Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee

  The house in which Mrs. Barber continued to live with her teenage daughter was little different from our house, or any other in our neighborhood: a brick Colonial with myrtle and ivy planted around it instead of grass, and a long backyard that sloped down to a vegetable garden. I knew the Barbers’ yard well, because there was an oak tree near the vegetable garden, with a swing in it that neighborhood kids were allowed to use. On the evening my mother and I came to visit, the daylight was fading, and the windows of the house were dark. It seemed that no one was home, but in the summers in our town, people often waited a long time in the evening before turning on lamps. It occurred to me as we walked up the driveway that the house itself seemed to be in mourning, with its melancholy row of blue spruces by the fence; I gave way, with a feeling that was almost like ecstasy, to a sudden shudder. Mama rubbed my goose-pimply arms. “We’ll just stay a minute,” she said.

  My mother was carrying a recipe for peach cobbler. It was intended for Mrs. Barber, a bony woman who had fascinated me even before her husband’s death, because she wore a very thick pair of elasticized stockings. However, after we’d knocked and waited for a while, the front door was finally opened by Phyllis, the Barbers’ sixteen-year-old daughter. Mama, who had taught Phyllis, sometimes referred to her as “the fair and brainless”; I had seen her plenty of times at the swim club, pretty and somewhat fat-faced, drawing the stares of the men to her plump legs in Bermuda shorts. That night, though it was only about eight o’clock, she opened the door in a light summer bathrobe and peered out at us without turning on the porch lights.

  “Hello, Mrs. Phillips. Hi, Sarah,” she said in a low, hesitant voice. She came out onto the dark steps as she spoke, and let the screen door bang behind her. She explained that her mother wasn’t there, and that she had been taking a shower when the bell rang; she radiated a fresh scent of soap and shampoo. When my mother asked her how she was feeling, she answered in the same hesitant tone, “All right.”

  I looked at her with a kind of awe. It was the first time I had seen her since I had heard the news about Judge Barber, and the first time I had ever stood right in front of anyone associated with an event that had caused such a convulsion in the adult world. In the light-colored robe, with her wet hair—which normally she wore flipped up at the ends and pulled back with a band, like other high-school girls in the neighborhood—combed back from her forehead, she had a mysterious, imposing look that I never would have suspected of her. I immediately ascribed it—as I was ascribing the ordinary shadow of the summer twilight around the doorway—to the extraordinary thing that had happened to her. Her face seemed indefinably swollen, whether with tears or temper, and she kept her top lip tightly clenched as she talked to my mother. She looked beautiful to me, like a dream or an illustration from a book, and as I stared at her, I felt intensely interested and agitated.

  In a few minutes Phyllis went back inside. My mother and I, as we had done many times before, walked quietly up the Barbers’ driveway and through the backyard to the swing in the oak tree. Mama stopped to pick a few tomatoes from the overloaded plants in the Barbers’ vegetable garden, and I helped her, though my second tomato was a rotten one that squashed in my fingers.

  It was completely dark by then. Lightning bugs flashed their cold green semaphores across the backyards of the neighborhood, and a near-tropical din of rasping, creaking, buzzing night insects had broken out in the trees around us. I walked over and sat down in the oak-tree swing, and Mama, pausing occasionally to slap at mosquitoes, gave me a few good pushes, so that I flew high out of the leaves, toward the night sky.

  I couldn’t see her, but I felt her hands against my back; that was enough. There are moments when the sympathy between mother and child becomes again almost what it was at the very first. At that instant I could discern in my mother, as clearly as if she had told me of it, the same almost romantic agitation that I felt. It was an excitement rooted in her fascination with grotesque anecdotes, but it went beyond that. While my mother pushed me in the swing, it seemed as if we were conducting, without words, a troubling yet oddly exhilarating dialogue about pain and loss.

  In a few minutes I dragged my sneakered feet in a patch of dust to stop the swing. The light of a television had gone on inside the Barber house, and I imagined fat, pretty Phyllis Barber carefully rolling her hair on curlers, alone in front of the screen. I grabbed my mother’s hand and said, “It’s very sad, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” said Mama.

  We took a shortcut home, and by the time we got there, it was time for me to scrub my grimy arms and legs and go to bed. Mama went immediately to the refrigerator and got out an uncooked roast of pork, which she stood contemplating as if it were the clue to something. She smelled of sage and dried mustard when she came upstairs to kiss Matthew and me goodnight.

  Gypsies

  Franklin Place, the street that ran like a vein through most of my dreams and nightmares, the stretch of territory I automatically envisioned when someone said “neighborhood,” lay in a Philadelphia suburb. The town was green and pretty, but had the constrained, slightly unreal atmosphere of a colony or a foreign enclave; that was because the people who owned the rambling houses behind the shrubbery were black. For them—doctors, ministers, teachers who had grown up in Philadelphia row houses—the lawns and tree-lined streets represented the fulfillment of a fantasy long deferred, and acted as a barrier against the predictable cruelty of the world.

  Franklin Place began at the white stucco walls of the swim club, constructed by neighborhood parents for their children, who couldn’t swim elsewhere. It ran three tranquil blocks downhill to intersect the traffic of Marymount Lane, a road that traveled through Brandywine country into Delaware. Sometimes in summer, when I listened to the cicadas striking themselves into song from tree to tree, down the street and into the valley, I would imagine following that rasping chorus as it headed south—flying fast over shopping centers, split-level developments, cities, and farms until I reached the perilous region below the Mason-Dixon Line, the region my parents had told me held a sad and violent heritage for little girls like me. Beyond a self-conscious excitement when I heard this, I had little idea of what they meant. For as long as I could remember, the civil rights movement had been unrolling like a dim frieze behind the small pleasures and defeats of my childhood; it seemed dull, a necessary burden on my conscience, like good grades or hungry people in India. My occasional hair-raising reveries of venturing into the netherworld of Mississippi or Alabama only added a voluptuous edge to the pleasure of eating an ice-cream cone while seated on a shady curb of Franklin Place.

  One July morning my best friend, Lyn Yancy, and I were playing a great new game in the middle of our street. The game involved standing about twenty feet apart and whacking a large, bouncy red rubber ball back and forth with a pair of old putters that belonged to Doctor Yancy. Most of our time was spent chasing the red ball, which had an eccentric will of its own. Each retrieval was an adventure—from the stand of bamboo in the corner of Reverend Reynolds’s yard (counting my father, three ministers lived on the block); from the hazardous green slope in front of the Pinkstons’ house, patrolled by a nasty little Scottie named Pattycake; from the pyracantha hedge in front of the house where the Tate twins lived, tough sixth-grade boys who sometimes extorted Sugar Babies from Lyn and me up at the swim club.

  It was high midsummer, the season that is unimaginable when you are twining your ankles around the legs of a straight-backed chair in school. All that week the sky had been a fine clear blue, like a direct gaze, and the heat could stop you flat, like a wall, if you were coming out of a cool house. Backyards were full of the raw, troubling odor of tomato vines, and the colony of black ants among the dusty petunias on the slope near the train station had grown into an overcrowded pueblo. If you wore cotton socks with your sneakers and went around riding bikes and hanging from tree branches all day, and you didn’t go swimming, when you took off your clothes at night, your legs
would be coated with a layer of the outdoors that ended abruptly where your socks had been, and your mother would say, “Run a tepid bath and scrub those legs and show them to me before you even get near the sheets.”

  Lyn and I whacked the red ball and screeched at each other, and danced up and down the street with the spidery gait of little girls who are rapidly growing taller. We were both seven years old and looked enough like sisters to pretend it almost constantly—two light-bodied, light-skinned little colored girls with our frizzy hair in braids that our mothers had bound into coronets because of the heat. It was fun to run on the broad, newly paved street that looked like a leafy tunnel crisscrossed with shafts of greenish sunlight. We were playing mainly in front of Lyn’s house, which was big and made out of stone with mica in it and had a grape arbor and a fascinating garage that the previous owner had left filled with stacks of Scandinavian nudist magazines. Occasionally we paused in our game as neighbors pulled in and out of their driveways. There was Judge Ramsgannett, plump, brown, and silver-haired in his big black car; Lyn’s mother, the dreamy-eyed Mrs. Yancy, on her way to the A&P in a creaky yellow station wagon; Freddie Monroe, a college junior, in a little green sports car that seemed to Lyn and me to be the final word in sophistication.

  After a while, wiping our sweaty faces, we sat down on the curb. We started talking about ponies, and about a scheme I had to package the mulberries that grew on a tree in my backyard and sell them to the patients at a nearby hospital. Lyn thought it was a great idea. “Charge ten cents a bag, and we’ll get rich!” she said, and hitched up her shorts to scratch a mosquito bite on her thigh.

  Down the street came Walter, Lyn’s little brother, sucking on a blue Popsicle.

  “Hey, Walter, where’d you get the Popsicle?” I called.

  “Good Humor,” murmured Walter, slurping. He was a sturdy-legged boy of five, who, with his bulging brow and protuberant light-brown eyes, looked a little like a baby dolphin. The Popsicle, dissolving in the heat, had left a trail of purple splotches down the front of his Woody Woodpecker t-shirt. He stopped and regarded us warily.

  “Give us a bite,” said Lyn.

  “No!” exclaimed Walter, jumping as if he’d received an electric shock. He stuck out his bluish tongue at us and ran toward the house, hopping over our two bicycles, which we’d left in the driveway.

  “I’m gonna tell Mom you were eating before lunch!” Lyn shouted after him. “And don’t you dare drink from the hose again!”

  “He drinks from the hose and gets his clothes disgustingly wet,” she explained to me.

  “Disgusting” was one of Lyn’s favorite words: just saying it filled her with such glee that she lay back on the grass beside the curb and waved her thin legs in the air. I flopped back beside her, and lay staring up into the branches of the big sugar maple that stood in the Yancys’ front yard. It was almost noon, and the sun overhead struck straight down through the green maple leaves, making discs of light that a hot breeze shifted over our faces. In the treetops the cicadas were going wild, stretching their harsh note up into the arid spaces unprotected by shade; around us, near and far, was the drone of a dozen lawnmowers.

  I was thinking, with a savoring sort of delight, that soon it would be lunchtime—cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches, I hoped—and that in a few weeks my brother, mother, father, and I would leave for the cottage we rented every summer at the beach in New Jersey; and that sometime—not too soon—after that, the leaves on the big maple would turn yellow, and Lyn and I could make a leaf fort the way we had last fall. That was the best fun of all: the ring of leaves heaped up so high it seemed like a castle keep, the cold, brilliant sun of autumn overhead, the smell of smoke from leaf piles burning up and down Franklin Place, and the two of us giggling snug and protected in the center, our hair and clothes full of leaves.

  Just at that moment a truck turned onto Franklin Place, and Lyn and I jumped up to get a look at it. Trucks were unusual on our street, and this was the strangest one we’d ever seen: a large battered red pickup, its dusty hood and fenders scarred with patches of rust. It carried in back a high, tangled mass of odd-looking furniture that turned out to be tables and chairs knocked roughly together out of pine branches, the way Lyn and I sometimes made benches for our dolls.

  The man behind the wheel had dark skin but was not a Negro; he looked a bit like one of the Indians we saw constantly defeated in TV westerns. He wore a green plaid flannel shirt; his face was a weathered mass of cords and seams, and his oily black hair was slicked back from his forehead. Beside him was a woman with the same kind of ropy brown face, and in the back of the truck, perched in a kind of niche in the furniture, rode a black-haired boy of about fifteen. The truck slowed and stopped beside us.

  “Little girls, do you live around here?” the man called out to us.

  “Right down the street,” I said, and Lyn pointed silently up her driveway.

  The woman in the truck opened the door, climbed out, and came around to us. Up close, we could see that her black hair, pulled back in a rough ponytail, was dyed a dry red at the front. She wore a long, faded yellow skirt, rubber sandals, and a gray t-shirt with one of the joke insignias you could get printed at the Atlantic City boardwalk. Hers read “Siberian Salt Mines,” and under the loose gray fabric, her long breasts swayed back and forth in a way in which our mothers’ well-contained bosoms never did. There was something frightening and wild about the outfit, and about the woman herself; she grinned at us, and we saw that one of her front teeth was broken in half.

  “Is this neighborhood all colored?” she asked, in a voice that had an accent to it, and also a tinge of complaint or lament.

  “I guess so,” said Lyn, almost whispering.

  The woman gave a harsh chuckle. “It’s a real crime for colored to live like this,” she said, putting a hand on her hip and looking up and down the street with small dark eyes that had the same glistening brightness, the jumpy intensity, of the eyes of a crow that had once alighted for an instant on my bedroom windowsill. She said a rapid phrase in a strange language to the man in the truck, and he scowled and spat heavily into the street. The boy in the back of the truck lifted his chin and stared at Lyn and me.

  “You are very lucky little girls,” continued the woman. “Very lucky, do you understand?”

  “We understand,” I said. At some point during this exchange Lyn and I had arranged ourselves side by side, and were holding hands tightly.

  “When my son was your age, he never got to play like you girls do,” said the woman. “He had to work hard; so do I. We get these trees from down in Jersey, and then we make the furniture. Two times, three times, I almost lost a finger from the saw.”

  The man inside the truck said something sharp to her in the language they shared, and she quickly gave us a broad smile, though her eyes remained the same avid black points. “Do you girls think that your parents would like to buy some furniture?” she asked, changing her voice and waving her hand at the tangle of pine in the back of the truck. “It’s for the lawn.”

  “You’ll have to ask my mother,” I said, staring past the woman to the place where the man had spat. On the smooth gray paving of the street, it made a wet circle that was vanishing fast in the noonday heat.

  Many families in the neighborhood, including mine, bought furniture from the people with the red truck. Gypsies was what they were, my father told us that night at dinner, shaking the ice thoughtfully in his glass of tea. We were eating roast chicken and corn on the cob and garden tomatoes, a magical summer menu, and the air from the kitchen fan was making my mother’s hair dance above her face. “They used to come through Philadelphia all the time when I was young,” said Daddy. “Crowds of them, first in wagons and then in big old cars. They were tinkers—used to fix pots. It’s strange to see them doing this kind of work.”

  “Do they steal children?” I asked abruptly.

  Beside me, Matthew snickered. “They wouldn’t want you!” he whispered, poking my fo
ot with his. I ignored him.

  “Gypsies stealing children is just an old tale,” said my mother. “Sarah, you have to eat all the kernels on the cob, or else you won’t get another ear of corn.”

  “Those Gypsies just seem dangerous to have around the neighborhood,” I persisted. “And that lady said that it was a crime for colored to live like this, and after that the man spit in the street.”

  “Spat,” corrected my mother automatically, and she looked over at my father with a wry smile.

  “Well, everybody’s got … to … feel … better … than … somebody,” said Daddy, drawling his words out progressively slower until they were as slow and exaggerated as the Uncle Remus record we had. He had the compressed look about his cheeks that he got whenever he was about to tell a joke, one of the complicated civil rights jokes he swapped with my lighthearted Uncle Freddy. “Most of the world despises Gypsies, but a Gypsy can always look down on a Negro. Heck, that fellow was right to spit! You can dress it up with trees and big houses and people who don’t stink too bad, but a nigger neighborhood is still a nigger neighborhood.”

  “James! Stop!” said my mother sharply, and Daddy stopped, though he kept the tight look on his face for the rest of the meal. Matthew and I kept glancing at him from the corners of our eyes; we’d never heard him talk that way before.

  After dinner I met Lyn down at the swim club. It was the nicest time of day to swim, when the parking lot was almost empty and the shadows from a line of poplars stretched over the cooling grass. While adults chatted quietly in lawn chairs and teenagers began to dance to sentimental records on the jukebox, we played complex underwater games. Around sunset the pool always began to seem a mysterious body of water of undefined dimensions, full of shadows and dim corners; when we lay on our backs and floated, looking up, the evening sky was a tender blue, and the odor of chlorine over everything was a strong, beneficent, healing scent. We were always wonderfully exhausted after these swims, lugging our damp towels home in deep silence through the darkening cricket-lined streets as if the power of speech had been washed out through our pores.