Brown Girl Dreaming (6 page)

Summer is over, a kiss

of chill in the southern air. We see the dim orange

of my grandfather’s cigarette, as he makes his way

down the darkening road. Hear his evening greetings

and the coughing that follows them.

Not enough breath left now

to sing so I sing for him, in my head

where only I can hear.

Where will the wedding supper be?

Way down yonder in a hollow tree. Uh hmmm . . .

The old people used to say

a pinch of dirt in the mouth

can tell tobacco’s story:

what crops

are ready for picking

what needs to be left to grow.

What soil is rich enough for planting

and the patches of land that need

a year of rest.

I do not know yet

how sometimes the earth makes a promise

it can never keep. Tobacco fields

lay fallow, crops picked clean.

My grandfather coughs again

and the earth waits

for what and who it will get in return.

Middle of the night

my grandfather is coughing

me upright. Startled.

It is late autumn now, the smell of wood burning,

the potbellied stove like a warm soft hand

in the center of my grandparents’ living room,

its black pipe

stretching into the ceiling then disappearing.

So many years have passed since we last saw

our father, his absence

like a bubble in my older brother’s life,

that pops again and again

into a whole lot of tiny bubbles

of memory.

You were just a baby,
he says to me.

You’re so lucky you don’t remember the fighting

or anything.

It’s like erasers came through her memory,
my sister says.

Erase. Erase. Erase.

But now, my mother is leaving again.

This, I will remember.

New York,
my mother says.

Soon, I’ll find us a place there. Come back

and bring you all home.

She wants a place of her own that is not

The Nelsonville House, The Columbus House,

The Greenville House.

Looking for her next place.

Our next place.

Right now,
our mother says,

we’re only halfway home.

And I imagine her standing

in the middle of a road, her arms out

fingers pointing North and South.

I want to ask:

Will there always be a road?

Will there always be a bus?

Will we always have to choose

between home

and home?

After our dinner and bath,

after our powdered and pajamaed bodies are tucked

three across into bed,

after
Winnie the Pooh
and kisses on our foreheads

and longer-than-usual hugs,

my mother walks away from the house on Hall Street

out into the growing night,

down a long dusty road

to where the Nicholtown bus

takes her to the Greyhound station

then more dust

then she’s gone.

New York ahead of her,

her family behind, she moves

to the back, her purse in her lap,

the land

pulling her gaze to the window once more.

Before darkness

covers it and for many hours, there are only shadows

and stars

and tears

and hope.

We know our days are counted here.

Each evening we wait for the first light

of the last fireflies, catch them in jars

then let them go again. As though we understand

their need for freedom.

As though our silent prayers to stay in Greenville

will be answered if

we do what we know is right.

Now the evenings are quiet with my mother gone

as though the night is listening

to the way we are counting the days. We know

even the feel of our grandmother’s brush

being pulled gently through our hair

will fast become a memory. Those Saturday evenings

at her kitchen table, the smell

of Dixie Peach hair grease,

the sizzle of the straightening comb,

the hiss of the iron

against damp, newly washed ribbons, all of this

may happen again, but in another place.

We sit on our grandparents’ porch,

shivering already against the coming winter,

and talk softly about Greenville summer,

how when we come back,

we’ll do all the stuff we always did,

hear the same stories,

laugh at the same jokes, catch fireflies in the same

mason jars, promise each other

future summers that are as good as the past.

But we know we are lying

coming home will be different now.

This place called Greenville

this neighborhood called Nicholtown

will change some

and so will each of us.

While my mother is away in New York City,

a fire sweeps through

her old high school

during a senior dance.

Smoke filled the crowded room

and the music

stopped

and the students dancing

stopped

and the DJ told them

to quickly leave the building.

The fire

lasted all night

and when it was over,

my mother’s high school had burned

nearly to the ground.

My mother said it was because

the students had been marching,

and the marching

made some white people in Greenville mad.

After the fire the students weren’t allowed to go to

the all-white high school.

Instead they had to crowd in

beside their younger sisters and brothers

at the lower school.

In the photos from my mother’s high school yearbook—

The Torch,
1959,

my mother is smiling beside her cousin

Dorothy Ann and on her other side,

there is Jesse Jackson,

who maybe was already dreaming of one day

being the first brown man to run

for president.

And not even

the torching of their school

could stop him or the marchers

from changing the world.

After my mother leaves, my grandmother

pulls us further

into the religion she has always known.

We become Jehovah’s Witnesses

like her.

After my mother leaves

there is no one

to say,

The children can choose their own faith

when they’re old enough.

In my house,
my grandmother says,

you will do as I do.

After my mother leaves,

we wake in the middle of the night

calling out for her.

Have faith,
my grandmother says

pulling us to her in the darkness.

Let the Bible,

my grandmother says,

become your sword and your shield.

But we do not know yet

who we are fighting

and what we are fighting for.

In the evening now

Coraandhersisters come over to our porch.

There are three of them

and three of us but Hope

moves away from the girls

sits by himself

out in the yard.

And even though my grandmother tells us

not to play with them,

she doesn’t call us into the house anymore

when she sees them walking down the road. Maybe

her heart moves over a bit

making room for them.

A colorful mushroom grows

beneath the pine tree. Purple and gold and strange

against the pine-needled ground.

When I step on it,

Coraandhersisters scream at me,

You just killed the Devil while he was sleeping!

Sleeping in his own house.

Cora warns me

the Devil will soon be alive again.

She says,
He’s going to come for you,

late in the night while you’re sleeping

and the God y’all pray to won’t be there protecting you.

I cry as the sun sets, waiting.

Cry until my grandmother comes out

shoos Coraandhersisters home

holds me tight

tells me they are lying.

That’s just some crazy southern superstition,

my grandmother says.

Those girls must be a little simple not knowing

a mushroom when they see one.

Don’t believe everything you hear, Jackie.

Someday, you’ll come to know

when someone is telling the truth

and when they’re just making up stories.

In the early evening, just before the best light

for hide-and-seek

takes over the sky,

it’s Bible-study time. We watch

from our places on the front porch, our cold hands

cupped around hot chocolate

half gone and sweetest at the bottom

as the Brother and Sister

from the Kingdom Hall make their way up our road.

Pretty Monday evening,
the Brother

from the Kingdom Hall says.

Thank Jehovah,
the Sister

from the Kingdom Hall says back.

We are silent, Brother Hope, Sister Dell and me.

None of us want to sit inside when the late autumn

is calling to us

and frogs are finally feeling brave enough

to hop across our yard. We want

anything but this. We want warm biscuits

and tag and jacks on the porch,

our too-long sweater sleeves

getting in the way sometimes.

But we are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Monday night

is Bible-study time.

Somewhere else,

my grandfather is

spending time with his brother Vertie.

Maybe they are playing the harmonica and banjo,

laughing and singing loud. Doing

what’s fun to do on a pretty Monday evening.

Jehovah promises us everlasting life in the New World,

the Brother from the Kingdom Hall says

and Brother Hope, Sister Dell and me are silent

wanting only what’s right outside.

Wanting only this world.

When the phone rings in my grandmother’s kitchen,

we run from wherever we are,

jumping from the front porch swing

climbing out of the mud-filled ditch out back,

running quick from the picked-clean garden—

but

my brother, Hope, is the fastest, picking up the phone,

pressing it hard

against his ear as though my mother’s voice

just that much closer means my mother is

closer to us. We jump around him:

Let me speak!
until my grandmother comes

through the screen door

puts down the basket of laundry, cold and dry

from the line

takes the phone from my brother,

shushes us,

shoos us,

promises us

a moment with our mother soon.

Monday night is Bible study with a Brother and Sister

from the Kingdom Hall.

Tuesday night is Bible study at the Kingdom Hall.

Wednesday night is laundry night—the clothes

blowing clean on the line above

my grandfather’s garden. When no one is looking,

we run through the sheets,

breathe in all the wonderful smells the air
adds to them.

Thursday night is Ministry School. One day,

we will grow up to preach

God’s word, take it out

into the world

and maybe we’ll save some people.

Friday night, we’re free as anything,

Hope and Dell’s bikes skidding along Hall Street,

my knees bumping hard against the handlebars

of my red three-wheeler. One more year maybe

Dell’s bike will be mine.

Saturday we’re up early:
The Watchtower
and
Awake!

in our hands, we walk like sleepy soldiers

through Nicholtown, ringing bells, knocking on doors,

spreading the good news

of something better coming. Sometimes,

the people listen.

Sometimes, they slam their doors

or don’t open them at all. Or look sadly down at me

ribboned and starched, my face clean and shining

with oil, my words earnest as anything:

Good morning, I’m Sister Jacqueline and I’m here

to bring you some good news today.

Sometimes they give me a dime but won’t take

my
Watchtower
and
Awake!

Sunday it’s
Watchtower
study at the Kingdom Hall,

two hours

of sitting and sitting and sitting.

Then Monday comes and the week starts

all over again.

They are pale blue or pink or white.

They are neatly ironed each Saturday night.

Come Sunday morning, they are tied to the braids

hanging down past our ears.

We wear ribbons every day except Saturday

when we wash them by hand, Dell and I

side by side at the kitchen sink,

rubbing them with Ivory soap then rinsing them

beneath cool water.

Each of us

dreaming of the day our grandmother says

You’re too old for ribbons.

But it feels like that day will never come.

When we hang them on the line to dry, we hope

they’ll blow away in the night breeze

but they don’t. Come morning, they’re right

where we left them

gently moving in the cool air, eager to anchor us

to childhood.