Beyond Molasses Creek

by Nicole Seitz

  Early one morning I took Daddy’s johnboat out in the creek and dared to get closer. Her skin glowed in the sunlight like a shiny penny. I crept near, letting the water lap me up, and there I was, standing in my boat just feet away from her, and I could almost see the light in her eyes as she grinned.

  “Hey!” she said. “I saw you last summer. You waved. Do you remember?”

  I did remember, too, but the wind stole my voice. Couldn’t speak a word.

  “You like to fish?” she asked.

  I nodded. Gulped. With her white skin, she looked and even sounded different, strange. Then a noise from behind liked to put the fear of the devil in me. Near ’bout fell out the boat.

  “Veees-ssae! Get yo’ fool-hide back on over here!”

  It was Mama, and she ain’t sounded angry, not exactly. I could tell by the pitch of her voice—she was something closer to fearing for life. I told myself we weren’t doing nothin’ wrong, but couple years into knowing Miss Ally, my mama found out about us two—how we’d sneak off in the boat, how we’d fish and laugh and pass the time in secret. She found out because I weren’t too smart at ten year old and seemed to be getting dumber every day. I actually told myself I was invisible when I’d push off from the bank into the black molasses. That no one could see me. I was like that ghost pirate off the coast of Carolina. What’s his name? Blackbeard. I was a ghost and the water was my turf, my place in the world. Where I belonged.

  Dad-an-howdy, you ought to seen my hide after Mama got aholt of me. I couldn’t sit for a week and I don’t think that’s stretching it none. See, Miss Ally and me was coming back from one of our trips on the water. We’d gone to sit in the breezes over down by the nice big oysters, when all a sudden my father comes on by in a boat with my uncle Percival. I telled Miss Ally to duck when I seen Daddy’s eyes grow big and white, and his mouth drop open. Why’d I tell her to hide? I don’t know. It was a mistake though, and Daddy and Uncle Percival beat me home. They told my mama I was out in our boat with a white girl, and let me tell you, I ain’ never heard the things I heard, ain’ never felt the whoopin’ I felt that day. Saddest part was, I weren’t so much hurt on the body but in the heart. How could I get in so much trouble just for being with a girl I considered a friend?

  A friend. That’s what Miss Ally was to me, but nobody could understand that, could they? We’d talk about fishing and the water and such, but we’d also talk about the other things. Like the clouds up in the sky and how the angels get to sit right up on there, nice and fluffy. And we’d tell each other our dreams. I wanted to be a doctor like Ally’s father, Doc Green. Wanted it so much I could see it when I closed my eyes. I wanted to help people. I wanted folks to look at me when I come in the door with a thank-God-you-here look like Mama give Doc Green. Miss Ally would say things like she ain’t want to marry and settle down, but she ain’t known what she did want to do. Maybe go off to Hollywood and be a star. It sounded silly to me but I never told her that. I believed she could do it if she tried. She was pretty enough. Smart enough too.

  Miss Ally telled me ’bout this one time her white friends was talking and one of ’em says, “I think it would be the worst thing in the world to be colored. Don’t you?” Humph. Imagine that? What did she know about being it anyway? Worst thing in the world.

  Miss Ally tells me this while I’m laid back feeling the sun on my face, the boat rocking all this way and that. I sit up right slow and just looked at her. I reckon I’d never thought of it that way— that being colored was the worse thing there was in the world. I knew it then, because it all made sense when Miss Ally looked at me, studying me. “I don’t agree with them though,” she told me. But I knew she was thinking hard on it like I was. Here she was, a young girl in a boat with the pret’ near worse thing in the world.

  I still at that age could not understand the differences between us. I don’t claim to be the smartest person out there, but dad-howdy, I was a God-loving body just like any white folk. I was.

  Least, I thought I was till Mama laid that whooping on me and told me I had no business being with a white girl. Who did I think I was and did I think I was better than everybody else and don’t I know she a cracker and we don’t mess with crackers lest we want trouble and Mama didn’t want no trouble. She done had all the trouble she needed so far. What she left me that day was this: not one more sneaky thing out of me with that white girl or she’d ship me off to go live with my cousins in that one-room house on John’s Island with the meanest man I ever seen, my uncle Percival. There’d be no schooling for me, just hard work in the fields day and night.

  I tell you, that did it for me for a good long while. It did. It was hard, but I never had any contact with Ally till she started leaving me notes in an old Co-Cola bottle at the end of her dock. I seen it odd-like shining in the noonday sun and come close enough to snatch it and take a better look. By that time I was pushing thirteen and struggling not to get into fights at school. The last thing on my mind was white girls. Until I read those first words I knew were meant for me: I’ve missed you. Where have you been? Meet me tonight. I have something important to tell you.

  Well, with the soul of a thirteen-year-old boy pent up in my body, how in creation could I ever resist an invitation like that?

  EIGHTEEN

  The Radio

  Ally 1963

  “YOU CAME.”

  “Of course I came.”

  Silence. Water rippling. “I haven’t seen you since . . . It’s been a few years.” The moonlight shimmered on the black glassy creek. Marsh grass tickled my legs. I could barely see the lights on at home. My parents were already asleep. “I could hear her whipping you that night,” I told him. “It was all I could do, listening to it. I cried and cried. Put a pillow over my head.”

  “Weren’t so bad.” His looks had changed. Even in the faint light of the moon, I could see he was almost a man now, and his voice was lower. A lot lower. It sent chills down my spine, and I found myself unable to look him in the eyes.

  “You said you got something you wanted to say,” he prompted.

  “Yes, I do . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “Sorry . . . that we’re so different. Sorry that everybody thinks a colored and a white person should go their separate ways. Sorry about what happened to you that night you got caught . . . with me. I think if people just took the time to know—”

  “Ally, stop.”

  “No, really—”

  “I said stop.” His voice was barely a growl. He clenched his fists and looked around toward his house to make sure no one was watching. Then he whispered, “Things have changed, Ally. It ain’t the same. We ain’t kids no more.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we cain’t see each other.” The words hung there in the air between us and then like mist they vanished, taking my breath along with them.

  “But why, Vesey? I mean, I don’t want you to get in trouble anymore, I don’t.”

  “You cain’t know what I go through. You cain’t know. I walk to the store and white folk yell at me, call me nigga. I try to go to school, mind my own business, and white kids knock down my books. I see signs that won’t let me drink the water, won’t let me come into a white restaurant. I’m colored, Ally, and I ain’t nothing to do about it. I cain’t do nothing. You cain’t do nothing.”

  If I was honest right then, if I was really honest, I knew what he was saying was true because I’d seen it. Hadn’t I? Different people, different circumstances, but I’d seen it—people being treated differently, wrongly, because of the color of their skin. And what had I done? Had I spoken up? Had I? The truth pressed my shoulders down.

  “I just . . . I wanted to say I’m sorry, that’s all,” I told him. “And I hope . . . I hope we can still be friends. I’ve missed you, you know. I miss going out in the boat and just being with somebody I don’t have to impress. We could just sit there and not say anything at all, not have to say anything, a
nd nowadays I have to be all proper and perfect and ladylike, and, well, I just miss the way we used to be.”

  “We used to be kids,” said Vesey.

  I reached back behind the marsh grass and pulled out a shiny black radio. I turned the knob and a small sound pierced the night air. Then I turned it just a hair louder. It was the Beatles. Vesey stared at the radio.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked, suspicious.

  “I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re implying. I got it for my thirteenth birthday. It was yesterday, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know. That’s a nice radio.”

  “So do you want to dance or what?” I asked him. It was the best thing I’d said in a long time. It made me feel right with the world.

  There was nothing but stone and concern in Vesey’s face at first, but when Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips” came on, he started bobbing his head a little. Then a smile broke out. A full-out grin. Then something like courage rolled onto his broad shoulders, and he put his hand out to me.

  I remember the way his warm hand felt in mine. Strong and capable. Music drifted between us, around us, and up into the cool night air. Lights glittered on the black water, and I stole furtive glances at the sculpture of his cheeks as the marsh grass swirled around us.

  Hands down, that moonlight dance with Vesey when we were thirteen years old was the best dance I’ve had in sixty years.

  The worst dance was not long after that, when Margaret insisted I make Vesey appear. She said she was losing patience with me, and if I didn’t produce him soon, she’d have no choice but to tell her parents or our friends at school. So I did produce him. I lured him back to the spot on the riverbank, brought my radio, and when we started shagging, Margaret stepped out from behind a tree.

  “Well, well, well,” she said. “I don’t believe you’ve introduced me to your friend.”

  She held her hand out to a rock-still Vesey. He looked at me, eyes wide. “This is my friend Margaret,” I told him. He seemed too stunned and afraid to shake her hand, and I was Judas.

  I’d betrayed our friendship. I’d betrayed his trust.

  NINETEEN

  Supper with Old Friends

  Mount Pleasant

  Ally

  “I’VE ALWAYS FELT DRAWN TO VESEY,” SAYS MARGARET, watching him wave from the boat. “Drawn to his . . . his, what is that, Ally? Animal magnetism?”

  “Forbidden fruit,” I say.

  “No,” says Margaret. “Yes? No. Well, maybe so.” Vesey ties his rope and steps up on firmer ground. “Vesey Washington, would you look at you? Looking good, old friend! Looking fine.”

  “Miss Margaret.” Vesey tips his hat. “Been a long time, ain’t it? Decades.”

  “Don’t you dare count how many, neither.”

  “Miss Ally?” He turns to me. “Right nice to have me over. Ain’t every day a man gets an invitation for supper . . . with old friends.”

  “Vesey, you are a sight for sore eyes! I just can’t get over . . . I declare, Ally, he hasn’t aged a wink! And for us, we have to work so hard to look this good.”

  Vesey is uncomfortable with this talk. Always has been a little uneasy with Margaret’s forceful nature. I feel protective of him and take him by the arm. “You are my guests for the evening, so I want you to relax, have some ginger ale or sweet tea, something cool to drink. We’ve got pot roast, you know. I hope you brought your appetite.”

  “And homemade gravy?” asks Vesey.

  “Even homemade macaroni and cheese.”

  “Lawd, I died and gone to heaven.” A look flashes between us, and I plead with my eyes, then mouth the words, “I’m sorry. About the whole heaven thing.”

  “Not at all, Miss Ally. Not at all. And who is this?” Vesey puts out his hand for Graison, who is standing quietly in Margaret’s shadow, taking us all in.

  “This is my granddaughter, Graison. Say hello, Graison.”

  “Hello, Graison,” she says.

  “Graison is staying with me . . . for a while.”

  “That’s nice,” says Vesey.

  “I’m preggers,” says Graison, taking his hand and shaking it firmly. My eyebrows rise.

  “Graison!” says Margaret.

  “Well, it’s true. They’ll know about it soon enough. Not like you can hide it forever. Mr. Washington, I’m staying here with my grandmother until the baby is born. Then I’ll be headed back home to Memphis. Back to school and all, I guess.”

  None of us knows what to say. The child is what, sixteen? A child having a child. Something aches inside of me and I brush it off. “Alrighty then, how about we go on in and eat some supper? I’d like to take a little boat ride before the sun goes down. If you feel up to it, Graison.”

  “Oh, I’ll be fine.”

  “That okay with you, Vesey? Dinner and a boat ride?”

  He nods. “Don’t have to ask me twice. Here, let me lead the way.”

  “As you can see, I have a long ways to go,” I say, pointing to the kitchen behind me. We never did have a proper dining room, just a screened-in patio out the back of the house with a concrete floor and aged wood walls. The table is new to the patio, teak, with fruits and little details carved into the legs. “Got this table in Hawaii nearly twenty years ago,” I say, patting the wood. “It’s turned a little, sitting in the warehouse.”

  “I think it’s lovely out here,” says Margaret, stretching back in her chair and crossing her legs. “Love how you can sit here and feel the breeze and watch the water dance.” She looks over at Vesey. “You still live across the river there?”

  “Sure do.”

  “How quaint. To still be this close, after all these years.”

  “Vesey was kind enough to look after Daddy over the past—”

  My throat catches and I grab my glass of tea. After a sip I say, “Would anyone like some more macaroni?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” says Vesey, holding out his plate. I offer some to Graison.

  “Not for me,” she says. “I’m stuffed.” Margaret looks at her granddaughter and at this moment I can see the resemblance, somewhere in the eyes and the forehead. Margaret seems concerned she’s not getting enough food for two.

  “Graison, have you thought about what you’re going to do once the child is born?” I hear the words come out of my mouth with such ease and familiarity; I don’t know what’s come over me. Obviously I’ve ruffled Margaret. She grabs her glass and swigs her ginger ale.

  “I’m going to adopt, I guess. We’re working with a lady to find a good family.”

  She says it so matter-of-fact, she might as well be selling a used car on craigslist. “I see. Well, you do have quite a life ahead of you, high school, college—”

  “Boys,” says Margaret. “It’s the boys that got her in this mess.”

  “Mimi!”

  “Well, it is.”

  “Miss Ally?” Vesey interrupts. “Looks like we got another twenty minutes or so before the sun sets. How ’bout I help you clear the table? That was some good food. Ain’t et that well in many a year.” He smiles big and jovial.

  “That would be nice,” I say. “Margaret, Graison, use the little girl’s room if you need to. You sure you’re up for a boat ride? Mister Vesey, here, can show you the most amazing views and the best places for oyster harvesting. I promise you. You’re in for a real treat.”

  “How ’bout we bring that old radio,” says Margaret, “and go shagging in the moonlight like we used to . . . back in the day.”

  The thought of it takes me back, fully there, and I can almost feel the damp ground beneath my feet, the way Vesey’s hand felt in mine, the music fading into the night. My heart skips and I smile at Vesey. I can see it in his eyes. He remembers too.

  TWENTY

  You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me

  Ally

  1964 WAS A LONG, HOT, HUMID SUMMER. HOTTER THAN the ones before. I would lie there in damp sheets, the window open, listening to sounds of night—the frogs and o
wls, the grasshoppers. Every now and then a noise would ripple up from the water as if a large fish had jumped for freedom.

  It sounded like my heart stirring.

  I was beginning to think about boys. All the time. I was fourteen years old and pretty much any boy made my heart race, the way their hands were strong and bigger than mine, the way they walked and how their shoulders were wide. Their muscles. My goodness, I was a mess of hormones and Mama didn’t know what to do with me. Not having any siblings at home to play or fight with, I’d skulk off alone in my room or on the dock with my sketchbook and draw the male figure in my mind’s eye. This worried Mama, and I’d hide the book just so she wouldn’t have to get all bothered about it. I never did put a face on those pictures I drew, those strong chests and rippling backs and arms. I didn’t put the face on it because it could only be one person: Vesey Washington.

  That summer, a strange awkwardness had grown up between Vesey and me. Having Margaret privy to us, I finally understood the taboo of our relationship, harmless as it was in my own eyes. In the South, it didn’t matter how things really were; it mattered what things looked like. The civil rights movement was well under way and businesses and restaurants had been so-called desegregated, but while the signs on the windows no longer read Whites Only or No Coloreds Allowed, reality was another matter altogether.

  I knew Vesey’s life was difficult. I knew it was all because of the color of his skin. Well, that and his mama. I could sense the unrest in whites and blacks alike as I’d walk down King Street or go into a diner. South Carolina had never been a state to simply abide by what the rest of the country was doing or what its federal government was telling it to do. It prided itself in being autonomous in some ways. The people of our town did things in a way they saw fit. Even though John F. Kennedy was dead, the civil rights acts had passed, and protesters were jailed in Birmingham, New York, Rock Hill, and elsewhere, Charleston was a little different story. There were things I saw—shoving, slurs, private conversations in beauty parlors—that never got reported on the evening news or in the paper. Folks didn’t just wake up one day and decide their feelings had changed toward blacks, or toward whites, for that matter. There were years and years of deep-rooted resentment built up on both sides.