We weren’t alone with the grand old dame. By an old chifforobe, in a spoke-backed chair covered with a simple cotton quilt, a boy sat day after day, maybe fourteen or fifteen. I don’t know who he was or what he was called. The old woman’s nephew? Grandson? I must have been told these things, but they’re lost to me now. He’d pull the quilt around his shoulders — though the room was a sweatbox — and watch my lips as I read. His stare was like the looking-at Ariyeh and I got from the old men when we walked home from church, a gaze that said I want to do things to you, and it made me feel both powerful and afraid. Look how I can make a boy set his jaw, I thought, fix his eyes on me, feverish, raw, but what else might he do if Mama weren’t here? She saw this silent exchange, and it gave her even more to dread, I’m sure — reminded her, perhaps, of her own buzzy stirrings, her first longings, in the bayou heat. Is that why we finally stopped calling on the old woman? Did Mama not want me to connect Houston’s swelter with the curious warmth just starting to prickle between my legs? Did she hope the old neighborhood would hold for me no romance?
If she caught me sloe-eyed on my bed, my hand drifting lazily down my belly, she’d tell me to sit up, get busy, do something useful. At night, I’d often dream of being smothered in one of her quilts, and I’d wake, gasping, then slip out of bed, careful not to stir Ariyeh. At least twice that I recall, I walked out to the alley, right to the edge of the chancy street, and sat in the dark, imagining the shut-in boy, as I thought of him, finding me here. I got goosebumps wondering what would happen if he did. I sat in the dirt, in my slippers and peppermint gown, rocking, rocking, my forearm stiff between my legs.
Now, I slide down the hot, dry culvert and cross a brambly lot. The old woman’s house is gone. I never saw the boy again. Soon after the summer-of-reading-aloud, Mama stopped bringing me back to Houston.
Frog clicks. Crickets. Grackles, not bats. I sit in a damp patch of grass. The flashlight is dead so I set it aside, breathe deep. I’m sorry I wasn’t a prize baby, Mama. I’m sorry I felt what I did in the old lady’s room. But see? I’ve done all right. I’ve bettered myself. These days, I can read most anything, even boring statistical reports composed for the mayor, transportation plans, and land development codes. I can wear any mask and wear it well. Black don’t crack.
But those old feelings … that lazy, dizzying heat … the breathlessness, the buzz …
I grip myself, rock in the dark, cover my mouth so all I hear are cricket songs, croaks.
4
UNCLE BITTER wakes me, midmorning, tapping the door with his foot. “Got breakfast, Seam. You dress?”
“Hold on.” I scramble from under the sheets, pull on a fresh pair of underwear, some jeans, and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. “Come in.”
With crusty old oven mitts he’s carrying a steaming bowl. He sets it on the floor, returns to the house, and comes back with a teapot and a cookie sheet brimming with soft brown rolls. “Made us some molasses bread and some oatmeal. You girls used to love this stuff, remember?”
I do: slow summer mornings, Ariyeh and I would beg to eat breakfast in the backyard — it was usually cooler outside, early in the day, than it was in the house. Uncle Bitter served us on the lawn.
“You ain’t gonna win no popularity contests wearing that,” he says, pointing with one hand at my shirt, stirring the oatmeal with the other.
“I don’t figure I’m going to be very popular around here, anyway,” I say, smiling. “A coworker of mine was a finalist for the Cowboys cheerleading squad. She got a handful of promotional clothing and passed it out at work.”
“Pretty blonde?”
“No. She was black, as a matter of fact.” Black like me. Day-black.
“Hm. I only seen pretty blondes when I watch the games on the tee-vee.” As he stirs, he watches me comb my hair with my hands. It’s shoulder length, straight, and seems to intrigue and appall him, equally.
“I used to get up early in the morning, ‘fore you girls was awake, chop the walnuts and the apricots, flake a little coconut, sift the good brown sugar into the oats …”
“Where was Mama?”
“Your mama slept in a lot, them days.” He pours us some weak red tea. “That where you want to start wit’ your questions?”
The oatmeal’s earthy smell joins grass and oak bark in the air, mint from Bitter’s garden, and the sweet scent of apples from a neighbor’s tree. Sunlight pokes through an open knothole in the shed’s east wall, lands, parchment colored, on the red flannel nailed above the pillow.
“No. I do have lots of questions about Mama — and my dad,” I say. “But let’s start at the start.”
He hands me a roll along with a bowl of oats. We sit cross-legged on the mattress, facing each other. Sparrows are wild in the trees. I notice an empty cicada shell in a corner, brittle as spun sugar.
“All the way back? What you know?”
“Mama never told me a thing. Beyond the rape story, I mean.”
“I’da told you, when you’s of an age to truly take it in. But you never come back.”
“Mama didn’t want — ”
“When you reach a certain point, it ain’t your mama no more. It was you. You decided we wasn’t no part of your life.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
He rubs his chest.
“I missed you so much, and Ariyeh, in junior high and high school. When Mama married Mr. Licht, I knew she intended for me to become a good suburban kid. White bread. Well-to-do. I rebelled for a while, claiming my heritage. Reading Maya Angelou.” I laugh. “But by the time I got to college — I don’t know, maybe it took, finally. Mama’s pressure. Or maybe I got tired of fighting. Not fitting in. Maybe I opted for the easy way out. I figured, ‘I look white. Why not take advantage of that? It’s the way to get ahead.’ So that’s what I did.”
“I always worried for you. At war with yourself. It showed in your body, your play. You and Ariyeh be drawing, she churning out one finished picture after another, you rubbing everything out, starting over all the time.”
“Start me again, Uncle Bitter. With the gallows. Please.”
He sets his bowl on the ground, wipes his mouth with his wide, callused palm. “All right. You know the name Cletus Hayes?”
“Yes sir.” I tell him I learned the official story from the trial transcripts. I tell him about C’s letter and the Crisis.
He grins. “So she kept that stuff, did she?”
“Piecing it together, then … I figure it wasn’t rape. Right? Or not exactly. Maybe he forced himself on her that night, flushed from the riot, but … I figure Cletus Hayes and Sarah Morgan had a relationship — ”
“Fancy talk. They’s in love.”