Glory Be (2 page)

B
y the time I walked back to the shade tree, Jesslyn had packed up her towel and transistor radio. I slipped on my unlaced tennis shoes, grabbed my bag, and followed her out the gate. For the rest of the livelong day, Mary Louise, Mrs. Simpson, and the whole dang pool would be whispering about Jesslyn. But I was pretending like they had disappeared into the air like the sound of the lifeguards’ whistles.

“Wait up,” I said when I caught Jesslyn. “Wanna come to the library? We could read together.”

She looked back at her friends. “I’m going home. The pool’s not fun today,” she said.

“You could help me plan my birthday party.” I stopped to take a breath. So far, everybody was
ignoring my birthday. Twelve days away and nobody cared a bit. “My party’s before Mary Louise’s. You think the pool will be open then?”

“I don’t know, Glory. There’s a lot going on around here that you’re too young to understand. But I doubt the pool will close. And I don’t have time to think about your party right now.” Jesslyn turned and headed across the street toward home.

I didn’t care if my sister ever helped me do a thing again. I’d figure this pool problem out. I walked straight to the library. Miss Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything. She’d know if the pool’s got cracks in it.

I pushed open the door and caught my breath inside the big room. Old men sat at the long wooden tables, reading newspapers near the front windows. I looked for Miss Bloom. But what I saw, sitting in a cool, dark corner of the library with a book perched in her lap, was somebody I’d never laid eyes on, just about my age, who I swear didn’t look like she belonged here in Hanging Moss. Instead of a ponytail like mine, one fat braid reached down to her waist. She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn’t standing
smack-dab in the middle of the library,
I
wouldn’t be wearing shoes.

I tucked my towel from the pool under me and scrunched down in a chair next to that girl’s. I grabbed a book and turned the pages. Someone would have thought I was reading the most interesting thing in the whole wide library.

When I leaned over to see the cover of what the girl was reading, she jumped like I’d shot off a firecracker in the library. “That book good?”

Before the girl could answer, earrings came jangling and high heels clicking around the corner. Miss Bloom never was a librarian who went around shushing people.

“Gloriana, I see you’ve met Laura Lampert. She’s visiting this summer. Just got to Hanging Moss yesterday.” Miss Bloom smiled big as you please, then kept talking. “Her mother’s starting a new clinic out from town; the Freedom Clinic we’re calling it. For folks who don’t have their own doctors or nurses. Laura’s staying with me at the library while her mother works. Maybe you girls can come together tomorrow to help with story time.” Miss Bloom took off her cat’s-eye glasses to rub them clean with her fingers.

Laura smiled a little, then turned away quickly. I smiled back at her.

“What’s that you’re reading, honey?” Miss Bloom asked Laura.

“
The Secret in the Old Attic
. I love Nancy Drew books. I’ve read them all.” When Laura Lampert said her
I
, it was in a Yankee voice like Walter Cronkite on the
Evening News
. And she ran her words together, real quick. Didn’t talk a bit like I was used to.

But that didn’t matter. “I’ve read every single Nancy Drew book in the entire world,” I told her.

“Glory, why don’t you show Laura around, outside where there’s fresh air,” Miss Bloom said. “Just don’t be gone too long. Laura’s mama will be back soon.”

Fresh air, my foot. I was dripping sweat by the time we’d walked to the park behind the library.

“Are you staying all summer?” I asked her. “We could look for some story time books together in the picture book library tomorrow.”

Laura spoke in such a quiet voice. “I’m not sure.” I had to lean closer to hear her. “We drove from Ohio yesterday.”

Ohio!
Wait till I tell Frankie. I’d have to get him to look that up in one of his encyclopedias.

“I’ve never met a real Yankee before,” I said.

Laura scrunched up her forehead, like she didn’t know what I was talking about. “I live across the street,” I said. “Maybe you could come to my house while you’re here visiting from Ohio.”

When we stopped in front of the swing set, I kicked off my shoes to feel the cool grass. There was sun shining on the slide. Its heat made that thing about to burn up. I moved under a shade tree near the little kids’ pool. “See that?” I pointed toward the wading pool. “Don’t ever swim there,” I told Laura. “My friend Frankie and me have a pact to never even put a big toe in the Pee Pool.” Kids splashed water and threw beach balls at each other. One of them was naked as a jaybird, standing by the side crying for his mama. No, sirree, you would not catch me in that baby pool full of pee. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you a statue. Supposed to be somebody famous.”

Laura followed me across the street to the County Courthouse, still not saying much of anything. That didn’t stop me from talking, though. I pointed up to the big statue of the soldier.

“Frankie claims he was killed in some battle while riding his horse. ’Course, I don’t believe everything Frankie says anymore. He’s been telling me a lie about
our Community Pool closing. We swim there every single day.” I wiped my sweaty forehead with the back of my hand and looked over at Laura in those black socks and sandals. Didn’t look like she cared much for swimming pools. “You thirsty?” I asked. “Not much to drink around here but water unless the sno-cone truck comes by.”

“Water’s fine,” Laura said. Boy was this girl quiet. She hardly talked.

I stepped up to the tall fountain next to the Courthouse, letting the water drip down my chin, dribbling it on my wrists to cool me off. I guess I must’ve taken too long because before I knew it, Laura was standing at the
other
fountain.

Oh, no! I had to do something quick.

“Laura.”
I tugged at the back of her shirt. “That’s the wrong fountain. Can’t you read? See the sign?” I pointed to
Colored Only
, big as you please, written above the fountain where she’d just leaned her white face and took a long drink.

Laura stepped back and looked up at the signs above our two Courthouse fountains. She touched one fountain, then the other, turning the handles to make an arc of cold water.

“My mother told me about this,” she said. “But they both work fine. It doesn’t seem right.”

Just then a little colored girl walked up and sat down on the hot sidewalk. When she splashed her white leather sandals in the puddle that had leaked from the fountain, all I could think was how mad her mama was gonna be when she saw the dirt she’d stirred up.

Out of the blue Laura asked that colored girl, “Would you like a drink? Do you need someone to lift you up to reach the water?” She held the girl up to the white people’s fountain to take a sip! I stood there with my mouth hanging wide open.

As long as I’d been alive, there were two fountains side by side here across the street from Fireman’s Park, where I played most every single day of the summer. One was for whites only, the other for coloreds. That’s the way it always had been, and here this Yankee was helping a little colored girl drink out of the wrong fountain.

I looked across to the park. Had anybody caught us breaking the rules?

“Ruth Ann! Get on out of there.” The boy hollering at the little girl must have been her big brother because he grabbed her hand and jerked her away from that whites-only fountain quicker than anything. He held
that little colored girl’s hand, tucked his chin, and took off. He turned around once, making sure we weren’t chasing after them.

Laura looked from the fountain to me and back again as the colored boy and girl disappeared around the corner.

“What difference does it make which one we drink from?” Laura asked. “The water tastes the same.” And she stepped up to the
wrong
fountain to get herself another long drink.

Oh, boy. I had a lot to teach this girl about Hanging Moss, Mississippi.

T
he next afternoon Jesslyn was upstairs with our bedroom door slammed shut, playing a sappy Elvis song on her record player. I plopped down in a kitchen chair to watch our cook, Emma, fixing supper, same as she’d done almost every single day since I was born.

She poured sweet tea into a tall jelly glass full of ice cubes. She sat next to me and stirred milk and two spoons of sugar into the coffee in her plain white cup. When she handed me my tea, I pressed our palms together. “Look here, Emma,” I said. “My hand’s the same as yours.”

She shook her head and laughed. “Glory, sweetie, our hands aren’t a thing alike. But they match up pretty good.”

I looked hard at our hands together. Emma was right — they
were
different. Mine were getting nearly as big as Emma’s, but her hands were the color of her coffee. Mine were white as Wonder bread. Still, Emma and me, we fit together like that Praying Hands statue over at Daddy’s church.

When Emma pulled our hands apart, she slid a postcard across the kitchen table. “I saved you this, to mark the place we stopped reading our Nancy Drew book,” she said. “Came from one of your daddy’s church people. Says here on the back, they were visiting in Tennessee.”

“‘See Rock City,’” I read out loud. “Maybe someday I’ll see Rock City,” I told Emma. Right now, I could count on one hand the places Jesslyn and me had been. “This postcard’s nice. I’m putting it in my Junk Poker box,” I whispered, then I smiled at Emma. “To bet with.”

“Don’t let me hear you talking about betting, Glory. Your daddy, Brother Joe, will skin you alive if he catches you and your sister playing that Junk Poker card game. And betting! That goes against your daddy’s church teaching.” Emma stood up, opened the icebox, and put the fried chicken inside, for later.

Ever since our mama died, before I could hardly remember, Emma’d been worrying over Jesslyn and me.
Eat your green beans. Stay inside with the shades pulled down when it’s hot. Watch crossing that street.
Mostly, I paid attention and did what Emma said. But when it came to Junk Poker, that was different. I tucked the postcard into our Nancy Drew book to save for my next card game with Jesslyn.

To get Emma’s attention onto something else, I said, “Guess what, Emma. I met a girl at the library. Her name’s Laura and she’s from up north. She drank out of the wrong water fountain over at the Courthouse. I told her not to but she wouldn’t listen.”

Emma didn’t answer. She was listening, though.

“Reckon she’ll be my friend? She doesn’t talk much, and when she does, she talks funny ’cause she’s a Yankee. Miss Bloom says her mama’s here being a nurse. You heard of a place out on the highway, called some Freedom Clinic thing?”

Emma shook her head. She still wasn’t talking, so I started on something new. At least her mind was off my Junk Poker postcard.

“Frankie says the pool’s gonna close,” I told Emma. “He says it’s a secret. Claims there’s cracks needing fixing or a broken fence. You think there’s cracks in our swimming pool?”

I could see Emma’s jaw twitching. She was trying hard not to say something. She stood at the sink washing her coffee cup over and over like the Queen of Sheba might be coming to our house for a tea party.

When Emma finally turned around, I stood up and crossed my arms across my chest. “What?” I stuck my chin out. “Are you mad at me?” I asked her.

Emma reached out and put her arm around my shoulders. “I know about that clinic.” Her voice was soft and low. “And I doubt your swimming pool has half the cracks as some pools I know about. But you stay clear of all that. Don’t be worrying about what you can’t fix, Glory honey,” she said.

I grabbed our Nancy Drew book and stormed off.

T
hat night after supper, our daddy, Brother Joe Hemphill, head preacher of the First Fellowship United Church, took his second dish of cherry cobbler to the front porch to practice his sermons for preaching on Wednesday night and next Sunday morning. Emma was nowhere to be seen. And it looked to me like Jesslyn was up to no good.

“Why’d you do those dishes all by yourself?” I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. She hadn’t even asked me to help with drying. “Where’s Emma?”

“Emma went home early.” Jesslyn wiped her hands on the dish towel, slipped the pearl ring that used to be our mama’s back on her finger, then turned around and gave me one of her looks.

“What for?” I asked. “Emma never goes home early.”

“Something about company at her house.” Jesslyn smiled at me like the world was one big happy family. “I wanted to help out.”

If Emma had been standing in our kitchen right then, she would have been telling me, “Gloriana June Hemphill, you are too nosy for your own good.” Even though Emma might call it snooping, I didn’t believe Jesslyn would be washing and drying those dishes for the pure D. niceness of it. I had to be nosy.

Jesslyn pranced upstairs to our room. I followed her. While she primped in front of the mirror, I reached under my bed for my secret shoe box of treasures. Shells from the times we visited our grandma in Florida, two Jesus bookmarks I’d won at Vacation Bible School, my Cracker Jack whistle, a bag of collected bottle caps, ten copper pennies, wax lips. My new Rock City postcard. I’d saved it all to bet with.

“Wanna play Junk Poker?” I asked.

With the way Jesslyn glared, I might have well asked her to play Patty-Cake. “I’ve got better things to do,” she said. “Besides, I dumped my shoe box out.”

“What’d you do that for? You made up Junk Poker
when we were little, before I could hardly count to twenty-one and beat you. Now that I’m getting good and winning all your junk away from you, you don’t want to play with me?”

Jesslyn smiled into her mirror, dug through the mess of lipsticks and bobby pins on her dresser, and pretended I wasn’t in the room.

“Why’re you getting so dressed up?”

“Mind your own business, Glory.” She flipped up the curl of her hair and painted on Persian Melon lipstick. I untied the purple bow on my Buster Brown shoe box and lined up my Junk Poker treasures on the bumpy chenille bedspread.

Jesslyn smeared Vaseline on her eyebrows, a trick she learned from her stuck-up pep squad friends. Says when they march up and down the football field, shiny eyebrows give them “a movie star look.”

I blew on my Cracker Jack whistle. “Where’re you going?” I asked her.

“If you must know,” she said, dabbing Evening in Paris perfume behind her ears, “to the library with Mary Louise. To plan her birthday party.”

“Sure are getting fixed up for the library.” I held a
shell up to my ear, pretending to listen to the ocean, biting my lip thinking about how Jesslyn didn’t care one bit about
my
birthday.

Our daddy knocked real quiet on our bedroom door. I stuffed my treasures in my shoe box quick. “Everything okay, girls?” he asked. He never was one for much talk unless he was in front of pews full of people waiting for the Good Word.

“Daddy, now that I’m going to high school, I’m too old to be sharing a room with Glory.” Jesslyn gave him her
I could never do a thing wrong
look. “She’s bothersome. And messy. I want Mama’s old sewing room.”

Last summer when the ceiling fan stirred up the heat, Jesslyn and me had pushed our beds close together. During the night we kicked off our sheets and flipped our pillows to the cool side. Finally we gave up on sleep, pulled out our secret shoe boxes, and played cards. Now here she was tossing out all her junk for our game and wanting to move to the sewing room!

“I’m
not
messy.” I straightened the perfect spines of my Nancy Drew books standing like soldiers on my shelf. “Look at Jesslyn’s stuff.” Mascara wands and
hairbrushes, perfume bottles and powder boxes were piled on a stack of dog-eared movie magazines.

Jesslyn gave me the eye — again. “I have private things.” The way she said
private
made me want to yank open her dresser drawer and steal her diary.

“Besides, Emma uses the sewing machine in there,” I said. “There’s just that little bed. With my quilt on it. You can’t have my quilt.”

“Now, girls, don’t start fussing.” Daddy raised a hand to hush us. “Let me think on this,” he said, heading back to his sermon.

“I’m fixing to walk over to the library,” Jesslyn told him, smiling. But our daddy was halfway down the steps already.

“I’m going with you.” I pushed my Junk Poker box under the bed.

“You are not. Stop sticking your nosy self into my business.” Jesslyn smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt for the third time.

“How come we never do stuff together anymore? Last summer you bought me a diary for my birthday present and taught me how to jump double Dutch. Now you pitch a fit if I walk to the library with you.”

“Mary Louise and I don’t need you hanging around while we’re planning her party.” Jesslyn smiled in the mirror one last time and did a little dance down the stairs.

Mary Louise, my fanny. I peered in that mirror at my dishwater blond ponytail and tried to imagine myself in Persian Melon lipstick. Or my hair done up in Jesslyn’s big brush rollers. Jesslyn’s hair flipped up at the ends. Mine looked like it hadn’t seen the right side of a brush all day.

I followed Jesslyn down the stairs, but the back door banged shut in my face before I could ask her any more questions.

I grabbed a Dreamsicle from the kitchen freezer and headed for the porch.

“Daddy, I’m going over to the library,” I called.

He looked up from his Bible. “Be careful. It’s getting dark out,” he said. “And maybe you can walk home with your sister?” Then he picked up his pen and started writing on his sermon again.

“Yes, sir,” I answered, wondering whether Jesslyn was even
at
the library.

I skipped down the front steps and headed off to find my sister.