Silver Sparrow (16 page)

“Go out in the back, then,” Wil ie Mae said. “You’l have to go through the kitchen, but you can be alone out there.”

They went into the house, saying “Excuse me” to the women and cousins clustered there. They would be confused until we had gone, and Wil ie Mae would explain that Raleigh wasn’t real y a white man, he just looked like one. At least one person would claim to have suspected it al along.

I sat back on the porch with Wil ie Mae and the pan of peas. She broke the seal of each pod with her fingernail and shoved the glossy peas out with her thumb.

“She’s out there breaking his heart, huh?” Wil ie Mae said, without looking over at me.

“We are going to keep everything like it is,” I said.

Wil ie Mae shrugged. “It’s her life.”

I struggled for a while with the peas, while Wil ie Mae’s hands zipped through the task.

“She asked me who I wanted for my daddy.”

“She did?”

“I told her I wanted to keep my same daddy.”

“Gwen should know better than to put that weight on you.”

“Is she going to tel Uncle Raleigh that I didn’t want him for my daddy?”

Wil ie Mae put the pan of peas on the floor near her feet. “No, honey. Gwen would never sel you down the river like that. Whatever you want to say about her when you get grown, you can never say that she betrayed you.”

RALEIGH AND MY MOTHER had their conversation in the backyard among the laundry. The sheets provided wet curtains, sealing them in with the clean-soap sweetness and the unforgiving scent of bleach. They were standing where Wil ie Mae had taught me to hide the secret things, the clothes you didn’t want visible from the street. I asked her to hang al my things there, not just my underwear, but my shorts, T-shirts, socks, even the towels I used. She laughed but did as I asked.

Wil ie Mae and I moved ourselves to the kitchen, where the women stirred pots and wiped sweat from their faces. We kept our eyes on the screen door, but we couldn’t see anything but the sheets, stil and impassive.

“Just keep your ears open,” Wil ie Mae said. “You never know what a man wil do when you try and quit him.”

“Uncle Raleigh is not going to do nothing to my mama.”

“This is not about your uncle, honey. It’s just about being grown. Just listen for anything that doesn’t sound right.”

I listened, but al I heard was the sounds of canning. I couldn’t make out their voices. I didn’t hear the click of the camera shutter, but I know that Raleigh took pictures; I’ve seen them. Close-ups of Mother’s face, eyes cast down. There is a photo of just her feet, the slender heels of her satin pumps sinking into the Alabama dirt. There is one of the palm of her hand covering the lens. The last in the series are six or seven of his own stricken face, his arms extended to hold the camera. These he must have taken once my mother had left him out there with the laundry, running to the kitchen and Wil ie Mae’s waiting arms.

“I told him,” she said.

“What did you say?” Wil ie Mae wanted to know.

“I told him that I couldn’t do it to Dana. That she needed her real father. He started saying, ‘Do you love me, Gwen? Do you love me, Gwen?’ I told him that this wasn’t the point, that it wasn’t a game.”

“Are you okay?” Wil ie Mae said.

“Yes,” my mother said. “It could have been worse. It could have been so much worse.”

I stood at the screen door staring out at the sheets. We had hung them out early in the morning, but here is was after noon and they were stil sopping wet. Under the house, puppies whined, waiting for Wil ie Mae’s mother to set out yesterday’s table scraps. The puppies were fluffy and pretty, but I wasn’t al owed to touch them, because they hadn’t had any shots.

I pushed open the screen door.

My mother said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m just looking at the puppies,” I said. “I won’t touch them.”

“Okay,” my mother said.

I opened the door and eased outside. As the screen door slammed against the frame, I ran to the clothesline. A wet sheet hit against my face as I pushed by it. I found Uncle Raleigh standing, staring up at the sky.

“Hey, Uncle Raleigh,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“Are you mad at me?”

“Naw, Dana,” he said. “I could never be mad at you. You are a sweet girl.”

“Do you want to take my picture?”

He shook his head. “I am tired of taking pictures for now. I’l take your picture next time.” He sat down on the earth, which was wet with the drippings from the clothes. “Dana, I’ve had a very hard life,” he said, holding his arms out. “Come sit with me for a while.”

I remembered Wil ie Mae’s uncle, who had said the same thing. I shook my head. “I’m not al owed.”

“That’s fine,” he said, and I pushed through the wet curtain of sheet. “Tel her I’l be there in a minute,” he said. “Tel her I’m getting myself together.”

THE DRIVE FROM Opelika to Atlanta is about two hours if you take 1-85 straight down. Raleigh opted to take the surface streets, saying that he wanted to see the countryside. My mother argued at first, saying that she didn’t want to be three black people in a nice car roaming around the back streets of Dixie. Raleigh said any redneck passing by wouldn’t see three black people, they would see a white man, a black woman, and a little girl.

When we passed the sign to get on the interstate highway, he didn’t put on his turn signal and instead kept driving along the two-lane road. He slowed a bit at every intersection, giving my mother the chance to ask him to change course.

11

THE PRIZEWINNER

AS MY JUNIOR YEAR came to a close, and I started thinking about col ege applications, James assured me many times that Chaurisse was going to Spelman Col ege, right here in Atlanta. “She’s a stay-at-home girl,” he said. “Takes after her mama, just like you take after yours.” He spoke with conviction, without even a flutter of a stammer, but how could I trust his report? I, better than anyone, understood the limits of my father’s ability to predict the desires, actions, and motivations of a teenage girl. Besides, James had not been right since his mother died.

After Miss Bunny’s funeral, James spoke softly, ate less. He lost track of himself, leaving his hat on after he’d entered the house, cal ing my mother and me by the names of our rivals. How could we bring ourselves to be angry with him, pitiful as he was? The stubble growing on his chin was stiff and spiked with white. When he took off his jacket, I could see that he ironed only the col ar of his white shirt, leaving the rest rough-dried.

He had repaired his glasses with an unfolded paper clip.

My worried mother asked me to catch the school bus, so I would be at home within an hour of the final bel , so that someone would be at the apartment if my father were to drop by. She had beat me home one May afternoon and found him waiting on the back porch, cracking his knuckles until they were swol en and sore. When he stood up, the grime from the rusty chair left a butterfly across the seat of his good wool trousers.

“James needs us right now,” my mother said.

He didn’t show up very often, so I spent many afternoons alone in the apartment, reordering the keepsakes atop my chest of drawers, leafing through col ege brochures, and longing for Ronalda’s basement hideaway. When we passed each other between classes one Thursday, she pressed a skinny joint into my hand, folded over in a discarded sandwich bag. At home, I turned on the bathroom fan and pul ed open the thin paper, touching my tongue to the crease, but getting high without Ronalda only made me paranoid and depressed.

When my father did come over on those early afternoons, he quizzed me about my only conversation with Miss Bunny.

“What did she say to you?”

“I already told you.”

“You didn’t tel me word for word.”

“I don’t remember word for word. Do you want me to get you an ashtray? Do you need a gin-and-tonic?”

“Would you get one for me?”

I set his gin-and-tonic on a coaster in front of him while he tamped his cigarette pack against his knee.

“How’s school?”

“Good.”

“Are you working on your col ege applications?”

“I’m just sending off to Mount Holyoke. That’s the only place I want to go. Okay?”

“I told you that you don’t have to worry about it. Mount Holyoke is expensive, but I am going to pay for it. Did you tel that to Miss Bunny?”

“How do you know Chaurisse isn’t applying to Mount Holyoke?”

“She’s not applying.”

“But how do you know?”

He took a swig of his drink. “She doesn’t like cold weather. Now answer my question about your grandmother. Did you tel her that I was going to pay for you to go to col ege?”

“She didn’t ask me.”

“You should have found a way to work it into conversation. What al did you say to her? I know I asked you before, but just run it al by me one last time.”

He worried so much about it that my mother started worrying, too, although I had given her the details as soon as I came home that evening. I had told her everything, after describing the shiny blue brooch that was to be my only inheritance. When I reported that James had told Miss Bunny that my mother was dead, she gasped as though she had been poked in a delicate place, and then she let go only a couple of tears before gathering herself together. It was not the first time that I had seen my mother cry, but the experience troubled me in the pit of myself.

“I ask for so little,” she said.

“I know, Mother.”

When she came to me three months later, inquiring again about the details of my conversation with Miss Bunny, I said, “I told you everything that there is to tel . You don’t want to go through it al again?”

She said, “When you told me before, I was distracted by the shock of it. I just want to know, now, for the sake of information. You father is tied up in knots and I am just trying to understand why.”

“I don’t know what he wants me to say. He asks me every time, and I don’t know what I am supposed to say.”

Mother sat down and took off her nursing shoes. “This is so peculiar.” In the kitchen, she fil ed a basin with warm water, adding a scoop of Epsom salts and a squirt of soap before putting it down in front of the couch, letting the sudsy water slosh onto the carpet. She slid her feet into the basin.

“My guess, Dana, is that she said something to him. People say al sorts of things on their deathbeds. At the very end, they just disappear inside themselves, but a couple of days before, they speak from the heart. She must have said something about us.” My mother smiled and touched my shoulder. “Whatever you did, you must have represented us wel .” She wiggled her feet in the basin, soaking the carpet again. “Keep your fingers crossed. Sometimes change is good.”

Ronalda wasn’t worried about col ege applications. She had already made the decision to go to Southern University in Baton Rouge. She had long admired the school’s marching band and hoped to be chosen as a Dancing Dol . I showed her the brochures from Mount Holyoke and the computer-generated letter that urged me to apply.

“Look how nice it is,” I said.

“Are you sure you want to live up there with al those white people?” Ronalda asked.

“It’s a good school,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “But living here, you don’t know anything about white people. Where I’m from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y’al don’t know what it feels like to be black.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“You’l see,” she said. “You get out to Holyoke with those white people and you wil see exactly what I mean.”

“Al I’m worried about,” I told her, “is that Chaurisse wil pop up and say she is going to Mount Holyoke. It wil be the same as Six Flags, but worse.”

“I stil can’t believe that,” Ronalda clucked.

“I can’t believe it either,” I said. “You would think I would be used to his shit.”

But I wasn’t. Six Flags Over Georgia provided the most attractive summer employment for a teenager in Atlanta. Ronalda and I had planned to apply together, but she ended up making better money taking care of her little brother. After three interviews, I was offered the chance to spin cotton candy onto paper cones for a nickel over minimum wage. My first choice would have been patrol ing the park, posing families for photos. Stil , I was happy enough with the cotton-candy position; it would good practice in meeting people, and the money would come in handy, too. To fit in at Mount Holyoke, I would need Ivy League clothes, skirts and blazers. My mother liked the idea of me working, saying, “If you are going to try and get a hardship scholarship, you need some proof that you have held down a job before or else they wil think you are just looking for a handout.”