by Dasha Kelly
As a preteen, Carla’s “thoughtful munching” advanced to “skillful worrying.” She worried about the supply of firewood during the winter. Laundry being snatched up by a heavy wind in the spring. Baking bread falling in the oven. Soloists forgetting their lyrics in church. The “what ifs,” as Uncle John and Aunt Rosie called them, also kept Carla from straying into friendships with girls her age, or enjoying the 45 rpm records at Miss Sherry’s Soda Bop.
The Soda Bop was a converted shed for young people in the area to gather. Miss Sherry had led the charge of keeping her kids from crossing paths with the law or drunken Klansmen on Saturday nights, and most parents in their rural community were glad to help her along by supplying the hangout each week with food, pies, and chaperones.
“A lot of these honkeys is wishin’ they lived in Birmingham,” Miss Sherry would say, constantly reminding the youth about the notoriously violent sundown towns surrounding Decatur: Lovington, Monticello, Blue Mound, Mount Zion. “Black folks still gettin’ lynched twenty miles in every direction from here. Hate and evil don’t know nothin’ ’bout North and South.”
“I hear Miss Sherry’s got a good thing goin’ for you young folks,” Uncle John had prompted one night at dinner. Carla was nearing the end of high school, becoming a woman. Still, she flushed at the blatant discussion of her social life, or lack thereof.
Aunt Margaret smiled and added, “We can take you whenever you’d like.”
Carla had thought about Miss Sherry’s, overhearing Monday morning reports at school all these years about the food, the music, the clothes and the slow dancing. Every now and again, her chest had pinched with intrigue. Aunt Margaret urged Carla to go just once, just so she wouldn’t have any regrets. Carla had agreed.
Then Aunt Margaret died. Their house, already draped in a lingering weariness, was thick once again with heavy sorrow. Carla was only fifteen and there was so much Aunt Margaret hadn’t taught her yet. Like how to whip the meringue. How to backstitch heavy corduroy and keep the seams straight. How to revive the tomatoes. How to turn around a bridge game with a false card or a flannery. How to type. How to pin-curl her hair.
Carla and Uncle John trudged through her final year of high school in dark quiet. While her classmates and cousins headed off to college, factory floors, and wedding chapels, Carla’s plans were to live at home, get a job at the library, and take care of her Uncle John. A few months after their extended family had thrown a celebration picnic for her in Aunt Rosie’s back yard, Uncle John told Carla about college.
She resisted, but Uncle John explained the arrangements had already been made. Margaret and Marjorie had been raised in a world foreign from John and his siblings. In their world, Margaret’s parents had established something called a trust to pass on to their girls the earnings of their hard work and that of the Reconstruction relatives before them. In turn, Margaret, John learned, had continued the tradition, traveling by buggy across the river to consolidate her trust with her twin sister’s to make a family trust and college fund for Carla.
When John drove his dirt-smattered pickup across county lines to meet with the attorney, John asked the polished Negro lawyer if disbursements would last long enough for Carla to finish school. The attorney had chuckled kindly, assuring John that Carla’s inheritance would support her well into adulthood.
Carla had steamed for several weeks at the idea of a conspiracy and being shipped away against her will. Uncle John had been patient with her anger, withholding a grin when Carla’s excitement betrayed her when her registration materials arrived in the mail.
Only halfway through her first semester, Carla turned away from the sweet potatoes and steaming pots to face her uncle.
“I’m there to learn about literature, not about Sandra!” she spat.
John pursed his lips, restricting his words. He didn’t want to upset her, but this was not a time for coddling. Margaret had always scolded him behind their bedroom doors that their job was to prepare Carla for the world as much as it was their privilege to shield her from it. He’d hated that truth then and it made his temples pulse now. Still, he knew it was best. He knew this beautiful girl—young woman—was headed for a lonely and gray-sky life if he didn’t push her forward now.
Carla turned her back to him, lifting and fidgeting with pot lids, opening and closing the oven door. She was upset, he knew. It often amazed him that although Margaret hadn’t birthed Carla, they’d come to be so much alike. John dropped his head to whisper a quick prayer and collect himself.
“Literature. I know, Bluebell,” he said, floating his favorite pet name for her. He’d called her that ever since she arrived on their porch with that blue ribbon in her hair. “But your Aunt Margaret done told me how being a college woman means you gets to learn ’bout more than literature and the Greyhound.”
Carla laid down the potato and the paring knife and Uncle John saw her shoulders slack, and then begin with the slightest bounce. He was through the door and next to her in a breath. Carla turned and cried into her uncle’s chest. He’d often told her and Aunt Margaret he never knew what to do with a crying woman, except stand still and be quiet. She loved him for that. Loved him for his simplicity. Loved him for being a constant in her life when she’d come to expect chaos around every corner.
“You know better about tracking mud into my kitchen,” she said once the gales had abated. She wiped her face. They both smiled at her small tribute to Aunt Margaret. John, raising his hands in mock surrender, retreated back outside. Once he fastened the bottom half of the Dutch door, he looked at Carla for a long moment.
“Your Aunt Margaret would have some real good words for you now. Make you feel better,” he said. “You know I ain’t never been the one good with words. I’m jus gon’ tell ya that you gon’ be all right. You smart, Bluebell. You gon’ be a professor one day, just like you wantin’ to, but you gots a lot of days ’tween now and then and you gots to live ’em all.”
Carla’s eyes began to brim again. She leaned against the counter with her arms folded across her apron. She let one fat tear fall, and she nodded.
“I promise, Uncle John,” she said, smiling. “I promise.”
Carla knew wandering into buildings alone wasn’t what Uncle John had in mind when she’d promised to invest more of herself in becoming a college woman. MacMurray was a quaint campus settled against a vivid, pastoral landscape. The college had a 120-year history, and Carla had been walking past its noble ghosts in a daze.
Carla’s awkward fidgeting was magnified here. In Decatur she tugged at her hands whenever someone turned attention to her in class or at church. Here, with so many girls eager to talk and link elbows, Carla found herself picking at the cuticles of her fingers. She was not ready for socializing, but she intended to keep her word to Uncle John.
Carla read the bulletin boards in front of the library to learn about the events happening on campus. She scribbled dates and notes on an index card and made plans to attend two lectures, one play, and a Christmas chorale concert. Blanketed in the darkness of the music hall, Carla let herself melt away. Tears wet her cheeks as the soaring altos carried Carla back to Decatur, when she and Aunt Margaret would clean house with Marian Anderson playing on the record player.
After her holiday break and another pep talk from Uncle John, Carla returned to campus ready to brave the next phase of her transformation: people. Her MacMurray classmates herded her in the cafeteria, lecture halls, dorm lobby, and on the mall. She didn’t know how to insert herself among them. She tasked herself to linger in the dining hall twice a week after dinner, rather than rushing back to the quiet of her room. She relocated herself out of the library corners to tables where passing chatter would force her to look up from her book every now and again. As she made eye contact and received acknowledging nods from familiar faces, Carla felt herself growing stronger and more confident.
The unease she felt here was different from what she felt in high school. Partly because the student body
raced ahead with their studies and lives with or without her, unlike the pressure of conformity back home. Partly, Carla hoped, because they were mature young women now, no longer juvenile high school girls.
Largely, Carla knew, her boldness came from being at a women’s college. There were no boys distracting her gaze in class, breathing on her bare shoulder in the lunch lines, brushing against her small body in the halls, giving her goose bumps, consuming her with a look from across the courtyard.
Just before spring midterms, Carla stood before the bulletin board and tried to convince herself to add activities with humans to the index cards this time. She swallowed hard at the thought, scanning notices for reading groups, sewing circles, volunteering, and a group wanting to head into town to see a movie. Carla was writing down the phone number for a small group seeking a bridge player when she heard her name.
Carla turned to see her roommate, Sandra, moving through the rotunda with a small group of girls. She said something to the group and they all turned to smile at Carla before walking through the library doors.
“You didn’t have to leave your friends,” Carla said.
Sandra glanced back toward the door as the group exited. She was tall and narrow, with pocked skin the color of sweet tea.
“That’s just my study group,” Sandra said. “I don’t really have friends here.”
Carla raised her eyebrows. “Really? You seem to keep pretty busy to me.”
Sandra laughed. “Yes, I suppose I do. Got to stay in the mix if I’m gonna keep up with the flavor.”
Carla nodded, amused by Sandra’s wit. From the one-sided phone conversations Carla could hear from the dorm hallway and listening to Sandra talk herself through her studies each morning, Carla knew her roommate to be intense, comical, charismatic, and domineering. There were always women, black and white, waving into their room at Sandra if their door was open. Based on the array of handbills and pamphlets Carla would often glimpse on her roommate’s bed, Sandra was clearly an even blend of style and substance. Still, Carla assessed Sandra to be likeable and outgoing, but deliberately unknowable. She thought of her roommate as one of the black holes she studied in science, undetectable but capable of coercing all matter of light, energy, and mass into its gravity.
“I almost didn’t recognize you without your headscarf and housecoat,” Sandra said, stopping beside Carla.
Carla felt her face heat and reflexively pulled her notebooks closer to her chest.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sister,” Sandra said, nudging Carla’s arm with hers. “I was only poking fun. I have a whole bag of head rags, and the only reason I don’t wear my housecoat is because it has a huge rip in the ass.”
Carla smiled as her neck and cheeks cooled.
“What are you doing?” Sandra said, turning her head to peer at the index cards on top of Carla’s notebooks.
“Oh,” Carla said, suddenly more embarrassed and less brave about her project. “I was—um—thinking about joining a bridge game.”
Sandra kept her eyes on Carla, expectant. When Carla didn’t laugh or wink, Sandra straightened and gave a small nod.
“I never learned to play bridge,” Sandra said simply.
“It was my aunt’s favorite game. She never found anyone to play with after—” Carla caught herself. “Until I got big enough to do the computations. We played two-handed games all the time.”
“She’s gone, your aunt?” Sandra asked.
“Yes,” Carla said, clearing her throat. “When I was fifteen.”
“What about your mother?”
“When I was five.”
Sandra was quiet. Carla could tell she was deciding whether to continue. “It’s a long, morbid story,” Carla offered, with a weak smile. “It’s me and my Uncle John now.”
Sandra returned Carla’s smile and reached out one hand to cup her roommate’s shoulder. “You’ve both been in very good hands.” Sandra pointed her eyes skyward. Carla’s heart was full. She was warm with thoughts of Aunt Margaret.
Walking back to their dorm, Sandra told Carla about her own family back in Rockford; huge, loving, religious, and from whom she couldn’t wait to get away.
“They might call me their rebel child,” Sandra said, sitting cross-legged on her bed. Carla’s short legs were tucked beneath her, and her nightgown and housecoat were pulled over her knees and feet.
“You don’t agree?” Carla asked. “You’re not the rebel child?”
Sandra twisted curlers into her hair and paused. “I wore my white gloves to church on Sundays. Snapped beans on Saturdays. Said ‘Yes ma’am’ and ‘No ma’am.’ Brushed my teeth. Real dangerous stuff.”
Carla laughed.
“I’ve always been well behaved,” Sandra said, and Carla noted the smear of disdain across the words. “Thinking for myself has been the problem. Wanting more than a husband and babies has been the problem. Wanting to be a part of this revolution has been the problem.”
“Revolution?” Carla asked. “In Rockford?” Her nightgown had become suddenly warm and itchy. Carla had heard this line of discussion devolve quickly on Sunday afternoons after service, young men home for the weekend squaring with older brothers and uncles in their church suits.
Sandra pointed a curler in Carla’s direction. “Exactly!” she said. “Since no one is burning crosses in our front yard, my family wants to act like what’s happening in Chicago and Detroit and Oakland doesn’t apply to us. They think they’re safe because they’re quiet. I’m not interested in a scared, quiet life.”
Carla shifted on her bed. She recalled herself nodding with the congregation as her own pastor had barked an entire sermon about blacks steering clear of trouble. God, he’d said, would command what would happen to His children, not protestors, looters, or so-called street soldiers with sinfully rebellious souls.
“I’m a little scared of it all,” Carla admitted, looking down at the buttons on her gown.
“It’s not all your fault,” Sandra said. “They want us to be afraid.”
“Who?” Carla asked.
“The oppressors.”
“Our families?” Carla asked, curling her face in confusion.
Sandra sucked her teeth. “Naw, girl. The White Man.”
Carla looked toward the closed door of their room, one pulse of panic ripping through her. She was quiet for a moment.
“I know a lot of decent white people,” she finally said.
“So do I,” Sandra replied, “but they’re outnumbered by the treacherous ones who are trying to destroy our communities.”
“How do you know what they’re trying to do?”
“I read the papers, watch the news.”
“So do I,” Carla said, now agitated. “I read stories every day about Negroes trying to make a change by breaking the law. I don’t see how that’s supposed to solve anything. It certainly isn’t making things any better.”
“See? This is the kind of propaganda I’m talking about!” Sandra said, bounding from her bed to Carla’s. She leaned in close and Carla could smell her toothpaste and hair grease. “First of all, sister, we’re Black, not Negroes. Second, they’re not going to put pictures in the paper about our tutoring programs and food drives, only when we get arrested for protecting our communities from crooked cops. No one talks about falsified records, or buildings getting set on fire by government officials, or the CIA orchestrating the assassination of Malcolm X and, now, Dr. King—”
“What are you talking about?” Carla exclaimed. Sandra’s hands had worked themselves into two spinning flurries while she raged.
Sandra calmed her hands and leaned against the wall, regarding Carla. Her tone was controlled and gentle when she spoke again. “We’re in a war, Carla,” she said. “The sooner we all start acting like that, the sooner Black people in the country can expect some peace.”
Carla was quiet for a long moment, conflicted by her resistance to Sandra’s ideas and embarrassed by her own naiveté. Carla’s relatives had lived on
the same stretch of land since her Aunt Rosie had unloaded her things from Arkansas in the forties. Dozens of other families filled in the young landscape at the edge of Decatur’s new city with similar jigsaw houses and handmade road signs. It never occurred to Carla that her neighbors were all Black for any reason other than choosing to live together after clapping the red clay from their roots.
Listening to Sandra talk, Carla felt a small seed of understanding begin to split and yawn open inside her.
“What if this is just the way things are?” Carla asked, her voice small. She was surprised by the sob trying to push through her words.
“When something is fundamentally wrong,” Sandra replied gently, “it doesn’t matter how long it’s been going on.”
The morning birds had begun to chirp and peal outside. The girls had been talking all night, but would need to get at least a nap before heading into their classes that day. Carla had a few more questions.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I wanted to attend Chicago State, but my parents wanted me as far from the ‘unrest’ as possible,” Sandra said with disgust. “And let’s make it a women’s college for good measure!”
The young women laughed, wearily now.
“What would you do if you were in Chicago?” Carla asked.
“I have no idea,” Sandra admitted, looking young and vulnerable to Carla for the first time. “I just know I would be involved. I wouldn’t be tiptoeing around in bobby socks and saddle shoes trying to pretend the struggle isn’t real.”
Carla stole a glance at the saddle shoes lined in front of her bureau. Sandra followed her eyes and the two young women exploded in laughter.
“I’m sorry, sister,” Sandra said, wiping a tear from her eye. “I got on a roll.”
They commented on the hour and the fading darkness and the classes they could not miss that day. Before sleep pulled her into the stillness of her blankets, CeCe asked one more question.
“What if you only know one way to be?”