I jumped in the wayback of the station wagon to hide under the blanket. Wherever we were going, I hoped it didn’t take long. This was the scratchiest blanket ever. And I couldn’t hardly breathe.
We were riding fast. The radio blasted that new Elvis song Jesslyn had played a zillion times on her record player, something about suspicion.
I kept quiet and rested my sweaty forehead against the picnic cooler.
I heard Robbie say, “Glad you thought of getting something cold to drink for the ride. I brought my camera, to take your picture in front of the house.”
But I kept still, barely breathing.
“I saw you practicing football,” Jesslyn said after a while. “Everybody’s saying you were the star back where you moved from. Why’d you leave?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. “And private. Promise you won’t tell?”
I got a worried feeling in the pit of my stomach like I’d eaten something rotten. Then somebody must have clicked the radio off because all I heard was the sound of wind whooshing through the windows and them shaking the ice in their Cokes.
I managed to hear Jesslyn say, “I’m good at secrets. Preachers’ kids hear a lot of stuff. Daddy has taught us not to gossip.” Yeah, well, he might have taught Jesslyn, but I still had work to do on that lesson.
At first, Robbie didn’t answer. I listened hard into the whooshing wind and rattly Coke ice. Then Robbie’s words tumbled out, loud enough for me to hear. “I promised my aunt I wouldn’t tell this. She doesn’t want everybody sticking their noses in our family’s business.”
Robbie got quiet again. Finally he said, “If I hadn’t come to live in Hanging Moss …” Robbie struggled with his voice, then managed, “… I might be in jail.”
Jail?
Jesslyn and me were riding in a car to Kingdom Come with a jailbird?
I put my hand over my mouth to keep it from yelping. Emma would have our heads — and our tails — on a platter!
For the first time ever, Jesslyn was speechless. She was probably thinking about Emma’s wooden spoon coming in for a smack to the back of her It’s the style skirt!
Quietly Robbie said, “I got in trouble back in North Carolina. It was in the newspapers.”
“What kind of trouble?” Jesslyn asked carefully.
“There was this dime store with a place to eat inside. Just stools and a counter. Good hot dogs and ice cream. I saw a boy there. A colored friend named Henry. His daddy worked on my granddaddy’s farm. Sometimes we’d throw the ball around, act like we were scoring. Henry was always nice to me. Our schools were getting ready to join up next year — our town wasn’t really big enough to have a school for white students and a school for Negro ones. We would’ve ended up on the same football team.”
I kept holding my breath.
“Henry was sitting there waiting to order something. One of his friends was reading a book. They were talking quietly, not doing anything bad. ’Cept, in our town, colored people aren’t supposed to eat where white people eat.”
I was all ears now. Robbie could have been describing Hanging Moss — same thing for us. Colored people and white people are kept separate at pools, schools, restaurants — even the town library.
“What did you do?” Jesslyn asked.
“The waitress yelled at them to leave. So I found a stool next to Henry. I sat down to order. I didn’t like that waitress hollering at Henry and his friends to get up. So I told her so. The police came. Pulled us out to the street. Of course, somebody called the newspaper.”
Well, I’ll be. If Jesslyn or me did that at the Five and Dime lunch counter downtown, Mrs. Simpson and her newspaper people would be there faster than you could say hot dog with mustard. I can’t imagine what Daddy would do if my picture ended up on the front page of the Hanging Moss Tribune.
“I bet that was scary,” Jesslyn said.
“I’m not sorry I did it. It was scary, though. The police hauled us off to jail. I stayed there till my step-daddy came that evening. I’d never done anything bad before, so they let me go with a warning. After that, Mama sent me here to my aunt’s. Said she needed some time away from me. Claimed she couldn’t hold her head up around town.”
Now my heart was beating faster than fast. I wondered if Robbie was going the speed limit. My insides were zooming.
Jesslyn said, “Maybe your mama will change her mind and let you come home?”
“Yeah, well, I like it here now,” Robbie said. “I’m gonna stay, especially if I make the football team.”
“You’ll make the team,” Jesslyn said. “You’re good.”
The ice rattling had stopped and the wind had died down some. I could practically hear Jesslyn batting her eyes.
“Please don’t tell anybody what happened in North Carolina. Word gets out I’m a troublemaker? My aunt might send me back. I don’t want the team to know, either.”
I shut my eyes tight, clinched my fists together, and willed myself not to push that scratchy blanket back, sit up, and say that Jesslyn wouldn’t tell a single soul ’cause she’s good at keeping secrets, and good at telling lies. I was bad at keeping secrets — and real bad at lying, especially to Emma.
The car radio came back on and all I could hear was Elvis singing. The picnic cooler bounced next to me while I thought about having a Dr Pepper with Jesslyn and Robbie soon, me pretending like I hadn’t heard that bad thing about Robbie and his friend Henry.
The station wagon slowed, then stopped. We were parked someplace. Jesslyn reached over to the backseat for the camera about the time Robbie opened the wayback door for the cooler. There was no more hiding. Both of them saw me at once.
Jesslyn looked like she’d seen a ghost. “Glory? What are you doing? How’d you get back there?” She stormed out, slammed her car door, and stood next to Robbie. She reached over and grabbed my wrist, squeezed it so hard she could’ve given me a rope burn. I twisted away and shut my mouth up tight. My sister was mad as a hornet. “Have you been spying on us?”
“I wanted to see where y’all were going. That’s all.” I glared at my sister. “I double-dog dare you to fuss at me! You’re not supposed to be here any more than I am. Isn’t shopping in Memphis with Mary Louise fun?”
When I looked over at Robbie, he had his jaw clenched tight.
“Stay in this station wagon,” Jesslyn hissed. “And stay quiet.”
I was all squished up next to the drink cooler.
“You’re not the boss of me.” There was a little house right next to where we were parked. “Where are we? What’s that broken-down shack over there?”
“You’ll never know,” Jesslyn said. “You aren’t budging out of the car.”
Robbie must’ve taken some pity on me. “Let her out. It’s hot back there.”
“She can burn up for all I care. She’s not coming with us.” Jesslyn’s voice was full of meanness. “And you’d better not tell. I mean it, Glory.”
Robbie grabbed the cooler and followed Jesslyn up the cracked sidewalk. She leaned over, pulled up a handful of grass from beside a front step of that little house by the road, and stuffed the grass in her back pocket.
I sat in the station wagon, hot, squished, itching to get out.
“I’m coming whether you like it or not,” I hollered out. Even if it was just some falling-down house on a street in the middle of nowhere, I wanted to see what they were doing. When I stepped on the porch steps, it felt like the whole house would cave in. “Where are we?”
“Not far from Hanging Moss, if you knew anything at all. This is Tupelo. Elvis lived here when he was a little boy.” Jesslyn hugged herself like this was as good as meeting Elvis himself. I mean, this place was downright pitiful, and Jesslyn was acting like it was a palace.
I looked around. “If this was Elvis’s house, you’d think it’d be a little fancier. Nothing but dead bushes and a cracked window.”
“What’d you expect, big iron gates? You don’t know anything, Glory.”
/> Robbie pushed back his black hair that was combed just like Elvis’s in the picture Jesslyn kept taped to the mirror in our room. “Elvis wasn’t rich when he lived here. Not that many people know about this house,” Robbie said. He spit on his shirttail, wiped circles in the dust of a front windowpane. “Hey, you gotta see this.”
Jesslyn peered through the dirty window. “I dare you to get me some of that wallpaper.” She batted her eyes like Robbie was the real Elvis passing out autographs.
“I’m going around back to break in.” He jumped off the low porch and disappeared.
Jesslyn pulled me down to the front steps. “Don’t move,” she said. She followed Robbie around the corner of the house.
I rubbed my hand across the splinters on the steps, picturing Elvis being a little boy crawling around on this very porch. Not a breath of air moved, and the sun was so hot I got to wondering what in tarnation Jesslyn and Robbie were doing behind the house. Nancy Drew wouldn’t just wait here. She’d be looking for clues.
Where were they? I spotted an open window! I peeked in just in time to see Robbie peel off a piece of wallpaper and hand it to Jesslyn like it was a diamond ring. I could hear them talking plain as day.
“If we hold the camera back, both of us can be in the picture.” Then I saw a flashbulb pop light and heard Jesslyn giggling.
I waited in the dirt and dried-up grass and thought about all those nights last summer when we stayed up late talking about how yucky boys were. Now Jesslyn had disappeared with Robbie into the cool shadows of Elvis’s living room and I didn’t hear talking anymore. Pretty soon they climbed back out the open window, acting all moony-eyed.
That’s when Jesslyn saw me sitting there.
“I told you to wait on the front porch.” She looked right into my eyes. She was squinting hard.
“I wanna see inside, too,” I told her. “You never used to mind if I went places with you.”
“I mind now.”
The heck with Jesslyn! I climbed right through the window of Elvis’s house.
Whew. It smelled like the inside of Frankie’s hamster cage. I got out fast and hurried around to the front porch. “Stinks to high heaven in there. When’s the picnic?” I asked.
Robbie handed me a drink and a cookie. I dangled my legs off the porch in the sweltering heat while they giggled and whispered. This porch-sitting was getting boring.
“It’ll be getting dark soon,” I said. “Emma might notice we’re gone.”
We packed up Robbie’s station wagon. Before we left, I reached down and stole me some of Elvis’s grass, too. Then I slipped in the backseat, right behind Jesslyn.
“This is pretty. Thank you.” Jesslyn curled her fingers around the piece of green-flowered wallpaper. She put her head back on the seat and looked at Robbie. “I had fun today,” she said.
I squeezed my knees up close to my face and smiled, thinking about Elvis and that ugly wallpaper. I stopped smiling when I thought about Robbie and what he said about jail.
“We need to hurry. It’s getting dark,” I said.
Right about now, all I wanted was to get home to Emma, safe and sound.
That evening, by the time Robbie’s headlights hit the Welcome to Hanging Moss, Mississippi, Population 8,003 sign out on the highway, the sun was sinking behind the trees and the sky was a million colors of orange. We were almost home. I leaned against Robbie’s backseat, thinking about the day. And what Emma would say if she found out Jesslyn and I were joyriding with Robbie, the North Carolina jailbird.
Jesslyn hollered so loud it woke me out of my daydreaming. She leaned over to shake my knee. “Glory, is somebody following us?”
I turned around. “Oh, no,” I said. “The car’s got a big red light on the top.”
“Uh-oh,” Robbie said, before he pulled in next to a small store advertising corn, tomatoes, and green beans.
“It’s a policeman.” I was taking in big gulps of air. I could hardly talk. “He’s getting out of his car.”
Jesslyn was whispering, “He’s writing down our license plate number. Wonder if he’s been following us all along?”
Robbie looked in his rearview mirror.
When the policeman tapped on our window, Jesslyn and I nearly jumped out of our skin. “I need your driver’s license, son,” he said to Robbie. “Get out of the car and turn around.”
“Yes, sir.” Robbie stepped outside. I scootched to the edge of my seat and leaned my head toward Jesslyn. Robbie reached into his back pocket to hand over his wallet.
“You’re from North Carolina?” The policeman looked hard at Robbie’s license. “What brings you down here?”
While Robbie explained about how he was here staying with his aunt for the summer, wanting to play football come September, my heart was pounding so hard I could hardly hear.
I wanted to be home where I belonged.
The policeman said, “There’s people from out of state down here stirring up trouble. You wouldn’t be one of them, would you?”
“No, sir,” Robbie said politely.
“Get back in your car. Drive straight on home. It’s not safe to be out after dark tonight.” Just when I didn’t think this evening could get any worse, the policeman’s hand brushed across his gun and he shined his flashlight in my eyes, then Jesslyn’s. “You girls visiting from North Carolina, too?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Jesslyn answered. And I was almost glad to hear her lie because lying to a policeman wasn’t nearly as bad as what Emma and our daddy would’ve done if he’d dragged us home in his big car with that bright red light shining for all the world to see.
Then the policeman looked hard at me and Jesslyn. “You’re sure you’re not from around here?”
“No, sir,” Jesslyn’s voice squeaked out.
“You look kind of familiar.” The policeman shined his flashlight around the backseat again.
Jesslyn didn’t answer the policeman. Neither did I.
Pretty soon, he nodded at Robbie. “Son, you get these girls home. It’s too late to be out on the highway. Whoever their daddy is, he’ll be worrying.”
When Robbie’s car started up again, I was shaking. My fingernails dug into the backseat.
“You think that policeman’s gonna get us in trouble somehow?” I finally asked. “Daddy will skin us alive if he finds out you’re not shopping with Mary Louise and that we got stopped by the police.” I dug my fingernails even deeper. “Once Daddy is done with us, it’ll be Emma’s turn to skin our hides.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Robbie answered.
“If you don’t count Jesslyn lying to a policeman,” I said.
We were back in town now. Robbie stopped the car in front of our house.
“Not here! Y’all better let me out by the library,” I told him. “I’ll walk home.” The last thing I needed was for Emma to see me getting out of Robbie’s car.
“You know, Glory,” Jesslyn said, without even turning around to look at me, “you shouldn’t go sneaking into people’s business. Don’t tell anything about today. Anything you saw. Or anything you heard.”
“I didn’t hear anything.” I was gonna try real hard to keep Robbie’s secret. Not like the time I blabbed to Emma that Jesslyn had broken our mama’s china cat statue when I’d promised I wouldn’t tell. Or when I let it slip to Frankie that Emma had sewed lace to Jesslyn’s underpants for pep squad tryouts. Nope, not like that. This time I was keeping a real secret.
As long as I lived, I’d never tell this story. If I lived long enough to stand a shakedown by Emma or Daddy.
Robbie let me out around the corner from the library. “Glory, I’ll be back at the house soon after you get there,” Jesslyn said.
When I got home, Emma was waiting on the front porch. “You been at the library all this time?”
“Yessum.”
“Get in here, Glory. Where’s Jesslyn? She promised she’d be back before dark.”
“It’s not quite dark yet. I don�
�t know where she is.” I kept my eyes on the grass.
“Brother Joe’s got a meeting at the church. He’s due back any time now. When he finds out Jesslyn’s not here —” Emma’s voice stopped. “I never liked the idea of that child going off to Memphis shopping. When do you reckon your sister’s getting home?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” I caught myself before another word popped out of my mouth. Jesslyn might get in trouble — but I wouldn’t be the one telling on her. I walked into the kitchen like it was any other night of the summer. I sat at the table, eating a stick of Emma’s warm corn bread. I turned the pages of Jesslyn’s magazine and looked at the movie star Sandra Dee, with not one single solitary blond hair where it didn’t belong. I focused my mind on how she’d have to sleep on brush rollers all night long to get that flipped-up hairdo.
When Emma walked in, she set down a plate of fudge big enough to feed half of Hanging Moss. I closed the magazine. “Can I have a piece?”
She handed me a tiny bite and covered it up. “I’m taking this home to my company,” she said.
“Who’s your company? Must be a heap of people to eat all that candy.”
“Just visitors,” she said. Emma didn’t ever have visitors. I’d been to her house over on the other side of town. There wasn’t room for anybody but Emma. I looked at the big plate wrapped in tinfoil. “Who are they?”
“I got four or five folks sleeping on my sofa and in the back room.”
“Who?” I asked again.
Emma sat at the kitchen table like she was plum worn out. She pulled her chair close to me. “Young folks from up north, like your friend Laura’s mother. Your daddy knows,” she said. “Some white people have fired maids for keeping civil rights workers, Freedom Workers, at their houses. But Brother Joe don’t mind.”
“Laura’s mother’s a Freedom Worker. Least that’s what Frankie called her. He says it like freedom’s something bad.” I picked at a scab on my arm. I couldn’t look at Emma. “Wonder if they’ll try to get the pool opened up. Frankie says it’s closed because of all the Yankees like Laura in town.”
Glory Be Page 6