The Summer We Got Free (28 page)

1959

M
addy and
Malcolm noticed the change right away. They had always loved Ava, from the
first moment they saw the child, and they knew that mostly everyone else on the
block, and in the church, felt the same way. They all talked about her all the
time, said how special she was, how different, how they had never known anyone
like her, how she seemed to have been sent to them by God, to remind them of
the happiest moments of their lives and the best things within themselves, and
to show them what freedom looked like, how it moved and spoke and sang. But when
that tarp came down, when everybody saw those shackles, something shifted.

A week after the uncovering of the mural—which
had been immediately covered up again, not with a tarp this time, but with
white paint—they could see the change, plain as day. Sitting on her usual
pew at Blessed Chapel, a few seats down from Ava, Maddy saw June Johnson, who
was sitting a few rows ahead of them, peering over her shoulder at the girl,
the look on her face plainly disdainful. A few minutes later, Marilyn Porter,
who was ushering that Sunday, standing by the wall with her white-gloved hands
clasped in front of her, whispered something to Clarence Nelson, who was
standing beside her, and they both looked over at Ava and frowned in unison.
Throughout the service, it happened at least a dozen times. Some people glanced
at Ava as they passed by, on their way to the restroom or perhaps the water
fountain, and frowned or rolled their eyes. Others were more openly
contemptuous, turning around in their seats to glare. A few times, Maddy
noticed, they did not direct their sneers at Ava alone, but let their eyes
graze Regina, too, and, once or twice, their entire family.

Malcolm was watching, too, though not from his usual
pew. He no longer wished to sit with the
Delaneys
,
and instead sat with his brother across the aisle, where Vic had moved his
whole family, giving up their long-standing seats. Malcolm had been outraged at
the unveiling of the mural. He had always liked Ava, and had even let it slide
when she had drawn those filthy pictures at the funeral, telling himself that,
despite his initial reaction, she was a good girl, and the good things about
her outweighed the bad. But when that tarp came down, he knew in an instant
that he had been wrong, and that he, and all of them, had been duped. She did
have the devil

in
her. It was plain to see. And he refused to be fooled
any longer.

Doris didn’t notice the change at all. She wasn’t a
woman who paid that much attention to what people were feeling. But she heard
plenty of whispering. On the pew right in front of her, Lillian leaned over to
Rose and said, “I can’t believe they had the nerve to bring that child in here
after what she did.”

“Girl, you aint never lied,” Rose whispered back. “Soon
as I saw her, I felt this rush of heat. I thought I was gone faint right there
in the aisle.”

Doris thought that was probably just due to the
temperature inside the church, but she wasn’t one to deny people their
occasional dramatic flourishes. Personally, she didn’t see what all the fuss
was about. She had known from the first moment she saw Ava that the child was
just too much.

When Pastor Goode stepped up into the pulpit, Malcolm
thought he looked tired. He could understand why. A few days ago, the pastor
had confided to Malcolm that he wanted the
Delaneys
out of the church. He didn’t feel like he could throw them out, because they
were still so
well-liked
by so many people, so much of
the congregation was still loyal to them. He said it was up to the rest of
them—those who agreed with the pastor and understood why there was no
place for the
Delaneys
at Blessed Chapel until they
got control of that child of theirs—to let the family know how they felt.

Now Pastor Goode stood looking out at them all, a look
of intense worry on his face. “The Lord sets down a path for us from the day we
are born. We may not see it, we may not understand what it is, but we can be
sure it’s there. God’s plan for us is that we walk that path. If we walk it, it
will lead us to Him and the kingdom of heaven. But the devil will try to lead
us astray. He will try to convince us that we know what’s good for us better
than the good Lord. He will bring into our lives people who seem good at first,
who appear to be of God, but who are really Satan’s minions. We must not be
tricked. We must believe in God’s plan, for us and for our neighbors and
friends and everyone we love. We must all act in service to the Lord. And, when
called, the righteous among us must take an active hand in the Lord’s plan.”

Malcolm looked around. Half the congregation was
nodding their heads and muttering,
Yes,
Lord
s and
Amen
s
.
Malcolm wondered how many of them realized
who
the
pastor was talking about. The other half of the congregation looked worried,
disturbed, as if they were unsure of what, exactly, the pastor was trying to
say, but thought it might be something they didn’t like. Regina and George
exchanged a look of serious concern. Farther down the pew, Ava’s eyes were
narrowed as she looked up at Pastor Goode. The sermon went on from there into more
general-sounding and less controversial territory. When the service ended and
the usual mingling and socializing in the aisles began, Malcolm noticed that,
like him, quite a few people kept their distance from the
Delaneys
,
their usual greetings, their hugs and kisses and hand-shakes, not offered. Some
people said hello but withheld the attention they had always showered on Ava,
some of them only smiling, or barely smiling, in her direction, others not
acknowledging her at all. All this Malcolm was
sure Ava’s
parents
noticed, too. When Elder Smith walked right by them without a
word, he saw Regina and George frown at each other. Right after that, though,
Deacon Brooks came up and shook George’s hand, hugged Regina, and put his arms
around all three siblings, and his usual post-service conversation, about the
traffic he’d had to endure on Baltimore Avenue on his way to the church that
morning, commenced. Jane Lucas was as friendly as always, as were many other
people, but it seemed to Malcolm that Ava’s admirers had been cut by more than
half, and were continuing to diminish by the hour.

After service, as the Delaney family made their way
out of the church, Regina noticed that Geo wasn’t with them. “Where’s your
brother?” she asked Ava and Sarah, sounding tired and stressed.

“Bathroom, I
think,” Sarah said.

“Ava, go get
him, please.”

Ava frowned and
turned back into the entrance.

Sarah leaned against the door and watched her sister
as she headed for the steps that led down to the church basement, where the
restrooms were. Sondra was standing at the top of the steps, off to the side a
little, laughing with her friends, and when she saw Ava coming, her laughter
stopped, and all mirth left her expression. What replaced it was a look of
loathing, of almost cartoon-like hatred, and Sarah half expected smoke to come
out of Sondra’s ears. She laughed to herself, then watched as Sondra moved a
couple of inches closer to the steps and, covertly, without looking down, slid
her foot into Ava’s path. Sarah stopped laughing. Everything slowed down, as
Ava, who did not notice what Sondra was doing because she was examining the
drawings she had done on her program, stepped forward. Sarah opened her mouth
to call out to Ava, but no sound came.

Ava stopped, half a step from Sondra’s foot, as Geo’s
voice called to her from the other side of the lobby. She turned and frowned at
him. “Mama’s looking for you,” she said, and skipped off in his direction.
Sarah watched as Sondra retracted her foot, looking disappointed.

1976

T
he next
morning, Saturday, Regina was awakened by the sound of her own muttering. She
got up carefully from the bed, trying not to wake Sarah. She grabbed the dress
she had left hanging over a chair the night before, her purse, and her shoes,
and crept out of the room. In the bathroom, she dressed and brushed her teeth,
then stepped out into the hallway and listened. No one in the house was stirring.
She crept down the steps and when she got to the front door she stopped. It
seemed to her that there was something on the other side of the door that she
didn’t want to see, something that would tear her up, but she couldn’t think
what. “Maybe it’s gone rain,” she muttered to herself, and then wondered why
rain would stop her. “I guess if I just take a umbrella I be alright.” She
grabbed an umbrella from the umbrella stand and went out the door.

On the bus,
people looked at her sideways, as if she was crazy or something. When she
noticed a couple of teenagers pointing at her and whispering, she thought they
must
be
looking at something out the window behind
her.

She got off the bus at the corner of Fifty-First and
Baltimore, and when she stepped out into the street a car slammed on its breaks
and honked loudly.

“Get your crazy ass out the damn street!” the driver
yelled, slamming his hand against the steering wheel.

Regina gave him the finger, then stepped back onto the
curb and waited for the light to change.

Baltimore Avenue was a wide, busy, two-way road, much
more heavily trafficked than Radnor, and louder for it, with cars and trucks
rolling up and down it in constant succession. The houses along Fifty-First and
Baltimore were narrower than those on her own block, but taller, standing three
stories high and, because of their lack of width, there seemed to be many more
of them, all crammed together along the block like books on a shelf.

She walked down Fifty-First
Street,
looking for the house number she’d gotten from the phone book the night before,
under the listing for Charles Ellis. A couple of times, she got confused, and
thought she was back on her own street, and wondered why the houses looked so
different. Finally, after walking up and down the block twice, she found the
correctly numbered row house, with a green awning and, hanging over the front
porch railing, flower boxes full of violets. She walked up the front steps, the
metal point of her large umbrella dragging against the cement. She stepped up
onto the porch, rang the doorbell, and waited. She remembered that Lena always
used to get up early on weekends and do all her cleaning before her family
could get in the way. Regina used to see her all the time, out on her front
porch in the mornings, beating out rugs and sweeping. That was so many years
ago, though, and she wondered whether Lena, who was older than she was, still
had that kind of energy. She didn’t have to wonder about it long. After just a
few seconds, the front door opened and Lena stood there, holding a
dustcloth
and some furniture polish, squinting at her
through the screen door that still separated them.

“Regina?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“Hello, Lena,”
Regina said. “I’d like to talk with you. Can I come in?”

Lena hesitated.

“I’m sorry to
drop by unexpectedly,” Regina said, and she realized she was speaking
unnecessarily loudly, so she lowered her voice. “I know it aint good manners.
But what I need to say ought to be said face to face. It won’t take long.”

Lena stood there a long moment and then, finally, the
screen door opened, and she gave Regina a strained smile. “Of course,” she
said. “Come on in.”

Inside, the house was as narrow as it appeared from
the outside. Regina propped her umbrella against the wall and followed Lena
down a hallway, past rooms lit only by the new daylight coming in through the
windows. It had been a long time since Regina had been inside anybody else’s
house, besides the houses she worked in. She eyed the furniture, which was at
least a decade newer than anything she owned, and well-kept, cared-about in a
way she herself had not cared about any item in her own house in seventeen
years. All along the walls, there were framed photographs of the Ellis family,
of Chuck and Lena and their children and, Regina supposed, their grandchildren,
of whom there appeared to be many. She got confused again and wondered why
Chuck and Lena looked so old in the photographs. They were both around her age.
Then she remembered that she was old, too, and that many years had passed since
she had known them.

They entered the
kitchen, which was very warm, and which looked very like the kitchen of the
house Lena and Chuck had lived in on Radnor Street.
 
This did nothing to help Regina’s
confusion. “It’s now,” she muttered to herself. “Not then.” She took a seat at
the table and Lena offered her lemonade.

“No, thank you,”
Regina said. “Your lemonade taste like shit, Lena. It always did. And I aint
gone stay long, anyway.”

Lena frowned and
sat down at the other end of the table.

Regina didn’t know what she had come there to say. She
knew that in the last couple of days, ever since she’d found out that Chuck had
been in the house, she had thought about Lena a lot, after not thinking about
her much at all for nearly two decades. She had wondered how she was doing,
what her life had turned out to be like, and she had felt compelled to reach
out to her. Now, sitting there at the table with her, she decided she must have
come to talk about George and Chuck. “Twenty-some years ago, I sat in your
kitchen—not this one, but one that looked a lot like it,” she said, more
for herself than for Lena, “and you asked me about our husbands. I guess you
remember that.”

Lena nodded.
“Yes. I remember.”

“Well, back then
I wasn’t ready to talk about it, I guess.” She paused, trying to remember
whether or not she had been ready to talk about it then. “No, I definitely
wasn’t,” she said. “I never have been ready. But I’m ready now.”

Lena looked down
at her hands in her lap. “Maybe I aint ready to talk about it no more,” she
said.

 
“Well, then you aint got to say nothing,”
Regina told her. “Just shut up and let me say what I got to say.”

Lena sighed. Nodded.

“Back then, I was trying not to think about it. All
them years, from way back when
me and George
was first
going together, I tried not to. And I did a good job of it, too.” She felt her
head clearing a little and what she was saying made more sense to her. “I
managed to push it back, way back, in my mind, and not look at it. But that
changed when we moved onto Radnor Street and George met Chuck.”

Lena shifted in
her chair.

“After that it
was harder to ignore it, to not see it. Shit, it was plain as day.” She
laughed, loud and deranged-sounding, even to her own ears.

Lena looked a little scared.

“Still, I wasn’t gone talk about it and let it be
real,” Regina went on. “I had three children and a house to take care of, so I
kept it in. And I hated George.
Hated
him.”

She remembered
watching George with Chuck one Thanksgiving, them laughing and whispering
together, and she being filled with loathing, stuffed with it like the turkey,
and how it had felt as if she wouldn’t be able to hold it in, that it would
bust her open at her seams, and spill out like the dressing from the bird’s opened-up
carcass.

“I held it in for so long. Even after their
friendship
ended, I still felt like
Chuck was there, that George still thought about him. And I kept on hating
him.” She sighed, and shook her head. “When my son died—” she stopped.
Her son hadn’t died. What was she saying? But he had,
hadn’t
he? “I went crazy. I lost my mind. I wanted to die myself. But I remembered I
still had two children to provide for, so I pulled myself together best I
could, and I kept on keeping George’s secret, because providing for them still
meant doing that. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Lena
said. “But I already figured all this, Regina.”

“Well, you aint
figured what I’m gone say next, so you just sit tight,” Regina said. “Lately I
been thinking, wondering why I’m still keeping it. My
children
is
grown. My house is paid for. But here I am, still keeping it in, and
still hating George. Why didn’t I confront him once Ava and Sarah
was
old enough to take care of
theyselves
?
Why didn’t I toss him out on his sorry ass?”

Lena looked as
if she was thinking about the question, trying to figure it out. Finally, she
said, “Why didn’t you? Why don’t you?”

“Because hating
George is who I am now!” Regina said, slapping her palm on the table to stress
the point, and causing Lena to jump. “My anger, my disgust, is everything to
me! These past years, I aint gave a damn about hardly nothing. I aint took care
of myself, or my house. But I took good care of my hate for my husband. I
nurtured it, kept it feeling new, looking shiny. It’s the most well-kept thing
I own.”

Lena stared at
her, the lines around her mouth deepened.

“But now I’m old and sick and mean,” Regina said. “You
see this hardness in my eyes?” She leaned forward and opened her eyes wide so
Lena could see. “I’m tired of it,” she said. “‘Cause, you know what?
It aint no joy in it, Lena.
Not one bit. And it aint never
been none. So, why I’m doing it? Why I spent all these years doing something that
aint brought me a lick of joy?” She laughed, and this time it didn’t sound
crazy, at least not to her own ears. “I see now what I got to do,” Regina said.
“I either got to leave, or let it go. And since I’m too damn old to leave, I’m
letting it go. Right here, right now. I came here and tell you that, Lena. In
case it helps you in any way.”

Lena just sat
there, not saying anything, with a look on her face that was half surprised and
half thoughtful, as if she was still trying to figure out what Regina was
talking about, still trying to make sense of her sudden appearance, but still
understood everything she had said.

Regina stood.
“Thank you for letting me
barge
in on you, Lena.”

“Regina,” Lena
said, getting up, too. “I want you to know I never agreed with Pastor Goode, or
believed in what he did to you and your family. The only reason I didn’t get in
touch with you after your son was killed was because of Chuck and George. I
just wanted to keep my distance from that. But I always hated what the pastor
was doing. It’s the reason I told Chuck we had to leave that block, because I
couldn’t stand to watch what was going on over there. Y’all didn’t deserve
that.”

“Thank you. I
appreciate you telling me that.”

“I been at Blessed
Chapel since I was a child. Since way before Ollie Goode became pastor. His
uncle, the pastor before him, wasn’t like that. He was a kind man.”

“You mean his
father?”

“No. Arthur
Goode was Ollie’s uncle, his father’s brother,” Lena told her. “Ollie’s father
died when he was young, and his uncle took him in.”

“I aint know
that,” Regina said.

Lena shrugged.
“Well, he
don’t
talk about it much.”

“How’d his
father die?” Regina asked.

“In jail,” said
Lena. “A cop shot him. They said he was trying to escape. At least that’s what
I heard. I don’t know nothing about it firsthand.”

“Lord.”

“Anyway, I just
wanted to make sure you know that I—that Chuck and I—been praying
for y’all all these years. And if you ever want to come by again, Regina, just
to talk, I hope you know you welcome to.”

“Thank you,”
Regina said. A few minutes later, on the bus ride back home, her mind began to
unclutter itself. The confusion and craziness of Saturday morning began to drop
away and, several hours earlier than usual, her sanity returned.

Ava slept long into the morning and she awoke feeling
deeply rested, as though she had slept for days, or months, or years. She
showered and dressed hurriedly, eagerly, filled with a sense that the day ahead
held great things. When she got downstairs, she saw the front door open, and
she went out onto the porch. Paul was on the sidewalk, cutting the hedges. He
looked up when he heard the screen door knock shut. “Morning,” he said.

Ava leaned over
the porch railing. It was a magnificent day, the sky watercolor blue over
white, with just enough cloud-wisp brushed in at the edges to balance the heavy
color of the almost-too-yellow sun. The grass in the yard was a million strokes
off the corner of a thin brush soaked with green, and the sunlight reflecting
off the tips of the
grassblades
was like daubs of
oily white, carefully, painstakingly placed. Each flower in the garden Helena
had planted was a fat drop of lush pigment, lemon-yellow or vermillion, hot
orange or rose or purple, and some of them seemed to spill into each other, as
if they were made by an excited hand, tiny beads of orange dotting the edges of
violets, and specks of purple clinging to buttercup petals. Ava watched Paul at
the hedges, bare-armed and bay brown, and looking like a field hand from a
Spanish fresco, superimposed against the backdrop of a city block, the size of
his hands and the amount of sweat on his forehead exaggerated just enough to
show that he was hard-working, a good, strong kind of man, the lines across his
forehead etched in with the sharp edge of a palette knife, like the lines of
the group of row houses that stood solidly behind him, sturdy and not changing,
solid and achromatic, a constant captured in grays. The screen door opened and
Helena appeared. Her skin was a saturate of all color, her body a
chroma
made up of angled brushstrokes, her bare shoulders
like drops of oil-black thrown against the canvas in a fever, precarious and
lovely.