Crow

by Barbara Wright

Lewis and Johnny looked at each other.

  “I’m going with Johnny.” Lewis swallowed hard.

  “Oh,” I said, and waited.

  “Where?” I finally said.

  “Mr. Dancy’s taking us aboard a schooner.”

  As collector of customs, Johnny’s father had access to the ships. I loved schooners. Lewis didn’t even like them that much.

  I looked at Lewis. He looked at Johnny. There was an awkward pause.

  “What about the kite?” I said lamely, as if a kite could compete with a giant vessel with four masts taller than most trees.

  “We’ll do that tomorrow,” Lewis said.

  Johnny took out his pocket watch—even Lewis didn’t own a pocket watch—and said, “We can’t be late.”

  “See you,” I said. “Schooner or later.” No one laughed. If only the spaces between the cobbles could slurp me up and make me disappear.

  Lewis hopped on the crossbar of Johnny’s bike, and they rode toward the Customs House.

  I continued along the wharf, where the towering ships were docked, their place of origin painted on the hull: Le Havre, France; Reval, Russia; Bremen, Germany; Liverpool, England. From our port, goods were shipped all over the world.

  I wondered which of these boats Johnny and Lewis were going to visit. They would probably even get to meet the skipper.

  I felt numb. How come Lewis got to go aboard one of these ships and not me? I kicked a cockleshell along the wooden slats. When I caught up to it, I kicked it again, following the shell along the dock.

  It wasn’t fair. Johnny had decided he didn’t like me, and he didn’t even know me. I gave the shell a final boot and it landed next to a fishhook. I put the barbed hook in the shell and took it with me to the Customs House, a few blocks farther along on Water Street.

  I found Johnny’s bicycle leaning against a palm tree. When I was sure no one was looking, I pressed the fishhook into his front tire until I heard a hissing sound, then I ran away. Let him walk back. If his father was so important, let him call President McKinley for help nabbing the culprit. They would never catch me.

  But walking home, I felt my spirits sink lower and lower. Once done, the deed could not be undone. There was no way to rid myself of the knowledge that I had a heart blacker than Blackbeard’s.

  Every week during the summer, I checked out books from the library at the Masonic Lodge at Eighth and Princess. In the early mornings, before the heat and skeeters got unbearable, I spent several hours reading aloud to Boo Nanny while she boiled clothes in the iron kettle over the fire pit. Her favorite story was Treasure Island, the one book I owned. “That Jim’s got some starch,” she said. “A colored boy needs himself some starch, too, all the things that be thrown his way.” She wanted to listen to Treasure Island twice, but I convinced her to move on to another adventure story, since I had already read the novel several times and knew Jim’s escapades by heart.

  I wanted to be like Jim—clever, adventurous, and brave. For a while, when faced with a new situation, I asked myself: What would Jim Hawkins do? But I was too lily-livered.

  In one way, I was like Jim: I was clever. Or at least, that was what Daddy told me. He claimed that my high forehead was a sign of intelligence—all that room meant a big brain. I thought I looked funny, more like a pint-sized old man starting to lose his hair.

  Daddy was the smartest person I knew, even smarter than Miss Annie, my fifth-grade teacher. He knew so many big words. In the summer, he made me keep a list of vocabulary words from the novels I read, and then quizzed me on them at the supper table. He called them challenge words. Daddy said I had to have a big vocabulary and good grammar if I wanted to go to Howard University, like he did.

  “What about Boo Nanny?” I asked. She didn’t know many words, but her words were so colorful and she told such good yarns that I knew you didn’t need a big vocabulary to get your point across.

  “Your grandmother hasn’t had the advantages you have. It was against the law for slaves to learn to read and write. But you—you have a bright future. There’s no limit to opportunity, if you learn to speak proper English.”

  I learned not to use big words around Boo Nanny. The trick was to modify your language depending on who you were around. That was one of my challenge words: modify.

  Once, I corrected Boo Nanny’s grammar, and I never did that again. She asked me to go fetch some wood, then said, “I would of went and got it myself, but I be tired to the bone.” Without thinking, I said, “Would have gone.” She rose out of her chair, and she was so mad that I thought for a minute her back was going to straighten itself all the way up, but it stopped at its usual spot. She wagged her finger at me and said, “I speaks the way what I done my whole life, and it’s served me just fine up till now. So don’t go putting right my words. I be perfectly able to get what I want across, no problem ’tall.”

  Boo Nanny felt left out when Daddy and I sparred at the supper table, trying to trip up each other with challenge words.

  “Summer’s time to be free and easy. No need to lay homework on the boy’s doorstep. He’s got time aplenty to work, and only a few short years to play,” she said one evening at supper. I didn’t consider the vocabulary game as work, but I didn’t want Boo Nanny to feel bad, so I kept quiet.

  “Moses loves to read, and it’s a great chance for him to learn new words,” Daddy said.

  “Now you take that Jim fella in Treasure Island,” Boo Nanny said. “That boy’s got a world of common sense. He ain’t sitting in the ship’s cabin studying a mess of words.”

  “Are you denigrating education?” Daddy said.

  Mama muttered, “Uh-oh,” under her breath.

  “Don’t go talking at me with books in your jaws,” Boo Nanny said, wagging her fork at Daddy. “Say what you mean, plain and simple.”

  I looked at Mama with pleading eyes. She was the only one who could keep the peace when Daddy and Boo Nanny were at cross-purposes. But she had come home from Colonel Gilchrist’s too dog-tired to do much.

  “You don’t approve of continuing Moses’s education when he’s not in school?” Daddy said.

  I didn’t like to be the source of a squabble.

  “If I had me some cash money, I’d start a school of common sense, ’cause that’s what so many needs and so few gots. And you’d be my first pupil,” Boo Nanny said to Daddy. “ ’Cause if it ain’t in a book, you don’t believe it. The boy needs to learn by living, is all I’m saying.”

  “Whoa, you two. Ain’t nobody here about ‘den-eye-grating’ book learning,” Mama said, stepping in at last. “Ain’t no reason in the world he can’t learn by living and book learning. You both be right.”

  But that didn’t solve the quarrel. Boo Nanny jerked the dishes about loudly as she cleared the table, and Daddy skulked away to the parlor, leaving me feeling low.

  In the heat of summer, Boo Nanny wore a cabbage leaf on her head when she worked outside stirring a boiling pot of laundry or hanging out clothes. “Sun can’t work its way through,” she said. “Never boils your brains out if you wear a cabbage leaf.” Because of its cupped shape, the green leaf stayed on her head, even though she was bent.

  But inside, when she fired up the woodstove to warm the irons, there was no protection from the heat. It bore down like the hot compresses she put on my brow when I was sick. She had a grim set to her mouth as she worked, and she regularly mopped her face to keep the sweat from dripping onto the clean ironing. She never sang like she did in cooler weather.

  “The thing ’bout rich folks is, the hotter the weather, the more laundry they give me. So I ain’t complaining, Cocoa Baby,” she said.

  She called me Cocoa Baby, not Moses, because when I was a little baby, she added laundry starch to my bathwater to make my skin soft, and after it dried, it left a whitish powder that, against my brown skin, looked like powdered cocoa.

  While I was watching her iron one day near the end of May, an idea came to me: ice. That was what she needed.
If Boo Nanny could hold a cold chunk of ice against her skin when she took a break from ironing, it would cool her right down and make her job more bearable.

  We couldn’t afford an icebox, so I decided to make my own. It wouldn’t have fancy brass handles, oak doors, and a zinc interior like Lewis’s icebox from Sears & Roebuck. Rather, it would be more like the icehouse by the docks, where thick brick walls and sawdust kept the blocks from melting.

  I combed the neighborhood for loose bricks and used them to line an old crate that we used to store kindling. Then Lewis gave me a ride on the crossbar of his bike to the sawmill on the edge of town, where a sawdust mound rose higher than a house.

  We horsed around for a while and played King of the Mountain—guess who was king?—then did somersaults on the pile. No one could hear our whoops over the loud whine of the circular saw, which ripped into the huge pine trees that workers pushed into it, sending arcs of sawdust spraying everywhere.

  When we were tired of playing, Lewis rode off on his bike and I filled a pillowcase with sawdust and carried it home on my back.

  There was no call for the iceman to come to where I lived in Darktown, but he visited Lewis’s neighborhood three times a week. A card in the front window indicated who wanted ice—yellow for twenty-five pounds, red for fifty, and blue for seventy-five. After I completed my icebox, I went to Lewis’s house. As we played marbles, I listened for the tinkle of the bell that announced the arrival of Mr. Willis’s ice wagon.

  Mr. Willis had light brown hair, blue eyes, and huge arms like the men who moved cotton on the wharf. He was a nice man and always let us pet his gray horse, Josie. When he pulled up in front of Lewis’s house, he opened the back of the wagon and rearranged the blocks with a huge pair of tongs. When he found the one he wanted, he split it with a hammer and pick, sending a rainbow of silvery slivers flying from the back of the wagon. He covered the split half with sackcloth, hoisted it onto the shoulder of his leather vest, and carried it to the icebox on Lewis’s back porch. While he waited for payment, I approached him and asked if he would give me any leftover blocks of ice at the end of the day.

  “Sorry, sonny, but that’s against company policy. You want ice, that’ll be cash on the barrelhead.” The sackcloth on his shoulder dripped onto the sand.

  I explained in detail how I had made an icebox out of bricks and sawdust for Boo Nanny. I was careful to call her Grandmother and not Boo Nanny, for fear a white person would find the name queer.

  “You’re a clever boy,” Mr. Willis said.

  “I’m not asking for a handout,” I said. “I’ll help you on your route.” He pocketed the money from Lewis’s maid and went back to his wagon.

  “Well, I reckon there’s nothing anywhere in the regulations against bartering,” he said.

  He gave me a twenty-five-pound block of ice that very day. “That should last you three days, if you did a good job constructing your box,” he said. “You let me know how that works out and we’ll call it even.” He whistled, and his horse moved forward.

  I wrapped the ice in a burlap sack and carried it back in a wheelbarrow I borrowed from Lewis.

  At home, Boo Nanny was at the ironing board. I chipped off several pieces and showed her how to rub the ice along her arms and let it melt on her skin.

  She hugged me and said, “Cocoa Baby, this be the best present a body could want.”

  When I left to take the wheelbarrow back to Lewis, she was singing.

  Daddy and I needed a place to hide some money. I suggested the woodshed, but Daddy said no, a thief might find it. Finally we decided on the dictionary in the parlor. It dated from his college days. The front and back cover were no longer attached, and the spine was missing entirely, exposing the raveled, stringy burlap back and golden globs of glue.

  “Jackson, I don’t wants that dog-eared thing messing up my parlor,” Mama had said several years before. She liked nice things and worked long hours to earn extra money to buy them. I didn’t give a fig about the machinemade carpet or the curio cabinet or the horsehair sofa, which felt stiff and scratchy, like riding bareback buck naked. If I had a choice, I’d rather Mama worked less and was home more.

  “We need the dictionary out in the open, where we can get to it easily,” Daddy had said.

  They argued for a while, but Daddy won out. Mama never went near the dictionary. That made it the perfect place to hide money from her.

  Daddy was saving up to buy her a pump organ. The previous summer he had included me in the secret plan. If we went without extras, he said, he could set aside two dollars every week, and a year later, we would have enough money to buy a pump organ.

  Every week, Daddy gave me two one-dollar bills, and I put them in the dictionary, starting with the letter A so I could keep track. There were twenty-six letters in the alphabet and fifty-two weeks in a year, so at two weeks per letter, by the time we reached Z, we’d have enough money.

  Mama loved music. She always sang around the house. When I was younger, she sang me to sleep with a lullaby:

  Close yo’ little eyes up, honey,

  Purty eyes so warm and sunny.

  Fold yo’ tiny hands and cross ’um.

  Hi, dar, yo’s a-playing possum.

  Mama had never taken formal music lessons, but she had taught herself to play by ear. Daddy was determined that she would have her own organ.

  A year is a long time to keep a secret. Just a month before, we had almost got caught out. We were all in the parlor when Mama walked through, dressed in her Sunday red dress with a satin rose at the waist. She was the prettiest lady in the neighborhood. Everybody said so. She had wavy hair, a thin nose, and skin so light she could pass for a white person. That night, she announced that she was on her way to a debate at the Benjamin Banneker Literary and Library Association. The topic was “Resolved: That Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly convicted of treason,” with J. C. Reaves arguing the affirmative and George Carnes on the negative.

  Boo Nanny said, “You is dead tired, chile, and you wants to go spending your free time filling up your mind with useless piddle just to please you man? What you needs is not refinement. What you needs is a good night’s sleep.”

  “Mama, I wants to improve myself.” Mama’s grammar was not up to Daddy’s high standards, though he never mentioned it.

  “Does you even know what treason is?” Boo Nanny said, setting her crochet work in her lap.

  “I reckon I can look it up, same like everyone else.”

  Mama headed for the dictionary, and Daddy and I both lurched out of our seats.

  Daddy was quicker than me and took her up in his arms and moved her away from the dictionary. “Remember the cakewalk? The first time we went out?” He held Mama’s hand shoulder high and started prancing.

  “You is taken leave of you senses,” Boo Nanny said.

  “Lord, I don’t remember. Only thing I remembers is how I rubbed myself from head to toe with lemon juice to get rid of that smell,” Mama said.

  “What smell?” I asked, keeping an eye on the dictionary, but she had forgotten all about it.

  “That fishy smell,” she said.

  “I first met your mother when she was working as a sounder. She came to my door and sang a little ditty. How did it go? ‘Sadie, Sadie, the seafood lady.’ ” His voice cracked as he sang.

  Boo Nanny made a face. Music was not one of Daddy’s gifts.

  He continued: “I didn’t know which was finer, her voice, her figure, or her face. I bought so many clams and oysters that first time, I was up all night throwing up.”

  “Why, Jack Thomas, you never told me that,” she said with a hand on her hip.

  “I didn’t want you thinking I was a sickly man. Now let’s dance.”

  “You gone make me late for the debate.” She playfully shooed him off and left.

  This close call came when we had reached the Vs. After Boo Nanny left the room, Daddy said there were only a few weeks left until we would get to the end of the alphabet, so
we might as well keep our hiding place.

  Shortly after school let out in mid-May, I held the dictionary upside down and shook hard. Dozens of dollar bills fluttered onto the carpet. I fanned the book’s edges and more money rained down, until there was a large pile, which I divided into stacks and counted. We were two dollars short. I located one of the missing bills, stuck in the dictionary pages, but Daddy said not to worry about the other one. That Saturday, we went to a clock-repair store on Front Street that had advertised an organ for sale for a hundred dollars.

  The owner, a small man with a light brown mustache, also repaired organs. Someone who moved West had left this one behind. When Daddy inquired about it, the man removed the magnifying loupe from his eye and put it on his forehead, where it was held by an elastic band. “You don’t want this organ,” he said. The loupe over his eyebrow looked like a giant pimple.

  “Does it work?” Daddy said.

  The man ignored him, pulled the loupe back into place over his eye, and leaned over the watch he had taken apart.

  “I said, does the organ work?” Daddy repeated.

  “I accept cash only, no down payments,” the man said, not looking up from his work.

  “I won’t know if the terms are agreeable until I see the organ,” Daddy said.

  “You’ll have to move it yourself. My people don’t deliver to colored,” the man said.

  Daddy leaned his arm on the counter and said, “What ward are you in? Do you know John Darnton? I believe he’s your alderman. We’re on the board together.”

  The man removed the loupe from his eye. “I bet you’re one of those Fusion fellows.”

  “Actually, I’m a Republican, but we banded together with the Populists to defeat the Democrats in the legislature last year and put in a Fusion governor,” Daddy said.

  “Well, I reckon that explains why there’s so many coloreds in office. Payback.”

  My mind wandered as they talked about politics, but just when I was getting seriously bored, the owner took us to a back room.

  My eyes widened when I saw the organ. Made of mahogany, it was covered with so many spindles, columns, and carvings that it made the fanciest gingerbread houses in Wilmington look plain by comparison. Two round wooden candleholders pivoted out from either side of the keyboard. A row of pull stops changed the tone of the organ to chimes, flutes, and other sounds. I couldn’t believe we might have something this nice in our house.