Baby Of The Family
by
Tina Macelroy

To Nellie everything in the delivery room seemed to be covered by a
spotless white material, the nurses, the doctor, the table she lay on,
her own body. Even the walls and ceiling were painted a white white that
reflected the sharp glare of the round overhead light. The glare made
her eyes ache, but Nellie was so glad to be in the last stages of
labor-a hard, long, wrenching labor such as she had never experienced
before-that she didn't mind the light.

The labor pains had gone on all night, and with the rising of the sun
her baby was born.

"Yeah, a mighty special little girl, Mrs. Mac," Dr. Williams repeated.

As if she weren't the center of attention already, the doctor's
statement made all eyes in the small hot room fix on the newborn child
even more intently. In her first seconds in this world, the little girl
seemed to bask in the glow from the eyes of her mother, her physician,
and two nurses-a tiny cynosure.

"This one came with a veil over her face. Yes indeed, it's a sure sign
that she's a lucky one, yes indeedy."

Wide arcs of perspiration marked the doctor's armpits, and the white
surgical gown he wore over his tight little round belly was stained
front and back with his sweat.

When Nellie rose up on her elbows, the sweat at the roots of her
auburntinted hair and on her brow rolled down into her eyes and stung
them a little.

But she was so anxious to see her little girl that she hurriedly blinked
the salty drops away as if they were tears and craned her neck to see
around the younger nurse who had moved in for a closer look.

Still blowing and puffing from the exertion of the birth, the mother was
forgotten in the excitement of the newborn child. She looked at her
longed-for girl over the sparkling white cotton cloth draping her knees.
At first sight of the infant, Nellie drew in her breath so sharply that
the shot of oxygen made her a little dizzy.

The baby, whom she planned to call Lena after her own grandmother, lay
in the doctor's outstretched hands. Her wrinkled skin was hardly any
color at all and her tiny legs and arms made circles in the air as she
wiggled about. She began a soft sweet whimper that made the doctor and
nurses smile at each other as if the child had performed a trick.

BIRTH It surprised her mother that Lena could cry at all. Over her
entire head, as if draped there by a band of angels, lay a thin membrane
that rose and fell away from the child's sweet face with each breath she
took. It looked almost like the white stockings the nurses in the room
wore.

Although at first Nellie's gasp sounded like one of fear, it was really
an expression of wonder. She herself was an only child and had learned
everything she knew about babies when her own children were born. She
had never seen an infant with a caul before.

The veil over her daughter's face gave the little girl a ghostly
appearance. Nellie almost expected her to rise from Dr. Williams's large
rubber-gloved hands and float around the small steamy room like a
newborn apparition.

"Oh, my precious, precious," she crooned to the child lying a few feet
away from her in the doctor's hands. She longed to reach over and take
the baby in her arms, but she was so fatigued that even the thought of
lifting her arms made her eyes roll around in her head.

Everyone in the delivery room was still. The doctor and the two nurses,
grinning under their white surgical masks, stood around as if they were
part of a Christmas tableau. Arriving with a veil over her face, the
child brought with her a touch of the supernatural into a place that
owed so much to the scientific. The doctor was reluctant to break the
spell that had settled on them all there in the hot, antiseptic little
room.

The fact that St. Luke's Hospital existed at all in the small Georgia
town of Mulberry in 1949was spectacular in itself. Nellie had thought so
each time she went there for a doctor's visit or a child's emergency or
to visit a sick friend. She knew that when black people went downtown to
the large county hospital, they had to use a back entrance and sit in a
dingy back room until a surly white nurse got around to them and shunted
them off to the colored ward and rooms, where everything, even the
sheets, looked used.

But a stay at St. Luke's, no matter how serious the complaint, was a
life-affirming experience. Nothing but black folks-the doctor, the
nurses, the receptionist, the aides, the orderlies, the patients, the
familiesall black folks. And the sick and injured got nothing but the
best the staff could give.

Being private it cost more than the public county hospital. Even a stay
in the wards at St. Luke's cost almost as much as a private room on the
colored floor of the public hospital. But Nellie didn't know anyone able
to scrape up the money who didn't try to get into St. Luke's first.

Dr. Williams, once a poor ashy-legged boy in Mulberry, had made two
promises to himself when he returned home from working and scuffling his
way through medical school, one was that he would help another black
Mulberry boy through medical school if the boy promised to come back
home and practice there, the other was that he would have a real
hospital in his hometown for his own folks one day. After years in a
lucrative and busy practice as the only black doctor in town, he had
fulfilled both promises. His first wife's nephew would be graduating
from Meharry in the spring. And this little hospital-just a one-story
white wooden building with a wide front porch, on a paved residential
street in the black part of town-was the other.

And exactly as the doctor-now graying at the temples and thickening at
the waist-had planned as a young man, his hospital had as much modern
equipment as he could acquire, There was an old but functioning
incubator in the delivery room, an X-ray room behind the nurses'
station, and a small laboratory in the basement next to the laundry,
where the hospital's nurses did all their own routine tests.

Dr. Williams only hired nurses from the top of their classes at Tuskegee
Institute. The examining rooms and main operating room had such
up-to-date equipment that he was sometimes reluctant to let the white
doctors from the county hospital come for a tour, for fear of their
jealousy.

For weeks the whole town had talked of the time Dr. Williams had stormed
out the front door of the hospital in the dead of winter, leaving his
hat and overcoat behind, in a fury about the BIRTH death of another
black premature baby. "That's the last baby we're going to lose because
we don't have an incubator!" old Nurse Bloom told folks he had shouted
as he jumped into his shiny black Ford and drove off into the night.

Two days later a crate arrived from Boston, Massachusetts, with a used
incubator inside.

"Don't be asking me a lot of questions bout this stuff," he'd tell his
staff when a new piece of equipment arrived unexpectedly. "Just read
those specifications and make sure you all know how to work it. You all
smart people, that's why you're here."

But this early morning Dr. Williams gave no thought to the techniques he
had learned at Meharry. Seeming to forget his usual delivery-room
procedure, formed over nearly a quarter century of practice, he turned
the next two minutes into a ritualized dance that had nothing to do with
modern medicine.

Standing at the foot of the delivery table so the mother could see what
was going on, the doctor turned with the baby in his outstretched hands
to Nurse Bloom, the older of the two women in white, walked three steps
over to her, and proffered his bundle, still steaming from the womb.

Wiggling and squirming and fighting the air with her tiny fists, little
Lena stretched her body out to its full length and threw her head back,
seeming to strain against the veil.

Nurse Bloom, acting as if the gods were watching her every move, reached
out, her elasticized fingers trembling a little. Starting at the base of
the child's neck where the thin membrane began, the nurse gently pulled
the caul from the baby's face until she had uncovered her miniature
features, the crown of her round head, and her mat of thick tightly
curled hair.

In the nurse's slim hands, wrinkled under her rubber gloves from age and
innumerable scrubbings in hot soapy water, the veil gave no resistance.
It came away from the child's head evenly, with a faint hiss,
disengaging at the nape of the tiny girl's neck where her hair grew to a
little V. Now it was the young nurse who gasped as she watched the
procedure for the first time. Old Nurse Bloom, feeling the gossas met
weight of the caul in her finely etched hands, had to stifle a bubble
rising in her throat and call on all her years of training and
self-discipline to fight the giddiness that was about to overwhelm her
in the windowless room.

Turning away from the others, she walked to the far side of the room,
dropped the limp membrane into a shining silver pan, and deftly slipped
the receptacle onto a shelf under one of the white tables there.

Beneath the white mask that covered her nose and mouth, her wrinkled
lips moved to a chant she spoke in her head.

The sound of the caul hitting the metal pan and the pan sliding across
the metal shelf were the only noises in the room besides the soft
mewling of the baby squirming in the doctor's big hands. The atmosphere
in the stark delivery room reminded Nellie of a joyous yet reverent
occasions baptism or a wake.

"Let's get this baby cleaned up and in her mother's arms where she
belong," Dr. Williams barked. But when he handed the child over to the
older nurse, it was with a gentleness that few of the staff of the small
hospital had ever seen in the harried physician. And Nellie thought his
whole stance, which had stiffened while he issued his order, had
suddenly relaxed again as he watched the old nurse take the newborn baby
into her hands.

Nurse Bloom hadn't giggled in years. Now, like a young girl accepting a
prize at the county fair, she carried the child to the metal table and
silver pan of clear water with a smile playing around the corners of her
mouth. Lying next to the pan of warm water was a stack of bleached white
towels neatly folded into squares by the younger nurse's aide.

The old woman dipped the baby's body into the pan of warm water, washing
the blood and afterbirth from the infant's face, throat, chest, arms,
legs, behind, and feet as she crooned softly to the child.

"Oh, what a special baby. What a sweet little lucky pretty baby girl.

Yes, that's what you are, all right. That's what you are. A sweet little
lucky baby girl. Yes, you are, I cause you come to this world right to
the person who know all about you, who know everything to do for you.
Uh-huh, this old lady right here washing your new little behind know
just what to do for a pretty, lucky little baby girl like you."

Nurse Bloom was standing on the other side of the room from where the
mother lay on the cloth-covered table, her feet still in the stirrups,
with her knees poking up in the air, Nellie looked like a capital M. She
couldn't quite make out what Nurse Bloom was saying, but the old nurse
cooed so sweetly to tiny Lena that to the mother's ear each word sounded
like a tablespoon of rich warm Alaga syrup poured over the child's soft
new body.

Dr. Williams and the other nurse looked on silently, smiling like
godparents. They stood there at the foot of Nellie's table with their
hands hanging limply by their sides as if they had nothing else to do
but admire Lena.

Well, damn, they just gonna forget completely about me, Nellie thought,
and let her elbows slip down the smooth sheet covering the surgical
table and her tired body fall back on its padded surface. She closed her
eyes against the bright light shining directly into her face, and before
she knew anything she had fallen into a deep, peaceful slumber.

When she awoke, the first thing she noticed was the
strawberryice-creampink walls. They were such a contrast to all the
glaringly stark whiteness she had been surrounded by in the delivery
room that for a moment she thought she must still be dreaming. But when
she heard Christine Williams's rich throaty laughter floating down the
hall outside her private room, she remembered where she was and allowed
herself to drift back to sleep.

Christine was the reason her room was pink instead of the antiseptic
white of most rooms in the small hospital. Even the narrow white iron
hospital bed in which she had just spent nearly twelve hours of labor
had been replaced by a brand-new pink one.

Christine, Dr. Williams's second wife, had insisted that some color was
needed for the women's private rooms and wards.

"Ya'll just wait," the tall slender woman with the elegant pompadour
hairstyle had promised as she stuck her head into each room one evening.
"I'm gonna get your butts out of these old white iron beds and into some
pretty pastel ones to match your new walls before this time tomorrow."

And everybody believed her, too. All the next morning, the nurses and
staff could hardly do their work for running to the windows and doors
each time they heard the gears of a truck grinding outside. The staff
had been as excited about the promised delivery of the pink, blue, and
peach beds as the patients were. If Christine Williams said they would
be there, they would be there.

Christine was the type of woman whom people just naturally flocked to
and trusted. More than one patient had teased Dr. Williams that the only
reason his hospital did such good business was because his wife ran it.

When Edward, Nellie's second son, had been born at St. Luke's Hospital,
Nellie had seen Christine send twice to the drugstore down the street
for tobacco for an old man on the ward who couldn't even afford to pay
for it.

When he complained about it not being his brand, Christine just laughed
at the old fool's crotchetiness and promised to get it right the next
time.

Everyone knew that Dr. Williams owned the hospital. But they also
understood that his wife, a woman much younger than he, who strolled the
halls and rooms all times of day and night dressed to kill in taupe
gabardine suits and neutral-colored silk blouses, was the heart of the
private establishment that black people in Mulberry considered a
privilege to get well in.

Most of the hospital-the wards, private rooms, and operating rooms-was
laid out on one floor, but at the end of the hall was a staircase that
led downstairs to the basement. This was Miss Sallie Mae's domain.

She was the cook for the hospital and ran the large basement kitchen
like a minor dictator.

Reluctantly she shared the basement with the laundry, the lab, and the
hospital's owner himself, whose office was at the very rear of the
building.

"Leave this room the way it is," Nurse Bloom told the orderly the moment
he entered the delivery room. "I'll take care of it myself.

When Jonah got the news that Nellie, his wife, had delivered a baby girl
("Mother and daughter are doing fine," the young nurse on the other end
of the telephone line said proudly) he was still at the bar, grill, and
liquor store he owned. As he settled the phone back onto the hook, he
turned and grinned at his buddies seated around a makeshift poker table
in the grill side of the juke joint. Its proper name was the Blue Bird
Cafe, Grill, and Liquor Store, but everyone in town called it The Place.

After Jonah had taken Nellie to the hospital the evening before, chatted
with Dr. Williams awhile, and seen that she was settled in, he had
returned to The Place with the latest.

"Well, folks," he had said heartily as he entered the smoky crowded juke
joint, "looks like Nellie's fixing to have that baby." The crowd-winos,
hustlers, small businessmen, working women and men, the waitresses, and
the roustabouts-all let out a yell. Most of them had crowded into the
bar to escape the sudden cold outside, And when they heard that they had
chosen the night thatjonah Mcpherson and his pretty wife Nellie were
about to have another baby, they felt as though they had found money.

Patrons extended four or five half pints of spirits-Dark Eyes vodka,
King Cotton wine, XXX bourbon-toward Jonah, the about-to-be new father.

But he smiled and brushed the bottles away.

"Man," he laughed, "get that cheap liquor out of my face. Nobody's gonna
drink that shit tonight."

The crowd laughed with him. Most of them had been around for the births
of his other two children, his sons, and they knew what kind of
celebration they were in for.

Jonah went around to the liquor store side of the joint and returned
with a fifth of Chivas Regal in one hand and a fifth of Jim Beam in the
other.

"Here, sugar," he said to a laughing woman in a dangerously tight dress
sitting on a stool at the entrance to the bar with her legs crossed at
the ankles, "twist off these bottle tops and throw em away. We won't be
needing them again."

The woman giggled and leaned up intojonah's narrow, handsome face,
nearly grazing her cheek on the black bristles of his thick, shiny
mustache as she uncovered the bottle caps and threw them into the air.

Then Jonah, grinning proudly, moved along the bar and weaved gracefully
among the tables, pouring splashes of the expensive liquor into every
glass he saw, including the ones held by the staff. Someone put more
coins in the jukebox and honkytonk music filled the smoky room.

"Well, what you think it's gonna be this time, Jonah? A boy or a girl?"

Peanut, one of jonah's poker buddies, asked as he drank down the scotch
and held his glass out for more.

Jonah snorted a little laugh and said, "Hell, man, you know what Nellie
said. She's not taking anything but a girl this time. Anything else,
she's sending back!"

Even the town's one black policeman took a little drink to celebrate the
occasion when he stopped in, swinging his nightstick, to see what all
the commotion was about on a weeknight in the crowded corner bar.

"Don't mind if I do," he said in his booming voice and laid the
nightstick on the wet counter to take the glass of ice proferred him.

When Jonah finally yelled, "Closing time," it almost started a fight,
and a couple of the roustabouts had to threaten a couple of the revelers
to get the last of them out of the bar.

"Let's all stay here till Miss Nellie have that baby," one drunk patron
shouted.

"Shit, man," Jonah said, "you better get your ass on home. I know your
old lady, she sleep with a pistol under her pillow and it's got your
name on it as it is. Hell, it's past three o'clock." He checked the
Miller High Life clock on the wall. "I don't give a damn where you go,
just get your ass on out of here."

When the last unwanted patron had been pushed out the door, Jonah got
another bottle from the whiskey store and sat down with four of his
gambling buddies to play some cards and await the news.

"Well, here's to her, Mac," Peanut said, raising his glass formally
whenjonah came back to the table grinning over the news of his baby
girl. "Any daughter of yours is bound to be something else."

Then all the men stood and had one last drink to the new baby Lena.

Jonah grabbed his coat from behind the liquor store counter and felt in
his pocket for his car keys. "Close up the place and drop the keys by
the house," he shouted as he picked up his glass of bourbon and headed
out the door into the crisp dawn.

Jonah started to go right to the hospital but decided to take care of a
number of chores instead. He pointed his shiny black Cadillac right
through downtown Mulberry, turning down Cherry Street and heading for
the big funeral home four streets over. When he pulled the Cadillac up
to the curb there, he saw that the florist next door still had a CLOSED
sign hanging in the glass door out front. So he didn't stop at the front
door, but headed around back through the alley that ran beside the
business. Locked doors and CLOSED signs didn't stop him, especially in
his town.

He met the florist taking chilled long-stemmed roses from a truck parked
out back. "Send a bunch of those to my wife up at St. Luke's.

She finally had that girl she wanted so bad." Jonah laughed to himself
and went out the door without bothering to tell the man to put the roses
on his bill, or that the next week he would bring him a box of rib-eye
steaks he would get from the head waiter down at the Dupree Hotel.

In the early-morning hours there was little traffic in the narrow
streets of the small busy town. Jonah drove slowly as he headed across
town to his home in Pleasant Hill, casually cutting down little-used
side streets and back alleys. The window was down despite the chilled
air, and his arm rested casually on the door of the car.

He drove past the Gothic railroad station and down the street past his
parents' former home, where he had grown up. He cut sharply down an
alley and drove alongside the playground to the Catholic school behind
the church his family attended. Two blocks over, he passed the deserted
yard of the public elementary school on one side of the street and the
house of his old music teacher on the other.

Every time he thought of his new baby girl lying in her mother's arms at
St. Luke's Hospital, he couldn't help grinning. He knew she was pretty.

Whenever anyone complimented a baby in the family, his mama said, "You
know, the Mcphersons ain't never had no ugly babies." It was a statement
that always made his wife mad because she said her mother-in-law made it
sound like she, not born a Mcpherson, had nothing to do with how her own
babies turned out.

Jonah laughed again to himself when he thought of his wife and her
determination to bear a girl this time. He even knew what her name was
already.

"Lena"-he said it aloud to see how it sounded. Then he repeated it again
with a smile, "Lena," because he liked the sound of it.

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Jonah caught the quick stealthy
movement of an old tweed coat he recognized. Not even touching the brake
pedal, he made a U-turn in the middle of the street and drove his car
partway up on the sidewalk.

The man in the tweed coat hiding behind the big oak tree knew he was
trapped. He stepped from behind the tree lightly. "Hey, Mac, I been
looking for you."

"Yeah, well, you found me, baby, so give me my goddamn money."

"Well, that's what I wanted to see you bout," the man said brightly.

"No, you ain't got to see me. You just got to give me my goddamn money.

Man, how many times do I have to tell you? Don't fuck with me about my
goddamn money. You need to stay out the card game if you can't take the
pain. Now, give me my money."

"Okay, Mac, I be honest with you."

"I don't want your honesty, motherfucker. just give me my money."

"Let me tell you what happened," the man in the tweed coat said, talking
as fast as he could. "I was on my way to see you last night, I swear to
God I was, but I stopped by this house, you know Bessie Mae's house, and
I got caught up in a skin game. Mac, you know how I am bout skinnin'.
You know I can't help myself. Got caught up in that game, Mac, and lost
every penny I have."

"Every penny, huh?" Jonah asked suspiciously.

"I swear, every penny," the man said as he turned his pants pockets
inside out to show they were empty. "Every penny, except for these two
dollar bills right here in my coat pocket. That's all I got in the
world."

"Well, then," Jonah said, "hand them over."

"Mac! You gonna take my last two dollars?"

"You damn right I am. Man, my wife just had a baby "Well, well, well,
congratulations, Mac. What she have?"

"A girl, Nellie finally got her a girl." Jonah beamed proudly behind the
wheel of his car. Then, "Now, give me those two dollars."

The man's face fell to pieces as the conversation came back to money.

But he knew there was no use talking, and he handed over the two
crinkled bills, shaking his head in disbelief. "You a hard man, Jonah
Mcpherson."

"Yeah, you weren't saying that when the cards were falling right," Jonah
shot back as he put the big Cadillac in reverse and backed off the curb.

Wait till Mama and the boys hear bout our new baby girl, he thought,
grinning again, as he drove past the corner grocery store he had owned
when he first got married, then turned down Forest Avenue toward home.

As soon as Nurse Bloom had seen that Nellie was comfortably on her way
back to her private room with a nurse and the orderly by her gurney, she
cradled the infant Lena in her arms and headed for the nursery and the
process that all newborns at St. Luke's Hospital went through.

The old nurse never put Lena down, from the time she washed the newborn
baby until she laid her in her bassinet among the other babies in the
hospital nursery. Nurse Bloom saw to it herself that Lena was weighed,
measured, and footprinted. Then the old nurse pinned her first diaper on
her and set her down in her crib.

The whole process wouldn't have taken as long as it did if Nurse Bloom
had been left alone to finish her business. But she wasn't. Every nurse,
nurse's aide, and cleaning woman in the place kept slipping away from
her duties to come get a look at the new baby, the one born with a veil
over her face. Even Miss Sallie Mae from down in the kitchen hoisted her
wide heavy frame up the back steps to see Lena and cluck her tongue over
the special child.

"Would you look at that little one come to this earth with a veil over
her face? Gon' be a wise child," Miss Sallie Mae pronounced, then headed
right back downstairs, sniffing all the way as if she smelled something
burning.

The cook's place was immediately filled by two young nurse's aides.

"Oh, look, isn't she pretty? I've never seen one come with a veil over
its face before. You can't even tell where it was," one young woman
said.

I "She already got a head full of hair," the other replied. "Lord, shore
hope she ain't tender-headed, cause I bet it's gonna be chore and a half
to comb it."

"I wish she'd open her eyes. You know it's supposed to be good luck for
a child like that to look at you. That's what I always heard. She
supposed to be a lucky child herself."

"My Grandmama always said a child like that was kin to being a witch."

"A witch?"

"Yeah, but not a evil witch, just a person with special powers. I had a
cousin who was born with a caul over her whole body that folks used to
come to from all over south Georgia to see cause she could read em.

Tell em they future."

"That's right, they do supposed to have special powers, They supposed to
be able to tell you things. But the biggest power is they able to see
ghosts."

"You right about that. I knew a woman in the country who had three
children-a boy and two girls-who was all born with cauls over they
faces. And she say they used to see ghosts all the time. Say they used
to play with em as children."

"For real?"

"That's what she told me. And she didn't have no reason to lie on her
own children. She said they used to play with them ghosts when they was
small.

But said as they got older, they grew real scared."

"All of you talking that silliness about ghosts and haunts and spirits,"
an older nurse cut in. "But you're overlooking the real thing that this
child's caul is a sign of. It's a sure sign that this child is special.
That caul is a gift from God, that's what it is.

This little girl has been chosen by God as a special person on this
earth. She can't hardly help but do something great in this life because
God has touched her in the womb."

Nurse Bloom just let them talk. She didn't confirm or dispute what they
said. She acted as if they weren't there and kept crooning to little
Lena as she weighed and measured her, "Oh, yes, sweet baby, Nurse Bloom
gonna take care of this sweet little thing. No need to worry atall. Old
Nurse Bloom know what she doing, sugar."

The whole process took less than half an hour. Nurse Bloom kept an eye
on the clock over the nurses' station to make sure. When she finished
with Lena and laid her on her stomach in her crib, the nurse glanced at
the clock on the wall again and shot the women gathered around the baby
a meaningful look. They got the message immediately and scattered like
baby chicks out of the nursery back to their duties.

Nurse Bloom stood in the hall and watched the women disappear into
doorways. Then she turned to the left and headed back to the nurses'
station.

"Let Mrs. Mac have her baby as soon as she wakes up, she told the nurse
behind the desk. "And I don't want anyone to bother me for at least an
hour.

I'm taking a break." She turned with a slight smile on her wrinkled face
and headed down the hall to the delivery room, where the piece of
membrane lay drying out in its metal tray.

When Nurse Bloom had been a midwife in the country, she had never let a
caul sit for more than a few minutes before preserving it for the child.
Now that she worked in a hospital, she had to adjust her ritual to fit
into the modern mode. But there were still some things that she would
not give in on.

I'm not the one to be changing some things that have always been, she
would tell herself when, on occasion, she bent hospital procedure and
slipped a sharp knife under the bed of a narrowhipped woman who was
having a hard time having her baby.

The old nurse stopped at the door to the hot little delivery room. She
was about to ask the powers who controlled such things to look on this
newborn child kindly and let pass what must pass. She took the white
starched cap off her head and the white leather oxfords off her feet and
laid them on the black-and white square-tiled linoleum floor by the
door.

The atmosphere inside the room was alive. She glanced around quickly to
make sure nothing had been disturbed. Satisfied that everything was as
she had left it, Nurse Bloom padded over to the table against the far
wall with the pan of water on top and pulled out the pan with Lena's
caul resting there where she had dropped it.

Picking up the thin membrane sent shivers through the nurse's stocky
body and set her teeth on edge. The caul had begun to stiffen and dry
out a bit in the room's heat. Without hesitating, Nurse Bloom dropped
the drying membrane into the still-warm bloody water in the round metal
pan beside her on the table. The caul immediately loosened and spread
out on the surface of the pinkish water.

With a satisfied little grunt the woman picked up the pan of water and
headed out the door. She was surprised at first to find the hall
deserted at this time of morning. But then, she thought, a child had
been born in this hospital with a veil over her face. Nothing much that
happened this November day was going to surprise her much. She turned to
the left and hurried toward the back staircase, careful not to slosh the
water from the pan onto the floor.

At the foot of the stairs she made a sharp right and slipped into the
laundry room.

The heat of the room nearly knocked Nurse Bloom off her feet. The big
white industrial dryer in a far corner was kept running most of the
time, and even the linoleum floor was damp and warm under the nurse's
stockinged feet.

The only person in the single large laundry room was Ted, the orderly
who had helped take Lena's mother back to her room.

"Ted, I need you to go up and scrub the small O.R" Nurse Bloom told the
orderly, who sat with his feet stretched out in front of him taking a
break.

"Please see to it that that room is spotless and antiseptic before you
leave it. You know what to do. And when you finish that, collect all the
soiled linens from the closet upstairs and sort them for pickup. Then
you can go to lunch."

Ted pulled himself up from his comfortable seat and wondered what he had
done to deserve Nurse Bloom's attention. Efficiency was a prized
commodity at St. Luke's, and he had tried to keep in step with the
hospital's policy since he had begun working there two years before.

But all this jumping back and forth! First leave the O.R. the way it is,
then clean up the O.R. right away.

Don't touch those linens, collect and sort those linens right now. Ted
frowned. I'll have to have a talk with Mrs. Williams, he thought.

Still, all he said was, "Yes, ma'am." He was so steamed that he didn't
even notice she wasn't wearing her cap or her shoes.

The nurse watched Ted leave the room, then walked over to the long
wooden table where the aides folded the clean dry clothes and linens.

Except for a large roll of white butcher's paper on a holder that was
used to keep its surface clean, the table was clear. She put the metal
pan she was holding down on the smooth paper surface. The caul, still
floating on the top of the water, waved around in the pan like a
jellyfish. She reached over the pan, pulled off a length of the heavy
white paper, and tore it off from the roll. Then she spread the paper on
the tabletop and smoothed down its curling ends with her hands.

She had to smile at her hospital efficiency. For years in the country,
where she was called Mother Bloom, she had conducted this same ritual
time and time again but not with all these conveniences.

"But I guess I been in the city too long," Nurse Bloom said to herself
with a cackle. In her three years at Saint Luke's, she had found the
most efficient way to preserve a child's veil. Until she returned to her
people's home in the country when she retired, she planned to continue
doing it this way.

She took the caul from the baby's bath water and spread it out as
smoothly and evenly as possible on the paper. She didn't hurry. In all
the years that she had done this-Must be forty at least, she thought-no
one had ever burst in and disrupted her.

And she believed that events, once set in motion, continued on the road
intended for them.

Carefully she picked up the paper with the caul, placed it on the hot
clean surface of the dryer, and stepped back with an air of
satisfaction. Now she had to dispose of the water she had first bathed
Lena in. She had no intention of pouring it down the drain of the deep
double porcelain sink in the corner of the laundry room. The pipes
connected to that drain led to the city sewerage system, where the
child's bath water would be mingled with all kinds of waste. And Lena's
first bath water, in which Nurse Bloom had soaked her birth caul, was,
like the child, special. It deserved special treatment.

The nurse picked up the pan, headed out of the room into the basement
hall, and padded in her stockinged feet toward the back stairs leading
outside.

The freezing temperatures of the night before, when she had come on
duty, had mellowed into a crisp autumn day with a pristine blue sky and
the smell of old leaves in the air. What a good day to be born, she
thought as she walked over to the rosebushes lining the rear wall of the
building beside the door.

She clucked her tongue and shook her head sadly. Every time she saw the
poor sickly-looking things, she got a picture of Mrs. Williams in one of
her pretty suits squatting down in the dirt with Ted the orderly to see
what was ailing the bushes that had looked stunted and yellow and
refused to grow ever since the two had planted them.

Let's see what this baby's water can do for Mrs. Williams's poor little
roses, Nurse Bloom said to herself as she sprinkled the base of the
plants with the pinkish water. I wouldn't be surprised if those things
aren't flourishing next spring.

Back in the building, the laundry room was still empty. When she reached
the dryer, the air escaping from inside felt so good blowing on the
front of her body that she stood there awhile with her eyes closed,
letting the warm dry heat blow up under her dress on her thighs.

Before she knew it, she was singing to herself a rhyme she had sung as a
girl, "Uncle Ted got this, Uncle Ted got that, Uncle Ted got a dick long
as a baseball bat." She thought about Amos, a boy who used to live next
to her folks' farm when she was a girl. He was the first boy she ever
opened her legs to and he used to blow his hot breath on her thighs,
too.

"Lord, have mercy," the old woman said aloud, as she shook herself all
over and stepped out of the direct blast of the dryer's heat. "What's
the matter with me? I hadn't thought about that little old nappy-headed
boy in years. Must be this child's caul making me remember such things.
There's all kinds of powers in this here caul.

I can tell."

She reached over and touched the dried and wrinkled membrane and wasn't
a bit surprised to see her hands shaking. Along the edges of the caul,
the paper had turned a pale beige and left faint water marks. In the
center the caul itself had dried and puckered into tiny peaks and
valleys. The whole sheet of paper resembled an ancient map of some
unexplored territory.

"It's done," the nurse said softly and lifted the caul with the paper
and took it back to the folding table. Then she headed across the hall
to Miss Sallie Mae's steamy kitchen that smelled of fresh
vegetables-turnip greens and rutabagas and pole beans-cooking in a
little fatback, and juices and roast beef and chicken baking in the
oven. Nurse Bloom had the nose of a hound, Ted the orderly always
complained.

No one paid any attention as she took down a pretty blue-and
white-flowered china teapot, just big enough to hold about two cups of
water, and a small sharp knife from the shelf where the nurses kept
their personal eating things.

On her way out the door, she looked over at the stove to make sure the
big copper tea kettle was whistling gently, as it usually was, on a back
burner.

When she reentered the laundry room, she walked over to the dried caul
on the table, swiftly cut a piece of it about the size of her palm away
from the paper, rolled the stiff section of skin up, and dropped it in
the teapot. Then she hurried back across the hall to Miss Sallie Mae's
kitchen and poured a stream of hot water into the teapot from the
steaming kettle. She was finished and out of the kitchen before the
workers noticed her.

Returning to the laundry room, the nurse placed the hot teapot on the
table and ran her hands over the dried caul once more. Then she deftly
folded the sheet of white paper with the caul inside nine times, until
it was reduced to a rectangle no bigger than her fist. She slipped it
into her pocket along with the small knife and headed back up the stairs
with the warm teapot in her hand.

When she nearly slipped on the freshly mopped floor that smelled of
disinfectant, she stopped and looked down at her bare feet. Frowning at
the dirty footprints she had left on Ted the orderly's clean floor, she
turned in her tracks and went back down the hall to the delivery room.
He won't like it one bit, she said to herself. But he'll have to go back
over this floor again with the mop.

As soon as she had slipped her dirty feet into her white oxfords and set
her cap neatly over the spot where her graying nappy hair was pulled
back into a bun at the back of her head, she was ready to go.

"I'm back on duty," she told the nurse at the station near the nursery
as she passed by on her way to the infants' supply closet. When she
glanced at the clock over the nurse's head, she was surprised to see
that only forty-five minutes had passed since her trip to the laundry
room. It seemed like she had spent hours down there. But it always did.
In the country, when she had dried babies' cauls over a red-hot brick,
the ritual had seemed to take all day.

Now she was moving with such smooth efficiency that she could almost
feel her body humming. She took a glass baby bottle down from the shelf
and poured the warm caul tea into it. When the pot was drained of
everything but the wet, limp piece of caul itself, Nurse Bloom put the
pot back on the table, screwed the nipple lid on the bottle, and held
the bottle up to the light.

Ignoring the nurse who sat at the station pretending to look through
some papers, Nurse Bloom headed out the door and placed the teapot and
small knife from her pocket into her satchel among her personal things
in the hall closet.

"I can take care of that when I get home," Nurse Bloom muttered to
herself as she returned to the nursery. Passing through, she noticed
that Lena's bassinet, like most of the others, was empty of its little
occupant.

That's even better, she thought as she went back to the nursery closet,
picked up the baby bottle of caul tea still warm and undisturbed on the
counter, and headed for Nellie's room. I'll let her mother give it to
her.

That's the way it should be anyway.

When the old nurse entered Nellie's room, the new mother was holding
Lena in the crook of her arm, which rested on the fluffy white pillow at
her shoulder, watching her little girl suck greedily at her breast.
While Lena drank, Nellie was doing what every new mother does.

She had stripped the infant naked and was checking her over, head to
toe. She was fingering Lena's little seashell ears, counting her fingers
and toes, pinching her nose to see her breathe through her mouth,
bending her arms at the elbow, kissing the tips of her tiny fingernails.

Nurse Bloom starting smiling as soon as she entered the room. "She got
everything she supposed to have?"

Nellie just gave a sheepish grin in reply. This room, a vision in pink,
was one of the prettiest private rooms in the hospital. Bright morning
sunlight poured into the tall window on the east wall and flooded the
foot of the new pink hospital bed with dust beams. A large green vase of
red roses stood on the bedside table right by the window.

Maybe I'll cut some of those last lavender chrysanthemums from the front
yard and bring them in here, Nurse Bloom I'E A thought as she looked
around the room for some nicety she could add to make Lena's first home
even prettier.

She approached Nellie's bed playfully. She was still grinning the way
she had in the delivery room. But at that point the caterwauling of some
other woman's baby from down the hall began to get on her nerves.

She stopped a few feet from the foot of Nellie's bed and said, "I'll be
right back." Then she turned on her heels and charged out of the room
and down the hall to the women's ward. There a young mother, still in
her teens, was sharing the ward with three other women, the teenager
hugged her crying child to her breast and eyed the nurse suspiciously.

"If you don't keep that crying youngun quiet, I'm gonna throw him in the
trash can," Nurse Bloom barked.

"Oh, please, ma'am, don't throw my baby in the trash can," the mother
pleaded as she gripped her bundle of joy tighter in her rail-thin arms.

The old nurse just looked at the woman cringing in her pastelblue bed a
moment and sucked her teeth in exasperation. "Girl," she said finally,
"don't you know I wouldn't go around throwing babies in the garbage
can?"

The young mother wasn't so sure. She clutched her child tighter, which
made the baby cry all the more. Nurse Bloom stormed across the
black-and-wbite linoleum floor of the ward and silently took the child
from the mother's grasp.

"Lie back," the nurse ordered as she rocked the baby in her arms,
quieting the infant instantly.

The young mother obeyed. The nurse expertly flipped the child over in
her hands and gently laid him on his mother's stomach, his face between
the girl's pitiful little titties.

"Now, put your hand on your baby's back and pat and soothe him instead
of being a frantic Frances," Nurse Bloom instructed as she marched out
of the room.

"Young fool girls don't know nothing about babies but how to get them,"
she muttered venomously as she walked back down the hall to Nellie's
room.

When she entered, she turned to Lena and her mother with a new face of
kindness replacing the face of anger she had worn a second earlier.

"Now, where's that sweet little girl baby who came to us with a veil
over her face," the hoary nurse purred. "I got something for that little
girl."

The old woman felt as frisky as she had in the delivery room when the
child had been born. She waved the bottle of clear tea back and forth
before the child's eyes as if it were a toy.

Nellie tried to look interested, but she was still tired from the long,
difficult labor and delivery, and she resented this intrusion on the
first minutes she and her baby girl had together.

"I'm naming her Lena," Nellie said in an effort to be polite as the
nurse lifted a straight-back chair from its place by the wall, brought
it over to the side of the bed, and sat down.

,.Well now, ain't that a pretty name?" Nurse Bloom said in a singsong
voice that cracked in her throat. "I got something for that baby named
Lena.

In fact I've got two things, one for the baby and one for the mama."

"What's that, Nurse Bloom?" the mother asked.

"Nellie," the nurse said familiarly, lowering her voice as if others
were in the room. "I guess you know you got a special child here. You
were aware enough to see she came here with a veil over her face?"

"I sure did," Nellie said proudly as Lena began to fret a bit and her
mother's nipple slipped out of her mouth. "Oh-oh, did you lose it,
sweetheart?

Here you go. Now, don't be in such a hurry.

"I sure did," she repeated to the nurse, who sat by the side of the bed
smiling down at the feeding baby.

"Well, I don't know you all that well. I never knew your people, cept
your aunt that ran the barber shop, so I don't know how much you know
about things like veils over babies' faces and such." Nurse Bloom let
the statement hang in the air like a question.

"To tell you the truth, Nurse Bloom," Nellie said, "not a whole lot."

"Well, there's no reason to worry, cause I know all about that kind of
thing. Your little girl coming here to this world with a caul over her
face means something, Nellie. It means she's a very special child."

"She certainly is, Nurse Bloom. I been hoping and praying for a little
girl each time I got pregnant. That's what I always wanted since I was a
little girl myself. But I had two boys first, and now it is almost five
years since the last one. I was beginning to think I wasn't gonna have
me my own baby girl."

"Oh, I know she's special to you, specially since you wanted a girl and
all. But what I mean is she's special in her own right. That caul she
was born with over her face was more than a piece of thin skin, you
know. That caul was a sign that your little girl got a link with all
kinds of things, all kinds of powers that the rest of us ordinary people
don't have."

"Oh, Nurse Bloom, I have to tell you, I've never been one to believe in
all those old-timey ideas," Nellie said with a smile. She didn't want to
offend the woman who was sounding so sincere. "I guess I'm just not a
superstitious type of person."

Nurse Bloom's face fell a little, but she leaned in closer, rested her
elbow on Nellie's bed, and continued.

"Oh, this isn't superstitions I'm talking about, dear," she said.

"What I'm talking about is what really is. I've been in this world
almost sixty years and I know of what I speak."

"Well, Nurse Bloom .. ." Nellie began slowly.

"Now, just listen to me, Nellie," the nurse said, sounding a bit more
like her normal stern self. "There's all kinds of things in this world
that people call superstitions because they don't understand them or
they don't fit neatly into their way of thinking nowadays, but that
doesn't mean that these things are just some crazy mumbo-jumbo of
ignorant country people."

This was not going anything like the nurse had thought it would. She had
been sure the mother would be thrilled that her baby had a nurse right
in this hospital who knew so much about her and the veil over her face
and what it all meant. Instead Nellie was acting like she didn't
appreciate what she had.

Lena whimpered a bit and let her mother's nipple fall out of her mouth
again, but her tiny lips continued to make sucking motions in the air.

"Is this baby still hungry?" Nellie asked in a baby voice as she began
to heave herself up on the pillow in preparation for turning the infant
around to her other breast.

Nurse Bloom stood up quickly and gently took Lena from her mother's
arms.

"Let me give you a hand there with that pretty little hungry thing," she
said as she turned the baby around and laid her with her head against
her mother's unnursed breast.

Seeing the old nurse handle her little girl with such care fairly melted
Nellie's heart. After she took her nipple and rubbed it against Lena's
soft cheek to get her to start nursing there, she looked up at Nurse
Bloom with softer eyes.

"I didn't mean to imply that you were country or ignorant, Nurse Bloom,"
the mother said sincerely. "Everybody knows how much everyone around
here looks up to you."

"Well, I am country-spent almost all of my life there," the nurse
answered, herself softening. "But I sho' ain't ignorant. I brought more
babies into this world as a midwife than you can shake a stick at, and I
learned a thing or two in the process. When I tell you your child is
special, I mean it, and I know what I'm talking about."

Nellie didn't say anything,-but she looked interested.

"Nellie, a child born with a veil over its face is an unusual thing.

It don't happen every day, or every month for that matter. And believe
me when I say it, it means something."

"What's it mean, Nurse Bloom?" Nellie asked.

"It means that little Lena is not like your other children and never
will be. She is gonna be very wise and wise in ways we don't always
appreciate.

Nellie, that veil over her face means she has a link to that other world
that most of us just pretend don't exist. Well, it does. I know you've
heard tell that a child born with a caul over its face can see ghosts."

"I have heard that," Nellie said slowly.

"Well, it's true. When people talk about ghosts, they usually think of
spirits of dead people. It's just not that simple. Of course there are
spirits of dead people that still wander the earth. But there are two
kinds of ghosts, one is the peaceful and harmless kind that appear
before you just the way they were on earth, natural-like, and they can
be helpful, too.

Then there's the other kind, and they can scare you plenty. Some of them
look like death itself, some don't have any heads or any feet, or their
heads are turned around on their shoulders."

Nurse Bloom saw Nellie's eyes begin to widen, and she wondered what kind
of family this smart-looking young woman came from that she hadn't heard
all this at some time in her life. But the old nurse didn't want to
scare her now that she had her attention and, seemingly, her respect.

"Oh, don't you worry any about your little girl, now. What I have in
this bottle will take care of any problems she would ever have in that
area." The nurse waved the bottle again like a rattle before Lena, who
was absorbed in her mother's tit.

"You see, I made a little tea for the child that will blind her to any
of those scary kinds of ghosts, so she won't be terrorized by those
spirits. Now, she was born with a veil over her face, so the child is
gonna see some ghosts you can't get away from that-but at least after
she drink this tea, it will just be the harmless kind she'll see.

Nothing that'll ever scare her."

The nurse smiled as if she had just accomplished an act of charity.

When she reached out and gave the mother the bottle of caul tea, she was
beaming.

Nellie felt that there was little she could do but accept the bottle
with a smile. The woman seemed so proud of what she was doing for Lena,
Nellie knew she could never tell the nurse what foolishness she thought
all this talk was.

She stood the bottle on the bed, propped up next to her waist, and kept
smiling at Nurse Bloom, who acted like she wasn't anywhere near ready to
leave.

The old woman sat in the straightbacked chair looking at Nellie and Lena
with all the self-importance of a grandmother.

"Now, don't let that bottle tip over and drip all that good tea out on
the bed there before little Lena gets to drink it," Nurse Bloom said a
little nervously. "It won't do her no good on that sheet.

"

"Don't worry," Nellie said as she steadied the bottle next to her body.

"It'll be fine right where it is."

"You mean, it'll be fine there until you give it to the child," Nurse
Bloom prompted.

"Uh-huh," said the mother vaguely, then added quickly, "So my baby being
born with a caul over her face really sets her apart, does it?"

"There's all kinds of things connected with being born with a veil over
your face," the nurse said, happy to impart her knowledge. "When I was
handling this caul of hers downstairs I could feel some mighty power in
it.

Shoot, Lena may be able to read people, see things, do all kinds of
things."

"Handling it? Why would you be handling it at all?" Nellie wanted to
know suddenly.

"Well, you don't think I would just dry something like that in a big
clump the way it fell, do you?" Nurse Bloom asked. "Nosiree. This caul
is a special thing. Let me tell you, I sure am glad that you decided to
have your baby at this here hospital instead of over at the big county
place where them white nurses take their time about getting you in and
then rush you out. Shoot, one of the cleaning women up there told me
that when a child is born with a veil over its face up there, they just
take it and throw it away in the trash." The old nurse clutched her
chest in distress at the thought.

"Thank God, there's no such goings-on in this hospital, not as long as
I'm here," she continued proudly. "Naw, I gave little Lena's caul the
right attention, spread it out on this white paper." She reached in her
pocket.

Nellie was repelled by the idea of this woman playing around with the
caul she had last seen over her baby girl's face. Nellie had a weak
stomach. She would always tell people, "Uh, don't show me that, I've got
a weak stomach, always did." Or she'd tell her sons, "Boys, one of you
run in the fish house right quick and get me some pretty mullet.

You know I can't go in that fish house and smell all those fishy odors.
I've got a weak stomach and will throw up in a minute."

She had just in the last year been able to clean chitterlings at the
kitchen sink without getting sick to her stomach as she fingered the
slimy greasy membranes and picked them clean of dirt and hair and flecks
of paper.

Now she imagined Lena's veil like the sink full of chitterlings-thirty
pounds of them, for the whole family-sloshing and slithering around,
sliding away through her fingers when she tried to pick up a piece of
the intestines.

At the thought, she had to bring the flat of her fist quickly to her
mouth and press it there firmly. She took deep breaths through her nose
over her bent index finger.

"Now, don't go getting overexcited, little mother." Nurse Bloom reached
for the back of Nellie's head and gently bent it forward onto her chest.
"Now, just breathe deeply. Take it slow, now-just in and out. Slow,
now-in and out." She massaged the back of the new mother's neck.

The antiseptic smell of Nurse Bloom's uniform snapped Nellie right out
of her sick-to-the-stomach spell. She pushed her head back and shoved
the nurse away with one motion. Nurse Bloom sat back down and continued
talking.

"See, that dizzy spell just passed. Now, like I was saying, I dried the
caul all nice and neat on a piece of white paper for your little girl.
You understand that you must keep this caul for your child until she is
grown.

That's important. She may never do anything with it but take it out once
in a while and look at it, or she may need it right away, but it has to
be kept, just the same. So until she's grown, you're gonna have to keep
this in some very safe place. If it's lost or misplaced, it will make
the child forgetful. , Nurse Bloom felt as if she were trying to cram a
lifetime of common sense into a few minutes. This whole confrontation
with the new mother was setting her on edge, ready to jump at the least
thing. She didn't know when she had last felt so tense.

"But then I guess I don't have to tell you everything at once, do I?"
she asked Nellie, as she tried to fight the nervousness that was
overwhelming her. "We all live right here in Mulberry, don't we?

Now, if you ever have any questions you know you can just come to me."

She paused. The only reason Nellie could see for pausing was for effect.

It seemed a rather dramatic gesture. Then, the old nurse reached in her
pocket and pulled out the thick rectangle of white paper.

Lord, I got more gris-gris, as mama's mama used to call it, in this room
than Madame Hand out on Highway 17, Nellie thought. But there is no way
I am going to go around handling my child's birth veil.

"Oh, Nurse Bloom, I can't believe you went to all this trouble," she
said.

"Wasn't no trouble at all, child. It was my pleasure. You have to know
that," Nurse Bloom said. "Here. Here's the caul in this paper.

Here, take it, it's for you to protect and keep safe."

Nellie lay there a long moment just looking at the thick paper the nurse
was offering her. She had the half-sick smile on her face that she used
when she couldn't come up with a social lie quickly enough.

Now what must I do? she wondered. If I take this piece of skin from this
woman, I bet she'll be asking me about it every time I step foot in this
place, expecting me to keep up with some old-fashioned foolishness like
it made any difference in my baby girl's life. But if I don't take it,
I'll hurt her feelings and she'll let me lay up in this bed and rot
before she'll answer my buzzer again. What must I do?

Nurse Bloom stood there smiling, with the white rectangle of paper
extended toward the new mother. "Go on, Nellie," she insisted, "take
it."

Nellie shifted Lena a little bit up on her breast to stall for more
time, but she couldn't think of any way out of taking the paper. She bit
her lip and took the paper between two fingers and gingerly laid it on
the bedside table.

"Now, you just be sure to give her that little bit of water in that
bottle for me. Give it her a couple of minutes after she finish feeding.
Then she'll take it right along, so don't worry bout that-I never seen
one child turn it down yet."

Nurse Bloom slapped her chubby knees and stood up as if she were
finished, then said, "Now, don't just leave that caul sitting right
there."

"Would you put it in my overnight bag for me?" Nellie asked the nurse
with a smile. Nellie wanted to touch the thing as little as possible.

Nurse Bloom did as she was asked and smiled in return. Then,
reluctantly, she headed toward the door. "Just buzz when you're ready
for us to come get that little prize for you. As a matter of fact, I'll
come get her myself." And the old nurse disappeared out the door.

Nellie heaved a sigh of relief and held the bottle of nearly clear
liquid up to the sunlight. She was surprised to see strains of color
floating through the water. "What in the world ... ?" she muttered to
herself as the sunbeam that sparkled through the water disappeared
behind a cloud and the colors in the water vanished, too. She shook off
the chilled feeling the disappearing sun gave her and kissed her baby
girl lightly on the top of the head.

"Nurse Bloom is a sweet woman, going to all this trouble for my baby,
yes, she is, for my sweet little Lena." Nellie looked down at the baby
at her breast, who seemed to stop sucking and listen. "But if she thinks
I'm gonna give my baby girl any of this old-fashioned potion shit@od
only knows what's in it-she better think again. just imagine, Lena, a
grown intelligent woman like that believing in ghosts."

As she cooed to Lena, Nellie unscrewed the cap of the glass bottle,
lifted off the nippled top, and slowly poured the precious water into
the vase of roses her husband had had waiting for her when she awoke
after being rolled back in from the delivery room.

"But there's no reason anybody but us needs to know anything about this,
not anybody-not Nurse Bloom, not your Grandmama, especially not
Grandmama, you know how she is about all this oldtimey stuff, she's
almost as bad as Nurse Bloom. It'll be our little secret, our first
secret, my baby girl."

The modern new mother screwed the lid back on the empty bottle and put
it on the table next to her bed.

"I'll burn that thing as soon as I get home." Nellie wrinkled her nose
as she glanced at the stiff white paper with the baby's caul inside
sticking out of her cosmetic case. She brushed her lips across the top
of Lena's head.

Then mother and daughter fell asleep before Nellie had a chance to buzz
for the nurse.

it was a quiet Sunday evening. Lena had been lying on her grandmother's
big four-poster oak bed, the one the old lady told her had been her
bridal bed forty-eight years before Lena was born, three years before.
Her grandmother, a small smooth-skinned snuff-colored woman, did not
allow just anybody to enter the private sanctum of her room.

But Lena was special, and many nights at her bedtime, the old lady would
give Lena her bath, dust her all over with talcum powder, slip on her
little cotton gown, and say, "Come on, baby, you been such a good girl
today, you can sleep in Grandmama's bed." Walking into Lena's
grandmother's room was like stepping back into another century. Lena's
own mother was very modern. Nellie had even bought pale blond furniture
and angular pastel lamps for the guest room. But there was none of that
modern new-fashioned, in-one-year-out-the-next nonsense in her
Grandmama's room. Besides the old four-poster bed, there was a big
overstuffed easy chair pulled up to one of the room's windows and, next
to it, a small pine piecrust table and a maroon-shaded floor lamp with
gold fringe. Lena's grandmother ignored the large closet in the room and
kept her cotton shirtwaist dresses and jersey knits in a red wooden
chifforobe. And although she didn't use it, there was even a china basin
and pitcher on the old marble-topped pine dresser in her room, as if
they didn't have two bathrooms in the house.

"When your granddaddy came to ask my daddy for my hand in marriage, that
dresser was sitting in the front bedroom," the old lady told Lena nearly
every time they entered the room. "When Daddy turned his nose up at this
here diamond ring, I Walter strutted straight across the hall into the
bedroom and ran this stone over the mirror, leaving this little old
scratch right here." Lena and Grandmama would lean close to inspect the
scratch. "Mama was so outdone she spoke right up.

Lizzie?" she asked me, you mean to tell me you want to marry this crazy
man?" I nodded my head, and she said, Well, go on then, and you might as
well take that dresser and mirror too."

" On the highly polished hardwood floors, her grandmother had scattered
three bright rag rugs, with colors of red and pink and yellow, one at
the door, one by the side of the bed where the old lady swung her feet
out in the morning, and one at the foot of the bed near the big easy
chair.

The beige walls of the room were bare except for one elaborately framed
picture that hung over the bed. It was a sepia photograph of an infant
dressed in a frilly white christening gown. The baby's cheeks and lips
were dusted pink and her eyes were painted brown, "Who's that?" Lena
asked her Grandmama one day as they both sat in the big mauve easy chair
facing the large, nearly life-sized portrait.

"That was my baby girl. My firstborn child. She died right after that
picture was took. Ain't she precious?"

"Uh-huh," Lena agreed and sat all afternoon staring at the picture of
the pretty little girl who would have been her daddy's sister.

Early that Sunday evening after her bath, her grandmother led her into
the room by the hand and walked over to the tall bed and folded back the
pink chenille bedspread. A perfume, old and PICTURE sweet, wafted up
from her pure white linens and overpowered the smell of talcum powder
rising from her own body. It was the smell that Lena inhaled when she
nestled her face into her grandmother's thin breasts and drifted off to
sleep.

Grandmama lifted Lena up onto the bed, letting go of her grip on the
child a little early so she bounced a couple of times on the firm
mattress when she landed on her fat little bottom. The bouncing gave
Lena the giggles and at the sound of the little girl's lilting laughter,
her grandmother giggled, too.

Then she pulled the top sheet up over the child's body and kissed her on
the forehead.

"Now, you close them pretty brown eyes of yours and drift on off to
sleep.

Can't nothing touch grandma's little puppy in this bed. Look," she said
pointing above Lena's head at the portrait, you even got grandma's own
little girl looking down on you."

Her grandmother's dry kiss reminded Lena of a butterfly fluttering
across her face. When the child closed her eyes to quietly enjoy this
feeling, her grandmother got up from the bed and silently tiptoed away,
pulling the door shut after her.

"She's up there sleeping as peaceful as an angel," her grandmother
assured the rest of the family when she returned to the living room.

But back in her grandmother's bedroom, Lena opened her eyes. She
expected to see her grandmother still sitting there next to her, and
when she found herself alone in the old-fashioned room, she lay there a
minute taking in the shapes around her in the early-evening light. But
that soon bored her and she wasn't a bit sleepy. Then she remembered the
picture hanging over the bed above her head.

This was the perfect time, she decided, to do what she had been wanting
to do ever since she had first seen the portrait. Pushing away the
sheets that her grandma had so carefully tucked around her, she scooted
to the foot of the bed on her behind and turned around with her back
resting against the spooled railing there.

When she gazed up at the picture, it looked as if the dead baby's eyes
were looking directly at her. She smiled because her grandmother had
already pointed that feature of the picture out to her.

"See how her eyes seem to follow you all around the room, no matter
where you stand?" Grandmama had said.

Lena had run all over the room looking into the eyes of the furbelowed
little girl to see if her gaze really did follow her into the corner by
the big red chifforobe and over to the door and back across the room to
the windowsill.

Sure enough, the velvet brown eyes seemed to roll around in their
painted sockets to follow her progress.

Lena stood on the mattress and walked to the head of the bed as if she
were stepping across the floor. When she reached the head of the bed,
she pushed the fluffy feather pillows aside and, leaning against the
headboard, reached up to touch the child's portrait. What she wanted to
do was touch the child's cheeks, to feel the texture they implied, but
she couldn't reach past the bottom of the frame.

Determined to take advantage of her solitude and the opportunity to
touch the dusty pink cheeks in the picture, Lena stood back from the
picture with her hands on her hips and looked the situation over the way
she had seen her grandmother do many times when faced with a problem. A
voice inside the room or inside her head said, "Pile the pillows up and
stand on them, Lena."

"All right," Lena replied and got right to work pulling the two big
downfilled pillows together and stacking one on top of the other. The
two pillows made nearly a mountain next to where she stood at the head
of the old bed.

"That's fine," the voice said. "Now climb up on it."

Again Lena obeyed the voice and, steadying herself with a hand on the
dark headboard, began walking up the side of the mountain of pillows.

She was determined to get on top of the pillows so her hands could reach
the pasteltinted picture of her baby aunt. With each step up the side of
the pillows, her bare feet barely made a dent in the fluffy surface. She
weighed only thirty pounds dripping wet.

When she reached the top of her shaky perch, she was so proud of her
accomplishment, she beamed like a mountain climber at the top of Everest
and leaned her small back against the wall below the picture to enjoy
the feeling.

And when the voice praised her accomplishment with "Good girl, Lena,"
the child ducked her head with pride and her cheeks blushed almost the
color of the girl's in the frame.

Remembering the object of her climb, she turned around with a smile and
stretched both of her arms as far as she could toward the oak-framed
portrait, then splayed her fingers to reach farther. Now that she stood
on the pillows, she expected to be able to touch the frill lace of the
child's christening gown, so she was surprised when her hands met the
cold surface of the sheet of glass covering the picture. The glass was
so cold that at first it felt hot to Lena's hands. It reminded her of
when she had touched the hot potbellied stove at her Grandmama's
friend's house.

Instinctively she yanked her hands back from the portrait's strange
feel, throwing herself off-balance on the pillows. But just as she began
to topple backward onto her grandmother's bed, two small hands with
yellowed lace at the wrists poked from the picture, grasped Lena's own
small hands, and began pulling her arms and head effortlessly through
the frame-glass, picture, and all-as if it were an open window.

Lena had never felt anything like this in her life. She let out a scream
that she thought would surely burst her throat open, but no sound came
out of her mouth. She felt the way her grandmother must have felt when
she awoke some mornings sunkeneyed and breathless to say the witches had
ridden her all night and no one in the house had harkened to her cries
of distress.

Lena's second terrified scream was muffled in the warm soft lap of what
seemed like yards of rotting old lace. Lena kept trying to yell as she
felt the strong tiny hands that had pulled her into the picture move up
her forearms, over her elbows, past her upper arms, and take hold of her
firmly under her armpits.

Lena gasped for breath, turning her head this way and that, trying to
escape the fetid smell of the dingy lace she found her face buried in.

She was suffocating in its old, dry, airless scent. But the more she
struggled-half her little body still hanging from the picture, her bare
legs and feet flailing against the wooden headboard, making a dull
thudding noise-the tighter the small warm hands gripped her, "Come
inside, come play with me," said the voice that had told her to climb up
on the pillows.

Lena tried to shake herself loose from the baby in the picture, but the
baby's grip was like steel, suddenly turning cold, too' "Mama!

Grandmama! Come help me!" she screamed over and over as she kicked the
headboard with her feet and fought against the child who was pulling her
into the picture frame. But the only noise Lena heard in the room was
the sound of her feet crashing against the headboard, which was now
shaking the entire bed, causing its bulbous legs to scrape on the
hardwood floor.

Just when Lena knew she could stand the deathly grip and the fear in her
chest no longer, she heard her entire family-mama, Grandmama, her
brothers Edward and Raymond, and her daddy-come crashing up the stairs
and into the room, nearly breaking the hinges from the door as they
entered.

Suddenly the baby in the photograph released her grip on Lena, and she
slipped out of the picture. She fell screaming and sobbing onto the hard
surface of her grandma's bed, landing on her behind and bouncing the way
she had earlier when her grandmother had dropped her there after her
bath.

As her family rushed into the room and surrounded her on the bed, taking
turns holding her in their arms, kissing her, soothing her, cooing to
her that she was all right now, Lena slowly lifted her stinging eyelids
and looked at the picture over the bed. The little girl in the portrait
sat as always on the royal-blue velvet throw, her little white baptismal
dress spread out around her, but her tiny feet and round head were
turned backward.

Lena screamed, "The picture, the picture, the girl in the picture, she
had me!" Immediately she went into convulsions.

"That's what you get for telling," the voice said as Lena thrashed
around on the bed.

After that, Lena refused to go back into her grandmother's room while
the portrait still hung over the bed. She never told her family why.

She didn't want to ever get as sick as she had the night she told them
that the ghost of the little girl lived in the picture. But she dug her
heels in and shook her head wildly whenever her grandmother said, "Come
on, baby, you can sleep with Grandma tonight."

This stung the old lady to the quick. So, she reluctantly took the
treasured picture down and stored it in the attic. After a few weeks
Lena's terror subsided, but she always remembered the sickness, the
vomiting, the fits that had struck her when she told her family about
the ghost. Especially when she awoke in the middle of the night.

From the age of three Lena had always woken at 4,00A.M. to go pee. Her
bladder's message and her response to it, even in the depths of a dream,
pleased her. It made her feel responsible and older, able to control her
water, not a baby who wet the bed each night, having to lie there in the
cold wet Pissy-smelling sheets until morning.

She wasn't a baby, she was a big girl. She was almost four.

Didn't she wake up each night on schedule? Didn't she pad past her
grandmother's room, past her brothers' room, down and across the hall
all by herself to the bathroom even though she knew what lived in the
night? Didn't she remember to wipe herself instead of drip-drying or
forgetting altogether and bringing the smell of pee back to bed with
her, drying on her inner thigh? Sure, she was a big girl, not a baby.

But her family still left the lights on all along the hall and in the
bathroom with the door open for her to see her way.

At night, when the scaries and ghosts stirred up by her memories and the
stories her grandmother told her@f old-time hearses pulled by black
horses with ebony plumes attached to their heads, and of swarms of flies
converging on windowpanes after a death in the house, and of
diamond-ring-wearing cats sticking their paws into open fires, and of
haunts of all kindsme into her room to scare her, she knew she didn't
have to stay ca and take it. Lena knew she could jump out of bed and
dash down the lit hallway with her eyes turned away from the big mirror
in the upstairs hall and knock on the door of her parents' room.

They almost always let her in and allowed her to climb onto their wide
firm mattress and snuggle down in the covers between them. Her brothers
Raymond and Edward teased her that she would probably be found some
morning squashed flat under the weight of her parents, who had rolled
together in the night. But even as a tiny thing, Lena knew this was just
jealous talk. Some nights her father didn't come home after closing The
Place at midnight, and then Lena and her mother slept together, lying
close in the big bed. "Jonah claims he's got business to take care of
tonight," Nellie would mutter as they lay there. "But I know what kind
of business he has this late at night."

But no matter how many times Lena plunged into the darkness surrounding
her bed and made it to safety in the path of light outside her door, she
didn't quite trust the dark. She tried not to think of it, but she knew
that things with their heads turned backward on their shoulders and some
with no heads at all roamed the world. And she was certain that they
lurked in the dark, because some of them routinely wandered past her
bedroom door.

Whenever she remembered the first time she had come face-to-face with
such a creature, she shivered a little, no matter how warm it was.

But as soon as her eyes opened this night, Lena knew that it wasn't her
bladder or a wispy creature floating through her room that had woken
her. It was a sound. She wasn't sure, but she thought she had heard
crying even before she awoke. She brought her hand to her face just to
make sure it was not she who had been weeping, but all she felt there
was the soft downy hairs that dusted her cheeks.

It was a small sound that she heard, not steady and even like a hum, but
here and there in small gulps like a busted machine.

And she knew immediately why she had heard it. It came to her ear
because she understood it. She knew that sound. It was like her own
cries when she was brokenhearted about something she wanted very badly
but couldn't have.

The sound drifted up to her on the night air from outside. The
uncontrolled hiccupping cries came to her through the open screened
window next to her bed, just like the call of the bobwhite and her fat
little babies who lived in the bushes at the edge of the yard.

"Bob-white, bob-white, " they called all evening and some mornings.

Lena sat up in bed and listened for a good long time before swinging her
legs into the darkness to go look for the source of the noise. She had
no wish to go wandering around by herself in the middle of the night,
but her desire to find the source of the noise was stronger than her
fear of what she might encounter in the dark. The sound clutched at her
heart and drew her through the house.

That's Grandmama's moonflowers, Lena said to herself as she stood in the
lit hall upstairs, sniffing the perfume of the big white night-blooming
flowers that her grandmother told her looked like ladies' fancy lacy
umbrellas turned inside-out in a sudden storm. They grew on shiny-leaved
vines that crawled all over the walls of the old brick house. She didn't
know how she knew that the scent emanated from those blooms. She had
never seen the flowers fully open, when her grandmother said their scent
was strongest. They bloomed after her bedtime. By the time she got up
each morning and ran outside to look at the flowers, they were already
curled closed and limp, hanging lifeless from their horned seedpod
shells with ants crawling all over them, She made a quick promise to
herself to go outside before this night was over to look at the
legendary flowers in full bloom and stick her nose in their wide-open
mouths and drink the scent she smelled now floating on the air. But as
soon as she heard the sound again, the jerking weeping that had woken
her, she forgot NIGHT all about the moonflowers and continued walking
down the lit hallway.

She was beginning to get that sick, fluttery morning feeling she got in
her stomach whenever her mother or grandmother woke her up before dawn
to get ready for an all-day picnic in the country. It was a sensation
hard for Lena to describe because it was sort of sickening, like she
might throw up any minute, but it wasn't altogether unpleasant because
it excited her and told her something interesting was about to happen.

Years later, when she first heard a nun in school speak about
butterflies in her stomach, Lena screamed right out in class, "That's
it!" and had to stand in the corner for the rest of the afternoon for
being disruptive.

She stood at the top of the staircase next to the linen closet door a
good while, listening to the weeping, waiting for her eyes to become
adjusted to the darkness, and getting up her nerve. The staircase was a
beautiful open oak structure that had a landing where the stairs turned
in two sharp right angles and continued down in the opposite direction
to the floor below. Moonlight streamed in through the big multipaned
vaulted window, flooding the pale green landing which looked out over
the nearby woods and the roof of the simple porch beneath it, splitting
the darkness with its soft shafts of light.

A simple carved varnished oak banister ran along the left edge of the
steps. Lena always thought the banister should have been shinier than it
was, considering the number of times she and her brothers had slid down
its length.

If it hadn't been the middle of the night, she would have stopped
descending the steps one by one and climbed aboard the handrail for one
swift ride down to the landing, then another down to the ground floor.

But she didn't want to swoosh down into the arms of some headless thing
in the dark at the bottom, so she walked down the steps carefully and
slowly, watching her step and the space directly ahead of her. Each time
she thought of turning back to the safety of her bed, the sound of the
crying pulled her on.

At the bottom of the Staircase she instinctively turned to the left and
walked toward the sewing-room door. Now that she was downstairs, the
sound she was following was muffled behind closed doors, and she
couldn't be certain where it was coming from. But she thought it was
from the direction of the screened porch that stood under her bedroom
window. She opened the door in front of her and entered the sewing room,
where it always looked like a small explosion had occurred.

Spools of thread, bolts of various materials-solids, plaids, stripes,
printsand dress boxes filled with sewing patterns lay on the narrow twin
bed and propped up against the walls and inside the open closet.

On one wall two sewing machines sat catercorner to each other under a
long overhead light. One was an old Singer in a sturdy, weathered walnut
cabinet with a wrought-iron base and a worn foot-pedal, that her
grandmother used. The other machine was also a Singer, but it was the
newest model they made, in a modern oak cabinet. That's what her mother
had asked for when she had taken Lena downtown to the dealership to
purchase the machine for herself as a Christmas gift from the family.
"I'd like to see your latest model," she had said in that haughty way
her mother had of talking down to white salespeople when she was paying
in cash, which she almost always did.

Cash was something her mother always seemed to have. Lena had seen her
father bring in a brown paper bag full of money one day and throw it on
the dining-room table, where her mother was cutting out a pretty little
white Sunday dress for her. Without saying a word, her mother had looked
in the bag and taken out a handful of bills which she rolled into a wad
and stuffed down the front of her dress into her ample bra.

Her father had just laughed and peeped down the front of her mother's
dress into the well of her titties with a grin on his face. Then he
picked up the bag and went on out the door. Her mother, the long sharp
black-and-silver scissors in her hand, had gone back to the tiny pattern
on the table with the strangest little smile on her face.

Two straight-backed chairs were pulled up to the machines like soldiers
waiting for orders. A pink corduroy cushion was in the seat of one
chair, and a red chenille cushion lay on the seat of the other, with
another pillow just like it propped up against the back.

Over in a corner stood a dusty model's stand with a wide straw hat
thrown on its shoulders where its head should have been. Lena had been
told that it was made in the shape of her grandmother's body when she
was twenty years younger. But it was only used as decoration in the room
now, because her mother and grandmother fitted clothes on each other
when they were sewing for themselves. Considering how her grandmother
sucked her teeth at Nellie all the time and the way her mother heaved
her big breasts in heavy sighs at her grandmother, the two women usually
made a pretty good team.

In the sewing room Lena walked especially carefully in her bare feet.

She knew that pins and needles, escaped from their paper folders and
their pin cushions shaped like plump red tomatoes, lay in wait at every
step to prick her feet. Here the sound Lena was searching for was louder
and clearer. Now she was sure it was coming from the porch on the other
side of the next room. The sound was nearly as strong to her ear as it
had been upstairs in her bed near the open window.

Moonlight, glowing through the pines, spiky needles, was streaming in
every window like candlelight. Through the opened door to the music
room, next to the sewing room, Lena saw that the door leading to the
screened porch also stood open. Still stepping carefully for fear of
pins and needles, she moved through the sewing room and into the music
room past the beautiful dark wood piano. She took the opportunity to
glide her hand across the smooth wood on the curved side of the piano as
she walked past it.

Without stopping, she walked on to the open door leading to the screened
porch, and the sound was right next to her ear.

The air out on the porch was so different from any she had ever smelled
before that it stopped the child right in her tracks.

It was as different from morning or evening air as it was from the heat
of the day. The scent of the moonflowers-it had to be the
moonflowers-was intoxicating. Crickets still rubbed their hind legs
together making an evening noise, but a couple of birds also chirped
intermittently.

Is it almost morning or still night? Lena wondered to herself.

She half-expected colors to be different from those she had seen earlier
in the evening, the wicker furniture red instead of white, the bricks of
the house blue instead of red.

In this air, feeling like this, nothing bad could happen to me. I've
been a baby to be afraid of the dark, she thought.

But when she looked around the porch and saw the outline of a figure
stretched out on the wicker couch, she almost let out a little cry.

The child's first thought was of ghosts and she started to dash back
into the safety of the house, but something familiar about the shape on
the sofa made her stay. As Lena wound her way to the sofa, she saw that
it was her mother who lay there, her forehead resting on her folded
arms, her shoulders shaking softly.

On such a gentle night it was even more confusing than it would have
been at any other time to find her mother crying on the porch sofa.

But there was no mistaking the sobs that made her mother's shoulders
quiver.

At the sound of the child's footsteps on the shiny green floor, her
mother sniffled a few times and turned her head on her arm to see Lena
standing right next to her. Nellie's face looked as wretched as the sobs
had sounded. All Lena wanted to do was make it better.

Little Lena reached up and patted her mother's face, wet with tears.

"This my mama right here," she said.

Her mother looked as if she would burst into tears again. Instead she
answered with a catch in her throat, "This my baby right here," and
pulled the child up on the wicker sofa to lie snuggled in the curve that
her chest, belly, and thighs made.

Satisfied that she had done all she could to comfort the crying woman,
Lena fell asleep immediately. Her mother breathed a NIGHT few convulsive
sighs and followed her baby daughter into slumber.

They lay together that way until morning crept through the tall pines
surrounding the house, long after Nellie felt the warm little stream of
urine trickle through the tail of Lena's nightgown and completely soak
the front of her shirt and shorts.

Lena was just five when she learned she was real.

One day, the summer after she started going to Miss Russell's
kindergarten class over on Pringle Street, Lena and her brothers Raymond
and Edward were sitting in the light green station wagon with wood
paneling on the side, waiting for their mother outside the old
Piggly-Wiggly. The supermarket stood across the street from the Sears
and Roebuck where the newly installed escalators, Mulberry's first set,
had become the number-one attraction in town.

There were so many people-children, mothers, adults, teenagers on
Saturdayafternoon dates-waiting their turns to ride the moving stairs
that one day the manager had been forced to close the store's doors in
the middle of the work day to prevent a tragedy. They even wrote a story
about it in the Sundaymorning newspaper.

"Threat of Stampede Shuts Sears' Doors," Lena's grandmother had read
over her son's shoulder at the breakfast table. Then she chuckled to
herself. She had never ridden the moving staircases and she didn't plan
to. "Fools," she had muttered, her head an aurora of steam rising from a
big serving bowl of buttery grits. "Would have served them right if
they'd all been trampled.

Nellie had promised the three children at least four roundtrips on the
escalator if they sat there quietly in the car while she ran into the
Pigglywiggly for a bag of rice.

"That's all I need, one little bag of rice. just for you children, your
Grandmama, and me. You know your daddy doesn't eat rice, it makes him
sick to his stomach, so he says. And damn if he doesn't refuse to buy it
either. So will you children please, please sit here and stay in this
car till I come out.

And you boys, if you could, would you keep your little sister from
getting out of this car and running all over the parking lot and darting
out in the street and letting a big Mack truck run over her.

That's the least you can do," she said in one breath. Then she blew a
wisp of auburn-tinted hair out of her face, turned, and headed briskly
into the store's wide glass door, her round low butt twisting prettily
inside her beige sleeveless linen sheath. The soles of her high-heeled
summer mules flapped gently against the smooth heels of her feet as she
walked away, and the heel tips made clacking sounds each time they hit
the Tarmac of the grocery-store parking lot.

Raymond, twelve then and tall for his age, was sitting in the front seat
by himself on the passenger side, his legs stretched out all the way to
the front of the floorboard of the big green wagon. Lena stood in back
with Edward, who sat directly behind his brother.

Lena was trying to get her lips just right so she could whistle. She was
having a hard time learning. Whenever the boys tried to teach her at
home, her father would say, "Girl, stop that whistling. A whistling
woman and a crowing hen never come to no good end."

The boys talked lazily over the back of the front seat, not bothering to
look at one another. They were just swapping loose talk to stir the air
further, with Edward stuttering every now and then when he became
excited by the prospect of the escalator rides.

"I wish Mama would hurry up," Raymond said. "It's gonna be crowded on
those escalators before long." He shifted his position in the front seat
and propped his big feet on the car's dashboard.

Wide and covered with yellowish-brown leather, the dashboard was a
steady and sure pilot house in the huge ship of a station wagon. All the
windows were rolled down to catch a breeze from off the muddy Ocawatchee
River on the other side of the highway from Sears. But not a breath of
wind was stirring, Lena could tell. She was standing in the back on the
hump that rose in in the center of the floorboard, so she would have
felt a cooling breeze before anyone else.

The hump was a special spot of hers, but her favorite place in the car
was the spot in the middle of the front seat, with the seam dividing the
backrest going straight down her spine when she sat straight up.

That spot was truly special.

For one thing it placed her right in front of the dials of the radio.

Even with the sound off, the face of the radio seemed to glow. The
volume knob to the left of the dial had tiny ridges in it. And to the
right the knob on the tuning stem was missing, leaving the metal prong
sticking out alone.

Unlike her two brothers, one of whom had broken the radio knob, she was
allowed to play with the radio as much as she liked, punching the
buttons and turning the knob until the noise and movement got on her
mother's nerves. Then she had to stop immediately. But there weren't too
many mechanical things that she was not allowed to touch-for a little
while at least-because she had the ability to "put the magic" on stuff.
That's what her family had always told her.

Lena couldn't remember the first time she had put the magic on
something, or where the idea had originated. It seemed to Lena to have
always been part of her family life. Most people would have considered
it a family joke, but her family took it seriously. If a stranger was
present when Lena put the magic on something, someone in the family
would explain casually, "You know Lena was born with a veil over her
face."

If the car didn't start after two or three tries, everyone in the car
would turn to Lena.

"Come on, baby," her mother would say, "put the magic on this car for us
so I can get these boys to school in this rain." Or one of the boys
would say, "Let Lena put the magic on the car so we won't be late for
church again. I don't want to start tramping in late every Sunday like
the Fosters cause Sister Mary Margaret Therese will blame us for it
Monday in school."

Lena loved this ritual of putting the magic on things. With no very
serious realization of what she was doing, she would lean over, rub her
little hands, still chubby at the knuckles, on the steering wheel a few
times, jingle the ring of keys sticking out from the ignition, then sit
back and wait for her mother to start the car, which usually turned over
right away.

She could put the magic on just about anything, a radio, the television,
a stuck door, a rusty ice-cream churn. Her magic was sometimes only
temporary, but it nearly always worked for a time. It was a stop gap
method until the TV repair man came or until dinner was over.

But the real attraction of sitting front and center in the car was the
veil of protection that enveloped her there. When she sat up front, she
could always count on her mother in the driver's seat reaching over with
her arm extended, palm flat against Lena's little chest, fingers spread
wide like a web, holding her safely upright whenever she had to bring
the big green car to a sudden stop.

"Ho-o-o-ld the baby," her mother would intone.

Lena's family did the "Hold the baby" for her alone and continued to do
it long after she was anything like a baby. The ritual, right down to
the magic words "Hold the baby" spoken just so, made Lena feel safe and
warm and lookedafter. Her brothers, who routinely terrorized her, even
got into the habit of doing it when one of them sat up front next to
her. "Ho-o-o-ld the baby," they would say with the same singsong
inflection as their mother and would reach over to save her pretty
little face from crashing into the broad dashboard.

While they were parked at the Piggly-Wiggly, Lena settled for standing
on the hump in the back floorboard. From here she could see out all the
windows, front, back, and sides, without having to strain up on her toes
or scramble about. Besides that, in this spot she could also look at her
reflection in the rear-view mirror.

She liked the face that she saw in the mirror, its caramel-candy color,
its long oval shape. Even though her mother sometimes called Lena "you
little horse-faced heifer" when she was exasperated. The insult was lost
on her. She liked the sound of the words.

"Horse-faced heifer, horse-faced heifer," Lena would repeat to herself
softly, enjoying the feel of the air as it rushed over her lips. Then
she'd laugh and make her mother laugh with her. The annoyance would melt
from her mother's face like a scoop of ice cream on a hot day.

Her lips were wide, full, and shaped like an arrow's bow turned on its
side, with a deep cleft above her top lip that was soft with a faint
sunreddened down. Whenever her chatter got to be too much for her
mother's nerves, Nellie would gently lay her finger on the cleft above
the child's mouth the way her mother said an angel in heaven had done to
keep her quiet. Then she would say, "Hush, baby."

Lena's nose was her father's, long from the bridge to the tip and
slightly flared. Lena had the ability to flare her nostrils as if she
were yawning whenever she wanted to. She performed this fascinating
trick for her brothers whenever she had a favor to ask. If she would
"bull" her nose, as the boys called it, ten times in a row, they would
give her a ride on their bikes or share the brightly colored Sunday
funny papers with her.

Whenever she looked into the car's rear-view mirror, she smiled at her
reflection. But this time when she caught sight of herself, she was
shocked by the image. She saw a person staring back.

For the first time she saw eyes that were obviously connected to a soul,
a beating heart, throbbing veins, a growling stomach, a brain.

In a flash, as quick as she could blink her eyes a couple of times to be
sure that the person in the mirror was her, she saw that she was REAL!
hildish The notion struck her speechless for a moment.

The tune she was la-th-da-ing to herself trailed off to nothing.

This was a revelation. It was a thought on a plane she had never probed
before. She was real!

She could breathe, she realized as she inhaled and exhaled deeply.

Uhbuh. She could think, she could see, she could move any part of her
body just by thinking of it. She wiggled her nose, lifted an index
finger to right before her eyes, and spun the finger in small circles
from its socket at her knuckle. Then she held her breath until she
became dizzy. She was real. She couldn't imagine why she had not thought
of it before.

Looking into those eyes, her eyes, almost frightened her. She half
expected some other creature who looked just like her to jump out of the
mirror. That wouldn't have surprised her. It had happened before, but it
didn't happen this time. She was this living, breathing, exciting
person. The revelation was so exhilarating, she never even considered
giving in to fear as she usually did when she saw ghosts and other
strange things. And somehow she knew it would be okay to tell.

"Fdward," she whispered to her brother sitting next to her without
taking her eyes off the face in the rear-view mirror. "Edward, I'm
real."

Edward and Raymond stopped their boyish chatter, their bragging, topping
each other about how many times they would ride the escalators at Sears
if given unlimited time there. They both stopped talking at the same
time and silently looked at their livie sister long and hard.

Her older brother Raymond was the more compassionate one, who didn't
harbor Edward's resentment toward her for having been born right after
him and taking over his place as the baby of the family. Lena could
usually count on Raymond's taking pity on her. He was the one who
carried her carefully-not clumsily, as Edward did-upstairs when she fell
asleep in front of the television.

"Raymond, I'm reallyreal," she continued with her gaze fixed on the
rectangular mirror. "For real, Raymond-look in the glass. I can see me.
I'm real."

The three of them sat silently for a few seconds. Raymond turned around
all the way in the front seat, "You real crazy, that's wh-what you are,"
Edward said, and Raymond laughed.

"Yeah," Raymond added, . you're real crazy, all right."

They both laughed again, but it was an uneasy laughter. it reminded Lena
of the evening they were supposed to be watching her for their mother
and instead took her, on the back of Raymond's bike, into the graveyard
at the top of Pleasant Hill because they wanted to stand on her tiny
feet, look over her shoulder, and gaze into the night in search of a
ghost. Grandmama had assured them ever since little Lena's birth that
this was a certain legacy of her being born with a veil over her
face-that others could see ghosts when looking over her shoulder.

The boys hadn't seen any spirits as they gazed over the top of Lena's
head and shoulders. But the whole thing-the excursion into the falling
darkness, going into the graveyard, her suddenly overexcited brothers
leaping from grave marker to grave marker in a half-crazed
dance-unnerved Lena. She wished she could tell them that if they wanted
to see ghosts they need only go up to the attic at home and touch the
baby's portrait turned to the wall.

In the bright noon of the late summer day, the boys got a good look at
their sister's face and saw something new there, some new understanding.
The look scared them as if they had really seen a ghost.

But Lena was no ghost. And she didn't realize until she saw her spirit
look back at her in the mirror that that was just what she had feared,
that she was not a real girl but a ghost just like those creatures who
haunted her.

"I'm real," she kept whispering, until Raymond called a halt to "all
that crazy shit." He tried to distract her with talk of upcoming rides
on the Sears escalator. But the Sears escalator could not compete with
her new knowledge, she was a real person.

She could hardly wait for her mother to come back to the car so she
could tell her about the discovery. As soon as Nellie rushed out of the
grocery store carrying a small brown paper sack with one large bag of
rice inside, she started repeating her promise of four rides on the
escalator so she could avert the whining she anticipated. Nellie always
swore she was delicate and couldn't stand too much noise, but when
things got busy down atjonah's bar and grill, Lena had seen her mother
swing skillets of hot grease and quarts of beer with a hearty,
determined strength while keeping an eye on the cash register. Still,
her mother insisted that she was "delicate," easy to wear out, easy to
bruise, seeming to enjoy the myth of her delicacy.

When her mother slid into the car, Lena was ready to pounce on her with
her news. "Mama, I'm real," she was going to say, so proud of her
revelation.

But the boys saw it coming and sat up, ready to deflect their baby
sister's prattle. They knew that their mother sometimes took Lena's
ravings seriously, and they didn't want their sister's crazy talk to
interfere with their upcoming escalator rides-talk about she's real and
all that. Their little sister was such a fool sometimes. But they had to
be real careful with the things she said, because her crazy talk could
sometimes get inside their heads and gnaw away at their thoughts until
they gave in and began to think about it.

It happened all the time, Lena would say something crazy like "Look at
me in the mirror, I'm real," and by the end of the week the boys would
find themselves staring in the bathroom mirror, gazing into their own
eyes and thinking that they too were real, a thought that had never
occurred to them before.

Lena was like that. She was just five, but already she could read as
well as Edward, and when the family sat around listening to homework
reading, she asked the strangest questions about the history and
geography and catechism that the boys were studying in school at Blessed
Martin de Porres.

"How can the President be the leader of all the people in the country
when I haven't even seen him and looked at him in person?" Or, "If God
made me to know, love, and serve him in this world and be happy with him
in the next, why do we have to be in this world at all? Why don't we all
get dressed up and go to the next world and be happy?"

Regardless of her moods, their mother responded to each and every one of
Lena's questions with a seriousness that sometimes made the boys mad.

"What's that, baby?" her mother asked Lena as she settled in behind the
wheel of the station wagon with a paper bag in one hand and her purse in
the other.

"I'm real," little Lena said proudly. The boys knew they had to act
quickly. Raymond was the first to make his move. He drew his long legs
toward his body and lunged for the paper bag his mother was about to
place down between them on the seat.

"What'd you get, Mama?" he asked as he tore the bag from her hand and
began riffling through it. "You buy anything for us?"

Edward followed his brother's lead.

"Yeah, anything-th-thing for us?" he asked as he pulled the bag from his
brother's hand. The bag tore down the middle, leaving each boy holding
half of the brown paper wk and the bag of Uncle Ben's rice lying on the
car floor.

"Just look at what the two of you have done!" Nellie yelled at the boys.

"Just look!"

"Mama," Lena interrupted, pulling on the shoulder of the woman's dress.

"Mama, I'm real."

"Just a minute, baby. Now, how many goddamn times do I have to tell you
not to go grabbing at my packages the minute I get in the car. You know
how I hate that, you know it!"

Lena tried again. "Mama, listen, I just found out. I'm real."

Her mother was angry now and would not be stopped. "But the second you
see me with a bag in my hand, you go to grabbing and snatching it like
you ain't never had nothing in your lives. You'd think you were born in
Switchblade Alley."

The boys had noticed that their mother got the prettiest red glow to her
golden brown skin when she became slightly enraged, as she usually did
at least once a day. The glow was beginning to light up her sweaty face
now as she lectured them about being so damn wild.

Lena, who was standing at her mother's shoulder, shaking the fleshy part
of her mother's arm to gain her attention, could almost smell Nellie's
exasperation with the boys. In the adventure stories Lena read in the
magazines her father left lying by the toilet, the women all had
flashing black eyes. Even though Nellie's eyes were a deep rich brown,
they too flashed with anger.

"Mama, I'm trying to tell you something, Mama, listen to me, Mama."

Lena kept trying to chip away at her mother's distraction. She shook the
woman's arm rhythmically and insistently at each word.

"Lena, stop that," her mother said as she lightly slapped the girl's
hand away from her shoulder and continued blessing the boys out. The
child snatched her hand away before the lick landed, and flopped back
into the seat, with its prickly straw covers, a hurt expression on her
face.

"You boys act just like some little wild younguns raised in the woods
sometimes. Raymond, you're almost thirteen now, and you're still as big
a damn fool as your brother."

Both boys ducked their heads and looked offended at the double insult.

It didn't stop their mother. She was on a roll.

"Neither one of you little fanatical fools ever worked a day in your
lives, never even hit a lick at a snake in the things you supposed to do
around the house every day. And here you come every damn time I go in a
store yelling What's for me? What you got for me?" What the hell you
think I got for you? Not a damn thing, that's what I got for you.

Did you give me any money to buy some damn thing? No, you never hit a
lick at a snake to earn any little pocket money, but the first ones to
go tearing open my packages as soon as I step my foot in .. ."

Lena could take it no more. She had something important to say and she
was going to say it. As her mother continued to fuss, she stood up on
the hump in the back floorboard and screamed at the top of her lungs,
"I'm REAL!"

It worked. All other sound in the car stopped as her mother and brothers
spun around to look at her. The sound of her voice seemed to echo inside
the cavernous car, then roll out the windows in the direction of the
slow-moving Ocawatchee to be lost in the noise of the traffic passing on
the street.

"Shit," Edward hissed under his breath and fell back in his seat with a
resigned sigh. Raymond mimicked his brother and slumped back in his
seat, too.

The sound of Lena's scream seemed to hit Nellie in the face and relax
nearly all the muscles that had tightened up there. The only muscle left
flexed was the one controlling the furrows that were raised quizzically
between her thin eyebrows. And she kept that one tight as she sat
looking at her little girl standing in the back of the car.

Now that Lena had said what she meant to, she felt so relieved and
unburdened she just looked back at her mother with a pleasant smile on
her face.

"Lena," Nellie said, lowering her own voice, "there's no need for you to
yell like that in this car. What's gotten into you?"

"Mama, I told you, I'm real," Lena said matter-of-factly.

Nellie turned her head to one side, trying to figure out her youngest
child. She had always known that Lena was going to be different from her
boy@ver since her birth and all that hocuspocus old Nurse Bloom had been
talking about-Nellie had known that. But the child unnerved her
sometimes with the things she said and did. So often her thoughts and
actions left no room for Nellie to respond in a sensible way.

"Now, what am I supposed to say to a five-year-old who screams that
she's real?" Nellie asked herself.

She just sighed and turned back to the steering wheel. As she started up
the car, she said, "Well, of course, you're real, baby. You're our Lena.
Now, let's get on over to Sears before the escalators get all filled
up."

As Nellie slammed the car in reverse and sped over to the Sears and
Roebuck, she considered taking Lena by the hospital to see if Nurse
Bloom could tell her something about the girl's strange ways.

But when she looked in the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of Lena
smiling to herself unselfconsciously, she dismissed the idea.

Lena wasn't too disturbed that no one in her family seemed as impressed
as she was with her discovery. She assumed it was just another thing she
had said or thought that made her household uncomfortable. Like the time
she described her Grandmama's wedding dress right down to the ripped hem
that the bride had gotten caught on her white shoe back in 1901." Musta
seen the pictures," Grandmama had muttered nervously and changed the
subject.

Sometimes she could see her brothers, mother, and grandmother pull away,
almost recoil from her, when she said or did something they weren't
expecting, which could be just about anything. It didn't really hurt her
feelings. It was always just a fleeting look or feeling, anyway, and she
never doubted the love her family felt for her-even when she was mad
with all of them. She just figured that their reactions were part of the
way life was, like her seeing ghosts and knowing not to tell anyone
about it.

Anyhow, when she made the people in her household too edgy, she knew she
could always scoot across the street to the house where nothing she said
or did seemed to disturb anyone.

Lena's house was bigger than was needed for a family of six. There were
rooms that they didn't even use regularly and rooms that she never saw
in other people's houses.

Besides a living room, dining room, kitchen, and six bedrooms, there was
a breakfast room, a music room, a sewing room, and a walk-in pantry.
There was a long, narrow linen closet big enough to play in, which was
lined with shelves loaded down with Packs of freshly laundered sheets
and tablecloths always neatly wrapped in heavy green paper from the
cleaners. And some of the hallways were as big as rooms. Even the
basement, with its huge steam furnace and cold damp concrete floor, was
partitioned into rooms, which were used for the laundry and storage. And
there was still enough space left for the heavy pool table with its
pretty green felt cover, which her father had had men move into the
basement during the night.

The little girl loved the big solid brick house with its porches on
every side and its attic making it look like a three-story building.

Its size and structure, the way it seemed set in the ground firmly-not
up on legs of brick and cement the way some houses on her street
were-pleased her. She was sure no wind could ever move her house, no
catastrophe could be so bad that it would shake its foundations.

The house was originally built as a residence for teachers of a black
private school located in front of it on the street. But the school,
which both of her parents had attended, had been razed years before
Lena's birth.

Kudzu and small pine saplings, their seeds blown from the adjoining
woods, had taken over the vacant land where the huge school had stood,
making the house barely visible from the street.

The house didn't even look as if it belonged to the neighborhood,
because it sat so far back from the street and was surrounded by tall
Georgia pines.

The trees kept a soft blanket of pine needles on the ground summer and
winter.

As though the house were a community unto itself with a mind of its own,
its real front porch didn't face the street. At the official front of
the house, the entrance they rarely used because it was so
inconveniently situated, there was a small open porch with two plain
painted wooden posts supporting the roof. The floor was made of cement
edged in the same old red brick that the house was made of, and two wide
brick steps led to the porch.

Her mother always kept two Boston ferns hanging from the eaves inside
the pillars, where people who didn't have enough sense to see that this
wasn't the right entrance to use bumped their heads when they came to
ring the bell there.

In winter, when the ferns withered and died, she just left the pots of
rich Georgia dirt hanging in their places.

Anotker porch extended from the kitchen. It was enclosed and sat at the
top of twelve smooth cement steps. Here Lena's family stacked crates of
Cocacolas and empty bottles, mops, buckets, rags, brooms, the ice-cream
churn, garden tools, moldy umbrellas and shoes, and an earthenware crock
jar.

Down an embankment from the porch, the land sloped gently to a narrow
strip of a brook that meandered past the house from the top of Pleasant
Hill and vanished into the woods. Although Lena herself had never been
allowed to follow the stream to its destination, her brothers Raymond
and Edward told her stories of a small waterfall and a glassy smooth
pond surrounded by luscious blooming plants that the stream fed. Her
Grandmama would send the boys into the woods with shovels, buckets, and
instructions. They would return hours later with white and pink dogwood
trees already in bloom, ready to be transplanted into the yard around
the house.

Lena would have given anything to see the pond herself, but she didn't
have enough anything-possessions, tricks, charms, information for
blackmail-not enough anything to force the boys to take her into the
woods.

They knew if anything happened to Lena while she was in their care,
their Grandmama would skin em alive, their father would beat them until
he was breathless, and their mother would promise to beat their butts
till they roped like okra, even if they knew for certain she would wear
herself out trying to hit them with whatever was handy, long before they
had been properly whipped. Often their mother would throw her hands up
to heaven in exasperation and declare, "I just can't take this
aggravation anymore. I'm going out in the woods and live and cat with
the animals. Ya'll can just have this house. I'll just live with the
animals in the woods."

The first and only time the boys had tried to help Lena cross the stream
to the wooded side, she had slipped on a mossy rock and fallen into the
icy water, getting her thick nappy hair soaked and splitting the skin on
her left kneecap. Her wails brought her mother and grandmother running
down the embankment with swift punishment for the boys right then, and
even more when their father came home for dinner.

"Go get the belt," Jonah had barked at the boys even before their mother
had finished explaining the bandaged cut on Lena's knee. Then, for three
days in a row, their father had repeated his order and the whippings
each time he looked at Lena's little scarred knee and her big brown
eyes.

"You gonna ever do that again?" their father had said, slightly out of
breath from flailing Raymond with one of his big heavy leather belts.

"No, no, no!" Raymond Screamed as he dangled from his father's tight
grasp on his left forearm. "I won't never do it again!

"

"Are you gonna do it again? Are you gonna let your baby sister go down
to that stream, let her go into the woods and hurt herseir"

"No, Daddy, no, I ain't gonna do it no more!" Raymond swore as he danced
in a perfect circle around his father.

"Are you gonna do that again? Be that careless?"

"No, I cross my heart, I promise, I swear!" Raymond had screamed.

His father wasn't satisfied. "Yes, you will," he said, and continued
beating the boy, forgetting to save some strength for Edward's whipping.

After that, if she even looked like she was thinking of going to the
woods on the other side of the brook, Raymond and Edward went running to
the house screaming, "Lena's headed for the woods! Lena's headed for the
woods!"

The porch on another side of the house was directly opposite the formal
front porch. It was really more of a small covered patio than a porch.

At Christmas time her mother got the boys to climb up on the roof's flat
surface and string colored lights and pine garland from the woods around
the outside of the big vaulted window at the landing of the staircase
inside.

The doors at all the entrances to the house were oversized to Lena, but
the one at this entrance seemed to take over the tiny foyer. At the top
of the door was a big glass window with beveled edges. Lena understood
why her mother had never put a curtain at that window. The girl too
loved the unobstructed view of the woods from that clear glass. The only
drawback to the glass was that unwanted visitors, like Father O'Donnell,
the priest from church, could look in and see who was home when no one
felt like answering the door.

Whenever her mother or grandmother walked around the house in her bra
and panties, trying to relax after an especially hot and frustrating day
of shopping or working in confining rubber girdles and hot nylon hose,
Lena made sure she stayed nearby in the house because she knew Father
O'Donnell would show up soon.

The Irish priest's pockmarked red face would appear magically at the
door's wide window, his thinning red hair standing up all over his head,
his green eyes darting from side to side as he tried to glimpse a bit of
movement anywhere within his view. Once he had seen someone, he had
her-no matter how quickly she darted out of his line of vision and hid
behind a door.

"Oh, good woman, good woman, open the door, open the door. It's only I,
your parish priest, come to visit your lovely family, lovely family."

And if the door had been left unlocked, he would turn the knob and come
on in as if he were a welcome neighbor. Lena's mother and grandmother
would squeal and run for cover as the priest, his dusty black suit
wrinkled and damp with perspiration, followed the screams of his
retreating prey on upstairs or into the kitchen or out on the side
screened porch.

"No, no, Father, wait! Stay right there, no, don't come up here, Father.

Go on in the living room, go on, Father. We'll be down in just a
minute," Lena's mother would yell over her shoulder.

"Lena, go on down there and keep that crazy priest company till we can
get some clothes on," her mother would say.

Lena knew just what to do. She would run down the stairs to head the
priest off at the landing and start talking as loudly as she could to
try to drown out her grandmother.

"That damn fool was gonna come right on up here. I don't care if he is a
priest, somebody is gonna shoot him dead one day, her grandmother's
voice would float down the stairs behind Lena. "I can see the headline
now, Irate Mate Shoots Intruding Paddy Priest."

"Hello, Father," Lena would shout, taking the priest's soft dry hand,
which felt as if he had just dusted it with talcum powder, in her own
and leading him back downstairs toward the living HOUSES room. "Mama and
Grandma getting dressed. They want you to wait for them in here."

"Oh, yes, child, what a lovely child, lovely child. And your name is .

.."

"I'm Lena, Father," she said with a giggle.

"Yes, that's right, Lena. Would you like to hear a poem, a poem for the
lovely child?"

Lena knew she need not answer. She would hear a poem whether she liked
it or not.

" The wise old owl sat on an oak,' " the priest began.

Lena left him in the living room reciting and headed across the hall to
the dining room.

" The more he heard, the less he spoke,' " he continued without her.

She was barely tall enough to reach the handles of the metal liquor
caddy that stood in the corner by the window. She gave it a push and
began rolling it back across the hall toward the living room.

" The less he spoke, the more he heard,' " Father O'Donnell continued.

The bottles of Old Forester and Beefeater and Chivas Regal and
Courvoisier and tall and short glasses on the caddy rattled a tune like
a one-man band as she hit the door jamb, pushed the service cart into
the living room, and pulled it to a stop right next to the parish priest
sitting on the sofa.

" Now, wasn't he a wise old bird?"

" the priest finished.

By the time her mother and grandmother joined them, the good father was
well into his fifth poem and second rye, straight up.

The porch on the last side of the house was everyone's favorite. It ran
the length of the house and was enclosed by a dustysmelling screen and
high hedges all around that made it a cool and private retreat.

The living room's French doors and the music room's heavy door opened
-)nto this porch. The porch's screen door was the entrance that most
people who had good sense used.

It was on this porch that the family sat and shelled peas in the
summertime, and it was here they all sprawled after a heavy Sunday
dinner.

The porch was furnished just like a room, with heavy wicker furniture
painted shiny white and high-backed cane-bottom rocking chairs painted
forest green. The long wicker sofa and wingback wicker chairs were piled
with forestgreen cushions of polished cotton that her mother and
grandmother had made and stuffed themselves.

Forest green was one of her mother's favorite colors. "It's so cool,"
she said. She had Whit, the man who did all their repairs and odd jobs,
paint all the wooden trim on the house in the same green. Even the
wooden floor and ceiling of the porch were painted a glossy forest
green. The color scratched easily with all the traffic that passed over
it. But her mother didn't care and said she loved the way the color
looked in summer.

The white wicker sofa was placed between the living-room and music-room
doors, along the brick wall of the porch that was the side of the house.
A long white wooden table with wicker legs was set in front of it with
big ashtrays on top. Chairs were scattered around the edge of the porch
near the other three screened walls, with small round metal
white-lacquered tables beside them. Boston and maidenhair ferns cascaded
around the porch from hooks in the ceiling and from old-fashioned wicker
stands in the corners.

In the spring and summertime, this porch was where her parents had their
parties. The women in bright halter-topped dresses and pedal-pushers and
sleeveless blouses, the men in big short-sleeved cotton shirts splashed
with wild colors and roomy beige slacks gathered at the waist with tan
leather belts.

Lena loved these times out on the wide cool porch with highballs and
cigarette smoke and men's loud talk and women's soft perfume. She and
the boys were only allowed to stay a little while at their parents'
parties, just long enough to speak to everybody and ask about the
visitors' children. Even though HOTISES she was the youngest, Lena
usually stayed the longest, because the boys, five and seven years older
than she, soon tired of the attention and noise and sneaked off to watch
television upstairs in their parents' room. But Lena never tired of it.
Besides, she had to stick around long enough to drink the first
sip-Jonah called it "the poison"-off her father's first bourbon and Coke
with a wedge of lemon in it. She had to walk around the dining-room
table and sample some of the beautifully arranged food her mother and
grandmother had worked on all day. And she had to go sit awhile with her
mother's childhood friend Mary, who wore hats so stylishly that she had
a whole closet full of them. Lena's "Aunt Mary" would ask her about her
day and listen to the answer with such wide-eyed interest that Lena
never doubted her curiosity about mud pies and skinned knees.

But then, just when Lena was beginning to enjoy herself, her father
would announce, "Isn't it about your bedtime, young lady?" Her face
would fall, her brown eyes would fill with tears, and for Lena the party
would be over. She'd run off to her grandmother, her heart broken anew
as if, instead of a family ritual, it were happening for the first time.

Lena usually played in her own yard, but one afternoon after Miss
Russell's kindergarten class she wandered away from her house down the
long dirt drive to the street and discovered a treasure. Even though
Lena had a feeling she had already broken some basic rule of the house
by leaving her yard by herself, she knew better than to make matters
worse by crossing the street by herself. Even if Mrs. Willback's big
white wooden house was very tempting with its red brick porch and steps
that stood next to a garden that was so big it looked like a small farm.
Instead she satisfied her yen for exploration by walking up the road a
bit on her side of the street.

She walked past the blackberry patch where in summer her brothers,
dressed in long pants to protect their legs, scrambled through the briar
and brambles in search of the dark juicy fruit her grandmother and
Nellie made into the rich buttery cobblers the family ate after dinner.

Nellie would be amazed at Raymond's and Edward's bravery. She warned
them that "snake's grandmammy" lived among that tangle of seductive
growth. But the boys just waved aside their mother's protestations with
the big tin pans they carried and waded into the bush. They weren't a
bit afraid of snakes. In fact they liked them. Once Lena had sneaked
into Edward's room when he was away and found a shoebox under his bed
with tiny eggs inside lying on a mat of dried grass.

Inside one of the cracked eggs was the shriveled body of a baby snake.

But she never told her mother.

Everyone knew that nothing exceeded Nellie's fear of snakes. Once, when
Lena was at home alone with her mother, Nellie killed a small snake she
had found behind the freezer with nothing but a hammer, banging away at
the wiggling, writhing reptile and calling on Jesus the whole time. "I
always will believe one of Jonah's women put that snake there," she said
later as she stood at the liquor caddy drinking straight from the
bottle, trying to settle her nerves.

The trees and brush that grew on the other side of the berry patch had
been thinned near the stream, which ran parallel to the street. And
although it wasn't really the woods, the real woods, where her brothers
disappeared for hours, Lena still approached it as an adventure. She
picked her way steadily along the edge of the brush by the side of the
road until she came to a patch of weeds in flower with soft yellow
blooms.

"Oooohhh," she said in surprise at the sudden bright buttercup color
among the browns and greens.

As much as her grandmother worked, raked, fertilized, and watered her
garden, few of her flowers were still in bloom so late in the fall.

Yet the flowers growing along the side of the road made it look as if it
were the middle of summer. They stood there, bending in the wind as if
they had been waiting all day for Lena to come along. But when she
stooped beside the flowers HOUSES and reached out to pluck one of the
saffron heads bobbing in the breeze, a lowpitched voice stopped her.

"Uh-uhn. Don't touch that thing, it smell like do-do," the voice
cautioned.

Lena jumped to her feet like a skittish cat and looked around with
widened eyes.

Across the street from her a little girl with dark glassy eyes was
standing under a wide, low-hanging tree with half a piece of fruit
resembling a big red jeweled brooch in her hand.

Lena's first inclination was to greet the little girl with glee. Then
she remembered the child in the picture that used to hang over her
grandmother's bed and decided to hold her delight in check. Lena knew
that with no one here to protect her, this other child could very easily
rise from the dusty ground where she stood and soar into the treetops.
For a while Lena had thought that ghosts appeared to her at or around
first dark. Her grandmother, when she told ghost stories, always said
they came out at midnight. But now that Lena was going on six, she knew
that they could appear at any time they wanted to appear.

The two girls stood for a while on opposite sides of the street,
surveying each other from head to toe. Lena saw a dark brown girl a
little larger than she, whose shiny black eyes were almost level with
hers. The girl was slightly swaybacked, or perhaps just looked that way
because her stomach was a bit protrudent. At one time her thick short
hair had been combed into a neat pattern of six plaits braided into one
another from her high broad forehead down the back of her head. But the
short edges of her hair had worked themselves away from the braids and
formed a roll like a diadem around her face.

She wore a green plaid dress in a style something like the red one Lena
wore. But Lena's dress, made with love and care by her grandmother with
white smocking across the chest and around the tail of the full skirt,
was clean and lightly starched. The dress the little girl across the
street wore was not only stained down the front and soiled in the back
where she had sat down in the dirt, but it was also torn at the waist
and ripped under the left arm of the short, puffed sleeve.

And the left sleeve itself was no longer puffed like the right one
because the elastic in its hem had broken and the material hung limply
on the child's arm.

Lena wondered how long it had been since the girl had rubbed any jergens
lotion or Vaseline on her body after she got out of the bathtub. Her
arms, legs, elbows, and feet were nearly gray with dry scaly ash. If
Grandmama got hold of her, she'd have her shining, Lena said to herself.

"This damn ash," the old lady would grumble as she coated Lena's legs
with globs of Vaseline she had rubbed between her hands until it was
warm and nearly liquid. "It's like a plague visited on the children-the
female children-of Africa." Then she would rub the excess Vaseline off
Lena's legs with a damp towel. "Even Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge
have to put up with it. Goodlooking Lena leaning up against one of those
big white pillars singing her heart out musta been thinking, I hope my
elbows ain't ashy."

Lena hugged the red cardigan her mother had bought for her atjoy's
Children's Shop in the nearby white neighborhood close to her body as
she examined the other girl's bare arms and naked rusty feet stuck down
in a pair of stiff-looking brown oxfords. just the sight of the girl
standing there in the crisp fall air without anything on her arms and
legs made Lena shiver a bit.

Finally Lena swallowed hard and broke the silence as they continued to
eye each other. "Are you really a little girl?" Lena asked the child in
a voice barely loud enough for the girl to hear across the distance of
the street.

The girl's eyes crinkled up at the corners and sparkled brighter as she
threw her head back slightly and let out a deep laugh. Then, without
looking either way, she dashed across the street to Lena.

"You so crazy," the little girl said merrily as she landed on Lena's
side of the street. "What you mean, am I real? I'm as real as you is.

Here, feel my hand. What's that feel like to you? You want a piece of
pomegranate? It's one of the last ones we got last month.

Be careful, don't swallow the seeds. A tree'll grow up in you.

How old you is?

I'm gonna be seven soon, but I ain't in school yet. Mama ain't got a
chance to roll me yet. Let's play in the stream. You wanna be friends?"

Lena simply nodded yes to all the girl's questions and followed her to
the edge of the icy water and squatted down next to her. She was pleased
to have someone other than family to play with, especially after she was
certain that her new friend was indeed a little girl just like her, not
a creature sent from another world to Forest Avenue to torment her and
then disappear.

They played there in silence at the stream's edge for some time,
collecting small rocks worn smooth and shiny under the water's flow and
building them into shapes and dams beside the shoals of the water before
Lena thought to turn to her new playmate and ask, "What's your name?"

Without looking up from the patty of wet sand she was molding in her
hands, the little girl said, "Puddin' Tame. Ask me again, I'll tell you
the same." Then she looked at Lena out of the side of her dark eyes and
laughed slyly at the quizzical look on Lena's face.

"Girl," she said, "don't you know nothing? That's what everybody says
when you ask them something. Come on now, you do it. What's your name?"

"My name's Lena," Lena said proudly.

The girl nearly fell into the water laughing. "No, no, no," she screamed
and laughed. Then she grabbed Lena's shoulders with her wet sandy hands
and hugged her to her smelly little body in delight.

"Girl, you sho' mo' is funny," she said and her eyes crinkled up again.

Lena didn't know what to do with this cloak of teasing affection that
her new friend was embracing her with. She didn't think she had said
anything funny. It all made her a bit confused, and it showed on her
face. The girl looked at Lena and dropped her teasing tone quickly.

"My name is Sarah," she said seriously and stuck out her hand politely
the way Lena had seen grown men do to each other on the street.

The two little girls shook hands solemnly, then giggled.

Lena loved the girl immediately. She wanted to take Sarah home with her
right then to show her off to her mama and Grandmama, but Sarah said, "
I got to go home myself. I'm watching my sisters and brother."

And she pointed back across the street to the cluster of four wooden
shotgun houses built up on legs of cinder blocks. Each house was
surrounded with a patch of fine gray dust for front and back yards, and
had clotheslines in back crisscrossing each other and a bunch of young
children on the porch.

The four were almost identical-peeling gray paint, unscreened front
porches with parts of the railings missing, curtains at only a few of
the windows-but they looked nothing like any of the other houses on the
steep street. Although most of the other houses were smaller than
Lena's, they were palaces compared to the four sad sisters across from
where Lena and Sarah played.

The trees that grew between Sarah's row of houses and the Willbacks' big
white one were still full of orange and red leaves, which helped the
houses not look so shabby. But the brown house trimmed in cream on the
other side of the houses, where the old man lived, showed them all up to
hell. The old man's neatly kept lawn and the bucket plants on his front
porch made his neighbors' dusty yards and bare porches look thrown away.

"Which one is yours?" Lena wanted to know.

"That one on the end, next to the big chinaberry tree," Sarah answered.

"Where do you live?"

Lena turned around and saw that she could barely make out the green roof
of her own place through the trees of the woods and pointed in the
general direction of the big brick house.

Sarah drew in her breath and her eyes widened with excitement, "I'll
come visit you first thing in the morning," Sarah promhouses ised right
away. "I always wanted to see inside that house." Then she darted back
across the street right in front of a passing car without giving it a
glance. The car, a large green Oldsmobile, blew its horn and swerved
crazily to miss her.

They waved to each other one last time, then Lena turned and ran all the
way back home, only slowing up to skip down the long driveway and admire
her house.

When Lena ran onto the side screen porch she was too excited about her
new friend Sarah to remember not to let the screen door slam. But her
grandmother only smiled absentmindedly when she ran into the sewing room
chattering away about the little girl across the street.

"Lena, baby, be careful round that hot iron," she said as Lena nearly
collided with the ironing board that was always set up in the room while
her grandmother and mother sewed. Then she made the girl stand straight
and still while she held a green-andred plaid pleated skirt with
matching suspenders up to the child's waist. The entire woolen skirt was
only about half a foot long.

"Hmmm-huh," the old lady muttered with a few straight pins still in her
mouth as Lena wove the story about magic fruit made out of red jewels
and a little girl named Puddin'.

Her mother, when Lena found her sitting in the living room in her
favorite rose-colored chair reading a thick book without any pictures in
it, was no more receptive.

"Lena, baby, sit still for just a minute so Mama can finish this one
last page. You've been such a good girl all afternoon. As soon as I
finish this one last page, I'll put on some music for you. Some Billie
Holiday or some Sarah Vaughan, how about that?

Then you can help me bake a cake. What kind do you want? A chocolate or
a coconut?"

Nellie's voice was as seductive as the thought of a homemade cake.

"Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate," Lena screamed as she jumped down from
the arm of her mother's chair and ran over to the sofa to sit quietly
until her mother finished her reading. The thought of a moist yellow
cake covered with warm smooth brown icing pushed the image of Sarah
right out of her head.

But the next morning, with the sun barely breaking through the trees and
the boys still stumbling into each other half-asleep in the bathroom as
they got ready for school, the household seemed to rock with the sound
of banging at the front door.

At first everyone but Nellie, who knew she had left him snoring in the
bed next to her, thought it was Jonah again firing off shots from the
pistol he always carried with him-barn, barn, barn, barn, barn-the way
he had done late one night when he came home and found that Nellie had
locked and barred all the doors against him. Weary from a long night of
poker and carousing, he hadn't yelled and he hadn't cussed. He had just
pulled the gun out of his back pocket and fired into the roof of the
side porch, and the doors of the house had magically opened to him.

The five small holes that the gunshots made were still in the porch's
forest-green ceiling. Lena giggled whenever she looked up and saw them.
Her father's brashness frightened most people, but it didn't scare her
one bit.

She knew she was immune.

The gunshots had not only opened the locked door for her father, they
also had held in check all the talk Nellie had said she had for him
about him staying out as late as he wanted and not expecting anybody to
say anything about it. About what did he think she was, anyway? About
how sick and tired she was of him and his whores.

Overhearing Nellie's mutterings, Lena, sitting on the toilet, had
wondered what a whore was, since it didn't exactly sound like the thing
her Grandmama used to turn the dirt over in her garden. A simple garden
tool couldn't have made her mother as mad as this whore seemed to. And
Lena didn't think anything that sounded as bad as her mama made the word
sound could be so harmless.

The way her mama said it, "whore" sounded like it was covered with
spikes and prickly barbs.

So, as she pulled up her panties, she asked her mother for a definition.

Nellie just snapped, "Go back to bed, Lena."

The early-morning banging at the door was loud and insistent. Lena's
grandmother strode down the stairs with Lena beside her. Lena was
walking so close to her grandmother that she almost got tangled up in
the length of chenille robe flapping between the old lady's legs and
tumbled down the steps head over heels. Grandmama scratched the side of
her nose again and marched down the downstairs hall on her way to the
front door muttering to herself, "Who the hell is this come to our door
this time of morning banging like the goddamn police? If it's one of
jonah's half-witted flunkies, they'll be sorry they were ever born.

Yes, if it's one of those fanatical fools from The Place come here this
time of morning to borrow a couple of dollars to throw away on some
foolishness, they'll be sorry they ever learned how to count pennies
when I finish with em. Knocking on this door like they the damn police
or something."

Lena had to walk fast to keep up with her grandmother. Despite the
threatening banging at the door, she wasn't a bit afraid. She thought
nothing could befall her as long as the older lady stood between her and
the world.

Grandmama was out of breath and still cussing out "that fool out there"
when they reached the door. She didn't even peep out of one of the panes
of glass that edged the big door first. She just flung it open and stood
there with her arms folded over her flat breasts as Lena peered around
her legs.

At first all Grandmama and Lena could see in the breaking morning light
was a wide smile and a pink blouse. Then Lena recognized her friend.

"Sarah!" Lena screamed as she dashed past her grandmother's legs and ran
up to the door, pressing her face against the screen.

Grandmama, still annoyed at the early-morning visit, looked down at Lena
with a confused expression.

"It's Sarah, Grandmama, Puddin' Tame. I told you all bout her yesterday.

She's my friend. Don't you remember?"

Grandmama was still puzzled. It had never occurred to her that Lena
could have anything to do with this early-morning commotion at their
front door. On top of that she was having a hard time believing that
Lena, her baby, had made a friend without her Grandmama knowing about
it. And what a friend!

The dark little girl who stood on the front porch smiling for all she
was worth looked to Grandmama like a little piece of street trash who
had tried to doll herself up.

Grandmama was halfway right. Sarah had stayed up nearly all night
preparing for her first visit to Lena's big house. It felt like the most
important event of her short life, and she knew if she didn't prepare
for it, nobody would.

Everyone in Sarah's family was used to her doing things on her own. So
the night before, when her mother had heard her bumping around in the
nearly darkened house, the woman had just smacked her lips a couple of
times sleepily, turned over against the warm body of her husband, and
gone back to sleep.

Sarah had stopped rummaging through a cluttered drawer and stood
perfectly still when she heard her mother stir. She knew she had her
work cut out for her, and she didn't need anybody asking a lot of
questions and getting in the way while she tried her best to piece
together some kind of outfit.

Sarah wanted so much to look nice when she met Lena's people. But she
had so little to work with. When she thought she couldn't find a decent
pair of matching socks in the whole house, Sarah sat in the middle of
the cold bathroom floor and wept.

The only matching set was the tiny pair of faded lacy pink baby socks
she found stuck in the back of a drawer, which her mother had bought for
one of the children but had never had a fancy enough occasion to use.
Sarah brightened when she found a dark blue sock and a dark brown one
that belonged to her younger brother. If she didn't fold down the cuffs
of the socks, they almost looked like they were bought for her. And in
the light thrown off by the tone lamp with the broken shade in the front
room, the brown and blue socks looked like a perfect match.

Sarah didn't realize until she was standing in Lena's mama's big bright
kitchen that she was wearing mismatched socks. By then she was too happy
to care.

There was no shoe polish of any color in the house, so Sarah just took a
damp rag and wiped the red dust from her lace-up brown oxfords. They
looked fine as long as the leather remained wet, but as soon as the
shoes began to dry, they reverted to the smoky hue they had been for
months.

At least, Sarah thought, I don't have to worry that much about my
underwear. If I keep my dress down and don't flounce around too much, it
won't matter if I got holes in my drawers or not. As luck would have it,
she found a pair of her own panties that were still white and didn't
even have a pin hole in them in a pile of clean laundry someone had
taken off the line and left on the swayback chair in the kitchen.

Then her main concern became finding a dress without a hole in it.

Because she was usually as raggedy or neat as anyone else in her house,
Sarah rarely gave any thought to her attire. She woke in the morning,
put on something to cover her body, and went on with her day. But the
way Lena had been dressed that day, and the size of the house Lena lived
in, had made Sarah look at herself for a long time in the wavy mirror of
the old hall dresser and decide she wanted to wear something special to
her new friend's house.

With tiny lines of concentration creasing her forehead, she picked up
and discarded nearly every piece of clothing she found in two chests of
drawers, stuck down between the frayed cushions of the couch, or lying
under the cot where she and two of her sisters slept. She had long ago
outgrown the only "nice" Easter dress she had ever owned. It had been
passed down to her next sister, who despoiled it right away by putting
it on and playing in the mud.

The search seemed hopeless. Then she remembered the cardboard box full
of old clothes that a white woman her mother had once worked for had
dropped off at their house the Christmas before instead of coming up
with the five dollars she owed for almost a week's work. Her mother was
so disgusted that she had thrown the box into a corner of the porch and
dared anybody to go near it.

At the time, Sarah had shared her mother's anger and disappointment and
wouldn't touch the box of old clothes for anything in the world. She had
even stopped her sisters and brother from messing with it. But that was
then. Now Sarah needed something that wasn't ripped and torn and soiled
beyond repair, so she broke down and dragged the box into the kitchen
from the back porch.

She pulled out dozens of old men's shirts and plaid housedresses and
faded pastel dusters before she came to anything that looked like it
might fit her.

At the bottom of the box, under a piece of a yellowed sheet, she found a
layer of children's clothes. She lifted them all out and laid them on
the kitchen table. Then she threw everything else back into the box.

The bare light bulb hanging from the cord in the ceiling was one of the
brightest ones in the house, so Sarah stayed in the kitchen to examine
her discovery.

"Too little, too little, too big, too little, too big," Sarah muttered
to herself as she held up each piece to examine it briefly and then
dropped it into one of two piles on the table. When she had gone through
all the children's clothes on the table, she realized she hadn't once
said "My size."

So she picked up the small pile of "too little" clothes, dropped them
back into the cardboard box, and pushed it back onto the porch. Then she
returned to the "too big" pile on the table to see what she could use.

First Sarah went through the pile to check for pants and dresses and
blouses that had no holes or rips in them. Earlier, while Lena had been
engrossed in the piles of rocks and sand they had been building to dam
up the flow of the stream cascading beside the street, Sarah had
examined her new friend close up. She had been struck with the vivid red
of Lena's frock, which was unlike anything she owned.

But later, going over the afternoon meeting in her mind, the thing that
stood out about Lena's dress was not only its bright color but also its
neatness. No rips or tears at the seams, no threads hanging down-none of
the hem of the wide skirt dipping like a shelf below the rest of the
dress. Sarah was sharp enough to see that the collar was hand sewn and
the sleeves were eased into the armholes so they didn't pucker. And she
just somehow felt that the hem of the skirt had been turned under,
ironed flat, and stitched before the final edge was expertly measured
and hemmed. That's the kind of dress she was looking for in the pile of
"too big" items on the kitchen table.

In what was left of her childish hopes, Sarah fully expected to find it
there. But there was no hand-made red dress to fit her in the pile of
children's apparel on the kitchen table. The closest she came to it was
a long-sleeved pink blouse with stitching on the cuff and around the
buttonholes that was only slightly frayed at the collar, and a navy-blue
pleated skirt with elastic at the waist that some little girl had worn
as part of her school uniform.

The blouse's long sleeves hung below her knuckles and the armholes
sagged beneath her shoulders, but when she tucked the hem of the blouse
down into the elastic waistband of the blue skirt, it settled into neat
little pleats all around her rib cage and looked kind of cute, Sarah
thought. The skirt was longer than she would have liked, but it made a
pretty unbrelia-like display when she twirled around, and since she had
a clean white pair of panties to wear that weren't holey, she figured
she could twirl around a few times and remind everyone who thought the
skirt was a sad little sack that it was really quite attractive on her.

She planned to hit the skirt and blouse a few times with the ancient
iron her mama kept on a kitchen shelf under the sink. But when she
plugged it in, the iron shot golden sparks from the raw copper coils
exposed beneath the ragged black covering on the cord. Sarah jumped back
and yanked the plug from the wall socket for fear of going up in flames
before she got the chance to see inside Lena's house. She spread the
outfit on the kitchen table and tried to press out the wrinkles by
running the palm of her hand over and over the material.

But she gave up after a few tries.

"I'll just walk fast and whip them wrinkles out, like Mama say to do,"
Sarah told herself as she went into the bathroom and started running
warm water into the sink.

It was much too cold in the small bathroom for Sarah to think about
stripping naked and getting into a tub full of tepid waterthe only kind
that came out of their hot-water faucets. And besides, if she had run
water into the tub, everybody in the house would have awakened to find
out what was going on that deserved a full bath. Instead, Sarah took the
bar of rough gray soap from the wire dish above the sink, held it under
the warm running water, and rubbed up enough suds on a rag she took from
hanging on the side of the tub to run over the trunk of her body and
leave a light trail of suds behind on her skin. It was the type of bath
her mother took when she was late running out to work or going downtown
to a juke joint. "I don't have time to bathe," she'd mutter to herself
as she undressed. "I'll just take a wipeoff." The toilette was what most
women in Pleasant Hill, regardless of where they lived, called a
"whore's bath," but Sarah didn't know what a whore was any more than
Lena did.

After she rinsed the suds off with the wet rag, she dried off with a
stiff towel hanging on a nail behind the door and quickly slipped into
the pair of panties and undershirt she had found in the laundry. As she
walked around the house in her bare feet turning off lights, she
shivered a bit as the air seeping though gaps in the thin walls hit her
damp skin. When she finally settled in for the night, she was grateful
for the warm spots her sisters, asleep in their narrow cot, made for her
to snuggle into.

The walls of her house were so thin and holey that in winter the wind
whistled through the small rooms like a prairie storm through a log
cabin. The floors, buckled and rough in unexpected places, creaked each
time someone in the house shifted, let alone walked across them, And the
whole place smelled of dried and fresh urine that seemed to have soaked
into the very wood of the structure so long ago that its residents no
longer even noticed the scent.

When Sarah awoke the next morning, she didn't feel as if she had slept a
bit that night. She had dozed off a little, but the excitement of her
visit to her new friend's house woke her before daylight and before
anyone else got up.

She put on her socks and shoes in the dark room, turned on the light in
the bathroom only long enough to find the hair brush and rake it over
her head one time, then switched the light off and headed for the
kitchen.

Her new pink blouse and blue skirt were still lying on the table,
wrinkled as they had been the night before, but Sarah didn't pay the
wrinkles any attention as she quickly buttoned up the blouse and pulled
the skirt over her head.

She twirled one time to make sure the skirt still ballooned prettily the
way it had the night before and headed out the door to Lena's house
without waking anyone-not even her father who woke early to get a spot
on the dayworker's truck that drove through the neighborhood. By the
time she got halfway down the driveway leading to Lena's house, she
couldn't keep from grinning.

Before Sarah knew anything, she and Lena were standing on opposite sides
of the screen door beaming at each other in the glow of their new
friendship.

But Lena soon grew impatient with her Grandmama's dazed gaping from one
to the other of the two little girls and pulled a handful of chenille
robe.

"Grandmama, open the door. Let Sarah in. She came to visit me."

"Okay, baby," her grandmother answered vaguely as she flipped the metal
hook from its eye and pushed the door just wide enough for Sarah to
squeeze through.

Sarah bounded into the hall and stood beneath the overhead light,
excitement and awe written all over her ashy face. It was like a palace
to Sarah, the highly polished hardwood floors, the pictures hanging on
the wall near the door, the simple chandelier over the dining-room table
in the next room, the dining room itself with its big oval table and six
high-backed matching chairs pulled up to it, the mouth-watering bowl of
fruit sitting in the middle of the table were like something in her
dreams.

Grandmama thought just what Lena knew she would when she got a good look
at Sarah, I sure would like to scrub that little rusty neck and grease
her down with Vaseline. And when the old woman got a whiff of Sarah's
mildewed clothes, she thought, I bet she hasn't ever had a real good hot
soapy bath in a tub in her life.

"So you're our baby's new friend?" Grandmama said out loud.

"Yeah," Sarah answered, her voice gravelly from getting up so early but
so respectful that her short answer didn't imply rudeness, even to
Grandmama.

"Say, yes, ma'am,' " Grandmama instructed Sarah gently.

"Yes, ma'am," Sarah said carefully, repeating Grandmama's gentle
inflection.

"Well, next time wait till the sun has come up good before you come
visiting," Grandmama said pointedly. Then, "I guess ya'll want something
to eat. You had breakfast yet, Sarah?"

"Breakfast?" Sarah was puzzled.

"Have you eaten this morning?" the old lady rephrased her question as
she headed for the kitchen.

"Oh, no," Sarah answered with her eyes caressing the fruit on the dining
room table as they passed by.

All three of them had to blink a few times as they entered the black-and
white kitchen situated at the eastern corner of the house.

The early-morning sun flooded the spacious room with shafts of
startlingly bright light that hadn't reached the other parts of the
house yet. Sarah felt as though she were walking out onto a stage, it
didn't seem real. She had seen kitchens similar to Lena's when she
accompanied her mother to her occasional daywork jobs in the white
neighborhood behind their house. But those kitchens didn't smell like
Lena's. In fact there had been no smell at all except the ones she and
her mother brought there.

But even first thing in the morning, Lena's kitchen smelled wonderful.

And it wasn't just the fresh aroma of coffee brewing on the stove and
buttery grits and sausage grease and cinnamon and sugar dusted lightly
on buttered slices of toast. It was the layers of smells that had
settled on the walls and floor and worked their way into the fiber of
the room that made Sarah come to a halt near the threshold. Sarah could
smell the vegetable soup Nellie had made the week before when the
weather first turned chilly. She smelled the fish dinner they had had
that Friday. She smelled the chocolate layer cake even before she saw it
sitting in a glass-covered cake dish on the top of the refrigerator.

She came close to bursting into tears with the yearning that the room
called up in her swelling heart.

Lena grabbed her friend's dry hand and pulled her into the kitchen and
over to the white enamel table to sit down.

"Nellie," Grandmama said to Lena's mother who stood by the sink looking
out the window in the direction of the woods. "Look who was making all
that noise at our front door this time of morning."

Nellie turned around with her thin eyebrows raised. They shot up even
higher when she saw Sarah.

"Well, I be damned," she said. "Now, who is this?"

Lena giggled and so did Sarah.

"This is a new friend of Lena's," Grandmama said with a strange lilt to
her voice on the word "friend" that made both little girls stop laughing
and look into the old woman's face.

Lena kicked Sarah under the table to encourage her to speak.

"Girl, what you kicked me for?" Sarah asked in her gruff, raspy voice.

"This my mama, Sarah," Lena said as she reached under the table and
patted the spot on Sarah's leg that she had kicked.

"Where do you live?" Grandmama asked Sarah as she placed a small glass
decorated with circus animals and filled full with orange juice in front
of each girl.

"She lives across the street in those houses next to Mrs. Willback's
house.

Next to that big tree. What kind of tree is that?"

Lena asked Sarah. Sarah couldn't answer at first because she had picked
up her glass of juice and was drinking down the fresh tart drink in
small continuous swallows, allowing the citrus tang to coat the inside
of her mouth and throat. With one last gulp and a loud smack of her
lips, she put the glass back on the table and answered.

"Chinaberry."

"And just how did the two of you get together?" Grandmama asked as she
walked over to the table with more orange juice and poured another
stream into Sarah's glass that made the child's eyes light up even more.

But before Sarah had a chance to answer, Nellie jumped in and said
nervously, "Oh, with our little girl, it's no telling, but I assume that
you didn't cross that street out there, Lena."

"No, Mama, Sarah did. You ought to see her dodge those cars," Lena said
proudly.

Nellie laughed softly. "I bet she can."

After that, Sarah would show up on their doorstep regularly to join Lena
and the boys for breakfast. Some days she had to run home after eating
to "do something." Other times she stayed all day until Grandmama made
her go home.

When anyone asked her why she didn't go to school, she'd say, "We going
up there any day now, soon as mama gets a chance to roll me." But for
more than a year she never attended any school other than the one she
found in her own backyard.

"Lena, what are you and old Rough-and-Ready doing today?" Grandmama
would ask as the two girls came into the kitchen and took seats next to
where she sat making peach puffs or carefully cutting the seams away
from a pile of pole beans covering the table. Lena's father said he had
gagged and nearly choked on strings Nellie had left on the beans soon
after they got married. From that time on, Grandmama always prepared the
pole beans in their house.

"Don't know yet," Sarah would answer for both of them, not minding the
old lady's all too appropriate nickname for her. Grandmama made a point
of always having something healthful for Sarah whenever she came into
the kitchen-a piece of fruit, a sandwich with extra slices of tomato, a
pile of raisins-and she always gave the bigger portion to Sarah.

But whatever their plans were, everyone knew that they would involve
pretend. It was their favorite game. Everything they played hinged on
the basic unit of Let's Pretend. These games sometimes involved props
and background and sometimes they didn't, and that was fine, too. At
Lena's house, where her attic, filled to bursting, yielded all kinds of
costumes and paraphernalia to fill in the chinks of the stories, their
games were elaborate and staged. But Grandmama or Nellie or one of the
boys always had to go up the steps and drag down boxes or armloads of
stuff because Lena still refused to go into the attic as long as she
knew the portrait of her dead infant aunt was stored up there.

For the few days each winter when it was too cold to play out-of-doors,
Sarah came to Lena's house and they played and danced in the big
upstairs hall in front of the wide floor-length mirror so they could see
every movement they made. In the daytime, with her friend by her side,
Lena was never frightened of the big mirror, as she was during the
nights on her bathroom runs.

it was bare-bones pretending under the chinaberry tree, which was the
only place they were allowed to play at her house year-round, but that
didn't bother the girls. Despite the house's deficiencies-glaringly
obvious to the adults in the neighborhood-Sarah had two things in her
yard that Lena and every other child in Pleasant Hill envied her for, a
mature and flourishing pomegranate tree and the ancient chinaberry whose
broad sturdy limbs swooped down to the ground and back to the sky to
form natural nooks and dens. Lena and Sarah called it their house." The
year Sarah and Lena discovered each other, the two of them planned all
winter that, when the warm weather came, they would both move into the
chinaberry tree by themselves and live off the fruits of the
pomegranate.

"You'll have a room, and I'll have a room," Lena assured Sarah.

Sarah's two sisters still wet the cot she shared with them in the front
room of her house. "We'll make two beds out of pine straw and
Grandmama's flowers, and it'll smell so good in our house, we won It
never have to clean up." It was hard for Lena to believe, considering
the number of babies and toddlers that roamed the house and yard all day
long, but Sarah was the eldest child in the Stanley household. She had
responsibilities that Lena never knew about.

They were best friends, sharing games and secrets, special words and
questions. But the first time Lena remembered seeing Sarah's world
clearly, it was winter and raining very hard, too hard for Lena to head
out the door into the cold sheets of water. Lena was stuck at Sarah's
for dinner, even though her mother had told her not to accept dinner
invitations because Sarah's family had enough trouble feeding their own
members without having guests' mouths as well.

"Just say, No thank you, I already ate' or I'm going to eat when I get
home,' " Nellie instructed Lena.

By the time Raymond came running up on the porch with her yellow
raincoat and an umbrella, Lena had seen Sarah's family at home for
dinner. It was a revelation.

Sarah's mother stood in the tiny kitchen, movingquickly from the sink to
the tiny white stove, opening cans, stirring, and chopping. She worked
quietly, not saying a word to Lena and the other children assembled on
the floor and sitting in the room's one swaybacked chair.

When she was finished, Sarah's mother laid down the big metal spoon with
holes in it, turned to the children, and announced, "Catch as catch
can." Then she walked out onto the lean-to porch to light up a
cigarette, blowing long furls of white smoke out into the driving rain.

The other children rose quickly and lined up behind Sarah with small
plates and bowls in their hands. Lena could tell what was cooking in the
big blue pot even before Sarah lifted the lid off and steam roiled up to
the cracking ceiling.

It was neckbones. The distinctive pork scent mixed with tomatoes from
the two big yellow-labeled cans sitting on the kitchen table had wrapped
itself around the very hairs in Lena's nose. She didn't dare look in the
pot for fear of going against her mother's orders and succumbing to the
temptation to share the meal, but she guessed that Sarah's mother had
put in lots of onions and pungent bell peppers and fistfuls of spaghetti
that she broke in half first.

Neckbones was one of Lena's favorite dinners. They had them two ways at
her house. If her mother cooked, they were made the way Sarah's mother
did, with tomatoes and spaghetti. If her grandmother was in charge of
cooking the meal, the bony meat was always prepared with potatoes and
thick brown gravy.

Although Lena knew both her mother and Grandmama wanted her to lean one
way or the other in her preference for neckbones, prepared red or brown,
she never made a choice. She could never bear the thought of life
without neckbones both ways.

When Sarah had filled all the children's bowls and plates, she filled
her own plate, broke off a piece of bread from the charred hoecake in
the black skillet, and sat on the floor with the others who were already
wolfing down their food. Not a word was said until every plate was
clean. When Lena asked why everybody was so quiet while they ate, Sarah
looked at her as if she had just pointed out the holes in her sisters'
drawers, and Lena was sorry she had said anything.

One warm murky day in their second summer, Lena found her friend sitting
beneath the protected wings of the chinaberry tree, playing with mounds
of dirt between her opened legs. Sarah's house seemed strangely quiet,
free of the noises and traffic that usually encircled the house.

The dirt in Sarah's yard was gray and dusty and didn't look as tempting
to Lena as the rich brown loam under the pine trees in her own yard.

But she had to fight the urge to reach down and put a handful of it into
her mouth anyway. Lena understood perfectly why Estelle, who came from
time to time to help clean the house, kept chunks of stark white laundry
starch in her apron pockets and munched on it throughout the day.

But Lena had promised her mother that she would stop eating dirt. And it
seemed no matter how hard she wiped her mouth, Nellie could always tell
when she had been eating the stuff. So, instead of picking up a palmful,
holding her head back, and letting the grains of dirt trickle into her
open mouth from the fist of her hand, she just sat down next to Sarah
and started building her own pile of earth into a hill.

"What's your name?" Lena asked playfully, in their customary greeting.

Sarah looked up from the sandhill of earth at her knees and smiled at
Lena. "Puddin' Tame," she answered.

"What do you want to play?" she asked Sarah after a while.

"Let's play like we married," Sarah said without hesitation.

"Okay," Lena agreed.

"I'll be the man and you be the woman," Sarah said as she pushed aside
the top of the pile of dirt.

"You sit at the table and I'll cook us some breakfast," suggested Lena
as she looked around the yard for the few pieces of plastic and china
plates and cups they used for serving pieces and sticks for bread, rocks
for meat, mounds of dirt for rice, mashed potatoes, and grits, and dark
green leaves from the trees around them for collard and turnip greens.

it was a careful game of pretend eating they played. Lena treated it
with as much reverence as the real thing was accorded in her own
household. She always got a pan of water and washed the rock of "meat"
well before putting it in an old dented pot or shoebox "oven" to cook.

And she washed and fingered the chinaberry leaves carefully and
tenderly, just the way her mother and grandmother did before shredding
them and putting them in a pot with a rock for seasoning.

She had been in the kitchen once and seen her grandmother stand at the
sink for the longest time examining each leaf in a pile of collards she
had just picked from her garden, where they grew year-round.

Lena had thought at first that the old lady was looking for worms until
she beckoned her over to stand on a chair at the drain beside her.

"Look at this, baby, all these little roads in a single leaf," Grandmama
said softly as she traced the separate pale veins in the dark verdant
leaf with her wrinkled index finger. "And listen, just listen to this
music." Then she had run the soft pad of her thumb over the dark green
surface of a leaf, and the thing let out a little baby squeak. They both
just smiled in wonder.

Sarah sat near her pile of dirt and thought awhile. Then she shook her
head as she watched Lena begin to gather the plates. "No, not like that.
You want me to show you how to really play house? I know. I seen it
plenty of times."

"Okay," Lena agreed easily, even though she knew she had watched her
family all her life and knew how to play house just as well as Sarah.

But she figured she and her friend enjoyed each other too much to waste
time disagreeing over something that didn't matter all that much.

"We just need one thing," Sarah said. "I'll go get it."

And she hurried off to the empty front porch of her house and returned
right away with a copy of the Mulberry Clarion in her hand. It looked so
stiff and clean, Lena knew it had to be that day's copy of the
newspaper. Besides, it was Friday and Lena knew that most people in
Pleasant Hill, even those who didn't read the newspaper every day, took
the Clarion on Fridays because that was the day the paper included the
page that Rowana Jordan wrote and edited.

Stretched across the top of that inside page, just before the want ads,
was the standard heading "News of Our Colored Community."

When Mulberry's one colored newspaper had gone out of business at the
beginning of the fifties, Miss Rowana, as everyone called her, persuaded
the Clarion to insert black folks' news once a week by promising to sell
ads, take photographs, and write all the stories herself. And she was
true to her word, rushing all over town in her too-fancy dresses and
outrageous hats collecting news, church notices, wedding and birth
announcements, and gossip, along with receipts and ads from funeral
homes, barbershops, grocery stores, and the Burghart Theatre. She
already had a tiny storefront office on Cherry Street, far enough away
from the newspaper's building to please both her and her employers. So
she just changed the sign from the Mulberry Crier to the Mulberry
Clarion and continued working.

The newspaper Sarah carried was still rolled up the way it had been
thrown. And the little girl held it out in front of her like a magic
wand. As soon as she got back to their spot under the tree, she plopped
down in the dust and began unrolling the paper.

"Sarah," Lena said, "your daddy read that paper yet?"

"Uh-uh," Sarah answered as she continued to spread the paper out in her
hands.

"Then you better leave it alone till they do read it. Nothing makes my
daddy madder than for somebody to come and tear up the paper before he
gets a chance to read it. He says it shows a goddamn lack of
consideration."

Sarah sucked her teeth derisively as she separated one big broadsheet
from the others and laid it up on the elbow of a limb of the chinaberry
tree they sat under. "Shoot, nobody'll even notice it's gone. If I
didn't move it, it woulda sat there forever."

Lena still wasn't convinced, but she was too intrigued with what Sarah
was going to do with the paper to press her argument.

When Sarah had all the sheets separated from one another, she divided
them evenly, giving Lena four double wide sheets and keeping the others
for herself.

"What we gonna do with these?" Lena wanted to know.

Sarah looked around the base of the tree that was their "house" and
picked a corner where the limbs touched the ground.

"We need to go over to our bedroom. It's nighttime," Sarah said as she
picked up her sheets of newsprint and stepped into another part of the
"house."

Lena followed her.

Sarah sat down and pointed to the spot next to her for Lena to join her
in the dust. Lena sat down. She was beginning to realize that this was a
private, ritualized game they were about to play. And when Sarah said,
"Our children sleep so we gotta be quiet," Lena knew she had been right,
and she was excited. As many times as she had been frightened by some
apparition or discovery, she couldn't keep herself from loving a
mystery, especially when she was with someone in her family or Sarah and
felt safe.

"This what you got to do," Sarah explained as she crumpled a sheet of
the newspaper up into a ball, lifted up her skirts, and stuck the paper
down into the front of her panties. She leaned back against the stump of
the tree and looked down at her crotch, appraising the difference the
addition made. Lena sat next to her staring at it, too.

Lena couldn't take her eyes off Sarah's dingy panties, now bulging at
the crotch as Sarah added another ball of newspaper, then another. The
newspaper balled up like it was and nestled inside Sarah's drawers
didn't look like anything other than what it was. But Sarah continued to
fool with it, arranging the rounded part against her body and making one
end of the clump of paper into a pointed edge, which she aimed at the
pad of her panties.

Lena knew she was supposed to keep quiet because the ritual had begun,
but she just had to ask. "Sarah," she whispered, "what's that supposed
to be?"

"I'm the man," Sarah said authoritatively. "That's my thing, my johnson.

I'm supposed to have it."

She patted her newspaper growth one last time, then grabbed one of
Lena's sheets of paper and scooted over to her spot in the dust.

"Here," Sarah said as she handed Lena a ball of the newspaper. "You do
the same thing. That'll be your thing, you a grown oman, so that'll be
your pussy."

"I already got one," Lena said as she started to pull down her panties
to show Sarah. "We call it a matchbox at our house. It just ain't as big
as a grown woman."

"I know you got a thing," Sarah said, with a touch of exasperation
creeping into her voice. "All girls do, but you right, it ain't big
enough. So, go on, put the paper down in your panties like me." And Lena
complied, shoving the stiff paper into the front of her white panties,
now rapidly turning gray in the dust. "Ouch, that's scratchy," she
complained as she moved the paper around trying to find a more
comfortable place against her skin.

"That's okay," Sarah said as she scooted over to Lena to sit facing her
between her opened legs. "I think it's supposed to hurt some. That's
what'my daddy make it sound like. He say, Oooo, baby, yeah, that hurt so
good, do it some more, uh, yeah, that hurt just right."

" Sarah had moved in so close to Lena that their two panty fronts, both
bulging out in front of them, were now touching. Without any further
explanation. She started moving her body around, rubbing her paper penis
against Lena's panties and making short sucking sounds as she pulled air
between her clenched teeth. She threw her head back and closed her eyes,
imitating her father, the whole time repeating, "Uh, yeah, uh, yeah,
right there, uh-huh." Lena watched in fascination as her friend
continued to rub up against her in the dust and to suck her teeth as if
she were in pain.

Sarah's face was a picture of pleasure glazed over with a thin icing of
pain, like the faces of women at The Place who danced and ground their
hips to the beat of a saxophone solo played on the jukebox. She seemed
to pay Lena no attention, so Lena figured she was supposed to imitate
her friend.

She threw her own head back and closed her eyes like Sarah and began
rotating the bottom of her body, the part in her panties stuffed with
stiff newspaper, up against Sarah. Lena felt a little silly at first and
couldn't stop thinking about how dirty the seat of her panties was
getting from being ground into the fine gray dust under the big
chinaberry tree. But since Sarah, with her eyes still closed and her
raspy voice still spitting out the litany of "Yeah, ooh, yeah, ooh,
yeah, do it," seemed intent on playing this game, she closed her eyes
and gave herself over to the pretending.

"Oh, baby," Lena mimicked her friend in earnest and scooted her bottom a
little closer to Sarah's. The movement forward suddenly pressed an edge
of the newspaper in her panties into the split of her vagina and across
her clitoris.

"Uh," she yiped in surprise, and the prick of pleasure shot through her
pelvis and slowly melted in her stomach.

Her elbows, resting on the crook of a low limb of the chinaberry behind
her to prop her back up off the ground, suddenly lost their gristle and
slipped off the edge. Her shoulders landed on the ground with a dull
plop, raising a dry dust storm around her ears. But Lena didn't stop to
give the fall a thought. She was lost in the exquisite wet feeling that
was spreading through her hips and rolling down her thighs.

Letting the ball of newspaper lead her, she rose up on her elbows and
pushed her bottom back toward Sarah, brushing her stuffed panties back
up against her friend in search of more of that quick warm feeling.

She opened her eyes briefly to stare into Sarah's face to see if it
mirrored what she imagined her own must look like. Satisfied that it
did, she closed her eyes again and continued gyrating her little body
against her friend's, sucking air between her teeth the way she had done
automatically when the quick warm thing inside her had melted before.

Suddenly she felt the large strong grasp of a fist clutch her upper arm
just below the sleeve of her dress and pull her roughly away from Sarah.
At first Lena thought it was the strong arms of the chinaberry tree come
to life to grab her. Her eyes flew open.

Sarah's mama's face was a mask of rage. She had just been weary when she
came looking for Sarah, calling her name over and over to ask what had
happened to the newspaper, but when she found her with Lena pressed
together, rubbing against each other in the dust, their panties
protruding with the turgescence of her Friday newspaper, she turned
furious.

"What are ya'll doing!" she screamed as she loomed over the two girls.

"What are ya'll doing over here?"

But she didn't wait for an answer. She just screamed at Lena. "Don't be
trying to hide from me. I see you. I see what you doing. You little
nasty girl. I shoulda known better than to let Sarah play with you."

Sarah and Lena didn't know what to say. Sarah's mama still had Lena's
arm in her grasp and lifted her away from her daughter like a rag doll.

"Think you so damn fine with your little red dresses and your hair
ribbons and your big house. Well, you ain't so fine, is you? just
another dirty little girl, trying to do nasty when you think ain't
nobody looking."

Sarah, seeing the attack on her friend, tried to jump in with an
explanation.

"It was me, Mama, it wasn't Lena. It was my game."

But the woman didn't want to hear any of that. "Shut up, Sarah. I know
what I see with my own eyes. You go on up to the house. I'll deal with
your butt later. You know better than this." But Sarah didn't move.

Then, turning back to Lena, who was trying to wrench herself away from
the woman's grasp, "I got a good mind to go across the street and tell
your fineass ma just what I caught her precious baby doing. Yeah, I
oughta go tell her what her precious daughter was doing with my little
girl."

Then she turned on Sarah again. "Sarah, if you don't get your ass in
that house, you better, girl."

With her attention wandering from Lena, her grasp on the child loosened
too, and Lena, suddenly free, started to dash away from the screaming
woman.

But Sarah's mama looked back in time and caught Lena's skirt tail in her
fist.

"Yeah, but she probably wouldn't believe me. Yeah, probably put it off
on Sarah. That's right, little girl, you better run on home, get on out
my yard.

You don't own everything, you know." Sarah's mother was about to release
her grip on Lena's skirt. Then she had a thought. She flipped the girl's
skirt tail and grabbed the elastic band of Lena's panties and reached
inside.

"And gimme back my newspaper," she said with a snarl as she yanked the
crumpled paper from Lena's drawers. "I ain't read it yet." Lena ran all
the way home and sat quietly on the side porch steps getting her breath
until her mama called her in to dinner.

The last thing Lena thought before she fell into a dreamless sleep that
night was that she and Sarah would be friends forever, no matter how her
mama had acted earlier that day. Nothing could change that.

Despite the strange thoughts and ghosts that had popped up unexpected
all her short life, Lena still hoped there were some things she could
count on.

Sarah had always been there when Lena called her. Usually, when Lena's
household got busy midmorning, she would just go to the end of her
driveway and yell for Sarah, and Sarah would emerge from her house or
the chinaberry tree and lead Lena safely across the street or just come
over to Lena's house to play. Lena could count on Sarah's consistency.

Consistency of any kind pleased and reassured Lena in her world of
apparitions and uncertainties.

So she couldn't understand it when, late in the afternoon, three days
after Sarah's mother had found them rubbing their bodies together, she
went to the end of her driveway as usual and shouted for her friend and
no one appeared in the yard across the street. No one. Lena didn't think
she had ever seen Sarah's house when there wasn't someone playing in the
yard or sitting on the porch or standing in the doorway.

Whenever she and her family drove past, she always threw up her hand in
greeting before she even looked over that way good, as her grandmother
said, because she was so sure there would be someone there to return her
greeting.

Lena called for Sarah a couple more times, and when she still didn't get
a response, she looked both ways up and down Forest Avenue then dashed
across the street by herself. She giggled with pride at having made it
safely across the street, but as soon as she stepped into Sarah's yard
she felt something was different. It was so quiet and still.

Not only was no member of Sarah's family visible, there was no sign that
any of them were even there. The front door, usually standing wide open
except on the few bitterly cold winter days, was shut tight. No light
burned in the front room or the kitchen window on the side. The radio
that was turned on every time Lena had ever been there was gone from its
spot on the frontroom windowsill and the window itself was tightly shut.

"Sarah! Sarah!" She called as she headed around the side of the house
past the low limbs of the chinaberry tree that looked as deserted as the
house did.

But there was no answer. When Lena got around to the back of the house
she saw that even the raggedy curtains that had hung at the kitchen
window in back were no longer there.

Maybe they're doing spring cleaning like at my house, Lena said to
herself. She headed up the plank steps leading to the back porch with
the idea in mind of looking through the low kitchen window and rapping
on it to stir someone inside. With each step she took, the tiny porch
made a mournful squeak that sent small shivers up her legs. But even
before she made it to the window, Lena had a strong feeling that she
wouldn't like what she saw. So the kitchen with its dirty linoleum floor
bare of its few pieces of furniture and the hall without its old dresser
and mirror and what she could see of the empty front room didn't
surprise her. It just left her very sad. As if she had lost the delicate
pearl necklace her Grandmama had given her.

At first Lena tried to tell herself that Sarah would probably show up
soon, laughing in her familiar raspy way, her brother and sisters in
tow. But even as she thought of her friend, Lena realized with a start
that she couldn't even remember what her friend's voice sounded like,
and her sadness turned to fear.

A sudden cool breeze raised goose bumps on her arms and she looked up
and noticed that dark clouds were gathering in the western sky. When the
smell of rain blew in on the next gust of wind, Lena knew it was time to
go back home.

There didn't seem to be anything else to do. She couldn't wait any
longer.

As she hurried back through the empty yard in front of Sarah's house,
big drops of rain began hitting the ground, raising tiny clouds of gray
dust like puffs of smoke. Suddenly, going through Sarah's yard felt like
a walk through a graveyard. As a sense of loss enveloped her, Lena began
to feel as if her friend Sarah were dead.

Not bothering to look either way, Lena dashed across the street toward
her house as the rain started coming down in pellets. She didn't stop
running until she had reached the kitchen, where she found her mama and
Grandmama cleaning out the pantry.

"Mama, Mama," she cried as she ran into the first pair of arms she came
to, knocking her mother to the floor. "Sarah's gone, Sarah's gone! "

"What, baby? What in God's name is wrong?" Nellie asked, becoming
frantic at the sight of Lena's tears.

"Sarah, she's gone-nothing there. I think she's dead!" Lena sobbed.

"Oh, sugar," Grandmama said as she stooped beside Lena and Nellie
sitting on the floor. "I forgot all about it. I shoulda told you, baby."

"Told her what, Miss Lizzie?" Nellie demanded.

.. It's Rough and Ready, Lena's little friend Sarah. She and her family
moved away. Moved on the other side of town, to East Mulberry.

You know, Nellie, Yamacraw, you know that neighborhood. Miss Willback
cross the street told me. Sarah and her people got put out over there.

Miss Willback saw their pitiful little few sticks of furniture out in
the yard yesterday."

"Sarah's gone, Sarah's gone," was all Lena could say.

"Oh, don't worry, baby, you and your friend can still visit each other,"
Grandmama tried to reassure her. She would say anything to make Lena
feel better.

"Oh no she won't, not in that neighborhood she won't," Nellie said.

"See, I told you Sarah was gone, she's gone for good," Lena cried, her
sobs turning into hiccups.

"Lord," Nellie said to Miss Lizzie as she kissed the top of Lena's head
and rocked her in the salty, sweaty valley between her breasts.

"My baby is getting to be so high-strung. just like I was when I was her
age."

Nellie's ministration finally calmed Lena down, but it did nothing to
ease the knot of pain Lena felt at the loss of her friend. The following
fall when she went to grade school for the first time, she stood around
in the yard searching for a little girl who looked like Sarah. There was
none. All these girls were shined, polished, and pressed, their hair
neatly snatched back into braids and barrettes.

None had Sarah's rusty beauty. Then one of her firstgrade classmates, a
chubby girl who stood alone with her blouse already creeping out of her
skirt first thing in the morning, caught Lena's attention.

Her eyes didn't sparkle like Sarah's, but they did seem to be full of as
much mischief. And when Lena sidled up to her, she smiled and slipped
her hand into Lena's.

The gesture reminded Lena of Sarah.

When the first bell clanged, Lena and her new friend Gwen marched
bravely into the strange schoolhouse side by side.

Still, on her way home from school that day, Lena felt a tug at her
heart when she passed her first friend Sarah's house and missed her all
over again.

From time to time down at The Place, Lena saw Sarah's mother, but when
the girl tried to speak and ask about Sarah, the woman pretended she
hadn't heard and kept walking from the back door on out the front.

For years afterward Lena couldn't understand why, in a town as small as
Mulberry, she never ran into Sarah, not once since she was six years
old.

Sarah had disappeared from her life.

The Mcpherson family at the dinner table reminded Lena of the priest,
altar boys, and communicants at Mass.

Jonah, at the head of the table, sat in the largest chair, with arms.

Nellie sat opposite him, facing the kitchen door. Lena was on Jonah's
left, Edward on his right. Grandmama was on Nellie's right, Raymond on
her left. Even the fabric her mother had chosen to cover the chairs'
seat cushions-alternating strips of maroon satin and beige satin
separated by ridges of gold-reminded Lena of the priest's vestments of
gold, purple, green, red, and white.

Although there was a huge red brick fireplace in the dining
room-identical to the one in the living room-behind where Lena and
Grandmama sat, it was never filled with logs and lit. Years before,
Grandmama had placed pieces of a set of fine bone china that she had
received as wedding presents after the turn of the century over the
fireplace on the dining room mantelpiece. Much of the set had been
broken while her children were growing up, and Grandmama had vowed to
keep the remaining pieces intact. There was a soup tureen and ladle, a
huge turkey platter, and a gravy boat and saucer.

By the time Lena was six, even the boys had learned, "No one runs in
this room."

The rule was as much because of the small brass urn on the room's
mantelpiece as the fine china beside it.

The urn, which Lena liked to think of as made of gold, contained the
ashes of Miss Lizzie's husband, Lena's grandfather, who died the year
Lena was born.

Like Lena he had been born in November and, according to Grandmama,
whenever a person born in that month dies, another birth takes place in
the family the following November.

Lena liked the sound of that story. Instead of feeling responsible for
Granddaddy's death, as the boys sometimes taunted her, she felt a
product of his death-a seed from the lips of a dying flower.

"That's your granddaddy there," Miss Lizzie would sometimes tell the
children, matter-of-factly pointing a wet iced-tea spoon toward the
mantelpiece as she helped them clear off the dishes after a meal. "By
rights, he's not supposed to be up there. He always said that I was to
sprinkle his ashes on the railroad tracks on Montpelier Avenue right
before the seven-ten southbound Silver Crescent headed for New Orleans
came through. Your granddaddy worked for the railroad all his life,
first as a laborer, then as a boiler washer, finally as a switchman.

Lord knows, he loved a train. That's where your daddy gets it from.

"But your granddaddy, he always wanted to be headed for New Orleans,
headed for New Orleans. You know, that's where we went on our wedding
trip.

Went down on the train, stayed a week.

"All you had to do was mention New Orleans to get him to grinning. And
it wasn't just that wedding trip, either. It was those porters who put
those ideas into that man's head. He always said that that city meant
good times to him. People dancing in the street, even after a funeral.

Second line, they called it. Playing music when the mood hit 'em. He
even liked the idea of Marie Leveau and all her voodoo stuff. Tried to
get me to go to one of those all-night rituals while we were there.

But I said no thank you. I got enough sense to know not to be messing
around with the spirit world, specially when I was happy as could be and
didn't need no potion to keep my man."

Raymond and Edward would nudge each other and giggle at Grandmama's
confidence, and she'd notice for the first time that all three of the
children had stopped clearing the table and were standing around with
plates and silver in their hands. She'd motion for them to keep working
and caution Edward, "Boy, don't be shaking that tablecloth out the door
after dark. You know that's bad luck." Then she'd continue.

"But your granddaddy, he made me swear I'd toss his ashes on those
railroad tracks before the Crescent came through. Southbound,' he said.
Make sure it's southbound, Lizzie. Please, ma'am, don't send my ashes
north."

"just after he died, I couldn't do it, couldn't bring myself to let what
was left of him be thrown on some cold steel tracks, even thoughjonah
was perfectly willing to climb up that trellis and do his duty. Shit, it
was bad enough that he went and had already arranged to get himself
cremated in Atlanta. I figured Walter's soul wouldn't ever find no rest,
as it was with his body all burned up like that.

"At the last minute," she'd say wearily as she slumped down in one of
the dining-room chairs, "I just couldn't bear to part with his remains."

Then Lena and the boys would stop their dish-scraping and
silvercollecting and come sit down near the old lady and join her in
staring at the urn on the mantelpiece as if it were "The Ed Sullivan
Show." Lena, leaning.

against her Grandmama, would nuzzle her face into the woman's armpit.

"Hope he forgave me," Grandmama would say after a while. "Walter swore
he would haunt me every day of my life if I didn't follow his wishes.

But he never did. Sometimes I waited for him to come haunt me."

"Well, of course he didn't," Nellie would say from her reading chair in
the living room where she had been listening all the time. "The children
know there ain't no such thing as ghosts haunting you. I don't know why
you insist on rehashing those old tales." But Lena and the boys always
pleaded with Grandmama to tell them more.

Grandmama didn't even deign to throw Nellie a triumphant glance. She
prided herself on being the bigger person in most situations. Lena had
heard her tell an old friend that very thing one day as they sat on the
side screened porch while her mother was in the kitchen cooking dinner.

"You know, living here in this house that isn't really mine, and
especially with Nellie who has always been spoiled rotten just because
she's so pretty, I've had to be the bigger person in so many instances
and just overlook a lot of things that a small petty person might have
taken offense at."

The old friend had just reached over and patted Grandmama's hand,
resting on the arm of one of the big wicker chairs, as though somebody
had died.

The urn on the dining-room mantel was full of coarse gray material, like
the vermiculite Nellie added to her potting soil. Lena knew what it
looked like because the boys had told her so. They had taken the jar
down once when no one else was home and looked inside. When they tried
to make her look, too, she refused and ran away to hide behind the sofa
on the porch until her mama came home. She had no idea what she would
see down that jar. But she had an inkling that it would be something
like looking at the picture of her dead baby aunt that had hung over her
grandmother's bed. She had no intention of going looking for trouble.

In the center of the dining-room mantelpiece, between Granddaddy's ashes
and Grandmama's china, was a posed portrait of Grandmama's family,
Grandmama, Granddaddy, and her daddy and Aunt Sister as children. The
photograph was nearly identical to the one of Lena's family on the
mantelpiece in the living room, Nellie seated on the left, Jonah on the
right, Raymond next to his mother, Edward next to his father, and Lena
at age nine months in the middle sitting on what looked like a fern
stand.

Everyone in Lena's black-and-white photograph wore a tight smile except
Lena, who had only stopped screaming when the photographer's bulb
flashed. The tears still glistened in her eyes in the photograph and her
lips formed a surprised little "O" like a fish's mouth.

Despite her early encounter with her father's dead sister's picture,
Lena loved photographs. She could sit and stare at the ones of her
family for hours. Her father, picking up on any interest his children
showed in a subject, had bought her a square, lime-green Brownie camera
and film and demanded that the family assemble and stand still whenever
she wanted to shoot their picture.

There was something right and prodigious about the family eating their
big meals in the room that had become a mausoleum for a dead patriarch.

It seemed to show the family's knack for making things important and
inconsequential at the same time. Food, after all, was just sustenance,
but it was also something glorious and rapturous for the family.

Lena heard her mother once mutter over a stack of fresh bloody beets,
"You would thinkjonah grew up in a house where there was never enough to
eat instead of one that had Miss Lizzie's kitchen in it."

At the beginning of each meal Jonah looked around the table into each
person's face, then said in a serious deep voice, "Let's say the
blessing, please." His intonation quieted any chatter and everyone,
including Grandmama who wasn't a Catholic but a Baptist even though she
didn't attend any regular church service, made the sign of the cross and
said to themselves, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost, Amen." Then they all said aloud together, "Bless us, OLORD,
and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty,
through Christ our Lord. Amen."

"Amen, Brother Ben, caught the rooster and killed the hen." That
wasjonah, too. He said that nearly every day but especially when there
was company.

Then he would look around the table and everyone would smile or chuckle
appreciatively as his grin seemed to bounce off the windowpanes behind
Raymond's and Edward's chairs. And the sounds of the meal-cutlery
against china, spoons stirring sugar into glasses of iced tea, heavy
serving bowls being lifted and replaced on a fresh white linen
tablecloth, requests to "pass the bread, please"-would take over for a
while.

On some days Jonah would slap his hands and rub them together in
delicious anticipation. "Good bread, good meat. Good God, let's eat,"
he'd say. And the meal would begin on that note.

On days when Jonah was in a bad mood-Nellie called it "having the devil
in him," which always made Lena shudder when she heard it-there would be
no joking after the grace was said. On those days the food would taste
as delicious as always, but the atmosphere around the big oval table
would feel as though they were eating in a prison. No amount of
jocularity and teasing among the children or sweet talk or buttering-up
ofjonah could lift the heavy pall that he laid over the table.

But some things never changed. After the soft clatter of dishes began,
Jonah would address his mother, his wife, or one of his children, "And
what did you do today?" It was a command not only to reply but to
enlighten, engage, hold forth on the type of day that had passed since
the last meal the family shared.

Lena always thought the question deserved some answer better than, "We
saw a train on the way to school and it got to the crossing before we
did and we had to wait all morning for it to pass. We were late. You got
to write us a note for tomorrow."

But Jonah never wasted his time on writing notes to nuns. Nellie did
that. He was more interested in the train.

"How many cars?" he'd ask as he leaned over on one arm of his chair-his
was the only chair around the table that had armshis graceful, neatly
manicured hands poised in the air along with his question.

"Fifty-seven-and a caboose," Raymond would answer, proud that he had had
the foresight to count.

"Fifty-seven? Um ... must have been one of the Seaboard's if it was that
long," Jonah would figure seriously.

This kind of talk satisfied her father. If none of the children had seen
a train, or if Grandmama hadn't discovered an old pattern for a dress
come back into style, then they would all discuss how much was paid for
the corn or pole beans and whether the price was higher than the one
last year, or if it was better the week before when the beans came from
the farmer's curbside market rather than the new Colonial grocery store.
Or Jonah would tell of the two men down at The Place who got into a
fight over someone calling someone's woman ugly-even though Jonah said
he had to tell the truth, the woman was ugly as sin and in his
estimation wasn't worth fighting over under any circumstances, "Big old
fat woman, you know her, Nellie, she's a big un "-and how he was going
to have to replace the plateglass window that one man had thrown the
other through.

It was all part of whatjonah called learning to make conversation.

"Hell," Jonah had said many times, snorting derisively, "knowing how to
make conversation at the dinner table is one of the most important
things you'll ever learn to do. Hell, you can sit over there with your
mouth poked out if you want to, but I'll never sit at the table with
somebody who sits there like they ain't got sense enough to make simple
conversation, the least you can do is sit there and look pleasant. God
knows, nobody wants to sit down to a meal of fine food and have to look
across their plate at somebody with a unpleasant expression on their
face."

Whenever Jonah lectured about conversation, Lena secretly thought that
he was making a reference to Edward's stuttering. At one time all the
adults thought they had a cure for it. Their father thought reading
aloud would help improve Edward's speech. His mother thought
extracurricular activities like the Boy Scouts would relax the boy
enough that he would forget his nervousness and not stutter.

His grandmother kept her feelings to herself, but she too had had a
theory. One evening, as the three children sat under the bright light in
the sewing room and their mother listened to them read from their
history books and readers, their grandmother crept into the room quietly
with her right hand behind her back and sat down on the bed.

She motioned Lena over to the bed to sit by her, When the child sat
down, her grandmother slipped her hidden hand between the two of them.

Lena felt something cold and greasy on her thigh, but when she tried to
look down to investigate, her grandmother said, "Sit still, Lena, and
let Edward read."

Edward always read last because if he didn't, the other two children
would become so impatient with his stuttering over words before their
turns that they would start telling him to "come on and say it," and get
their brother even more fiustered. Even little Lena, who had started
reading before she was four, could read as fast as Edward, who was five
years older than she. He was just beginning to read from his large
history book when their grandmother had come into the room.

" The government of the United States is th-th-th Edward began, but he
didn't get any further than that because when he began to stutter on
"divided" his grandmother raised her hand from the bed and hit him
square in the mouth with a fat greasy piece of raw meat with stiff black
hairs sticking out all over it.

Everyone in the room except Grandmama screamed. She just stood back
looking satisfied as the room dissolved into pandemonium. Raymond
covered his head with his history book and ran into a corner yelling,
"Good God from Gulfport!" like one of the winos down at The Place their
daddy owned.

Nellie dropped the hand sewing she was working on and rushed over to
Edward, who was spitting and sputtering and wiping his mouth over and
over with the back of his hand. Lena, who had jumped up on the bed
feet-first when her Grandmama hauled off and hit Edward in the mouth,
watched enthralled as her brother's face went through four or five
different expressions-surprise, disbelief, fear, embarrassment,
anger-after the blow landed on his lips.

"Miss Lizzie, have you completely lost your mind?" her mother asked in a
low voice as she wiped her son's lips with the first piece of material
that she could lay her hands on, a piece of pink voile.

"Hitting this child in the mouth with-what is that, anyway?"

"It's a cow's tongue, is what it is," her grandmother replied
selfrighteously. "And it's the only sure cure for stuttering. While
ya'll around here with your fancy solutions to the boy's problem, his
Grandmama had to take matters into her own hands.

"Does that really work, Grandmama?" Raymond wanted to know as he emerged
cautiously from the corner he had run into when the cow's tongue began
to fly.

"Of course it does. If you hit the person right in the middle of a
stutter, I know it works, seen it work lots of times.

"Ain't that right, Son?" Grandmama asked Edward, who still stood there
like he didn't know what hit him, wiping his mouth and looking confused.

"Now, didn't that cure you, Edward?" she repeated.

All of them in the room held their breaths waiting to see the effects of
the miraculous cure.

Edward spoke.

"Wh-wh-wh-what you do th-that-that for, Grandmama?"

Lena could almost feel the disappointment in the small sewing room
settle on all their shoulders.

Since then everyone had tried to accept Edward's stuttering and practice
patience, especially Grandmama.

But while they were eating, there was so much else going on that
Edward's stuttering was no distraction. At their table there were as
many rules and regulations involved as there seemed to be in any
liturgical service. Don't talk with your mouth full. Wait until the
other person stops talking before speaking. Leave your napkin in your
lap. Don't wave your knife around like that. Slow down, nobody's gonna
take it away from you. Mabel, Mabel, big and able, keep your elbows off
the table. Who's that humming? No singing at the table.

These incantations were offered up with the meal like sacrifices.

Jonah hated paper napkins, said they were of no use. If anyone gave him
one in restaurant or at dinner in a friend's home, he'd make such a mess
of itshredding it, pretending it stuck to his fingers, asking for two or
three more because one wasn't sufficient-that sometimes Nellie would
reach into her purse, silently hand him one of her pretty lace-trimmed
handkerchiefs, and pray he would just shut up.

At home the meal was over when everyone was finished, meaning when Jonah
was finished. He'd take his linen napkin and wipe his mouth heartily,
drop it by the side of his plate, and say sincerely, "Enjoyed my
dinner," or "Enjoyed my breakfast." Nellie and Grandmama would say in
unison, "Glad you did."

Then it was each child's turn to express appreciation for the meal.

"Dinner was real good."

"I enjoyed that ... .. Good candy yams, Mama." The enjoyment was
genuine, the appreciation sincere. It was like the priest at Mass
saying, Dominus vobiscum and the congregation responding Et cum spiritu
tuo." The ritual didn't get stale from day to day any more than the
liturgy did from Sunday to Sunday. It got richer.

Lena would sit at the table as she did in church, waiting to see if the
patterns would be different one day, if the response would vary, if the
communicants would hold back the response just for the devilment of it.

After the meal the ritual continued in the kitchen when Nellie told the
three children it was time to let Grandmama come sit down and for them
to clean up. Once, Nellie checked and found the boys rolling around on
the floor fighting over the dishrag while Lena, standing on a kitchen
chair, merrily washed dishes, still laden with food from dinner, in a
sink overflowing with billowing white Ivory Liquid suds and lukewarm
water.

Nellie's anger began at the white swinging door leading from the
breakfast room and built as her gaze slowly swept the kitchen,
turnip-green grease caking the edges of the plates and the big pot,
overhung by a sickening overlapping of odors, meat juices and lemon
rinds and squash and onion casserole, together with the buttermilk and
eggs from the cornbread-all having had an extra hour to sit around in
the heat of the kitchen and grow.

For the twelve years that Nellie and Jonah had been married, jonah's
mother had lived with them, forming an unofficial triumvirate to rule
the household. In that time Nellie had picked up two skills from the
older woman.

One was cooking, the other was cursing. But unlike her mother-in-law,
who Lena thought cursed in a straightforward average way, Nellie cursed
in what Lena saw as curlicues and arabesques.

Lena's regal mother could and often did let loose with a curse that made
the hair on her children's arms stand on end. "You children would make
the Good Lord curse," she would scream at them. But Lena could never
imagine the Lord saying, "You make my very asshole quiver," the way her
mama did when they all got on her nerves badly, which was fairly often.

As soon as the children saw her in the kitchen doorway, reeling a bit
with the effect of the scene, her eyes nearly closed, one hand gripping
the heating pipe running from the cold furnace in the basement, they
knew they were in for it.

When she recovered herself and opened her eyes fully, her anger rose
another step and she segued from the swooning stage to the cussing stage
without stopping.

"You little wild useless younguns!" she had screamed from the doorway,
getting angrier and angrier as her gaze swept from the dried mashed
potatoes, still in a pot sitting inside a frying pan of water simmering
on a low burner on the stove, to the boys fighting on the unswept floor
amid thin orange onion skins and sugar spilled from the large tin
canister on the counter. Then she took a step toward the boys, arms
outstretched to grasp them, and her foot cracked a pile of sugar
scattered on the floor.

The sound sent quick shivers through her whole body. Right there her
anger took a giant step up the staircase of rage.

"Get up off that damn floor! Get up off that floor this instant, you two
little fanatical fools. Get up and sweep up this sugar. I can't stand to
walk on sugar. You all know that! Dammit, look at this kitchen. I'd
rather be in west hell with my back broke than have to depend on you all
to do anything right. Can't ya'll do shit? Well, you gon' do it tonight,
you can bet your little asses on that, if you have to stay up all night.
Look at this floor, that stove, this table, that sink."

Then, on cue, Lena the baby, soaking wet all down the front of the plaid
jumper that barely covered her fat little behind, standing with soapsuds
in her hair, on her cheeks, soapsuds up to her armpits-little Lena
sneezed. "Achoo!"

The sound, a tiny egg cracking in a raging storm, sent their mother even
higher in her rage.

"Listen to that child, just listen to her! If you ain't got enough
goddamn sense to do the job right-and God help your little ignorant
asses in this world if you can't wash a damn dish right when you got hot
running water at the sinkthen you could at least keep your sister from
wetting herself all up and making a mess at the sink. Lord have mercy!
One of ya'll run get the mop. Cut off that water."

The water flowing from the faucet had filled the sink and was cascading
over the sink's edge to the floor.

The boys, each eager for the honor of running to the back porch and
retrieving the mop from its place high on a wall, and perhaps working
his way back into his mother's good graces, rushed across the tile floor
and made for the back door. When they both arrived there at the same
time, they started up another fight on the spot, scuffling and
struggling in the narrow doorway like two cheap comics, neither moving
on to the task assigned to them.

Their mother made another dash for the sink to cut off the water and
crunched more sugar underfoot. , "Damn, damn, damn!" she shouted as she
pirouetted on the slippery granules.

Then she remembered the boys and turned to find them fighting in the
doorway, and it seemed to be the worst situation she had ever seen.

"Jesus, keep me near the cross," she'd moan and shake her head slowly as
if she were about to burst into tears. Her knees bent as she almost
broke down to the floor, her pretty face contorted into a mesh of rage
and misery.

"Lena ain't nothing but a baby. But she's got more sense than you two
damn boys put together. How you both let her stand at that sink getting
soaking wet ... Come on, baby, we'll go change your dress.

It's almost time for bed anyway. And child, don't you open your mouth to
me tonight about going to bed. You'd think I was sentencing you to a
slow death!"

Lena knew her sneeze was a tolling of the death knell. She had tried to
stifle it, but it had burst out of her face with a force she couldn't
control, drawing unwanted attention her way. At the mention of bedtime,
her eyes began to fill with tears that threatened to brim over and flow
down her face like the soapy dishwater had just overflowed the sink.

"Little witch, I'll whip your ass till it ropes like okra if you give me
trouble tonight," her mother said, her sweetness souring on her stomach
at the sight of the child's tears. "I want you to get upstairs,
undressed and ready for your bath, before I come back up these steps. I
mean what I say."

Then, turning to the boys fighting over the mop, she sincerely promised
a slow death for both of them when their father came out of the bathroom
if they didn't straighten up and fly right. It was all she needed to say
to get them moving.

On some evenings in seasons other than winter, ifjonah didn't make the
family take too long eating, or if the pandemonium in the kitchen
clean-up didn't destroy the mood of the evening, they all congregated
afterward on the side screened porch facing west. Full and content,
they'd watch the sun set behind the tall pines and Mrs. Willback's
garden. Thenjonah would retrieve his pistol from the top of the
bookshelves and prepare to return to The Place for the night.

He would stretch and sigh and say, "Lawdy, Miss Clawdy," as if he
dreaded a night of hard labor ahead of him, but Lena always suspected he
enjoyed spending his evenings at The Place. Lena knew she always enjoyed
the time she spent there after school and on Saturdays.

Every Saturday morning the boys sat quietly on the edge of Edward's
lower bunk bed trying to appear to listen attentively to what Nellie was
saying to them about how much money to spend and how not to eat those
hot dogs and ice-cream sandwiches that tore up their stomachs, and what
time to come home. They both knew that if either of them showed the
slightest sign of letting his attention wander during her instructions,
she was as likely as not to cancel their Saturday ritual of going
downtown to the Burghar-t Theatre for the entire morning and afternoon.

Their mother was still angry from three years before, when Raymond and
Edward had gone to the theater as usual but, instead of coming home in
the early afternoon as they were supposed to, had stayed and stayed
there, way past dark. The car hadn't started, and Lena wasn't yet old
enough to put the magic on it. Nellie didn't want to call down to The
Place to tell Jonah to walk down Broadway and get the boys out of the
movie house, because she feared he might kill them in his rage. And
calling a cab would have been just as bad, because Jonah wandered in and
out of the cab company any time of the day to talk with Joe Blount, the
owner. She could just hear Joe Blount saying when Jonah walked in,
"Nellie called a cab Saturday night ... .. So she had to walk all the
way up Pleasant Hill in the dark and catch the bus and come all the way
downtown to drag them home on public transportation.

When she got to the theater, it took nearly fifteen minutes to convince
the ticket-taker that she was not trying to sneak in without paying just
to see three cowboy movies, two cartoons, and a short. Jonah strolled
through the red-leather double doors any time he wanted to, and the
woman at the theater door wanted to make sure Nellie didn't think that
courtesy extended to her.

When Nellie got into the darkened theater she found the boys in the
front row, just feet from the screen.

"If you don't get your little butts out of here, you better," she hissed
at them.

They had had the nerve to "sh-sh-sh!" her. And Edward had asked her to
wait one minute until they saw "this one part oneone-one-one more time."

She had a hissy fit right there in the front row of the Burghart
Theatre, screaming and cussing and nearly crying with rage. She screamed
so violently as she lunged across the knees of a row of little boys
ducking their heads and craning their necks around her to see if
Hopalong Cassidy was going to lose his hat in the final fistfight that
even the projectionist woke from his half doze and peered out his tiny
square window to make sure he had not missed something in this movie he
must have seen already twenty-five times.

"I don't remember no cussing in this picture," the projectionist said to
himself as he rubbed his eyes, scratched himself, and surveyed the
screen.

He was just about to stop the projector and brace himself for the
barrage of hoots and whistles and foot stomps and yells of "Hey, mister,
Hey, mister, what's the matter with you up there?" when he spied the
silhouette of a woman against the screen, waving her arms and
brandishing her fist at somebody in the front row.

SATURDAY "Shoot," the man said to himself, "it ain't my department.

Let the manager handle the fights."

Then he settled back on his tall barstool and dropped his chin back to
his chest for a quick nap before he had to change the reel for the next
feature.

Raymond and Edward's friends never let them live it down. They'd ask
each Saturday as they all stood in line at the ticket booth, "Come by
yourself today?" Edward or Raymond or both of them would have to light
into the questioner for coming so close to asking, "Did you bring your
ma?"

Sometimes Lena went with the boys to the Burghart just to get on their
nerves, because she knew they hated for her to tag along unless it was a
scary movie they could frighten her with later or a movie like
Carmenjones or Manbattan Madness with an all-black cast that nobody was
going to miss. But usually she preferred to hang around at The Place on
Saturdays instead.

Especially if Nellie was working there.

Lena loved to watch her mother at work at The Place, selling half pints
on the liquor store side, filling frosty glass mugs on the beer parlor
side, writing cream-colored checks for the liquor salesmen from the big
blue ledger, and tearing the checks off precisely at their perforated
edges. It was like watching an entirely different person from the one
who had given Lena life and went around the house with a whine or a roar
in her voice all the time.

"Mama sure is good at being the boss," she told her father one evening
after dinner as she climbed up into his lap, wrinkling the open
newspaper he held in his hands. He sometimes sat and read the paper for
an hour or so after dinner before returning to The Place.

Jonah furrowed his brow and tilted his head to the side as he looked at
his baby daughter.

"What do you mean, baby?" he asked Lena as he folded the newspaper and
dropped it on the floor next to the lamp beside his chair.

She shifted her weight and tried to find a more comfortable spot in her
father's lap.

"I mean like when she's at The Place. She'll be doing all kinds of
things at once, cashing checks, making sure Dear One doesn't sneak off
without paying, telling Gloria and em what to cook, making Big Bill
leave if he too drunk.

That's being the boss, isn't it?" Lena asked. "That's what I see you
doing when you're there. Except Mama don't play no skin on the counter
like you do with Mr. Tyler."

Jonah laughed a rich deep chuckle that he reserved for his daughter's
prattle. "She don't play no cards, huh?"

"No, but that's the only thing she don't do like you. So that makes her
a good boss, huh?"

"Well," Jonah said slowly, considering the idea of his wife as boss for
the first time in his life, "I guess Nellie does do a good job of
helping out at The Place."

Lena laughed right out loud, spraying her father's face with spit.

"Daddy, Mama shore do more than helping out at The Place. Helping out is
what I do when I go outside and shake the tablecloth for Raymond and
Edward when we all have to do the dishes. Mama do more than that."

"Well, of course she does," her father answered. "She does lots more
than that, but it's all helping me out with my business."

"But that just don't sound right, Daddy-'helping out." Lots of times
when you stay out late, she gets up early in the morning and goes and
open up The Place so you can sleep late. And the salesmen always say
they glad Mama's there because she always know just how much beer and
drinks you need and how much it gonna cost. And people call her Miss
Nellie. Lay-Down and Yakkity-Yak even call her Boss Lady. And if Gloria
or Estelle don't show up, she fries the fish and makes sandwiches."

"And you think that's more than just helping out, huh?" her father
asked.

Lena shrugged her narrow shoulders. "Seem that way to me."

Jonah just grunted and looked off over Lena's head into the SATURDAY
growing darkness outside the big picture window over the sofa. When her
father remained still and quiet for so long, Lena grew bored and slid
down his leg and went off to see what everybody was doing in the
kitchen. And when Lena returned to the living room nearly a half hour
later to join the boys looking at "Father Knows Best," Jonah was still
sitting in his chair staring into space, thinking about his wife as boss
of his business.

Lena loved just about everything about the liquor store and juke joint
downtown around the corner from the main business district. She even
liked the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke that engulfed her when
her mother unlocked and swung open the double glass doors to the beer
parlor side at eight o'clock on some Saturday mornings. Lena would look
up at her mother and wait for her to say, "Uh, Lord, that stuffy old
stank smell makes me sick to my stomach," as she always did.

Then Nellie would turn all the way around to face the nearly deserted
street and take a few quick gulps of fresh air before turning again and
plunging into The Place and her duties there.

Not Lena. Without waiting for her mother, she would stick her head
inside The Place, take a deep breath of the still musty air, and dash
inside to plug in the lighted displays hanging on the walls. The square
Miller High Life sign edged in golden neon, the black-and-white Black
Label sign that seemed lit from within, the red-and-white "Coke
Refreshes" sign, the sign shaped like a big can of Bluebird grapefruit
juice, They all sputtered once or twice before flickering on. And
although all of the signs, enticing customers to buy wine or snuff or
cigarettes, lit and unlit, were coated with layers of grease and dust,
they gave The Place the festive air of a carnival. That's what the smell
reminded her of-a good time.

By midmorning on a Saturday, it was more crowded in The Place than
anyone could imagine a jukejoint in a small town like Mulberry could be.
But folks from surrounding towns and burgs even smaller than Mulberry
who came into town to shop, pay bills, and window-shop would also stop
by The Place to take a little drink and occasionally even a dance while
they sent their children and sometimes their wives to the theater or the
peanut shop for a while.

When Jonah had moved into the corner location, he had divided The Place
into two rooms. The grill and beer parlor side was located in the
L-shaped portion. And the small square liquor store fit into the L's
missing corner.

The whiskey store, which could be seen from the grill side through a
panel of colored windows, was crowded with hanging promotional displays
that nearly eclipsed the shelves of gin, bourbon, scotch, vodka, and
blends.

On busy Saturdays-and there were no other kinds-there would be thirty or
forty people sitting at the counters on the side and back of the cafe,
eating or drinking. There would be another ten or twelve folks standing
around the walls and jukebox. A few couples would be on the tiny dance
floor, and the six small square tables would be crowded with as many
people as could find chairs to sit down. And noisy. The noise in The
Place on a Saturday was nearly as thick as the cigarette and grease
smoke and the odor of beer, wine, and whiskey, drunk, digested, and
belched back into the heavy juke-joint air.

Besides the music from the jukebox that patrons never let rest, there
was the heady hum of conversation that always made Lena think of a swarm
of giant bees that had attacked her and the boys in the plum groves
behind Mrs. Willback's house. At regular intervals the hum would
suddenly grow into a loud exchange of words that would sometimes end in
a burst of laughter or more, even harsher words. If the words were angry
enough they would turn into sudden slaps or flying fists.

The news-"Fight, fight"-would travel along the bar as though it were a
telegraph wire to the front and back doors and out to the street.

Folks inside trying to get out would almost have to fight those standing
at the doors trying to see in.

Then, like a summer rain shower, it would be over, dwindling like mist
into idle threats or broken up by Jonah or one of "the boys" with a long
stick from under the bar. And like a quick rainfall it would leave The
Place cleaned and refreshed. Then the steady hum of music and voices
would settle back over the room.

There was hardly anywhere on earth that Lena enjoyed more than The
Place.

She prayed that her father was serious when he got mad at the boys and
swore he planned to overlook them and will The Place to her to run when
he died. It made her heart race to think that she might one day be in
charge of The Place.

She wouldn't change the name or anything that she could think of. It
would still be the Bluebird Liquor Store and Beer Parlor and Grill.

And everybody would still refer to it as The Place.

She would always wear high-heeled mules and good-looking dresses like
her mother did and not worry one bit about the smell of cigarette smoke
and grease from the grill that got into her wool and cotton and linen
fibers. She'd keep the same arrangement with Mr. Greeby down the street,
who seemed to do all their dry cleaning for nothing. She didn't know
what the agreement was, but she knew her father's penchant for deals and
she knew she could never improve on any deal Jonah had made. He seemed
to make deals all over town. He thrived on them. If he could get a
product for less, whether or not he needed it, he was happy. He'd buy
syrupy mandarin oranges by the gallon, knowing no one in the house ate
them, just because he'd gotten a good price.

And The Place seemed to love Lena as much as she loved it. Women and a
couple of men dressed like women, who sometimes smelled like they had
doused themselves with ten or twelve tiny bottles of Hoyt's Cologne to
hoodoo some man without washing under their arms and between their legs
first, would sometimes sweep into The Place, scoop Lena up in their
arms, and go sailing down Broadway with her as if she were some prized
booty from a battle.

"Don't worry, Miss Nellie," they would yell over their shoulders. "I
just want Emily Lewis at the candy store who think she got such pretty
children to see what a truly pretty smart child look like."

Nellie rarely objected to the short trips these women took Lena on up
and down the Street. After working more than ten years off and on at
Jonah's place of business on the corner of Broadway and Cherry, she knew
most of the people there as well as she knew her own personal friends.
Jonah's business associates and poker and drinking buddies stopped by
The Place all day, sticking their heads in the door to inquire, "Where
is he?" as if "he" were some potentate whose whereabouts should always
be known. But Nellie's friends never came by, even when they were
downtown shopping. They never stopped in for a cold beer or a cold soda.

In fact Nellie probably knew the women at The Place better than she knew
some of her friends. She knew which ones to trust and which ones not to
trust.

If some woman known for being dangerously unstable, like Cliona from
Yamacraw, grabbed Lena and headed out the door, Nellie would just say to
one of her "boys" standing close by, "Short Arm, go get my child."

And Short Arm or one of them wearing a big white apron would hurry off
importantly and bring Lena right back.

"Let me through, let me through," Short Arm would shout as he pushed
through the crowd that always gathered on the corner outside on
Saturdays, swatting folks left and right with his stump of an arm. If
anyone even tried to speak to him, the short stubby man would puff up
with importance and tell them, "Man, leave me lone, I ain't got no time
to be messing around wif you. I don't play wid children. I'm on a errand
for Miss Nellie. Got to get her child back from that fool-ass woman."

Short Arm would catch up with the escapee from Yamacraw with Lena riding
fearlessly on her hip, snatch the child away with his good arm, and
plunge back into the crowd with Cliona shouting after him, "You ignorant
no-arm motherfucker, who you think you is? .. ."

"Big-mouth crazy-assed woman," he'd mutter as he stormed the crowds.

"You okay, Lena? She ain't hurt you, did she?"

"Aww, Short Arm, Cliona from Yamacraw okay. She don't mean no harm,"
Lena would assure him.

"Yeah, most Negroes don't mean no harm to let them tell it.

SATURDAY But you got to stay away from folks like that. She crazy, baby.
You got to stay away from crazy folks in this life. Heck I'm, bout
crazy, myself."

"Then what I'm doing with you, Short Arm?"

Short Arm just laughed. "Lena, baby, you a mess." Then he'd hurry to
deliver Lena safely back to the counter in the liquor store and return
to his job of stacking drink crates or putting cans of beer into the
coolers.

On top of that, Nellie knew that Jonah instilled enough of a healthy
fear in everybody who came to The Place that no one would be fool enough
to let any harm come to Lena while in his or her care.

"All right, heifer, you let anything happen to my baby girl, you know
I'll have to kill you," Jonah would warn the women if he walked past the
peanut shop or the dry cleaners and saw Lena sitting atop the counter
munching nuts or playing with an adding machine. The women would titter
coquettishly at her father. But soon they would pick Lena up and take
her back to The Place.

Actually there was little chance of anything happening to Lena, whether
Jonah threatened them or not. Everyone on Broadway-whores, winos,
boosters, family men, gamblers, flunkies, women with their maid's
uniforms in big brown paper bags, roustabouts, store and theater owners,
hard-working women from the box factory who were sometimes too tired at
the end of the day to hold their heads up and drink their quarts of
beer@l treated Lena like a precious commodity.

They all were tickled by the way Lena walked up and down Broadway
looking just like Jonah spit her out.

"I bet I know who your daddy is," folks would yell at Lena from
barbershop doorways and candy-store windows. She seemed to be the only
regular of the strip under the age of ten, other than the children
running in and out of the Burghart Theatre.

From the time Nellie had first brought her into The Place wrapped up in
her yellow knitted blanket and propped her up on the counter of the
liquor store in an empty Old Forester bourbon box, Lena had been treated
like a princess by the denizens of the downtown strip. And she
accommodated them by seeming to be what they thought she was-special-and
by growing used to their wine- and whiskey-soaked breaths the same way
she gradually grew accustomed to the taste of olives.

It wasn't hard to do. Besides, the folks at The Place were easy to like,
they were interesting people. Everyone there seemed to have a story, and
no matter how quiet they were around other people, they were eager to
tell Lena their tales.

Out of the clear blue, for instance, Peanut-a shriveled little kernel of
a man barely five feet tall with arms and thighs the size of a child's
and a little bitty nut-shaped head-would walk into The Place, pull one
of Lena's braids, and sit down at the end of the grill counter near her.
Then he'd buy a pack of Wrigley's Doublemint gum, take out one stick for
himself, and give the rest to her, even though everyone knew Lena could
have anything she wanted that was for sale behind the counter. Peanut
and Lena would sit there and chew their gum in silence for a while. Then
he'd reach into the pockets of his tiny pants and pull out a quarter and
hand it to her.

"Here, Lena, go play me some tunes on the jukebox," he'd say.

Lena would hop down from her stool, run toward the purple, red, and blue
lights of the jukebox, and punch the greasy redand-yellow buttons of
J30, A 15, and P22without even thinking. She knew just about everybody's
favorite records on the nickelodeon because each tune seemed to have
some special meaning for at least one customer at The Place. And each
patron played that song over and over until the vending-machine man
came, updated the records, and-usually over protest-took it off the
machine.

Even Lena's mama had a favorite record. Weeks before Christmas the
jukebox man would come in The Place smiling. "Well, Mrs. Mac, it's that
time of year again," he'd say. And her mama SA TL,"RDA Y would smile and
nod her head as she continued to count out a customer's change.

In a few minutes all chatter and noise on the grill side of The Place
would cease as the first words of Nellie's song came up on the jukebox.

"Bells will be rirlging (boomp-boomp, boomp-boomp), the glad, glad news
(boomp-boomp, boomp-boomp), Oh, what a Christmas (boomp-boomp,
boomp-boomp) to have the blues (boomp-boomp, boomp-boomp). My baby's
gone (boomp-boomp, boompboomp), I have no friends (boomp-boomp,
boomp-boomp) to wish me greetings once again. "Charles Brown's smooth
worn-out voice carried all over The Place and even out into the street,
because the jukebox man would have turned the volume up loud to make
sure Nellie could hear it over on the liquor store side. Then just about
everyone in the joint would join in on the chorus, "Please, come home
for Christmas, please, come home for Christmas, if not for Christmas, by
New Year's night."

Nellie would slide aside the window that separated the grill from the
liquor store and yell over the music, "Would you Negroes please be quiet
so I can hear my damn song!"

Everybody in the joint understood that request. From the way patrons
acted, Lena knew that in The Place, when your record, the one that came
closest to saying what you felt, came on the jukebox, it was customary
for you to stop in your tracks, bow your head, close your eyes, raise
your right hand in the air above your head, stomp your foot, and command
the entire place, "Be quiet, will you. That's my song. Lord, Lord,
Lord."

Usually it was a slow tune that people claimed as theirs, like "A Change
Is Gonna Come" or something by Sam Cooke or The Platters that had some
special significance for the regulars of The Place. But there were those
who consistently went for the upbeat tunes, like Jimmy Reed's "You Got
Me Running" or Hank Ballard and the Midnighters' "Work With Me Annie,"
in which case they would close their eyes but wouldn't bow their heads
and, instead of raising their hands over their heads, would just bend
their elbows and pop their fingers to the beat of the song while
rhythmically dipping their heads from side to side.

At that time Lena knew Peanut's favorite songs were all sung by Brook
Benton. Funny as it seemed to everybody, Peanut pictured himself a lover
and patterned himself on the smooth mellow Benton. Once, Lena had heard
two women sitting at the counter say as Peanut walked by and brushed his
hand across one's big ass, "Aw, don't pay it no mind. That ain't nobody
but Peanut." Then they burst out laughing. "Girl, don't give me no
little piece a' man," the dark little woman named Willie Bea said as she
wiggled her sad narrow hips on the plastic bar stool.

"Little as I is it's like rubbing a bunch of sticks together. Might
start a fire." Then both women had laughed again.

When Lena came back from playing Peanut's songs on the jukebox, she took
her seat on the stool and watched Peanut close his eyes and sing along
with Brook, "Moonlight in Vermont." He even sounded a little like the
romantic singer.

"You know, Lena, I used to have a pretty fair voice when I was a young
man," he said as Brook's voice trailed off to music. "Sang with a little
old band around here. Coulda made something of it, too. Ask your daddy.
The girls used to be crazy bout me, used to just almost pass out when I
really got to going, for real. But then I caught the TB and had to go
away to the TB home. Folks never did forgive me for that. I got better,
but I went away to nothing and so did my voice.

Never did regain either one of them-my weight or my voice."

By then A 15 had come up on the machine's turntable, and Peanut lost
himself in Brook's mellifluous tones again. Lena just sat there and
chewed her gum and tried to picture Peanut in a pretty blue silk suit
with his hair brushed back severely and waved with grease and covered by
a stocking cap, his frame fleshed out to a healthy huskiness.

Peanut wasn't the only one. Even Stank, who worked in the fish house and
walked Broadway with fish guts and blood smeared down the front of his
apron and had a contingent of cats SATURDAY following him like he was
their mother with her tits full, once told Lena about the time his
brother fell into the Ocawatchee River while they were fishing on its
banks. He jumped in, even though he couldn't swim a lick, and saved the
boy's life.

"Yes siree, I was a hero for a day then. My mama made me a cake and the
preacher made me stand up in church. Never did learn how to swim though.
I always been scared of the water."

Transvestites sitting at the bar with scented powder lightly dusting
their pockmarked faces taught her things about men and women long before
she knew what to do with the newfound knowledge.

"Lena, baby, I've fattened my last frog for the snake," Seymour, who
sometimes called himself Yvette, said bravely one day as he sat dejected
and alone over a tall can of Miller High Life while his latest boyfriend
was grinding shamelessly on the small dance floor with a skinny woman
wearing a shiny wig. "I don't mind being the wax. I don't mind being the
wick. But I be damned if I'm gonna be the flame."

All Lena could think of were the short votive candles that burned all
the time in blood-red and sea-blue holders in the front of Blessed
Martin de Porres Church and of the metal tray with the burned matches
and quarters scattered in it. I didn't even know Seymour was Catholic,
she thought.

Lena didn't always make friends easily with children her own age, but
the folks at The Place were all eager to count her as a friend. Most she
had known all her life. Many she had seen drunk and sober, high and low,
broke and fiush. Their habits were as familiar to her as her family's.
And she vowed to herself if she ever got to run The Place, she would
keep it open on Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Year's just for them,
no matter what the law said.

The summer vacation that took Lena and her brothers Raymond and Edward,
her parents, her Aunt Sister, Uncle Jack, cousins James junior and
Jackie from South Carolina, and the family friends from Atlanta, the
Stevenses, across the state to the Georgia coast the year she was seven
could have been called Colored Folks Going to the Beach, like a
painting.

That's what her grandmother called it, Colored Folks Going to the Beach,
She said it all month long as her family undertook the massive
preparations for the two-week vacation. And she always sucked her false
teeth in disgust when she said it.

"Colored folks going to the beach, pshhht, " She said it when Lena's
mother came into the house carrying big thin brown paper bags filled
with new shorts sets for herself, terry-cloth playsuits for Lena,
swimsuits for the both of them, swimming trunks for Lena's father and
brothers, and new white cotton undershirts and drawers and brightly
colored towels for everybody. Her grandmother just watched the boys and
Lena tear into the sacks of beachwear while they were still in Nellie's
arms and muttered, "Colored folks buying beach towels." Then she sucked
her teeth.

When her mother rounded up everyone in the house the Monday before they
left, to go downtown to Dannenberg's department store to purchase
sandals-Red Goose for the children-her grandmother went along for the
ride but refused to accompany the family into the shoe department.
Instead she wandered through the sewing and notions section picking up
spools of thread and cards of bias tape and putting them back while the
others tried on white leather sandals and light brown ones with wide
straps and chunky brass buckles.

Every once in a while the old lady muttered to herself, "Colored folks
buying beach shoes. They'll ruin those children's feet. Nellie ought to
know better, ought to know those children's feet are still growing.

They need support, not some little flimsy strap."

When the saleswoman in notions approached her grandmother suspiciously,
Lena saw the old lady give her such an evil look that the pale white
woman with the beginnings of a humped back actually edged her way back
to her station at the big brown cash register without turning around to
watch her step.

Most everyone in the house knew enough not to mention the trip directly
to their Grandmama. But Lena thought she was special, so later that week
she ran to her grandmother in the sewing room to proudly display her new
pair of redand-white rubber flip-flops purchased expressly for the trip.
The old woman was too outraged to speak right away. She just reached
down and grabbed the rubber thongs off Lena's feet, flipping the child
on her butt on one of her rag rugs, and flounced out of the room in
search of someone who had "a little damn bit of sense" with whom to
commiserate.

She found Imogene at her usual station above the ironing board in the
kitchen and conferred on her the honor of a little damn bit of sense.

"Will you look at this little piece of shit Nellie bought to put on her
child's feet, her baby daughter's feet! Now, is that crazy? Psshbt,
colored folks going to the beach."

Imogene, not wanting to jeopardize her job that only entailed some light
cleaning, which she hated, and some heavy ironing, which she loved, just
frowned without saying a word, spit snuff juice into the Maxwell House
coffee can resting on the window sill, and went back to ironing one of
the boys' plaid cotton sbor-t-sleeved shirts and moving her feet to Ray
Charles singing "Baby, What I Say" on the tiny transistor radio that
hung around her neck on a string . That infuriated Lena's grandmother
even further, so she flounced out of the kitchen too and, on the way
back to the sewing room, threw the flimsy shoes as hard as she could
under the long picnic table in the breakfast room.

Later Lena didn't dare ask her grandmother what she had done with the
shoes, so she had to search the house for an entire day before she found
them wedged between the deep freezer and the breakfast-room table.

Her grandmother had no intention of being part of Colored Folks Going to
the Beach. That spring, when she had heard her son and daughter-in-law
discussing the idea of the trip, she let them know right away not to
count on her going along.

"No, thank you very much," she told them very politely, "but I'll just
stay here and have a vacation from foolishness."

Lena couldn't for the life of her understand why her grandmother would
not want to go on vacation to the beach in the first place, and why she
was so vehement in her conviction that no other black folks had any
business there either.

"Grandmama acts like she takes it personally that we're going to the
beach," Lena told her mother, whom she found at the big white metal
kitchen table shucking long ears of sweet white Silver Queen corn, Her
father could never get enough sweet fried corn in the summer when it was
plentiful, cooked just the way Nellie did it, First, holding the corn
upright on the pointed end, she went over the outside of each shucked
ear with a very sharp butcher knife, barely shearing off the very tips
of each kernel. Each of the firm pieces of corn fell into the bottom of
the big black iron skillet with a little plink.

Then she went back over each car with the flat side of the knife,
scraping the cobs dry of all their milky juices.

"This is the only way to fix fried corn," her mother told her as she
spit a long strand of silk from her mouth over her shoulder.

The smooth reddish-brown skin on her face, chest, and bare arms would be
dotted with spatters of corn juice. it seemed to Lena that her mother
was polka-dotted with bits of corn milk all summer long.

"Now, you watch how I do this," her mother said as she added maining
flour off her a handful of flour to the corn, washed the re hand into
the mixture with about a cup of water, stirred the whole thing around in
the big black skillet with her fingers, and put it over a low flame on
the stove. "Heaven help you, you may get a man who loves fried corn the
way your daddy does."

Finally she poured some hot fatback bacon grease into the corn, where it
sizzled, and covered it with a big lid.

"I'm watching," Lena said as she sat with her chin on the table watching
a fat green worm inch across the surface. But she persisted, "Marna, why
is Grandmama so mad about us going to the beach?"

"What makes you think she's mad?" her mother asked innocently.

"I don't think, I know she is. She even tried to throw my new flip-flops
away when I told her they were for the beach," Lena replied.

"Well, Lena, your grandmarna's old, well older than the rest of us.

Don't say I said she was old. And sometimes older people have different
ideas about things than we do."

"Why?" Lena wanted to know as she made drawings in the layer of flour
dusting the table.

"All kinds of reasons. Mostly because they grew up in a time different
from ours. When your Grandmama was little there were all kinds of things
she wasn't allowed to do that you can do, like go into the stores
downtown or to the county fair in the fall, Colored folks still can't do
a lot of things, but you can do more than she ever thought about."

"What's that got to do with a vacation?" Lena wanted to know. "Seems
like that would make you want it more."

"When your Grandmama was coming tip, and even when I was, the beach was
one place that was just for white folks, not for colored unless you were
taking care of somebody's white baby. It just wasn't for colored folks."

"Why?"

"Oh, you know how when white folks have something good, they make like
it's no good for black people. Shit, you even hear colored people doing
the same thing when somebody says, Let's go to the beach. I'm black
enough,' they say, or, Colored folks and water don't mix."

"When you been kept from something so long, sometimes you don't know how
to act when you get to it."

"Oh," Lena said slowly as she trailed her finger through the flour.

"Do you understand, baby?" Lena's mother asked as she wiped up the
child's picture from the table's surface with a damp dish towel.

"I think so," Lena answered and walked out of the kitchen to go sit with
her grandmother in the sewing room. She loved her Grandmama and didn't
want her to think that she was being disloyal by going to the beach. But
she had no intention of missing out on this opportunity.

This trip was the first time in her life Lena would ever experience real
freedom around water.

It wasn't fear of drowning that made her mother scream like a banshee
every time Lena went near a body of water that was not in a bathtub or
sink.

It was fear of the child getting her hair wet, nappy, and tangled.

All Lena's life her long thick wiry hair had ruled her. It shaped what
she was allowed to do, where she could go, how comfortable she was with
her surroundings, what she did, how free she felt.

One of her earliest memories was of her mother combing her hair as
gently as she could imagine anyone possibly doing it, cooing soothing
words in her ear to distract her from the pain of the tugging and
pulling it entailed. Until she was four years old, her mother sometimes
combed her hair while she slept.

She would go to bed, her long brick-colored hair freshly washed with H A
I R coconut-oil shampoo and standing all over her head, and wake up with
it smoothed and molded into four neat symmetrical plaits. Her mother
told her it was magic that caused the transformation. All Lena knew was
the "magic" gave her terrible dreams in which strange creatures chased
her and cut off her head and swung it around in circles by her hair as
they danced and shouted.

Ever since her birth, when she had come into the world with head full of
tight bright curls, soft and thick like the wool on baby lamb, her hair
had been a major topic of discussion, in her family and out.

"When I looked at you laying in my arms the first time, I knew all this
damn hair on your head would be the death of me," her mother fussed and
fumed as she sat on the edge of her bed and tried to pull the big black
comb through Lena's shoulder-length nappy red hair.

"Owww!" was Lena's reply as she sat on the floor of her mother's
bedroom, her little shoulders clamped between her mother's skinny knees.

"I'm sorry, baby, I'm doing my best not to hurt you. But you know how
your hair is."

"It's not my fault it's long and nappy like it is," Lena said with her
bottom lip trembling.

"Of course not. I just wish it didn't hurt you so much to get it
combed."

"Me, too. Oou)wwwww!"

"Sorry," her mother said automatically and kept on combing, bearing down
on the job to hurry and finish. For as long as Lena could remember, and
even before that, as she saw from her early pictures, she had had her
hair combed in one of two ways. Either it was parted straight down the
middle then divided again across the crown of her head into four equal
parts which her mother braided into four plaits-this was her everyday
hairdo. Or, on Sundays and other special occasions, the hair from the
two top braids was combed together in one big pretty barrette and
braided to fall down the side of her right cheek. The other two plaits
were left to hang down her back.

"Whew, long-assed nappy red hair just like mine used to be before it all
broke off when I started having you children," her mother kept
muttering. "I feet like getting a pair of scissors sometimes and cutting
it all off."

"Yeah, Mama, do that. Cut it off like Raymond and Edward's, real short."

"You mean to tell me you want me to cut off all your pretty long hair?"

"Yeah, real short too. Give me a skinny ball like the boys. Then I won't
even have to see a comb. I can have me a little brush like them and wear
a stocking cap to bed. Cut it off, Mama."

"Aw, but then you won't look like my little girl, you'll look like an
old boy," her mama said, wrinkling her pretty nose at the last two
words, then laughing at the thought of her baby without all her long
rusty-colored hair.

Her Grandmama, who could hardly stand to be in the same room when Lena
was being put through the torture of getting her hair combed, was once
walking by on the way down the hall to her own room and caught a snatch
of this conversation. She came barreling into the room, "Nellie, don't
tell me you are actually considering cutting off that child's hair. I
never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life. Cutting off that
baby's pretty hair," her grandmother buffed.

Her mother resented the intrusion.

"Well, Miss Lizzie, my daughter and I were just having a private
conversation of what if. But you're a fine one to talk, you who never
lifted a comb to try to rake through all this hair."

"Now, Nellie, you know good and damn well I'd do anything I could for
that child-she's my heart. But I can't stand to see her hurt and crying
the way she gets when you try to comb her hair."

Oh, that's right, make me the mean one, the one the child hates for
hurting her and trying to make her look nice and neat," her mother said,
her voice rising and cracking as she worked herself into a tizzy over
something that had been decided years before.

Lena's mother swore that she hadn't had the luxury of expressing her
true nature ever since she had had the responsibility of children-that
she was sensitive, high-strung, and prone to be excitable, and had been
ever since she had been a girl herself.

"Well, if you would just warm the child's hair out a little with a hot
comb, it would be a lot easier to handle," Lena's grandmother would
counter.

She had no other retort and was on the defensive. Even before the
suggestion was out of the old woman's mouth, she knew what Nellie would
say.

"Warm it out? Warm it out?" her mother answered incredulously.

"Shit, Miss Lizzie, you know as well as I do that the reason I don't
straighten this child's hair-and God knows she could use it-is because
of your son and his ideas."

"You goddamn right, you won't straighten that baby's hair because of
me," Lena's father yelled from down the hall on his perch in the
bathroom. No one knew he was even in the house. He liked to slip in and
out unnoticed. Nellie said it was to hear what was said about him.

"Any fool knows you'd stunt the girl's growth of hair if you apply heat
to it too early. Any fool knows that," he said. Her father was sure
about everything he said, Lena had noticed.

"Yeah, any fool," her mother repeated.

"What's that, Nellie?" her father asked as he cracked the bathroom door
another eye's width and threw his adventure book on the linoleum floor.

"I just said uh-huh,' " her mother replied with sour meekness.

"When the girl gets to be nine or ten, that'll be plenty of time to be
straightening her hair," Jonah said, ending the conversation with a slam
of the bathroom door.

Lena's grandmother felt somehow vindicated, and she strutted out of the
room and down the hall saying, "Hell, cut off that child's hair-see
what'll happen."

Shit, I'd cut it off myself if I didn't think they'd all kill me, Lena
thought as she squirmed between her mother's legs while the woman
tightened her grip and went back to the unpleasant task.

Despite the pain it caused Lena and everyone who had to deal with it,
everybody in her family seemed to think her hair should give her some
pleasure.

It didn't. It was a burden. Sometimes it was even an embarrassment.

Strange women in the grocery store would stare at her and say to one
another in amazement, "Look at the head of hair on that child. Make her
look just like a grown woman."

Even her best friend in first grade, Gwen, the quiet chubby little girl
who was smart like Lena, knew the burden that Lena's hair was for her.

"You better be careful not to run under Miss Pratt's sprinkler, Lena,"
Gwen would shout as they both ran down the sidewalk of Ward Street after
school. "Unless you want a whipping when you get home for getting your
hair wet."

During the first steamy fall and final hot spring days of the school
year, Miss Pratt, who had a well and didn't use the city water, which
she had to pay for, watered her vegetable garden and yard every
afternoon at 3:00sharp for a good two hours. So when the Georgia heat
was most oppressive, the neighborhood children-private school and
public-knew that if they could make it to the end of the school day,
they could take a refreshing dash across Miss Pratt's pretty green lawn
through the shower of icy-cold water. Everybody, that is, except Lena.

Lena never had known the wild abandon of running in the spray of a
garden hose without hearing her mother or grandmother calling from the
house or garden, "Lena, if you don't get your little butt out of that
water, you better." Or, "Lena, you get that hair wet and you and me
gonna have it out."

Or, "Lena, you know good and damn well you cannot cavort out there like
that and get your hair wet. I refuse to let you go out this house once
more with yourself looking like some wild savage because you played in
some damn sprinkler and got your hair all nappy and tangled and then
wouldn't let nobody come near you with a comb. No, little miss. Get your
ass out that water."

The women had said it so often to Lena that they no longer had to be
around to deter her when she considered running through some water.

In the weeks before their trip to the beach, there was as much
discussion about what to do with Lena's hair for two weeks in all that
moist humid air near the ocean as there was about the actual travel
plans.

"Well, I don't care what you say, we gonna have to take a straightening
comb with us to warm out that child's hair from time to time. Or do you
want her to look like some wild thing the whole time we're down there?"
Nellie asked Jonah in all seriousness, as if it were a pressing matter
like, How we gonna pay this house note this month?

"Don't waste my time talking bout things that are already settled. You
know what I said," her father replied over his plate at the breakfast
table, as his wife jumped up and down getting more hot grits, more
butter, more ice for his orange juice from the ice bucket on the
breakfront. "The child's hair don't need straightening yet."

"Well, I don't know how you expect me to keep it looking nice when that
ocean water and air get into it. I tell you, it's gonna rise like yeast
bread," her mother replied, her voice high, as though she were being
persecuted.

The discussion went on and on, from the breakfast table to the dinner
table, with Lena sitting there pretending they weren't talking about
her, and Raymond and Edward making monkeyshines when their parents
weren't looking, one of them pretending to be a crying Lena getting her
hair combed and the other one pretending to be their exasperated mother
combing her bales of hair.

The problem was solved serendipitously for Lena and her family when Gail
Goode, a shoplifter and loose woman (Lena's family called such women
Broadway jessies, alluding to the street they walked) strutted into The
Place a few days before their departure with her own daughter proudly in
tow for Lena's mother to see.

Lena, downtown at work with her mother that day, was playing behind the
counter of the liquor store, exploring the everchanging trove of
treasures kept on the shelves beneath the cash register-pocketknives,
sunglasses, tissues, silver dollars, packs of Sen-Sen, cigarette
lighters, torn dollar bills, rusty nails, rolls of pennies, and decks of
cards-when she heard the bell on the door ring. She didn't bother to
stand up and see who had entered, but she did see her mother, who was
sitting near the end of the counter and running the store that day,
nearly leap over the counter in her excitement.

"Who did that child's hair like that?" her mother wanted to know
immediately.

"Well, good afternoon to you too, Miss Nellie. And how are you today?"

Lena heard Gail Goode's slow liquid voice and knew who it belonged to
because Gail Goode was the proud owner of one of the biggest asses on
Broadway.

"Oh, hey, Gail," her mother greeted the woman perfunctorily. Then, "This
your little girl? She shore is cute. Now tell me, who did her hair like
that?"

"I did," Gail answered proudly.

All Lena's mother seemed interested in was the child's hairdo. Lena knew
it would eventually have something to do with her, so she scrambled from
the dirty floor and peeped over the counter.

The little girl standing next to the Broadway Jessie with the enormous
behind was a bit smaller than Lena, but her shiny black hair was every
bit as long and thick.

Whereas Lena had her hair braided into four thick plaits, this little
girl must have had her hair combed into a hundred thin braids cascading
down on her shoulders like Shirley Temple curls. Someone had taken the
time-Lena imagined that it must have been days-to part off a small
section of her hair and braid it, then another small section and braid
it, then another and another and another, until the little girl's entire
head of thick, strong-looking hair was herded into long, tight
manageable plaits that fell from her scalp to the ends of her hair where
they curled into wiry little spools.

From behind the counter Lena could tell that the little girl did not
like being the center of so much attention. She skipped around and
fidgeted behind her mama's big butt to get out of so many lines of
vision. But Nellie was having none of that.

"Well, you cute little thing," Lena's mother crooned from her stool at
the end of the counter by the plate-glass window. When she wanted to,
Nellie could get almost anything she wanted by being sweet. "Come on
over here and let me get a good look at you."

"Go on, Shirley Lee, let Miss Nellie see your hair."

The child burrowed her face deeper into the cheeks of her Mother's ass
and wrapped her arms around the woman's thighs in shyness.

"Go on, child," Gail said impatiently. "Don't be acting like a fool when
people talk to you."

The child saw she had no choice and peeped around her mother's hips, her
head full of thin heavy braids swinging around her ears. Then she moved
out to where Lena got her first good look at her and walked slowly over
to Nellie with her chin tucked down to her chest and her eyes on the
dusty cement floor.

The little girl had on a fancy pink polished cotton dress with a huge
sash tied in back that was frilly enough for a party. On her feet she
wore pink stretch socks trimmed with a narrow band of white lace and
shiny black patentleather baby dolls that were so free of scuffs that
Lena knew they had to be new. And on the very top of her head someone
had tied a wide pink satin bow on one of her braids.

Nellie lightly touched the girl's pink hair ribbon with the tips of her
fingers and smiled. Lena saw her mother's eyes devour the little girl's
hairstyle as if she were memorizing it.

"Well, I sure do like your hairdo, young lady," Nellie said to the
child, who still hadn't looked up. "I have me a little girl just about
your age, too. Come out here, Lena, and meet this pretty little girl."

Lena was going through a shy period herself, but after seeing how the
other girl caught it for ducking her head behind her mama I s big
behind, she didn't dare pull the same stunt. So she stepped right out
and leaned her back against the Schenley's gin sign pasted on the front
of the counter.

"Say hello to the little girl," Nellie prompted.

"Hey," Lena said softly.

The other child looked up at Lena and smiled shyly, then dropped her
chin back on her chest.

"Why don't you take Shirley Lee over to the other side and get you and
her a nice cold drink," Nellie suggested.

Happy to escape the two women's scrutiny, Lena took the girl's hand and
led her out the plate-glass door into the hot street, then back into the
airconditioned grill next door. The little girl hesitated a moment at
the entrance when the blast of Bobby "Blue" Bland's rough blues from the
jukebox hit her in the face, but Lena just tugged on her hand and pulled
her into the sea of adults' legs that crowded the counter and dance
floor. Lena knew The Place so well she could almost find the opening in
the bar with her eyes closed. When she and Shirley Lee reached the
entrance in the counter, they slipped under the lid and came out on the
employees' side of the bar.

"Boo," said a voice right at their ears as they slipped behind the
counter. Lena jumped higher than her little companion, but she just
laughed at herself when she turned and caught a glimpse of hair the
color of the inside of a baked sweet potato and the glint of gold.

Gloria was sitting on the floor next to the grill with a stiff brush in
her hand and a bucket between her propped-up legs.

"Well, look a' here, here's my girl. Miss Lena, I was wondering if you
was ever gonna come over here and say hello. Or do you have you another
friend now and don't have no time for Glo?"

Gloria was down on the floor, scrubbing around the bottom of the grill,
which was caked with grease and dirt, because the health inspector was
expected that week. But the waitressharmaid-cook got around so much-in
The Place and out-that Lena wouldn't have been surprised to find her
anywhere. She was one of those women, Nellie had said, whose real age
you couldn't tell but "considering how long she been out there, she
don't look bad for whatever age she's going for."

Lena didn't know exactly where "out there" was, but she felt as if she
knew just what her mother was saying. To Lena, Gloria almost always
looked pretty good.

Gloria prided herself on working with what she had. Lena knew that
because Gloria had told her so. "I may not have much left, baby, but I
works with what I got."

Lena thought anyone with eyes could see that. When Jonah insisted that
Gloria wear a clean white apron when she worked on the grill side at The
Place, she wrapped the big stiff apron around her body to make a tight
outfit like a sundress that showed off her shape. And sometimes in hot
weather she didn't wear anything but a pair of panties underneath, Lena
knew. Gloria had told her that too.

She had a gold tooth in the front of her mouth. And because she was
always talking or laughing or popping a stick of gum, you could see the
tooth flashing from all the way across the room, like a golden beacon.

And she nearly always had a black mole on her right cheek between her
nose and her cherry-red lips. One day when she rushed into The Place
without the birthmark on her face, Lena asked, "Gloria, where your
mole?" And Gloria said, "Damn!" and ran over to the cheap mirror on the
Kool green cigarette machine and hastily drew one in with the point of
the red Maybelline eyebrow pencil she took from her big red purse.

Gloria seemed to enjoy talking with Lena as much as Lena enjoyed
listening to her. Gloria was always anxious to talk about what she had
done the night before, even though half the time Lena didn't understand
Gloria's sly jokes at the expense of the string of losers and bums who
slithered through her life.

"Lord, ham mercy, I'm getting too old for this here shit, excuse me,
Lena baby, but I am," Gloria would avow as she hurried into The Place
late and reached for two Stanback powders and an RC cola. She would put
her quarter on the cash register and sigh. "Either I got to stop whoring
around or stop working a steady job, one or the other. I tell you, I
can't keep up both ends of this stick."

By then Lena knew what a whore was. She had insisted that someone tell
her one Sunday morning as the family drove to Mass or she would ask
Sister in class that next Monday morning. "I bet I miss half of what's
said at home cause I don't know what it means," she said to the silent
car.

Her father had kept the big green station wagon climbing up Forest
Avenue at the same pace, but he looked over at his wife and said, "Tell
Lena what the word means, Nellie." Lena excitedly jumped up on the back
of the seat between her parents, wrinkling her pretty new
navy-blue-and-white-dotted swiss dress with the big white sailor's color
trimmed in red ricrac all down the front, to get in closer earshot.

"A whore," Nellie said evenly, "is a bad woman."

Lena waited for more.

Her mother didn't say another word.

Lena sucked her teeth in disgust like her Grandmama did and fell back
heavily on the rear seat between her two brothers. "Is that all?" she
asked in disappointment.

"That's bad enough," her mother said quietly.

When Gloria said she had to stop whoring around, Lena was quick to pick
up on the word.

"Aww, Gloria," the girl said, "you ain't no whore."

Gloria looked at Lena in surprise. Then she reached in her purse and
pulled out a dollar bill. "Here, Lena baby, go down to the peanut shop
and buy us some candy."

Lena and Gloria were about to start one of their long conversations
about life, but they were interrupted.

"I gotta go," Shirley Lee spoke for the first time, in a small nervous
voice.

Lena and Gloria looked around in surprise. Lena was so engrossed in
Gloria she had forgotten that she was still holding the little girl's
hand.

Shirley Lee was holding Lena's hand tighter and tighter, looking around
The Place as if she were frightened by something.

"Let me get you girls a little treat," Gloria said and went over to the
cooler for two orange drinks. After she handed each girl a bottle, she
pulled two ten-cent bags of pork skins from the rack next to the
Alka-Seltzer dispenser. With one hand she opened the cellophane bags,
and with the other shook dollops of fiery orange hot sauce onto the
rinds from a bottle on the counter.

By the time the girls had returned to the liquor store side of The Place
with their snacks, negotiations must have been settled, because the next
morning Gail Goode drove up to their house in her loud raggedy
Chevrolet. She had come to comb Lena's hair into the same do that she
had given her own daughter.

It hadn't taken days to do it as Lena had imagined, only the entire
morning. The tugging and pulling that it entailed hurt Lena's tender
scalp as much as ever, but when Gail Goode was finished, Lena couldn't
have been happier with the results. She stood on a chair in front of the
small mirror in the downstairs hall, the same mirror where she stood and
lip-synched songs from long-playing albums by Dinah Washington and
Billie Holiday and Dakota Staton, and looked at herself until her mother
made her come to dinner.

She danced around all that evening and the next day slinging her tiny
braids around her head. Sometimes she whipped them around so sharply
that the ends stung her face where they landed. Her brothers swore they
were sick of her and couldn't wait until she slung her hair around one
time too many and her head went flying off into a corner.

Even her grandmother told her that if she didn't stop swinging her
headful of braids around her cars like that she was going to get a
headache for seven years like you got when you threw your hair outdoors
and the birds used it for their nests. But she smiled when she said it
because she thought Lena looked cute as a button with her braids. The
old lady tried to count them, but when she got up to two hundred, Lena
wouldn't sit still any longer and Grandmama lost count.

Lena didn't care what anyone said or thought. She was so pleased with
her new hairdo that when she awoke the following morning and felt all
the braids on her cheeks, she giggled. She felt she looked like a whole
new exotic person.

When she overheard her mother tell her father, "And the best part is, no
matter how wet she gets her hair, we won't even have to comb it again
till we get back from vacation and she'll still look nice," Lena knew
this new hairstyle was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

Maybe I am really lucky, like everyone says, I cause I was born with a
veil over my face, she thought. And my luck just took a while to start.

That very afternoon she put her new hairdo to the supreme test. While
everyone else was off in different parts of the house preparing for the
trip or ignoring it, she went into the kitchen pantry and closed the
door. She stripped off her playsuit and panties and stepped into the
striped tank-style swimsuit and white flip-flops her mother had just
bought for her. Then she slipped out of the pantry, through the kitchen
door, and down the back steps, peeping around corners and looking over
her shoulder all the way to the water spigot under the back steps to
make sure she wasn't seen.

She went straight for the water spigot and turned it on full force.

Not giving herself time to lose her nerve, Lena ran full steam into the
spinning jet spray of the lawn sprinkler.

The cold water hit her right in the chest and sent a shiver through her
system. She screamed in shock and delight. As she turned and came back,
the sprinkler spun around to hit her from behind, and she screamed
again. When the stream of water came around a third time, it hit her on
her butt and legs. Now she was completely wet from shoulders to feet,
and she just laughed.

The fourth time, she ran into the spray head-on, and she yelped again
when the water hit her in the right ear and soaked her face and hair.

There was no turning back now, so she decided to enjoy this new
experience.

She danced in the water's spray each time it came around, holding her
hands out to make it cascade over her head. She pretended that the white
stone birdbath in the middle of the yard was her partner and she danced
around it, giggling at the sound of the drops of water hitting the
surface of the water in the bowl. Usually when she danced, everyone
laughed at her lack of coordination. But dancing in the water made Lena
feel like a ballerina. The two redbirds-a bright crimson male and his
mottled brown mate-that came each evening and bathed in the spray of the
sprinkler appeared at the edge of the birdbath from the pine trees above
and jumped around the rim of the bowl as if they were joining Lena in
her dance.

She didn't notice she had an audience until she heard her mother's
voice.

"Lena, you must be mad!" Nellie screamed from the porch where she stood
with her grandmother and brothers beside her. "Get out of that water,
get out of that water this instant!"

Lena had one wild idea of playing on as if she hadn't heard or seen her
mother, but thought better of it when she remembered how angry her
mother got when one of the boys ran from her while she was trying to
whip him. She scampered out of the sprinkler's spray and up on the porch
dripping wet.

Before her mother could get her hands on her, however, Lena began
explaining.

"But, Mama, you said it yourself, I heard you say it to Daddy, you said,
Lena can get her hair as wet as she wants and we won't even have to comb
it." You said it, I heard you. You said it."

Her mother stopped in midgrasp, her hands about to encircle Lena's
skinny arm. Nellie turned to Grandmama with her brows raised slightly,
and the older woman laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

Lena's eyes danced from her mother's face to her grandmother's face in
expectation.

By the time Nellie said, "Go on, girl, enjoy yourself," the boys had
peeled down to their undershorts and beat Lena back to the sprinkler,
where they ran and played all afternoon until their fingertips and toes
were wrinkled.

Three days later they packed the big green station wagon and headed for
the beach.

Car trips were something at which Lena's family excelled. They had it
down to a routine. Her daddy drove. Her mama sat in the front passenger
seat.

Each boy took a back windowedward behind his father, Raymond behind his
mother.

Lena scrambled all over the car, usually starting out sitting in the
middle of the backseat, then moving to stand in her spot on the hump in
the middle of the floorboard, then climbing over to the middle of the
front seat, then sidling over to sit between her mother's legs, then
maybe moving back to the rear seat to fight with one of the boys for a
view from his window. If there was nothing packed in the rear of the
station wagon, she would sometimes climb back there, usually at the
insistence of one of her brothers, to look out the wide back window and
make faces and take off her shoes and wave her feet at the people in the
car behind them. When her grandmother was along, the older woman sat
between the boys in the back and didn't seem to mind Lena's wandering
all over her.

The family took a car ride every Sunday after they all attended Mass.
Sometimes they just rode around town, where her father would stop from
time to time at some run-downlooking house on a dirt street or back
alley. He would get out of the car and go in to chat amiably or to
demand matter-of-factly his "goddamn money." From the sound of her
father's voice, Lena imagined this money that her father wanted from the
people living at his Sunday stops as somehow different from ordinary
money.

For one thing it was his money. He put the emphasis on that. So Lena
suspected that the money-the dollar bills, fives, tens, and twenties-may
have looked like ordinary money, but it was special, separate from the
money he spent on the family food and utilities and clothes. Maybe it
was money he won in poker and skin games. Perhaps it was money that came
directly from the cash register downtown in The Place. Lena had thought
for some time that there was something special about the money in the
cash registers in the liquor store and in the grill side of The Place.
Many times she had seen her mother stealthily slip a couple of twenties
from the cash drawer into her pocket or purse while she was working
behind the counter.

It had to be special money. That's how her daddy treated it.

"Man, don't play with me about my goddamn money," he would yell as he
walked out of one of the ramshackle houses, stopping to speak in a
friendly manner to the older people sitting in swaybacked chairs on the
porch. Then he would get in the car with his family and drive off to the
next house, where he would want his goddamn money from some other
person. Her mother would sit there in her Sunday finery, her slender
hand on her throat, and smile out the car window with a look on her face
that said, "My children in this car and I don't even know this man."

Other Sundays her father would head out of town to the countryside
surrounding Mulberry to drive the back roads, smell the fresh air, and
comment on the small patches of vegetable gardens country folks were
growing in their yards.

"Look at those collard greens over there," he would say, making all of
them in the car direct their attention toward the garden with the huge
shiny leaves of collards growing in neat bunches. "Now, those are some
beautiful greens. Put down those comic books and papers back there," he
would tell his children in the backseat. "Look out the window and enjoy
the scenery.

Although the boys and Lena didn't dare say anything in protest, they
would close the books and Sunday paper grudgingly. Then they would start
taking out their anger on each other by pushing and shoving and pinching
for more room or a better seat or view, or more air. They were miserable
in the backseat watching the same scenery they had seen all their short
lives, Sunday after Sunday, and they had to let somebody know it.

This trip to the beach was different. It was to be the longest trip the
family had ever undertaken. Lena's father calculated it would take them
all about eight hours, with rest, comfort, and lunch stops. He had
calculated just about everything they were likely to encounter between
their house and the Georgia shore. He didn't tell anybody, but he had
even allowed time for them to get lost because he was to be at the head
of the caravan leading three cars and ten people across the state. And
he almost always got lost at least once during every road trip he took.
He couldn't explain it or understand it really, but there was just
something about a road map that seemed to dare him to strike out in his
own direction regardless of what the lines and signs told him to do. in
private Lena's mother said it was just so he could get mad when things
didn't go according to his schedule. But Lena had noticed that it was
her mother who always got anxious and angry when hey got lost. Her
father seemed to enjoy it, taking it as an opportunity to explore an
area that they wouldn't have normally seen.

"Well, what do you know? I never knew that there was this little lake
back here off this road," he'd say, sounding sincerely intrigued.

Her father had already told them that there would be no reading during
this trip. They could do that as soon as they got back home from
vacation and started school. He wanted them to pay particular attention
during the next two weeks to the things around them.

"As soon as we get out of this county," he told them over his shoulder
as they pulled away from the house, their grandmother still waving to
them from the steps of the side porch, "you'll start noticing how things
are gonna change. The land, the way things look, the way they smell.
just watch."

Lena and the boys, wide-eyed with excitement over the trip and with no
comic books to read, had to admit that he was right. Out the windows of
the station wagon, they watched the familiar red Georgia clay of their
own region gradually change to the rich black loam farther south and
then to the light friable sandy soil of the coast.

The peach trees they were so used to seeing by the sides of the roads on
their Sunday drives gave way to the broad pecan trees of south Georgia.
After a hundred miles or so, the tall pines they knew so well seemed to
grow shorter, into the knobby loblolly pines of the coastal region.
Then, to their amazement, the trees seemed to take on an even stranger
form.

The majestic oak trees they were familiar with began spreading their
limbs and growing curly appendages like an old man's beard, which their
father told them was Spanish moss. Then the sandy ground began sprouting
palm trees, like those they had seen in pictures of desert islands.

The caravan of cars-first their big green station wagon, then Lena's
aunt and uncle's black Ford sedan, and finally the Stevenses' brand-new
1956red Cadillac-arrived at their small motel across the road from the
beach long after dark because they had made so many stops across the
state to eat and pee and stretch and rest. Lena could smell the sharp
salty scent that her father told her was the smell of the marshes and
the ocean, and she could hear the waves crashing against the shore, but
it was too dark to see anything. And her mother insisted that the
children get right into bed after a bath in putrid water that smelled
like rotten eggs so they would be rested and ready to start their
vacation early the next morning.

The motel they stayed in was owned by a short fat black man with a
square fleshy face, who said his people came from Savannah. He had the
unsettling habit of slapping his palm to his forehead, then slowly
pulling his hand over his face and down the curve of his throat before
he spoke. He wrapped up this ritual by thumping the middle of his chest
with his fist once where his hand's journey ended. After seeing him do
this the first night when he showed each family to its flat concrete
block bungalow, Lena avoided him as much as possible. She lived in fear
of watching the man pull his features into his hand like a cartoon
character-maybe Popeye-and seeing them snap back like rubber into the
shape of another face altogether.

The sulphur of the bathwater made them all smell like oldtime
beachcombers before they even saw the ocean. And that night Lena dreamed
of the beach@r at least what she imagined it to look like from pictures
she had seen.

The next morning Lena's father was the first to rise, getting the rest
of them out of bed by singing loud choruses of "Shake, Rattle, and
Roll."

"Get out of that bed, wash your face and hands. Get into that kitchen,
rattle them pots and pans," he sang in his smooth tenor voice. "Shake,
rattle, and roll."

He had them all laughing and dancing in the tiny kitchen of the small
motel suite as grits bubbled in the pot and bacon fried in the skillet.

Then they all dressed in their swimsuits and covers and headed across
the street for the beach.

It was like going on a treasure hunt.

They started out walking in a group, but by the time they reached the
wind-blown rickety fence along the well-worn path into the dunes, they
were walking single-file. They all stopped every few steps to admire
something completely new to their inland eyes, the wild white
fiddle-leaf morning glories that crawled on dark green vines all over
the dunes, the tiny sand crabs that ran from their approaching feet, the
big holes in the sand that the men, sissy-like and skittish, swore were
made by some kind of beach snakes. Raymond and Edward ran over to the
biggest hole they could find in the sand, expecting to find a huge snake
sticking its head out.

Disappointed to discover no signs of life around the hole, Edward
started to stick his hand down the wide opening. Four or five adults
yelled at the same time. "Boy, don't you stick your hand down there!

You may draw back a nub!" his father cautioned harshly.

Even for those in the group who had been to the beach before, this trip
seemed like a whole new excursion into an unknown territory, an exotic
exploration by pretty brown-skinned creatures perfectly at home under
the burning midmorning sun.

Lena loved everything about the beach, the way the gulls and pelicans
squawked and swooped above her, the way the air cooled the closer she
got to the water, the salt she tasted on her lips when she licked them,
the way the sea oats swayed gently in the ocean breeze, the tiny
sanderlings scurrying away from the surf trying not to get their feet
wet. She felt that she somehow belonged there at the shore, even though
it was her first time even seeing the ocean.

She followed her first impulse when her group topped the final tertiary
dunes and caught their first sight of the greenish-brown waters of the
Atlantic. She threw down her bundles, kicked off her rubber thongs, and
ran into the water, her many braids flying behind her like a bridal
train. An incoming wave met her headon and kissed her right in her face.
She giggled like a flirtatious teenager and shook her head so her wet
braids swung around her like a dog flinging water off its body.

She felt a little guilty when she remembered her Grandmama back in hot
dusty Mulberry. But after a few minutes of playing in the water and
feeling the hot morning sun on her back, she ran up to her mother, her
aunt, and Mrs. Stevens where they sat, all dressed in strapless skirted
swimsuits, under two big red-and white beach umbrellas her father had
saved from a liquor promotion the summer before. There she wiped the
salty water from her eyes and soon forgot everyone but the few black
people in her group, who had the beach to themselves.

By midday everyone was spent from the sun, the playing, the sea air, and
the big picnic lunch of fried chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs, ham
and pimento cheese sandwiches, and lemon Coke that the women had found
time to prepare during the morning. There were times when Lena hated the
idea of having to grow into an adult woman on whose shoulders so much
work seemed to fall. But like everyone else she sat down on the spread
and ate until her face was greasy.

After lunch, while the women and men half-dozed under the big beach
umbrellas, the children played on the sandy beach, careful not to go
into the water without an adult or until an hour after they had eaten.

it was in this half-dazed state that Lena wandered away from her
brothers and cousins, who were playing near the surf, kicking up sand
and salt water in each other's faces in their exuberance. Her brothers
had already forgotten the instructions given to them just that morning.

"Now, boys," their mother had said, trying to sound serious and stern as
she beat eggs in a bowl for breakfast, "we want you to enjoy yourselves
during this trip, but we also want you to take on some responsibility."

Lena, standing in the doorway of the small kitchenette, saw both sets of
her brothers' shoulders sag at the news.

"Now, when we're out on the beach, no matter what other adult is there,
we want you two to keep an eye on Lena. We don't expect you to kill your
own damn fool selves in that water trying to save her or anything if she
wanders in too deep, just make sure she doesn't get that far.

"Lena is just a little thing and doesn't understand like you two boys
the respect you have to have for the water. Now, like I said, we want
you to have a good time down here, too, but don't forget it's just like
at home. Keep an eye out for Lena. She's our baby."

Lena found it easy to understand sometimes why the boys said they hated
her. She hated it herself. always being considered a burden no matter
how good she tried to be.

But when the idea hit her, she still wandered down the beach by herself
without a thought to how the boys would have to pay for her absence when
her mother discovered it.

it was low tide. Lena didn't know it was called that, but she knew the
ocean was different because she could now see the big brown pelicans
congregate out on a long narrow sandbar that was not even visible a few
hours before. Every now and then another three or four would glide by
her, flying just inches above the waves, and swoop down on the island,
insisting every time that their brothers and sisters find room for them
to land. To Lena the birds looked ancient, like something from another
time, before creatures like her mama and daddy and brothers walked the
beaches.

As she strolled down the beach, she stopped for a while to watch a
school of mullet leap and splash not three feet from where she stood at
the water's edge. Lena could see the dragonflies and sand flies and
gnats hovering above the water's smooth still surface. Each time a big
fat mullet, going after an insect, jumped out of the muddy water, the
sun turned it silver-colored as it fell back in on its side, and Lena
let out a little cry of appreciation.

When the fish moved on to another feeding spot, the girl looked down at
her feet sunk nearly ankle-deep in the muddy sand of the ocean floor and
saw the darting figures of minnows swimming fearlessly over her toes and
behind her heels. She tried to keep her feet as still as possible
because the smallest wiggling of her toes would produce clouds of mud in
the water and disturb the tiny fish. To Lena there seemed to be hundreds
of them, but then she saw that their shadows on the ocean floor near the
water's edge doubled their numbers.

The child really enjoyed the feeling of communion with other creatures
that the small fish playing around her ankles gave her. Bugs and small
crawly things didn't bother her. The only thing that crawled on the
ground she was truly afraid of was the black crusty roll-up bugs that
her brothers delighted in throwing in her hair and dropping down the
back of her blouse.

If Raymond and Edward were here, she thought as she watched the tiny
fish play with her toes, they would feel called upon to go whooping and
running through the water trying to catch the poor little things.

Boys! Then she sucked her teeth in disgust the way her grandmother did
and walked on.

The fine white sand, sparkling with glints of light like the glitter her
mother sprinkled over her hair and on the costumes for her dance
teacher's annual recitals, was hot between her bare brown toes. She
wandered in and out of the surf to coot them off from time to time. To
someone watching her from a spot in the dunes farther inland, Lena would
have appeared to be wandering idly down the beach with no particular
destination in mind, but the appearance would have been misleading.

Lena was looking for a particular place just a little farther down the
beach, where the big rocks that lined part of the coast formed a low
overhang facing the ocean. At that spot, she was sure, there was a curve
in the beach that created a protected little cove where she could sit on
the dry pure sand and feel the ocean breeze blow over her face and
chest. She had dreamed about that very spot the night before as she
slept with the smell of the sea in her throat.

When she saw the spot, she wasn't a bit surprised that it looked exactly
like she had dreamed it would, with a big tree stump bleached white
wedged among the rocks. In her seven years she RACHEL had occasionally
dreamed about places and things and events before they came to pass.

But she was a bit startled to find a barefoot black woman dressed in a
long filmy maroon dress sitting on the huge stump of driftwood with her
knees pulled up to her chin and her arms wrapped tightly around her bent
legs.

The woman's hair, coming loose from short nappy braids, was wild and
free in the wind. A heavy dark gray scarf of some rough cotton material,
caught on one of the tree's short broken branches, blew just as wildly
in the breeze beside her.

The woman was staring out at the water. She acted as though she didn't
see Lena, but something inside the child told her she had. Lena
continued walking toward the woman, although her best instincts told her
to run back in the direction she had come.

Her heart began to beat rapidly. to sea as Lena walked The strange
figure continued to look out toward her spot on the beach.

There was something familiar about the way the woman sat there. She
looked as if she belonged there, but she also looked unaffected by her
surroundings. Thejuly sun, blazing like a hot tin plate in the sky,
hadn't even raised a sweat on the woman's face and throat, which looked
like they were made of old brown leather. But Lena could feel the rays
burning her own scalp in the tiny parts between her braids.

Lena stopped and just stood there for a moment, digging her toes into
the sand a few yards from the woman. The woman's washed-out-looking eyes
swept away from some point far out to sea and moved around to Lena.

"Hey, Lena," the woman in the long thin maroon dress said in an easy,
natural way. "My name is Rachel. I been waiting for you."

"Waiting for me?" Lena asked, her voice cracking with fear before she
even felt it. "How you even know who I am? I don't know you."

"Oh, I knows all kinds of t'ings," the woman said. "Why don't you come
over chere and set down by me?"

Lena was about to answer, "Do I have to?" when the woman said, "Or do
you want me to come visit you in your bed tonight?"

The image of the woman coming to haunt her in the middle of the night
instead of there on the sunny beach made Lena walk up to the apparition
and sit down beside her immediately.

They sat there in silence for a long while, looking out at the baby
waves gently lapping the sandy shore as the ocean breeze, soft as her
grandmother's kiss, blew around them and lightly lifted Rachel's thin
skirts around her knees. Hundreds of dragonflies zipped and darted
through the air, going after the large mosquitoes, with the squawking
gulls right on their tails looking for lunch. All the animal activity
filled the air with humming, buzzing, and flapping.

The woman appeared calm and untroubled. Lena felt just the opposite.

Now that she was sitting up close to the woman, the vise that had
gripped her chest on first seeing her had tightened even more. The
tightness made it hard for her to breathe and made the thumping of her
heart against her rib cage seem more pronounced. Lena thought everybody
on the beach would be able to hear her heart beat.

But when she looked up and down the beach, she realized for the first
time that she had walked so far that her family and friends were no
longer even in sight. And she began to panic.

"What's wrong wif you, gull? What you scared op" Rachel sounded a bit
annoyed.

"Lady, I'm scared of you."

"Shoot," the woman snorted and pulled the child closer to her on the
tree.

Rachel smelled like something out of the ocean, salty and wet all the
way through, and her skin was scratchy with grains of sand. Lena now sat
with her head full of the long reddish braids tucked under the woman's
smelly armpit.

"You ain't got no cause to be scared of me. A child like you. You gonna
see a heap more like me before you dead, too."

Lena shuddered at the thought and the feel of Rachel's clammy skin and
clothes pressed next to her face, arm, and thigh.

RACHEL "Feel good here on this log, don't it?" Rachel said as she
slipped her arm from around Lena's shoulders and leaned her head back to
catch the breeze on her throat. "Me and the peoples round here used to
call the wind Tony. We used to sing,"Blow, Tony, blow."' Lena just
nodded dumbly. Her heart was still thumping like the machines at the
paper plant, and when she tried to swallow, no spit came up in her
mouth.

"When I was live, I used to love to come sit on this chere very spot.

But I wasn't here much, much as I loved it, cause when I was live I was
a slave."

"A slave?" Lena wanted to know.

"Yeah," Rachel answered.

"A slave? A slave like I read about in school?"

"A little thing like you can read?" Rachel asked with wonder in her
voice.

"How old you is, Lena?"

"Seven," Lena said.

"Seven. Hummmpph, I always wanted to read."

She just sat there a moment looking at the child, who sat next to her
scratching mosquito bites on her thigh and staring back at her with big
eyes.

Then the woman seemed to remember what she was talking about and
continued speaking.

"Years and years ago we peoples, black peoples, was all slaves Up along
in through this chere area. All up in through Georgia and down on
through Alabama and ssippi and on up the coast, too.

"I warn't born here. I was born on a place up round Macon, where I was a
slave, too, but they sold me off down chere when I was just bout a
growed oman.

I don't know why, just one day they just sold me, put me on a wagon with
some pigs and goats and rode me off to this chere place ... still to be
a slave but a slave way from my ma and my pa and everybody I know."

"A slave?" Lena repeated in wonderment.

"The big house and barns and outbuildings and our cabins where us slaves
stayed was set way back there," Rachel explained as she pointed inland
past the sand dunes and sea grass that rose, then dipped out of sight.
"The white man that say he owned us owned a whole lot of land and he
grew rice long the river up the coast. You ever see fields where they
grows rice, Lena?"

"No," Lena answered. She didn't know how to address the woman. Do you
call a ghost ma'am? she wondered.

"Well, let me tells you, you don't never want to see it either. I didn'
t know noting bout no rice till I was brought down chere, but I had to
learn mighty quick.

"Warn't no field really where they grew it, just a big old marsh where
the river flooded every tide. It would be full of big old cypress trees
with stumps that went way down in the mud and those palms with the sharp
leaves that look like swords and all kind of t'ings growing in it. And
the man which work us would say, Ya'll niggers go out there and clear
that field today." Us womens would have to tie up our skirt tails and go
out there with the mens and work in that swampy water up to our knees.
Water full of water enoc'sin snakes and snapping turtles and gators.

"And the sun be beating down on you and ain't even no shade for what
seem like a mile. And if they is, you better not get caucht standing
under it. And the mosquitoes and flies and gnats, they be eating you up.

"And, Lena, every day be like that. If you ain't clearing a field, you
planting or you weeding or you cutting and hauling. Every day."

"Every day? Even Sundays?" Lena wanted to know.

"Every day and some nights too, when the moon was big and bright.

Going out in that marsh at night used to scare me to death. Sometimes
there wouldn't even be no moon, and they send us out there to work with
somebody holding a flambeau.

"But onst in a while, I take a chance and I slip off and come down chere
to set. All I wanted to do was go by myself, set with my feets in this
sand and let those cool, cool, moist breezes brush all over my tired
body. I wanted the wind to blow right through me.

"I warn't trying to run away. Not then. Down chere I didn't even know
which a-way to run. All I wanted was a little time down by the water.

No working and sweating and hauling and caring for folks that warn't my
own.

"This land right chere looked like the onliest place I was ever gonna
know, the onliest home I was ever gonna have. I knew I had another home
way, way cross the waters, but I ain't never been there or set foot on
that soil.

This all I know and I wanted it for my own. I wanted to feel and taste
and hear this place that was all I knew.

"But the white folks say I warn't nothing but a slave. The missus she
say, How dare you think you can just go to the ocean when you feels like
it?"Just like that, she say it, How dare you? The onliest reason for you
to go to the shore is to bring me a cool breeze back. Can you do that?
Can you?" I'd say no, I can, t do that. Then she say, Then what use is
you going there wasting time?"

Rachel stopped speaking and seemed to catch her breath. Lena remembered
to breathe for the first time since the ghost started talking, it
seemed, and Rachel continued.

"They beat me the first time they caught me chere. Beat me bad too.

But I still come back. I had to breathe this air. I had to let it play
with my skin. Shoo things out my body."

"You were a little girl to get a whipping?" Lena asked.

"No, I was a growed oman like I is now."

"And they still whipped you like you wasn't but a child?" to "They
whipped me like I wasn't nothing. That what it mean be a slave-you ain't
nothing."

"What you mean, you am I t nothing?" Lena really wanted to know. She
couldn't comprehend what Rachel was trying to tell her.

Rachel just looked at her. "Lots of people loves you, don't they, Lena?"
she asked after a little while. "Don't they?"

Lena thought a second or two, then nodded her head.

"I'm glad. I'm glad you loved. Most times I don't think I was loved.

Mebbe I was. My ma and pa loved me, I knows that, but they couldn't save
me none. Sitting down chere at the ocean made me feel loved a little.

"There was something about the ocean that just kept drawing me chere,
just tolling me to chere. It asked me questions that tore my heart.

Questions I couldn't answer, but I couldn't stay way from chere
neither."

"Late last night, up in our room at the motel with the windows open, I
heard the ocean talking, too," Lena offered.

"Then you know what I mean. What it say to you?" Rachel wanted to know.

Lena turned shy and just shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, I tells you what it say to me. It tell me all the t'ings that
coulda been, that could be.

"It sung songs to me of what I coulda been if I warn't no slave. What my
mama coulda been. My mama before they sold me away from nem, she could
sew anyt'ing with a needle and tread, anyt'ing. But she warn't no sewer,
she was a slave.

"And my pa, he war a blacksmith. Best one in that whole county. That
whole county. But him, he was a slave, too. And what about me? Maybe I
wanted to make clothes for people, or stories, or pick a tune on the box
for them to dance to or marry to or cry to. A slave can't do that.

Not for real." Rachel fell silent again and let the sound of the
seagulls and dragonflies fill the space her voice had left.

"It was bad?" Lena asked, but didn't really want to know. She had
already heard more than she ever wanted to hear in her life.

"Little girl, you don't know how bad it was. Look at your legs, how
smooth and clear they is. Look at mines, my whole body, so covered with
scabs and scars and whelps. It was bad.

"And I ain't just talking bout the beatings I got, not that the beatings
wasn't a big part of it. The beatings was bad, they make you strip down
mother-naked. They didn't care none bout everybody seeing you without no
clothes. Then they tell you to hug that tree or lay cross that log or
stick your head in that fence, then they try to wear out that leather on
your back, your neck, your behind, your head-anywhere. I seen
folks-womens, mens-beat till the blood run down round they feets and
stand RACHEL in puddles in they brogan shoes. And seeing other folks
beat was just bout as bad as it being you. I think the white folks know
that, how bad it was seeing somebody else beat.

"Where I was born, up round Macon, they beat you through your clothes
where the marks and blood don't show, but down here where I was they
strip you mother-naked like you ain't got no decents, then they whips
you.

"The white man that say he own us say, I don't care bout the marks, I
take the loss. "That's what he say, I take the loss." Like he know
somet'ing bout loss. No, I was born to be something else than a slave."

"Then why were you a slave?" Lena asked.

"Didn't have no choice, child, what you think? But to be a slave on the
ocean, I could not bear it."

A sleek white sea tern sharply traced in black flew directly over their
heads, casting a brief shadow over Lena's face and leaving Rachel's
untouched.

"See that bird, that beautiful, beautiful flying creature? When I lived
they flew over me too, while I was working in the fields and late in the
evening when I trudged back to my cabin to fall out dead tired on my
t'in pallet stuffed with the Spanish moss that hang from the trees round
here.

"Seeing them birds flying used to break my heart. I used to hear stories
bout how our peoples used to be able to fly at one time. When I was your
age, I used to try, try so hard I'd break out in a sweat just wishing,
but I never could, never could fly."

Lena dropped her eyes to the sand and felt suddenly ashamed Of the
question in her mind.

"Course I wanted someone to love me," Rachel answered her silent
question.

"Course I needed a strong shoulder to hold on to, course I wanted to
cry, and did lots of times. But it didn't do no good. T'ings was still
the same when I woke up before first light each morning."

Sadness was overtaking Lena's feeling of fear. She wanted to tell
Rachel, I'm just a little girl. I don't want to hear all this. I don't
want to know all this. Please, don't tell me any more." But Rachel just
looked at the child's big brown eyes welling up with tears and slipped
inside her head and thoughts again.

"Child," she said softly. "Do you know how long I been waiting for
somebody like you to come along so I can tell them all of this, so I can
share some of this? You t'ink I'm not gonna tell you now I got you here
on my beach?"

Then Rachel threw her head back and began to shake all over, her short
nappy braids quivering with her. She opened her mouth wide, wider than
Lena thought anyone was capable of doing. Her lips stretched back
farther and farther, exposing more and more of her brown-and-pink gums.

Then she started moaning and howling like something from the grave, long
and low like a werewolf out of a scary movie. Lena started to cover her
eyes with her hands and bring her knees up to her ears, the way she
always did during the scary part of movies when she sat in the balcony
of the Burghart Theatre with her brothers, but she couldn't move her
hands to her face. She couldn't move at all.

At last Rachel settled down and sat quietly on the log, rocking from
side to side.

"But I didn't feel so bad when I took a chance and come down here to set
awhile," Rachel finally said.

"Did they beat you some more when they caught you down here again?"

Lena couldn't understand why she asked these questions. She didn't
really want to know the answers. They seemed to pour out of her mouth
without her permission.

"No, little girl, they didn't beat me. When I warn't where they thought
I oughta be, they sent a boy to come look for me. His name was Johnny.
He was a nice boy. He had a club foot and fetched things and did errands
and such around the place. He was just slow and the white folks holler
at him for it, but he couldn't no more help it than the man in the moon.

"Johnny come and he beg me to come back. He found me sittin' on this
chere tree stump that had been hit by lightning and then had fell in on
the beach.

"I was just setting here watching it get dark. Johnny was real RACHEL
scared for me. All us black folks, we all lived in fear. Always afraid,
scared of the beatings or of getting sold away or of something.

He come running up, calling my name, Rachel, Rachel."

I heard him long fore I saw him. "When he caught sight of me setting on
this tree stump he stopped dead still up on the cliff back there.

Then he come running down the path to the beach down here where I was
setting.

" What you hollering my name for, Johnny @' I asked him.

"He say, Rachel, Rachel, they send me for you. They say you better get
your black ass back to the cabins fast as you can run. Rachel, you got
to do it. They come here, they kill you."

" They already done that, Johnny,' I said then.

"The boy was looking back over his shoulder like something fixin' to
jump out the bushes and grab him, then turning back, straining to see me
in the growing darkness.

" I told him, You go on back, Johnny. Tell em you can't find me. I'm
staying right chere on this log."

"The boy stood there dancing from his good foot to his bad foot for a
while, then run off in the direction of the big house.

"When I heard the bosses' hooves, it was pure-T dark. And the tide that
was dead still whenjohnny come looking for me was turned around and
coming in fast. just like it is now," Rachel said as she pointed to the
water's edge creeping back toward them.

Lena looked out at the ocean a ways off from their feet in the sand.

The surf was being whipped up by the wind. The churning of the ocean had
made foam like dingy soapsuds that blew onto the beach and skittered
across the sand around the legs of the tiny sanderlings and larger
seagulls standing with their beaks to the wind. how quickly the water's
edge had The girl was surprised to see inched back toward them.

The sandbar full of pelicans had disappeared under the waves, and the
sun was no longer directly overhead. She knew it must be getting late in
the afternoon. Her own braids blew in the wind like Rachel's hair and
she longed to get away from that fishy odor that rose from the
apparition's clothes and being, but she still couldn't move from her
spot on the log, She tried to creep her foot along the white sand a bit
at the bottom of the crab-eaten log, but when it wouldn't obey her
command and move, she didn't dare try to get up and walk away. She
wasn't even sure that she really wanted to leave Rachel crying and
moaning on the beach, until the woman said she could go.

Does the tide come in that fast when she's not here? Lena wondered to
herself.

"I'm always here," the woman answered and lifted her chin in the air.

"This is where I wanted to be, this is where I choose to be, and this is
where I is.

"Like I was saying, this is where I was setting when them two white
men&the man which owned the place where I was a slave to and the man
which worked for him-come riding up on their big snorting hosses. In the
dark they sound to me like they was come riding from hell.

"I could feel those hosses' hoofbeats hitting the earth and echoing
through my chest, but I warn't scared. Not a bit that time, cause I knew
I warn't gonna go nowhere. They reined in them bosses and come to a stop
right up there above us," Rachel continued, jerking her head over her
shoulder in the direction of the overhang behind them.

" Rachel!" one of em screamed down at me. I was surprised they could see
me in the dark. They most likely couldn't. They must a' just knowed I
was down here.

" Rachel, you black bitch, who the hell you think you is, making us come
out here in the dark to look for your black ass? Get on back to the
house, you gon' regret the day you ever saw this here water."

"But I didn't say a word. The tide was coming in fast, I could feel it
around my feets already. And I knew that the path leading up to the
overhang where they stood was under water itself by then. I just sat
there listening to the ocean, to what she had to say to me bout what
coulda been, RACHEL .I reached up and pulled this chere scarf off my
head. Wropped one end of it round my right arm here at the wrist, then
wropped the other end onto this branch of the log. Had this here long
apron. I ripped it off from round my waist and tied my other arm best I
could to the other side of this log.

"By then the water was almost up to my waist, and it felt good and cool
on my body.

, We oughta just leave your black ass down there,' one of the mens said.

"I didn't say nothing. I just smiled. It happened real quick, faster
than I thought it would. The tide rose so fast I hardly had time to
t'ink of my ma and pa back at the place up round Macon, then I
thought'bout this here man name Daniel and how his eyes look when they
drove me away from up there.

He looked so sad that I was going away.

"And the last thing I remember as I heard them two mens trying to ride
down that watery path and cursing when they find out they can't get down
there to me is I hope don't nobody's eyes never took that sad for me
again. Cause I was glad to be going. I was going to the ocean and
couldn't nobody ever stop me from going there again.

"I been chere ever since, but you the onliest one I ever talked to.

You special, Lena."

Rachel settled back on the log so solidly and contentedly that Lena
thought the ghost might just disappear into the wood. The child sat as
still she had before. When a big stinging deer fly landed on her left
arm and began biting her, she swatted it with the palm of her right
hand. The swift movement of her own hand surprised her. She could move
once again. Get up and walk away, she told herself, since Rachel was
back to looking out to sea as she had been when Lena first saw her.

But now it was Lena who held herself there. She knew in her heart there
was something she still had to share with Rachel, just as the woman had
shared her story with her.

"Grandmama say colored folks don't belong on the beach."

Lena's voice was barely a whisper.

Rachel turned her whole body around so she was facing Lena. Then she
reached out with her damp leathery hands and grabbed the child's
shoulders firmly and dipped her face down until it was level with
Lena's. She spoke right into the girl's mouth.

"Don't you believe that," she said very slowly. "Don't you believe that,
Lena. Black folk belong here. You belong here. Don't believe black folks
don't belong on the beach. Don't never believe black folks don't belong
nowhere. Don't be afraid, Lena. Claim what is yours. I died to be here
on this beach, Lena. Don't never forgit that. You belong anywhere on
this earth you want to."

The smell of the ocean-salty, fishy, alive, green-was SO strong on
Rachel's breath blowing into Lena's face that it made the girl a little
dizzy. And the woman was holding the child's shoulders so tightly in her
hands that it was beginning to hurt.

"Lena!" her brother Raymond's harsh voice broke through the sea air.

"Girl, where you been?"

Lena jumped up from the log, breaking Rachel's grip on her. She was in a
state of confusion. For a while she had forgotten that her brothers even
existed. Seeing them running up the beach toward her and Rachel's
protected cove seemed to make stars spin before her eyes, as if two
worlds had collided before her.

"Lena, wh-wh-what you doing up h-here all by yourself'?" Edward demanded
angrily as he reached her first and grabbed her skinny bare arm so hard
it made her wince. But Lena could see the relief in his eyes.

"Good God, Lena, what made you go off by yourself like that?" Raymond
asked. He was as mad as Edward.

Lena didn't know what to say. She saw the boys looking right at her
where she stood next to the log, but they didn't say a word about
Rachel.

Just to make sure, Lena turned around and looked at the woman in the
thin maroon dress. She was still there and had gone back to staring out
to sea.

"Lena, pay attention." Raymond grabbed her hand and pulled RACHEL her
sharply toward him. "Do you know you almost got us killed? What you
wander off for by yourself like that? Mama an'em still sleep, so they
don't know you gone."

"Yeah, if th-th-they did, they'd b-b-be makin' two little wowo-wooden
overcoats for us right now. Daddy woulda skskinned us alive."

"Yeah. You're more damn trouble than you'll ever be worth," Raymond
agreed as he took her other arm and pulled her away from the log back
down the beach in the direction of the motel. "Come on, let's get back.
And quick too."

Coming behind them, Edward gave Lena a push and muttered, "You old
popeyed fool."

Lena couldn't take any more. Seeing Rachel, hearing the ghost's story,
knowing she was the only one who saw her and that she better not tell
anyone or she would get sick, then having Raymond and Edward shoving and
pinching her like she was nothing. It was all too much.

She pulled away from her brothers' grasp and flung herself down on the
hot beach sobbing, the ends of her hundreds of plaits falling into the
sand.

The sight stopped Raymond and Edward in their tracks. They had never
seen anything like it, had never heard their baby sister cry like that
before, deep heart-rending sobs that shook her whole body. They were
immediately repentant.

Dropping to the sand beside her, they sat her up and tried brushing the
sand off her face and arms and swimsuit.

"Shhhh, don't cry, Lena, we sorry. Come on, stop crying, we sorry we
yelled at you," Raymond said in gentle tones.

"Yeah," Edward added, as contrite as his brother, "we were just scared
you had gone off and got in the water and drowned. You know you ain't
got no business going off by yourself on this beach."

"Yes, I do.

Yes, I do, I belong on this beach. We all do. We do, too, belong down
here," Lena kept repeating to her puzzled brothers.

"Lena, you know you don't have any business going off being by yourself,
especially down here where you don't know anybody," Raymond tried to
reason with her, "Yes, I do, yes, I do," Lena kept saying. "I belong
down here on this beach. This ocean is just as much mine as anybody's.
It's yours too, Raymond.

We colored folks, we belong on the beach."

"Girl, what you talking about?" Raymond demanded.

"I do, too, belong down here. I belong on this beach, Raymond, I belong
anywhere on this earth I want to be," she insisted.

The boys exchanged glances and decided not to press their baby sister
about what she meant. They knew she was as likely as not to say
something that would confuse and scare them. And they had had enough of
a scare for one day when they realized she was missing.

"Okay, okay, y-y-you right, Lena, w-we do belong here. I know w-wh-what
you mean. Now, stop crying."

Lena was calming down some now. She was trying to stop her sobs. But
they kept escaping from her chest in little hiccuping sounds that shook
her whole body. And her face, especially her nose and ears and eyes, was
red and strained. Me boys knew that their mother would be able to tell
right away that Lena had been crying.

"Come on," Raymond suggested. "Let's get in the water and cool off." The
sudsy waves rolling into the shore with the tide were like a refreshing
cool drink against their bodies. But Lena couldn't help shuddering a bit
at the feet of the salty water on her skin. It made her think of Rachel,
whom she could still see sitting up on the beach on her bleached-out
tree stump. And when an especially big wave came in while Lena wasn't
looking, covering her head and face, going up her nose, and putting a
salty taste in her throat, she had to fight a panicky feeling that she
knew must have been like the one Rachel felt when the tide came in and
she was tied underwater to that tree.

When she emerged from the wave, spitting and sputtering, RACHEL her
heart racing, her eyes stinging, she heard the boys laughing at her
histrionics. She was about to get angry with them because they obviously
didn't understand the importance of what she had just experienced. She
was going to tell them that they were stupid and unfeeling and didn't
care about anything but not getting a whipping.

Then she looked up at Rachel and saw a smile on the woman's leathery
face. She was laughing, too, just like the boys.

Throwing her head back, showing her throat and teeth. She was laughing
at Lena flopping around in the water's edge like a clown doll trying to
find her footing in the shifting sands under her feet, snot hanging from
her nose, hundreds of plaits heavy with ocean water trailing down around
her ears.

it was the first time Lena had seen a smile on the visage of the ghost,
and it raised so many emotions in the girl that she didn't know whether
to laugh herself or cry. Instead she threw her head back into the next
oncoming wave with her braids dangling behind her and flopped her entire
body spread-eagle like a puppet into the surf. She knew it must have
looked funny.

The ocean rushing into her ears filled her head with water, grains of
sand, and what Lena knew had to be the sound of Rachel's laughter.

As soon as the boys saw Lena laughing again, they were so relieved that
they did everything they could think of to please her and make up for
their nastiness toward her. Edward found a long narrow silver-and-black
feather floating on the water, which he shook nearly dry and gave to the
girl to stick among her many braids made thick and bouncy by the moist
salt air and seawater.

They found two seashells almost exactly the same, with swirls of blue
and yellow in their whorls, and promised to show her how to make them
into earrings for her pierced ears when they got home.

At the water's edge they acted like clowns, too, standing on their hands
with just their feet sticking out of the water, to make Lena laugh as
they walked back down the beach toward the contented black people just
stirring from their afternoon naps.

Nellie nudged her sister-in-law and Mrs. Stevens, lying on either side
of her on big yellow beach towels. "Look how happy the children look,"
she said as they watched the boys swinging Lena between them, walking
down the beach toward the women. "I know I don't give them enough credit
sometimes. But those boys do look out for their baby sister."

Lena enjoyed the rest of her vacation at the shore, going down to the
clean sandy beach every chance she got, her skin turning as rich and
brown as a berry from hours in the sun, her braids becoming woolly and
fat from the water and bright red from the sun. She had become what the
motel owner called a real beach bum, a native of the coast. But there
was one thing she couldn't bring herself to do. She couldn't eat the big
blue crabs that her father bought from the black fishermen on a rickety
nearby dock and the women steamed up in huge black pots with hot peppers
and salt until the creatures were orangy red.

Their smell reminded Lena too much of Rachel, whom she never saw again
on the beach.

Driving back to Mulberry didn't take nearly as long as driving to the
coast had. They didn't get lost once, and they made fewer stops than
before.

At one little store in the middle of nowhere, the caravan pulled over.

The men went into the woods to pee, and the women and children went into
the store to buy cold drinks.

"That child look just like a little pickaninny," the fat smiling white
woman behind the counter said, pointing to Lena.

"Well, bitch, she ain't no damn pickaninny," her mother replied, looking
dead into the woman's faded flat eyes and not dropping a stitch. The
woman was dumbfounded. She couldn't seem to find her voice as Lena's
mother laid down the correct change on the counter for the cold drinks
and the deposit on the bottles that Lena and the boys had picked out of
the ice-filled cooler, grabbed Lena's hand, and strutted out the door.

Her mother got back in the car and never said a word about the exchange,
but as soon as they got home, Nellie and Grandrachel mama sat up most of
the night loosening all the braids from Lena's head and twisting the
thick waved hair into four balls.

The next morning, her mother got in the big green station wagon and
drove Lena the short distance up the street to Delores' Beauty Parlour.

The early Georgia morning was already hazy hot when Lena's mother sent
her up the street to the neighborhood beauty shop. The shop was located
on a dusty red clay street in a buttercup-yellow wooden shed-like
structure behind the home of the proprietress. The sign out front near
the dirt driveway portrayed a woman, vaguely black, with a waved hairdo.
Actually it was a drawing of a white woman with a paint-darkened face.

Beneath the picture it sa BEAUTYPARLOUR. id, DELORES The route Lena took
from her house to Delores's was a familiar one. She had been going that
way for two years. The street climbed for seven blocks past homes and
gardens and stores until it reached the peak of Pleasant Hill, where the
area's city bus service began.

Lena made the short walk up the street to the shop last as long as
possible. She paused at the dusty window of Mr, Gibson's tiny grocery
store and counted the four loaves of Colonial breadthere were never more
than half a dozen-along the counter. If she had walked in and asked to
buy a loaf, the owner, a tall man with stooped shoulders, would have
muttered to himself, "Lord, people just coming in buying all my bread."

Although Lena looked forward to having clean straightened hair, she did
not relish Delores's casual style of cosmetology. The previous spring
the beautician had burned a spot on the left side of Lena's face when
the greasy handle of the hot curling iron had slipped from Delores's
hand and, in failing, grazed the child's cheek. Lena had sat up front in
church that Easter with her head bent down, embarrassed by the scar. She
tipped her straw hat forward and hoped to keep her burn a secret.

Her grandmother had walked up the street, a damp dish towel still tucked
in her belt, to curse Delores out for her carelessness. And her father
had personally thrown Delores's skinny boyfriend out of The Place
because of his old lady's mistake. But that fury had faded with time as
the small scar on the girl's face had vanished with the help of cocoa
butter. And besides, Lena's hair was more than anyone in her family
could, or wanted to, handle. Each time her mother tried to wash, comb
out, and straighten the girl's long wild hair at the kitchen stove, the
attempt had ended in misery. The older Lena got, the thicker and more
tangled her hair became. And her mother, who was no expert with a
straightening comb, burned her scalp and the top of her ears often.

The whole thing weighed too heavily on the household. For days after the
simple hairdressing, Lena's cries seemed to ring through the house.

The ghostly cries seemed to give more validity to Grandmama's belief
that because Lena was born with a veil over her face she was indeed
touched by the supernatural.

Instead of sitting on a chair in front of the kitchen's gas stove to get
her hair fixed, Lena was back at Delores's, where, her mother was
convinced, a trained cosmetologist could handle her hair a bit less
painfully.

As the girl reached the shop, a few feet away from the open screened
door, she began to smell the fruit-scented hair preparations that had
become the trademark and community-wide joke of Delores Beauty Parlour.

Months before, some sweet-talking salesman had come by the shop offering
Delores an unbeatable deal on what he called "a famous formula specially
made for the colored hair."

Besides adding luster and aiding in the growth of hair, this lean,
smooth young man had told Delores as he slowly reached across her
enormous breasts to pick up a bottle, all the products had a "light,
fruity scent."

Delores, long known around town for her weakness for skinny men, bought
six cases each of the fuchsia-colored shampoo, pressing oil, and
conditioning cream from the drummer who then disappeared into another
sales territory, where his long brown frame played havoc with some other
lady's good sense.

The coconut-pineapple odor of the hot pink hair products overwhelmed
even the smell of burning hair that was nearly palpable in a shop where
hair was straightened with the twin force of heat and metal. Despite the
customers' complaints that the sticky-sweet, heavy smell of the hair
preparations made them sick to their stomachs, especially when combined
with the heat of the hot comb and curlers, Delores continued to use the
stuff, determined to prove that she had not been hoodwinked by the
skinny young man in the shiny blue suit who talked with a golden
toothpick dangling from his mouth.

Old men, walking in twos down to the corner store for tobacco, would
pass the beauty shop driveway, stop, sniff the air a few times, look at
each other out of the sides of their eyes, shake their gray heads, and
break into streams of laughter as they walked on.

As Lena opened the screen door to the shop, the door screeched an
announcement of her arrival to the four women there. They turned in
unison to scrutinize the newcomer and cut their conversation off
abruptly when they saw the skinny-legged little girl standing in the
doorway.

Although the women in the shop had stopped their talk as soon as they
saw Lena at the door, they hadn't done it early enough. From outside the
shop, Lena had heard the friendly rough talk that she had come to
associate with the shop and the sweet smell of hair products.

"Did you get to go to that big gospel caravan at the auditorium in Macon
last Sunday?"

"Go to it? Girl, I will have you know I were even invited backstage. I
know the lead singer in The Three Luminaries. Rev.

Roland introduced all us at a revival last year."

"Lord, girl, the lead singer? You know the lead singer-The one with all
that curly hair and that big bass voice way down in that big ol' chest
of his?

I wonder if he got any hair on that chest.

Uh, uh, uh?"

"I don't know - Ask Delores, she the one who know the man.

"That is right, Delores. you say you know the man."

"Now, just cause I know him don't mean I know all bout up under his
clothes. Lord ham mercy. He sing gospel music, for God's sake." d to
hear it, the talk was as familalthough she wasn't suppose iar to Lena as
the red lipstick-stained cigarette butts floating on a-Cola and spit in
the bottom of bottles left the last bit of Coc sitting around the shop.
As familiar as the little electric radio on a high shelf always tuned to
gospel music interspersed with commercials for Nehi Orange drink and
hair pommade jingles,I'm glad I found that Long-Aid in the pretty pink
jar." As familiar as the small copies ofjet magazine and larger copies
of Sepia lying around on upended milk and cola crates for the customers'
enjoyment and enlightenment. man here' ,Will you look at the fingernails
on this "Miz Wilson, don't you know that's the first thing I saw when I
picked up that new issue ofjet this morning."

"Disgraceful."

"They almost needed another page to show all of em."

"Disgraceful, just disgraceful. For a man to let his nails grow over
like that."

"What man? What's disgraceful?"

"New Jersey Man Claws Way Into Guinness Book of Records. Postal Worker
Charles E. Bylington Grows 5-Foot Nal'is. "I can still stamp a letter
postage due, " says father of 3."

"Oh, that makes me sick to my stomach."

"He wouldn't have no three children with me till he cut them nails."

"Can you imagine what his feets must look like?"

Lena smiled shyly as she climbed the two wooden steps to the shop,
entered, and let the dusty screen door close behind her. Three of the
women there she recognized as Delores, the shop's fleshy owner, and two
regular customers. One of them, a schoolteacher wearing a red-and-white
polka-dot dress, sat waiting her turn in one of the four chairs, with a
white hand towel wrapped around her head. Delores was straightening the
other customer's short salt-and-pepper hair with a smoking hot comb, but
as she paused to look at Lena, the beautician let the hot comb hang
loosely from her hand, the habit that had caused Lena's burn the
previous spring. Lena winced and looked away to the back of the shop.

"Good morning. Mama says for me to get a shampoo, dandruff treatment,
press and plaits, no curls," Lena recited her instructions as usual.

But this time she did it with less thought than usual. Her full
attention was riveted to the fourth woman there, who stood at the back
near the shop's only window, deliberately drying fruity-scented combs
and brushes and smiling as she listened to the schoolteacher's talk.

Lena guessed that the fourth woman was a new girl working for Delores.

As long as the child had been coming to the shop, there had been a rapid
procession of young women at Delores Beauty Pariour. Helpers, Delores
called them sometimes. But usually the beautician just referred to each
of them as "my new girl," even though they ranged in age from their late
teens to their late twenties.

They appeared and vanished with regularity, usually coming from tiny
Georgia towns like Quitman and Barnesville, willing and anxious to learn
a trade under Delores's guidance. She taught them very little past wash
and press, however, keeping the secrets of curling and croquignole, a
specialty of hers, to herself. Disgruntled, they all eventually left
after only a few weeks, to be replaced by other girls as excited and
eager to please and learn as their predecessors had been.

This new young woman leaning on the back windowsill looked up at Lena
briefly then returned to her conversation with the towel-wrapped
schoolteacher.

Lena was awestruck.

She had seen pictures of Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge in copies of
Ebony at home and in movies at the Burghart Theatre, and she thought the
women in her family were just as lovely. But this was as close she had
ever come to such a clearly beautiful woman outside that sphere.

It immediately made perfect sense to Lena that someone who looked like
the new girl should be in the beauty business.

I want to be made to look just like that, Lena thought as she hung back
near the door of the shop. my years old, no The new "new girl" looked to
be about no longer a teenager but barely so. She was tall and
sturdy-looking, not heavy but robust. She appeared able to take care of
herself. There were lifted buckets and raised axes in her body frame,
not artificial pink roses encased in glass. She was what Lena had heard
other women derisively call "big-boned." But this woman wore her size
proudly like a suit of armor. In fact this new young helper looked to
Lena like a warrior, with her broad hands and strong-looking arms and
legs.

The pair of black patent-leather Mary Janes she wore on her big wide
feet just made her appear overgrown. She was too stately to look
ridiculous. She made the slightest movementlike the shifting of the
weight of her hips on the windowsill with the grace of a falling
feather. oman was from a When Lena learned later that the young w point
on the Georgia coast between Savannah and a town too small to have a
name Lena recognized-making it smaller than her own little town-she was
not a bit surprised. The woman had the same raw country air of health
that her cousins from Wrightsville gave off. Lena could almost smell it.

The new girl was nearly bursting with good health. The orange smock she
wore over a green blouse and black cotton skirt pulled tight across her
shoulders, her body teasing the seams with its heartiness.

Lena felt she could stand there staring at the new girl's strong solid
body all day, but it wasn't only the woman's sturdy body that left Lena
spellbound.

It was her face. Round, full, and oily, beautiful past the point of
reality, the new girl's face looked out of place in the small dusty
shop. But then Lena could not imagine a place of suitable matching
beauty existing anywhere in the world.

The woman had deep deep, dark skin that gleamed with the patina of
natural oils. Her skin was taut, glowing, and flawless, stretched over a
face that was rounded at the cheeks and chin to the point of healthiness
but just shy of chubbiness.

Her black hair, as shiny as her skin, was straightened hard and pulled
back into a short ponytail held by a red rubber band. The hairdo left
her head free of unnecessary extras, unencumbered. Lena tried to imagine
that countenance with any of the big pearlized and glassy earrings her
mother kept in a golden leather box on her dresser. But it was a wasted
exercise. The pretties paled next to this face.

Her eyebrows, thick and unruly, made dark unexpected statements across
her face. Her short curly eyelashes gave her face a slightly surprised
expression.

And her eyes, with flecks of gold sparkling in them, were alive with
something that Lena did not immediately recognize but knew that she
admired.

Looking at the woman's face was like looking at the beautifully elegant
dark wood piano that her grandmother kept in the music room but allowed
no one to touch since Jonah had decided one day to stop playing. When
the young woman spoke, Lena half expected to hear the tinkling of piano
keys. But what she heard from the back of the shop was enough to make
her start, the sounds of a lowland geechee. Here and there the woman
with the gleaming face pronounced a word so strangely to Lena's ear that
the girl giggled at the plain foreignness of the sound. The lilting
voice put Lena in the mind of something-maybe a movie she had seen, but
she couldn't remember which one.

Pointing to a customer's purse on the floor, the new girl admonished her
to "Watch your satchel " And in talking about a pot of collards one of
the customers had cooked the night before, she said, "I like all
vegetables, " as if the word were pronounced like "kitchen table."

Lena understood most of what the women said, but coming as the words did
from this woman's rich, beautiful mouth, Lena could not be sure if they
were ordinary words or strange exotic ones.

"Lena, this here are Mamie," Delores said as the woman with the glorious
face rose from her perch on the windowsill, walked up to the little
girl, and stood directly in front of her with her arms crossed loosely
under her full breasts. She was even taller than Lena had first thought.
Lena only came up to the woman's rib cage. Delores continued, "She are
going to be doing your hairs from now on. Looks like I have got myself
so many new heads to do that I are surely going to need some help."

Lena had noticed that Delores routinely forgot each "new girl" and
talked about the latest arrival as if she were the first and original
"new girl."

Delores, a pretty woman who weighed over two hundred pounds and moved as
if she were always wearing an easy-towrinkle taffeta dress, talked
"proper," stretching grammar and pronunciation all out of shape with her
airs. Lena's father called Delores's manner of speaking " talking full
of ers' and bers,' like folks from the North." Lena knew little about
the North. But from what she could tell from folks' stories, she
imagined it a veritable Tower of Babel with everyone trying to talk
"proper all at once. Atlanta was the farthest north of her middle
Georgia town she had ever been, and there, she had noticed, people spoke
with a few "ers" and "bets" of their own.

As Delores continued to chatter, Lena saw that her own right hand was
halfway up to the new girl's face before she even realized that she had
reached out to touch the woman's full shiny cheek with the backs of her
little girl's fingers. She stopped her hand in midair, clenched it into
a fist, and, hunching her shoulders, quickly brought it back down to her
side without a word.

At age nine Lena felt too old for this spontaneous touching, but it came
as naturally to her as a baby reaching for a gold locket.

From the comments her mother and grandmother made around the house, she
knew she would be leaving little-girl status soon, and only because she
was the baby of the family had she been allowed to prolong the stage as
long as she had. At her house "Awww, she just a baby" had recently been
giving way to "You know you too big a girl to be doing that."

But Mamie had already seen her abbreviated gesture and gave her a little
conspiratorial grin. Without speaking, the full-faced apprentice
beautician put her large hands on Lena's shoulders, turned her around,
and guided her to the back of the shop and the lone steel sink with a
black rubber neck rest attached to its lip. A red vinyl chair with metal
armrests was placed in front of the sink with its back up against the
rubber neck rest. Mamie sat the girl in the chair, shook out an orange
plastic drape cloth, wrapped it around Lena's thin shoulders to cover
her red plaid shorts set, and secured it at the back of the girl's neck
with a tuck. Lena felt she was in the hands of an expert, not a large
country girl at her first paying job.

Mamie was to do Lena's hair at that basin that Saturday and every third
Saturday until the girl was twelve. In all that time, Lena never missed
an appointment. Even with bad weather, summer vacations, visits of
relatives from up north, rehearsals for school pageants, and illnesses
in the family, she could think of nothing more important than seeing
Mamie.

Before Mamie had come to Delores Beauty Pariour, Lena had always kept
her eyes closed tightly during her entire shampoo for fear of the sting
of fruit-scented suds. Now, with Mamie's face shining down on her, Lena
could not force herself to lower her eyelids and shut herself off from
the only opportunity she might have to stare directly into her
hairdresser's beautiful face.

From time to time during the shampoo and rinse, Mamie would smile down
at Lena, and the little girl would be struck anew by the wide-open
radiance, the pure, clean beauty of that face, untouched by any flaw.

It was a face that beckoned response. Lena just had to smile back at
her.

ill AM I E At the sink in the back of the tiny shop, it seemed hotter,
if possible, than in the front, where the metal combs and curlers lay
burning all day over the open rings of gas fire. Few breezes Stirred
through the open front door or the back window. As Mamie stretched
across Lena to reach some shampoo on the shelf above the sink, the
cotton material of her smock would strain at the seams and soak up
perspiration on her shoulders and under her arms. At those times the
young woman smelled to Lena like the dirt outside her home when a sudden
rainstorm hit the dust and the aroma of earth rose up all over the
neighborhood.

As quietly as possible, Lena would inhale deeply.

In the tiny shop's year-round heat, Mamie would work up more suds in
Lena's hair. Heavier and thicker when wet, it pulled Lena's head back
into the sink, exposing her throat to the shop. Mamie didn't handle her
hair delicately, the way her mother did. She maneuvered it like a woman
washing a big bath towel by hand. As she scrubbed, pearls of sweat
formed on the brow and upper lip of the young beautician's face.

Like liquid jewels, the perspiration formed and rolled off Mamie's face
unattended as she continued to work up more fruity suds. On Mamie's
skin, greasy smooth and taut, the sweat looked like the beads of water
that Lena had seen her grandmother accidentally spill once, only once,
onto her prized upright piano from a vase of flowers.

Sometimes Lena tried to catch a drop of perspiration as it rolled down
Mamie's cheek and fell off the soft curve of her rounded jawbone.

If she could catch one droplet, the girl was certain it would roll
around in her palm like a drop of mercury from a broken thermometer.

But since Lena never wanted to be obvious about what she was attempting,
she never succeedednot in more than three years of Saturdays-in
capturing that one drop.

What she did capture from Mamie, however, was far more precious for Lena
than an imagined jewel. With only a few sentences, Mamie gave Lena the
gift of curiosity. She let drop the germ in Lena that grew to the
desire, the yearning, the obsession to know and understand her world.

"It's never been book sense I was after, no," Mamie would say to Lena as
she straightened the very edges of the girl's thick sandy-colored hair
without so much as warming the skin around her face and cars.

"What's been important to me is the whys of things. And that you can't
be learning through no books.

No, indeed not. That's the kind of knowledge has to be learned, through
people, through finding out things about them. Allkinds of people, all
kinds of things. Things they don't even know they know.

"You know how you find out things? You just keepa asking and asking and
digging and searching. When you find out things about folks, you find
out things bout life, you find out things bout yourself. And the puzzle
is always just sitting there just waiting for somebody to come along and
figure it."

"People always telling me stuff", Lena offered shyly, "Well, course they
do," Mamie had responded with a smile. "People just naturally love to
tell things to a curious little something like you."

But this explanation of Mamie's came much later, after Mamie had
discovered that Lena got the thin wide scar on her left calf by backing
into the grill of the upstairs bathroom heater while she was drying off,
that she was seven when she was vaccinated against polio, that her
fingernails were unusually small compared to her hands, that she and her
friend Gwen had once stolen two candy bars, and that her grandmother
played the numbers with Delores, the neighborhood numbers lady.

When Lena would slip into the shampoo chair on her Saturday mornings,
and like two old women on a porch, she and Mamie would slip comfortably
into whatever space the end of the girl's last appointment had led them
two weeks earlier. And though most days Mamie joined in the hubbub of
business and socializing that was a black beauty shop during Lena's
visits, the two talked mainly with each other. Delores and her other
customers rarely interrupted them, hardly noticing their talk, so
naturally did they communicate.

As Mamie began Lena's shampoo that first Saturday, another of Delores's
customers entered the shop, and the dusty screen door screeched again.

"Uh, I wonder why that creaking door bother me so?" Mamie asked aloud as
she soaked Lena's hair with a jet of steaming hot water.

"Me, too," Lena said softly, hesitantly.

"Me, too, what, child?" Mamie asked like an old woman, her voice
curious, not unfriendly, as she continued to work the pink shampoo into
Lena's hair.

Lena froze. Fool! she thought. She had no sooner imagined her worst fear
than it had happened, she had said something stupid to this woman whom
she had only to remain with and gaze upon. Sometimes it seemed even her
thoughts haunted her. Clamping her lips shut tight, and keeping them
that way, s hoped she would be forgiven.

As soon as Mamie had spoken her question, she had felt the skin of the
child's scalp tense under the pads of her soapy fingers. She leaned
forward and looked directly into the girl's upsidedown face for a
moment, then she stood up and continued talking as if Lena were a
longtime, trusted friend who had instinctively said the appropriate
thing.

"Well, you know, that noisy door just makes my neck hairs just stand on
end," Mamie explained. "Makes me scared. Other people, they always say
that that noise sets they teeth on edge, but me, no. it's my neck hairs,
and you know why? The noise remind me of the time I was little and these
little kittens-to be sure, I didn't know they was kittens at the
time-was outside my window all night just a-screeching and a-yelling and
crying for they mama who wasn't there.

"I was up laying wake all night, too, too scared to look outside and
make sure it wasn't some dead thing from the grave making them howling
noises, and too shamed to wake anybody else up in the house to go look
for me. Whew, always make my neck hairs all prickly, that noise." She
shook her broad shoulders with a fastidious little shudder.

Lena had little time to consider the strangeness of this beautiful-faced
grown woman she did not know talking so freely with her. If Delores had
not just introduced her, the girl might have suspected Mamie of being a
ghost. As Mamie effortlessly washed, combed, and dried Lena's hair,
causing her no pain, she was off on another subject, easing in a
question here and there. Lena's throat was sometimes too dry for her to
reply, but no matter. Mamie was in control.

Mamie made Lena think about herself, her family, her schoolmates, her
looks, and her dislikes, the things that made her sad, angry, joyful,
tearful, confused. Mamie showed her how to delve into all these things
with a question and come up to the surface with answers that somehow
soothed and excited her at the same time.

There was only one topic that Lena was truly afraid to put under the
microscope of her questions. But one Saturday, after she was sure she
saw the visage of a young child float through her bedroom the night
before, she screwed up her courage and brought her fears to Mamie.

"Mamie," she asked while the woman rinsed the fruity-smelling suds from
her hair, "do you believe in ghosts?"

"You mean hants and spirits and such, child?"

"uh-huh," Lena said, already sorry that she had brought it up.

"Well, course I do," Mamie said with a smile.

Lena felt a relief so strong that she feared she might burst into tears.

She had been so afraid that Mamie would laugh in her face, call her
silly, a little girl afraid of ghosts. She should have known better.

She should have known Mamie.

But even after she asked Mamie the question, she could not bring herself
to say what she really wanted to say. "Mamie," she wanted to say. "I see
ghosts." She had never told anyone, and she felt she never would.
Besides the sickness that started to envelop her whenever she began to
tell someone of her ghostly visitations, Lena knew the way most people
reacted to such talkeven her own family, who claimed to know her better
than anybody else in the world. They talked of her being born with a
veil over her face and of seeing ghosts over her shoulder and of putting
the magic on things, but they did not really believe in half the stuff
they talked about.

After some weeks it was settled between Lena and Mamie. Each appointment
became a couple of hours of instruction in "questions." It always began
with a question.

"Lena, child, how many children in your family?" Mamie asked one
Saturday morning.

" just me and my two brothers, Raymond and Edward," Lena replied,
pleased that the questions had begun for another Saturday.

"No other ones?"

"No, Mamie."

"Urnm, a little family?"

"Little? It's not so little, Mamie. There's me and Edward and Raymond
and Mama and Daddy and my Grandmama. She lives with us. Then there's
other folks."

"Other folks?" Mamie sounded interested, but her tone was still as
casual as before and she continued with Lena's shampoo.

"Yeah, like Dear One and Yakkity-Yak an' lem. The ones from The Place.

They don't live with us either. They just there all the time, in and
out."

"What's The Place?

It's the whiskey store and grill. The place Daddy own. Grandmama just
turn up her nose when they come to the house to do some heavy work or
bring a case of Coca-Colas from The Place. She says they're just old
beer-heads and winos and drunks."

"Old winos?" I Mamie had that same casual, interested tone in her voice.

"Oh, Grandmama doesn't mean anything by it, Besides, it's really not
true. They're not all just old winos."

"How do you know?"

,i know."

" How? " n's not an old wino.

"I know because I know Frank Peterse And I know I never seen him drunk.

He just takes a drink."

"Frank Petersen?"

"Uh-huh. He's my friend."

"Oh." Mamie said, satisfied for the time being.

Lena, now as enamored of Mamie's entire being as she had at first been
of her face, latched on to the instruction as a way of touching her, of
getting close to the woman. The girl still remembered her first
inclination to reach out and touch Mamie's shining face.

In the early weeks of their friendship Lena had let Mamie do most of the
talking and querying, seldom contributing to the conversation. But as
she grew comfortable with Mamie and her questions, she began taking part
in their ritual, passing along tidbits of background about the customers
at Delores's or repeating a stray old wives' tale just for the sake of
tearing it apart to look for truth.

When she left the shop to reenter her own life, Lena took with her a
piece of Mamie, the questioning part. Around her own house she gingerly
began investigations about events, family, neighbors, situations that
interested her.

At school she gently made incisions into the backgrounds of most of the
nuns who taught at Blessed Martin de Porres and discovered facts about
their heritages that might have embarrassed them if they had noticed her
investigation. Her schoolmates would have gotten whippings if their
parents knew the things Lena got them to tell her about their
households.

Lena was surprised by the flood of satisfaction and accomplishment she
felt on having uncovered some rag of information that had gone
undetected before. From Mamie she had learned the private joy of
discovering.

As far as Lena could see, only she had been privileged to share Mamie's
wealth of questions and knowledge. She wanted to keep it that way.

She hadn't even told her mama or Grandmama what a special person Mamie
was. Only her breathless wonder that she had Mamie all to herself kept
Lena from standing up in the middle of the beauty shop and testifying
like the women she and her brothers heard crying inside revival tents.

"Yes, Lord, thank you, Jesus. You saw what your child cried for and you
answered her prayer. Thank you, Lord Jesus."

Lena knew she was free to ask Mamie questions whenever she wished.

Mamie had never backed away from any of her inquiries. This meant she
could ask Mamie questions about herself, too. Mamie's "You'll never
know, child, if you don't ask" was not a platitude for her, it was a
motto, a banner. But the child never did ask for personal information,
and Mamie never volunteered it.

Whenever Lena thought of the many details she didn't know about Mamie,
it made her heart race the way it did when she saw ghosts. She didn I t
know Mamie's exact age or birth date. She didn I t know who Mamie's
people were, or if she had any family. She never saw the young woman in
the store or at church or strolling down the street in the late evening.
And the child never asked why. She preferred to keep Mamie a mystery.

Even when, three years after their first meeting, Lena showed up for her
regular hair appointment and found Mamie, like the other "new girls"
before her, vanished, gone from her wooden stool in the shop, It was not
that the child did not ask Delores any direct quesstions about her
disappearance or whereabout Lena did not ache to know, was not frantic
to know where Mamie was . The girl, by then almost a teenager, just did
not ask. It seemed to be somehow breaking their rules.

instead Lena sat in the shampoo chair at the back of the tiny shop,
turned to the new girl, a shabby and faded replacement for Mamie, and
asked her, "Is it scary to come to a new town to live and work?"

The young woman just stared at her vacantly.

it took much longer to wash and straighten Lena's hair than it had in a
long while. The new girl fumbled and tugged, putting en back into her
hair. some of the pain Lena had nearly forgott ed the drape cloth when
she finally finished and clumsily removed from around Lena's neck, Lena
leapt from the chair and dashed out the door and back down the street.

She passed Geraldine Hardeman's grandmother's house with out a sideways
glance. And when she got to Sarah's old house she even forgot to feet
lonely.

By the time she got home, it was two hours later than she usually
returned. Her head throbbed from her new beautician's work. She hadn't
eaten all day and her empty stomach growled and snarled.

Mamie's disappearance had upset her and made her long for the familiar.

When she entered the kitchen, she was relieved to find that, as far as
she could see, nothing there had changed. Most importantly, Frank
Petersen was still there washing dishes at the sink. And from the aroma
of coffee in the air, Lena knew the man who was her best adult friend
now that Mamie was gone had made a fresh pot for her.

"Will somebody get that stinking wino out of this house with that
stinking Pall Mall. This ain't no damn juke joint, you know, this is a
home." Grandmama was furious. She swore she smelled a whiff of smoke
upstairs in her bedroom. "it was just a whimp, a mere whimp of that
nasty cigarette smoke, but I smelled it all right." And she knew, just
knew, that that "stinking wino" with his stinking cigarettes had been in
her room, in her own personal room, and had been smoking in there and
now she was sure that she'd never be able to get that odor out of her
clothes and personal things.

"A person's bedroom is a private and sacred place, or at least it's
supposed to be. Hell, it's the only little spot I have in this whole
house that I can call my own and I be damned if I'm gonna let some
nameless riffraff invade it."

Lena wanted to say, "He ain't nameless," but she had better sense than
to say anything.

"And I bet he had that greasy hat of his laying on my bed, too. Any fool
knows that's bad luck. No man will ever lay there now! " Grandmama had
already dragged Raymond from his bed, p w half-asleep, insisting that he
come into her room and smell it, too.

When he couldn't smell anything, the old lady roughly ejected him and
grabbed Edward coming out the bathroom and nearly threw him through her
bedroom door to "hurry up and smell it before the damn smell goes away,
for God's sake." But he couldn't smell anything either. "I swear I
can't, Gr-gr-Grandmama, he said.

He too was ejected.

Grandmama looked for a moment to Lena standing silently in the hall next
to her own bedroom door for corroboration but dismissed the notion with
a suck of her teeth. She realized that Lena would staunchly stand by
Frank Petersen and deny any smell of smoke the same way the child would
have denied it if someone asked if her Grandmama played the illegal
lottery called the bug" with Delores the hairdresser.

"That's right," Grandmama buffed when she finally tracked Frank Petersen
down as he sat on the back porch steps smoking a filterless Pall Mail.
"That's where you better be if you must smoke. Dirty habit, none of my
people ever did it. And a good thing, too. You better not come into my
room again with even the odor of cigarette tobacco about your clothes."

Frank Petersen took a long drag on his cigarette-it was one of a mere
three or four that he smoked the entire day while he worked at
Lena's-and looked out into the woods on the other side of the stream.

He wouldn't turn to look at the old woman or even to acknowledge with
the tilt of his head that she was there at the top of the cement steps
fussing down at the crown of his graying head. When she finally ran out
of steam and couldn't think of anything else to berate the man about,
she turned and headed back into the house muttering, "I don't know why I
even bother."

Lena waited in her hiding place with her back pressed against the wall
in the breakfast room awhile because she knew that Grandmama was known
to double back on a target if a stray thought hit her as she wandered
away and everyone was sure she was finished. Lena never wanted to get
caught in the crossfire of her grandmother's rage. Even though Grandmama
sometimes sounded like Lena's mother in her tirades, her fits of rage
were different from Nellie's in intent.

Nellie was mostly rant and rave.

Grandmama was action.

When Lena was sure the coast was clear, she'd slip onto the back porch
and quietly sit on a step below where Frank Petersen still sat smoking
his bent cigarette.

"I'd die the death of a Chinaman before I'd ever go into that woman's
room," he'd say calmly, then stub the cigarette out carefully on the
cement step and throw it out into the yard with a flick of his slender
fingers. Grandmama by Lena had never heard Frank Petersen refer to name.
She was always "that woman,"

"she," or "her." And Grandmama returned the favor by calling Frank only
"that stinking wino,"

"he," and "him."

It had been a running battle between the two of themgrandmama and Frank
Petersen-ever since he first showed up at the screened porch door when
Lena was eight.

The family had just sat down to dinner when there was a knock at the
door.

"Now, who the hell is that?" Grandma asked and made as if to push her
chair away from the table and stand up, even though she had no intention
of actually rising. But Nellie reached over and laid a hand on the
woman's wrist to stay her just the same. She looked over at Raymond with
a raised eyebrow.

But Edward was quicker. He jumped up and headed out of the dining room
before Raymond had a chance to respond to his mother's signal.

"Whoever it is, tell em we're at the dinner table and can't be
disturbed," Jonah said across the table to Edward's retreating back.

who it is," Nellie "Then you come right back. I don't care added.

"We're waiting to start dinner."

Edward disappeared and returned right away. "It's a man," he said. I
Nellie asked.

"Who is he?"

B AB I' OF THE EA IIFILI' Edward snapped his fingers and said, "Oh,"
then dashed back to the porch.

Grandmama just shook her head, looked at Nellie, and sighed, "Lord,
Lord, Lord," Edward appeared again. "He sa-sa-say his name is Frank
Petersen, you spsp-sp-spell it with an e-e-e-e-e-e-e."

"Did you tell him we were eating dinner?" Nellie asked.

Edward snapped his fingers again and ran off.

This time both Nellie and Grandmama rolled their eyes to heaven and let
their heads fall back against the high backs of their dining-room
chairs.

Raymond stretched his long legs under the table and nudged Lena's foot.

They both started laughing. Jonah, trying not to look exasperated, laid
a hand on either side of his plate and examined his neatly trimmed
nails.

"Well, what does he want?" Nellie asked when Edward returned, beginning
to breathe hard.

"Say he got some Co-Colas from The Place. Wh-where you want I em?"

"Jesus, keep me near the cross! Edward, don't you know where we keep the
drinks?" Nellie said, her voice threatening to rise.

Jonah finally lost patience with the whole scene. "Edward, Son, tell him
to stack those drinks on the back porch, show him where it is, and tell
him to put 'em with the other drinks and put those empty bottles he
finds on the porch underneath into the truck." While Edward hurried off,
Jonah explained, "That's Frank Petersen. You know him, Nellie, from down
at The Place. You said you needed somebody round here to wash windows
and take down those heavy curtains. He can help round the house too.
He's about the most reliable of those Negroes who supposed to be working
for me. He can be here whenever you need him." By then Edward was back
in his seat and the meal was about to begin. But whenjonah took one bite
of his pole beans, he said, "These beans cold." And Grandmama and Nellie
jumped up in tandem and began snatching bowls of food off the table to
take them back into the kitchen to reheat.

it seemed that Grandmama never forgave Frank Petersen for the cold beans
that day.

When Lena wandered into the kitchen later that evening for some more
banana pudding, she found a strange thin man standing at the sink
washing dishes. Her heart started to thump a few beats faster, and she
took a couple of steps backward before she remembered the man who had
knocked on the door during dinner. ith a frame that He was a dark
slender man, almost tall, w looked supple and wiry even while he was
standing still. As many times as Lena had been at The Place, she was
sure that she had never seen him there. He had the kind of demeanor that
she would surely have remembered. Back straight, shoulders relaxed but
level, feet planted firmly a few inches apart on the linoleum floor, he
made washing somebody else's dishes an action of dignity.

She stood next to the refrigerator for so long watching the back of the
man's head that he felt her stare raise the hair on the back of his
neck, and he turned at the waist, tilted his head-one car over his
shoulder-and said, "Good evening." Then, without waiting for a greeting
from her, he turned back and continued washing dishes.

Quietly Lena took a small bowl from the cabinet and a big serving spoon
from the drawer next to the sink. Then she stood in the open door of the
refrigerator and spooned her banana pudding into the small
blue-and-white bowl in silence. When she turned around, the man was
still at the sink with his back to her, but he had his right arm, soapy
to the forearm where the long sleeve of his white shirt was rolled up,
stretched out beside him, his slim elegant hand open, palm up.

Lena was used to picking up silent signals from all around her. She
licked the big spoon clean of banana pudding and laid it in the man's
outstretched hand. Still not bothering to look at her, he dropped the
big spoon in the sink of soapy water and handed her a clean smaller
coffee spoon from the drain for her banana pudding.

"Thank you," she said to the side of the man's face. Under a stubbly
gray-and-black beard, his skin was the color of old snuff spit and
doubleetched with lines. In addition to the deep lines around his mouth,
nose, and eyes, his entire face was entrenched with fine wrinkles
crossing and crisscrossing each other like a dried river bed.

Where his beard stubble stopped, right above his Adam's apple, the hairs
grew thin and slightly curly.

"My name is Frank Petersen, you spell it with an e, " he said.

"Thank you, Frank Petersen," Lena said.

"You welcome," he replied to the heavy skillet he was washing, seeming
to forget her right away.

She turned and walked as slowly as she could toward the breakfast-room
door, hoping he would invite her back to sit at the kitchen table and
keep him company the way her grandmother did. But by the time she
reached the door, he hadn't said a word.

Minutes later, when she returned to bring her empty bowl back into the
kitchen, he was gone.

Although Frank Petersen almost never spoke directly to Grandmama, he had
a hundred responses to the complaints and accusations she lodged against
him all day long. If he walked into the room she was in with a broom or
mop in his hand, she would brush past him and say, "Get that thing out
of my face. And don't be trying to brush up against me," even though
Frank always made sure not to come anywhere near her.

After letting her pass, he'd say under his breath, "When nine catch ten,
that's when I'll be trying to brush up against that woman."

Or if Grandmama found him standing at the sink washing dishes, she'd say
to the room in general, "I think I'll go out and weed the garden till
things clear out in here." Then she'd grab her big straw hat with the
polka-dot streamer trailing down from it, which Nellie had bought and
hung for her on a hook by the kitchen door, and she'd head outside.

Frank Petersen would wait until the old lady had descended the cement
steps and was well out of earshot, then say, "You got diamonds in your
back.

You look better going than coming to me."

Each time Grandmama shot a comment in the man's direction, Lena
pretended to pay no attention, continuing to do whatever she was doing,
but actually she was always hoping to hear her favorite retort from
Frank Petersen, "Excusezmoi." Except Frank would pronounce it,
"Ex-cusez-moi" and roll his eyes in his head and wiggle his shoulders in
an exaggerated Gallic shrug.

"That's the Frenchman's language, Lena-Wena," Frank had explained to
Lena.

"It means excuse me,' yet it means more than that. And then, not exactly
that either because you can't say in our language what you can say in
their talk.

Talk means a lot more to a Frenchie.

I learned that over there, too," Frank would say casually, seeming not
to want to brag about his travels and experiences. But he talked quite a
bit about France. "Now it may not be that way now. May be a different
place nowadays." He told Lena that he had been there in World War II,
"the big un," and had served proudly in the artillery unit of the 135th.

The two of them would sit on the back steps in the warm and the cool
weather. While they both shucked corn or while he plucked plump squab
clean of their gray feathers, Frank would weave long, detailed stories
of his time in France. He told Lena of the red wine drunk in chdteau
cellars while the artillery boomed overhead, of green green countryside
so lush you wanted to take a bite out of it, of fresh crusty French
bread crisp and hot from the oven of some pretty mam'selle. The air in
France, he said, smelled different from the air in Georgia. It was all
different, the sky bluer, the fog softer, the trees greener. Frank made
it sound wonderful.

But Lena found out years later, after he had died and left all his
things to her, that he had never even been to France. It was only his
dream to go there. In fact he had spent all of the war years in a dusty
army town in Arkansas, peeling potatoes and washing mountains of dishes
and glasses in a greasy spoon on the edge of camp, where feckless young
men came to drink and pick up women and tell tales of France. The
recruiting officer had laughed out loud at him when he showed up to
enlist, already a man in his forties.

"We may be fighting a war, buddy, but we ain, t that much in need.

Next.

" But, God, he had wanted to go to France. To join the army and train
and go to another continent to fight and love and experience life there.

And whenever he told Grandmama "Excusez-moi,"

" it took Lena and him right to the outskirts of Paris. Even after
Nellie finally heard him say the phrase under his breath and laughed at
his speaking French, he didn't let it weigh down his dreams, He just
looked at her haughtily, raised one eyebrow, and said, "Well,
ex-cusez-moi."

"You sure are silly to be an old man," Nellie told him irritably. But
she really didn't take Frank seriously.

"Heard you were down on Broadway the other night drinking that cheap
peach wine and wanting to turn the place out when you got bout drunk,"
Nellie would say with a sly grin as Frank Petersen took a load of
clothes downstairs to the machine in the basement.

He would just cut his eyes at her and dismiss the comment with a soft
snort as he continued on down the basement steps. But later, if he heard
her upstairs in the hall doing her exercises, her thighs slapping
against the wood floors, he'd grab hold of a door or the banister and
yell, "Hold on, Lenawena," and pretend the whole house was shaking.

Looking back from adulthood on those days when Frank Petersen came to
their house nearly every day with his redrimmed eyes and his stories of
traveling the world and living by his wits, Lena sometimes thought she
should have suspected that he had been mostly lying, embellishing his
life for a gullible little girl. But then, just as quickly, she would
remember the jaunty way he wore his battered hat, the time he sat down
at their untuned piano while he was dusting it and played a snatch of a
rousing ragtime before Grandmama flew into the room, a tiny outraged
bird, to stop the desecration, the funny drawing he once made of her on
the back of a brown paper bag, exaggerating her long face, big eyes, and
pointed witch, s chin. And she couldn't help but be swept up in his
dream self all over again, When Grandmama complained directly to Jonah
about her dislike for Frank, her father always said the same thing. "For
God's sake, Mama, the man shows up every day he's supposed to and does
anything you ask him to. That's more than any of those half-wits and
idiots do who work for me."

But as far as Grandmama was concerned, Frank Petersen had so many other
drawbacks.

" Early in the morning in the middle a' the night, two dead boys rose to
fight. Back to back they faced each other, pulled out their swords, and
shot each other. Two deaf and dumb policemen heard the noise, came and
killed the two dead boys. If you don't believe my story is true, ask the
blind man, he saw it, too."

"You believe that, Lena-Wena?" Frank asked Lena one day after reciting
the bit of nonsense for the children's enjoyment.

"Some of it," she said sincerely, hoping he would ask her what part.

But he didn't. He just chuckled at the thought of Grandmama being
annoyed that he taught her and Raymond and Edward such things. The boys,
who were teenagers when Frank first came to the house and usually didn't
hang around the man as Lena did, loved the rhyme and knew the piece of
silliness by heart. The first time Grandmama heard them recite it for
their friends, she immediately recognized its source and sucked her
teeth.

"Too damn bad you can't learn your schoolbooks as quick as you pick up
that stupid-assed shit," she'd say fiercely.

And Grandmama had other complaints. The whole time Frank Petersen worked
at the house, he refused to keep to a set schedule. Even though he came
to work early in the morning and always stayed until late in the
afternoon, it seemed he came and went when he felt like it.

If Grandmama decided she wanted something done and discovered he had
already left for the day, she just limped and latched on to his
departure as another opportunity to berate the man.

"Gone already, huh? I'm not surprised," Grandmama would say as she
leaned over her sewing machine to look out the window down the long dirt
drive to see if she could still catch sight of him. Lena always thought
she looked with longing after Frank. "Probably been sneaking a drink all
day from the liquor caddy. Probably drunk as a skunk by now.

Probably had to leave and get out of here while he could still walk
upright."

Lena kept silent, but she knew that Frank Petersen hadn't been drunk.

She knew what drunk looked like. And in three years she had never seen
Frank Petersen there. Lena knew that he hadn't touched any of the
bottles of liquor on the caddy in the dining room, either. He didn't
need to. Frank carried his own bottle of Growers peach wine with him at
all times. And whenever he felt like a drink, usually at the end of the
day, but never in the mornings, he would reach into the folds of his
pants for what he called "a taste or two." He drank right from the
bottle wherever he happened to be when the need hit him and didn't seem
to mind if Lena stood by and watched his Adam's apple dance up and down
as he drank.

He took his drink, smacked his lips, and replaced the bottle in the
pocket of his baggy pants. Then he went on with his work. Lena had
watched him closely and he never seemed changed by the wine. After
practically growing up at The Place, seeing folks getting drunk, saying,
"Hey, baby, sugar, how you doing, baby, pretty li'l thang, you, how you
doing today?" slurring their words as though they had pieces of juicy
Fruit in their mouths, Lena felt confident that she knew what a drunk
person looked like.

Lena knew a wino when she saw one. They were men mostly, with names like
Yakkity-yak, Sass Ass, and Slack, names they had picked up somewhere
after tossing their real names aside as too much trouble to keep.

They were nothing like Frank Petersen.

But one Saturday morning when she was twelve, soon after Mamie had
disappeared from Delores Beauty Pariour, and Frank Petersen still had
not shown up more than two hours after he usually arrived, Lena began to
worry. And for some reason she couldn't get the thought of Growers peach
wine out of her mind.

Most Saturdays, when Frank Petersen arrived) he would heat up a pot of
coffee and sit down with Lena in front of the television set-She on the
floor, he on the pink ottoman that matched Nellie's pink reading chair,
with the steaming cup dangling between his knees-and watch a few minutes
of "Mighty Mouse" or "Pixie and Dixie" or "Merry Melodies" before he got
to work.

But it wasn't until midmorning, when Popeye was singing his final stanza
of "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man," that Lena looked out the French doors in
the living room and saw Frank Petersen coming slowly toward the house.
She knew in a flash he was drunk, really drunk.

For one thing, he was walking like an old person, which, despite his
graying hair and stories of the old days, she didn't think he was
anywhere near being. Lena couldn't think of Frank in terms of age. He
never complained that he was tired or his bones ached or his legs gave
out on him, the way Grandrnama or Mother josepha at school did, and she
knew both those women were old. The laws of time and nature just didn't
apply to Frank Petersen as far as she was concerned.

Usually he walked briskly, with his body slightly aslant, his head and
shoulders forging the way through the air for the rest of his body.

When he was in a real hurry, he swung his arms sharply by his side with
his hands clenched in loose fists. But this morning Frank Petersen was
walking with his shoulders hunched over, legs stiff, arms hanging limply
at his sides. He seemed afraid to step down hard on the ground for fear
of jarring loose some old bone or muscle that would never have time to
heal before he died.

He bypassed the screened porch, his usual entry, and headed around the
side of the house on his way to the back porch, stepping on each faded
pink flagstone that lined the walk to the back of the house as if it
were a fragile lily pad afloat a deep pond. The way he walked made Lena
think again of winos huddled down in doorways all night waiting for The
Place to open and give them a dry, comfortable place to spend the day.

Watching him in the bright morning light was like watching a strange
stage show through the living- and dining-room windows. She felt she
knew the character but that he was different, maybe dressed in a bizarre
new costume.

But that wasn't it exactly, either, because although he looked strange,
Frank Petersen was wearing his usual getup, the same one he had been
wearing three years before, when she first saw him, baggy dark brown
trousers held up at his thin waist by a worn leather belt, a white
long-sleeved cotton shirt bleached thin and brilliant in the morning
sunlight, stiff black lace-up shoes, and the dusty brown felt hat so
battered out of shape by wear and time that it no longer fit into a
specific category. It could once have been a Stetson or k could have
been a derby. But this morning, instead of wearing it at what he called
a jaunty Parisian tilt, he wore it pulled down low on his brow, as a
farmer would.

He also had on the pair of black frame sunglasses Lena had bought for
him at Woolworth's downtown with her own allowance when he complained
that the bright morning sunlight was beginning to give him headaches.

When the weather turned cold, he added to the outfit a thin brown suit
jacket that didn't match the pants. Then, when he came into the house,
he'd remove his hat and put one of the large white starched butcher's
aprons he always left hanging on a nail on the kitchen porch right on
over his clothes, coat and all. He'd put on the apron, cross the strings
behind his back, and tie it closed in front with a bow.

Sometimes he even left his weary-looking hat on after tying on his apron
and kept it on all day. So on some winter days he would stand at the
kitchen sink doing dishes in his hat, coat, and apron. He would push his
coat sleeves up to the elbows so he could plunge his slender leathery
hands into the steaming dishwater, scalding the way he liked it.

Although Grandmama would suck her teeth at the strange picture he
presented, everybody else in the house kept silent about it. Of all the
women who had ever come to the house over the years to help Nellie and
Grandmama with the cleaning, no one of them had ever been as reliable as
Frank Petersen.

When Frank disappeared from Lena's view out the side of the dining-room
window around the back of the house, she raced through the breakfast
room and reached the kitchen door just in time to see him trying to make
it to the top of the steps of the porch outside. When he got to the top
step, he sighed heavily and leaned forward, bracing his hands on his
thighs to get his breath back. Then Lena watched him wearily remove his
hat and put on his big white apron. Something about the way he held his
head made Lena know he couldn't stand any noise that morning, so she
didn't say anything.

silently she unhooked the latch on the inside screen door and pushed it
open. Frank walked in in that same old-man way and brushed past her
without saying a word, which was unusual for him. He didn't even bother
to raise his head or throw her a glance as he shuffled across the
black-and-white linoleum tile to the white metal table next to the sink
and sat down heavily in a chair with his back safely to the sunlight
streaming through the open window. Moving as if it might be his last
effort, he put his elbows on the table's surface and rested his temples
in the upturned palms of his hands.

Lena, who felt as comfortable with Frank Petersen as she felt with
anyone in the world, suddenly didn't know what to do in his presence.

Maybe he needs a cup of coffee, she thought as she examined the top of
the man's head still resting in his hands at the table. She went
immediately over to the stove and turned on the gas under the blue tin
pot of coffee left over from a fresh pot Frank had made at the end of
the day before.

Frank Petersen still hadn't moved, and it was silent in the bright
yellow kitchen. Lena stood at the stove and watched him for a while
before deciding to start his day for him the way she knew he usually
did. She walked over to the sink and began running hot water onto a big
dollop of Ivory Liquid, then stood back and watched the sink fill up
with clouds of suds. When the suds stood over the top of the sink's rim,
she turned off the faucet and began putting dirty glasses into the
water. Lena could see Frank Petersen flinch each time she clinked a
fluted beer glass or tall tea glass with Coca-Cola gummy in its bottom
against the sink, so she stopped that.

The kitchen was so quiet, she was almost afraid to move. It was so quiet
that when the coffee boiled over on the stove, the sizzling sound
startled her and Frank and she knocked a glass into the sink with a
clatter. Frank shot her a murderous glance from between his fingers.

And for the first time that morning, she looked right back into his
face, because although she had heated the coffee up, she didn't feel
responsible for the noise it made. And she was growing more and more
uneasy about Frank showing up in such a strange condition. Angry, in
fact.

Their eyes met only for a moment. Then Frank dropped his head back in
his hands. When he made no move to get up, Lena rushed across the room
to the stove and turned the gas flame off. Using a dish towel that was
hanging on the refrigerator door, she moved the pot from the front to
the back burner. Then she went to the cabinet for two coffee cups and
placed one on the table directly in front of Frank Petersen and the
other across the table from him.

Still in silence she went back to the refrigerator, opened the door, and
reached inside for the red-and-white can of Carnation evaporated milk
sitting on the top shelf amid jars and bottles and bowls of food.

Each time she made a trip across the room she noticed that her lanky
bare legs sliced through the shafts of orange morning light pouring into
the room and stirred up thousands of dust motes in the air.

After taking the dishrag off the refrigerator door again, Lena stopped
to take the hot coffee Pot off the back of the stove and brought the
coffee and the can of milk to the table.

There she stood completely still and silent at Frank Petersen's elbow
with the pot of coffee in her hand like a highly trained waiter in a
posh restaurant. When he finally slid his elbows off the table and
slowly leaned back in the straight-back chair, she poured the steaming
coffee, nearly as thick as syrup, into his cup and then filled her own.

she tugged at the leg When she returned and sat at her place, of her
white shorts and tucked one leg under her thigh to keep her skin front
sticking to the yellow vinyl seat.

. g them white shorts?" Frank "You gonna ever stop wearin Petersen spoke
for the first time, not lifting his eyes from his cup of coffee.

said, looking up at him, glad he was "Not till they split," Lena like
they are.

talking. "I like em. Tight, just The room fell back into silence. he can
of evaporated When Frank Petersen didn't reach for t milk, Lena pushed
it across the tabletop to him.

But he still refused to pick it up. instead he sat there taking great
searing gulps of the hot coffee black, even though Lena knew he took his
coffee the same way she did, with sugar and lots of cream.

Frank Petersen's eyes were so red and puffy, Lena didn't understand how
he could see out of them when he raised them and looked directly at her.
"Humph, you probably just wearing them shorts for those little boys from
up the street who come flocking down here," he said. she could tell that
Lena looked up at him in surprise because he wasn't kidding her.

"Who you mean?" Lena asked. "Ronnie and Charles and them? You know they
just come down here so they can play pool down in the basement."

"That's what you think?" Frank had an ugly sound to his voice that made
Lena as uneasy as his swaying in his chair did.

"Shoot, that's what I know." Lena sucked her teeth in disgust. "Frank
Petersen, you know good and well those boys are Edward's friends."

But he wasn't listening. "Yeah, keep messing around with those boys,
you'll have a baby fore you twelve."

"I'm already almost thirteen," Lena snapped back at him, but she didn't
feel as confident and sassy as she sounded. Frank Petersen's talk of
boys and having babies was making her flustered. She had never really
given much thought to the boys who pretended to come to the house to see
Edward but spent most of the visit trying to flirt with her. They were
closer to her age than to Edward's. But to Lena they weren't serious
suitors, just fools she had known all her life who tried to impress her
with fancy pool shots.

"You sure are mean today," Lena said finally.

Frank Petersen finished off his coffee while it was still steaming and
ushed the drained cup an arm's length away from him on the table. Lena
could tell he was no longer looking at her, but she couldn't pinpoint
exactly where his red watery eyes were focused. A fine misting of sweat
was beginning to cover his sagging face and he swayed a bit in his
chair. Tired of fighting the battle to keep his head up, he let his chin
fall to his chest.

Lena had to know. She remembered that Mamie once said, "Child, sometimes
the easiest way into something is the straightest way.. If you want to
know something bad enough, then be a woman in your own shoes and just
ask."

"Frank Petersen," she asked, "you drunk?"

"Humph." He laughed shortly to himself. "My name is Frank Petersen, you
spell it with an e. I'm not drunk."

But when he laughed, he lurched forward in his chair and had to brace
himself against the table's edge. Lena had been around The Place enough
to know that a firm denial of inebriety was a sure sign of drunkenness.

"I've never seen you drunk before," she said, trying not too hard to
hide her disappointment. "I didn't think you got drunk.

I thought you just took a drink." Frank thought for a while, then said,
"Lena-Wena, you think too much of me."

And Lena didn't know what to say to that. So they sat silently white
metal tabletop. The girl again, eyeing each other across the saw that
Frank was looking at her the way he did when he was trying to decide
whether to teach her something new or let her e must have made up his
mind because after remain ignorant. H n the table in front a while he
deliberately placed his hands flat o of him, palms down, and leaned
forward toward Lena. ight," he said in a "Bessie Mountain came back to
me last n whisper.

Lena could barely hear him, so she leaned forward, too.

He repeated it. "Bessie Mountain came back to me last night."

Lena was about to say, "Who) Big ole fat Bessie Mountain?" e call the
huge because that was all she had ever heard anyon woman who had once
been Frank Petersen's woman but had moved on years before to someone
else. Everyone teased him about Bessie Mountain, even Nellie. But Lena
caught herself in time and just nodded her head at Frank's revelation,
"She came up to my boardinghouse last night," he continued oftly.
,Walked right up the stairs and into my room like she s and she was
standing in the door.

belonged there. I looked up d up the whole door "Humph, she as big as
ever. Nearly rille way. But she looked good to me." He closed his eyes
and sort of chuckled at the memory of the fat woman in his room.

Lena was leaning closer and closer to him, trying to catch his hisper in
the quiet house.

every word as he continued to where?" She say, I come back "I said,
Bessie, what you doing that's to see you, Sweet man." And my heart .

just dance because what she used to call me, sweet man. on the end of my
"Then she came over to where I was sitting bed and stood over me and rub
my head right there," he said, pointing to his gray temples, "like she
used to. And I laid my head against her big belly, like I used to."

Frank Petersen and Lena were leaning so close to each other now that she
could smell the sweet fruity peach wine gone sour on his breath.

She moved in even closer to the man when he began to speak again, still
in a whisper.

"We stayed like that for a long time, her with her hand on my head, me
with my head on her stomach. Mostly because I was scared to move.

Lena, I coulda stayed like that forever. But I did move . cause I knew
it couldn't last. I pulled back my head and looked tip at her.

She had that'i'm after something' look on her face. And she just laughed
with her big mouth open and her teeth showing cause she knew I know that
look."

He paused.

"You know what she came back to me for after all these years? You know
what?" Frank Petersen demanded.

Lena finally found her voice. "No, Frank Petersen, what?" she asked.

"She came back to me for a piece of money, a piece of money, like I was
John Dee Rockyfeller or somebody. I ain't gonna tell you what she wanted
it for. I'm too shamed," Frank said, dropping his gaze briefly to the
tabletop, then raising it again. "But I gave her what I had-just a few
dollars and some coins and her old gold ring.

"She put her fingers, soft puffy fingers, on my head again, right here,"
he said, pointing again to his temples, "called me sweet man and left. I
heard her flat feet going down the steps and down the hall and on out
the house. I couldn't get the sound of those feet out my mind all
night."

He paused, and Lena thought for a second that he was going to continue.

But he was finished. And the girl and the man both slumped back in their
chairs exhausted and sat looking past each other's head in silence.

When her father went out the front door and let the screen door slam
behind him, Lena nearly knocked over her half-full cup of coffee at her
elbow in her surprise. But Frank Petersen even flinch. He sat like stone
and didn't bother to reply didn't when Lena asked if she could do
anything for him.

As quietly as possible Lena rose and finished the few dishes in the sink
and swept the kitchen floor, being sure not to sweep any trash and good
luck out the door. By the time Grandmama and Nellie came down to fix a
late breakfast, they hardly noticed how as and how busy Lena was.

slow and silent Frank Petersen Lena began each school day by standing in
line in front of the three-story red brick schoo Ihouse. All the girls,
dressed in pleated navy-blue skirts and white blouses, stood in one
straight line, and the boys, in neat blue trousers and short-sleeve
white shirts, stood in another straight line beside them.

Lena had attended Miss Russell's small kindergarten in the front room of
the teacher's house as her brothers had before her and her mother and
father had before them. She began Blessed -floor room of Sister Ann's
first Martin de Porres in the first grade. The next year, when she was
seven, she moved up to the second floor of the three-story schoolhouse
to Sister Mary Hespian's second-grade class with the same boys and girls
who would be her classmates for the next eleven years.

Second grade was the last time she would be in a room with only one
grade until she was elevated to the third floor and high school.

Although the public-school children sometimes taunted Lena and her
classmates, saying they went to a poor folks' school, the
Catholic-school children were never daunted by the classroom setup.

They knew their parents paid tuition of thirty dollars a month for their
education.

"You aren't some of those public- school children," Mother josepha would
boom in her nasal, Northern accent. "You attend parochial school,
private school. And I expect you all to conduct Ives as such."

The nuns at Martin de Porres, Sisters of the yourse Blessed Sacrament,
dedicated to teaching American Indian and colored children, could say
"public school" as if it were something nasty in their mouths.

Besides Miss Russell, Lena had had no otker teachers than nuns. They
were all women from the North whose first assignment in the South seemed
to be her school. They spoke lovingly of Boston baked beans and ate, so
Mrs. Claver said, strange flat patty squash and the roots of turnips but
threw the greens away.

They were all white, something that the black students quickly forgot in
the struggle just to survive twelve years at a Catholic school.

Lena thought of their skin color as part of their uncomfortable-looking
black-and-white habits.

But school wasn't hard for Lena. She loved learning, and because she was
smart and her parents had money and contributed regularly and generously
to the school and church, the nuns went easy on her. She relished going
to her classroom, where so far everything had gone smoothly. She prayed
daily that the ghosts that still haunted her would never invade her
school.

Meanwhile the other girls in her class were beginning to get ly and
flirty with the same boys they had ignored the year before. But Lena
gigg found it hard to be truly swept up in passing love notes and
writing boys' names on notebooks. And since her first dance she had been
as wary of boys as she was of ghosts.

She hadn't really wanted to go to the harvest dance sponsored by the
church's Catholic Youth Organization. Despite her ease with the patrons
of The Place and her flirty nonchalance around the boys Edward brought
home to run in the woods and play Pool in the basement with, Lena was
still shy in situations in which she wasn't absolutely sure of what was
g And unlike her classmates, who seemed to
glideoeinffgorttoleshsalyppietno. the latest dance steps, Lena had the
coordination of the white girls on "American Bandstand" and embarrassed
herself and her partner each time she took to the floor. Her friends
tried to be patient with her when they came to her house to practice the
latest moves. But Lena spent most of the visit sitting on the attic
steps watching her friends do the Stroll and Madison in front of her.

However, Gwen, who had already bought a new dress, was determined that
they both go. It was the first dance that the nuns had allowed the
eighthgraders to attend.

"We've all got to go. You know how vengeful nuns can be. If we don't
take advantage of their great generosity, they'll get back at us. They
won't let us come to a dance till we're eighteen," Gwen had warned.

And on the day of the dance Lena was caught up in the excitement of
preparations along with everyone else. Her Grandmama and Nellie had
collaborated on her mint-green party dress, combining the high neckline
of one pattern with the trendy bouffant poi de sol' skirt of another.

It was all sleek lines and fitted bodice.

In it she felt like women she had seen at The Place who burst into the
joint shouting, "Uh-huh, watch out! I feel like I'm gonna take
somebody's man tonight." And those brassy women, Lena had noted, usually
ended up doing just that.

But much of Lena's brass was dulled when she discovered that the nuns
had slipped in a group of students from the colored academy for the
blind without telling any of the CYO members. They assigned each Blessed
Martin de Porres student the responsibility of a blind boy or girl for
the evening.

The blind student Lena got was a slim, solidly built boy named Henry
with three pimples on the side of his nose. His hair was closely cropped
and he wore a brown suit that was a bit too small and a white shirt.

Emboldened by how pretty she looked in her mint-green dress and
low-heeled pumps, Lena took Henry's hand and led him across the dance
floor to the refreshment table. She was stunned to discover that his
hands were callused across the top of the palms. How could a blind boy
play so vigorously that he got SCHOOL calluses on his hands? Lena had
imagined that this shy gentle boy, like most blind people, sat around
all day listening to sounds and staring into darkness.

Henry's hands felt like those of a ditch digger.

She knew rough play on playground equipment could have left his hands
that way. Lena's mother had forbidden her to play on the iron things and
still checked her hands for calluses to make sure she wasn't swinging
around a pole throwing her legs up in the air. Nellie had told her she
was a young lady and shouldn't go around showing her panties to anyone
who cared to stare.

That warning was as close as Nellie had come to discussing sex with her
daughter, until the day she found the girl sitting astrada's four-poster
dle the spool railing at the foot of her grandmam bed and screamed,
"Lena, get down off that thing. You hurt yourself down there in your
matchbox, you never will have any children."

The injunction had left Lena a little confused until she and her
girlfriends caught two teenagers under the bleachers at a Publicschool
football game. "I bet she gets a baby," Lena's friend Marilyn predicted
as the girls continued to peer through the cracks in the bleachers at
the copulating pair.

"You play with fire, you get burned. You play with pussy, you get
fucked."

When a slow record began playing, Lena impulsively grabbed Henry's hand
and led him out on the floor. Whatever activity Henry was used to,
dancing was definitely not part of it. The two of them stumbled around,
stepping on each other's feet, until the laughter of her friends drove
them back to their chairs.

Responsibility for the blind boy had worn off sections of Lena's
sparkling party veneer. She was ready to ditch him even before it
occurred to her that Henry couldn't even see how pretty she looked in
her green party dress.

When she looked into his eyes, Lena discovered thick-looking milky
pupils unlike any she had ever seen before. And unless she spoke, the
two of them sat there in silence. Once, when he tried to edge his
strangely callused hands toward hers, Lena cleared her throat loudly and
startled him motionless, When the boy finally got up enough nerve to
say, "You smell good, Lena, I bet you're pretty," Lena felt the germ of
annoyance turn to terror.

She snatched her hand away and hissed, "How do you know how I look?"

The boy was so flustered he couldn't answer. Lena jumped up and ran to
the bathroom. Once it had occurred to her that the blind boy might not
really be blind, and that he resembled the creatures that haunted her,
everything else seemed unimportant. She spent the rest of the evening
trying to avoid him, but the nuns chaperoning the dance kept bringing
him to her whenever she tried to hide.

"Lena?" the boy said hesitantly, reaching out his callused hands each
time he was led to her. The very sound of the boy's voice speaking her
name made her shiver as if a cat had walked across her grave.

But Lena's clumsy dancing and wariness about boys didn't deter their
interest in her. They knew her family made their living on things they
considered dangerous-liquor, gambling, and loans. The allure of danger
made the boys hot.

"Your daddy's not here with his pistol, is he?" one boy asked each time
he showed up at Lena's house under the pretense of shooting a game of
pool.

Gwen laughed at Lena's allure. "If the nuns knew how much boys came by
your house, they'd call you an occasion of sin," she joked.

Lena and Gwen thought they knew all about nuns. But later that year,
when the girls arrived at school and discovered the nuns racing up and
down the wide staircases of the schoolhouse on the trail of a rumor,
they began to question their own knowledge.

As the nuns ran about, their rusty black and sparkling white veils,
starched to the consistency of cardboard, flew out behind them, coming
perilously close to exposing their black, brown, red, and gray crewcuts
to the ever-vigilant eyes of the students. The holy women had gotten
wind of an accusation that some student's mother had inadvertently
passed on to her child.

SCHOOL "Those nuns just hiding behind those veils," the mother was
supposed to have said. The student had overheard the comment, picked it
up, and brought it back to the crowded classroom.

The rumor, begun on the third floor of the school among the older
children and overheard by a child on the second floor, quickly spread
among the students on the lower floors. The phrase was repeated over and
over, word for word as the mother had said it, because most of the
little ones had no idea what it meant. Each child told it exactly as he
or she had heard it to the next little pair of ears, and then they
dissected it.

y are hiding be'does it mean that they have horns that the hind those
veils?" asked a little girl in second grade.

"Maybe it means they are really bank robbers and thieves running from
the law," suggested a boy who was always being sent home for insisting
on wearing his cap pistols and holster over his blue-and-white uniform.

m veils?" Marilyn, considered II could be they men behind the the most
mannish of Lena's classmates, suggested slyly, pointing to her crotch.

he'd through the In a frenzy of truth-hunting, the nuns rus school and
its grounds pouncing on students and bringing them to the principal's
office on the third floor for questioning.

Meanwhile Lena and her friends-Brenda, Wanda, Dorothy Lois, Carroll,
Marilyn, Deborah, Caryl, and Gwen-stood in the schoolyard by the gray
metal swing sets, hastily getting their stories together. "Now, when she
asks you who said it first, just say you never even heard it before,"
Marilyn instructed the girls standing around the playground like a covey
of jaybirds in their navy-blue pleated skirts and white cotton blouses.
By the time a nun swooped down on them, they were all nodding their
heads in agreement.

So when Sister Mary Augustine, looking like the visage of death with her
long bony face and her deep-sunk gray eyes) appeared at the principal's
door and beckoned Lena-next in the line of students winding all the way
down the staircase-to come in and stand before Mother josepha's gleaming
dark wood desk, the girl marched in without a qualm. And when the hefty,
redfaced nun behind the desk asked, "Who did you hear this from? Whose
mother said this thing?" Lena threw her shoulders back, stuck out her
chest, and opened her mouth to speak.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Mother, I never even heard
anything," was what she intended to say, just as Marilyn had told them
to.

Instead a voice from deep inside her that she had never heard before
boomed, "It was Cynthia's mother.

The voice was a man's or a grown woman's, husky and deepit certainly
wasn't Lena's voice. The words came out of her mouth in a rush of hot
air.

Lena covered her mouth with her hand, but it was too late. The words the
voice had spoken were the truth.

The nun standing on guard with her back to the principal's closed office
door seemed as startled by the voice as Lena herself had been.

The thin blond hairs of her eyelashes fluttered over her pale eyeballs a
few times and her nose began to twitch. The nun had taught Lena in sixth
grade and knew just what her prize pupil's voice sounded like.

But the principal, thrilled at the ease with which her interrogation had
elicited results, immediately jumped from her seat in the wooden swivel
chair, shoved her colleague aside, and threw open the door.

Reaching back to drag the tall, stunned Sister Mary Augustine with her,
she flew out of the office past the line of Lena's friends awaiting
their turns under the hot lights of interrogation.

Left in the office alone, Lena leaned against a cream-colored wall.

The bones in her body turned to jelly, she slid down the wall and
slumped onto the floor. The strange, unsummoned voice coming out of her
mouth stunned and scared Lena worse than any ghost ever had.

She hadn't seen any ghosts or apparitions since she had suspected the
blind boy at the dance was a spirit, and she was trying to forget she
ever had.

But that voice coming out of her mouth made her face it, no matter how
many pretty dresses her mother SCHOOL and grandmother made for her, no
matter how many good ored on her how high she sc grades she made in
school, no matter her hair looked after she reading tests, no matter how
pretty came from Delores Beauty Pariour, there was something wrong with
her.

She was like a fancy birthday present all wrapped up in flowered gift
paper and tied with a pretty bow. But for all the festive wrapping,
there was no telling what was underneath. You couldn't take her out.

She might say or do or see anything.

While Lena was immobile on the floor of the principal's office, afoot.

"Lena told! Lena told. The word I other demons were rumor had.

spread through the school as rapidly as the origina Her classmates were
astonished at the news. "What kind of traitor is she?" Dorothy asked the
other girls under her breath while Sister Louis Marie taught the
eighth-graders on the other side of the room. us, that's why)" hissed
Wanda. "She never was " She's not like and this prove$ it." ways asking
that stuff like, did I "Remember how she was al f the think tables and
chairs talked when people were out room?" Deborah said.

"And how bad she treated that poor blind boy at the dance that time.

Running around the hall like she was crazy?"

The girls' outrage took on epic proportions as the day went cipat rang
the big cowbell dismissing classes on. When the prin to fight her way
home.

for the day, Lena almost had with her. When Lena Gwen was the only girl
who would walk with some acceptable, natural explanation for tried to
come up Gwen just shrugged and said, "It's no why she told on Cynthia,
omebody." big thing. Everybody's acting like you killed s Lena went to
bed that night without eating dinner, even though her grandmother had
prepared stew meat with potatoes, and turnip greens with their creamy
roots left unmashed specifically for her.

"But, baby , it's your favorite," Grandmama pleaded, trying to entice
her downstairs from her bedroom.

"Well, tell her to come down and sit at the table anyway," Jonah
demanded when he walked in and saw the table set for only three. Now
that Raymond was also away, at college in Tennessee,jonah was almost
beginning to regret his decision to send Edward to military school.

"I really don't think Lena feels well," Nellie said. "She's been quiet
as the grave since she came home from school, She didn't even have
anything to say to her buddy Frank Petersen today. You know she's a
young lady now. She may just be having cramps. , "Hell, just cause you a
young lady don't mean you can't sit up at a table and make conversation
while everybody else eats," Jonah said. But after a while he put the
paper down, went upstairs, and knocked on Lena's bedroom door.

"I come to visit the sick," Jonah joked as he stuck his head in the
door.

"I'm not sick," Lena said from her spot on the bed with her schoolbooks
around her. "I just don't want any dinner."

"Well, that sounds sick to me. You know your Grandmama made stew meat
just for you," Jonah said from the doorway. "If you don't want any
dinner, you can at least come down and kee us company at the dinner
table." p "I just don't feel like it, I just don't feel like sitting at
the table and making conversation. Just this once, I don't feel like
it." It wglsn't that she wasn't hungry, she was. People in her family
never seemed to lose their appetites, no matter what. But she had just
had one of the worst days of her life. She did not feel that she could
rally her strength to sit at the table and pretend that everything was
okay while she ate the delicious meal.

Jonah tucked in his chin and looked at her as if she had spit on the
floor. "Who the hell you think you talking to like that?" he wanted to
know.

"I'm sorry," Lena said automatically.

"Well, you damn well better be and you also better learn to change your
tone of voice. What's the matter with you tonight?

SCHOOL I think you better just stay your ass up here for the rest of the
evening till you learn how to talk to people."

Jonah thought that his baby girl had such a strange haunted look on her
face that even he couldn't bring himself to chastise her any further, He
left the room and didn't even wait for her reply, "Yes, Daddy."

After Jonah closed the door and went back downstairs, Lena stopped
looking vacantly at the books on her bed and returned to staring at the
ceiling. She closed her eyes and concentrated, as Mamie had taught her
to when she did her hair at Delores Beauty Pariour.

what was that voice like? What did it put me in the mind of-." she asked
herself, thinking that Mamie would be proud of her attempt at
objectivity.

The voice wasn't exactly like the strange ghosts that had been appearing
to her off and on for as long as she could remember. Those
apparitions-an animal, a woman, or a floating creature with no head-all
had some form, some shape that she could see. Even though the shapes
they took invariably frightened her, at least they were things that were
discernible.

This voice had no shape or form. it didn't come out of the night or
first dark or the mirror or a picture. it came out of her. Was this
thing now in her? Was it now a part of her, this thing she had feared
the most?

it was as if some demon had taken possession of her body.

That thought Struck her like a slap in the face. She sat up on her bed,
still covered with the summery white eyelet spread and the ruffled
valance around the edges dusting the floor, and stared off into a corner
as she remembered something her teacher Sister Louis Marie had .

said a couple of weeks before.

From time to time the nuns at Martin de Porres, from the first grade on
up, calmly terrorized their students by telling stories they represented
as factual about their adventures in the western United States, where
they had taught American Indian children. ,I saw things out West," said
Sister Louis Marie, "that I never would have believed if I had not
witnessed them with the two good eyes the Good Lord gave me and heard it
with my own ears. I saw people, little innocent children, possessed by
the devil, whose eyes blazed with the fires of hell and whose voices
were no longer their own.

Young women who spoke with the voices of men and men who sounded as if
they were animals. Children who had clawed their bodies raw with their
own fingernails.

"It was the devil in those poor people, the very devil that I saw with
my own eyes. But the church in her infinite wisdom knows the power of
Satan and has holy implements like holy water-demons cannot stand the
touch of holy water, it burns the very skin of the possessed one-to
drive the demons of hell out."

Now the nun's words churned red and ugly in Lena's mind, reminding her
of faces she had seen in the night.

Jesus, keep me near the cross! Lena thought, using her mother's favorite
phrase. Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm possessed, too.

The next morning Lena wanted to skip breakfast and get to the church
long before school was to begin. But she knew that if she even looked as
if she wanted to miss two meals in a row, her mother would put her in
the car right then and take her to St. Luke's Hospital's basement for a
visit to Dr. William-even though Nellie was beginning to dread visits to
the doctor there. She did love to stop and look at the luscious yellow,
red, and white display of rosebushes climbing up the back of the
hospital like the eighth wonder of the world, but she said she got sick
and tired of trying to dodge old Nurse Bloom and her barrage of
questions about Lena and all that old-fashioned shit about veils and
spirits and second sight.

"The last time I took Edward there, when he broke his arm, she had the
nerve to say she just knew in her bones I was going to be coming there
soon with an emergency- I started to say,"Well, I wish the hell you had
called and told me what the emergency ,was going to be. It would have
saved poor Edward a lot of pain and me a lot of trouble."

" torted sharply, "You so quick to "Nellie," Grandmama had re urse Bloom
may not be a bosom dismiss anything old folks say. N buddy of mine, but
I shore respect what she say."

Nellie had just sucked her teeth. And Grandmama hadn't spoken to her for
the rest of the day.

So Lena rose earlier than usual, while the house still slept, and
dressed hastily. Then she went downstairs by herself in the quiet house
and began frying bacon in the big black spider and put the pot of water
and salt on the gas fire for grits. When Grandmama and Nellie, awakened
by the smell of breakfast, walked into the kitchen tying their robes
around them, Lena wasn't a bit surprised.

Food got such a hold on this family, she thought.

"I see your stomach woke you up bright and early this morning,"
Grandmama said with a chuckle and a sly look at her daughter-in-law as
she took the long fork from Lena's hand and turned the strips of bacon
in the pan. "Look at her, Nellie, the girl got the white mouth. I may
have to smear some of this bacon grease around your mouth before you
pass out. That'll teach you to not join us for dinner."

"Taught us, too," Nellie said as she took the butter from the
refrigerator door and bread from the box on top next to the cake box.

"It was so lonesome at that table without you, baby. I don't know what
we're gonna do when you go away to college."

"Well, that's a long way off," Grandmama said huffily, as if she were
offended by even the idea of Lena leaving the house and the family for
four years.

This morning, more than usual, Lena was grateful for the easy flow of
conversation that seemed always to envelop her family. Now the talk made
it easier for her to slip away. By the time she had wolfed down her
breakfast, grabbed her books and blue cardigan, and headed up Pleasant
Hill, it was only about a quarter after seven.

She hurried past Sarah's old house, cut through the dirt street where
her friend Lois lived, and crossed the big street that led to the public
elementary school, past the old library that was now a housing project.

The Blessed Martin de Porres school and churchyard were still empty when
she walked slowly up the stone steps to the church with the books
clutched to her chest. Inside the church with her school books the
church air was damp and cool, heavy with the incense the altar boys
burned when Father O'Donnell held the beautiful gold monstrance above
his head during Benediction. On Sundays the scent made Lena sick to her
stomach@mpty since midnight so she could receive Holy Communion.

Someone else-probably the priest's housekeeper-had already been there.

Lena saw flames on a couple of the small votive candles flickering in
their blue and red holders at the side of the altar. Taking a deep
breath, she reached her trembling right hand into the small font next to
the church's door, dipped into the well of holy water, and made the sign
of the cross with her eyes closed. r did not sear and scorch her skin as
Sister But the holy ware by the devil.

Louis Marie had said it would a person possessed Lena stood a moment in
the middle of the church and stared at her she wiped her wet fingertips
as tears welled up in her eyes. W the salty drops away from her lashes,
the tears mixed with the holy water and still no steam rose from the
mixture.

She didn't know whether to feel relief or disappointment. On the one
hand it meant that she was not possessed, as she had thought the night
before. On the other it meant she was right back where she had been when
the voice had issued from her throat in the principal's office.

She knew there was something different about her, but she didn't know
what.

She headed slowly down the carpeted aisle toward the altar, genuflected,
and slipped into the nearest pew, directly under the choir's loft,
letting her body relax against the smooth oak seat. She had never been
in the church all by herself before. It was peaceful just sitting there
beneath the gaze of the Christ on the cross and the statues of Mary and
Joseph and Martin de Porres and the beautifully simple Stations of the
Cross carvings. It never crossed her mind that anything scary could
happen there.

She couldn't remember ever sitting this far back in church. It seemed
that she had always sat in front in the children's pews, with the nuns
directly behind to thump a head or pull an ear of anyone who dared to
talk or appear inattentive during Mass. Back where she sat now, in the
adults' seats, she got a different perspective.

Compared to the simple tables in the Western mission churches the nuns
described, the altar at Blessed Martin de Porres was grand, with gold
candlesticks, lace-trimmed linens, and the heavy red leather-bound
gilt-edged missal.

But for all its fancy trappings, the church wasn't the least bit
intimidating to Lena. For a little while in fact, Lena considered
staying there. Not just for the morning or for the school day, but for
the rest of her life. She could live on the white wafers that stuck to
the roof of her mouth during Communion, and the amber-colored wine that
she knew was kept in the sacristy off the altar. She could wash in the
baptismal font at the side of the altar near the candle tray, but there
was only room for a whore's bath.

She wasn't sure what she would do for a toilet. She guessed she could
sneak downstairs to the bathroom in the church hall at night and not be
seen. But she knew she couldn't hold her pee all day.

For a little while it was pleasant sitting in the cool church, weaving a
fantasy of living there, imagining her pretty clothes hanging on a rack
in the back where the ushers stood during Mass, her lotions and powder
and deodorant sitting on the altar next to her comb and brush.

But, she thought with a deep sigh, what was the use of weaving a stupid
future for herself like that? She couldn't live in the church any more
than she could go to the nuns for help.

There was no running away from herself. I've come this far, she thought.
I'm thirteen years old, I'm not a baby anymore. I can't run and hide,
and I can't pretend everything is just fine. But, Lord, what am I gonna
do?

The sound of the big cowbell calling the students to stand in line for
the opening of school was her answer. Lena emerged from the church
feeling older and more responsible than she had been half an hour before
when she had entered the building.

But she wasn't prepared for what awaited her at school.

All the girls were standing as usual at the school gate. When ,Ifa GIC
she was et them, they all turned away in unison and, lked up to gre as
if according to plan, hurried to stand in line.

Her tattling on Cynthia had ostracized her. Days after the incident Lena
would turn in class to pass a silly note along to Wanda or Dorothy, and
the girl would look straight ahead as if she didn't see or hear Lena. Or
worse, Wanda or Dorothy would raise her hand and complain to Sister
Louis Marie, "Sister, Lena's talking and disturbing my work."

No matter how hard she tried to fight back the tears and hold her chin
up, she couldn't pull it off. Reprimanded by the teacher, she would sit
in her seat with tears rolling down her cheeks, the titters of her
friends dancing a round her like demons.

Lena thought that after a few days, when the voice didn't manifest
itself again, things would get better. The girls would tire of the
silent treatment and break down and be her friends again. But she was
wrong. As the fall days grew chillier and chillier and winter became a
fact, the girls became frostier and meaner.

"Look at her over there with her funny-looking self," Deborah said
during recess on the first day as she and her friends watched Lena come
out of the school building, her brown paper lunch bag in her hand.

"Think she cute just cause she think she got a shape. I wouldn't have no
titties and big butt like that for nothing."

"Yeah," Brenda added , and she ain't hardly got no legs." it was a
feeding frenzy, each girl took a trait of Lena's in her mouth like a
thick piece of flesh and gnawed it to shreds with anger and envy. over
Lena's nervous habit of biting her nails.

Theylaughed d to hate her long red hair when she wore it Then they
decide in a ponytail. They hated her hair more then than they had when
she had just got it done at Delores Beauty Parlour and wore it loose and
wild and hanging down.

She was the last to be picked for any ball teams or tag teams. When they
clustered in the school yard in groups of three and four pretending to
be The Supremes, or Martha and the Vandelaa's las, they closed ranks
against Lena and pretended there was no room for one more.

When they ran out of things to hate her for, they turned to Gwen, Lena's
one remaining friend, called her fat and laughed at the gap between her
two front teeth. That hurt Lena as much as the unkindnesses they hurled
at her.

But Gwen only shrugged and acted as if she couldn't care less. She had
read somewhere that gapped teeth were a sign of passion and prided
herself on her smile.

"Shoot, they weren't ever that nice to me anyway," Gwen tried to
reassure her friend. "Don't let em see you cry."

It was some time before Lena's family noticed that she seemed unusually
moody and lost. Then one day it struck her mother that none of Lena's
friends other than Gwen ever came around to visit.

"Well, Nellie, our baby has never been one to have a whole lot of
children running in and out the house," Grandmama reassured her
daughter-in-law when Nellie brought up her concern one day in the
kitchen.

"I know, Miss Lizzie, but do you think it's healthy for her to have just
one friend at her age? Why, she's a teenager now. The only person she's
ever on the phone to, it seems, is Gwen, and they've been friends since
first grade."

"Well, if you ask me, old friends are the best kind to have. Those are
the ones you need to keep," Grandmama said.

"I just don't know if it's a good idea for her to be up under grown
folks so much," Nellie said. "If it's not us, it's Frank Petersen.

And if she's not with him, it's the folks down at The Place. I just
think she ought to be stretching her wings a little bit now that she's
growing up and learning about all kinds of people." Grandmama sucked her
teeth. "You got to face it, Nellie. She's not like you when you were a
girl-always having to rip and run the streets to this place and that,
getting into this and that just to keep entertained."

Nellie bristled.

randrnama said. "The last G ,She s a reader and a thinker en to my
hearttime I was at St. Luke's to have Dr. Williams list a Montana mule I
was what for, I don't know, I'm strong as talking to Nurse Bloom about
Lena and how smart and bright she is. That old nurse said she wasn't a
bit surprised. She was there at the birth and says she knows how Special
Lena is." too, you might "Well, Miss Lizzie, I was there at the birth,
remember.

I don't know about all that veil-over-her-face shit, but said Nellie.

I do agree with you that our Lena is special,"

"Our baby ain't got to be a little hot-butt fast girl to satisfy the, "
the older lady said.

Nellie slammed down the lid on a pot of field peas boiling on the stove.

She knew her mother-in-law well enough to know what she was getting at.

"Dammit, Miss Lizzie, how many times do I have to tell you that Raymond
was a premature baby before you get it into your head? He came two
months early.

That's all.. What's over Hell, the boy is more than twenty years old now
is over." . h the two women The rest of the afternoon was taken up wit
arguing moral values, all concern about the recent change in Lena
momentarily forgotten.

Coming in from school, Lena had heard some of the women's sharp talk.

She decided to detour upstairs to her room instead of going through the
kitchen as usual. As she pulled off her navys to put on, she blue skirt
and looked for an old pair of jean thought about her family's attitude
toward her, always telling her she was special. ile how she used to "put
the She remembered with a sen everybody in her magic" on stuff when she
was a little girl. How family expected her to be able to rub her hands
across the surface of anything that didn't work right so it would
magically be fixed just by her touch. They didn't ask her to do that
anymore. Now that she thought about it, she couldn't remember when they
had stopped, just as she couldn't remember when they first started
expecting her to do it.

Sometimes the things she remembered seeing and doing when she was
younger seemed like a dream to her now. Had she really seen the ghost of
a slave named Rachel on the beach? Did the baby in the picture that was
probably still leaning against the wall in the attic really try to pull
her inside the frame?

It could get very confusing. Real people could become as unreal for her
as the ghosts were. With a twinge of guilt she remembered the blind boy
Henry, whom she had suspected of being a ghost. She sometimes even
doubted whether she had really had a beautiful beautician who taught her
how to ask questions.

Deep down she knew that the ghosts she saw were real. She could feel her
heart beat harder just thinking about some of them. But somewhere along
the line she had decided that the best way to deal with the ghosts and
visions was to push them far back in her mind and pretend they were
unreal. She imagined a whole pile of scaries somewhere in her soul,
covered up with an old khaki canvas tarp like the one Frank Petersen
threw over the cord of wood stacked up by the front door porch. Perhaps,
she thought, that's where the voice came from, from that pile of
memories and visions.

Putting the magic on stuff, she mused quietly. She was a little
embarrassed by the childish idea, but she was alone and willing to give
anything a try.

She sat up straight on her bed in her socks, white blouse, and panties,
her head high on her long neck, her legs crossed like an Indian's, and
tried to remember the kinds of things that used to go through her head
when she had put the magic on stuff. But she couldn't remember a thing
about what she had thought in those days when she got their big green
woodie started or the television picture unscrambled, so she cleared her
mind as best she could and began rubbing her right hand over the left
side of her body.

She started at her bare brown shoulder and let her right hand follow the
contours of her left arm, past her vaccination mark, past her slightly
ashy elbow, over her forearm, her wrists, and her knuckles until she
stopped at the fingertips of her left hand.

When she finished that, over her right arm.

Then she returned owly rubbed the entire length of the front hands, sl
ts, where she felt her heart paying special attention to her breas her
smooth beating. Gently she brought her hands down over thighs, slender
legs, and ankles-down to her narrow feet with ing pan full of hot lard
had the scar on the left instep where a fry if the stove, and on to her
slender toes.

mysteriously fallen on her back, but she crossed her She could only
reach so far as she could around, arms over her chest, stretched them
Then she ran and ran her fingertips down the side of her spine. er
thighs and her hands the rest of the way don the backs of h legs to her
heels.

She thought she should pay ey-tr attention to her head. Sheer her
forehead, across her temples, and rubbed both hands ov ad where her
thick hair was pulled around the crown of her he to her she did it again
before moving back into a pon.vta-l throat, from which the voice that
tattled on Cynthia's mother had come. said aloud and continued sitting
on the bed in "There!" she something to show her that putting the magic
silence waiting formed too much like tempting on herself had worked. But
it see to walk into her room. Finally fate, like asking something
strange she jumped up and ran out to the telephone in the upstairs hall.
She was surprised that she could even remember her classmate I been a
long time since she had Lois s phone number. it had . s a good sign,"
she said dialed it, but it came right to mind .That' aloud. wered the
telephone on the second ring, Lena when Lois ans ther good sign. She
swallowed and spoke thought, That's ano right up.

"Hello , Lois? This is Lena," her flattest voice, "Yeah, There was a
Pause. Then Lois said in what you want?" nd of her former friend's
voice.

Lena's heart sank at the soit she did the same thing with her left hand
to her broad shoulders and, with both of her body, B AB Y OF But Lois
didn't give her a chance to come up with anything. "My mama want to use
the phone," she said. "I got to go."

Then she hung up.

Lena held the dead phone in her hand for a moment, still hearing the
loud click of the broken connection. For the first time, she allowed
herself to feel the anger at her ex-friends that had been simmering
since the girls had stopped speaking to her. Who the lieu does Lois
think she is, hanging up in my face like that?

Instead of slamming the phone back on the receiver, she decided to dial
another number.

"Hello?" Lena said timidly when the line was picked up. "Hey, girl,"
Gwen said immediately. "Whatcha doing?" Lena longed to say, "Gwen, I see
ghosts and hear voices and all kinds of things." But she was afraid
she'd lose Gwen, too.

Saying anything to her family was out of the question. Lena remembered
the frightening convulsions she suffered when she had tried to tell when
she was younger. She was sure that even Grandmama, who claimed to have a
belief in all kinds of things, wouldn't be able to help her.

Nobody could help her.

What good would it do to tell them?

There didn't seem to be anything anyone could do, Whatever was inside
her making her see and feel things no one else saw and felt was stronger
than anything in her everyday world. Sure, her family would love her and
pet her up after she went into convulsions. Dr. Williams would make a
house call and take her temperature and give her a sedative. Her mother
and grandmother would lay cold compresses on her head. But the ghosts
would still come back whenever they felt like it.

Three nights later Lena began walking in her sleep. The first time it
happened, Sunday night, Nellie woke at about midnight to find Lena
standing by her bed, her arms sticking out from her body at an angle,
her hands clenched into fists, her gaze fixed straight ahead at some
point over her mother I s head, her mouth hanging open.

"What is it, baby?" Nellie asked groggily. "You can't sleep?"

"The wolf. It's attacking me," Lena said in a strange voice.

,Wolp What wolf, sugar? What you talking about?" Nellie A was trying
hard to come awake and see what Lena wanted.

"The wolf tried to grab my throat and tear it out. It tried to kill me,"
Lena said. It didn't sound as if she were answering Nellie's question,
but rather just talking to herself. t of the In the moonlight streaming
into the room at the foot of the bed, Lena looked to Nellie like a
phantom. Dressed in her favorite long white flannel gown, her hair
pulled back into a ponytail and wrapped around one pink sponge curler,
she hardly resembled the pretty teenager Nellie was used to seeing.

The sound of Lena's voice was like that of some girl her mother didn't
know. it gave Nellie a chill all over. She reached over to her night
table and clicked on the lamp for some light to reassure herself, to cut
through the darkness.

Lena didn't even blink at the bright light in her face. She just stood
there staring at her parents' headboard. Now that the light was on,
Nellie could see the muscles in the side of her baby's face flexing and
contorting.

"Jonah, Jonah," Nellie whispered to her husband, who was snoring soundly
next to her. "Wake up, Jonah. Something's wrong.

When he didn't stir, Nellie shook his shoulder sharply and repeated,
"Wake up, Jonah. Something's wrong with Lena."

Jonah shot awake, flailing his arms and snorting. "What's a matter with
her?"

Nellie just put her finger to her lips and pointed to the girl standing
still as a statue next to their bed. "I think she's still sleeping.

Look at her."

Jonah sat up and leaned across Nellie to look at his daughter intently.

"Lena, baby," he said.

"Shhh. Don't startle her. Not while she's still sleep. If you wake her
up while she's sleepwalking, they say she'll go crazy."

"Well, then, dammit, what we gonna do?" Jonah asked, exasperated.

"Let's see if we can get her back to her room," Nellie suggested.

They both led her into her room and tucked her stiff body back into bed
as quietly as possible, trying not to awaken her.

Nellie and Jonah stood over their sleeping daughter for a while to make
sure she was soundly asleep again before returning to their own bed.

The air in their room was thick with thoughts they were reluctant to
express. They were both frightened by the sleepwalking.

Nellie tried to act casual the next morning when Lena came downstairs
hungry and ready for breakfast, unaware that she was a somnambulist.

sleep all right last night?" Nellie asked as she poured "You beaten eggs
into the frying pan. she sipped her orange juice.

"Pretty good," Lena answered as "How about you?" ered quickly.

"Oh, just fine," her mother answ that she had Nellie had had every
intention of telling Lena sleepwalked into her parents' room the night
before, but now that she was faced with the task, she felt unsure of
herself. Somehow she suddenly felt that this was something she had to
protect her daughter from. She remembered how, just three days before,
Lena had almost burst into tears when Miss Lizzie had teased her about
never dreaming of a winning number for her to play in the "bug."

We've told this child too much foolishness about herself as, it is, her
mother thought. She doesn't need to know that she's walking in her sleep
now, too.

But as soon as Lena left the house for school and her Grandmama went
into the sewing room, Nellie got right on the phone to Dr. Williams's
office.

"Oh, it's nothing to worry about, Mrs. Mac", Dr. Williams reassured her
after hearing the story of Lena walking in her sleep. "Young folks do
that sometimes. Puberty, adolescence-it can be a hard time for, some
children. And the sleepwalking, that could just be Lena Is reaction to
it. I'd be surprised if it ever happened again.

"Besides," the doctor added, chuckling, you know the old folks say you
don't have to worry about a child like Lena. You know she's one of my
little lucky babies. The old folks say nothing bad's gonna happen to
her."

Nellie hung up the phone relieved. Many of her friends over the years
had deserted Dr. Williams for other physicians-good Jewish doctors,"
they called them-and the integrated county hospital. But Nellie never
even considered it. She still felt the same aura of care and healing at
Saint Luke's that she had felt when her children were born there. She
was one of Dr. Williams's fiercest supporters. Now, as relief flooded
her head, washing away the sense of foreboding that had been there since
the night before, she knew why.

Still, for months afterward, she and Jonah continued to keep an eye on
Lena. Waking in the middle of the night, Nellie would slip into Lena's
room on bare feet to make sure she had not wandered away in her sleep.

When Jonah came home in the early-morning hours-from The Place or
playing poker or screwing around-he would peep in before he lay down for
the final time. But when they always found her safe in bed, eventually
they relaxed their vigils and slept through the night.

As soon as they did, Lena began her night wanderings again.

In the darkness of early morning she would rise from her bed and head
out her bedroom door. Never pausing to check her surroundings, she
walked down the steps and out the front door of the house. An hour or so
later she returned, climbed back into bed, and fell into a blessed
dreamless sleep.

Her night wanderings went on for six months at two- or three-week
intervals without anyone in the house becoming aware of them. Then Lena
got suspicious.

"Lena-Wena, you're gonna have to start wearing shoes even when you're
just walking around the house," Frank Petersen told her one day as he
changed the linen on all the beds. "The bottoms of your sheets are just
full of dirt."

She just turned up her nose at the suggestion. "I hate wearing shoes and
socks," said Lena, who went around the house in her bare feet long after
the weather had turned chilly.

"You know, your feet gonna be wide as bateaus if you don't start wearing
shoes more regular," Grandmama said. But she dropped the subject when
she realized that she was agreeing with Frank Petersen.

Lena ignored them both, but she began to notice that her feet did seem
dirtier than usual some mornings when she took her bath. Then, a few
months after Frank Petersen complained of her dirty feet, Lena awoke to
find her feet and the end of her gown not only soiled but also soaking
wet. And stuck between the toes on one foot were two or three shreds of
slimy brown leaves.

Lena almost let out a scream. Where did the wet leaves come from? Had a
night visitor left them there between her toes as a reminder of the
visit? Had she dreamed so hard about wading through water that she
actually became wet? As she sat on her ing rumpled bed, bit' the
cuticles around her thumbnail nervously, Lena was reminded of something
she hadn't thought of in years. She couldn't put her finger on it, but
it seemed so important it kept intruding on her fear and confusion.

Lena raced to the bathroom and, thankful that it was empty, frantically
rinsed the material off her feet. As she watched the debris spin down
the drain, Lena wished the terror that it raised in her could be as
easily washed away. But she knew that nothing having to do with her was
ever solved that easily.

For days after that she checked her feet first thing in the morning for
signs of wet and leaves. Each time, her feet came up dry. But the
question still nagged at her while she ate breakfast and tried to make
small talk, while she sat in class and tried to concentrate on the
Crusades, while she undressed again for bed, how could she get soaking
wet without knowing how it happened?

But before a week had passed, she discovered just how.

One night the pressure of her bladder tugged her awake. She Slowly
opened her eyes. But she didn't see the familiar surroundings of her
room-the Pink walls, the chest of drawers by the closet, the vanity
table prettily trimmed in pink ruffles and covered with bottles of
Shalimar and jars of Dippity Do and Noxema. Instead she found herself
sitting in the middle of the woods behind her house, propped up against
the rough bark of a big pine tree with the moonlight in her eyes. She
knew she was deep in the woods, she couldn't see an electric light or
the roof of a house nearby or hear the sound of a living thing around
her.

For just a second, Lena thought she might still be dreaming, but she
could feel the cold wet ground beneath her and the scratch of the tree's
bark against her back. Her feet and gown hem were wet and sandy. ck. In
the middle of This time she didn't even try to hold it ba back her head
and the woods, deep in the night, Lena threw howled like some wild
thing, like a wolf. She cried as she had not allowed herself to cry
since she was seven years old. She screamed until her throat was raw,
and she clutched at her long hair, pulling it out of the ponytail clip.
Then she lay on the ground among the brown pine needles and slick
leaves, shuddering and gasping to catch her breath, dry heaves wracking
her body.

"Oh, God, help me, help me!" she prayed as she felt the cold seep into
her bones from the damp earth. She closed her eyes and tried to remember
some time when she felt safe and warm. But all she could recall were the
apparitions and voices that still made her shiver.

Now I'm wandering around at night through the woods and doing God knows
what all, and I can't even remember any of it, she thought as she sat on
the damp ground, hugging herself against the cold and rocking back and
forth, scraping her back on the tree. I can't keep on like this.

I've got to get far away from here, I've got to get away from here, I've
got to get away from here!

Lena sat rocking on the cold ground, not bothering to wipe the tears
from her face.

But her immediate problem was finding her way back home and doing it
before anyone discovered she was missing. If Mama and em find out I'm
wandering around in my sleep, they'll never let me out of their sight
again.

But if I can't get away from here and all this crazy shit, I may as well
be dead.

She got up, brushed herself off, and started walking, stepping in and
out of beams of moonlight. At every step she just knew she was going to
run into some frightful rotting creature, maybe the one that had lured
or brought her into the woods in the first place. But she couldn't bear
to stand still and wait for daylight.

She seemed to be walking in circles, getting nowhere. But after an hour
or so she heard the sound of falling water and, following it, came to a
small clearing in the wootis where a stream flowed over a huge flat
boulder and cascaded gracefully into a small dark pool five or six feet
below.

Lena had found her brothers' secret swimming hole, the one she had
yearned to see when she was a little girl forbidden to wander in the
woods. She was so happy to find something she recognized, something she
could connect with the world of reality, that she sat down on the banks
of the pool and cried againit was no longer as dark as before. She
jumped up and began running along the banks of the stream. If she stayed
with the course of the water, she knew she would eventually come to the
she got there, the sun was spot behind her house. By the time almost
peeking through the pines behind.

"Don't let anybody be up early," she prayed as she carefully slipped
past the kitchen door she must have left wide open and quietly ran up
the steps to her bedroom.

She longed to go into the bathroom and wash off the dirt and debris that
still clung to her feet, but she didn't dare make that much noise.

So she just scraped her feet against the painted wicker wastepaper can
in her room) changed from her wet nightgown into a clean one, and
climbed wearily into bed. She was exhausted, but she didn't dare sleep.
How would she ever sleep again? the sheets and the heavy quilt when she
shifted in bed under her Grandmama had made especially for her, her
gritty feet rubbed together like two pieces of sandpaper. of sand on her
She was reminded of Rachel. The fine grains be-,ween her toes damp feet,
embedded in the creases weaving and under her pink toenails, put Lena in
mind of the watery ratchy when she woman whose skin and clothes felt
rough and sc rubbed against her.

g ago put down to fantasy the memory of sitting Lena had Ion next to the
woman who said on the beach on a washed-up log she was a ghost. In fact
she had tried to put the memory of all gh her bedroom the ghosts and
specters that had wandered throu and her head all her life out of her
mind. But now, with the feel the memory of the slave's ghost was so of
wet sand on her feet, sharp, the woman seemed in the room with her. osed
What was it she told me? What was it I was never supp to forget?
Suddenly it seemed important to remember everything about the experience
on the Georgia coast that she had spent years trying to forget.

She closed her eyes to recreate that day when she had wandered away from
her family in search of the protected cove she had dreamed about.

When she felt herself slipping off to steep, she snatched herself alert
and sat up with her back against the headboard. Then she remembered.

Rachel said I belonged there on that beach. "You belong here. You belong
here." That's what she kept saying, Lena said to herself. She said I
belonged anywhere on earth that I chose to be.

But even as Lena repeated Rachel's words to herself, she felt they
weren't intended for her. The last thing in the world she wanted was to
belong to the spot of earth she found herself on. She didn't feel she
belonged there in Mulberry, on Forest Avenue, in Pleasant Hill, at
Blessed Martin de Porres School. Just getting to be fifteen years old in
that spot had been so taxing for Lena that it seemed any minute she
might crack down the middle and fall apart. In fact she yearned to get
as far away as she could from the place she called home.

All her terrors, the sleepwalking, her childhood memories of ghosts, her
skewed premonitions, the hatred the girls at school still harbored
toward her, all the things that had frightened and haunted her all her
life were connected with the town of Mulberry and her close familiar
home.

I can't trust anything, Lena thought.

"Grandma, am I still shaped-up like Mama s people?" Lena asked as she
looked over her shoulder at her body, naked except for white bra and
panties, in the full-length mirror in the sewing room. aid, clenching a
till the day you die, baby," Grandmama s mouthful of straight pins
between her teeth. It was sometimes dangerous to hug or kiss Grandmama
while she was sewing. If the pins in her mouth didn't prick Lena, the
needles stuck in the front of her dress did. Lena had learned long ago
it was best to d and only kiss the top of her hug her Grandmama from
behiii head, where her hair was balding, when she came home from school
and found the old lady sitting at her sewing machine.

Lena could tell by looking in the mirror that she had the same body and
frame her mother had. She had the same big low butt, the same long waist
where no belt felt comfortable unless it was nearly resting on her low
narrow hip bones, the same slender legs and fragile-looking ankles. She
also had her mother's beautiful breasts, not so big they weighed her
down, but big enough that they played a perfect counterpoint in front to
her big behind and made her resemble an S when viewed from the side.

This seemed to make the link she felt with her mother real and B AB I'
OF THE F A ,Ifili' tangible. Something that she could look in the mirror
and see. Something that all those people who thought Lena strange could
look at and compare and say, "Yes, indeed, that's Nellie's child, all
right." She might be crazy as hell, nervous and jumpy for no reason, but
she was Nellie's child. Her body proved it.

It made her feel less like a changeling left for her family by mistake
and more like the special baby girl they thought they'd gotten.

Ever since she awoke in the middle of the woods, Lena lived in fear that
others, especially her family, would discover the secret of her visions
and voices and be forced to take some action. Lena held on to anything
that would make her feel more anchored to what she imagined other
people's lives must be like. The problems she knew others faced-no job
or money, an alcoholic relative, physical abuse, being evicted-never
seemed so bad when she compared them with hers. Shit, at least they
don't see things, she thought.

"We'll have this outfit finished, except for the handwork and hemming,
before your mama gets home from The Place this evening," Grandmama said,
holding up the straight white wool skirt she was making for Lena to wear
to the school talent show. Lena put on a lightweight pink cotton duster
and sat on the bed next to her completed winter-white mohair jacket.

"So stop standing over me like that, breathing down my back," Grandmama
fussed. Lena wasn't anywhere near the old lady's back. She stretched out
on the bed and tried to feign interest in a pattern cover left on the
bed.

"Why don't you go in the kitchen and get me a cold Co-Cola, baby? And
while you at it, go through the living room and see what that noise is I
hear in there. Frank Petersen ain't still sneaking around here, is he?"
Grandmama peered accusingly over the top of her reading glasses.

"Nope, it's just you and me, Grandma," Lena said. She had heard it, too,
a desperate little noise like the sound of an insistent breeze nipping
at the tail of a curtain at an open window. But she had waited for her
Grandmama to say something about it before she acknowledged she'd heard
it. What she had heard could just have been a sound to lure her into the
room by herself.

At sixteen Lena felt she knew herself better than she really wanted to.

Whenever she looked at her smart new suit, she thought of it as a
costume she would wear to masquerade as a normal person for the evening.
But she wasn't really like any other person she knew. Not like the girls
who still wouldn't talk to her. Not even like Gwen She could sit in the
parking lot downtown by the auditorium with Tommy Davis, smelling
overpoweringly of jade East, and kiss until her teeth clanked against
his perfect straight ones to the sounds of Otis Redding singing "Try a
Little Tenderness," the way she had done the week before after the James
Brown show, but it didn't make her a normal teenager.

The passion the boy's perfect kisses stirred in her reminded her of how
it felt to see visions, her heart beating wildly, her breath short, her
skin prickly. She had pulled away from the boy's searching mouth.

Instead of seeing Tommy's look of disappointment, in his eyes she saw
the heavy eyes of Henry the blind boy. Panicking, she insisted that her
date take her home immediately.

She had finally come to the conclusion that she was crazy, truly crazy.

As bad as Cliona from Yamacraw. She just prayed that she could hold on
and not do anything too bizarre not walk the streets talking and arguing
with herself like Cliona-until she finished college, got a job, and
could pay for some professional help. But she knew better than to broach
the subject with anyone in her family or even with Gwen, That
shit-paying Some man a bunch of money to listen to your problems-was for
white women and fools, they would say.

Her family didn't even like her to say she had a stomachache, let alone
something serious like being crazy. Her mother seemed to dread having to
take her to Dr. Williams's office when she was ill and having to answer
all old Nurse Bloom's questions about Lena as much as she dreaded seeing
her baby in pain.

Sometimes Lena thought Nurse Bloom knew she was crazy, too, and might
say something about it. Lena was starting to dread trips to the hospital
herself.

Reassured by her Grandmama that there really was a noise in the living
room, Lena got right up and went through the music room to investigate.

As soon as she entered the living room, she could tell that the source
of the sound was in the fireplace. She only needed to glance that way to
see what was making the commotion. Quickly she spun around and ran back
into the sewing room.

"Grandmama, Grandmama," she shouted to the startled old lady, "there's a
bird in the house!"

"Lord, have mercy," Grandmama exclaimed and threw the white skirt across
the black body of the sewing machine. She jumped up from her pink
chenille seat and ran into the hall. She stopped short of the door to
the living room.

"Quick, go get the broom," she instructed Lena, who was hard on her
heels.

Grandmama was still standing in the hall peering into the living room
when Lena returned at a trot with a broom and dust t-nop in her hand,
her heart racing. Grandmama, whom Lena always thought of as fearless,
looked small and unprotected standing in the hall all by herself, her
eyes too big for her face, her old hand clutching the lapels of her
shirtwaist dress as if they weren't full of straight pins. But the old
lady rallied and sprang into action as soon as she spied Lena. She
snatched the broom from the girl's hand and took a deep breath, her flat
chest puffing out with strength.

"Good," she said, "you brought something, too." Then, without another
word, the old lady plunged into the living room. Like a good foot
soldier, Lena followed without question.

But she nearly ran into her grandmother's back as soon as she crossed
the threshold. The old lady had stopped dead in her tracks the moment
she got inside the room. She stood perfectly still by the ottoman next
tojonah's big easy chair, staring at the bird as it struggled in the
ashes of the grate.

"Lord, have mercy, GRANDMAMA owl. Dammit, it's an owl." She brought her
hand to her it's an flat chest and stood there nervously biting her
bottom lip.

The bird was a small thing, probably a baby, Lena thought. She couldn't
tell what color it had been originally. It had thrashed around in the
ashes of the fireplace so desperately that it Was now a dusty gray. And
it didn't make any noise that Lena could hear from where she stood near
the doorway. just the flutter of its wings and the sound of its body
slamming against the ashy bricks as it threw itself wildly around the
cold grate.

"Is it a screech owl?" Grandmama asked herself as she leaned on her
broom and gnawed on her bottom lip . with her big false teeth. She
peered around the spark screen trying to get a better look at the bird.

"Now, what in the world is a screech owl doing in amongst all tltese
pine trees around here? I haven't seen one of those in I don't know how
long. But it's a screech owl, all right." Then, seeming to remember she
had help, the old lady turned to Lena and said, "Baby, a bird in the
house is a sure sign that there's gonna be a death in the family. We got
to get him out of here and damn fast. Maybe we can shoo him back up the
he came in. I. chimney, the way and the fireplace But just as Grandma
took a tentative step tow in her soft cloth house shoes, her broom
extended before her like a sword, the bird found the opening at the top
of the screen and flew out into the woman's face, leaving a trail of
gray ashes in the air.

Lena and Grandmama both screamed. Lena dropped her mop, fell to her
knees, and covered her head with both hands to keep the bird from flying
into her hair. Grandmama closed her eyes and swung her broom in the air
with all her might, knocking over the tall floor lamp by jonah's chair.
The frightened bird flew to the corner of the ceiling.

"Go open the door to the porch, Lena," Grandmama yelled.

I'll chase him that way."

Lena dropped her mop and dashed to the French doors, but as soon as she
got there, the bird flew over their heads in the opposite direction and
headed through the door leading to the hall.

"Goddamn his soul!" Grandmama muttered and raced through the door behind
him, her broom still held high. The old woman was running back and forth
the length of the hall breathing hard and searching in corners, under
the telephone table, on the staircase, muttering the whole time, "A bird
in the house, we got to get him out of here, we got to get him the hell
out of here." They heard a flutter in the dining room, The bird, most of
its feathers sticking out every which way, was caught in the white
pleats of the sheers that hung at the dining-room window. It was a
pathetic sight, Lena thought, with its long talons hopelessly entangled
in the threads of the curtains and a soft sound like a cat's meow coming
from its beak.

"We got him now!" Grandmama grabbed the curtains halfway down, trying to
envelop the bird in their folds. In her excitement she pulled too hard
and the whole curtain rod came crashing down on her head, freeing the
bird to fly crazily around the room. "Dammit!" Grandmama freed herself
from the curtains and angrily spun around. The bird rested for a moment
on the corner of the wide mantelpiece. Grandmama ran to the fireplace
and brought the broom down on the spot from high above her head.

"I bet I got your ass now!" Grandmama screamed.

The bird hopped to the middle of the mantelpiece, but the broom swept
across the end, knocking a piece of Grandmama's prized wedding china-the
large turkey platter propped up like a painting against the wall-to the
floor. It crashed into four pieces against the brick of the hearth.

Lena gasped, but Grandmama paid no attention. She swung again at the
bird as it perched on top of her beautiful soup tureen, its breast
rising and falling as rapidly as the old lady's chest. The bird avoided
the falling broom by hopping to the side behind Grandmama's family
portrait, but the tureen came crashing GR ANDAI AMA down, sending
slivers of china and the ladle dancing across the shiny wooden floor and
under the big oval table.

Lena dropped her mop, ran over to Grandmama, and grabbed the old woman's
hands, now clutching the broom handle in what felt to Lena like a death
grip.

"Stop, Grandma, stop. You're breaking your china," she shouted into the
woman's face.

swipe at the bird, knocking over the photograph. It bumped the Grandmama
pushed the girl away from her and took another brass urn containing her
husband's ashes next to it. The urn fell over on its side with a
metallic clank and rolled slowly to the very edge of the mantelpiece.
The urn's matching brass top came loose and fell end over end to the
hearth below.

ma stopped. She and Lena watched in horror Finally Grandma as the ashes
of the dead man, coarse granules of his bones, slipped from the lip of
the urn and slowly trickled over the edge of the mantel to the grate.

It was the first time ashes had been in that fireplace since the big
fire had killed all the teachers thirty years before, leaving only the
original fireplaces standing and ashes everywhere. sight of the ashes
Grandmama let out a little cry of pain at the drifting to the floor.

"Walter?" Her voice rose slightly as if she were asking the dead man a
question.

Lena looked over at her grandmother and thought the old woman might
burst into tears. Instead she squared her shoulders and raised her broom
again.

"That's my husband, you son of a bitch!" Grandmama lunged for the bird
as if it were a person who had desecrated Jonah's father's resting
place.

just then a ray of the setting sun glinted in the bank of windows Frank
Peterson had recently washed on the opposite side of the dining room.

The bird extended its broad wings, took off from the mantelpiece, and
flew through Grandmama's upraised arms, headed for what it must have
seen as outside.

Lena looked over from her Grandmama's contorted face just in time to see
the bird careen into the pane of glass. The impact made a loud crash,
sending splinters flying against the screen outside.

Impaled on a wide shard of glass, the bird quivered a few times, then
fell limp on its spike. A thin stream of watery blood began to run down
the shard of glass.

Once again the girl and the old woman were shocked into silence.

Death, the very thing that they had raced around the house crazily to
avert, had been thrust into the room as swiftly as the shard of glass
had seemed to thrust itself through the bird's heart.

The old woman was the first to move. Lena had seen Grandmama twist the
heads off live chickens with an effortless flick of her wrist, but when
the woman tried to lift the bird off the window glass, her hands shook
so violently that Lena was afraid she would cut herself on the jagged
edges. Even though Lena was certain holding the bird in her own hands
would ensure that it would soon be flying through her dreams to haunt
her, she insisted on doing it.

"Yeah, where the hell is that worthless Frank Petersen when you really
need him?" Grandmama blustered, but she couldn't hide her relief.

When Lena lifted the creature off the shard of glass, its plump rounded
body still warm and bloody, she had to fight the impulse to scream in
sympathy.

She was surprised that the thing had weight and shape and was touched by
its feeling of just-escaped life. Where the gray ashes from the
fireplace had come off, Lena could see that the bird was a beautiful
reddish-brown color and that it had small pointed ears.

"What should I do with it, Grandma?" Lena turned to the old lady with
the bird held as far away from her body as possible. Grandmama managed
only to back off from Lena and point outdoors with a quivering hand.

"It's only a bird. It's only a bird," Lena intoned as she walked around
the back of the house and down to the stream. She heaved the carcass as
far as she could over the water into the woods on the other side.

Looking at the thicket of trees, Lena thought of her brothers Edward and
Raymond, and how they used to tramp through the GRAND Al AMA Woods until
they smelled like puppies. She missed them so much now that they were
grown and out of the house-Edward to an air force base in Texas and
Raymond in his own home on the other side of town. Even though Raymond
worked at The Place in the evenings, she felt she hardly saw him
anymore. Her vely at every mother wasn't nearly as high-strung, cursing
creative chance, as she had been when they were all living at home, but
Lena knew Nellie missed the boys, too.

She felt more and more alone. The girls at school didn't even slip up
and speak to her by mistake anymore. And the boys only wanted to see how
close they could get to putting their eager hands on her breasts as if
it were a game. Even if her brothers didn't understand her any more than
anyone else did, they loved her just the same.

When Lena returned to the house, Grandmama was already kneeling at the
dining-room hearth, brushing her husband's ashes back into the mouth of
the urn. She was frantic to clean up the mess she and the bird had made
all through two rooms and , -if we hurry the downstairs hall before
anybody else came home.

up and get this house back into shape," she said, sweeping up the from
she had just used as broken pieces of her china with the bro a weapon,
we won't even have to mention that a bird was ever in the house."

Without a word Lena fell right to work beside the old woman. She wanted
to ask if keeping quiet about it would keep the death the bird portended
at bay. But Grandmama's drained face made it impossible for Lena even to
say the word "death" in front of her.

"We'll just tell your mama that I broke the window," Grand on the
diningmam a said, straightening her family's portrait mantelpiece.

"And your daddy is away so much now he got room d another line-what he
need that other place out on the county ow fixed before old dive for
I'll never know-we'll have the wind he even notice it's been broken."

Lena sighed deeply at the thought of another secret she'd have to keep.

When I get grown and get myself straightened out, I'm never gonna keep
another damn secret as long as I live, she thought as she helped her
grandmother put the chairs back at their places at the dining-room
table.

"I'm surprised that damn priest didn't show up in the middle of
everything, the way he always does at the worst possible time."

Grandmama tried to sound like her old self when they finally sat back
down in the sewing room.

The house was back in order again. Grandmama picked up Lena's wool
skirt, making several stabs at finishing the waistband, but she kept
looking over her shoulder as if she felt someone standing there and kept
sticking herself with the needle. Then she began rubbing her left
shoulder and arm as if to get a crick out.

"Grandma, why don't you go upstairs to your room and lie down until you
get your breath back," Lena suggested.

Grandmama looked at the girl as if she had said something outrageous.

She sucked her teeth and said playfully, "You must think I'm an old lady
or something to have to take a nap in the middle of the day."

After a while she did gather her hand sewing in her arms and move to the
sofa in the living room. But her seat there seemed no more comfortable
than the one in the sewing room. Still she refused to discard the work
altogether and go upstairs to her room. When Nellie blew the car horn
for someone to come out and help her with her packages, Grandmama was
sitting straight up, looking over her shoulder every once in a while.

Neither Nellie norjonah noticed anything out of place in the house
except the broken window. After dinner, during which Grandmama tried to
put on a face that looked normal, everyone but Jonah, who returned to
The Place, went to bed around eleven o'clock as usual.

Lena, exhausted, fell right asleep and, for the first time in years,
didn't even awake to go to the bathroom during the night. She wasn't a
bit surprised when the owl that had flown around downstairs flew through
her dreams, ten sizes bigger than it had been in reality, wreaking havoc
on everything its wide wings GRANDMAILFA came in contact with and
picking up people like toys in its big curved beak.

But the loud screeching Lena heard in her sleep was not made by her
dream bird, Everyone in the house heard the pathetic calls made by the
mate of the owl that had died that day in her dining room.

Lena awoke to a house that seemed to be in an uproar. But when, still
groggy with sleep, she tried to distinguish one anguished scream from
another, she realized that it was really strangely quiet.

Nellie had stuck her head into Grandmama's room when she came out of the
bathroom that morning. She meant to look in on the old woman and then
let her sleep late, even though Nellie knew Miss Lizzie would berate her
later on for making her miss the best part of the day. But as soon as
Nellie saw her lying there so still, her body slightly contorted, she
rushed into the room and gently shook the old woman's shoulder.

"Miss Lizzie? Miss Lizzie?" Nellie repeated a few times, but she knew by
the feel of her mother-in-law's body that the woman would never again
reply, "What, Nellie? Shit, I can still hear! Hell, I'm just sleep."

Nellie had found her own mother dead in her sleep the same way and knew
there was no use rushing to the phone to call an ambulance.

She sat on the edge of the bed next to Miss Lizzie's body and smoothed a
few crinkled strands of the old lady's hair back into her hairnet.

The two women had spent a great deal of time together in the last
twenty-or-so years, especially in the early morning when they both rose
together to prepare breakfast for the family and get them out of the
house so they-the women of the house-could start their day. It felt
right for them to be together for this last time undisturbed with the
morning light beginning to break through the satiny curtains. Nellie
knew it was the last time they would ever be alone, and already she was
missing the old lady.

"As much as we talked and fussed and carried on, Miss Lizzie, you would
think I wouldn't have anything else to say. You'd think we had said it
all.

But now, dammit, I all of a sudden can think of a thousand things I
didn't tell you before." Nellie didn't think she would have, but she
began to cry. She let her tears fall from her face onto the patchwork
quilt that partly covered her mother-in-law.

"You know, Miss Lizzie, I know about you and Frank Petersen." Nellie
addressed the corpse on the bed, but she was really talking to the old
lady's spirit that seemed to be imbued in the very wood of the furniture
in the room that was so much like her. "Not that I thought for a minute
that anything happened between you two. To tell the truth, I almost wish
it had. Don't get me wrong. I know how much you loved Mr. Walter, but
you've been as close to me as a mother. And I know a woman gets lonely.

"It's just that I saw you, how you looked at him, how the two of you
picked at each other. I knew he was making you hot. If no one else knew,
if he didn't know it, I knew."

Nellie was so used to the old lady breaking in while she talked that she
paused for a moment half-expecting a quick retort. Then she half-smiled
and continued.

"And another thing. You know, Raymond wasn't premature like I always
said. You were right. I was fast. I didn't mean to be. I just always
was.

It came easy.

"And since we can talk honestly here," Nellie continued, beginning to
feel the cleansing that her tears and words brought, "Jonah and I, we
got Raymond in your house on that pretty curved-back maroon velvet sofa
in the living room. You and Mr. Walter were upstairs in your room. I
don't mean any disrespect by laughing here on your deathbed, but I was
just thinking about howjonah insisted that we putall your stuff in
storage when you moved in with us.

Remember? All he really cared about saving was that old velvet sofa.

He planned to make sure Raymond got it some day.

"Lord, Miss Lizzie, I shore don't want to be the one to do it, but I got
to go in there and tell Jonah that his mama's gone. He's gonna take it
so hard. Maybe it would have been easier if you'd been sick for a while
or something, Miss Lizzie. But you were always so damn strong.

"And then-Jesus keep me near the cross-I got to go and wake up our baby
and tell her. Now tell me, Miss Lizzie, how am I'm gonna do that?"

"You don't have to tell me, Mama," Lena said from her spot in the
doorway.

She looked more like six than sixteen in her long thin cotton gown and
bare feet.

Nellie held out her hand to Lena, who slowly walked over to join her
mother and grandmother on the sixty-four-year-old four-poster bed.

The funeral was held at a church near the top of Pleasant Hill, which
Miss Lizzie had attended briefly when her children were small and where
she had once been on a program sponsored by the Negro Women's League.

It was an excellent turnout for a winter weekday afternoon. Everyone
said so. Even Jonah, who sat in the first pew between Nellie and Lena
and sobbed like a baby, his shoulders shaking through the whole short
service, noticed that there wasn't an empty pew in the entire church.

Nellie, who seemed to have to hold up for the entire family, was just as
pleased to see Gloria and Yakkity Yak and Slick and Bovine and the rest
of them from down at The Place as she was to see the principal of the
black high school, two nuns, Father O'Donnell, and Jonah's business
associates sitting there in their dark outfits and funeral faces. Some
busy people, like Dr. Williams and some of his nurses and FUNERAL Miss
Rowana from the Mulberry Clarl'on, only put in appearances at the church
or cemetery, but they were there.

Other than the sounds of soft sobbing and wailing and the gleaming brass
of the coffin, Lena remembered little about the service. Before Lena saw
Father O'Donnell there, she wondered briefly if she would have to
confess to him that she had gone to a Protestant service. She sat there
in the strange church in the high-waisted royal-blue wool dress trimmed
in black piping that her grandmother had made for her to wear to serious
functions, and low-heeled black leather pumps, and tried to keep a rein
on her emotions. She prayed to be made numb, the way her mother said her
father was whenever anyone asked, "How'sjonah holding up?"

But Lena feared that she wasn't doing a very good job of appearing to
hold up. Nellie must have thought that her baby girl just might pass out
or something. At the end of the service, a thin light-skinned man with a
notepad in his hand led the family down the church aisle behind the
casket, carried by jonah's poker partners, to the waiting line of black
limousines left running outside. Nellie grabbed Frank Petersen's hand as
they passed his pew and pressed a nearly limp Lena into his arms.

"Take her home for us, Frank Petersen," Nellie whispered. "We'll be
there as soon as we leave the cemetery."

Frank Petersen grabbed his battered hat from the seat beside him and
took Lena's arm formally on his own. They headed toward the beat-up blue
pickup truck with "The Bluebird Bar and Grill" painted on the side,
parked in the lot next door.

Frank didn't say a word all the way down Forest Avenue. Lena felt as if
she might never utter a sound again in her life. When they got home,
Lena headed upstairs. She was having trouble breathing and couldn't wait
to get out of her uncomfortable panty girdle and stockings and heels.

"I'll stick around till your mama and them get back," Frank said as he
went toward the kitchen.

In the hush that seems to descend only on a house where a death has
occurred, Lena changed hurriedly into a loose-fitting blouse and skirt.
Then she rushed down the stairs to look for Frank Petersen.

She found him sitting on the back porch steps smoking a Pall Mall.

Even though it was cool out on the cement steps, Lena took a seat beside
him.

"Just cause she's gone, don't mean I'm gonna start disrespecting her in
her own house by smoking in there," Frank Petersen said, looking
straight ahead.

They were silent for a long while, Lena beginning to feel lost in the
cloud of deeply scented tobacco smoke that ringed them. Then Frank spoke
again.

"You know me, Lena-Wena, I ain't no liar. Everybody knows me and her
didn't get along, never did. So I'm not gonna say a whole lot of mess
about what a good woman she was and she went before her time and all
that. But I know what she meant to you. And I'm sorry you hurting."

Frank hadn't looked at Lena since she walked out on the porch. While he
talked, he kept his bloodshot eyes trained on the woods down by the
stream.

Lena laid her forehead against the thin cotton of the man's shirt sleeve
below his shoulder and wept as she had wanted to for the last
twenty-four hours. She didn't stop until she heard Nellie's friends
bustling around in the kitchen preparing food for the mourners. Frank
acted as though he didn't feel a thing, but when Lena lifted her head,
she saw that his sleeve was soaking wet to the elbow with her tears.

That evening Nellie came into Lena's bedroom one last time before she
tried to lay her own weary body down for the night. She was exhausted
from the wake, the funeral, and the dinner afterward (more people seemed
to tramp through the house than showed up on a Saturday near the first
of the month at The Place), but she was so worried about her baby, she
knew she couldn't steep until Lena was asleep for the night.

Nellie had felt unsettled all evening, ever since she saw old Nurse
Bloom at the funeral.

Nurse Bloom had to be older than Miss Lizzie was, but she still FU,VERAL
looked the same as Nellie remembered her when Lena was born more than
sixteen years before. The strange old woman wore the same brilliantly
white nurse's uniform she always wore, but for the funeral she had added
a matching white net veil covering her face and falling to her shoulders
and chest. Nurse Bloom had taken Nellie's hand in her white gloved one
as they all walked back from the gravesite, and forced Nellie to fall in
step with her. Then she leaned forward and spoke conspiratorially.

"It is such a blessing to have a child like Lena in the house at a time
like this," Nurse Bloom said softly. "Children like herborn with a veil,
who can see beyond the grave-are such a comfort when the rest of us are
trying to understand the death of a loved one."

Nellie hadn't even tried to hide her repulsion and indignation at the
old woman. I don't give a damn how old she is. There are certain things
any fool knows better than to go around at a funeral saying, Nellie had
thought as she snatched her hand away from Nurse Bloom's grip and
hurried away to join the others in the family. And who does she think
she is, saying that about Lena as if my baby was some kind of crazy
voodoo woman? What in the hell would Lena know about death?

Miss Lizzie was the first person close to her who ever died.

Nellie had vowed that afternoon to forget all about the old nurse.

just thinking about the woman made her so angry she couldn't see
straight. But at the same time, Nellie couldn't shake the eerie feeling
that somehow the nurse really knew what she was talking about.

Lord, I hate funerals, she said to herself as she stopped climbing the
stairs to stand awhile on the landing overlooking the woods. All those
flowers crowded into that little spac@l thought for sure I was going to
throw up right up there in that front pew each time the heat came on and
blew that warm wet air over those roses and carnations right into my
face. I never could stand heavy odors.

Even from outside her bedroom door, Nellie could hear the soft whimper
of Lena's sobs muffled in her pillow. She knocked and walked in without
waiting for a reply. Lena was curled into a ball in a corner of her bed
nearest the wall.

"Oh, sugar," Nellie said as she rushed over to Lena's bed, "don't be in
here all by yourself crying like this."

"Mama, I should have said something," Lena cried.

"Said what, Lena, baby? What could you have said? That Grandmama was old
and her heart was giving out? What did you know, baby? She didn't tell
any of us what Dr. Williams had found when he checked her out."

"Oh, Mama, I know'bout stuff like that. What's gonna happen and stuff
like that. You know that."

"Lord, your Grandmama know she can reach from the grave," Nellie said
with a sigh and not a little admiration.

"Mama, you know," Lena said, too tired to continue fighting an enemy too
big and powerful for her to deny.

"Lord, Lena, what in the world made you mention that tonight? You sound
just like .. ."

"I sound like who, Mama? Grandmama?" Nellie hesitated and hurriedly
said, "Uh-huh, you sound just like your Grandmama."

"Well, I don't deserve to sound like her," Lena said harshly. "I don't
deserve anything I cause I know I could have done something and I didn't
and she died."

"Oh, Lena, baby, please don't start talking crazy tonight. I'm just too
tired. I swear I can't take it tonight. If you got any God in your
heart, you will not put your mama through this shit tonight."

"But I can't help it, Mama, I can't help but talk crazy. Everything that
comes out of my mouth is crazy."

"Lena, you got to stop that," Nellie said sternly. "You've got to stop
talking about being crazy and all that. Before you know it, you'll
really be acting crazy. It's nothing to play with."

"I'm not playing, Mama. I am crazy. I know it."

"Lena, life is gonna be hard enough for you as it is. It's hard on all
us, without you making it more so by acting crazy. You FUNERAL just not
allowed to act any way you want to in this world . I know we raised you
like there ain't nothing you can't do, but, baby, acting crazy is one
thing me and your daddy can't fix. The world'il make you pay for acting
crazy."

"Mama, how can I help it? I'm just crazy."

"Sugar, you're just overwrought and upset about your Grandmama. We all
are. But you got to try to calm down. just feel your forehead.

You already getting warm. When you were a little girl You'd do this, get
yourself so worked up that you actually got sick. Now, you too old for
that shit," Nellie said, getting exasperated at Lena in spite of
everything. It had been a long day, and because Miss Lizzie had not been
her mother, everyone in the family had expected her to be strong and
take care of all the arrangements.

And everyone knows how damn delicate I am, Nellie thought.

"Now, don't you go getting sick on me," she said as she stroked Lena's
warm forehead.

When Lena didn't seem capable of controlling her sobs, Nellie just held
her tighter in her arms and said softly, "This my baby right here."

The familiar words dried up some of Lena's tears.

"This my mama right here," Lena said finally and they nestled up against
each other the way they had when Lena was a baby.

Nellie stayed in Lena's room until she thought the girl had fallen
asleep. Then she got up, covered Lena with one of the quilts Miss Lizzie
made for all the beds, and quietly left the room. As soon as she had
closed the door, Lena opened her eyes.

Lena longed to turn back time. If she had had any sense, she thought
harshly as she lay in bed, she could have protected her Grandmama in
some way. Many nights, even after she became a teenager, Lena had gone
into Grandmama's room and checked on her, and the old lady had asked her
to come lie beside her on the big old-fashioned bed, as she had when she
was little. Happy not to sleep alone with the apparitions that visited
her in the night, Lena would jump eagerly into the high bed and nest
against her grandmother's old thin bones under her heavy quilt.

But I wasn't lying there when it counted, she thought ruefully.

Whether she was crazy or not, she knew that she did see things, real or
otherwise. And if she could see all these other dead people-a slave on a
beach, her infant aunt in the picturethen she damn well ought to be able
to see her beloved Grandmama.

Lena lay awake, waiting.

For the first couple of hours, Lena lay awake in the dark, the covers
pulled up to her chin, listening to the house creak and settle. The
image of her grandmother sitting at the sewing machine rubbing her left
shoulder kept sleep away.

She remembered how years ago her Grandmama would say to her, "Don't
worry, baby, Grandma ain't gonna let nothing happen to her little
puppy."

That memory made Lena bury her face in her pillow and heave dry sobs.

But she sat up at the sound of a tree branch brushing against the window
near her bed.

Then she noticed a heavy odor. At first she thought it was the scent of
the joy perfume that her mother had left there. But as soon as she took
one deep breath she realized that what she smelled was not Nellie's
perfume, but the heavy scent Of moonflowers. As Lena sat on her bed
taking in big gulps of flowerscented air, it became stronger and
stronger. Soon the smell lay on the room like a cloud of smoke and made
her drowsy.

Lena seemed just to have drifted off to sleep when she felt the bed
jostled as if someone had sat on the mattress right by her shoulder.

When she opened her eyes again and raised herself up on her elbows, she
recognized the figure immediately.

"Grandmama! " she screamed and threw herself into the familiar arms.

All Lena wanted was to feel the spirit of her beloved grandmother
envelop her like a gentle mist, but Grandmama seemed frantic to tell her
something.

In what looked to Lena like slow motion, Grandmama held the girl at
arm's length and looked into her eyes.

"Oh, baby, baby, Grandma so sorry," the spirit said over and over.

"Baby, Grandma so sorry. I shoulda known better. If I'da been any kind
of Grandmama, I would of known something was wrong. I've seen plenty of
country folks who never been off the farm who had enough sense to know
about a child like you and to make sure everything was done that should
be done."

Lena didn't understand what she was being told, but she didn't care.

She was so happy to have her grandmother again. Dead or alive.

"Grandma, can you hold me again? I been so alone."

Grandmama's ghost enveloped Lena like a soft warm mist. "Alone? You
alone?"

"The girls at school stopped speaking to me," Lena said. "And I never
had anyone I could ever really tell about the things I saw."

"Lena, don't you know you ain't never been alone? No matter how bad it
got, there was always some somebody, dead or alive, trying to help you."

"Help me? Grandma, don't you know what it's been like for me? I thought
you said you knew what it's been like for me."

"Baby, didn't you always have all your family's love? We may a' been
foolish and blind not to see you were special in a way other than just
being our baby. But didn't we love you with all our hearts? And your
friends Sarah and Gwen? Didn't you have Mamie all to yourself for more
than three years? What would you have done without that old lying wino
Frank Petersen? Baby, you wasn't never really alone. And you shore ain't
alone now.

I tell you, Lena, baby, it's been some kind of job to get to hree or
four lifetimes I been trying to get back you. It seems like t to this
house. But them other spirits-the scary evil ones-was too strong."

"Oh, Grandmama," Lena moaned. "What's gonna become of men't no fortune
teller. But you, "Shit, baby, I'm just dead. I ai you can do more than
me and four others like me put together if you let yourself."

"Grandmama, I don't know what you're talking about."

"Come with me, baby," Grandmama said as her wispy form seemed to rise
from the bed and waft out the door.

Lena jumped out of the bed and followed her to the hall.

.Girl, go back in that room and put on your slippers and a robe,"
Grandmama chided when she saw Lena's bare feet. "Walking round like that
in that flimsy little gown, you'll catch your death of cold."

Lena couldn't help it. She had to smile. She stumbled back to her bed in
the light streaming from the bathroom. For once she felt lucky to be
able to see ghosts.

"Now, come on," Grandmama said and floated down the stairs. Lena
followed quietly in her soft slippers. She could hear her brother
Edward, home for the funeral, snoring through his bedroom door and her
father, across the hall and two doors down, joining in as if on cue.

rely a glow in the sky.

It was a cloudy night, with the moon ba But Lena had no problem seeing
the luminous figure of her grandmother.

Besides, Lena seemed to be trailing the scent of moonflowers, long since
out of season, as much as she was following her grandmother's spirit.
She was glad Grandmama had insisted she wear shoes and a robe.

Lena could see her breath as she bounced down the back kitchen steps
toward the incline leading to the stream. She felt as carefree as a
two-year-old.

At first Lena thought her grandmother was going to lead her across the
brook into the forest. Since the night she had awoken shivering in the
woods, she had been afraid even to look in the direction of those trees.
But Grandmama stopped at a charred spot just before the stream, where
the family had always burned yard and garden debris. Even dead and cold,
the place still had the heady smell of burnt leaves. Scents seemed to be
so strong whenever ghosts appeared, Lena thought.

"When you were born, and Dr. Williams caught you, Nurse Bloom was right
there. And she did right by you, I found out. Right there in the
hospital she gave Nellie two things. One was a bottle of tea made from
your birth caul.

The other was the actual thing, the caul.

"Your mama poured out one, and the other, your caul, she burned in this
spot." Grandmama looked at the chunks of coal and ashes and sucked her
teeth in disgust. "While we were up there in the house making over our
newborn baby girl, Nellie was down here destroying your priceless,
precious caul. I still can't believe that Nellie was foolish enough to
do something like that. She disrupted two rituals, Lena, that you were
lucky to even be connected with.

They would have helped you in living the kind of life a child like you
should have lived. If you had drunk that tea, baby, it would of weakened
those scary spirits. Instead, you been scared of what you should have
understood."

"Grandmama, I thought I was mad. I thought I was crazy like Cliona from
Yamacraw."

"My poor baby. I know it's been hard. But don't you know, Lena? We all
mad in our own way."

"But, Grandma, I really saw all that stuff, all those things .. Lena
paused a moment. "Grandmama, I see you."

"For God's sake, baby, just cause you see a few ghosts and such, you
think you crazy? What you think the rest of us-those that come before
you, those that's living now@one been through? Don't you think we bout
crazy, too? All us colored women in this here country crazy as betsy
bugs. Life done made us that way.

"Crazy ain't all bad, child. Sometimes it's the only thing that protects
you. This world you living in can be so mixed up, so ass-backwards, that
not fitting into it, being what some folks call crazy, is a blessing.
And you, Lena, you got the power to do something with your craziness."

"Do something with it? I don't want to do anything with it! I want to
get rid of it."

"Don't never say that, Lena. Don't never let me catch you saying that
again. What if your powers can heal people? Don't you remember how you
could put the magic on stuff? Or, baby, what if your craziness can just
bring a little succor to some tortured soul? Even those old roustabouts
at your daddy's place seek you out to tell you some little ole thing
bout their lives, just to share it with you. Don't you think that means
something?"

"I don't care, Grandmama. I don't want to have to keep living like this.

With no friends and seeing strange things and hearing and saying all
kinds of things." Lena bit her lip and shuddered. "Grandmama, if I can't
get rid of it, can't I just be with you for good? Is that why you're
here? Am I gonna die, too? Did you come to take me back with you?"

"Go back with me?" Grandmama said. "Hell, no baby, you just starting
out. You got a whole lot to do before you over on this side.

That's what you was made for. That's why you had that veil over your
face when you was born.

That was a sign of the things you can do, things you can be."

"Tell me, Grandma, what was my veil a sign op"

"That's what you got to find out yourself. Baby, if you don't know
yourself, then you ain't never gon' find no peace.

"There's someone who can help you. I want you to see Mother Bloom."

"You mean Nurse Bloom? You want me to go to the hospital?" Lena asked.

"Yeah, you can probably find her at the hospital. Tell her that what she
thought was done to protect you at birth wasn't done."

"What? Grandmama, I can It just walk up to her and tell her something
like that."

"Nurse Bloom can't bring back your birth caul or change what you been
through. Your caul is gone forever." Grandmama looked down at the
charred spot on the ground with such an expression of loss that Lena
felt the old lady's spirit might cry.

"But she can tell you things about yourself. She got a lot of experience
with children like you and that can help you."

"And after I do this, after I go to see Nurse Bloom, then I'll be
normal, Grandmama?"

Grandmama chuckled. "Normal? Baby, you ain@t never gon' be normal."

In the pit of Lena's stomach it felt as if a storm were brewing.

Suddenly gusts of wind set the woods across the stream dancing and
swaying in the moonlight.

The wind whipped through the trees and brush like a chorus. Then it
seemed to collect itself, whiz over the stream, and whistle around Lena,
lifting her gown and robe above her waist. The gust of wind eddied up
her body. As it blew past her face, Lena noticed a scent she hadn't
smelled in nearly a decade ... the raw briny smell of the ocean.

The salty wind was soft and warm, but Lena was beginning to feel the
dampness of the ground through her thin slippers. She shuddered and
Grandmama said, "Let's go back inside."

When they got back to Lena's room, Grandmama sat on the bed beside Lena
and looked at her granddaughter's crestfallen face. "Lena, there're
things you have to know about yourself. And it's time you did something
to start finding them out. Baby, you can't run away from what you are.
You was born a special child. Now you got to claim what is yours."

Tears started to well up in Lena's eyes.

"You believe what I'm telling you?" Grandmama asked.

Lena opened her mouth a couple of times to reply, but no sound came out.

The simple question threw her into such a state of confusion that she
was actually dizzy. How can I believe in all this? Lena thought.

"I ain't saying it's gon' be easy. But listen to me, Lena, no matter
what you see or what you hear, I don't want you afraid anymore. Now,
that's your grandma talking, you hear me?"

Lena nodded her head.

I got to go now, baby," Grandmama said.

"Wait, Grandma! I am scared. I don't want to do all this alone. I don't
even know what I'm doing. Going to Nurse Bloom.

Talking bout teas and veils. Don't make me."

"Ain't nobody making you, Lena. What you are, baby, it's a gift. It's
like in the Bible. It's your birthright. There's gifts that you're given
in this world that you just can't throw away. If you do, it's like
telling somebody who love you to kiss your ass." e time. "And no Then
she took Lena in her arms one mor matter what, me and others who love
you, we'll always be with you Grandmama paused and added, "Baby, there's
just some things you have to take on faith."

Then she gave Lena one last squeeze and evaporated into the darkness
along with the scent of moonflowers.

Lena sat watching the empty space her grandmother's ghost left in the
middle of the room. She had to rub her throbbing temples to try and
settle her thoughts. went to the closet.

She finally got up, turned on the light, and For a while she stood
staring at the image in the mirror hanging on the door.

She bunched her gown up tight and pulled it in the back to show her
figure.

Leaning close, she examined her face, the faint line of hair above her
lip, the beginnings of freckles on her cheekbones like her mother's.

She stared so long into her eyes that her pupils began to dilate. She
Then she switched off the light and went back to bed. pulled the quilt
her grandmother had made for her up around her waist and sat up in bed
the rest of the night.

the end.