Arilla Sun Down

by Virginia Hamilton

  “Do you think you’re the only one with blood of Indians in this town?” Mom says.

  “I’m the only one that’s my father’s Sun.”

  “Your father is interracial. And you are interracial.” Mom says it like it’s a tribe all its own.

  “Don’t give me that,” Sun says. “She’s interracial, if you want,” not even looking at me. “But a blood is a blood. Dad’s mother was a full-blood.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Mom says.

  “You look at her picture and you know.”

  “We know how she married,” Mom says.

  “How?” I ask them, looking from one to the other. I’ve never heard any talk like this before.

  “No, you don’t know that, either,” Sun says to Mom. “I say she married only part colored in the first place. The rest was hers and it was blood.”

  “But your father married me. So that gives you less than a sixteenth.”

  “Or as much as three fourths,” Sun says. “Anyway, Dad and I look Amerind.”

  “Looks don’t mean a thing,” Mom says. “It’s what society says.”

  “Society has said it all wrong forever. And looks mean everything, and who cares what society says? A blood is a blood.”

  “No sir.”

  “He may be light-complexioned,” Jack Sun goes on. “He can be dark with blue eyes or blond with coal-black eyes. But if he wants it, he’s a blood and the law will back him. You have to agree with that, Moon Mother.”

  “Stop it,” she says.

  “You have to agree,” he says again. “You wait and see. One day the restless bloods here will reclaim what’s theirs. They’ll build a nation house and the Feds will give them funds, it’s happening all over. And some will be blond and blue-eyed just like country farmers; some will look like Little Moon there, and some will be like me. Because some of the mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers and even the great-grands never left when the tribes were forced across the Mississippi.”

  Jack Sun smiled, looking like he was seeing it all. “They stayed, but they melted away into the countryside. And for generations they looked like poor white and poor black farmers. They looked like you, Moon Mother, and they looked like Dad. But they were just waiting. They were bloods, waiting.”

  “So now everybody’s an Indian,” Mom says.

  “Just maybe you and her and me and my dad,” Sun says.

  Slowly, Mom shakes her head back and forth. Slowly, Jack Sun nods his head.

  They look deep into each other’s eyes. Something between them not quite friendly.

  This is the strangest dinner table I’ve ever sat at. All the days of dinner tables being just about the same, something you could depend on to be ordinary, with all kinds of usual, ordinary nourishment. And this time we are the first time like this, with these words and eating.

  All at once Mom says, “You always were a brilliant boy. Always different, though, and set apart.”

  “Yes?” Sun says.

  What about me? What am I?

  “When you called me Moon Mother, I thought it was your sense of humor, that’s all I thought it was,” Mom says, looking at him so deep.

  “No,” Sun says.

  Who am I? What part, on which side?

  “I see that now,” Mom says. “You mean Moon Mother, just like you say it. And Moon Child for Arilla, just like you say it. To differentiate, to set us off from the Sun.”

  “Why name me the Sun, if not to differentiate?”

  “No,” Mom says. “I had a dream. The night you were born, and I’ll never forget that dream. I was walking down this very dark and lonely road. There were streetlights like question marks about half a mile apart. They couldn’t keep the dark back. There was no moon.”

  Sun smiled.

  “Suddenly I stopped in my tracks,” Mom said. “I could see the whole earth in the dark. You know the way a harvest moon will come up big and orange? Well, this time a really gigantic thing began to rise up from beyond the earth’s curvature. It was orange, but it wasn’t a moon. It filled the whole night sky with its fire. It was terrifying and it was beautiful. It was the sun.

  “The next morning you were born. I couldn’t get the dream out of my mind for a minute. So I said to your father, ‘Let’s name him Golden. Golden Adams.’ But Dad saw your long, skinny legs and he said, ‘This sun has to run.’ That’s how you came to be named Sun Run.”

  “Nice,” Jack said. “People shouldn’t be named like Jack, after your father. People should be named like Sun Run, by prophecy.”

  “It was an accident,” Mom said.

  “No,” Jack Sun Run says.

  “Oh, yes, Jack, come on.”

  “No,” Jack says. “Maheo, the all one, spooned you that dream just for me.”

  Mom laughs. I laugh with her.

  Jack Sun smiles at us, but his eyes are not laughing.

  Mom sips her coffee. She is smiling just a little. “I can’t wait to see where you end up,” she says.

  “Yes?” Jack says.

  What about me? Can you wait for me?

  “Wish you had a dream when I was born. Mom? Then I could be Arilla Jump Over The Sun or something.”

  Mom laughs. I don’t know why I even say that. Jack-Sun is looking at me. Like a shadow falls over him. The look gives me a chill before it is gone.

  “Moon Child is some interesting sometimes, too,” he says.

  “’Course I am,” I tell him. “Want to hear how interesting?”

  He backs up from the table, taking his plate to the sink. Just like that, he puts an end to the meal and keeps from talking to me at the same time.

  Sun takes my plate to the sink and Mom’s to the sink. He clears off all the dishes and puts warm food from the stove pots on a plate in the low-heat oven. So it will stay warm for Dad. Dad may eat when he comes home or he may not, depending on how he feels. But we always keep food warm for him.

  Jack-Sun is such a good waiter he clears the table in a second and with hardly a sound. Always clearing from the seated person’s right.

  “I don’t think I’m finished talking with you,” Mom tells him. Looking at me, she smooths back my hair and runs her hand over my cheek. I like when she does that.

  Jack stays busy and says nothing to her or to me. When he wants to end a meal, he can be as silent as a thief.

  7

  “We will have to finish this conversation sometime,” Mom says to Sun Run.

  She is holding me around the shoulders in her nice way. I lean against her, ever so tired. We stay at the dinner table.

  Sun keeps silent at his work. He can clear a table in fast time, but he never will scrape a dish. Mom says, if you ever expect Jack Sun to do more than pile up dirty dishes at the side of the sink, you’d better have the proper flat scrapers on hand, and a barrel for the garbage. She says you’d better have a square vat of scalding water to rinse them — three feet across and four feet deep.

  Sun wipes off the table and begins to set out a clean plate, a napkin and silverware for Dad. Looking just like the best waiter in a dining hall.

  I’ve seen my brother waiting on tables with his silver tray. Now, with school on, he works only Sundays. I’ll work some Sundays, too, when I’m fourteen. But I have seen Sun carry that oval tray full of dinner plates of food on the flat of his hand. One dinner in the center of the tray for balance and six more surrounding it. Seven on a tray — turkey or chicken dinners with stuffing, and roast lamb with mint jelly and mashed potatoes on a Sunday. Sun holds an eighth dinner in his left hand, with all of the dinners steaming up to the hanging lights overhead. He is so quick the meals stay as hot as when they left the kitchen. Sun can balance that heavy tray of food like it is nothing. He can move through a crowd of diners whose chairs clutter the aisles as if the crowd weren’t even in the way. Eight dinners for a round table of evening diners. Sun has already served them their rolls, water, coffee, or tea.

  I have seen him trip over a chair leg in
that big dining room. The full tray he carries jars out of his hand. It seems like forever that the tray is falling. But Sun catches it before it hits the floor. Not one plate of food is spilled. The whole room of diners starts in clapping for him.

  Once I saw him slip on a piece of ice and the whole tray of food flipped and fell in his lap. Gravy and mint jelly dripping down his fingers. And Dad rushed in at the sound of the crash. Dad stopped still when he saw who had made the noise.

  “Well, Sun, at least the silverware didn’t break.”

  And all those college diners laughing.

  I have seen the college kitchen, where the refrigerator lockers are so large I could roller-skate inside them or pull up a couch in there to lie down. Next to the lockers are metal cabinets about waist high, with round holes in their counters. Deep cardboard containers of ice cream fit into the holes, ice cream that the college makes. Never in my life have I seen so many different kinds of ice cream and that taste so good. And college boys in a line in front of the cabinets, scooping ice cream onto pieces of apple, cherry, pumpkin and berry pie in season, and lining up the pies and ice cream on still more counters. So that waiters like Jack Sun can scoop them up and serve them out in the dining room. Those fantastic pies are made by women and men who are fine cooks. A lot of them are related to me on Mom’s side of the family. We have lots of cousins in this town, but few my own age. Mom says her family is now about middle-age and will die out. She says the relatives stayed in one place too long and that the college influence and zero population has sifted through the sand in their brains.

  The cooks sure know how to pull fine meals together in that huge, hot kitchen. They always greet me nice when I come in once in a while before the busy dinner hour. I have Dad’s permission to get me some free pie and ice cream — man-oh-man!

  “Hi-you, Arilla-honey?” the cooks will say, like a bunch of bells chiming Arilla-honey, Arilla-honey, on down the kitchen. Most of them with time for a smile at me — “Hi you doin’, Arilla-honey?” Sometimes with some signifying at what Mom says are my origins.

  “Arilla, you sure you want some fattening pie? Put on a little weight this summer, dint cha, honey?”

  “Takes after her father’s side.”

  “Well —” and soft laughter.

  “How you know about her father’s side!” And snickering.

  “I know which side it am not!” And whispering and more laughter.

  It don’t bother me. I know they like me better than they do Mom or Dad or Jack Sun. They think Mom is strange for wanting to dance. She came back home and that was a plus on our side. But if her studio had failed, she says, they would have called her a dreamer-woman to carry on so. Ought to know there’s no business in that kind of thing, they’d have said. Now they can’t say a thing, with some of the women joining in exercise classes and inching what Dad calls their ample figures into The Dance.

  They tolerate Dad with some respect because he is good at his job, all will say, and plays no favorites. They used to call him Old Stone Face behind his back because he was so polite. Maybe distant is better, and they couldn’t tell what he was thinking, couldn’t read him. But they stopped it when one day this weird couple with an out-of-state license came to the dining hall driven by this black chauffeur. Nobody had ever seen a black chauffeur, not even in the movies, usually, and for certain not in for-real life in town. Anyway, these folks out of state wanted a peaceful evening meal on the dining-room screened-in porch, which is really the best place to eat on a summer’s evening. They asked Dad to please give their chauffeur — Mr. Bushnell D. Walker was his name — anything he wanted to eat, but, if you please, to feed him in the kitchen.

  Dad blew a righteous fuse. I wasn’t there, but Jack Sun told how it all happened. He said Dad stood stone still. Didn’t move for a full ten seconds. And then he began to shake. After he shook, his face turned darker, like he couldn’t breathe. And then he spoke in a steady three-minute rage right up to the out-of-state dude’s face:

  “Even the cooks don’t eat in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have them eat in that hot kitchen. How dare you enter this establishment with your offensive trash? Everybody eats right out there on the porch before the evening meal, right where you want to eat. Their fingerprints are on the salt and pepper shakers. Their elbows have rested on the same tables. No need to speak about what of theirs has warmed the same chairs. The food you eat will be cooked by their hands — and you come here with … with that offensive, that stupid nonsense, when no one has ever come here with it. The black man eats in the dining room or you can take your hunger elsewhere …”

  Anyway, that was the best part of it. Sun said he was hoping Dad would go ahead and punch out the dude. But Dad never would do a thing like that. Sun said the black man was an old guy afraid he might lose his job. So he felt he’d better fix things by eating his dinner in the dude’s car. Dad sent a waiter out and a busboy, and even one of the hostesses to hand him a menu. He sent Sun out as the waiter, to serve the old guy. That’s all Sun had to do the whole time — waiting table on the old guy in this white Lincoln Continental. I was always surprised that the out-of-town dude and his wife didn’t just leave when Dad started on him. But Sun said he was too scared and embarrassed. And probably too hungry. Anyhow, they all got to eat. After, they paid and they left, with Sun, the hostess, the busboy, my dad and a nice bunch of students that had gathered watching them leave. I don’t expect we’ll ever see them again, either.

  From then on, my cousins — the finest cooks in the county, too — thought that Dad was just about perfect. Still, they don’t much like folks close to them to be too perfect. What’s there to talk about, to make up gossip and tales about, if the point of interest, Mom says, is above it all and can do no wrong? To them, Dad is much more like a relative at those times when he pulls one of his disappearing acts and is nowhere to be found for a few days. They can’t find him. The college jeep he uses is missing. None of them have seen him. The college wants to know where he is. So they cover for him, but they don’t know a thing. They think they understand disappearing. Mom says they think they know why it happens — just another poor fool with some weakness in the flesh. All kinds of excitement and they can make up stories. Call him Stony, just the way Mom does.

  But when there are strangers around, new people working in the summertime, or a pick-up kitchen crew for the overload of out-of-towners, they call Dad Mr. Adams. Mr. Adams to all outsiders. That’s funny because we, Dad and Sun and Mom and me, are always the outsiders at other times. Goes to show that blood is a closed door against the wind.

  They hate Jack Sun Run Adams. They hate him with a pure, perfect hate. Because Sun decides to be whatever he wants and as weird as he wants, any day he feels like it. They can’t get a handle on him, the way he enters into a world he makes for himself. They do these little mean things to him. Like, they will shun him by never saying a word to him directly. They talk around him when maybe for a few minutes the counter has no pumpkin pie, or something. They know they need to put out more of that kind of pie. Sun comes rushing in wanting the pie. In a minute he knows they know he needs the pie. He waits while they make him wait. He won’t ask for it, knowing they know it’s their job and knowing they know their job. He’s always ahead of them, knowing that if he’s too long from the dining room Dad will notice.

  “What’s he standing there for?”

  “Like a fool, too.”

  “Like a idiot.”

  “Stealing some time. Tired of working.”

  “Just lazy. Too big a shot to ask.”

  “Hair falling all in the food.”

  “Couldn’t pay me to eat his dinners.”

  And whispering and laughter. Not looking at him or putting out pumpkin pie.

  Until Dad comes in. “What’s holding it up?” he says to Sun.

  “No pumpkin pie ready,” Sun says, looking at them, the cousins.

  “Pie’s been ready for hours — get those pies out there! Now! Do I have to
do it all myself?”

  Sun laughs. He has got them again. Every time. They put the pies out, flinging them, once Dad’s back is turned.

  All of it small-minded, Mom says, just spiteful. She says Sun shouldn’t even go down to their level. But my brother always does. He knows what to do to beat them in the littlest thing, too. I wouldn’t even care to beat them. But Sun will play any game, any time. No game is ever too low. And that keeps me on my guard.

  Here, still sitting, leaning on Mom. Thoughts jumping over things, with dozing off a few seconds in between. I’m so tired. Our kitchen is always so cozy with its yellow curtains and yellow paint. It’s the best place to be when my dad comes home, although I sure should be thinking about bed. I can feel all the little aches in my ankles and in my calves. Legs are going to hurt me tonight. Sometimes they get so muscle-tight they hurt me the whole night through.

  Seems like we’ve been here at the table a long time. But it’s not much later when Dad comes in. Bringing a swirl of fresh night air with him clear into the kitchen. I must have been dozing good, for Sun isn’t in the kitchen. Everything is neat and ready for Dad. Sun is waiting for him in the hall there. He always waits for Dad like that when he’s wanting to go out somewhere. Sun is neat and casual with just the thinnest silk headband tied in a knot just above his ear. I’ve tried to wear headbands knotted like that and they look awful.

  He and Dad stand in the light of the hall, facing each other. Standing close, Dad is on this side, and flings an arm over Sun’s shoulder. Sun is looking down at the floor, talking right in Dad’s ear. They talk low and for a long time. Most often they have this long, private say between them. I wonder, does Sun tell Dad about his whole day? How he is going to hurt me? Or does he make up a whole day like my dad would want to hear? Does Sun say that Mom doesn’t want him out of the house?

  Dad eases his arm away. He stands looking at Sun. Sun Run is not quite as tall. Both of them have their hands deep in pockets now. Run can meet Dad’s gaze, but not for more than a few seconds before he has to look down at the floor again. I get the feeling more than once that Sun has these layers. Thin, like onion skins. And the longer he looks at Dad’s eyes, the more skins peel away. Brother has this wall of respect for Dad. You can see it the way he stands there. Layers peel away and Run lets Dad see him as some sixteen-year-old waiting for permission.