by Shana Burg
When Ralphie’s father hears me coming, he calls, “Addie Ann, bring me my little boy,” so I carry Ralphie into the living room, where the guests poke their toothpicks into the fruit salad Mama set on the table.
“How old’s the baby?” one of the men asks.
Ralphie’s not a baby! I want to tell him. He can talk and he can almost walk! But I keep quiet and hand Ralphie to Mr. Tate.
“Fourteen months,” Mrs. Tate answers.
“Oh, he’s darlin’!” coos a lady. Her beehive hairdo’s so high on her head, she’ll likely need a harness to keep it perched up there for the rest of the night.
I slip into the kitchen. Mama fusses about the pork roast and I cook up the green beans, while we listen to the lady with the beehive hairdo ask Mrs. Tate how the garden’s coming along.
“It’s only been a few weeks since the planting,” Mrs. Tate says, “but Mr. Mudge called the other day and told me to hurry on over. It was the perfect time in his busy schedule to give me a tour. And I have to say everything looked marvelous till the sky split and we was stuck out there in the thunder and lightning without an umbrella. Mr. Mudge said, ‘You can never know the weather in advance,’ but I tell you, that’s the last time I get caught out in the middle of a garden like a soaked squirrel!”
“Golly!” says the lady.
“I still can’t get the mud stains off my shoes!” Mrs. Tate says.
“I reckon it’s safer to check on things from the garden gate,” says the lady.
“You’re probably right,” Mrs. Tate agrees.
Then the lady with the beehive hairdo tells Mrs. Tate how to get the mud stains off her shoes with carbonated water.
I’m moving the collards into the serving dish when all of a sudden I hear Mrs. Tate yell, “Careful!” I look into the living room, and there’s Mr. Tate tossing Ralphie into the air high above his head. “You’ll make a great linebacker, little man,” he tells his son.
Poor Ralphie!
A few minutes later, I’m taking the rice off the stove when I hear Ralphie cough.
“Spit-up!” I murmur, and grab the cloth.
But when I get to the living room, everyone’s faded, pale. Everyone except Ralphie. He’s red. Bright red!
Mrs. Tate, she’s frozen, hands over her mouth, eyes round as stones. The lady with the beehive hairdo yells, “Get it out!”
Mr. Tate, he reaches his finger into Ralphie’s mouth. Ralphie gags.
“I can’t get it!” Mr. Tate yells.
Then Ralphie stops gagging.
“He’s turning blue!” a man says.
And it’s true. Ralphie’s blue round the lips. He’s not breathing.
Neither am I.
Before I know it, I grab that boy from his father, dash to the kitchen, sit down, turn him over on my lap. Ralphie’s little hands and feet flail in the air. I whack him on the back between his shoulder blades. Hard! Nothing happens. Just one breath, Lord!
I hit him again with the heel of my hand, the way Mama showed me back when I started here, just in case. And this time Ralphie coughs. A mashed-up grape dribbles out his mouth onto the floor. Then Ralphie starts screaming, quick and high. I’ve never heard him so frightened. It sounds like he can’t breathe even though I know he can.
Mrs. Tate stands in the kitchen doorway crying, “Thank God! Thank God!”
“Ralphie!” I say, and pull him to my chest. And now that it’s over, I feel all trembling inside like I’ve walked miles in the heat without drinking water. A warm rush flows through me. And I know how much I love this little boy.
And I reckon Mama feels how much she loves me, because she whispers, “You done good, Addie Ann Pickett.” Then she plants a squishy kiss on top of my head.
Mrs. Tate sits down at the kitchen table, but she’s too upset to take Ralphie in her arms, so she rubs her finger across his hairline while I hold him and sing, “Hush, little Ralphie, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”
At long last Ralphie’s breath calms.
Now Mr. Tate’s in the doorway. “Can’t you see he’s fine? Come on!” he whispers to his wife so the company in the living room won’t hear.
“You can’t throw him in the air when he’s got food in his mouth!” Mrs. Tate whispers back. She picks the purple grape off the floor and holds it up for her husband to see.
“It was just one grape,” he says.
Mrs. Tate glares.
“Is little Ralphie all right?” a man calls into the kitchen from the living room.
“Everything’s fine, thank you,” Mrs. Tate answers through her tears. She throws the grape in the trash and washes her hands in the sink.
Mama gives Mrs. Tate a handkerchief, and she pats under her eyes. “Is everything ready?” Mrs. Tate asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mama says.
I’ve still got Ralphie in my arms, but Mrs. Tate walks over to us, holds her son’s pudgy cheeks in her hands, and plants a long kiss on his forehead. Then she struts back into the living room.
I can only see the back of her hat, but from the song in her voice, I imagine Mrs. Tate must be smiling a southern-lady smile when she tells her guests, “Thank you kindly for your concern. The baby’s fine. And dinner will be served in the dining room.”
Mama pours the sauce over the roast. In no time, the guests are chewing up their pork. They just can’t get over how delicious it is! And I know sure as sugar there won’t be a bite left for Mama and me.
Later I’m up in Ralphie’s bedroom, changing him into his nightclothes, when Mrs. Tate comes in. I can still hear the company downstairs and I wonder what Mrs. Tate’s doing.
“How’d you know how to do that?” she asks.
For a second I get real scared. Is she angry I saved her son? Was I supposed to let her do the saving?
I’m thinking what to say, when she says, “Well…?”
“Mama showed me, ma’am,” I whisper. “When I first came to work here. You know, just in case.”
Mrs. Tate’s quiet. I pull the nightshirt over Ralphie’s head.
“Bless your heart!” she says. “Bless your heart!”
I breathe a sigh of relief. Then I pick up Ralphie from the changing table. But I feel real odd here holding Mrs. Tate’s boy while she watches me.
“You know, Addie Ann, you remind me of Messy Melvinia,” she says.
I must be looking at Mrs. Tate crooked, because she sets out to explain.
“Well, her name wasn’t really Messy Melvinia, it was just Melvinia, but I took to calling her that ’cause she was my maid when I was growing up, and she knew just what to do with me, the way you know how with Ralphie.”
“Why’d you call her Messy Melvinia?” I ask, and hand Ralphie to her, so she can hold him close like I know she needs to.
Mrs. Tate holds Ralphie over her shoulder. “Messy Melvinia was always complainin’ ’bout the mess I made wherever I would go. We was like friends, me and Messy Melvinia,” she says, and laughs. “Papa was off fighting the war, so Mama took a job ringing the cash register at the Corner Store, back when it was owned by Mr. Mudge’s late daddy. Each morning, after Mama left for work, Messy Melvinia and me cleaned the house together. I mopped the floor and dried the dishes, but I wasn’t much good at any of it. Messy Melvinia put a chocolate drop in the middle of my lunch sandwich every day.”
Mrs. Tate touches Ralphie’s hair. “But after I went off to first grade and left Messy Melvinia alone in the house all day and played with my new friends after school, it never was the same between us.” Her eyes fill up. “I reckon what my mama says is true.”
“What’s that, ma’am?” I ask.
“Negroes are good at loving other people’s children.”
I have to stop myself from shouting right out at her: It’s not because I’m Negro I know how to love your son. It’s a deep-in-the-heart connection between Ralphie and me. Got nothing to do with anything else! And Ralphie loves me right back. He doesn’t care what color I am.
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One thing’s clear: Mrs. Tate only sees what happens on the outside—me bathing Ralphie, changing him, making him laugh—and maybe anyone can do that, but it’s what’s going on inside me that’s important. I’m loving her son with all I can. Even though Elias takes up the back of my mind, I’m giving the whole front part to Ralphie. Mrs. Tate can’t imagine how hard it is to do that. She’s got no idea how I struggle inside to smile for her boy each day. Course, I can’t tell her how I feel, so I look at the carpet and say nothing at all.
“You don’t even have a baby of your own but you know just what to do with him,” she says. Then she kisses Ralphie’s forehead and hands him back to me. “Well, I’d best get back to the company,” she says, and leaves.
I hug that boy tight, the way Mama hugs me after she’s been good and worried. Then I set him in the crib and turn out the light.
When I get back home, my stomach rumbles. All Mama and me had for dinner were some collards and rice, since the guests licked the pork bones clean. But I know how to get by. I drink down one and a half glasses of water, just enough to fill my belly, but not so much that I’ll have to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night.
CHAPTER 15
September 2, 1963
A couple days after the Tates’ dinner party, Ralphie took his first step without holding on to the side of the changing table. Then he took his second. A few days later, he wobbled all the way across the kitchen floor. I thought Mrs. Tate would jump for joy watching her son walk. For a second, I thought she might give me a raise. But instead, she just turned to Mama with a forehead full of wrinkles and said, “Oh, my! They do grow up fast!”
Well, I’m sure glad Ralphie’s coming along, because starting tomorrow I’ll need to cut back on my time with him. That’s because tomorrow I’m starting seventh grade. Even though school lets out at noon this month on account of the heat, I’ll have to come straight home to do homework before I head across town to see about Ralphie. Up till now, I was nothing but excited about seventh grade. But come to think on it, maybe I shouldn’t be. After all, this is junior high school and I’ve got Mrs. Jacks for a teacher, so I’ma have to study round the clock.
Still, Mama’s keen on celebrating the big event. She even cooked up a new dish for supper. “Crawfish stew!” she announces, and sets the creature in my bowl.
My stomach lurches.
After Mama serves Uncle Bump, she carries her own bowl to the table, and the three of us sit together in the lantern light.
“I’m so proud of my little girl I could just burst!” Mama says.
“I’m not little,” I say.
“Well, I’m catching the jitterbug thinking ’bout you going to seventh grade at County Colored tomorrow!” she says.
“How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Forgive me! What I most certainly meant was”—Mama clears her throat like she’s going to make a special announcement—“West Thunder Creek Junior High School.”
But I reckon I shouldn’t get mad, because Mama doesn’t know much about schools at all. She grew up on a cotton plantation and went to the plantation school. Now get this: the plantation school was only open six months—November, December, March, April, and then July and August. The rest of the time, all the children were planting, chopping, and picking cotton.
Mama’s father, my granddaddy, was a sharecropper. He had a house on the plantation and a couple acres. Instead of paying money to the boss man who owned the plantation, he paid a share of his crop. When Mama got to the fourth grade, Granddaddy needed her to work his land all the time, so Mama dropped out. Because of all that, Mama can only read baby books and she can barely write, so she keeps the grocery list in her head.
But my daddy grew up in the city. And when he married Mama, he made her promise their children would get a high school education like he did. “That’s the only way for them to live free,” he said. He told Mama that no matter how much money they’d lose by sending us to school instead of work, it would pay off in the end. So hard as it was for her to do, Mama raised us the way Daddy wanted.
“Nervous?” Mama asks.
A sharp pain jabs my belly. “I’m not nervous,” I tell her.
“No reason to be.” I poke the crawfish in my bowl.
“Why’s that?” Uncle Bump asks.
Something inside me snaps. “’Cause I’m not going.”
It’s the first time since Elias disappeared that Mama laughs the way she used to, straight from the gut.
I fix my eyes on the spindly sea creature in my bowl. Life’s hard enough without my brother. What’s the point of making it harder by going to junior high school without Delilah? Besides, Delilah won’t ever be coming to junior high school with me, because next year, after she finishes sixth grade, she’ll go to charm school. She says she’s almost got her parents convinced to let her.
But seeing as I’m not a charm-school candidate, tomorrow morning I’ma have to walk three miles to Weaver with Cool Breeze Huddleston. Three whole miles! For all the times I dreamed about holding his hand, now the thought of walking beside him makes me queasy. If the white folks would let me into their junior high school, I could just mosey across the tracks, because their school’s right here on the edge of town. Then I wouldn’t have to walk miles with Cool Breeze, and I wouldn’t have to think of what we could talk about while we walk.
Mama clears my dish. Then she smiles at me and winks.
My stomach growls but there’s nothing else to eat except rice and beans, and I have the fidgets so bad, I’ve just got to jump.
I take my rope outside to the dirt patch next to the swing. But instead of saying something dumb while I jump, like “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,” I say a list of all the things me and Cool Breeze can talk about in case I decide to go to school after all.
As soon as the roosters crow, my gut somersaults, and I don’t even think about not going to school. How am I going to teach geography on television if I don’t go to junior high school to learn it? I pull my new yellow dress over my head, but it doesn’t slip on as easy as it did back when it was the color of flour. After all, I’ve done a heck of a lot of growing this summer, though not in the most important place. But at long last this dress fits. And just in time! No doubt Mama had it all figured out when she bought it for me way too big back in fourth grade. Now I tighten the ends of my braids and run into the kitchen.
“Don’t she look beautiful!” Uncle Bump says, his mouth full of biscuit.
“Sure do,” Mama says, but her smile from last night is gone. She stands at the counter flattening dough with her palms. “Remember what I told you. No crossing to no place you don’t—”
There’s a knock at the door. Mama hustles to get it. No one’s got to tell me she’s still hoping it’s someone with word of Elias.
But it’s only Cool Breeze.
“She’ll be out in a minute,” Mama tells him and returns to the counter to pound out the dough.
I put on my blue sneakers. I just got them last year. “This girl’s growing like a weed,” Mama told the salesman at the dry goods shop. “We’ll need ’em big enough to last a good long while.” As soon as I got them, I stuffed the toes with cotton so they’d stay on my feet.
Now I tie up the laces and step outside. I exhale summer and inhale fall. Deep in my nostrils a chill warns me times have changed.
I hang the straps of my canvas sack over my shoulder and, like it’s no big deal, stroll to the swing where the only other seventh grader from this side of Kuckachoo stands ready to start a new life.
“Hi!” I say.
“Let’s go,” he says back.
Even if Cool Breeze does notice my new yellow dress, he sure doesn’t get to admire it too long before Delilah steps into the yard. What’s she doing here? I ask myself. She’s not coming to Weaver with us. She’s sure not going to West Thunder Creek Junior High School.
“Your clothes gotta match the day,” Delilah always tells me, so I wonder why she�
��s wearing her red dress, the one for when love is in the air. I notice how the part round her chest fits real tight. Besides this one and her church dress, she’s got two others: a polka-dot dress for good luck and an orange one with a yellow iris down the back for courage. How a dress can bring you love, luck, or courage, I’ve got no idea. But I reckon it works, because it was right after Delilah got the polka-dot one from Bessie that she grew enough breasts for a bra.
“You look nice,” Delilah tells me.
Then she punches Cool Breeze in the arm. “You’re not so bad either,” she tells him.
Sometimes I can’t believe how stupid Delilah is. I’d like to tell her that. Instead I just tweet, click, click. I only get to call for Flapjack once before Delilah says, “Don’t tell me you’re taking your cat to junior high school!”
“Course not,” I say. “Can’t a girl whistle a tune?” Then I turn to Cool Breeze and say, “Let’s go.” But he doesn’t budge, so I’ve got no choice. I head off for school myself.
I’m all the way at the end of the lane when I hear his footsteps on the dirt road beside me. Together, we turn onto the highway. On both sides of the paved road, fields stretch into the horizon, exploding with fluffs of cotton. I hear awkward shouts and nervous laughs of kids from Titus and Bramble before I see them in their starched dresses and fresh-pressed collars. Almost all of them wear shoes.
Excited as I am, a part of me’s stuck down low, because my brother’s supposed to be here. He’s supposed to start his senior year of high school today. And even though the high school for Negroes is four miles south on the highway, while the junior high school for Negroes is three miles north, I just know Elias would’ve walked me all the way to the front door of my new school. But now, instead of having my big brother lead me, knowing exactly how to go, I’ve got Cool Breeze Huddleston ramming right into me.