The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  “That’s my family,” Regina said. “That’s us back home, down Hayden. All them is my sisters and brothers. And them two is my Ma and Daddy.”

  “Are your parents still living?”

  Regina shook her head, no.

  “I can see some of you in your father. You stand like him, hold your shoulders the same.”

  Regina stared at the picture. “We was real close, me and my Daddy. I knew I was his favorite of all us kids, even though he never said so. I stuck to him like glue.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Funny. He used to make me laugh so bad. And he was kind as he could be without looking weak. Down there, any little sign of weakness could get you killed. Then again, any sign of strength could get you that way, too, if the wrong people saw it. People think it’s bad up here, but it wasn’t never nothing compared to how it was down there.”

  “Paul and I spent a summer in Alabama when we were kids. Just the one. We didn’t need any more than that.”

  “I know that’s the truth,” Regina agreed. “But you know, I miss it, too. Whatever bad there was, it was my home and I had a lot of love there. If I’d had my way, I never woulda left.”

  “You didn’t want to come up here?” Helena asked.

  Regina shook her head. “No, I did not. That was my husband’s idea, not mine. He was set on it. He said a black man couldn’t get nowhere but dead in Georgia, and some sooner than later. Said I ought to know that better than anybody.”

  “What he mean by that?” Sarah asked.

  Regina got quiet for a moment, as happy memories of her family faded, and dark, heavy things took their place. She sighed and said, “Because of what happened to my father.”

  “You mean the accident?” Sarah asked.

  “No, that aint what I mean,” Regina said. She hesitated. She hadn’t talked about it in years. Her children didn’t even know the story. She had never been able to tell them. Staring down at the photograph of her father now, though, she felt compelled to tell it. “He used to sell greens and tomatoes out the back of his truck, down at the open market by our town, and I would go with him every chance I got. Everybody went there to sell or buy whatever they had or wanted. Every now and then, white men would come and try to cheat folks. Most colored down there didn’t have no schooling, so they couldn’t count all that good, and these fast-talking white men would math ‘em so they aint know what they was owed. If you was selling tomatoes a nickel apiece, corn for a dime a ear, and a head of cabbage for a dime, the white men would say, Okay, I’ll give you four cent apiece for them tomatoes, cause they look a little bit too ripe, and that corn aint worth but seven cent if it’s worth a penny, and the same for that cabbage. I’ll take eight tomatoes, seven ears of corn, and six heads of cabbage, and my friend here’ll have the same, plus two more tomatoes, and another ear of corn, that’s two dollars and thirty-one cent, I’ll give you two dollars and a quarter, and he’ll give you two, and you owe me ninety-five cent, and him half a dollar, and come on and hurry up, nigger, I aint got time to be waiting round here all goddamn day. Wouldn’t be ‘til you went home and counted what you made ‘fore you knew how bad they cheated you. But my daddy was good with numbers. Better than good. He never went to school a day in his life, but he taught hisself to read and write and count. He could count faster than anybody you ever seen, faster than them white men could talk. It didn’t make no real difference, ‘cause he still couldn’t say nothing to ‘em. But after while I guess he just got fed up with it and couldn’t take it no more. One day they come around to the market looking for some greens. My daddy was selling some for six cent a bunch. I never will forget the price as long as I live. They tell him they aint worth but five cent, and they want a dozen and one, and when they start trying to math him, my daddy say, ‘Scuse me, sir, you owe me another twenty cent for these greens. Thirteen time five is seventy-eight, not fifty-eight, sir.’ They didn’t like that too much, talmbout, ‘What you ‘sposed to be, nigger, a math teacher?’ They went ahead and paid him the other twenty cent. But soon as them four nickels touched his palm, he knew he made a big mistake. He said, ‘Aw, no, never mind, y’all can have ‘em for fifty-eight,’ and tried to give the money back. But they aint want it back. They said, ‘Naw, you keep it, smart nigger, and see if it don’t turn out to be worth it for you.’ My daddy set up all night with his rifle, while me and my ma and sisters and brothers was curled up under the beds at the next house. I never shut my eyes that whole night, I don’t remember even blinking. After while, we heard a truck coming up the road. I felt my brother squeeze my hand, and heard my mother say, ‘Please, Jesus.’ Then footsteps, then banging on the door, then shots. Shots so loud it didn’t even sound like guns to me, more like the sky cracking open. I never saw my daddy again. They took him somewhere and left him, buried him maybe. My brothers went and looked in the woods near our house, but they aint find him. Ma went to the sheriff, mostly just so she could say she had, ‘cause she knew they wasn’t gone do nothing, and sure enough they said he probly just ran off, the way shiftless niggers like to do.”

  When Regina finished talking, a heavy silence filled up the room.

  Helena had tears in her eyes.

  Sarah stared wide-eyed at her mother and after a long moment said, “You never told us that. You said your father died in an accident.”

  “How come you never told us that?” Ava asked her.

  Regina sighed. “’Cause I don’t like to think about it.”

  Sarah couldn’t believe it. All her life she had been told that her grandfather had died when the truck he was loading slipped out of gear and backed over him. “You lied to us all this time? You just made up that other story? How could you do that?”

  “I just told you, I don’t like to think about what happened, let alone talk about it.”

  “You told Helena,” Sarah said. “After lying to your own children for thirty years.”

  “Y’all wasn’t ready to hear nothing like that when you was kids,” Regina said. “So I lied. And I regretted it, too, because if I had told you maybe y’all would have known better what can happen to Colored people in this world and maybe things would have turned out different.”

  “I’m sorry,” Helena said. “I really didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

  Regina was quiet now, still staring at the photograph of her father. “It just don’t seem to be no end to us getting taken away from each other, do it? I swear, if you letting your sanity rest on the well-being of any black man, you may as well go ahead and go crazy now and save yourself the heartbreak.”

  A few minutes later, Ava was on her way out the front door, on her way to work, when Helena came out of the dining room, holding the pad of paper with the grocery list on it. “Did you do this?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  “Oh, I almost forgot it,” Ava said. “Did you want to add something?”

  Helena blinked, looking confused. “No, not the grocery list. The drawing.”

  There was a little pencil drawing of Regina, sketched in detail on the corner of the page. She was in motion, her hands out in front of her and her mouth open, as if she was speaking. Ava said. “I guess I was doodling while Mama was telling her story.”

  “Doodling?”

  Ava nodded.

  “But this is wonderful,” Helena said. “Ava, do you know how wonderful this is?”

  Ava was always doodling in the corners of pages. Every grocery list she wrote had some sketch in its margins, drawn while she waited for Sarah to decide whether she wanted to buy pork or beef for Sunday dinner, or for Paul to make up his mind about milk or orange juice. She never thought anything about it, never assessed her scribblings, never even looked at them afterward. She had certainly never considered that they were wonderful. She looked again at the drawing Helena held out and noticed that Regina’s face seemed alive with the story she was telling. Her mouth and hands suggested movement. The tiny creases around her eyes and the lines along her brow held heavy emotio
n. It wasn’t just a scribbling of Regina, it was Regina.

  Ava took the pad and peered close at the drawing. Helena was right. It was wonderful. Ava could see now that it was.

  1953

  Sarah Haley was called Mother Haley by everyone who knew her. She was called Mother Haley because of her standing as an elder in her church in Hayden, Georgia, the church that both her son, George, and his wife, Regina, had grown up in and had been members of all their lives before moving up north. Mother Haley was devoted to her church, where she had met and eulogized two husbands and raised her only son, and she believed in everything it stood for, including community and family and togetherness and, especially, judgment.

  When Regina and George had moved to Philadelphia, Mother Haley had begun visiting them once a year at their little apartment. When they moved into the house on Radnor Street, she called within days to say that, now that they had more room, she was planning to visit more often. Regina assured her that it was too soon for company, that they weren’t yet able to accommodate her, that the house was a mess with their belongings only half unpacked. She told her mother-in-law that for two and a half years until, finally, Mother Haley could be discouraged no longer. In the spring of 1953, she called to say that she was coming, that she had already bought her train ticket. Regina told George to tell her no.

  “I can’t function when she’s here. She spends half her time telling me what I’m doing wrong, and the other half telling me what I aint doing right.”

  Mother Haley’s visits at their apartment had been hard on Regina, for reasons she did not think the existence of more rooms would necessarily help. Regina always believed that Mother Haley didn’t think much of her and that she imagined George could have done better, got himself a lighter-skinned, less-kinky-haired, better cook of a wife. Their relationship had always been strained, from way back, when George and Regina were first going together. Mother Haley was bossy, with other women and with men, and Regina did not take kindly to being bossed. But George could not say no to his mother. He had been raised to be an obedient child, to study on everything his mother and father told him and, as a grown man, he found it difficult to break the habit.

  He met his mother alone at the train station, and the first thing she said was, "Where everybody at?"

  "Regina had to stay home with the children,” he told her.

  "Why aint she bring the chiren out to meet me, like she usually do?"

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Mama,” George said, picking up her bags.

  "Don't make no sense. I don't know what Regina be thinking."

  Regina was thinking that if she got through the week with Mother Haley in the house without snatching the woman bald-headed, she'd buy herself

  that hat she'd seen in a store window on Sixtieth Street and wear it to church, feeling weighed in the balance and found worthy as Job.

  "Red aint no kind of color for walls," was the first thing Mother Haley said when she entered the house.

  "I love them,” said Regina, who had only ever tolerated the red walls before.

  Mother Haley’s lips twisted into a purposeful frown.

  Regina fixed ham hocks and rice for dinner, and watched as her mother-in-law sniffed each bite, then tasted it with the tip of her tongue before eating it, and she decided she'd buy herself that hat if she made it through the night without killing her.

  George did not seem to enjoy having his mother there any more than Regina did.

  "He on edge all the time," Regina told Maddy, a couple of days into Mother Haley’s visit, sitting in Maddy’s kitchen, smoking and watching her friend chop onions for a meatloaf. "And he look fit to jump off any minute. He quicker to criticize, quicker to holler about nothing."

  Maddy frowned. "I thought you said they was close.”

  "They was when he was growing up. And she still always the first person he call when he get a little raise at work, or Pastor Goode ask him to do some special job for the church. But it's something else there, too."

  "Something like what?"

  "I don't know. Sometime I see him watching her with a kind of meanness in his eyes, when she aint doing nothing but washing the dishes or sweeping the front porch. And she aint got to do a whole lot more than look at George Jr. before George get his drawers in a twist."

  Just the day before, when Geo had run into the house from the backyard, crying, with his knee slightly skinned and barely bleeding, Mother Haley had said, “Don’t cry now. You a big boy, and a big, strong boy don’t cry like that.”

  George had frowned over his newspaper and said, “Mama, he aint a big, strong boy, he only six, and he can cry if he want to.”

  When George had come home later that same evening he had found his mother holding George Jr., cradling him and talking sweetly, saying, “You a sweet boy. Aint you just the sweetest thing?”

  George had stormed up to her, his nostrils flared, his bulgy eyes huge. “Don’t coddle him like that, Mama,” he’d said, through clenched teeth. “You gone soften him up too much.”

  “George, what’s the matter with you?” his mother had demanded.

  He hadn’t answered, had simply taken the child from his grandmother’s arms and put him down on the floor.

  “I wasn’t doing him no harm,” said Mother Haley, as Geo skipped off happily. “I raised you, didn’t I?”

  George had walked away.

  Regina had gone upstairs a while later and found him lying on their bed, staring up at the ceiling, his eyebrows drawn tight on his forehead.

  "What's the matter with you?"

  "Nothing."

  "She's your mother. You the one told her she could come stay."

  "You know she don't wait for me to tell her she can do something.”

  “He spent the rest of that evening alone in the bedroom,” Regina told Maddy. “Yelling for me to shut the children up when they played too loud.”

  Maddy frowned over her meatloaf. “Well, how much longer she gone be here?”

  “Two more weeks,” said Regina, feeling tired.

  The next Sunday, the Delaneys took up one more seat than usual on the pew at Blessed Chapel. Mother Haley sat between George Jr. and his father, and spent much of the service straightening either George’s tie, picking lint off either George’s lapel, and reminding either George to sit up straighter in the pew, because, after all, they were in God’s house, and it was bad manners to slouch on anybody’s couch, let alone the Almighty’s.

  It was late April, and it was hot inside the sanctuary. Large fans that were mounted high on the walls re-circulated the warm air around the chapel, lightly blowing the feathers on ladies’ hats, aided by the hand-held paper fans with illustrated bible stories and thin wooden handles that everyone was using to fan themselves. As many times as his grandmother told him to stop slouching, Geo had a hard time staying upright in his seat. The heavy air kept rounding his shoulders and loosening the muscles of his thighs so that he slid down more and more on the hard wooden bench. Watching Pastor Goode in the pulpit, looking debonair despite the large beads of sweat that kept forming on his face, which he wiped neatly away every few minutes with a simple white handkerchief, Geo wished the man’s lips would stop moving, that the sermon would end and the music would start again. The music was the only way he could stand church on a warm Sunday.

  He wasn’t listening to the preacher’s words, only the cadence of his voice, and whenever it seemed to build and then come down again, Geo hoped the sermon was ending. But then Pastor Goode would take a breath, and wait for the applause and hallelujahs and yes, Jesuses to quiet down, and he would go on. Geo reached into his pocket and pulled out a butterscotch candy, hoping the sugar rush would help, and looked over at Ava, who was seated beside him. She was staring at Pastor Goode, unblinking, looking completely focused on the sermon. At first, Geo thought she was daydreaming about something else, but the way her head was tilted made him think she might actually be listening to what the pastor was saying. Geo decided
to listen, too, to hear what was so interesting to his sister.

  “Devotion to the Lord is key to our salvation. We got to follow the teachings of our savior, and spread his word, every day of our lives. It aint always easy, living by the word, because the devil tempts us every day. But to live any other way would mean damnation. First Corinthians seven thirty-five: I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you might live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord. And devotion to the Lord also means devotion to the church, because in here his word is never forgotten. Out there, it’s easy to forget, to be led astray, but within these walls you always face to face with your creator, and any child knows that it’s harder to do wrong when you know your Father is watching.”

  The longer Pastor Goode preached, the more the corners of Ava’s mouth turned down, until she was frowning so openly that their mother, who was seated on Ava’s other side, nudged her with an elbow and whispered, “Stop looking so evil.” Ava sat back on the pew and folded her arms across her chest.

  When service was over, Mother Haley said she wanted to meet the pastor, so they all went and stood in the line of people waiting to thank Goode for his wonderful sermon. The Liddy’s were among them—Doris, her husband, Dexter, and their daughter, Sondra, who was a year older than Ava and Geo. Doris fawned over the pastor so long that Maddy said, loud enough so Doris could hear, “She see the man every day, she can’t have that much new to say to him. Lord.”

  The pastor greeted George and Regina warmly. In the last couple of years, since they had moved to Radnor Street and joined Blessed Chapel, George and Regina had become favorites, it seemed, of Goode’s. He was always talking about how smart and capable they both were and always asking them to help out with one or another church event or activity, which they always did, happily.

  When George introduced his mother to the preacher, Mother Haley smiled like a teenage girl. “You a real gifted preacher.”