Come a Stranger (15 page)

“Are you listening?” Samuel demanded, stopping right in front of her with his feet planted and his hands on his skinny hips. She started to just say she was, then she realized that he knew better.

“I wasn't, but I am now.” Laughter bubbled up in her voice, and she hoped he wouldn't notice.

“So I'm going to learn how to really read.” He stayed right in front of her, to be sure he kept her attention.

“What do you mean really read. Can you already read things?”

Louis splashed water over Dream, but gently, as if he was making her a private waterfall. Dream rewarded him with laughter. Louis would think Samuel was boasting, but Mina wasn't sure.

“I can read Sesame Street, but that's not like reading books.”

Mina stared at him.

“Daddy said my school will have a library. There's going to be bad kids there, but I'll ignore them. There'll seem like there're more bad kids than good kids, but Daddy said that's just the way it seems.”

Mina stared.

“Not the way it is.” Samuel clarified himself, in case she misunderstood.

Mina couldn't stop herself. She reached out and grabbed him close, and hugged him close. He was so little, with his little shoulders
and his little bathing suit with his pipe-cleaner legs sticking out of it. She didn't wait until he started to struggle free, but let him go right away. “That was because I like you.”

“Good,” he said. That made Mina laugh.

“I like the way you laugh,” he told her. She knew what he meant, just as she thought she knew why Selma came up just then to drop wet, muddy sand on the front of Mina's bathing suit.

They stayed out at the Shipps' almost the whole day, going back to the house for lunch, where Mina made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for everyone, and more Kool-Aid. They sat on the porch, not moving much. Dream and Kat and Alice, who had the only chair, studied magazines, talking about dress styles and hair styles and makeup styles. Selma fell asleep, so Mina carried her upstairs to the room she shared with Dream. None of the beds was made, not even the double bed. The bathroom had towels on the floor, which she picked up. She could sympathize with Alice, too bowed down by heat to bother polishing the house up. It wasn't the kind of house that any amount of polishing would make look good anyway.

Back with the others again, Mina studied the house from her seat on the porch. The wood had never been painted. It had just weathered down to gray. Overhead, the tin roof glared up against the sunlight, hot silver. The other three turned pages of magazines while Samuel and Louis, at the far end of the porch, built with clay. Mina leaned back against the wooden post.

All around her the day was quiet. No cars, no radio or TV sounds, only occasional voices. The corn grew silently. Bugs whirred or buzzed quietly. Except for the two bikes parked just on the side, under a dilapidated-looking loblolly, it could have been any time at all. It could have been a hundred years ago. In more peaceful times, Mina thought. It could be anytime. But if
it were just a hundred and fifty years ago . . . they would have been slaves.

That thought sat her up straight. For the little kids, things would be about the same—the slow, hot summer hours. Except they'd belong to someone, who could sell them just the way that blond boy sold corn and tomatoes. And the man who wasn't there, he could have been sold away, or he could have tried to run away, heading up north to freedom, however he could. Or he'd be out in the fields, working. So would Alice; except someone as pretty as Alice would probably be a house slave, dressed plain and waiting on her mistress, or maybe working in a washhouse. Kat would never be there, Mina thought, looking at her friend who was entirely engrossed in the glossy magazine. She'd be down in Louisiana, near the swamps Miz Hunter talked about. And Dream—looking at Dream a hundred and fifty years ago, Mina's heart twisted with pain, because Dream was going to be too pretty, and she'd be noticed. If you were a slave, it wasn't good to get noticed.

Samuel's bony spine stuck out as he bent over his clay. He'd never have learned how to read or had glasses even if his eyes needed them. He'd have learned never to open his mouth and say what he was thinking. Selma would have her stubbornness whipped out of her if they couldn't teach it out of her. They'd try to teach it out of her, her parents, or her mother, if her father wasn't around for some reason, just like they'd try to teach Samuel's way of thinking true out of him.

And herself? Mina looked at her legs, lined up neat, two strong thighs and the knees flexed at the joint, long calves and big feet. She registered her bust under the bathing suit and knew she looked much older than she was. A hundred and fifty years ago, it wouldn't have mattered how old she was; she'd have been treated like a woman grown. Broken to slavery from day one of her life.

She'd have been entirely different. She'd never have had a chance. There were so many people, then, who never did have a chance, no choices to make, not about what to eat or where to go or what to do. She'd never even have had a chance to make her own mistakes. A black girl who was t-rou-ble didn't make anybody smile a hundred and fifty years ago. And all because of the color of her skin, all because the skin covering that bony back at the far end of the porch was dark skin.

But the blood under it was red, and the bones were white.

Looking with a long eye, Mina saw how close they sat to a hundred and fifty years ago, and fear ran along her blood. Her stomach closed up in fear and pity. Her heart rose up in anger, against the whites that had done this.

It wasn't just a hundred and fifty years ago, she thought, remembering dance camp. A black girl who was t-rou-ble at dance camp got sent home. As if she'd failed, as if she couldn't dance because she couldn't dance their way.

Mina couldn't sit still. She got up and walked back to the driveway. Her legs moved long over the ground, and she turned around to look at the faded house, with the people sitting under the sagging porch roof, and at the pile of bricks holding the floor of the house up from the ground. Her fists clenched. She guessed she'd show them. She guessed she wouldn't let them drive her into any swamp to die.

“Hey,” she called. All the faces turned to her. “Let's go,” she called. There was a moment's hesitation and then they scrambled up.

“You'll come back? Come back real soon,” Alice asked from her chair.

Louis and Kat hurried out to join Mina. Samuel trailed along. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Ask Mina.” Louis sulked, because he wanted to stay longer.

Mina realized she didn't know the answer, except “Home.” Then she added, to Samuel's solemn face, “I've got things to do,” although she wasn't sure exactly what they were.

Even carrying Louis on her handlebars, she stayed ahead of Kat, racing along the black roadway all the way.

A
ugust just lay down on Crisfield like a dog, panting, too hot to do more than hang its tongue out. All day long, all the long days, the heat built up and the air hung heavier and heavier, as the hours rolled on by and the sun rolled across the sky. About four times during August, Alice called Mina up in the morning. “I've gotta get out of here and some friends are going up to the mall,” she'd say. “I'm going stir-crazy,” she'd say. “Can you possibly watch the children?”

Mina would ride out there to find Alice waiting on the porch, looking fresh and cool from a shower, her perfume a cloud around her, her hair done up fancy. Alice would go off for the day and Mina would stay with the children. Sometimes Louis came along with her, and sometimes Kat too.

They'd clean the house, while the heat was still bearable, then go on up to the creek for the worst of the day. Alice was usually back by the time they returned, in the late afternoon. Sometimes she'd be silly and giggly, and they'd all get silly together. Sometimes they'd find her sleeping on her bed, with her shoes off and her dress getting crumpled. If Alice was asleep, Mina would stay around either until she woke up or Mr. Shipp got home.

One of those afternoons, the storm that had been grumbling in the distance all afternoon finally broke. It woke Alice up, but she kept the kids inside with her. Mina and Mr. Shipp went out
on the porch to watch. Rain beat down on the high stalks of corn. Wind blew the dark clouds across the sky and pulled at the branches of the trees. Lightning, visible for miles out here, it seemed like, cracked down through the sky. The thunder growled. The air cooled in the slanting rain. They didn't talk, Mr. Shipp and Mina; they just stood there watching and listening, leaning against the posts. Mina didn't know what expression was on her face until, as she turned around from the tail end of the storm to go in and say good-bye, Mr. Shipp said, “This is your kind of weather, isn't it?”

“I like it,” Mina told him, careful as she always was to try to be exact with Mr. Shipp. “But I wouldn't say it's my kind of weather. Or the only kind.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, and she thought he did.

Riding home along the slippery roadway, riding right through the shallow puddles when they crept up the side of the road, Mina wished she knew Mr. Shipp well enough to ask him about dance camp. She almost never thought about it, partly because she was having a good summer, partly because she didn't want to. But when she did think about it and try to understand, she couldn't think because it was like teeth in her heart. She couldn't think while those sharp teeth were cutting away. All she could do was replay that scene with Miss Maddinton and all the things Miss Maddinton came so close to saying she might as well have said them right out: That Mina had only been allowed to go, and given the scholarship, because she was black. That she wasn't good enough and she never had been. That she was just a way for the camp to get money from the federal government, which it used to train the real dancers.

But how could Mina have been so stupid about herself? Unless Miss Maddinton just never could see the truth, because she always only saw that Mina was a black, different. That meant
it didn't mean anything what Miss Maddinton said. But Mina had been wrong about her friends there, even Tansy, about them liking her. She remembered walking into her single room and the teeth cut into her heart.

Maybe she would ask Mr. Shipp about it, about how he managed. Maybe in another couple of summers she wouldn't be embarrassed to ask him about it. She could believe what he'd say.

With the Shipps, Mina felt like a big sister, older, wiser, more responsible. Being a big sister suited her. Mr. Shipp said he wished she'd come back to New York with them. “But you'd hate it, down in Harlem,” he told her. Mina knew from that that he hated it. He thought Alice liked the city, but Alice said she didn't. “If we could move downtown,” Alice said, “but it's so expensive, we can't. It would be something, though, to walk out of your door and see nice things in the store windows. I do that, sometimes, when my mother-in-law comes to take care of the kids. I take the bus to Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street and just walk on down, looking in the windows. Oh, Mina, you'd die if you could see the things they have. But Tamer'll never leave Harlem, not in a hundred years. How'd they call him up in the middle of the night, if he wasn't nearby? Everybody needs him, and especially when they're in trouble. I tell him, sometimes, he should open a law office and start charging people. But I worry, because some of those people, they'll turn on you for no reason. I wish he'd let us move, before one of them cuts him up.”

One day, they were gone. Mina felt curiously aimless then. She played Scrabble with Miz Hunter in the afternoon, but half her mind was on where the Shipps would be, and what their apartment was like. She got Miz Hunter talking about them and that eased the empty feeling a little, even though the old lady was pretty critical of Alice and her butterfly ways.

The day after the Shipps drove off up north, a few days before school began, her father came home. Mina's mother took one look at him and chased him off to bed: “You're skin and bones, you look like you haven't slept for a week, and listen to that cough. You're not a young man anymore, Amos Smiths, and I've half a mind to tell that board what I think of them, sending you all over the place.”

“It's good to see you too, Ray,” Poppa said, giving her a bear hug before he went obediently upstairs to flop down on the bed and fall asleep.

Mina's father spent about a week in bed, letting the deacon take that Sunday service. He was mostly tired, Momma said, telling them not to worry, and he had a feverish cold, and she was going to get him healthy before she let him go back to work. And that was all there was to be said about that.

Mina watched this and thought that Alice would never talk like that to Mr. Shipp. But the Shipps loved each other, like her parents did. Mina thought there were times when Alice should talk like that and take care of her husband; and she thought it would be better if her mother prettied herself up more, like Alice did, because she thought her father would like that.

Mina thought about a lot of things, but almost never about the dance camp and the people up there, the white people. She wanted to write them a letter and tell them. She wanted to get famous, really famous, and be on a talk show and laugh at them. She wanted—she wanted not to feel so restless and unhappy with things. She was eager for school to begin, so she'd have something to do.

Once school started, Mina sat in her seventh grade classroom like a storm about to explode across the sky. She could take down some branches, she thought, and she could knock out electricity. She looked around her, at the black kids who made up more
than half of the class, at the white kids, and she felt all her smartness and all her energy building up, ready to be used. She knew where she was heading: so far to the top that nobody would come close even to her heels.