I lost it then, right on the front pew. I grabbed a handful of afro and tugged with all my might, letting go only when I remembered where I was. Brian’s eyes doubled in size. He looked like he wanted to punch me. We’d only fought once since kindergarten, but this morning would probably be the second time. And I didn’t care.
I gritted my teeth and waited for Miss Eva to knock me off the pew with that fan, but she didn’t. Nobody even looked our way anymore. All eyes were on her, watching, waiting for her to begin.
When she did, I knew that I’d had it wrong. She didn’t look like an angel. She sounded like one.
Brian was not impressed. Though no one seemed to hear us, I could certainly hear him. “You are going to regret that, fool. You watch. My hair was perfect. Perfect!” He hissed the word through his teeth.
I tried to scream over the music and tell him that his ’fro had been totally sideways since the second strain of “Amazing Grace” but I had no time to play games with him.
My wife was singing.
“She’s mine,” I said, hoping my face conveyed how crazy I felt. Crazy scared Brian more than actual fighting. That’s why I’d pulled his hair.
The youth choir stood to sing the next verse. In the back row was the tallest kid I’d ever seen. Although right now Brian was looming pretty large over my shoulder. His ’fro was turned down at the edges now, sweated out like a floppy hair hat. I was glad he couldn’t see it. This was war as it was.
Brian dug a hymnal into my side. “She’s yours? Zeely? Man, please. She’s like a foot shorter than you and she’s not even your type. If you think Rev is Jesus, she’s Jesus’ daughter. For real. Them Wilkinses is crazy.”
Still wrapped up in her singing, I didn’t respond. Zeely. What a wonderful, beautiful name. It fit her perfectly. What didn’t fit was Brian’s angry reaction and his speech patterns. He was out of control, but I could play that game.
A foot shorter? I stared at her, sizing up her small frame, then looked back at Brian’s eyes. I realized then that he hadn’t been looking at my Zeely at all. His eyes were fastened on a big-boned girl in yellow on the top row, her afro bigger than Brian’s by a good inch. A serious feat.
Oops. “So you’re not looking at Zeely?”
Brian took a deep breath. “Of course not. We’re not even friends. They’re too good for me. And you too. Things are bad enough without you pulling my hair and all like you’re nuts.” He squinted at the tall girl. “Everybody always treats me different. Like something is wrong with me. But not her. I thought she’d moved away.”
Zeely came down off a high note. So did I. “Who moved away?”
My friend was growing tired of me. “Her! The dance—”
He almost finished his sentence, but Miss Eva’s fan crashed down on his head and knocked the last letter out of his mouth. Brian looked like he wanted to cry.
If it were anyone but Brian, I would have laughed. Mama hit me harder than that to make me turn off the TV.
Zeely finished her solo. Everyone clapped but they stopped after a few seconds. Everybody but me. I gave her a standing ovation.
Brian yanked me down by my jacket pocket. Well, it was his jacket pocket actually, but still . . . I hit the bench so hard I was thankful that the pockets were the fake kind. Just flaps. Eva’s fan fluttered like a butterfly on the other side of me. The choir fought through their giggles to start the next song.
Until Brian’s hot breath hit my ear, accented with rage and spit, I probably would have never stopped clapping. “Will you quit it? See that big guy on the top row? The one with the big head and the really white teeth? That is who Zeely is going to marry. I think it’s crazy, but their parents have already agreed.”
That shut me down. I scanned the row again. That dude looked like a grown man. He did have some nice teeth. Nice tie too . . .
“Stop staring.”
Okay, they had me there. I looked away, but not before making my first church vow. It sounded like what they made me say in family court, but I meant every word.
If he wants her, he’ll have to beat me to it. So help me God, she’s mine.
5
Zeely
“Zeely, this has gone on long enough, sweetie. It’s time to stop. You’re just playing with fire and I wouldn’t be a good mother if I didn’t put a stop to it.”
I knew it would come to this eventually. I’d gotten too lazy. Grown too bold. Ron had moved back up to the front row, joined the choir. People were starting to talk and we were starting not to care. This was the day I both dreaded and prayed for every morning.
“Mother, I’m seventeen now, grown up. I think I should be able to pick who my friends are.” My breathing stayed steady. I pushed back on my bed, shoving Ron’s letters into my pillowcase. He wrote things for me in the morning and passed it to me at lunch. The next day was the reverse. Sometimes, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I risked it all and brought my notebook home.
Our notebook.
Lately, that’d been every day. I thought once that a page was torn, that my marker was out of place, but now I wondered if someone else hadn’t been reading it, tearing pages as they flipped through. I swallowed hard now, praying that my mother hadn’t read it, that she didn’t know what fire burned beneath my long skirts, what passion roughed my unmade face. The way she looked at me now—and the way my father didn’t—told me the truth I didn’t want to face.
They knew.
My mother pressed her hand to her throat. It was Saturday night and her nails were already filed into perfect ovals, long, full, and covered with clear polish. Once she’d worn a light-colored polish, a dusty rose that someone from her job had given her. Mrs. Terrigan and the other women from the church they’d grown up in had expressed concern that her worldly behavior might affect the younger women. If only they knew that we were already affected and not by some old-timey nail polish either. Daddy had complimented her on it several times, but didn’t say anything when she threw it away. Neither did he say anything now.
“See, that’s just it, Zeely Ann. You think that because you’re getting older that you can choose, that now is the time for you to be making the big decisions of your life. It isn’t. Now is hormones and emotions, nonsense that you’ll forget when you settle down with Jeremiah and start your family. We have a plan for you—”
“Doesn’t God have a plan for me?” I was on my feet now and my voice was loud and high, like when I sang the Negro spirituals at church. Daddy didn’t like them much. He said they were too painful. Those songs were like books to me. When I sang them, I saw those people torn away from love, from life, and trying to create it new in a place that made no place for it. No place for them.
I closed my eyes for the slap sure to come, waiting for the sting. My mother didn’t tolerate backtalk. “Rebellion is as a sin of witchcraft,” she would say and she’d beat the devil out of you. For my brothers and I, the remedy had been total and permanent, and then came a skinny white boy to sit in the front row of church and give me a standing ovation. It’s been over two years and he hasn’t stopped clapping. If I’m honest, I haven’t stopped singing. Only now, it’s a new tune: Why? That’s the focus of all my thoughts these days. None of the rules I once accepted about what I can wear, who I can love, where I can be seem to make sense. It seems to me now that maybe the God in my Bible and the god in my house are not the same. I don’t want to do wrong, Lord knows I don’t, but they aren’t making it easy.
I’ll talk to your father. I’ll do anything. I just want to marry you. I’ll die if I don’t. Please, don’t give up on me. We can find a way. God will make a way.
If my mother had read our notebook, what had she thought about that? What did God think?
My parents glared at each other as if they were trying to answer the same questions, only without saying any words. There was anger in my mother’s eyes, accusation. Gentleness in my father’s. Forgiveness. I wondered if it was for himself or for me.
Both.
<
br /> She stood, pointing at me. “You see what you’ve done to her? This is your fault, you know. You’ve encouraged it. Letting her go over to that heathen dance class—”
“There’s nothing wrong with that class and you know it. Joyce prays with those girls every practice. Their performances are all based on the Word.”
My mother shook her head then, raining plastic rollers down on my bed. Pink, yellow, mint green, they showered down like oversized candies. “I don’t care what she prays or what she says, I know what she is. You see what happened to that other girl, the Dixons’ daughter? That’s not going to happen to mine. You hear me? You shall know them by their fruit. Saved girls don’t need to be dancing anyhow. Dating either. I’m not going to let this boy use her up, knock her up, and then leave her for the first blond he meets in college. I’m not! And if you won’t protect her, I will.”
I sat down on my bed, letting their angry words float over my head. How could she talk about Diana like that? And Miss Joyce too? There was no point in trying to tell Mama anything. She could only hear what she wanted to hear. And Daddy? His voice only seemed to work in church.
“The boy just wants to spend time with us, to see if things can work out between them. You can’t protect that girl forever. You’re pushing them too hard. They’re kids. Just let the boy come over for dinner after church tomorrow.”
My heartbeat was all I could hear. Ron had never said anything about talking to my father. Maybe they hadn’t seen my notebook at all. Maybe they had seen something even more telling: Ron’s heart. Maybe there was a chance for us.
In seconds, I knew better. My mother threw her head back and laughed and not because anything was funny. It was mad laughter, like Macbeth or some other Shakespearean head case. Every woman has her limits and somehow, my father and I had just surpassed hers. There was no point in stopping now.
“No,” she said, half screaming, half laughing. “Noooooooo!”
“But, Mama, just give him a chance. He loves me—”
The slap came then, forceful and unexpected. I knew from the look in her eyes that it was meant to knock what she thought was the devil out of me, to shake me to my senses. As I wiped the blood from my mouth, I thought that my senses were more awake than they’d ever been.
My father moved quickly, quietly, pulling Mama’s hands behind her back. He spoke into her neck with his preacher voice. “Don’t hit her again. That’s enough.”
She twisted in his grip and worked one hand free, reaching for me. “It will never work, don’t you see? It never has. His mother will spit in your black face. Eva should have never brought that boy to the church in the first place. She knows better than anybody how folks are around here. Look what they done to her boy! That white girl said she loved him too.”
Daddy jerked her back then, hitched his arms under each of hers and began to pull her from the room. Before he shut the door, he looked back at me, and I blinked back the tears threatening in my eyes. Tears I knew would never fall.
“Forgive your mama, Birdie. And forgive me. I should have never let her go this far.”
I fell back on the pillow and closed my eyes, clutching the notebook inside the cloth to my face. Birdie. Ron called me that too, even before he knew it was my nickname. What would happen to us now in this town where race was the invisible elephant in every room, even after so much time? I could hear Ron’s answer in my heart, quiet and clear: If the elephant won’t leave, then we’ll ride him . . . all the way to our wedding.
Laughter kissed my bloody lips. Daddy was right. It never should have gone this far.
6
When the letter came announcing my scholarship, everyone cheered. I was too tired, too broken, too empty to celebrate. It had been a long, hard year, each day like sandpaper on a wound, love in short supply. Mama and Daddy were both determined now to plan my future: for her, wedding; for him, my graduation. Ron was preaching now and then, trying his best to avoid my eyes. Our secret love was now broken open before everyone, weeping everywhere we went like an open wound.
I never knew what they said to him, did to him, to make him turn from me, but I knew him well enough to know it hurt him deeply. Cut him to the bone. Only once had he said anything to me, in the hall after choir practice when everyone else had gone.
“Can you see the scar?” he’d said softly.
“From what?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
“From you,” he said, tracing my face with his finger. “From where they cut us apart.”
There was movement then, on the stairs. Someone coming for sheet music they’d left behind. We turned and ran in opposite directions and we’d been running ever since. Tonight was different. We were older now, both eighteen. Eva was frail, dying, and Ron had found a place of his own. I wondered how Brian felt about that, but I’d probably never know. My mother and some of the other families had never been kind to him. People said things but I never passed them on. Life was hard enough, I was learning, without other folks’ problems.
My own mother was sick tonight, too sick to protest when Joyce had thrown all of her students who’d earned scholarships, which really meant all of us, a party. The DJ was playing something that I’d heard when cars went by on the block, but nothing I knew the words to. Nothing I’d be singing in church anytime soon. Ron seemed to know it. I wasn’t surprised.
“Dance with me?” It was more a statement than a question, more an inevitability than a command. While other couples started for the dance floor led by a hand, Ron steered me with his body, pressed tight behind me. He stopped at the edge of the carpet and waited, spiking the front of his hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I should go.” Contradicting his words, his hands touched my hair, his lips to my eyelids.
Our classmates pushed us back, edging us onto the carpet, shielding us from the eyes of chaperones and church mothers. My arms strained to circle his neck, despite my last-minute growth spurt. He bent down to shorten the distance between us, which wasn’t any distance at all.
I waited all night for him to give me my first and only kiss, but he didn’t. Instead we danced slow and close, even on the fast songs, mourning our lost love.
“I hope he’s good to you,” he whispered finally. “I told him to be.”
Ron choked up some then. I did too.
If my mother had been there, she would have been worried how I might look to Jeremiah if he came in. “No prince wants something wasted,” she’d said days before on the night of my graduation. “Virtue is all a girl gets in this man’s world. Spend it wisely. You can never get it back.”
At the time, her words were like some kind of torture device, ripping back and forth a piece of me desperately trying to heal. Later, I would see the wisdom in those words, the love in her motivations.
Much later.
Tonight, I only saw the forbidden and the required, both pulling at me with deadly force, striking me dumb, making me numb.
“I will miss you,” I told him.
In truth I’d always been missing him, since the first day I saw him, long before he’d come to the church. He and Brian had been racing at the Charles C and a child’s bike was in the way. Brian hurdled over it, but Ron stopped and wheeled around the corner to the sound of a little boy’s cry.
No one else saw but me.
And now it was me crying, only no sound was coming out. We danced for four songs, but it seemed like forever. At the end of the last tune, a bone-deep Anita Baker ballad that even a church girl like me knew the words to, we let go, biting our lips and choking back everything that could have been.
And then I saw him.
Jeremiah, half drunk and wearing his letter jacket even though it was June. In one hand he held a beer, in the other, the thigh of the homecoming queen of the school across town. She’d made the cheerleading squad at Central State, where he’d be playing football, first string. I made it too, but not without a fight from Mama. Too much temptation, she said.
She gave in eventu
ally, urging me to stay away from Jeremiah as much as possible. I even had a bishop’s daughter for a roommate to keep an eye on me. Not that I needed to be watched, my mother said when making the arrangement. It was the boys she worried about. Always the boys.
I backed into the shadows as Jeremiah dropped his beer and attended to things with both hands. My hands, empty now, covered my mouth as my future stared me in the face. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t win.
When the first punch landed, I heard it but didn’t know what it was. But the words that came after couldn’t be denied. Though he weighed less than Jeremiah, Ron used his quickness. His heartbreak too.
“I told you not to . . . I told you!”
Jeremiah’s high crashed down and he held Ron back. He argued at first, but then they both fell in a heap of frustration. They’d become close now this last year with Brian slipping away, turning into some angry cloud ready to burst at any moment. These two had prayed together, played together, talked about anything and everything.
Except me.
Jeremiah banged his head on the wall. The cheerleader slipped from under him and disappeared into the crowd, straightening her skirt as she went. I didn’t know whether to hate her or admire her. Whatever this game was, I was certainly losing.
Jeremiah couldn’t keep score either. “Man, I don’t know what I’m doing. Everybody has a plan for me. God wants me to preach. Mama wants me to marry Birdie. Daddy wants me to play football. I’m losing it, Red. I just want to do something because I want to, not because I have to.”
Ron started to say something, but I ran out before he did. I couldn’t bear to hear how I’d wrecked his life too.
Jeremiah tried to grab me when I passed by, but I slipped through his hands. Ron wouldn’t let me go so easy. He dived and caught me just as we fell through the front door.
He took his time with me at first, there on the floor of his almost empty apartment. Wouldn’t even let me in his bedroom so I could see his only furniture—a twin-size bed and a black-and-white TV. He kept saying he was going to get the TV set or take me home, he couldn’t settle on which. All I could see was his eyes. I’d never seen them this close in this much light. Or with this much love.
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