Feathers

by Jacqueline Woodson

  “Girl, you must have lost your mind,” Mama said. “If you don’t get back out there and take off those boots, you better! And get some paper towels and wipe up that trail you trying to leave through my house.”

  I smiled, hugged her and went back down the hall.

  “You feeling all better, Ma?”

  Mama didn’t say anything. I got my boots and coat off quick as anything and ran back into the kitchen, then grabbed some paper towels and started wiping. “You look all better. Huh, Mama? You feeling all better, because you look—”

  “I’m standing here making this chicken, right?”

  I nodded, looking up at her and smiling.

  “Well, that must account for something, huh?”

  “Accounts for Mr. Hungry calling that chicken’s name.”

  Mama smiled and leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “Remember when Mr. Hungry moved into your brain, girl?”

  I thought about it and frowned. “I don’t even remember,” I said. “I’ve always said that.”

  “Since you were about five—the first time you saw a commercial for those biscuits. The one that said, There’s a hungry man inside of everyone!” Mama laughed. “You got so scared that there was some man living inside of you. It took me and your father about an hour to calm you down. That’s when Mr. Hungry moved into this apartment.”

  I tried to remember the commercial she was talking about but couldn’t remember a single minute of it.

  Mama had the radio on. A group called the 5th Dimension was singing, “Then peace will guide the planets. And love will steer the stars . . .”

  I leaned against the counter. “Mama . . .”

  Mama was reaching up to get some plates down. Her belly was tiny and round now.

  She stopped reaching and turned to me. “What, honey,” she asked, her eyes looking all worried. Maybe it was the way I’d called her.

  “It’s so strange, isn’t it? The way some things stay in our memory and other things don’t. Like I don’t remember any of that—not even the commercial. Where does all that memory go to?”

  Mama checked her chicken, then turned the heat down underneath the pan.

  She folded her arms and leaned against the sink. “It’s there inside of us somewhere. It comes up in other ways, I guess. Like even though you don’t have the memory, you got Mr. Hungry.” She smiled.

  I thought about how hurt Sean had looked this morning.

  “Does stuff go away?”

  Mama sighed and turned back to her chicken. “I don’t think the important stuff does,” she said. “You know—the stuff that really makes an impression. I don’t think you remember it just as it happened—but you remember the feelings you had. Good ones. And bad ones too, unfortunately.”

  “Hmmm . . .”

  Mama looked over her shoulder at me. “How about we make a good memory right now and you get those potatoes mashed, baby girl.” She pointed to the bowl of potatoes on the table. I threw the paper towels away, got a fork from the drawer and started pressing it into the potatoes.

  “How about giving those hands a quick washing?”

  “I was wearing gloves, Ma!”

  “Not when you were wiping up that snow water, you weren’t.”

  Our old mama’s returned, I signed behind her back, then headed to the bathroom.

  The minute I started working the potatoes, the door slammed. After a few minutes, Sean was standing there watching us, his face broken out in this huge smile. I tried to see some memory of those dumb girls and found it—just a little bit, right around his eyes, they weren’t real bright, even though he was smiling.

  We’re having chickennnnnnn, we’ve having chickennnnn, I signed, moving my hand slowly at the end of the word chicken and doing a little dance. Sean’s smile got a little bigger.

  What’d the doctor say? Sean asked. He sure knew how to kill a moment!

  Took some tests, Mama signed. She pulled some chicken thighs out of the hot oil with a fork and laid them on a flattened paper bag she had put next to the stove. Said the baby’s looking just fine.

  And she’s feeling good right now, I signed, glaring at Sean. That’s what matters.

  Sean tapped his head with his hand and made a face at me, which basically translated into I see that, stupid.

  I didn’t care. Mama was cooking, we were having chicken and mashed potatoes and greens and Mr. Hungry was gonna be packing his bags to-night!

  18

  The next morning, the Jesus Boy came up to me just as we were lining up to go inside. He looked like he wanted to say something, then just looked down at the ground. After a moment, he raised his head again.

  “I probably shouldn’t have talked about his daddy, huh?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, he was saying stuff about you. I never understood why you let him say and do all those mean things to you in the first place. Didn’t make any sense.”

  We stood there. Somebody had a transistor radio going and I could hear little pieces of the Jackson 5 song “I’ll Be There.” Across the school yard, I could see a group of girls moving slowly to the music.

  On the news that morning, they’d talked about a draft lottery to get more guys signed up for the war that was going on and Mama had stopped frying bacon and kissed both of Sean’s ears.

  Jesus Boy looked at me. Some days, he looked real beautiful—the way the bones in his face kinda pushed out against his pale skin, the way his gray eyes looked all these other colors when the sun came near them.

  “It frees him,” he said. “All that stuff that makes him mad and mean and ugly leaves him when he does stuff to other people.”

  “Until the next time,” I said. “Then it all just comes right back.”

  The sun went behind some clouds and the wind picked up. I shivered.

  “But maybe the next time, it’ll be a little bit less and a little bit less and a little bit less until it’s finally all gone.” He looked up at the sky—like he was trying to see the wind. I looked up too—trying to see what he saw. Just the graying sky. Just the snow starting to come down again.

  Trevor came up behind the Jesus Boy and made a face at his back. Then he moved between us.

  “I want to introduce y’all,” Trevor said, pointing at me. “To Mrs. Jesus.” Some kids laughed. I saw Rayray flick his eyes at Trevor.

  “Come on off it already, Trev,” I heard him say. “It’s getting tired. That boy ain’t doing nothing to you. Frannie ain’t either.”

  “Jesus loves me, this I know,” Trev sang softly as he started walking away again.

  Rayray just turned away from him and headed inside the building.

  A little bit less and a little bit less. I guess calling me Mrs. Jesus wasn’t the meanest thing Trevor could say.

  When we got inside the school, Ms. Johnson was in the hallway, talking to another teacher. As we walked quietly into the classroom, I saw her looking at Jesus Boy.

  “Let’s start with some writing this morning,” she said. Most of the class groaned. I just took out my notebook and let it make a loud slap on my desk, liking the sound it made.

  “No slamming books,” Ms. Johnson said, looking at me. “We write in books, we read books—we don’t slam books. If you’re mad, go home and slam a door, please.”

  The sun was out and melting snow dripped down over the windows.

  “Now what we’re going to do this morning,” she said, her voice becoming all bright again. “Is write down the things we all have in common. I love this exercise because the lists are always so different, which means”—she stopped and looked around the room—“this is not the time to discuss your list with each other. Just write.”

  She was wearing a pretty blue dress with black platform boots that came just below her knee. Ms. Johnson always looked like she’d spent the whole weekend looking through fashion magazines, then going out and buying whatever was in style. Samantha would probably grow up to be like Ms. Johnson because she dressed nice too. I usually
put on whatever was clean and sometimes that didn’t amount to much. Mama said one day I’d care a little more about how I looked, but I didn’t see that day coming in the near future.

  “Rayray, Trevor, Maribel and Chris,” Ms. Johnson said. “The answers aren’t outside that window.”

  Maribel rolled her eyes like she was insulted that Ms. Johnson had the nerve to say something to her. Everybody else just faced front.

  I stared down at my blank notebook page, wondering what to write. Here’s the list I came up with.

  • We all go to Price.

  • We all wear clothes.

  • All of us kids live on this side of the highway.

  • We all walked in the snow at least once this winter. Maybe a hundred times.

  I looked around the classroom. Rayray was slumped down in his chair. Trevor had gone back to staring out the window. The Jesus Boy’s pen was moving real slow over his paper. I thought about the way all of our mamas and daddies must have looked at us when we were babies—all new to the world, all squishy-faced and spider-fingered, and them loving us anyway. I thought about my own mama—the way she smiled at me sometimes like she couldn’t believe I was her daughter.

  • We were all little babies one time.

  19

  On Wednesday morning, Maribel was absent, so Samantha and me got to sit alone at lunchtime. The cafeteria was loud and hot. We were having that goulash thing for lunch again.

  “Frannie,” Samantha said. “I got something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

  I looked up at her.

  “That day—when Trevor and Jesus Boy had that fight? How come you went over to him?”

  Samantha was wearing a blue suede vest over a turtleneck. She had dangly earrings in her ears and had gotten her hair cornrowed. I leaned on my fist and stared at her. We’d been friends for so many years, I’d stopped counting. She was one of the few people outside my family who knew about the pock scars on my hand. When I’d showed them to her, all those years ago, she was the one who’d said, “Those could be nail holes.”

  “It was the right thing,” I said softly.

  Samantha took a small bite of the cracker that came with the goulash and kept looking at me.

  “You know—Trevor was on the ground, looking like he was going to cry. And then, maybe you couldn’t see it, but he was crying. And he was having a hard time getting up with his arm and all . . .” I stopped talking because I realized I was talking real fast. Until that moment, I hadn’t really understood why I went over to him.

  “But Trevor’s always been so mean,” Samantha said.

  Now I just looked at her.

  “I don’t know why you’d help someone so mean like that,” she said.

  “Because he needed it,” I said. “I don’t know. I’d even help Maribel get up if she fell down. I don’t really like her but—I don’t know. It’s what you do.”

  “But you don’t even hardly go to church,” Samantha said.

  I picked up one of the crackers, then put it down again. Mr. Hungry wasn’t anywhere to be found anymore. I couldn’t believe I had to explain what I didn’t know how to explain. I’d figured Samantha would just understand—deep inside. Of all people.

  “It was the right thing,” I said again. “Trevor was just sitting there in the snow.”

  “And why do you think the Jesus Boy went over to him?” Samantha asked. But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking over at the Jesus Boy. “I mean, you know—after he said those bad things about Trevor’s dad?” She frowned. “After he showed his true colors and all. And me thinking that maybe he’d come here really being Jesus and all.”

  I looked at Samantha. “Maybe he is,” I said.

  “You’re crazy. Jesus would never say something about somebody’s daddy.”

  “But he wept,” I said. “You said so yourself. And so did Trevor. So maybe Trevor’s Jesus!”

  “That’s blasphemy,” Samantha said.

  “I was hoping . . . ,” she said slowly. “I was hoping so hard that Jesus had come back and had come right into our classroom. And the hoping turned into believing, I guess.” She put her head on her fist and stared at the Jesus Boy. “But Rayray was right. Why would Jesus come here, to this side of the highway, to Price.”

  “But he did, Samantha. The Jesus Boy did.”

  “But he’s not the real Jesus.”

  “Maybe he is. Maybe there’s a little bit of Jesus inside of all of us. Maybe Jesus is just that something good or something sad or something . . . something that stays with us and makes us do stuff like help Trevor up even though he’s busy cursing us out. Or maybe . . . maybe Jesus is just that thing you had when the Jesus Boy first got here, Samantha. Maybe Jesus is the hope that you were feeling.”

  “You don’t make any kind of sense,” Samantha said.

  But I did make sense. Maybe I only made sense to me. But maybe I was the only one I needed to make sense to.

  20

  Ms. Johnson says everybody has a story. She said some of us are afraid to tell ours and that’s why when it comes time to write something, we say we have writer’s block. Ms. Johnson says there’s no such thing as writer’s block. She said it’s just your mind saying to your body, I ain’t trying to write that jive. Everybody laughed when she said it like that because, mostly, Ms. Johnson speaks proper.

  “Then what does your mind want your hand to write?” Ms. Johnson asked the class.

  Trevor was tracing the letters on his desk. Rayray was staring out the window. I looked down at my blank paper, my pencil in my hand and my hand and mind real still and quiet.

  “Frannie?” Ms. Johnson looked at me.

  I shrugged. “A story?”

  “Maybe,” Ms. Johnson said. She walked slowly over to Rayray and turned his head gently toward the front of the room. She walked over to Trevor, lifted his pencil out of his hand.

  “If the story is the truth,” Ms. Johnson said.

  “But that’s nonfiction then,” somebody said.

  “The truth in your heart. My daddy says we all have a truth in our hearts.”

  It was the Jesus Boy speaking. He even surprised Ms. Johnson. But she tried to hide it by smiling.

  “Exactly,” Ms. Johnson said. “Write what your heart tells you to write.”

  We all looked around the room at each other. Nobody said anything.

  “My heart’s not saying anything,” Rayray said. He slumped down in his chair. “I hate this.”

  Ms. Johnson walked back to the front of the room. “Think of a day in your life,” she said. “Any kind of day—where something big happened or nothing at all happened. Something important or something just regular, like you ate a sandwich while watching some cartoons. Anything. Just try to write down every single detail you can remember about it.”

  The Jesus Boy raised his hand. “When I was three years old, my mama and daddy brought me home and told me that they’d be my mama and daddy from that point on—”

  I heard someone whisper, “So that’s it! He’s adopted!” but the Jesus Boy didn’t hear. Or maybe he ignored them.

  “And from then on, that was my mom and that was my dad. But I don’t remember anything about that day, so how can I write it?”

  Ms. Johnson nodded. “That’s an excellent question. How do we write what we don’t remember.”

  We all just looked at her.

  “How about,” she said slowly. “How about imagining how something felt.” She turned back to the Jesus Boy. “Imagine how that day must have felt for you,” she said.

  And slowly, the Jesus Boy smiled as though all the memory was suddenly flooding back into his brain.

  I looked down at my paper. There were a million days in my head, all of them marching all over each other. All of them coming from my heart and feeling like my heart-truth. I didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin. There were all kinds of thoughts swirling around in my head and it felt like the whole class dropped away and disappeared and all that
was left was me and my pen and my paper and the whole wide world spinning around me. I felt dizzy with all those thoughts, had to put my head down on the desk.

  “Frannie, are you okay?” I heard Ms. Johnson asking. Her voice sounded like it was coming from real far away.

  I nodded into my arm but didn’t lift my head. “I don’t even know what the first line to write would be,” I said.

  “Begin at Frannie’s beginning,” Ms. Johnson said.

  The first word I ever learned was now. Sean said I was not even two years old when he showed me the word—middle fingers against your palms, thumbs and pinkies up and your hands moving down.

  I lifted my head and took a deep breath.

  My brother taught me to speak, I wrote. I grew up inside his world of words . . .

  21

  That afternoon, as Samantha and me walked home, the Jesus Boy came running up to us. Samantha looked at him without really looking at him. Now that she’d discovered he wasn’t really Jesus, it was like she couldn’t care less about him.

  “Hey,” the Jesus Boy said.

  “Hey yourself,” I said back.

  Samantha just watched us.

  “I’m swimming tomorrow,” he said. “It’s Saturday.”

  I looked at him and nodded.

  “So if you go to the rec center, you’ll probably see me.” He smiled.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said back. Then none of us said anything.

  “I guess I should head home then,” the Jesus Boy said.

  “Okay,” I said again.

  He turned, then turned back again. “Hey Frannie,” he said. “It would be cool if I saw you there.”

  For the first time, he didn’t look calm. He looked nervous and a little bit scared.

  “Maybe it was somebody you knew,” I said, signing the words at the same time. “Before your mama and daddy brought you home. Maybe there was somebody who you knew who knew how to sign, right?”

  The Jesus Boy smiled. “I remember and I don’t remember. That’s crazy, right?”