Before I know it, I’m walking out of class next to Mei Ying, and she says something. I have to bend to hear her, with kids jamming the doorway and yelling in the hall. “There’s a lot of slavery still,” she’s saying to me. “It wasn’t only then. In China and Korea, girls are sold, smuggled out. It’s awful. My mother’s cousin …” Her words trail off. “And over in Berkeley, remember that guy that was arrested who owned the Indian restaurant? He had teenage sex slaves from India. Like girls our age.”
“What happened—” I ask, but Mei Ying drifts away in the crowd.
After field hockey practice, where Fran’s absence hits me with a pang, I kick leaves, which seems to be my new favorite pastime, and kind of jog around the school, not sure where to go or what to do with myself. I’d try calling Fran, but she still hasn’t answered my text. As I round a corner of the plaza, I find Jessica and Claudette lounging on the ledge of a huge planter overflowing with petunias. It’s a riot of purple. Jessica matches; she has on her pink Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt, exactly like mine. We bought them last summer when her dad dropped us off at the mall to shop, and afterward we gorged on shrimp dumplings at P.F. Chang’s. Amy slumps next to Jessica and Claudette. I keep jogging, near enough so they can see, but no one calls out to stop me.
I’m nearly home when Tyrone and Dwight lope up East Hills toward me. Now that we’ve seen each other, there’s no way to avoid them. My legs are long, but so are theirs. My first idea is to dash into the driveway next to a brown-shingled house; even though the red Prius there isn’t very big, I could duck behind it. But it’s too late; they’ve picked up their pace and are only half a block away. And why should I run? What do I have to be afraid of? So my brother took Tyrone’s bike. It’s not the first one to be stolen in Canyon Valley. Happens to kids all the time. Big deal. Plus, we’re going to return it.
“There she is.” Tyrone points and charges toward me. This close he looks even more menacing, with that strange scarred face and the permanent scowl. He’s bigger than I’d realized too. “I’ll bring the bike back today, dudes, if you’ll give me a chance,” I want to shout. But on instinct I bolt into the drive past the Toyota and directly into the backyard, slamming the gate closed behind me, and race as fast as I can, crashing through brush as I break into the next backyard, and then the next. Hopping over a trickle of a creek that runs behind the houses, I fly to Calusa and make a series of switchback turns, hardly letting my feet touch the ground, until I come out on Oak Hill. Panting, I finally let myself look back over my shoulder. There’s no sign of the boys.
“Mom!” I puff when I get home, dripping sweat and gasping for breath. My voice, winded as it is, reverberates off the high ceilings. “Mom!” My stomach aches. “Mom!” The house is empty. Without thinking I begin to text Jessica, but once my fingers touch the keys I realize that by now the whole school probably thinks I stole some stupid thing from Fat Slices, thanks to Claudette’s version of what happened, and Jessica could have heard about the bike too, which might be why she’s hardly talking to me. She must think we’re a whole family of thieves. What’s the point of telling her that Claudette was really the thief, and how Tyrone’s chasing me, how terrified I am? She’d probably say I deserved it. Even though I didn’t do anything!
At last I hear Mom downstairs opening the hall closet before she kicks off her shoes and pads over to the couch. “Nina,” I hear her call up. I know her routine: she always lies down to listen to music for a few minutes, then asks me to help her make supper.
“Mom.” I rush down. “Mom.” Yeah, she’s on the couch under the window, listening to Aretha. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” Mom’s singing along, Sock it to me, sock it to me. I want to tell her how lonely I am, and how frightened, more than I realized, about the cops shooting black people in Oakland, the so-called “looters,” after the fires. Twenty-six people died, not all of them from explosions or flames. A couple of teenagers had bullet holes in their backs, and so did one ten-year-old girl. A commission is investigating. What if I lived there, or Jimi or Dad, like Dad said? Would we be safe? The class on the Constitution scared me too. “Mom,” I blurt, “if it was only an amendment that freed the slaves, couldn’t they pass a new one? And make slavery legal again?”
She looks at me and draws a big breath. For a second I forget how clueless she is and how grown I am; I wish I could burrow into her, the way I did when that used to make everything all right. Then all I had to do was hear her voice and everything was okay. “If they did pass a new amendment, Dad and Jimi and I could be slaves. We could be bought and sold, like furniture.” I’m shaking.
Mom leans up and holds her arms out. “Come here, sweetie. Slavery’s not going to be legal again.” She scootches up so she’s halfway sitting.
I drop onto the couch and lean into her. “How do you know?” I search her face.
“I’d never let anybody take you away.”
“You let Dad take Jimi.”
Her shoulders tighten. “Nina, Jimi is not enslaved. This is completely different—”
“Not that different. And if amendments get made, they can get unmade. All it takes is votes! Mr. Apuzio told us that today.” I’m itching for a fight.
“Nina, there’s a whole international understanding now about human rights that didn’t exist two hundred years ago. Nobody’s going to reinstate slavery.”
“But there’s slavery in the Sudan. There was a show on it. And a girl at school told me girl slaves are smuggled from China, and there was even sex slavery in Berkeley.” How can I be sure slavery couldn’t come back here? I bet the people in the Sudan didn’t expect it. I never thought my family would fall apart either. I never thought a bully would call my brother a thief—or that Jimi would steal. I never believed Jessica—Jessica!—would stroll by and act like she didn’t even know me. My feelings about my mom are so mixed up, I’m gonna explode. She’s always been my confidante, because she could understand what I was going through and help me out when nobody else could, except maybe Fran and Jessica, but now it seems like she’s standing across a wall from me—this wall called race—and suddenly I’m on the other side.
I’m exploding too because I don’t dare tell her about Jimi and the bike and the boys—Dad would kill Jimi before Tyrone could get to him. It’s hard to keep it in, when normally she would help me figure it out. I’m trembling, I feel so scared and lonely. I try another hot subject, to see if she understands. To see if she can help me through this thicket of confusion. “Shouldn’t African Americans get paid back for all the years our ancestors worked for nothing? If anything can happen, and there’s no safety anywhere … We built this country; we even built the White House. Did you know they had slave pens in sight of the White House?” I frown at her the way Dad frowned at me, with that fierce, penetrating look.
Mom is staring back, as if she’s trying to see inside me. “Nina, what’s wrong? You’re acting so strange. I know the separation is hard on you, honey. I’m so sorry.” Her lips are tightening; she looks like a tulip closing up at night.
“Why did Jimi have to move too? How could you let him go?” I can’t stop accusing her, stop wanting to know.
“Oh, sweetie.” She lets out a big gulp of air. “Is that what’s bothering you?” Mom bores her green eyes into my face, like an X-ray.
“Why did Dad only take Jimi? Didn’t he want me?”
“Oh, sweetie, that’s not it.” She sighs. “Not at all. Of course he’d love to live with both of you, but … Nina, what’s going on? You’re leaving your clothes and your schoolbooks and dishes scattered all over the house. I’m picking up after you every minute, you won’t talk—”
“Who won’t talk? I ask you about Dad. I ask you about slavery. I ask you why you let Dad take Jimi. Everything I ask, you don’t answer. And now he’s got a girlfriend!”
Her eyes fill. “Nina, that’s not what this is about. There’s a lot you don’t understand.”
Right.
“I wish I could explain, but I’m try
ing to understand it myself. The world is hard on mixed—” She stops and takes another breath. “We’ve had a rough time lately.”
“I thought race didn’t matter. That’s what you always said. ‘You’re you. With lots of wonderful heritages, all mixed to make a perfect you.’“ I hear the sharpness in my voice as I mimic her. “What if Jimi were a looter?” She looks at me strangely, but my words tumble out. “He could get shot. And Jessica’s been avoiding me ever since I started eating lunch with Lavonn and her friends sometimes.”
“Is that what this is about? Eat with whomever you wish, Nina,” she says primly, as if I haven’t just told her my world has exploded under my feet. “Claim every bit of who you are.”
Right. Tell me how! Should I claim the thief part too? Did you know your precious little Jimi—that you abandoned—is stealing? And speaking of abandonment, why did my own father abandon me?
“If someone is treating you badly, you know what my dad says: you’re wearing a Kick Me sign. People will treat you the way you expect to be treated.”
“That’s not true! It’s all about race at school. You have to be one or the other. You don’t understand at all.” My voice is tight with trying to hold back sobs. How could my whole world have erupted exactly like Oakland did, from one day to the next: everybody at school hates me, plus my own family doesn’t even want me, and then this insane stealing thing ricocheting between the bike and Fat Slices.
“Race doesn’t matter,” Mom says. She gets a glassy look in her eyes. “Yet it does too. It’s paradoxical. Your father and I grew into different ideas—about what you kids need, about life—and it’s not only race. Though it’s partly based on our different backgrounds.” She’s rambling and stumbling. “We do love each other. But your father got to a point—” She stops. “Hon, you’re growing up—”
This is making no sense. Not only does Mom not take my problems away, these days she makes them worse, acting like everything that happens to me is my own fault.
Suddenly she sits up and says, “Nina, you’ve lost your center. You can’t keep making excuses, blaming other people about what they did or they didn’t do. You’ve got to listen for that still, small voice that tells you what to do. You know, the voice I call intuition.” She gets a funny look on her face, a mix of sadness and love that I can’t read. “The inner voice your father calls the connection to God. Whatever it is, you know you’re disconnected when you feel this bad. You need to get quiet and look within so you can hear that voice. It’s always with you.”
What? This is so not helpful. “Mom, there’s a lot of stuff going on that I can’t control. This isn’t about any voice inside,” I say sarcastically. “This is about mean kids …” And mean parents.
She gives me a frustrated look and shakes her head, and then she says, like it’s part of the same conversation, “Jimi’s coming after school tomorrow. To stay for a week.”
“Why? It’s not his turn. I’m supposed to go to Dad’s this Friday.”
“Oh, Silas is going to Oakland for a week with a friend. They’re driving a truck over with food and clothes, and they’re going to stay for cleanup.”
A “friend”? I bet I know who. Why didn’t he tell me?
Without warning, I hear my new harsh voice drill into her, as if she’s the person who’s turning my world upside down, as if she’s the one who stopped gravity and kicked God out of heaven. As if this mom I counted on had jumped over to the other side of that stupid race wall on purpose, to leave me alone. “If slavery comes back, you’d be Miss Ann,” I snarl, to let her know for sure that I don’t care about her one bit. Then it’s like it was with Dad: I can’t believe what I said. I’ve heard a few people sneer about Miss Ann—a stuck-up, bossy white woman, like the female Mister Charlie—and I know it isn’t nice.
“Miss Ann?” Mom repeats, as if she can’t believe it either. For a whole minute she stares at me. “Miss Ann?” She sounds confused. Her voice tightens. “I am hardly Miss Ann, Nina Armstrong. All my life I’ve been fighting racism!” She stands up and raises her hands to the ceiling, like she’s gonna scream. “Why … why did you call me that? It’s that book your father’s writing, isn’t it? Well, that’s enough of that book. You’ve gotten more and more withdrawn. And now this obsession with slavery. No more reading that nonsense! It’s not helping.”
She stomps into the kitchen. “I bust my butt all day long, and I am not going to come home to you telling me I’m Miss Ann!” I hear her banging around. “Oh no,” I hear her raving and cursing worse than I’ve ever heard. “Not from my own flesh and blood.” She’s wild. “You, Nina Armstrong, are not a slave.” I’ve never heard her like this before, crashing dishes. I think something broke inside her. She’s insane. I sit on the couch, paralyzed, until I realize I’ve had a reprieve: Dad’s going away. I won’t be scheduled to go over for a week. That’ll give me time to dump the bike, and put off my reckoning. At least with my dad.
I creep to my room and it sounds like Mom doesn’t even notice, she’s so mad. Finally I hear her calling from the hall, “I have to run out to the store for a minute. We will talk about this when I get back, young lady!”
Mom doesn’t know it, but I’ve got two more chapters of MISS SARAH ARMSTRONG stashed in my room. There’s nothing else to do, since I don’t care about my homework, and anyway, if she doesn’t want me reading it, that’s reason enough right now. I find a note Dad pasted on the next chapter, a note he wrote Before I Called Him Out and Wrecked My Life: “Miss Sarah was one persistent reader, like you! Love, your papa.”
I can’t wait to dive in. Now that my parents both hate me, I feel like the only person who cares about me is this girl from long ago.
Papa
Even mesmerized by reading, Sarah noticed that everything around her was changing. The land was giving out. No matter how many oyster shells they crumbled and spread for fertilizer, crops weren’t growing the way they used to. “Oh yeah,” old-timers clucked, “I remember when tobaccy was this high,” and they’d stretch their hands. “But now …” Their hands lowered and they shook their heads.
Ol’ Master Armstrong, she heard, was gambling like his neighbor, losing money. His slaves had started calling him Master Tipsy behind his back, “because he looks too long down the whiskey glass.” In a bad mood more and more, he swore and threw dishes, lamps, anything close to hand—or rained blows on anyone unlucky to be within striking distance.
For the first time, too, he made plans to sell his “family,” as he called them at church. “At the highest prices ever!” Cotton way down south needed more pickers, or so she heard. Traders began to travel out to the plantation, holding auctions in the wide, grassy spot on the side of the Big House, with its huge white columns covered by purple clematis, the selling platform bordered by sloping lawns and pink magnolias. The scent, which Sarah used to breathe in deeply, began to sicken her. She didn’t go over there much; but when the auctions were held on Saturdays she held her hand to her nose and watched from a distance.
Soon Aunt Sally was sold off, with three of her children, shaking and trembling. Sarah heard they were “going down with the gangs to the cotton fields.” Unfamiliar places were on everyone’s lips now. The first she heard was Georgia. “Yes,” said Rachel, sucking her teeth, “That’s right, I had a baby once in Georgia. Far, far away.” Like the look in her eyes, Sarah thought, until you got closer and understood it wasn’t a faraway look; it was right up close, with agony burning inside her pupils.
A new place, Alabama or Alabamy, was repeated over and over, each mention filling her with dread. Louisiana, Mississippi. The long words had a fearsome sound. Once Aunt Sally left, no one heard from her again. It was like that with everyone who got sold away. They were sucked into some indescribable place, and all you recalled were the last-minute tears, the expressions on the faces—terror or anger—and maybe some happy moments before that. Or a curious incident that you remembered, like why did Aunt Sally say she’d a mind to drown her littl
e blue-eyed babies? That’s what stuck with Sarah, along with the warm feeling of Aunt Sally feeding her by hand when she’d been a tiny girl.
One Sunday morning Big Albert didn’t show up as he always did, week after week and year after year. All day she and her family waited for Papa.
And the next day.
It wasn’t until Monday afternoon that they got the news, from one of the foremen. “Over to Spotsylvania County. Sold to a Mister Jackson, I heard. Small place.” That was the next county.
After that Mama worried about everything, all the time. She cuffed Sarah for no reason, and hollered at little Albert when he played under her feet. It was two months before they saw Papa again.
Sarah spotted her bedraggled father walking into the yard that Sunday morning, his feet dragging but a big smile on his face. She flew straight at him, and pasted herself against his chest. He scooped her up. “Lilla Bit! You’re Big Bit now.” He swung her back and forth, laughing and kissing her.
“Yasmine, Esther, Albert!” he called. They tumbled out of the cabin, and Papa pressed them all close. “I walked all night,” he said, his arms around them all. “Charley, on the Jackson place, forged me a remit.” He couldn’t stay long. The pass expired Monday morning. “Glad to have it,” he said, patting his pants. “In black and white. And you know black and white will talk.” Papa laughed, looking at them and slapping his pocket.
That was one of the glorious Sundays, but it carried a pain in it too, because they didn’t know for sure when they’d see Papa again.
Ever since, Mama had berated Sarah about her tiny Bible. “If you’re troublesome, keepin’ up with that book readin’, massa might sell you. Be careful, daughter. Don’t you get caught.”
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