People had gathered to celebrate the soldiers who died in the War Between the States. Truth be told, I didn’t know much about the war. When I was younger, Lewis and I played war with sticks for weapons and magnolia pods for artillery. Lewis played the part of the victorious Union Army and made me take the Confederate side.
I knew the Rebels were bad men. That was why Lewis made me play them. But I was surprised at Boo Nanny’s fury when I told her about it.
“Honey chile, you gone stark raving mad, playing a Rebbie boy?”
“But Lewis made me.”
“Can’t nobody make you do nothing, lessen you let them,” she had said.
Now I searched the crowds for Boo Nanny and Mama, but before I could find them, Daddy mounted the stage, which was covered with flags and red, white, and blue bunting. The band stopped playing. Mothers shushed their children, and everyone looked in Daddy’s direction. He was a slight man, not grand and imposing like some of the preachers in town. But he had a booming voice and could easily be heard without using a speaking trumpet.
When everyone was quiet, he began by thanking various people for making the event possible. My mind wandered, and when I came out of my daydreaming, he was already into his speech.
“Ten percent of the Union Army was composed of our Negro brethren. Some were runaway slaves; some were freedmen. Some lived, and too many died.”
He was quiet for a moment, and the crowd followed him in silence. You could hear the rustle of leaves and a bird’s call.
“The headstones to your right commemorate the United States Colored Troops who died in the battles of Sugar Loaf and Forks Road. There are also cooks, teamsters, and other colored U.S. Army personnel buried there.”
Lined up like soldiers, the headstones sparkled pure white under the afternoon sun. I could not tell where the graves of the colored soldiers left off and the white section began.
“These brave men sacrificed so that we could become family members, productive citizens, and home owners. It is their sacrifice that we honor today.”
There was scattered applause.
“These soldiers could not have imagined a city like Wilmington, where, two years shy of the twentieth century, people of color would hold four of the ten seats on the Board of Aldermen. Where thirteen of the twenty-four policemen would be black. Where fourteen percent of Negroes would own their own homes, in a community with lawyers and doctors of color and a solid middle class. These achievements are beyond the wildest dreams of the soldiers resting beneath these rows of headstones. And yet, none of this—none of it—would be possible without their sacrifice.
“The twentieth century promises to be a century of opportunity for our race. If we continue to work to better ourselves, we can scale Olympic heights so that these soldiers’ lives will not have been spent in vain.”
At the end of his speech, people jumped to their feet, shouted, and waved their hands. When the cheering died down, the band struck up.
I felt myself swell like a bullfrog’s throat. I didn’t understand everything Daddy said, but I understood that he was someone people looked up to, and that made me proud.
I went to find him, but he was surrounded by well-wishers, so I decided to return Lewis’s bike and walk home.
The bike was not where I thought I’d left it. The white headstones stretched out in identical rows. It wasn’t hard to confuse one row with another. I walked up and down every row looking for Lewis’s bright blue bike. As I got closer to the stone wall where the graves ended, my heart started thumping. The crowd was breaking up, and I came to the conclusion that I should have reached earlier but had dared not consider: someone had stolen Lewis’s bike.
My stomach felt as if I had eaten bad oysters. Lewis was my best friend. But when he found out that I had lost his bike, he would chuck me for good.
Trudging along the roadside in the sand, I tried to think of what to tell him. The only solution I could come up with was to buy him another bike. But I had been saving my pennies for months to buy my own wheels, and even after adding my Christmas money, I barely had enough for one wheel, on sale at the hardware store.
I dragged myself up to Lewis’s front porch, my body heavier and heavier with each step. The maid answered the door when I knocked. The starched white apron she wore over her long gray skirt made me think of a nurse. She told me that Lewis was out for a carriage ride with his family. I let out a sigh. I had more time. I told her to tell him that I would bring the bike back the next day.
At supper, while Mama and Boo Nanny carried on about Daddy’s triumph, I kept quiet. That night I barely slept. The next day, I got up and out of the house early, vowing to scour every block in town until I found the missing bike. I told Boo Nanny that I was walking to the ocean—that would take all day.
“Don’t go forgetting my conchs,” she said as I went out the door. In the backyard, next to the big iron pot where she boiled the laundry, she had secured a piece of driftwood upright, then placed a conch shell on each of the points of wood. We had an agreement that anytime I went to the shore, I would look for a conch to add to her tree.
I started out on my street, Fifth, which was divided by a median. I walked on the right side, looking into all the backyards. Across the bridge over the railroad tracks, the houses started getting bigger and more ornate. They were painted pastel colors and had large front porches with fancy railings and windows as big as doors. I walked by quickly. It was unlikely that rich people would steal a bike, but still, I checked every backyard, just to be sure. I kept walking on Fifth for about a mile until I got to Dry Pond, where the po-bocra lived. Here, the houses were more like shacks, as small as the houses in my neighborhood but not as neatly kept. The yards were mostly sand, with a few sprigs of grass here and there. Drooping from the enormous oaks along the roadside were hanks of moss—haint’s hair—filled with chiggers.
I felt uneasy as I went down the narrow streets, looking into front and backyards. Here I was the only black face, unlike the fancy areas of town, where a few rich Negroes lived and maids walked to and from work.
A man in overalls approached me. He was carrying a copy of the Wilmington Messenger, the white newspaper. “Where you headed, boy?”
“I’m just walking,” I said.
“You got to be walking somewheres. Where would that be?”
“Down the road,” I said.
“Well, you best turn back. You ain’t welcome here.”
I went up a side street and turned back toward town on a parallel street. Several blocks down, I passed a tarpaper shack surrounded by a peeling white fence with rotted pickets. In the front yard, beside an anchor half buried in the sand, was a bright blue bike lying on its side—Lewis’s wheels.
I looked around. It was a hot day and no one was out in the streets. I eyed the mongrel dogs sleeping under the house and calculated the distance between the bike and the front gate. The sand was thick and there was little grass, so I probably wouldn’t be able to ride off. I’d have to grab the bike and run until I got to the street, which, in this poor part of town, was packed sand instead of cobblestones.
Before I could chicken out, I climbed over the side fence and snuck up behind a tree. The dogs didn’t stir. I darted toward the bike, grabbed the handlebars, and lit out for the street. The dogs scrambled from beneath the house, barking, but I was out the gate before they could reach me. I thought I was home free, when suddenly a huge man shot out the front door like a wad from a spitball gun. “Hey, you! Thief! Stop!” he yelled, running after me.
At the end of the block, the man in overalls who had stopped me earlier appeared out of nowhere. As I pedaled past, he hurled the newspaper at me. It hit me in the face, and the bike slid on the slippery brown pine needles that covered the road. Both men reached me at the same time.
“That kid stole my boy’s bike,” the big man said.
I was trembling but managed to say, “It’s not your son’s bike.”
“Ain’t no nigger tells
me what’s what.”
“Do you want me to go fetch the law?” the man in overalls said. In this part of town there were no telephones.
“Forget it. I’ll take care of him right now.”
He grabbed me by the shirt and a button popped off. I braced for the worst.
“Let him go,” the man in overalls said. “He’s not a bad boy. He’s learned his lesson, and you’ve got your son’s bike now.”
“He’ll come back and help himself to anything that’s not nailed down. That’s the way these people are.”
While they were arguing, I grabbed the bike and took off. I was all the way down the block before they started running. I darted down a side street, then zigzagged along the city streets until I was sure I had ditched them.
I rode the bike directly to Lewis’s house. The maid got him and he came outside. “I brought your bike back,” I said.
He looked over my shoulder, down the steep porch steps. Rubbing the crust from his eyes, he said, “That’s not my bike.”
“Wh-wh-what do you mean?” I was sure he had not fully woken up.
“Mine’s a Columbia. That’s an Eagle.”
I went numb.
“Johnny saw my bike at the celebration and didn’t think I’d mind if he took it for a spin. When he returned and couldn’t find me, he brought it over to my house. Where the heck did those wheels come from?”
I looked at the stolen bike. I was a thief.
Lewis invited me to stay and play marbles, but I begged off. I needed to figure this out. The obvious thing was to return the bike to the owner, but I was terrified. That man would kill me if he saw me again.
I decided to go to the ocean. I always felt better when I went to the ocean. At least I could turn the lie I told Boo Nanny into the truth. Then I would only be a thief, instead of a liar and a thief.
The back road to the beach passed along the edges of the salt marshes. The tides mixed with freshwater streams to feed the tall grasses and create a vast field of green that, waving in the wind, made me seasick if I looked at it too long. The road ended at the dunes. I walked the bike through the thick sand to the ocean.
The sky was a colorless blue, like the marbles we called aggies. The sun formed a dull halo behind the clouds, but it cast a glaring silver pathway across the sea, like the moon sometimes did.
The waves lapped at the shore, pushing on their forward edge a trim of foam. The wind lifted the froth and sent it skimming over the sand until it broke off into smaller clumps, then disappeared, and another wave brought a new batch. I wanted to ride for miles and miles, with the wind against my face, trying to outrun my troubles.
Being at the beach usually cheered me up, but today the sea was not my friend. Before starting home, I left the bike on its side on the sand and walked along the shore to look for a conch for Boo Nanny’s tree. No other people were in sight.
A short distance away, I found a half-buried sand dollar. The flat white disk had a star etched on its face and five slitlike holes. This was a sign. It would fetch me good luck. I slipped the sand dollar into my pocket and walked on.
It took me longer than I thought it would to find a conch, but I was glad I kept looking, because the shell I found was the prettiest yet—tan with streaks of pink and orange.
The bike had no basket, so I put the conch inside my shirt, with the sharp points away from me. On the way back, I took the toll road, since it was shorter and bikes could ride for free. I pedaled along the packed shoulder past mule-drawn wagons and carriages, their metal wheels crunching against the crushed oyster-shell surface.
No one was in our backyard when I stashed the bike behind the shed. Before going into the house, I took out the conch and then reached into my pocket for my good-luck charm. To my horror, I discovered that the sand dollar had broken into pieces. Among the fragments were four tiny chips that looked like doves.
The kitchen was filled with the spicy smell of molasses cookies. One batch was cooling on top of the pie safe. Boo Nanny was rolling out the last of the dough on the kitchen table. She used an empty baking-powder tin as a cookie cutter.
Daddy was at the table by the window reading a book. If he was sitting and not eating, chances were he had his nose in a book.
“Make youself useful and go fetch me a load of wood before you get too comfortable,” Boo Nanny said when she saw me at the door. After my miserable day, I couldn’t wait to get into the spicy-smelling kitchen, but I went back to the woodpile and brought an armload of split logs to the porch.
“What’s the matter, sugar? You had youself a bad day?” Boo Nanny said when I came in the second time.
I gave her the conch, then took out the pieces of the sand dollar and showed them to her.
“I found these inside.” I showed her the chips.
“Doves of peace,” she said, shaking her head knowingly.
“They’re good luck, aren’t they?” I said. I couldn’t imagine doves of peace being bad luck.
“You be missing one.”
I counted four.
“They’s five slits in the sand dollar. Two for the nails in sweet Jesus’s hands, two for the nails in his feet—and one for the Roman sword. You be missing one. That be a powerful sign you got a mess of trouble coming to your door.”
“Josephine, don’t go putting nonsense into the boy’s head,” my father said, looking up from his book.
“I don’t hardly ’spect you to believe me, Jack, but I knows what I knows.”
Then, as if a signal that the bad luck would start that very moment, Daddy said, “Whose bike is that out back?”
“Huh?” I said, fingering the sharp edges of the broken sand dollar in my pocket.
“The one you put behind the shed.”
He must have looked up from his book just as I arrived. I felt searing heat spread across my chest, knowing that Daddy had watched me hide the plunder like some common area sneak.
“It’s Lewis’s. I mean, I thought it was. I borrowed his bike and then it disappeared and it was all my fault and I felt terrible and I’m not a thief.…” Everything came out in a confused rush as I blathered on, not making much sense.
“Whoa. Slow down, son. It’s all right. Now tell me, as simply as you can, what happened.”
I tried my best. When I finished, he paused a moment to ponder what I had said. “I’m not blaming you. I don’t want you to think that,” he said slowly. “But you need to return the bike to its rightful owner and apologize. It doesn’t matter if you thought you were taking what belonged to you—it’s stealing nonetheless.”
I remembered that angry white man and shuddered. “Have you been to Dry Pond, Daddy? Those people hate us there.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That may be true, but that doesn’t change anything.”
“I bet he’s Ku Klux.”
“What the man is or isn’t has nothing to do with what you are. It’s not your bicycle. I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying that you have to set things right.”
I thought of what Boo Nanny had said about trouble coming to my door. “But he might kill me.”
Daddy seemed indifferent to the possibility, which shocked me. “It’s easy for a man to be hateful in a group. It’s harder when he’s face to face. You’ll show him what you’re worth. A real man admits his mistakes.”
I felt miserable. “But I’m not a man. I’m a boy.”
“I’ll go with you, if that will make you feel better.”
Daddy closed his book and went to the other room. I slumped down at the table.
“You appear to me to be a boy in need of some molasses cookies,” Boo Nanny said. “Go grab youself a handful, and don’t tell you mama or she’ll go accusing me of ruining your supper.”
I went to bed early but could not get to sleep. After a while, Mama came into the room. “You playing possum?” she said. The moon filled the curtains with light, but the bed was dark.
I kept my eyes shut and remain
ed still, hoping she would go away.
“You ain’t asleep. I know you ain’t.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed my forehead. She smelled of lemons. I could hear the clock ticking in the parlor.
“When I was a child, I stole something once,” she said.
“You what?” I opened my eyes and sat up. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe Mama had ever done anything wrong.
“You knows ’bout how I couldn’t get enough of Millie-Christine, the colored Siamese twins.” I listened carefully as she described the time when she was fifteen and Millie-Christine came to town. They had just returned from a European tour and were at the height of their fame. Mama couldn’t afford to see them, but some of the stores carried their autobiography, The History of the Carolina Twins, Told in Their Own Peculiar Way by One of Them. A drawing of the twins was on the cover.
In the store, she slipped the paper pamphlet into the back waistband of her skirt and covered it with her jacket. The clerk smiled at her as she walked out. Back home Boo Nanny found the pamphlet.
“Whoo-ee. You should a seed Boo Nanny. That kind of mad you don’t never forget,” Mama said in the dark.
Boo Nanny made her return the pamphlet and apologize to the clerk.
“What did you say to him?” I said.
“I don’t rightly remember. Only thing I remember was he thought I was a straight-out white gal, and when he found out I was colored, he said, ‘You is some kind of purty,’ and gave me a long, ugly, adult kind of look. Boo Nanny dragged me out of there quick and said, ‘I don’t want you ever to get anywheres near that man, you hear? He’s no-count.’ After that, I never stole another blessed thing.”
“Why was he a bad man?” I asked.
“Honey, it don’t matter. You too young for that. Important thing is, I done something wrong, and had to make it right.”
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