“No, ma’am.” The other girls—even Caroline—have gotten themselves into high heels when I wasn’t looking.
“You’ll be in back as well, then,” she says with a disapproving tick of her tongue. “Short as you are, you won’t even show up on the picture.”
Everyone shuffles, everyone pushes. Everyone wants to be seen, to be acknowledged by a future they don’t even know. Girls are sent back inside to wipe rouge from their lips. Boys are told to turn down coat collars and straighten gators. The world is suddenly frozen, the Rome Treaty signed amidst deepening recession and Mrs. Dickerson shaking her head at my winter boots. I run, then, away from her judgment, away from the senior girls’ indifference. Away from the little kids, from poor Imagene and her mossy, unbrushed teeth. Past the steps, where I take Caroline’s shawl by its edge and unfurl it like a flag in front of me. Behind the school, where I unlatch the door to the crawlspace and throw it in, making of it a carpet for huddling mice. I turn on my heels and feel the stiff backs of my new boots dig into my Achilles tendons, and I run just to run. Toward the backs of my posing schoolmates, their sweaters and coats dark as pilgrims’. After a spring snow comes warmth, always. Caroline might miss her shawl on the walk home, but she won’t be cold. I’d never leave her cold.
We’re all in line then, being hushed by Sylvia French, whose thin finger makes a cross with her lips. “Children,” Mrs. Dickerson says, as she passes Mr. Rollins to take her place at the end of the front row. She picks up the chalkboard, on which she’s written in careful script: Montgomery County Colored School, 1957.
Caroline and the senior grade girls in my row are all half a head taller than me, and even the junior and sophomore girls one step below are taller: when the photograph comes back to hang on the school wall, no one will ever be able to see my face. But if they look just under the top of the school’s tallest window, they’ll find a half-White girl with as serene a smile as Mona Lisa’s. One of her last, a smile Caroline sent away when she found her shawl gone missing, a smile turned to fallen hardness as she sat on the school steps after the last bell, shaking her head and refusing to walk home with the rest of us girls, refusing to tell why.
And if someone were to step close to our class photograph and focus, if they were to look at the end of the row of girls, they’d see the grains of portrait that make up Mrs. Dickerson, the sallowness of her cheeks and the malevolent thoughts behind her eyes. Even closer, just past Hannah Cosby’s left arm, they’d see that I’m the only girl who, just before Mr. Rollins ducked his head under the drape and released his shutter, slid her coat to her feet. And if they looked two rows up, if they blocked out all the other cloying faces and concentrated on the black-and-white-and-gray boy with the soft charcoal cap and one jaw bulging with snuff, they’d see that his eyes are trained not on the photographer’s lens but on the V of my dress back, and all of my future that the camera cannot see.
COAL
By the time Russia launches Sputnik, Caroline has stopped telling me anything. Grandpap turns up the bombs in Saigon from Tuesday’s Lexington Herald. VIETNAMESE COMMUNISTS BETRAY THEIR COUNTRY, he reads; 13 Americans wounded. The skin of the newspaper shakes with his hands; he reaches up and folds the page in a clumsy half. He reports in a voice dry of sorrow—“Guerrillas have assassinated over two hundred Vietnamese officials, says here”—and moves on to the racing page without further reflection. When his hands begin to shake again, he steadies them against the kitchen table. If not for the war just passed, my father would have been here with us, but I wasn’t enough to keep him. I was eleven then, when he left, and much smaller—a presence demanding hugs and glasses of milk. Not enough to keep him here, safe and alive. He felt he had to leave, even if that meant he might have to die.
A cold misery warms the roots of my teeth, and I go outside to lie on the porch under the ghost of my swing, which Grandpap has already chopped up for next winter’s stove. Battered into slats, its white paint sanded off and the chains broken out of its arms, the swing now seems, in the backyard woodpile, as though it never could have cradled me or Caroline or anyone else. The porch L’s around the front of the house like a blank stone tablet, a fair and just plane that cools my back while it flattens my hairstyle. Grandpap whistles some sad Cole Porter and I know he’s thinking about another Asian country, another chain of death, a morning three years ago, when he read the last day of the war that killed my daddy. NORTH AND SOUTH KOREA SIGN TRUCE, he’d read then. South Korea to gain 1,500 square miles. At 52,000 of our men lost and 1,500 of their miles won, our United States gave 36 men per mile. One Nebraskan for fifteen palm trees, one Mainer for a den of panda bears. My father for one copse of trees and a cave, I figure, and I hear a door slam and know that Caroline has run out of her house again and down the street without speaking to me. North and South Korea are living as neighbors, and downtown at the bank, the branch president has raised the American flag back to peak every day since the Army stopped telegramming death from overseas, but my daddy isn’t coming back from there. I hear hard-soled shoes running back up front steps, Dr. French’s beagle laughing at the morning, a thin wood door slamming, Caroline shouting Imagene’s name down Miss Myrtle’s cellar stairs. Last July, Althea Gibson won Wimbledon. This morning, at dawn, it rained through sunshine, the devil beating his wife, the dew above Mt. Sterling painting two intersecting rainbows. Daddy won’t come back, but still, the world keeps spinning wonders.
The last Caroline spoke to me was the day school let out for the summer. Nothing at all significant, just one girl commenting to another on the stench of chicken liver coming from someone’s kitchen.
“Gah,” she said. “Smells like my grandmama’s underpants.” We were walking home for the lunch recess—me to Grandpap’s neckbones, swirling in a pot on the stove, and Caroline to whatever she’d left for herself in Miss Myrtle’s pantry—and when she said it, she turned for approval to Ralph, who walked one pace behind her. Humidity being what it was, Caroline had taken to twisting her hair into one tree of a braid to hide its greasiness, and though her neck seemed less a giraffe’s than a swan’s that last day of school, and her chest had finally puffed out enough to hold up the two circles of lace on her shirt, her face had rededicated itself to growing pimples. Ralph’s skin, as if in correction to Caroline’s, was so perfectly smooth that it seemed, under its light sheen of sweat, to glow.
“Your grandmama’s underpants probably got green cheese in ’em,” he said, and pinched her behind, which made her slap the air where his fingers had been. But then she put her fist on her hip and threw a switch in her walk. He looked at her behind and matched her smile without even seeing it, and she belonged to him in a way I hoped I’d know someday. “Audrey—” he began, because he’d caught me staring. “What you doing all summer?”
Tyrone saw a nickel in the street and cut in front of Ralph, blocking my answer, planting a nebula of body odor I wouldn’t talk through. I turned, then, back to the road ahead of me, back to whatever we were all walking toward.
I’ve seen them together since, Caroline and Ralph, stepping into each other’s shadows on the paved sidewalk of the White downtown, taking the shade of a tree at the Baptist district meeting, changing themselves so cleanly and secretly into the habits of one person that the grown-ups don’t even notice they should be separated. I’ve seen Caroline take on composure as though she’s an unplugged jar being filled at a well, as though Ralph has opened up a fatal hole to pour in his attentions. She’s told me nothing of their relations—we haven’t talked since before the beginning of Ralph—but I imagine if she were still speaking to me, she’d tell me, between giggles, that she thinks, in his absence, of the depth of his voice and how it lifts his heavy Adam’s apple. She’d tell me that she’s tried her name with his (Caroline Cundiff), and that when they walk to the edge of Mattie Gibson’s corn and hold hands, she feels the wind blow through the eyelets of her dress and knows what it is, after all, to be a modern girl of 1957. She’d tell me that she�
�s equally in love with each of his three brothers simply by virtue of their being blood related, that she’s picked out children’s names (Ralph Jr. and Raylene) for the days to come with him, and that anyway we were wrong, love is none of that, love is nothing we’ve imagined at all. It isn’t just holding the envy of the lower-grade girls or feeling a boy’s stubble against your forehead but just. Just wheeling around town knowing that someone in the world thinks you’re A-all right. I rescued her woolen Jupiter from the crawlspace, washed the spider eggs out of it, and laid it to dry. I twisted and retwisted its fringes so they hang just right when I sleep in it at night, pull its neck around mine. But Caroline’s found Ralph. She’s found love. She’s found it.
To fill another day without her, to till love of my own and make Grandpap happy by conjuring his son, I play the old upright in the living room. It starts as me dusting the pearline surface of the keys, then mixing baking soda and salt to scour away whatever’s gotten in the grooves of the ivory since Daddy left. But it’s deep under the keys, a fungus that refuses to be conquered, and the more I try, the less I can stand the wrong notes of my cleaning, the hammers misstriking. I pick up a rhythm to soothe the old board, to apologize to the undusted half notes; first an easy boogie-woogie like Daddy never played in front of his father, then the church songs Grandpap taught us both. “We’ll Understand It Better By and By,” and “The Last Mile of the Way,” and without knowing, I start humming deep in my throat to fight with the bass, until Grandpap says, “People want to hear you play, girl, not hum.” And in fact Miss Aileen, after hearing me play just one time, said she had nothing else to teach me save to keep the humming in my head, told Mother I should be teaching her.
“Well,” Mother said when we got out Miss Aileen’s door, “guess you’re ready for Carnegie Hall, then.” But it wasn’t kindly said, and when we got home, she handed me a basket full of laundry for folding and went off to listen to her afternoon story. The memory of her lying flat on the sofa, eyes to the ceiling, makes me stop humming, and the fight of this song squares my shoulders until I’m actually standing, hovering inches above the bench. To this physical error, Grandpap pays no nevermind. He sings, he taps, he stomps, he cries, and I know he’ll never tell Mother: it’s our secret, until the doorbell rings and I brake on a G major.
“Coal,” comes a voice. Even through three inches of door, the pitch is so familiar I hear it more with my skin than my ears. I open the door to let Caroline into our lives and find her with Ralph, the two of them standing like twins in brown caps and knickers, with blackened palms and circles of wetness under their arms. Swaths of ash across their foreheads where they’ve forgotten and used their dirty hands to wipe sweat. The prickliest part of the picture they make is Caroline’s hair, which is gone missing. A tiny tail of auburn comes out the back of her cap where someone has severed the braid. Behind them, a wheelbarrow full of coal tilts down to Grandpap’s yard.
“Pookie Wallace?” Grandpap asks, shielding his forehead from the sun’s attack. His eyes have gone buggy with wonder. “That you, little bit? Out selling coal?”
“We’re selling it cheap,” Ralph answers. He parts his legs to swagger.
Grandpap asks Caroline, “Miss Myrtle know you out doing boys’ work?”
“Her grandmama know,” Ralph says. “We’re selling it cheap.”
“She still got a tongue to talk for herself?” I ask. Caroline’s a study in evasion, lips drawn over her horsey teeth, eyes focused so hard on the grass I think she might set it ablaze. She’s defeathered, lost in something I cannot touch.
“Y’all need any or not?” she finally asks, as though we’re wasting her afternoon.
Grandpap limps out to the edge of the porch and bends over to inspect the wheelbarrow. “If you’re selling cheap coal cheap, it ain’t no bargain. But you ones is too young to have sense enough to figure on that. Ought to be home reading books or some. Figuring out the world you just got born into.” He turns around to Caroline’s back, the slow bullet of her hair just hitting him. “Little girl, what happened to your hair?”
“Cut it off,” she says, staring at Grandpap. “Don’t need it.” The summer has grown her so tall that she doesn’t even need to look up to see Grandpap, who’s been watching the crown of her head since she was a baby. Now, at his eye level, she chews her gum and blows a bubble whose root thickens between her two front teeth until it pops.
Grandpap throws both his hands in the air as if to say he’s giving up on all humanity, but he’s just a buzzing white-haired midge, one more set of judgments this pair of doves won’t hear, more of that code so old it is written into the stones of this earth.
Ralph backs off the porch and tips his cap. “Come on, Caroline,” he says as he descends our three steps, and he seizes and rights their wheelbarrow. Having stared at Grandpap just long enough to make her eyes involuntarily roll when she turns away, Caroline lands her gaze momentarily on the emptiness where the porch swing used to hang. She tugs at the phantom braid still hanging over her shoulder and walks away into the sun.
From the porch, Grandpap and I stare down the street after the two of them. “Lord hammercy,” Grandpap says, shaking his head. “That boy’s got her nose blown wide open.” He grunts to second himself, and my morning becomes even more miserable: eventually, everyone leaves. One day, it will even be Grandpap.
In the westbound lane of Queen Street the seafood truck splashes by, a new black Ford with a custom metal tray in its bed and LIVE FISH painted in candy apple red down its side. Water leaks out the truck’s back end, and a larger catfish leaps out of the bed to writhe in a circle on the hot dirt. “Hey hey,” Grandpap says, running his hand down the front of his yellow plaid shirt. “Burtis in town with the fish.”
The street’s children break from jump roping and footballing and run to tease the fish where he lies flapping his giant arteried gill; the boys squat, hold out their hands, and try to catch him, but each time the fish surprises them with a lift of its barbelled head and a violent twist of its body. They fall bad, girls and boys both, in giggles and squeaks, until a mother yells out the front door that that fish will surely cut one of their arms wide open. She slams her door shut over a pillow of dust and the children deflate of purpose, so that one by one they return to their chanting and leaping. There remains, finally, only one pigtailed girl who bends over and studies the gill that flaps more and more slowly in its death of oxygen.
“Fish for dinner?” Grandpap asks.
“But the truck’s gone. Burtis didn’t even stop at Mr. Barnett’s.”
“Must not a had enough this time, but he’ll surely be gone to sell it to the White people.” Grandpap gives me two quarters, and when I stall, gives me a quarter more for myself. A third quarter will buy me plenty—fifteen Mary Janes or three packets of Necco wafers or even a tin of lip rouge—but a fourth quarter, a squaring off of the silver rounds, will keep me safe. One. Two. Three. Are difficult. I close my palm over the triplets so I won’t have to see them. I daren’t ask Grandpap for the fourth, because he’d never understand about the protection of even numbers. He’d only believe me greedy.
“Be back in an hour,” he says. “I got to have time to clean it.”
Along the route to the White grocery, I pass everyone and everything in this town. I walk up the hump where mud meets sidewalk and the ground under my feet doesn’t give. Past the abandoned brick newspaper building with the cleanness of S.Q.U.A.R.E D.E.A.L. left behind the missing steel letters where the brick had dirtied all around them. Past the young couple, their arms full of seed, who raise peacocks up on the mountain and speak to no one in town, the girlfriend in a pair of jeans as dirty as any man’s and the boyfriend with hair longer and darker and shinier than hers. Through one thick spiderweb that survived the rain but not my body, past drops of moisture still left on a town park bench. Past Lucille Grady and Pauline Burke, girls from the grade ahead of me, Lucille switching in her sandals with the newfound elegance of the formerly fat and
Pauline piebald with psoriasis save for where makeup forms a brown carapace on her face. Into a sharp right, down the 700 block of Chestnut Street, and suddenly behind the crisscrossed suspenders of Ralph, who has mounted his hand atop Caroline’s on the wheelbarrow handle. The houses have gotten bigger, the yards greener, the playing children whiter, and she and Ralph leave the wheelbarrow to thud against the sidewalk while he chases her in the street far ahead of me, and then I’m just following ghosts.
To move out of the way of a passing Packard, they clip back to the sidewalk and almost run into a White woman who, when she walks past me, says, under her breath, niggers. Ralph catches Caroline around the waist and swings her in the street, and she grins my way when she finds me watching, but her teeth seem like weapons. Whatever friendship we had has slipped away in dark waters.
Burtis’s truck is parked in front of the White grocery but I can’t see Burtis himself; the store window offers rows of canned goods, bags of flour and sugar, a bushel box of tomatoes, and no Negro fish seller. Even Burtis—rangy, fish-perfumed Burtis—has been called away to some glorious point beyond this town. The sun elbows its way more strongly through the clouds and the window more cleanly reflects what’s behind me: White children paying dimes to Ernie Hodges’s three-horse wooden carousel. The children turn and scream, and it takes four of their revolutions for me to realize I’m not going in the White grocery. I’ll lie to Grandpap, stanch his disappointment with a can of sardines from Mr. Barnett’s. I’ll play his son some more, clean the house to make Mother feel guilty. She’ll come home then in the afternoon and press my hair, thinking the cleaning was for her, when I’ve simply enjoyed the rhythm of a house being able to dirty itself one day and come clean the next. Mother will light the flame for the stove and watch the match burn down to its quick, remembering all her four thousand days with my father in those seconds the match burns. When the stove catches, she’ll blow the match but it won’t die; it will flare up again in orange-blue glory, reminding her for that panicked second of the joy she has in the stout-bellied man she thinks she’s keeping a secret from me and Grandpap: she’ll run the match under the sink and sigh. Mt. Sterling is a palsy, a consumption, a slug drying from the salt in the soil beneath. It’s a hunchbacked woman who cannot walk straight, a torpescent blight on God’s map, a crooked spoke in His well-oiled wheel. This morning was the last morning I didn’t know: if I stay here, I’ll begin to rot from the inside out.
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