We Are All Welcome Here

by Elizabeth Berg

  “You ever seen Negroes voting?” LaRue asked. I had not. But then, I didn’t live in their neighborhood.

  “Whole lot of hate in the world,” LaRue said. “Whole lot of people don’t want the Negro move up from down. When the Negro try to vote, the white man play tricks on him. Tax him. Give him a test he cain’t nohow pass, ax him how many jelly beans in the jar. Or tell him he got to memorize a passage from the Mississippi Constitution, and if he mispronounce a word, reciting back? Cain’t vote. If he give his age in years instead of year-month-date? Cain’t vote. Underline an answer ’stead of circle it, forget to dot an i? That’s it, cain’t vote.”

  He shook his head. “They send us off to the wrong polling place all day long till it too late to vote. We go to register, they say they run out of applications. They try to scare us, tell us our name be published in the paper, and don’t nobody want their name in the paper on account of they gets fired from they jobs. People been arrested, waiting in line to register!

  “But this the summer we trying to change all that. President of the United States got his eye on us, seen Li’l Bit in a movie, all the marchers holding they signs say, ‘Why Not Help Mississippi Negroes Get the Vote?’ Say, ‘Integration Is the Law!’ They be clapping their hands and singing smack in front of everyone! Lord!” He laughed, and in it I heard a frightened joy.

  “Li’l Bit teaching in a Freedom School, teach the children a new way to think. Whole new way to look at they own selves, make ’em feel they got the right to stand up. He got a friend got him started in all this, but James done disappear, ’longside two white boys. Don’t nobody know where they is, but plenty of us thinking they dead. The Klan be burning churches, they be firebombing houses, they be beating up people want to help. They be lynching.” He looked over at me quickly. “Best not say I told you that. I’m a fool, tell you that. Your mama like to keep you innocent.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t tell.” I was beginning to feel odd inside. Why would this be happening? Who cared if Negroes voted? Who cared if anyone voted?

  “You know, it was Li’l Bit taught me to read,” LaRue said.

  I looked over at him and saw tears in his eyes. “I know,” I said. I reached over and touched his arm lightly. “You read good, LaRue.”

  “Thank you.” He wiped at his nose. “I’m gon’ help out,” he said. “I got to do it. I’m glad to.”

  We said nothing for a long time. And then I said, “LaRue? Can I open the chips and have one?”

  “I ’spect you can.”

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  “I know that. But I ’spect you can anyway.”

  I reached behind me for the bag with the chips on top. “You want one?”

  “I believe I will.”

  We crunched together, serious and silent. I said only one more thing on the way home. I said, “You be careful now, LaRue.”

  He smiled at me. “Little mama,” he said.

  About a week later, when I brought in the mail I found a large envelope for me. My name and address were typewritten. At first I thought it was some sort of report from school, arriving, oddly, in July; then I saw Elvis Presley’s name on the return address. I stood stock-still, afraid to open it. But then, my heart racing, I got a knife to carefully split the seam, and pulled out two pieces of paper. The one on top was a large photo of Elvis smiling that Elvis smile, his hair falling in his face. His arm was resting casually on his upraised knee. There was an autograph in one corner, probably fake, but who cared when I had an actual letter from him? When I began to eagerly read it, though, I saw that it was not from him at all. It was only from a secretary, who said thanks so much for writing, all fan letters were passed on to Mr. Presley, and she was sure he would enjoy mine. Right.

  I went upstairs to my bedroom. I tossed the letter in my trash can, put Elvis’s picture at the bottom of my underwear drawer. Then I stretched out on my bed to have a think. LaRue had been gone for a few days, and I kept imagining Li’l Bit all beat up. I saw his hand resting alongside his jaw, his fingers pressing gingerly on his swollen eye. What had he been doing? He must have been doing something; surely no one had beat him up like that for no reason. He must have gone too far.

  All my life I had grown up with Negroes close by, yet distant from me. They had their place and we had ours. If everyone held to a certain model of behavior, there would be no problems. White or black, you had to abide by rules set in place long ago, and not cross any lines. Brooks’s friend Holt took exception to the friendly ways Brooks had with his Negro customers. I’d once heard him say, “I tell you what, a nigger fuck with me, I be on him like white on rice. You got to keep a boot on their neck, or you end up having to put their ass in a sling.” Brooks had laughed and said, “Aw, they’re all right,” and then he’d looked at the floor, embarrassed, like he’d been called into the principal’s office.

  I’d also heard, many times, “Educate the nigger and you get a spoiled field hand and an insolent cook.” I’d heard it and never thought about it. But only last week I’d heard my mother and Brooks talking about that very thing. My mother said, “If you don’t educate someone, they don’t have skills. If they don’t have skills, they can’t get a job. If they can’t get a job, they’re poor and on welfare. You can’t keep someone from being educated, and then condemn them for taking welfare.” Brooks said, “I know, but this is too much, Paige. They’re going too far now.” I’d walked into the room and said, “What’s too much?” and they’d changed the subject. They must have been talking about the same thing LaRue was, this “Freedom Summer.” How far were the Negroes supposed to go? Close as my mother and I were to Peacie, there was a separateness enforced by her as much as us.

  But now I thought of her standing below me in the kitchen, keeping my mother alive. I thought of LaRue, and I realized I loved him and that my mother loved Peacie, they loved each other. I got off my bed and went over to the window. The clouds were ill-formed today, indistinct. I liked the cumulous clouds better; they looked like clouds were supposed to look.

  It made me nervous to think about things changing so much, about college students from up north coming down here to tell us what to do. Everybody watching. The coloreds liked their separateness, didn’t they? Everybody was more comfortable with their own! The people in Shakerag didn’t want to live with us any more than we wanted to live with them. Those kids from up north had started big trouble and LaRue’s nephew had to pay for it.

  I moved back to my bed, lay down, and closed my eyes. It was too hard to try to think of what was right and wrong in the world. I wanted to think only about my mother, who was undergoing big changes of her own. She had a date tonight.

  It was a date with Brooks, about which she was excited, and she had carefully planned what to wear. Not her normal britches, with the zipper in the crotch that Peacie had put in so that we could put the urinal right up to her—no need to pull down pants and fool around with all that lifting and pulling. Unzip, pee, wipe, zip up, done. Easy. “This is ingenious,” my mother had told Peacie when she thought of it. “You should patent this!”

  “I ’spect I should,” Peacie had said. “I ’spect I should patent my brain; I got a lot of ideas.” It came to me now as a warm flush over my chest that when she said that, I was thinking they were Negro ideas. But they were just ideas, free-floating and of no color at all.

  But tonight: no slacks for my mother—all of hers had been unfashionable even new, but now every pair was stretched out at the waist and unevenly faded. Tonight she was going to be careful not to drink much of anything, so she wouldn’t have to pee. And she was going to wear a dress, a yellow sleeveless dress she had hanging in her closet that came with a matching yellow sweater that had daisies embroidered on it, rhinestones for the centers. She would wear nylon stockings and little yellow heels. I swallowed hard against a lump that formed in my throat. Because I had seen her in yellow, and I knew she would look so pretty and for what.

  Peacie stayed
late to help get my mother ready. Mrs. Gruder stood by, ready to assist, and I sat at my mother’s feet, watching. Peacie applied mascara to my mother’s lashes with painstaking care; they were longer than ever. She used lipstick for blush. She made sure my mother’s nails were perfectly painted in the rose color they both liked best. When she finished, my mother asked Mrs. Gruder, “How do I look?”

  “Like the Breck girl,” Mrs. Gruder said, standing before her in plain admiration, her hands clasped.

  “Well,” my mother said, smiling, “maybe a little.”

  Peacie also supervised my mother being loaded into Brooks’s car. She was like one of her own chickens, running around and pecking at the men, telling them what to do and what not to.

  First, my mother was transferred from her wheelchair into the car seat—that was awkward. I stood by, watching helplessly until her dress rose up too high; then I had a job of pulling it down. Next, her wheelchair was put into the trunk, which, thankfully, was large enough to accommodate its high back and new plywood platform. Then Holt climbed into the backseat with the portable respirator, the battery, and the backup respirator.

  “Get to that restaurant soon,” Peacie admonished Brooks. “But don’t go too fast. Don’t get in no accident!” Holt leaned his head out the window and said, “Sooner you stop flapping your jaws, sooner we be on our way.” My mother looked relaxed; but I always worried when she was frog-breathing that she would suddenly be unable to go on. It was a disconcerting thing, to know that what kept her alive was behind her, and that Holt would have to be the one to act first in case of an emergency.

  When the car drove slowly away, Peacie stood on the porch with her hands on her hips. I couldn’t tell exactly what she was thinking. I suspected she was caught between two feelings, as I was: It was good for my mother to go out like a real person; it was terrifying to think of the things that could go wrong in the restaurant. Brooks had been around my mother often enough to know how to feed her, how to lift her, the basic operation of her respirator. But what if she did have to pee? What if she choked? What if her equipment malfunctioned? After the car disappeared, Peacie stomped past me to go into the house for her purse. She came back out and walked past Mrs. Gruder and me without saying a word. In her clenched jaw, I saw her worry that my mother, who had already been hurt so much, might now suffer more. Why not just leave things as they were? Why push for a life beyond what she was used to, that, despite its limitations, was at least safe?

  “That was her wedding dress,” Mrs. Gruder said from behind me. “Did you know that?”

  I turned around. “No. I didn’t know.”

  “Well, it was. She told me once. She’s kept it all this time. She looks awful pretty in it, doesn’t she?”

  I nodded. My heart hung heavy and raw-feeling inside me. I wondered what my father had looked like that day, how he had felt, marrying the lively and beautiful girl who was my mother. I wondered what his life was like now. Did he ever think of us? I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t; I didn’t know him well enough. Instead, I wondered about him occasionally, with a confused kind of longing. There was a place inside me carved out for him; I didn’t want it to be there, but it was. Once, at the hardware store, Brooks had shown me how to use a drill. I’d made a tiny hole that went deep. The place for my father was like that.

  Brooks had been pretty fancied-up himself, wearing what looked to be a new shirt and pants, his hair slicked back. He’d brought my mother a wrist corsage of white carnations and a box of Whitman’s chocolates, and I was dying to take off the cellophane and the red bow. To have the whole array of chocolates before you, to be the one to get to choose before anyone! My mother had told me I could go ahead and open the box and have some, but I knew enough not to take her up on her offer. It would be wrong.

  But now after Mrs. Gruder and I went inside and she disappeared into the kitchen to clean, I removed the outer wrapping, put my nose to the box, and breathed in deeply. The smell alone was delicious. I shook the box and heard the little pleated papers rustling around inside. I lifted the lid and admired the pastel-colored Jordan almonds, the caramels with their little curly designs. The rounded tops of the chocolate-covered cherries—those were my mother’s favorites.

  I carried the box around and tried it out on different surfaces. The coffee table in the living room, that’s where it would be best, I decided. In the daytime. At night I would move it to her bedside. I put it there now, opened the lid, and slanted the box at a tantalizing angle. My mother would probably eat one chocolate a day; last time she’d gotten a box of candy—from Brenda, who sent it to her at Christmastime—she’d done that. But surely she wouldn’t be able to eat all of it. I hoped for the Messenger Boy. He was the biggest piece, solid chocolate, and occupied a place of distinction—the very center of the box.

  After Mrs. Gruder cleaned up the kitchen, she came to sit in the living room with me. There was something about the evening that became suddenly unbearable to me; I asked if I could go to Suralee’s. I saw a quick flash of something in Mrs. Gruder’s face—I thought maybe she was hurt that I didn’t want to be with her. But to stay there would be like having to disrobe in daylight, like at the doctor’s office. To imagine my mother in a restaurant, looking so nice and being stared at so mean, thrilled and killed me; I needed my friend.

  “What are you doing here?” Suralee asked when she answered the door. I hadn’t called first; I’d figured that if Suralee wasn’t home, I’d go under my own front porch for a while. Now here was this strange situation: Suralee was home, but she was not glad to see me.

  I shrugged. “I just came over.”

  She poked her head out the door to look up and down the street. Then, “Come in,” she said. “Hurry up. I have something to tell you.” She was dressed in a skirt and blouse, and the scarf her mother had worn the other day was tied around her neck. She wore her mother’s lipstick and eye shadow and charm bracelet, too.

  “I have something to tell you, too,” I said. I wanted to tell her all about my mother, but I knew I’d have to wait. Suralee had many qualities I admired; patience was not one of them.

  “Those boys are coming over!” Suralee said.

  “I thought you said tomorrow!” Here I was, dressed in donated mustard-yellow pedal pushers and a pink sleeveless blouse with a spaghetti-sauce stain.

  “They are coming tomorrow. But they’re coming tonight, too.”

  “So…should I leave?”

  She looked me over, then said, “No. But let’s change you into something else. You can wear my blue dress, only don’t spill!”

  I followed her to her bedroom. “What are we eating?”

  She turned around to look at me. “Drinking. Booze.”

  I stood still. “What do you mean?”

  “Booze! Liquor! I’m going to make rum and Cokes!” She went to her closet and pulled out her blue dress, laid it across her bed. She was nice to let me use it; it was new, and it was very pretty. It would be a bit big for me, but it would still look good. I stood staring at it.

  “Hurry up!” Suralee said. “They’ll be here any minute!”

  “Maybe…” I said.

  “What? Maybe what?” The doorbell rang, and Suralee gasped and covered her mouth. Then she moved to her dresser mirror for a quick look at herself. She pushed at one side of her hair, smoothed the front of her skirt. “Hurry and get dressed,” she said. “I’ll keep them busy.” She started out of the room and then turned back to me. “I’m glad you’re here. What would I have done with two of them?”

  For the first time, Suralee’s acting talent failed her. I knew she would have been just fine with both of the boys. She would have preferred it. I wondered if she had done this before.

  I stood still in Suralee’s bedroom, listening to her welcoming the boys, telling them that she had a surprise for them. I looked at the dress again, weighed my options, then took off my pedal pushers and blouse.

  “You’ve got to get out of here!” Suralee said.
It was almost two hours later, and I lay ill on her bed. I’d thrown up, which made me feel somewhat better, but the room still spun. “My mother will be coming home soon,” she said.

  “She knows me,” I said. Only I said noash. I began to laugh. “It’s okay if I’m here.” My words were lazy and slow.

  Suralee came over and grabbed my arm. “Get up,” she said. “Oh, I knew I shouldn’t have let you stay!” She began undoing the zipper to her dress and caught my flesh in it.

  “Ow!” I yelled, from both the physical injury and the pain of her words.

  “Shhhh!” She got the zipper undone and pulled the dress down. “Step out of this.”

  I did, with some difficulty. I was never going to see Suralee again. “I’m not coming tomorrow,” I said. So there.

  “No kidding,” Suralee muttered.

  “What,” I said. “You invited me!”

  Suralee threw my pedal pushers and blouse at me. “I’m not even going to talk to you about this! You are drunk!”

  “Ha!” I said.

  “You need to go home. And of course we’re not doing anything tomorrow—they don’t even like you. Now get dressed!”

  I started to cry. “Why are you being like this?”

  She softened, just the slightest bit. “Diana. I have to get you out of here or we’ll both be in a whole lot of trouble. We all will. Go home. We’ll talk tomorrow; I’ll call you as soon as I get up.”

  I raised a leg to put on my pedal pushers and fell down. “Whoopsh,” I said, and started laughing again, though I also felt an enormous sadness expanding within. The boy I’d let touch me in both places already didn’t like me anymore.

  Suralee knelt beside me and helped me get dressed. Then she walked me to the door and pushed me outside. “Go!” she whispered. “And when you get home, don’t talk to anyone! Just go right to bed!”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” I said, walking backward. I saluted smartly, then turned around and wove my way down the sidewalk toward home.