Brown Girl Dreaming (5 page)

The first time my mother goes to New York City

it is only for a long-weekend visit,

her kiss on our cheeks

as much a promise as the excitement in her eyes.

I’ll bring something back for each of you.

It’s Friday night and the weekend ahead

is already calling us

to the candy lady’s house,

my hand in Daddy’s.

He doesn’t know how to say no,

my grandmother complains.

But neither does she,

dresses and socks and ribbons,

our hair pressed and curled.

She calls my sister and me her baby girls,

smiles proudly when the women say how pretty we are.

So the first time my mother goes to New York City

we don’t know to be sad, the weight

of our grandparents’ love like a blanket

with us beneath it,

safe and warm.

They look like regular people

visiting our neighbor Miss Bell,

foil-covered dishes held out in front of them

as they arrive

some in pairs,

some alone,

some just little kids

holding their mothers’ hands.

If you didn’t know, you’d think it was just

an evening gathering. Maybe church people

heading into Miss Bell’s house to talk

about God. But when Miss Bell pulls her blinds

closed, the people fill their dinner plates with food,

their glasses with sweet tea and gather

to talk about marching.

And even though Miss Bell works for a white lady

who said
I will fire you in a minute if I ever see you

on that line!

Miss Bell knows that marching isn’t the only thing

she can do,

knows that people fighting need full bellies to think

and safe places to gather.

She knows the white lady isn’t the only one

who’s watching, listening, waiting,

to end this fight. So she keeps the marchers’

glasses filled, adds more corn bread

and potato salad to their plates,

stands in the kitchen ready to slice

lemon pound cake into generous pieces.

And in the morning, just before she pulls

her uniform from the closet, she prays,

God, please give me and those people marching

another day.

Amen.

In the stores downtown

we’re always followed around

just because we’re brown.

Saturday night smells of biscuits and burning hair.

Supper done and my grandmother has transformed

the kitchen into a beauty shop. Laid across the table

is the hot comb, Dixie Peach hair grease,

horsehair brush, parting stick

and one girl at a time.

Jackie first,
my sister says,

our freshly washed hair damp

and spiraling over toweled shoulders

and pale cotton nightgowns.

She opens her book to the marked page,

curls up in a chair pulled close

to the wood-burning stove, bowl of peanuts in her lap.

The words

in her books are so small, I have to squint

to see the letters.
Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates.

The House at Pooh Corner. Swiss Family Robinson.

Thick books

dog-eared from the handing down from neighbor

to neighbor. My sister handles them gently,

marks the pages with torn brown pieces

of paper bag, wipes her hands before going

beyond the hardbound covers.

Read to me,
I say, my eyes and scalp already stinging

from the tug of the brush through my hair.

And while my grandmother sets the hot comb

on the flame, heats it just enough to pull

my tight curls straighter, my sister’s voice

wafts over the kitchen,

past the smell of hair and oil and flame, settles

like a hand on my shoulder and holds me there.

I want silver skates like Hans’s, a place

on a desert island. I have never seen the ocean

but this, too, I can imagine—blue water pouring

over red dirt.

As my sister reads, the pictures begin forming

as though someone has turned on a television,

lowered the sound,

pulled it up close.

Grainy black-and-white pictures come slowly at me

Deep. Infinite. Remembered

On a bright December morning long ago . . .

My sister’s clear soft voice opens up the world to me.

I lean in

so hungry for it.

Hold still now,
my grandmother warns.

So I sit on my hands to keep my mind

off my hurting head, and my whole body still.

But the rest of me is already leaving,

the rest of me is already gone.

There’s James, Joseph, Andrew, Geneva, Annie Mae,

William, Lucinda, David, Talmudge,

my grandmother says.
All together,

my mama gave birth to thirteen children.

Our heads spin at the thought of that many brothers

and sisters.
Three died as babies,
she says,

but only a little of the spinning stops.

There’s Levonia, Montague, Iellus, Hallique,

Valie Mae, Virdie and Elora on my daddy’s side.

We can’t help but laugh each time our daddy

tells us the names of his brothers and sisters.

His own name,

Gunnar, sends us laughing all over again.

Gave their kids names

that no master could ever take away.

What about Bob or Joe?
Hope wants to know.

What about

John or Michael? Or something real normal, like Hope?

Hope is not normal,
my sister says.
Not for a boy. I think

your name is a mistake. Maybe they meant

to name you Virdie.

I’m the great Hope of the family,
my brother says.

Just like Grandpa Hope.

Just like Hope the Dope,
my sister says back.

Keep up the arguing,
my grandfather says,

I’ll take you both down to city hall.

People be happy to call you Talmudge and Valie Mae.

Even when my girls were little, we’d go down there,

my grandmother tells us.
And people’d be marching.

The marching didn’t just start yesterday.

Police with those dogs, scared everybody

near to death. Just once

I let my girls march.

My grandmother leans back in her brown chair,

her feet still in the Epsom salts water,

her fingers tapping out

some silent tune. She closes her eyes.

I let them and I prayed.

What’s the thing,
I ask her,
that would make people

want to live together?

People have to want it, that’s all.

We get quiet—maybe all of us are thinking about

the ones who want it. And the ones who don’t.

We all have the same dream,
my grandmother says.

To live equal in a country that’s supposed to be

the land of the free.

She lets out a long breath,

deep remembering.

When your mother was little

she wanted a dog. But I said no.

Quick as you can blink,
I told her,

a dog will turn on you.

So my mother brought kittens home,

soft and purring inside of empty boxes

mewing and mewing until my grandmother

fell in love. And let her keep them.

My grandmother tells us all this

as we sit at her feet, each story like a photograph

we can look right into, see our mother there

marchers and dogs and kittens all blending

and us now

there in each moment

beside her.

Some Fridays, we walk to downtown Greenville where

there are some clothing stores, some restaurants,

a motel and the five-and-dime store but

my grandmother won’t take us

into any of those places anymore.

Even the five-and-dime, which isn’t segregated now

but where a woman is paid, my grandmother says,

to follow colored people around in case they try to

steal something. We don’t go into the restaurants

because they always seat us near the kitchen.

When we go downtown,

we go to the fabric store, where the white woman

knows my grandmother

from back in Anderson, asks,

How’s Gunnar doing and your girls in New York?

She rolls fabric out for my grandmother

to rub between her fingers.

They discuss drape and nap and where to cinch

the waist on a skirt for a child.

At the fabric store, we are not Colored

or Negro. We are not thieves or shameful

or something to be hidden away.

At the fabric store, we’re just people.

In downtown Greenville,

they painted over the
WHITE ONLY
signs,

except on the bathroom doors,

they didn’t use a lot of paint

so you can still see the words, right there

like a ghost standing in front

still keeping you out.

We watch men leave Greenville

in their one good suit, shoes

spit shined.

We watch women leave in Sunday clothes,

hatted and lipsticked and white gloved.

We watch them catch buses in the evening,

the black shadows of their backs

the last we see of them.

Others fill their cars with bags.

Whole families disappearing into the night.

People waving good-bye.

They say the City is a place where diamonds

speckle the sidewalk. Money

falls from the sky.

They say a colored person can do well going there.

All you need is the fare out of Greenville.

All you need is to know somebody on the other side,

waiting to cross you over.

Like the River Jordan

and then you’re in Paradise.

When my mother returns from New York

she has a new plan—all of us are going

to move there. We don’t know

anyplace else but Greenville now—New York

is only the pictures she shows us

in magazines and the two she has in her pocketbook

of our aunt Kay. In one, there are two other people
standing with her.

Bernie and Peaches, our mother tells us.

We all used to be friends

here in Nicholtown.

That’s all the young kids used to talk about,

our grandmother tells us,

going to New York City.

My mother smiles at us and says,

We’ll be going to New York City.

I just have to figure some things out first, that’s all.

I don’t know what I’d do without you all up under me,

my grandmother says and there’s a sadness

in her voice.

Don’t know what I’d do,
she says again.

Even sadder this time.

Mama takes her coffee out to the front porch

sips it slow. Two steps down and her feet

are covered in grass and dew.

New York doesn’t smell like this,
she says.

I follow her, the dew cool against my feet

the soft hush of wind through leaves

my mother and I

alone together.

Her coffee is sweetened with condensed milk,

her hair pulled back into a braid,

her dark fingers circling her cup.

If I ask, she will hold it to my lips,

let me taste the bittersweet of it.

It’s dawn and the birds have come alive, chasing

each other from maple to pine and back

to maple again. This is how time passes here.

The maple will be bare-branched come winter,

Mama says.
But the pines, they just keep on living.

And the air is what I’ll remember.

Even once we move to New York.

It always smelled like this,
my mother says.

Wet grass and pine.

Like memory.

When Daddy’s garden is ready

it is filled with words that make me laugh

when I say them—

pole beans
and
tomatoes,
okra
and
corn

sweet peas
and
sugar snaps,

lettuce
and
squash.

Who could have imagined

so much color that the ground disappears

and we are left

walking through an autumn’s worth

of crazy words

that beneath the magic

of my grandmother’s hands

become

side dishes.

Warm autumn night with the crickets crying

the smell of pine coming soft on the wind

and the women

on the porch, quilts across their laps,

Aunt Lucinda, Miss Bell and whatever neighbor

has a
breath or two
left
at the end of the day

for
sitting and running our mouths.

That’s when we listen

to the grown folks talking.

Hope, Dell and me sitting quiet on the stairs.

We know one word from us will bring a hush

upon the women, my grandmother’s finger suddenly

pointing toward the house, her soft-spoken

I think it’s time for you kids to go to bed now
ushering

us into our room. So we are silent, our backs against

posts and the back of the stairs, Hope’s elbows

on his knees, head down. Now is when we learn

everything

there is to know

about the people down the road and

in the daywork houses,

about the Sisters at the Kingdom Hall

and the faraway relatives we rarely see.

Long after the stories are told, I remember them,

whisper them back to Hope

and Dell late into the night:

She’s the one who left Nicholtown in the daytime

the one Grandmama says wasn’t afraid

of anything.
Retelling each story.

Making up what I didn’t understand

or missed when voices dropped too low, I talk

until my sister and brother’s soft breaths tell me

they’ve fallen

asleep.

Then I let the stories live

inside my head, again and again

until the real world fades back

into cricket lullabies

and my own dreams.