The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder: A Novel

by Rebecca Wells

  So I put my hand out to shake, but Tucker didn’t even move his arm. He just stood there. I couldn’t believe it.

  “Tucker, can’t you hear what I keep telling you to do?” Miz Lizbeth said.

  Finally, Tucker put up his hand and we shook. His hands were still so dusty and grimy that I had to wipe mine on my shorts afterward.

  “Now, say you’re sorry, both of you.”

  “He’s going to have to say sorry first,” I said, “because he’s the one who started it.”

  “I am not! She’s the one who started it. She went out there without asking and saddled him. She was putting a bridle on him—my horse, the horse I wanted to ride.”

  “Ricko?” Miz Lizbeth asked. “Tucker, that is the pony that Calla has always ridden. There are plenty of other ponies, any one that you can make your own.”

  “Well, I’m not saying I’m sorry.”

  “Do I have to go through this all again? Do you want me to have to go in and get Papa Tucker? Because he will handle this a little bit differently.”

  “No, no, ma’am,” Tucker said quickly. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”

  First he was so tough, and then he acted downright scared when he heard Uncle Tucker’s name, like Uncle Tucker would beat him up or something—when everyone knows that Uncle Tucker is gentle as can be. I apologized, too, and started to walk off, but just then I decided to turn around for a second and whisper, “I’m still taller than you.”

  Chapter 5

  JULY 1964

  On the day it happened, I swam in the river first thing in the morning, like any other summer day. I dove in off the pier and swam the Australian crawl, like Papa had taught me. Then I turned on my back and floated for a while, looking for figures in the clouds above.

  I walked back home along the path, making sure not to step on any stickers—those things that stick in your feet when you’re barefoot. After I changed into my shorts, I stuck my head into the Crowning Glory and asked M’Dear if I could go to the Shop ’N Skate. She gave me a kiss and a quarter, and I headed out.

  One of the things I have always loved about our town is there are all these paths that you can walk without having to go into the streets with the cars. Once I crossed the street in front of our house, I could go all the way to Nelle’s Shop ’N Skate without ever having to walk on another road! Some are just sandy paths, but some are covered with pine straw, which smells so good on a hot day. When you walk on the paths, you pass other people’s backyards and vegetable gardens. And if they’re outside I always wave and they wave back and we talk and visit a while. That’s how it is in La Luna.

  I had my mind set on a cold Orange Crush when I pushed open the screen door to the Shop ’N Skate. Orange Crushes were the onliest cold drinks I would touch because I’d read in Teen magazine that anything brown in a bottle gives you pimples.

  And there was Nelle. I can still remember the way she looked that day, beautiful like always, sitting on her swivel stool behind the counter, wearing a blue cotton short-sleeve shirt tied up over a pair of faded yellow shorts. She loved color, and it showed all over. She had a deep tan all year and pretty light brown hair that she cut very short with fingernail scissors. It looked kind of sophisticated in what M’Dear calls a Bohemian way. That hair had a mind of its own, and so did Nelle. She was an original, what everyone called “a character.” She and I took to each other the first time we met, which would have been when I was three months old. M’Dear was about six years older than Nelle, and had watched her grow up.

  “Nelle,” I said, “if it was any hotter, I’d have to crawl up under the porch with the yard dogs!”

  “Well, come on in, girl,” she told me. “You’re smart to have your hair up in pigtails like that—keeps your head from getting too hot. Get yourself a cold drink out of the cooler.”

  The heat never did seem to bother Nelle like it did the rest of us. She was always cool and slow, like she and the store’s old ceiling fan were on the same speed.

  Nelle was the proprietor of Nelle’s Shop ’N Skate roller-skating rink. After her daddy died and left her the family place and some good-size acreage, Nelle shocked everyone by up and buying the old La Luna grocery and fixing it up.

  She fixed herself up a little apartment to live in behind it. Everyone had just assumed she would settle down and get married, but now folks said she was “not the marrying kind.” Sukey, Renée, and I suspected Nelle had a secret boyfriend who she went to see when she went away for three or four days every month and closed the store but we never told anyone, because we didn’t have evidence that Nancy Drew would approve of.

  Besides the grocery and roller rink, Nelle kept horses in her own barn, and gave lessons to Renée and me, along with a few other girls. Both M’Dear and Papa loved Nelle. Sonny Boy said he wanted to be like her because “she comes when she wants to come, and goes when she wants to go. She’s got her business set up good, and she has time to go fishing.” I guess that described Nelle pretty well. That, along with the fact that, along with M’Dear and Papa, she was one of the best dancers in La Luna. Folks just liked it when Nelle liked them, because she sure didn’t like everybody. When Nelle decided she liked someone, M’Dear called it a “Nelle Endorsement.” Mama knew who liked who because of being in the position she was in, both a dance teacher and beautician. A whole lot of town “information” came to my mother, but you’d have to put bamboo shoots under M’Dear’s fingernails to get it out of her.

  Nelle added the skating rink about two years after she took over the grocery. Papa says he remembers coming in and seeing her in there hammering right along with the builders. Even back then she had a sign in the grocery like she does now, that read, “Help yourself. Leave your money on the counter. Honor system.”

  Nelle was petite, maybe about five-feet-one at the most, and what little there was of her was muscle. She was a fine horse lady, and I only wished I could someday be as good as she was. She taught me how to ride, and from the minute I got my own horse, she helped me learn good horsemanship. She was good to our town, too. Always donating canned goods for our Christmas food drives and opening up the skating rink for special causes. I looked up to her—well, I actually looked down to her, since I was already taller than she was. But I was still a kid, and she was a grown-up. She could have been my mother, age-wise. But no one else in the universe could be my mother but M’Dear, the brightest star in La Luna.

  I hopped up on the big red Coke cooler, which is where I liked to sit, to sip my Orange Crush and watch Nelle zero in on a fruit fly. Nelle was still as a turtle for a second or two and then she whomped that flyswatter down so fast it made my head spin. Then she reached for a clean rag and slowly wiped her counter clean. Nelle always had that old wooden counter polished to a shine.

  I loved to just sit and look around the Shop ’N Skate. The store had wide old pine plank floors that Nelle kept gleaming. On one side of the store Nelle had her food aisles—mostly canned goods and what have you. Then there were the stacks of empty soda bottles in wooden racks and Nelle’s big shiner box for folks who liked to use live bait. I mean, that shiner box had some of the biggest worms you’d ever see in your life! Next to that was a big bright yellow display card of all kinds of fancy fishing lures. On the walls were old painted metal signs to advertise things like Holsum bread, Viceroy cigarettes, and Coca-Cola. Nelle also had this great rack of used paperbacks. They cost a nickel, but if you brought in a paperback to exchange, they were free!

  I would have to say, though, that my favorite part of the Shop ’N Skate—besides the rink, of course—was the magazine rack. Nelle had all these magazines from all over the place, always displayed so nice and neat. She let me look through them if I was real careful not to bend them up.

  To get to the rink you had to go beyond Nelle’s counter, sitting first at a long wooden bench to put your roller skates on. There was a small room there where the skates were stored, in all sizes—black for boys, white for girls, and little bitty red one
s, cute as could be, for the small kids. Rows and rows of skates on plywood shelves, skates with wooden wheels. Nelle paid me a nickel a pair for polishing those skates every month or so. She had an old carpenter tray filled with tubs of shoe polish and brushes and Texana heat powder to sprinkle inside so the skates wouldn’t stink. Skaters had to provide their own socks, but Nelle always had a few clean pairs lying around for people who forgot and came in barefoot.

  I was staring at the cover of the new Life magazine that had a lady with a swirly hairdo swept high on her head when Nelle broke me out of my daydreaming.

  “Calla, girl,” she said, “Ruth Ellen Ronson came in here yesterday after you did her hair. Looked like movie star hair—even on Ruth. I suspect you have the gift of beauty, honey. Anyone that can make Ruth Ellen Ronson look that good has got to have the divine grace. You ought to get yourself some training, sweetheart. Start up a career. A career’s an important thing. That’s what kept me going when I first opened the store. I thought, ‘Nelle, you get to call the shots now. You got your own place and your own possibilities.’ A career’s something to hold on to, Calla. Look at your mama. She’s got a career, and I suspect that she gets almost as much as she gives.”

  Well, it was true. I was getting pretty well known around La Luna for doing hair.

  When Mariane Trichelle got married—a huge wedding, every single soul in the parish of Tallabena was there—I helped M’Dear do the entire bridal party’s hair. After that, word just spread that I was good with hair. And I was. I had flips down cold by the end of that wedding, and I could tease a head into a smooth bubble in nothing flat. Later, I told M’Dear that I wanted to learn a French twist, and she said, “Calla, I think you might just be what we call a beauty prodigy.”

  But until that day, talking to Nelle in the shop, I had never thought about beauty as a career. I was still thinking about beauty as a career when the screen door squeaked open and in walked Cleveland Bonton.

  Now, Cleveland’s mother was Bertha Bonton, Olivia’s daughter, who had been ironing over at Aunt Helen’s house forever since I could remember. Cleveland must have been a few years younger than me, maybe nine. Sometimes he mowed our yard when my brothers couldn’t get to it. I will never forget one time M’Dear had me take him some ice tea out to the yard, and when I went back out there to get the pitcher, he was sitting under the pecan tree just singing like you never heard! He sang so sweet it made me want to cry—some gospel song, I can’t remember exactly what, but it was something like, “Over my head, I see glory in the air.” Beautiful, high, sweet little-boy voice. I stood there listening to Cleveland, just amazed. When he finished, I told him, “Hey, you are good. You could be the Little Stevie Wonder of La Luna, Louisiana.”

  He smiled at me and laughed. “Onliest thing is, I ain’t blind!”

  “Still,” I said, “you are a boy musical genius like Little Stevie Wonder.”

  “Thank you, Miss Calla,” he said. “I sings in the choir at St. Claude AME Baptist.” Then he finished up the rest of that ice tea in one gulp.

  Miss Calla, that’s what he called me. Even though we weren’t nothing but kids, both of us.

  When I went back in the house, I told M’Dear about Cleveland’s singing. She said, “Lord, yes, Negro people are blessed with a good ear. You should have heard Cleveland’s grandfather sing! Played guitar, too.”

  M’Dear and Papa taught us to always say “Negro” because they thought it was more polite than “colored.” And we knew it was better than “nigger.” That word was not permitted in our household.

  Anyway, so in came Cleveland to the Shop ’N Skate. Pair of long black skinny legs sticking out from under his cutoffs, his head hanging down, staring at the floor.

  “Afternoon, Cleveland,” Nelle said. “How’s your mama doing?”

  “My mama doing just fine. How you, Miss Nelle? Miss Calla?”

  Then he kept on standing there. His eyes were glued to the floor like it was going to look up and tell him what to do next.

  “What can I do for you today?” Nelle asked him.

  Cleveland didn’t say a thing. We waited and we waited and we waited some more, but Cleveland didn’t say a word.

  Finally, he said, “Miss Nelle, I wants to skate.”

  Whoa! Negro people had never skated in Nelle’s place. Oh, Nelle served them, sold them bread, shiners, Coca-Colas, and all. But they didn’t use the bathroom there, they didn’t drink from the fountain, and they didn’t—couldn’t—skate in the rink. But there was Cleveland Bonton, standing there and asking if he could skate!

  I’d known Bertha and her boys all my life, and I never thought that one of them would up and do something like this. It was wild. It was sticky. It was against the law.

  I had been seeing so much on TV. In Birmingham, hundreds of Negro people out in the street, and huge police dogs with mean, sharp teeth. Dogs trained to kill, taking down little boys, girls, and old women. Fire hoses forcing regular everyday Negro people down on the ground, up against trees, with force so strong that M’Dear said, with tears in her eyes, “You know it must have ruptured kidneys and torn-apart spleens.” Oh, it was ugly business. The Sunday those four little girls were killed by a bomb, little girls in their best Sunday dresses. Papa cried when he saw the news with Walter Cronkite. Will, Sonny Boy, and me, we were all so sad and confused. M’Dear lit a sanctuary candle that day, and everyone was asked to join in prayers. For months, my dreams were all full of those little girls, the whiteness of their church dresses flying apart like burned feathers.

  But we hadn’t ever seen anything like that around La Luna. The danger seemed far away. But when Cleveland asked to skate, though, it made my stomach start to hurt. What kind of mess was Cleveland fixing to get into? Did he want to skate so bad that he was willing to take this chance? Or was he just a little kid who wasn’t stopping to think?

  Nelle didn’t answer Cleveland right away. The longer she didn’t say anything, the hotter it got, like that ceiling fan was somehow slowing down. Cleveland stood there, his knobby knees shaking like he was cold, even though sweat was dripping off his forehead.

  Finally Nelle said, “Cleveland, it costs fifty cents to rent you a pair of skates. Two quarters.”

  A big old grin spilled across his face. “Yas’m,” he said, “I got me the money.”

  Then he reached down into his pockets, pulled out a handful of nickels and pennies, and plunked all the change down on the counter.

  It seemed like time just stopped then. Nobody moved a muscle—not me, not Nelle, not Cleveland. I could still hear fruit flies buzzing over by the bait stand, the hum of the big red Coca-Cola cooler below me, the ticking of the clock with the Dr Pepper boy on it behind the counter.

  All these things were flying through my mind: What harm is it going to do, letting him skate on the empty rink? I wanted Cleveland to skate, and at the same time I didn’t.

  What did I see but Nelle picking up the change from the counter! She put it all in the register and asked, “What size skate you take, Cleveland?” She said it like she rented skates to colored people every day.

  Cleveland said, “I take a size nine, please, ma’am.”

  Negroes, people say, all of them, got big feet. That was what was running through my mind.

  “Go on over to the rink side,” Nelle told Cleveland. She went to the little room and brought out the skates, and I watched while Cleveland sat on the long wooden bench and bent over to lace them up over his bare feet. He didn’t ask for socks, and Nelle didn’t offer. It took him a long time to get them laced up because his hands were shaking.

  But I could not take my eyes away from his hair. So black and kinky but soft-looking, like lamb’s wool. How does it stay so tight like that, I wondered, those curls like little springs ready to pop out at you? The Bible says every one of our hairs is numbered, that God knows every single thing about us, whether we’re black or white.

  Cleveland finally got his skates on and headed out to the rink. He fe
ll down twice even before getting there. I thought, Well, where’s all that natural rhythm they are supposed to have?

  Nelle got out the broom without a word and started sweeping the floor of the grocery. Oh, she sure got busy all of a sudden. But every once in a while, I could see her steal a look at the rink.

  Cleveland had not let go of the railing. Matter of fact, he was holding on to it with the grip of death while slowly walking himself around the circle. But just when I was thinking he’d stay glued to that railing forever, he shoved off. Just a little ways, but still, he got moving. He got about five, six feet out onto the rink floor, then started to lose his balance. He almost fell down, but he caught himself.

  Watching him, it seemed like I could feel every move he made in my own body, like something in me was leaning out to him, like my muscles were straining to help him stay up on those skates.

  He stopped for a minute to get his balance, then he pushed off again. One wobbly leg in front of the other, the blackness of his skin blending with the black of the leather, so that those skates looked like extensions of his legs. He sailed for just a minute. And I knew that feeling—that a little minute of flying is worth almost anything.

  But then he fell, and fell hard, like the floor suddenly yanked him down.

  “Cleve!” I yelled out. “I don’t care how hot it is, you don’t get out on a roller rink your first time in cutoffs! You need you some long pants!”

  His knees were bleeding. He brushed himself off and worked his way back to the railing. Then he just stood there, looking out at the rink like a sailor looking out to sea. Or a bull rider who’d just been bucked.

  Nelle stepped back into the rink from the grocery.

  “Nelle,” I said, “he is gonna bust himself wide open.”

  “Naw,” she said, flipping the switch on the jukebox like only she knew how to do, to make music play without even putting in a dime. “Boy’s been dreaming about this. Been coming in here all summer, acting like he just wants to buy a Coca-Cola, but eyeing that rink like it was Christmas. Let him go.”