The Sleeping Night (2 page)

And who shall separate the dust

What later we shall be?

—Georgia Douglas Johnson

Gideon, Texas

1926

Everybody always said too bad about Angel Corey, living out there on the edge of Lower Gideon with only her crazy daddy Parker and no mama to put her straight.

The word in town was that Parker had seen a vision in the trenches of France in the Great War, just before they shipped him home for the gangrene in his feet. Parker never spoke about it, but it was clear he took seriously the notion of Jesus being “the least of these,” because from that day forward he treated every rag-tag stranger and down-and-out colored like the good Lord himself.

Had it just been Parker by himself, living like some crazy preacher out there in his store, folks might have turned a blind eye. A Corey had run the store since the War Between the States, after all, and he wasn’t much trouble, miles down the road from Gideon proper. A man had a right to make a profit and, though the coloreds had little enough, they spent most of what they had right there in Parker’s store.

But his little girl was the kind of child people never can leave alone. No accident she was called Angel. Gobs of spun-sugar hair the color of morning and great green eyes as strange as her mama’s, who appeared in Gideon out of nowhere one hot summer day and died one quick year later when her baby came into the world. Women were always sending Angel clothes they’d cut down from something of their own, and
tsking
over her hair when they saw her at church. More tongues wagged over the lack of a woman to put pin curls in those tresses than over Parker’s lack of inclination to marry again, though both received considerable discussion.

Among the men in town, another subject took precedence over her curls or lack of them. They worried about what kind of ideas she was picking up down there. Only decent people she ever saw was the ones at church and the odd farmer stopping in at Corey’s if he didn’t want to go all the way to town. Parker had even taught her to call colored people by their last names—Mrs. this and Mr. that. More than one person had tried to talk her out of that habit, including her aunt Georgia, Parker’s own sister. Georgia told Angel it was plain silly, that habit of hers—she wouldn’t call a dog Mr. Spot, now would she?

But typical for Angel, that’s just what she started doing. Every dog and every cat, Mr. Rover and Mrs. Puffy.

Lotta people decided right then she was lost.

Tsk as they might,
Angel never felt overlooked or unloved. She had her daddy, who told her stories at bedtime—stories about faraway places, about the chateaus and vineyards he’d seen in France, about brave soldiers and pretty dancing girls in cafés in Paris. In his voice, even the stories about Noah and Abraham took on a special sense of excitement. He read to her about King Arthur and Merlin; about elves and leprechauns; about all kinds of places and people and things nobody but her daddy seemed to know.

She also never missed her mother, seeing as she’d never had one to miss. Anyway, if she needed a mama, there was always Geraldine High, who scooped Angel up in her lap on the warm Texas nights, singing to her on the porch of the store while her husband Jordan—who was the only other man in the whole county who’d gone to Europe for the Great War—and Parker talked late in the night.

Angel often shared Mrs. High’s cushiony bosom with Isaiah, both of them falling asleep as she sang lullabies. Isaiah, two years older, was sometimes her best friend, sometimes her brother. It was Isaiah who listened with her to the stories her daddy read, Isaiah who brought her bluebonnets and wild daisies, Isaiah who colored church pictures with her late at night.

It seemed to her that a child could not have a better life than she did. She would sit on a corner of the porch on Saturday nights, her legs tucked up under her dress, and listen to the voices swirling around and into her bones, a quick-slow rhythm in the black voices that was unlike the voices of the white folks in church. Sometimes, with the indigo summer sky stretched overhead, she would listen to Jordan High laughing and think of God: God in a good mood, like he never was in church; God like he must have been when he made the sky. It was a luxurious sound, rich with knowledge and awareness and love. She’d close her eyes and let that laughing flow through her, thinking of God with a black face and strong black hands, and all the children of the world gathered into his lap.

She had enough sense to know that she couldn’t tell her Sunday school teacher that she thought God must be black. The God in church wore long robes and a long beard and he was always mad about the sinners. But in church on Sunday mornings, she never felt God spinning around in her heart and head, so big, like he did on Saturday nights when Jordan High laughed.

One August night,
Angel sat on the front porch of the store in her bare feet, waving away mosquitoes with a cardboard fan. They ate her like she was lunch, and her ankles were already spotted with bites she couldn’t resist scratching.

A slow stream of customers came in, as they did every Saturday. Laughter spilled out of the screen door behind her, and the radio was playing and, nearby the window, two men swapped friendly insults about something that happened that afternoon in a cotton field. Over all the voices, her daddy’s, deep and full, boomed out greetings to his customers.

From down the road, on foot, came a pair of travelers, one tall, one small. Angel straightened expectantly and waved. Isaiah dashed ahead of his father and ran to the porch.

“Hey, Angel,” he said. “Look what I found down by the river.” He held up the papery skin of a snake, almost whole.

“Can I see it?” Angel asked.

“You
lookin
’ at it now, girl,” he said. “You can hold it, too, if you want. Careful though. I ain’t never found one like this before.”

As Angel held out her hands, palms up so as not to wound it, the boy’s father gained the small pool of yellow light cast through the windows of the store. “Evening, Miss Angel,” he said in his deep voice. “How you doin’ tonight?”

“Just fine, Mr. High.” She displayed the skin. “You see what Isaiah found?”

“That’s quite a prize,” he agreed and touched his son’s shoulder before going up the steps to the store.

Isaiah sank down next to her. Bony knees stuck out from below his cut-off pants. His ankles were streaked, his shoes muddy, and he smelled like sunshine and dust and river water. “How come you don’t get scared like other girls?”

“What’s to be scared of? I think it’s pretty.”

“Me, too, but Florence Younger screeched like she seen a ghost when I showed it to her.”

Angel shrugged and handed it back to him. “You wanna do somethin’?”

“Yeah.” He grinned, his wide mouth a mix of half-grown teeth and baby teeth and two that had almost reached full size. “Go on and get your daddy’s book. The big one.”

Angel looked at him for a moment.

“Go on,” he said, nudging her, a secret in his dancing dark eyes.

Suspecting a trick, she nevertheless did as he said, finding the book on the table in the living room where it always sat. As she hurried back through the thinning collection of customers in the aisles, her daddy caught her arm. “Where you think you going with that book, gal?”

“Just to the porch, Daddy. Isaiah said to get it.”

Parker pursed his lips, then let her go. “Be careful with it, hear?”

Angel drew herself up to her full height, the heavy book clasped against her chest. “Have you ever known me or Isaiah either one to be uncareful with a book?”

Behind her, a man chuckled; Parker, meeting the man’s eye, grinned, too. As she hurried on her way, she heard somebody say, “You got your hands full with that ’un. Smart as a whip, she is.”

But Angel paid it little attention. Grown folks always talked like that about her, and about Isaiah, too. Which was why she imagined they had become friends. Somebody was always shaking their heads about one or the other of them, or making a little sound in their mouths like the food was good, “Mmn-mm-mm.” Only in this case it was a “what are you ever gonna do with that child?” noise.

Once, some grown-up had looked at Parker and Jordan, talking quietly by themselves and said (like Angel and Isaiah were deaf) “What are you gonna do about those children?” Straight out.

Parker had looked at the woman through the smoke of his cigarette and said, “I don’t aim to do nothing. They’re children.”

The woman had made that sound in her throat, then gone on with her shopping. Isaiah and Angel had talked about it and decided the difference they felt in themselves was the fact that both their daddies had gone to France for the war. They came back different, so naturally their children were different, too.

Parker often read to them on these soft Saturday nights after all the customers went home. He read a lot of books. But this one, both agreed, was the best.
Fairy Tales from Around the World.

Angel carried the book outside to Isaiah.

“Sit down,” he said, the secret spreading now to his face, where a dimple winked in his cheek. He opened the book with ceremony. “Which one you want?” he said.

Still puzzled, she shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“Come on, Angel. You always pick one.”

“Okay.
Hansel and Gretel.
” She giggled, because he hated it. It scared him.

But without a single protest, he opened the book to the story and began to read,
“Once upon a time .
 . .”

Angel listened, her mouth hanging open for a long, long moment, staring at him as he bent his head over the open pages. He didn’t read it as good as her daddy did, but it was a whole lot better than what Angel could have done.

“You can
read
?”

“You hear me, don’t you?” But a grin betrayed his belligerent tone, and he softened. “Pretty good, huh? I been practicin’ all summer. Your daddy gave me a book of my very own.”

“Oh, you’re doin’ real good.” She tucked her dress over her knees. “Read me some more.”

And he did.

Much later, Parker and Jordan
came out on the porch, where the children had moved to drawing with pencils on flat sheets of butcher paper. The men’s voices drifted over Angel, making her sleepy, and she laid her head down on her hands to rest for just a minute. Their words were indistinct, only their voices plain, and she waited for the laughing that would come.

But tonight their voices were serious. Isaiah’s great dark eyes focused on the men, the crayon in his hand forgotten.

“What’s wrong?” Angel asked him.

He frowned in a puzzled way, his gaze fixed on his father. “I ain’t too sure,” he said in a soft voice. “Somethin’.”

Parker glanced at the children. “Little pitchers have big ears,” he said, pursing his lips.

“Well,” said Jordan, a gentle smile replacing the worry in his face, “so they do. You children done already?”

Isaiah glanced at Angel quickly. If they said yes, then Jordan would stand up and hold out his hand for Isaiah. The evening would be over. “No, sir,” he said.

“Whyn’t you come on over here, anyway. Let me tell you a story tonight.” He settled back in the chair to make room on his long legs for both children. They scrambled up and he looped an arm around each, slowly beginning to rock back and forth in the still night. Parker turned off the porch light, then lit a cigarette, ice clinking in his tea as he lifted the glass to his lips.

Angel settled her cheek against Jordan’s shirt. Isaiah rested his head on his daddy’s shoulder. The gentle rocking made Angel sleepy and she yawned, closing her eyes as Jordan’s deep voice rumbled through his chest into her ear. “A long, long time ago .
 . .” he began.

Long as she could hear that velvety rich voice in her mind as she drifted off to sleep, Angel didn’t even care about the story. Isaiah shifted, his knee bumping hers, and she drew her legs a little closer to give him more room. She heard him take in a shuddery, long breath that turned into a hard yawn. Without opening her eyes, she smiled.