, all stretched out to enjoy themselves. Relaxed, Mina wondered why she hadn’t known how unrelaxed she had been the last year. Her eyes found Louis among the dark bodies and bright suits. When he looked up, she smiled at him. He came over then, and she hugged him, pulling him down beside her on the towel, keeping an arm around him.

  Mina kept on visiting with Miz Hunter too. The Scrabble games were fun. She was getting good enough to come close to winning, sometimes. Miz Hunter told her about books she should read when she got older, and some she should have read already. They talked a lot about Africa, because Miz Hunter was an Africa freak. She’d always wanted to go to Africa, she said. “There’s always been an African movement, ever since the War Between the States,” she told Mina.

  They were sitting on her porch, drinking lemonade, just watching whatever life went by on the quiet street. It was too hot and humid to move around. Even Louis lay quiet, coloring on old newspapers under a shady dogwood. “Liberia’s the place.”

  Looking around her, Mina wondered why anyone would leave. The houses lined up neatly and a few air conditioners hummed. The leaves drooped with heat, like beet greens too long in the store; nobody was expecting anybody to do anything in this weather. Everything was hot and moist and lazy. The lemonade slid cool down her throat.

  “That’s a functioning political state, and it’s a black state,” Miz Hunter said. “I’d have liked to be part of it. There’s something about the idea of building a country.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Oh, it was dangerous, I guess. Pioneering always is. You have to be pretty adventurous, or in pretty much trouble at home, to go out and be a pioneer.” Miz Hunter lifted her glass to her mouth and drank.

  “Like the frontiersmen,” Mina said. “I’d have been terrified,” she added, thinking about what it would be like to be scalped or captured by Indians.

  “You’d have managed, Missy. It’ll get you nowhere to underestimate yourself.”

  “You never even went to visit Liberia?”

  “It’s awfully expensive. I had family here, and friends, and then—when I finally married”—Miz Hunter laughed—“I had Mr. Hunter and the children.”

  Mina hadn’t known that Miz Hunter had children. She wondered where they were.

  “But it was always my dream. It was always—I wondered what it would feel like to be part of the majority. If I’d feel different.”

  “We’re the majority around here,” Mina pointed out.

  “You think so?”

  Well, Mina did. She almost never saw white people, except downtown. It was like Connecticut, only reversed.

  “We’re about half and half, around here,” Miz Hunter told her. “Where I lived in Alabama, we were the real majority. But there are majorities and majorities, there’s more to it than just numbers. I spent some long nights dreaming about Africa.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mina said, thinking about dancing. “But I can see how you wouldn’t have wanted to leave all this.” She looked down the street, and up the street.

  The church was on one side, then her own house on the other, with its two shade trees by the front porch, then the Westers’ house and the Phillipses’ . . . She went on, naming them to herself. She knew every family, on both sides of the street, and all around the blocks.

  Miz Hunter chuckled. “Oh, it wasn’t like this. This here is next to heaven. For our people, it is. Down south, we were still too close to slavery.”

  “But it’s been years, over a century.”

  “That’s not so long a time. It feels long, but it isn’t. My grandmother was born a slave, in Louisiana, and I was eight when she died. I remember her. Her mother, my great-grandmother, was a house slave. My great-grandaddy worked in the cane fields until he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “I’m pretty sure he died, but my grandmother’s mother never knew. He ran off, to get North. They never said exactly why, probably they didn’t know. There’d have been any number of reasons why a man would want to run off North.”

  “To be free.”

  “And to come back and buy his family free. My grandmother used to tell us, all her childhood she was waiting for this big handsome man to come for her. He was big, she said, and strong and handsome. He went off into the swamps one night and never was seen again. They went after him with the dogs, but they never got him.”

  “So maybe he did get away,” Mina said.

  “I used to think that. So I went down there, out of curiosity, one summer vacation. He’d taken up a lot of my dream-time too, that big handsome black man who wouldn’t be kept down in slavery. I took a bus down below New Orleans into the area where they lived. There was a kind of National Park, if you can call it that, with paths laid out through the swamp. Nobody much ever went there. I did.”

  Miz Hunter drank and swallowed. “Nobody needs to see that place, Missy. I had a clean room waiting. I had a friend waiting in New Orleans who would prepare me a fine dinner. I had a job to keep me, a good, secure job. Even so, looking at that place made me want to give up and die.” Her eyes looked out across some distance. Her words came slow. “The water was still, dead still, and green slime all along the top. Those cypress trees—between the dead stumps coming up black out of the water and the live trees tangled up overhead with vines to keep the s
un out and keep the wind out and keep anything clean out . . . I almost couldn’t make myself walk into it. He’d have had nothing with him, nothing but the clothes he wore and his bare hands and his bare courage. You could hear the trees creaking, sometimes. And bugs—and—it was the kind of place snakes love; it felt like the kind of place anything bad would be at home in. There were little hummocks of land, sometimes, and the water looking like pea soup gone bad on the stove. I was on a pathway, no more than half a mile from a town road, and I felt it reaching out for my soul. No, he died in there. As soon as I saw it I knew that. What made me wonder was what a man’s life could be like to make him go in there in the first place. Any man walking into that swamp was walking into death—so whatever lay behind him must have been worse than death.”

  Mina felt cold. She could see it, almost, and she thought that he would have looked like Mr. Shipp. It could have been Mr. Shipp born in slavery, sold into slavery. The painted boards of the porch floor felt thin, flimsy; when they gave out there was a swamp waiting underneath.

  “That’s terrible,” she said.

  “What’s most terrible,” Miz Hunter answered her, although her thin old voice didn’t sound like it was so terrible, “was that if he’d just waited a few years, he’d have been freed. It wasn’t ten years later that the war was finished. He couldn’t know, probably didn’t even know war was coming. The ignorance of slaves—nobody told them anything, nobody taught them—But if he’d only waited, he’d have had his freedom and his life.”

  “Oh no,” Mina said.

  “You have to look with a long eye, Missy. Some people never learn that, and I’d guess that my great-grandfather was that kind. We live in a blink of time, but God looks with a long eye.”

  “That wasn’t much over a hundred years ago,” Mina said.

  “And it’s been quite a road since then,” Miz Hunter told her. “If you look down that road with a long eye—as your poppa does—its almost a miracle how much territory has been covered.”

  But Mina’s imagination was stuck there in the green swamp, with a man who looked like Mr. Shipp, half in and half out of the water, alone, and his skin crawling over with bugs and covered with slime, the black skin that covered his strong muscles. She’d never understood before. Because that kind of man wouldn’t be quiet under any master.

  She put her glass down, even though her mouth was dry. She couldn’t have swallowed anything. She couldn’t have gotten anything down past the anger and misery, the pity and the bitterness all mixed up in her throat. She was looking with a long eye, and that man lay too close to be forgotten about.

  CHAPTER 12

  The day the Shipps came for supper, Mina and Louis, with Kat helping too, steamed and picked a bushel of crabs. They were at it all morning long. Belle was supposed to help, Momma had told her to, but once she got out of bed she decided it was too hot for work. She took her towel and went off to the beach. Steaming the crabs was easy, but the picking was tedious.

  Louis took the legs off, opened the shells and cleared out the gills. As a reward, Mina let him eat as many of the big pincers as he wanted. She and Kat did the finer work of picking the meat out of the many-chambered body. It was midafternoon before they had the big bowl of crab meat in the refrigerator. “Okay, Louis, now let’s go get some corn and tomatoes,” Mina said. She had an eye on the clock. There wasn’t any press for time, but there wasn’t any time to waste either. She was enjoying getting ready for the evening. She was looking forward to the dinner.

  “Can I come?” Kat asked.

  “Sure, but don’t you want to go to the beach?”

  “I thought I wouldn’t, today. There’s such a thing as being too available, you know.”

  “There’s such a thing as being too young,” Mina teased.

  “He’s not so much older, only three years.”

  “We’d like to have you along, wouldn’t we, Louis? But we’re going to have to bike out to Milson’s.”

  “It’s something to do,” Kat said. Mina knew she was having a hard time staying away from the beach, where Lije might be. She wasn’t sure exactly why Kat had decided not to go today, but she could sympathize with how hard it was, and she thought Kat’s decision was pretty smart.

  “And it’ll be good for your figure,” Mina said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my figure, except I’m too flat.”

  “Then it’ll be good for my figure,” Mina said.

  They were walking Mina’s bike over to Kat’s house.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your figure either. We’re just both of us out of step, that’s all.” Mina stared at Kat’s coppery skin, inherited from Creole ancestors Kat had told her. When did Kat get so smart, she wondered.

  Louis balanced on Mina’s handlebars, facing front, his legs held out. He was pretty heavy, but he’d helped out so patiently all morning long that Mina didn’t have the heart to leave him behind. At the vegetable stand, they bought two dozen ears of corn and several pounds of tomatoes from a high-school boy whose nose had one of those constant summer burns that blond whites sometimes got. Kat packed the two bags of corn into the carriers on each side of her rear wheel. “I hate it,” she muttered, looking back at the stand where the boy now waited on some people from a car.

  “Hate what?”

  “Hate the way they don’t even look at us. As if we weren’t worth looking at. Didn’t you notice?”

  “What does that matter? Although he is cute.”

  “Mina Smiths. You just shut your mouth. I didn’t mean anything like that and you know it.”

  “He’s white anyway.”

  “And Lije could beat him hollow if it came to a fight,” Kat said, satisfied.

  Mina wasn’t so sure about that, but if it came to a fight it would be a lively one, from the look of the blond boy. They rode off toward town, more slowly with their more awkward loads, riding side by side. Louis held the paper bag of vegetables under one arm and gripped the handlebars with his free hand. Things were pretty precarious.

  “Do you really think he’s cute?” Kat asked.

  “No, but he’s someone they’d think was cute, if you know what I mean.”

  “Who do you think is—good looking?”

  “Like, handsome? Oh, Mr. Shipp is. And Bailey Westers. I like Bailey’s looks.”

  “Mina, he’s built like a broomstick. And his mouth is huge.”

  “I don’t mind. I just said I liked his looks, that’s all. I’m not going to marry him, or anything.”

  Because she’d helped out so much, Mina asked Kat to stay and eat with them. It was almost a party, with the five of the Smiths family, and Kat, Miz Hunter, and Mr. Shipp’s family too. Mina mixed and formed the crab cakes, then fried them gently on the big griddle Poppa gave Momma for Christmas four years ago. Even so, there were so many crab cakes that she had to do them in two batches. They ate at the table on the back porch, where it was cooler. Poppa had made the table out of a door he’d bought at a hardware store, with legs he’d bought and nailed on. It wasn’t exactly beautiful, but it was a big, steady table.

  As soon as the Shipps arrived, Mina set out the platters of food, which Kat carried out to the table. Two platters of crab cakes, piled up high, each platter decorated with lemon wedges, went out first. Then a bowl of mixed sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, tossed in Mrs. Beaulieu’s special dressing. Mina wrapped the corn around with dishtowels, to keep it hot. She had a bowl of fruit in the icebox, chilling for dessert, and she had made brownies. The kids had glasses of lemonade, the grownups had glasses of beer.

  Big as the table was, they were all crowded around it, eating and talking, passing things up and down. Mr. Shipp really liked the crab cakes, Mina could tell as she watched him take his first bites. He sat at one end of the table and her mother sat at the other. Mr. Shipp finished his first crab cake pretty quickly. Alice ate daintily, slowly.

  “Your daughter was right; these are wonderful,” Mr. Shipp said to Mina’s mother. “What
’s in them?”

  “Mostly crab,” Momma answered. “It was Mina who made them.”

  “Did she?” he asked. “Did you?”

  Mina nodded, wishing her mother hadn’t said anything about it.

  “She and Kat made this whole dinner, if you must know. I just came home and showered and changed. That’s my contribution.”

  “Well, now, then, we certainly thank you girls.”

  “It’s very nice,” Alice said.

  “Is there anything you can’t do?” Mr. Shipp asked Mina, teasing. Mina looked up at him, from where she was buttering an ear of corn for his youngest daughter. He was treating her like she was about Selma’s age, about three years old, with that jolly teasing voice.

  “Dance,” she answered, putting a stop to that conversation.

  Everybody got uncomfortable for a few seconds. Mina could almost feel eyes looking at her quickly and then away. She wondered if maybe she’d gone too far, and thought probably she had and wished she hadn’t tried to be so smart. Being t-rou-ble. But Mr. Shipp kept on looking at her, and she wasn’t going to look away. His eyes were what she liked best about his face, maybe, she thought. They were really looking at her, as if he were thinking about her and interested and amused and sorry for her, all at once. Then he smiled, just a small, quiet smile, as if he knew what she was up to. She thought maybe his smile was what she liked best.

  “Why that’s perfectly ridiculous,” Alice said. “Anybody can dance. Everybody can.”

  Mina looked at her. She had missed entirely the undertone of what Mina said. But even Louis had gotten it, and Kat was looking at Mina as if she felt sorry for her, whereas Alice . . . but Alice must have known.

  “Even Tamer can dance, when he wants to,” Alice added, to prove her point.

  Mina kept herself from giggling, but she couldn’t stop the grin that spread over her face. Because the bows on the shoulders of her sundress, which Kat had been admiring, were more important to Alice than whether or not Mina Smiths was happy, or what. Alice was like a butterfly, who would land briefly on one leaf of a tree, paying no attention to the branches going back to the trunk, or the trunk going down to the ground, or the roots digging deep through the earth. It would be an easier life, being a butterfly.