Crow

by Barbara Wright

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Barbara Wright

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Edel Rodriguez

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wright, Barbara.

  Crow / Barbara Wright. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In 1898, Moses Thomas’s summer vacation does not go exactly as planned as he contends with family problems and the ever-changing alliances among his friends at the same time as he is exposed to the escalating tension between the African American and white communities of Wilmington, North Carolina.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98270-5

  1. African Americans—Juvenile fiction. 2. Wilmington (N.C.)—History—19th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. African Americans—Fiction. 2. Wilmington (N.C.)—History—19th century—Fiction. 3. Family life—North Carolina—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Race relations—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W932Cr 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011014892

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Julius

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  The buzzard knew. He gave the first warning. I was playing in the backyard while my grandmother stirred the iron wash pot over the fire. She had gray hair and a bent back. Standing, she looked like the left-hand side of a Y. If she’d been able to straighten her back, she would have been taller than me, but since she couldn’t, we were the same height. I called her Boo Nanny. She joked that I should call her Bent Granny.

  She took in wash from white people in town. In our backyard, clotheslines were stretched four feet off the ground. A higher line held pants and sheets. Daddy had built a platform so she could reach.

  The morning of my last day of fifth grade, the weather was hot—not as hot as it would get in a few weeks, when sand scalded bare feet and doors swelled so much that it was hard to open them, but hot enough so that the salt breeze from the ocean did little to cool things off. Boo Nanny wore a cabbage leaf on her head to protect her from the sun. Holding the cupped green leaf to her head with one hand, she shaded her eyes and looked up into the sky, clear but for some feathery clouds in the shape of seagull wings.

  Several birds looped around in the high currents, too far away to cast a shadow. They were black and shiny like crows, but as awkward as flying turkeys. Their wings held fixed, the birds did the dead man’s float in the air, drifting in lazy figure eights around an invisible circle but never running into each other.

  Then one lit out from the group and swooped down, pulling its shadow across the yard, over the top edges of the clothes on the line.

  Suddenly Boo Nanny shoved me onto the sand and covered my body with hers. The cabbage leaf flew off to the side. Her bent back made her look fragile, but in fact she was strong from hauling heavy irons from the fire and taking water from the well to the pit for boiling wash. Still, I was startled by how fast she could move.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, alarmed, feeling the weight of her thin body on mine.

  “Buzzard’s shadow,” Boo Nanny said, rolling off me and struggling to her feet. “That old thing tag you, means you happiness done dead.”

  “Did he get me?” I asked, worried. “Did you see?”

  “I don’t know. If he do, a mess of trouble be headed to our door,” she said.

  Before Boo Nanny tackled me, I had watched the buzzard break off from the circle and glide down toward us. The flat gray shape beneath it bent and unfolded as the buzzard passed over the fence and slipped away from us.

  I didn’t notice if the shadow had grazed my head or skimmed over any part of me. But I couldn’t say for absolute sure that I hadn’t been tagged. The shadow left no outward sign. What if I was a marked boy and didn’t even know it? But I was more worried about Boo Nanny. She had protected me by covering my body with hers, and if the shadow had grazed anyone, it was her.

  I went to school and didn’t think any more about the morning’s events, but the buzzard’s shadow opened up inside me a pinhole of dread. On the last day of class, the students were fidgety. Everyone was ready for summer to begin. Everyone, that is, except for me. Who would help Miss Annie with the buckets when it rained in the summer? That was my job during the year. The roof leaked, and the bare walls and ceiling of the second floor were covered with stains the color of tobacco spit. We kept the maps and phonetic charts on the first floor, where it stayed dry.

  At the awards ceremony that afternoon, I received a certificate for perfect attendance. I was so excited, I couldn’t wait until evening and had to show my father that very afternoon. He was proud of how smart I was.

  My father was a reporter for the Wilmington Daily Record, the only Negro daily in the South. The offices were located on the corner of Princess and Water Streets, across from the wharf. After school, I walked along Market Street, lined with live oaks whose great spreading branches drooped with hanks of wiry gray moss that Boo Nanny called haint’s hair. As I walked along, I leaped up to touch the moss, being careful not to damage my attendance certificate, which I had placed on the back of my slate and secured with a book strap.

  At Front Street, white ladies in hats and white gloves exited the streetcar and held their long skirts above the muck left by mules, horses, and oxen. A block farther on, I turned right and walked by the wharf, where the three-masted schooners and steamships were docked along the Cape Fear River.

  The air, softened by salt moisture, was crowded with noisy gulls waiting for scraps from the fish vendors. Men sold hot biscuits and fried bananas from carts, while coon dogs and the occasional shoat milled about.

  I rarely visited Daddy at work, but today was a special day. I smoothed the edges of my certificate against my slate and felt happy, imagining how proud he would be.

  At the Record office, I took the outside stairs, past the first-floor saloon with a sign that read: WHOEVER DRINKS HERE—RETURN FOR ANOTHER DRAUGHT. Even this early in the day, the place was crowded and noisy. I was under strict instructions from my mother to stay away from the saloon, which was not a problem. I liked the sound of white sailors singing off-key, but the smell of pickles and sawdust made my stomach turn.

  On the second floor, I didn’t see Daddy at his desk and asked the first man I saw where I could find him.


  “Ask Alex Manly. He’ll know your father’s whereabouts,” the clerk said, and pointed to a white man across the room. He was tall and had black hair, but not the way my hair was black. His was soft and straight and thin and lay flat on his head, like a horse’s coat.

  I looked around for someone else. I was certain that the owner of the largest colored paper in the state would not be a white man, though I knew that many white companies advertised in the paper.

  “That’s Mr. Manly?” I asked.

  “Yes, he’ll know where your father is.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, and turned to leave, too shy to ask the white man a question.

  But before I got out the door, he came over and said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Moses, Jack Thomas’s son.”

  I looked Mr. Manly straight in the eye and gave him an extra firm handshake, like Daddy had taught me. “A good grip shows you’re the equal of any man,” Daddy always said. “Now show me some pride. If you give me that seaweed grip, I’m going to think you’re cowed and ashamed.”

  I gave the white man my best grip, and it worked. He did not look down at my shoes. On that score, I had come up short. Well-shined shoes were also a sign of character, according to Daddy. “In college, I shined my shoes every day,” he had said.

  He still did, every evening before going to bed. I loved my daddy, but I drew the line at polishing my shoes. Many of the children in the younger grades didn’t even wear shoes. If I showed up with shoes as shiny as Daddy’s, I’d be laughed out of school.

  The white man said, “Your father’s out covering a story but should be back shortly. In the meantime, would you like to see our new printing press?”

  “Yessir,” I said, aware that everything I did reflected on my father.

  Mr. Manly explained that when the paper converted from a weekly to a daily, he had purchased on installment a four-cylinder Hoe rotary press from the editor of the Wilmington Messenger, the white newspaper.

  Tongue-tied, I followed Mr. Manly down a narrow hall. It was sad—a boy with a perfect attendance record couldn’t think of one intelligent thing to say. Luckily, when we entered the back room, the thundering noise made talking impossible.

  In the center of the room, the press churned out printed pages in stacks that got higher and higher with each rotation. The mighty machine had as many moving parts as a locomotive.

  The air in the room was stifling and smelled of machine oil and ink. Four boys not much older than me fed paper into the four smaller cylinders placed around the giant cylinder at the center. Their sweat-soaked shirts clung to their narrow chests, and ink smudges stained their skin. I wondered why the boys weren’t in school.

  Flies buzzed around the room. Using my slate as a fan, I waved them away, but the boys at the press, with their hands occupied, could only toss their heads like horses, without the benefit of a tail to get rid of the pests.

  The boy closest to me had a burred scalp interrupted by squiggly lines of no hair, like you’d find on worm-eaten shells. He looked up briefly at my clean clothes and slate and glowered as if to say, “Sissy.” The look passed in a split second. Any longer, and his fingers would have been drawn into the hungry machine.

  I wouldn’t want to meet these boys on the wharf after work. They would beat me up, for sure. Well, I didn’t care what they thought. I wasn’t a sissy. I was small for my age, but quick and athletic, and I could outrun them if need be—though I didn’t feel like putting my abilities to the test.

  “This is quite a machine!” Mr. Manly shouted.

  “Yessir, it is,” I said.

  I could feel the machine vibrating through the soles of my feet. I watched in awe as the press slurped the pages into its innards and spit them out onto cast-iron beds, inked on both sides, ready to be wrapped in twine and delivered by wagon across the state.

  “Prints eight thousand copies an hour,” Mr. Manly said.

  The number seemed unimaginably huge. I wondered how many Negroes there were in North Carolina, in the world.

  When we went back to the office, my ears were still ringing. Daddy was at his desk.

  Mr. Manly said, “That’s a fine young man you’ve got there, Jack.”

  I looked down shyly, but felt proud to be praised by someone as important as Mr. Manly. I noticed he’d called me a man, and not a boy.

  “Yes, he is,” Daddy said, beaming. “Today is a big day for him. I do believe he has passed into the sixth grade.”

  I grinned. I wanted to bring up my perfect attendance record, but didn’t want to brag in front of Mr. Manly.

  “This calls for a treat,” Daddy said. He looked at Mr. Manly for permission and received an agreeable nod.

  We went outside to the wharf and Daddy bought me a corn cake from a stout woman with a flat basket on her head. We continued along Water Street, where skippers mingled with smartly dressed brokers, arranging for passage of goods. The wharf was filled with jostling and sweating and shouting as Negroes and South Americans loaded pine and cypress timbers, burlap bags of rice, and barrels of turpentine, resin, and pitch onto steamers.

  “Why is the editor a white man?” I asked, and bit into the cake. The sweetness burst inside my mouth.

  “He’s a Negro. He just looks white,” Daddy said.

  “Like Mama.”

  “You know she’d have your hide if she heard you say that.” Mules and wagons clopped loudly along the cobblestone street. “So, tell me, what did you think of the printing press?” Daddy said.

  “It was big and loud,” I said. It had been thrilling to watch the power of the thundering cylinder transform blank paper into a newspaper, with headlines and articles.

  “Yes, we’re proud of it, even if it’s not the latest model. The press allows us to print the paper daily instead of weekly, and deliver it statewide. Our people will be better citizens and vote more intelligently if they are informed about the issues. That makes for a stronger democracy.”

  “What about people who can’t read?” I asked, licking my fingers so no crumbs went to waste.

  “That’s why education is so important.”

  “I bet those filthy chowderheads can’t read,” I said. “They don’t even go to school.”

  “Who?”

  “Those boys my age feeding paper into the press.”

  Daddy stopped walking and turned to face me. His voice became stern. “Moses, don’t ever make fun of people less fortunate than you. There’s nothing to be gained by it.”

  “I didn’t mean to … I was only … Who cares about a few stupid boys?” The corn cake broke in my hand and fell onto the cobbles.

  “You aren’t necessarily smarter than they are—just luckier.”

  Shame flared up inside me. I felt terrible for what I had said.

  “Son, those boys probably have to work to support their families. Try to put yourself in their skin, look at the world from their point of view.”

  When I did, all I could think of was how I’d like to beat up a little smarty like me for feeling superior.

  I felt tears forming, and that made me angry. I swatted at the edge of my eye, as if getting rid of a skeeter. More than anything in the world, I hated disappointing my father. I couldn’t bear to look at him.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. Today’s a big day. You’re a sixth grader. In the blink of an eye, you’re going to be grown and off to college.”

  I smiled, but didn’t mean it. Luckily, he had to get back to work, so I bid him good-bye and continued along the wharf beyond the boats to an open spot by the river. I removed my perfect attendance certificate from the back of my slate, ripped it up, and flung it into the air. The pieces fluttered down and scattered upon the water. I watched as the swift current carried them down the Cape Fear River, toward the ocean and the wide world beyond.

  When I got home, Boo Nanny was outside taking laundry from the line. Usually I had no trouble filling my time, but this afternoon I felt at loose ends, and s
ummer vacation wasn’t even a day old. I felt too restless to read. The swamp was filled with thick vines to swing on. I could poke around the sweet-water streams choked with lily pads and black snaky roots. Or I could go digging for clams and oysters in the marshes outside of town. But I didn’t feel like doing any of that.

  What I really wanted to do was whack at something. I picked up the stick Boo Nanny used to beat the clothes on a stump by the fire pit after she boiled them. She called it her battling stick—“battling the clothes to cleanliness.” The thick wood was worn smooth from so much use. I stretched out under the high line of sun-starched sheets, squinting at the sky.

  The clouds were going by so swiftly, they gave the impression that the earth itself was moving, and me along with it. I thumped the wooden stick against the hanging sheets as I considered how nice it would be if my small patch of ground actually was moving and could take me away from this spot, the way schooners took cotton and peanuts and turpentine to lands across the ocean.

  Boo Nanny spread apart two sheets, and her head appeared at the opening.

  “What’s wrong with my baby chile?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me nothing, like I ain’t got eyes in my head. You come slinking back from school, puny as the law allows.”

  “I don’t feel so good,” I said, tapping at the bottom of the sheet.

  She placed her palm on my forehead.

  “I don’t mean sick,” I said, before she could give me one of her potions.

  She often took me along with her to hunt for plants in the longleaf pine forest. She knew which part of each plant had healing properties. It could be the bark, the leaves, the roots, the berries, the flowers, the hips, or the stalks. She knew which plants flowered every other year, and which season was the best for collecting. I loved going with her, but I hated the potions she cooked up. The smell alone was enough to make me sick.

  Daddy was a modern man and didn’t believe in the old slave ways.

  “She never gets colds,” I pointed out.

  “No wonder. With that nasty-smelling pouch she wears around her neck in cold season, people keep their distance, and germs don’t get anywhere near her,” he said.