Holy Ghost Girl (21 page)

Queenie and Rita lay stretched out on the couch, one head at either end, illuminated by the chalky light of the late-night TV test pattern. Gary and I were wrapped in a tangle of quilts and pillows on the floor. A scrape along the outside of the house caused Queenie’s and Rita’s heads to pop up like toast from the ends of the couch. Another scrape and a light tapping at the side window sent them screaming from the living room into the hall closet. I scrambled close behind and pushed my way into the closet with them. The door slammed with my brother on the other side. I kicked and yelled until they opened the door and pulled Gary in. The four of us stood there jammed in the closet until someone said they had to pee and absolutely could not hold it. Then we all herded into the bathroom, locked the door, and slept on the floor with folded towels for pillows.

Queenie and Rita laughed the next morning as we walked around the outside of the house and searched for the source of the noise.

“Probably a branch,” they said, and laughed some more. They stopped laughing when they saw the broken bushes by the windows on the side of the house. Someone had climbed through that bush to look in the window. Little looks flitted between Queenie and Rita. Why someone would stand outside in the dark and tap on our window they would not say. The noises returned the next night, and every night after that. Sometimes we heard scraping, sometimes tapping. Sometimes voices moved in the dark outside our house. One morning we woke to find NIGGER printed in big black letters on our sidewalk. I knew from the looks on Queenie’s and Rita’s faces; it was not a good word. We scrubbed and scrubbed, but the shadow of the letters remained. We hung sheets and blankets over our windows and began to sleep during the day. We sat up all night, watching the sign-off circles on the television and waiting for the noises. If we nodded off, Gary yelled and sent us stumbling through the dark into the closet. We stood there, flesh pressed against oily flesh, breathing in the musty scent of sweat tinged with fear.

“What happened?”

“Gary yelled.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Why, Gary?”

“I saw angels walking up and down a ladder in the living room.”

Queenie and Rita sucked in their breath.

“A vision.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I will give my angels charge over them.”

“That’s right.”

 

 

On November 22, 1963, our time in the Houston house came to an end. After a long night of interrupted sleep, we woke up late and had just turned on the TV to watch
As the World Turns
. Soap-opera tragedies never seemed far-fetched to me. Secret lives? Ditto. Preachers who turn into uncles. Okay. Two or three wives? So what. A few years later when TV was no longer a sin and my mother and I watched
The Secret Storm
together, she made a crack about how there was always a secret storm brewing on those shows.

“It’s like real life.”

“Whose life, Donna?”

If she didn’t know, I wasn’t about to tell her.

Queenie and Rita sipped their first cups of coffee that afternoon as Nancy and Grandpa sat down on-screen to have their coffee. Nancy told Grandpa her son Bob had invited Lisa to Thanksgiving dinner. Grandpa lifted his eyebrow and asked if she knew
why
Bob had invited Lisa. Before Nancy could answer, a slide clicked over the scene and a man’s urgent monotone replaced make-believe family confidences.

“Here is a bulletin from CBS news. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by the shooting.”

Rita stood up slowly and stared at the TV. She cupped her face with her hands.

“The president. They’ve shot the president.”

Queenie groaned. Rita sank to the floor as if someone had let the air out of her. Queenie rolled off the couch, switched off the TV, and dropped to her knees. The television went dark and silent for the first time in months. Scattered like islands across our living room, we prayed without making a sound. Under the tent, people called on God as if he were hard of hearing. I had always thought of prayer as words, lots of words, until that day when a vast sorrow rolled across the country and a prayer of silence was the only possible response. I stayed hunched over until the sound of running water and clinking dishes signaled it was time to get up. Queenie brought two fresh cups of coffee into the living room and handed one to Rita. They took up their positions at either end of the couch and lit cigarettes. I switched on the TV. More reports followed. A would-be assassin in Dallas. In Dallas,
Texas.
Three bullet shots. The president slumped into the lap of Mrs. Kennedy.

“Oh no,” she said, “oh no.”

The helplessness of those words split me in two and my own grief came pouring out. Queenie opened her arms and waved me over.

“Come on over here, baby. Come on.”

She wiped my tears and pulled me against her soft body. Walter Cronkite appeared on the screen to tell us the president was still alive, and Governor Connally too. Walter showed us a big room filled with people who had come to eat lunch with the president. They sat at long tables covered with white cloths and glasses that sparkled even on black-and-white television. They knew the president wouldn’t be coming now, but still they sat there. A black waiter in a white coat leaned against one of the tables and covered his face with one of the big dinner napkins. When Queenie and Rita saw him, they let loose too. Then Walter appeared again in his white shirt with the news we already knew.

“President Kennedy died at one P.M. Central Standard Time, two o’clock Eastern Standard Time. Some thirty-eight minutes ago.”

Walter pressed his lips together and took off his glasses. The world held its breath. Some of us never exhaled. We watched and listened to news reports into the evening. Queenie and Rita lit one cigarette from another. Walter told us Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested. He showed us pictures taken of the president minutes before the rifle blew apart his skull. He looked like a man in charge. He looked like the president. In one picture Mrs. Kennedy held her hat on with a whitegloved hand. Such a small hand.

We forgot for a time the scrapes and taps and whispers we had lived with for weeks, forgot the fear that sent us running like rats for the small dark places that closed around us like tombs. We put aside our personal ongoing terror, but it came for us anyway. That night before the TV signed off, a thin voice called from outside our house.

“Here, nigger, nigger, nigger.”

We didn’t move. A horn blared, followed by the sound of breaking glass.

“Oh my God, they’re coming in. Get out. Get out.”

More horns and more glass. Images of the president’s coffin handed gently, so gently from the airplane into a long station wagon flashed across the screen. Queenie and Rita threw open the windows that lined one side of the living room and we all jumped through them. We ran screaming through the hedge that separated Nila’s yard from our own and pounded on her door. She cracked it open and pulled us inside. Her living room looked like ours, only neat and safe. Pools of light spilled across the ends of the couch. The long car with President Kennedy’s coffin moved across the TV. Nila’s kids had been in bed for hours and now they appeared in the doorway of the living room, rubbing their eyes. The police came with sirens and lights flashing. Nila sent her husband out to meet them and insisted Gary and I stay inside.

We pressed against the picture window to see what we could. Two cops and Nila’s husband stood in a small circle, their heads pointed toward the center. Walkie-talkie voices crackled off and on, but the policemen ignored them and wrote stuff down while Nila’s husband talked. They wagged their heads, then pulled out their flashlights and headed toward our empty house. After a few minutes they came through Nila’s door, filling the space around them. Nila had wrapped Queenie and Rita in light blankets and sat them at her dining table with cups of coffee. The policemen sat down with them and asked questions. What were their first and last names? How long had they lived here? What were they doing here? Who were we? Where was our mama? Did they know the people who smashed our living-room windows? Were they sure?

Queenie’s and Rita’s voices shook. They kept their heads down and said, “Yes sir, no sir.” Gary and I stood beside them until Nila took us by the hands and walked us out of the room. She took us into the bathroom, where she dabbed away at us with a warm, wet washcloth. The way she cupped my face with her hand made me miss my mother, but I did not cry. She pulled my dirty clothes up over my head without hurting my ears and replaced them with clean pajamas. Gary smiled and said he wanted to live with her. She said we could live there for the night. We woke the next morning to find Queenie and Rita on Nila’s couch, one head at either end. We spent the day packing our clothes and toys into boxes. When the two taxis came that evening, we loaded the TV into the trunk of one and piled our boxes in the backseat. Then we slipped inside the other car and drove away.

 

 

We moved into a light-blue apartment complex. Our across-the-hall neighbor had a phone and told Queenie and Rita they could use it anytime. They called Nila and asked her to give the number to our mother when she called to check on us. With the exception of a lightskinned kid who said his daddy was Willie Mays, Gary and I were the only white faces. I never felt uncomfortable. When the neighbors heard what had happened, they gave us suckers and smiled as if we had just come home from the hospital. I wanted to tell them we were all right now, but I was afraid they would stop giving us suckers, so I kept my mouth shut.

We began to sleep through the night again after a few weeks. Queenie and Rita shared a bed in the only bedroom, and Gary and I slept on the couch. We watched Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights and mashed-potatoed and twisted up and down the living room. Queenie and Rita laughed and shook their heads at the way the white girls stretched out their arms and cried when the Beatles sang
oooh
and shook their funny hair. Sometimes Queenie and Rita put on their leopard-skin pillbox hats and fur stoles and met men in the courtyard. Gary and I hung on to them and begged them not to go. If someone could kill the president, no one was safe. They told us we could watch them through the window, and we did. I didn’t understand how they could meet boyfriends and shop and pay bills as if everything were okay, as if the president were still alive, as if no one had chased us from our house. They said you couldn’t dwell on evil, that you had to move on.

We had lived in the apartment a few months when I opened the door to a young man I had never seen before. He said our mother had sent him to pick us up. Gary and I hugged Queenie and Rita good-bye and cried all the way to the car. By the time we pulled onto the freeway, our eyes were dry. We were headed back to Mama and the tent. The world had resumed its natural order, or we thought it was about to. As the sun set that evening, the implications of not knowing exactly where it was we were going or who it was that was taking us there began to dawn. I was afraid if the man—a boy, really—was a kidnapper, and if I asked him where he was taking us, he might kill us. Better to say nothing and hope for the best.

Gary fell asleep in the backseat. My shoulders worked their way up to my ears. The longer we drove, the more the boy talked. About the revivals, the miracles he had seen since he began to travel with Brother Terrell. Goiters, cancers, blindness, cripples, you name it. He smacked his gum and went on about how the Lord and Brother Terrell had changed his life. A familiar monologue. The headlights from oncoming cars played across his long, broad fingers curled around the steering wheel. I liked the way he kept both hands on the wheel and the way he slowed the car around curves. My shoulders began to relax. My eyes closed. He wasn’t going to kidnap us or kill us. We would see Mama again after all.