It was the summer of 1937 when Aggie’s first cousin, Elnora, and Elnora’s latest boyfriend, Calvin, drove all the way from Newark, New Jersey to Pelham’s Creek for the Fourth of July with Elnora’s mother. Five years earlier, Elnora had left her two children, a nine-year old girl and a boy, two years older, with her mother and headed North in search of a decent job and a good man.
After she had been in New Jersey two years, she sent for her children at the end of the school year with the intentions of keeping them for the summer. After all, she told her friends, “I am the chilren’s mama and I got to see ‘em sometime.” On some weekdays when she had time off from work, she took them to Palisades Park (on the colored side), and let them romp about until they grew tired and contrary. Occasionally on the weekends, they visited Buck Row at Coney Island where they rode the Ferris wheel, ate hot dogs and cotton candy, and frolicked in the water. When playing mama began to wear on Elnora’s nerves, long before the end of the summer, she bought them a huge box of Goodwill clothes, some discount toys, and a bus ticket back to Pelham’s Creek. All over the colored section of town, people talked about Aggie Scott’s Cousin Elnora from “New Jursie.”
Every time Lena saw Elnora, it was like watching one of the women on the billboards along the main road into town. With shiny black curls twinkling against her rosy brown skin, she was good-looking, glamorous. Only she never saw Elnora on any billboards with a Lucky Strike clamped between her fingers, and Elnora was a colored woman. Since the women on the billboards were always white with yellow hair and fiery-red lipstick, Lena sometimes squeezed her eyes shut, mentally painted one of the women dark, and pretended it was Elnora staring out at her from the signs. Elnora should have been on the billboard anyway, Lena thought. With her painted face and shiny hair, she was pretty enough, especially with the way she strutted around in flowered sun dresses and biscuit-polished patent high-heeled shoes. She gave herself a press and curl every time she started to sweat, so she kept the kitchen smelling like burnt hair and Dixie Peach. Twisting and turning in front of the hand mirror, caressing her hair and picking the dried lipstick from the corners of her mouth, she primped constantly, and would ask whoever was around, “Do I look all right?”
Ever since Elnora had gone to New Jersey, she had courted one man after another and nobody could remember a time since she had gone north that she had come home without a man. Alongside the farmers in their bib overalls, washed out shirts, and mud-soaked brogans, Elnora’s boyfriends were the women’s dream and the men’s envy. With the look and smell of money, they dressed in loud-colored suits, dark shirts with stiff collars and cuffs, broad white ties, and wide-brimmed hats. Their evenly cut, clean and shiny fingernails glimmered in the light as they flaunted money or talked with their hands. Lena figured her Cousin Elnora’s boyfriends, must have brought the city’s smell with them. It was always just a little too sugary for down home.
Lena had looked forward to Cousin Elnora’s visit ever since she heard she was coming home. When she found out she was bringing her children, Michelle and Leland, Jr., who had been in New Jersey with her for the last six months, Lena knew they were going to have a good time. A few weeks earlier, she had overheard her mama talking about how Cousin Elnora didn’t have the money to send her children home and couldn’t afford to keep them. “So,” her mother had said, “I guess they just running wild in the city.” Shortly afterwards, Lena’s mother got a letter from Elnora saying she and Calvin were bringing the children home.
The anticipation of Lena’s cousins’ visit was like getting ready for a new school year. There would be so much new stuff to learn. Michelle and Leland, Jr. seemed to know all kinds of things when they came back from the city. Pretending to have forgotten all about country work like feeding pigs, milking the cow, and getting the chicken eggs from the henhouse, they claimed the city as their home. They even tried to talk with a northern accent and teased Lena and Mary Gladys about being country. They had even earned new songs like the one about somebody’s daddy with “a l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g Cadillac” that he put in somebody else’s garage. One time Lena’s mother slapped her when she heard her singing a song she learned from Michelle. She still remembered singing, “Annie had a baby, can’t work no more. Ooh-a-ooh.” Just as she got the last “ooh” out, she felt the sting of her mother’s rough scrawny hand on her jaw. “Don’t” be so womanish!” her mother scolded. “These grown folks songs and ain’t no child of mind got no business singing grown-folks’ songs.”
Lena knew how much her mother loved Cousin Elnora and her children, too, in spite of how smart-mouth they were becoming. But with her father, it was different. Every time the subject of her visit came up, a grim silence fell over him as if he had heard about a loved one’s death.
“I don’t know why yall carrying on so,” Lena heard him say a few days before they were scheduled to arrive. It had been hot all day, and when the evening brought a soft breeze, her mother and father sat outside on the porch steps while Lena washed dishes. “Ain’t been that long since they was down here.”
“We didn’t see them except at Church. And that didn’t give me and Elnora chance to talk or anything.”
“Talk bout what? All she got to talk bout is living up yonder, whatever new man she got, and how she doing so good in New Jersey. I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Well, least it’s something different than just talking bout field work and rebbish white folks. It’s certainly better than you and me setting round here not talking at all.”
“Well, I don’t believe hardly a thing she say. Always talking bout how much better the city is, how white folks so different. Humph. White folks is white folks. I don’t care where they at.” He stood up, stretched and walked out into the yard, mumbling, “I’d just soon she stayed over there at her Mama’s while she was here.”
“Thomas, what’s the matter with you?” Aggie followed him into the yard. “Every time anybody say something bout Elnora coming, you act like you just can’t stand her. She ain’t never done nothing to you.”
“I just git sick and tired of her coming down here filling your head with a lot of foolishness.”
“Lemme tell you one thing, Thomas Scott. Elnora can’t fill my head full of nothing I don’t want it filled with. So ain’t no need for you to blame her for nothing. This my mind.”
The conversation had turned into an argument and Lena didn’t want to hear it. She tried to think of something else–Elnora’s colored dresses, her rouge, her boyfriend’s shiny black car with the bug-eyed headlights, but the sounds still filtered through. “. . . running after first one man then another. . .” Lena hated it when her father got into one of his moods where everything seemed to make him mad. “. . . don’t make a bit of sense. . .” Like the time she came home waving her report card, and all he had said was, “Uh huh.” He never even raised his head, and if he ever looked at it, she didn’t know about it. If only she could get a smile out of him. “. . . hope she don’t think none of them men she running with fixing to make no wife outa her . . .” Sometimes she stared hard at her father, wondering if he thought he was smiling when he turned his mouth down in the corners. That would make more sense considering he did it all the time.
Lena pressed her wet hands against her ears, trying to snuff out the sound of her father’s angry voice. He was always spoiling things, but she was not going to let him spoil this weekend, no matter what. She told herself she’d hurry and finish the dishes to get out of earshot, but until then, she’d make loud noises pushing the plates and spoons against the dishpan so she wouldn’t hear him. The clanging would drown him out and she could be free to think about her Cousin Elnora’s visit.
*****
When Elnora finally arrived, she was just as Lena remembered. Decorative. Colorful. As lively as the county fair. Michelle and Leland, Jr. showed off new clothes, new words, and new mannerisms. Michelle even wore a dress with the back out and had her hair in Shirley Temple curls.
“Who fixed your hair like this?” Mary Gladys pulled one of Michelle’s spiraled curls and watched it spring back. She, Lena and Michelle sat on the ground under the shade of an elm tree, inspecting the toys Michelle brought from New Jersey.
“Stop! You might mess it up!” Michelle tilted her head out of Mary Gladys’ reach.
“You don’t have to be so biggety. I was just looking at it.” The glimmer seemed to fade from Mary Gladys’s eyes, the way it always did when her feelings were hurt. “I just wanted to know who did it.”
Michelle turned her head quickly as if to make her curls shake. “Why? You can’t get yours like this.”
“You don’t know if I can or not.” Mary Gladys picked up a stiff pink doll from the ground.
“The beauty parlor.” Michelle stuck out her tongue at Mary Gladys. “So there.”
“You ain’t go to no beauty parlor, girl,” Mary Gladys said.
Michelle stood up and put her hands on her hips. “I did too. One of Mama’s friends who work there took me. She live on my mama’s street.”
“Don’t nobody care,” Mary Gladys said, looking at the ground and brushing the wild strands from her plaits. “Besides, my mama say she gon fix me some curls like that, one day.”
“Your hair too nappy for these kinds of curls.” Michelle blew a curl from her forhead.
“Naw it ain’t,” Mary Gladys said with uncertainty.
“Ah, anybody can get their hair like that,” Lena said. “It’s just that our mamas straighten our hair and don’t have to spend all that money in the beauty parlor. Too much money to be spending on somebody who all the time playing outdoors and making their hair go back.” Lena had heard her mother say such things and she figured that should shut Michelle up.
“Aw, you all just jealous.”
“You all?” Lena and Mary Gladys said at the same time and looked at each other.
Michelle rolled her eyes.
Lena looked at the things Michelle brought from New Jersey and picked up a piece of chalk from a small chalkboard. “Your Mama bought this in New Jersey or down here?” Lena broke the chalk and wrote her name on the small chalkboard that lay on the ground. A soft wind whisked through the hot July afternoon, stirring the branches hanging low on the trees.
“In New Jersey,” Michelle said. “I wanted a tea set, but she say, `don’t need no tea set. Git something do you some good’.”
“That’s nice,” Mary Gladys said as she braided a plait that had loosened. “I don’t see how come you don’t play with it. You could write on it and everything, just like in school.” She brushed back her short frizzy plait, then smoothed her dress under her legs.
“Just don’t want to, that’s all.” Michelle placed her plump hands under her behind and leaned back. “When we was in New Jersey, we ate at this place where they had music and this woman come round to the table and ask us what we want. It ain’t nothing like that down here,” she said smacking her lips. “It was a res-ta-rant. Bet you ain’t never been to no res-ta-rant.”
“You all the time trying to be so proper,” Mary Glady chided. “Don’t nobody want to go to no res-ta-rant.”
“You just mad cause you ain’t never been nowhere.” Michelle glanced at Lena and then pointed. “And you ain’t neither.”
Lena and Mary Gladys looked at each other, and then Mary Gladys kinked her nose. Lena suddenly wished Michelle were back in New Jersey. She seemed more stuck up than usual.
“Bet I know something yall don’t know,” Michelle said.
“What?” Lena looked up from the chalkboard, thinking that Michelle was losing her up-north accent by the minute.
“Bet yall ain’t never seen a man’s thang,” Michelle spoke casually and propped her head in her hand.
“Aw-aw-aw,” Lena sang out and then covered her mouth with her hands. Her eyes widened. “Girl, you better shut up, don’t you gon get a whupping.”
“You ain’t seen one neither,” Mary Gladys said.
“Did.”
“Did not.”
“Did too. You know my mama’s friend, Mr. Calvin? Well, I saw . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she looked from Mary Gladys to Lena.
“Girl, what you talking bout?” Lena asked.
Michelle straightened her back and spoke with authority. “Well. . . see. . .” She rolled her eyes upward.
“What, girl?” Lena shouted. “What?”
“See, where we stayed, they had this toilet at the end of the hall, see . . . and all the families on the floor had to use the same one. . .”
Lena dropped her chalk. “Go-o-od, that’s nasty.”
“Well, least it ain’t outdoors,” Michelle shot back.
Mary Gladys tossed her head. “She making that up.”
“Yall shut up. I’m trying to tell you.” She leaned closer to Mary Gladys and Lena and whispered while she ran her hand back and forth across the dry dirt. “I had to go to the toilet one night, and he was in there with the door open and I saw him. He act real funny reeling and doing like this.” She swayed her head.
“He see you?” Mary Gladys asked.
“Yep.”
“What he do?” Lena asked.
“He turned around like this.” Michelle mimicked a drunken stagger. “And then he shook it at me and stuck out his tongue.”
“Aw-aw,” Lena put her hand to her mouth. “You tell your Mama on him?”
“Naw.”
“How come?” Mary Gladys asked. “I’da beat him up with a stick.” Her eyes moistened and she looked at Lena.
“Then the next day, he come talking bout, `Commere and set on Uncle Calvin’s knee’.”
Lena frowned. “He ain’t none of your uncle. Let’s go tell our mamas!” She threw down the chalkboard and jumped up. “I’m telling!” She started up the hill.
“Lena! Lena!” Michelle ran behind her. “Come back! I made it up! It didn’t happen! I made it up!” With Mary Gladys behind her, Michelle caught up with Lena and grabbed her arm. “You can’t tell Mama cause I made it all up.”
“I told you she was telling a story,” Mary Gladys said. “Come on, Lena.
They moved slowly back to the tree, Lena and Mary Gladys’s arm locked together and Michelle walking slightly ahead.
Lena wasn’t sure whether or not Michelle made up the story, but she did know there was something about Calvin she didn’t like. When she first saw him, he was standing before the mirror combing his hair, all the while shining each shoe on the back of the opposite pant leg. When he saw her looking at him, he winked and something about that wink made her angry.
“Let’s play school,” she yelled, determined to change the subject. “I want to be the teacher.” She waved her hand impatiently.
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Excerpt from Chapter 4
From LENA & MARY GLADYS
It was the summer of 1937 when Aggie’s first cousin, Elnora, and Elnora’s latest boyfriend, Calvin, drove all the way from Newark, New Jersey to Pelham’s Creek for the Fourth of July with Elnora’s mother. Five years earlier, Elnora had left her two children, a nine-year old girl and a boy, two years older, with her mother and headed North in search of a decent job and a good man.
After she had been in New Jersey two years, she sent for her children at the end of the school year with the intentions of keeping them for the summer. After all, she told her friends, “I am the chilren’s mama and I got to see ‘em sometime.” On some weekdays when she had time off from work, she took them to Palisades Park (on the colored side), and let them romp about until they grew tired and contrary. Occasionally on the weekends, they visited Buck Row at Coney Island where they rode the Ferris wheel, ate hot dogs and cotton candy, and frolicked in the water. When playing mama began to wear on Elnora’s nerves, long before the end of the summer, she bought them a huge box of Goodwill clothes, some discount toys, and a bus ticket back to Pelham’s Creek. All over the colored section of town, people talked about Aggie Scott’s Cousin Elnora from “New Jursie.”
Every time Lena saw Elnora, it was like watching one of the women on the billboards along the main road into town. With shiny black curls twinkling against her rosy brown skin, she was good-looking, glamorous. Only she never saw Elnora on any billboards with a Lucky Strike clamped between her fingers, and Elnora was a colored woman. Since the women on the billboards were always white with yellow hair and fiery-red lipstick, Lena sometimes squeezed her eyes shut, mentally painted one of the women dark, and pretended it was Elnora staring out at her from the signs. Elnora should have been on the billboard anyway, Lena thought. With her painted face and shiny hair, she was pretty enough, especially with the way she strutted around in flowered sun dresses and biscuit-polished patent high-heeled shoes. She gave herself a press and curl every time she started to sweat, so she kept the kitchen smelling like burnt hair and Dixie Peach. Twisting and turning in front of the hand mirror, caressing her hair and picking the dried lipstick from the corners of her mouth, she primped constantly, and would ask whoever was around, “Do I look all right?”
Ever since Elnora had gone to New Jersey, she had courted one man after another and nobody could remember a time since she had gone north that she had come home without a man. Alongside the farmers in their bib overalls, washed out shirts, and mud-soaked brogans, Elnora’s boyfriends were the women’s dream and the men’s envy. With the look and smell of money, they dressed in loud-colored suits, dark shirts with stiff collars and cuffs, broad white ties, and wide-brimmed hats. Their evenly cut, clean and shiny fingernails glimmered in the light as they flaunted money or talked with their hands. Lena figured her Cousin Elnora’s boyfriends, must have brought the city’s smell with them. It was always just a little too sugary for down home.
Lena had looked forward to Cousin Elnora’s visit ever since she heard she was coming home. When she found out she was bringing her children, Michelle and Leland, Jr., who had been in New Jersey with her for the last six months, Lena knew they were going to have a good time. A few weeks earlier, she had overheard her mama talking about how Cousin Elnora didn’t have the money to send her children home and couldn’t afford to keep them. “So,” her mother had said, “I guess they just running wild in the city.” Shortly afterwards, Lena’s mother got a letter from Elnora saying she and Calvin were bringing the children home.
The anticipation of Lena’s cousins’ visit was like getting ready for a new school year. There would be so much new stuff to learn. Michelle and Leland, Jr. seemed to know all kinds of things when they came back from the city. Pretending to have forgotten all about country work like feeding pigs, milking the cow, and getting the chicken eggs from the henhouse, they claimed the city as their home. They even tried to talk with a northern accent and teased Lena and Mary Gladys about being country. They had even earned new songs like the one about somebody’s daddy with “a l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g Cadillac” that he put in somebody else’s garage. One time Lena’s mother slapped her when she heard her singing a song she learned from Michelle. She still remembered singing, “Annie had a baby, can’t work no more. Ooh-a-ooh.” Just as she got the last “ooh” out, she felt the sting of her mother’s rough scrawny hand on her jaw. “Don’t” be so womanish!” her mother scolded. “These grown folks songs and ain’t no child of mind got no business singing grown-folks’ songs.”
Lena knew how much her mother loved Cousin Elnora and her children, too, in spite of how smart-mouth they were becoming. But with her father, it was different. Every time the subject of her visit came up, a grim silence fell over him as if he had heard about a loved one’s death.
“I don’t know why yall carrying on so,” Lena heard him say a few days before they were scheduled to arrive. It had been hot all day, and when the evening brought a soft breeze, her mother and father sat outside on the porch steps while Lena washed dishes. “Ain’t been that long since they was down here.”
“We didn’t see them except at Church. And that didn’t give me and Elnora chance to talk or anything.”
“Talk bout what? All she got to talk bout is living up yonder, whatever new man she got, and how she doing so good in New Jersey. I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Well, least it’s something different than just talking bout field work and rebbish white folks. It’s certainly better than you and me setting round here not talking at all.”
“Well, I don’t believe hardly a thing she say. Always talking bout how much better the city is, how white folks so different. Humph. White folks is white folks. I don’t care where they at.” He stood up, stretched and walked out into the yard, mumbling, “I’d just soon she stayed over there at her Mama’s while she was here.”
“Thomas, what’s the matter with you?” Aggie followed him into the yard. “Every time anybody say something bout Elnora coming, you act like you just can’t stand her. She ain’t never done nothing to you.”
“I just git sick and tired of her coming down here filling your head with a lot of foolishness.”
“Lemme tell you one thing, Thomas Scott. Elnora can’t fill my head full of nothing I don’t want it filled with. So ain’t no need for you to blame her for nothing. This my mind.”
The conversation had turned into an argument and Lena didn’t want to hear it. She tried to think of something else–Elnora’s colored dresses, her rouge, her boyfriend’s shiny black car with the bug-eyed headlights, but the sounds still filtered through. “. . . running after first one man then another. . .” Lena hated it when her father got into one of his moods where everything seemed to make him mad. “. . . don’t make a bit of sense. . .” Like the time she came home waving her report card, and all he had said was, “Uh huh.” He never even raised his head, and if he ever looked at it, she didn’t know about it. If only she could get a smile out of him. “. . . hope she don’t think none of them men she running with fixing to make no wife outa her . . .” Sometimes she stared hard at her father, wondering if he thought he was smiling when he turned his mouth down in the corners. That would make more sense considering he did it all the time.
Lena pressed her wet hands against her ears, trying to snuff out the sound of her father’s angry voice. He was always spoiling things, but she was not going to let him spoil this weekend, no matter what. She told herself she’d hurry and finish the dishes to get out of earshot, but until then, she’d make loud noises pushing the plates and spoons against the dishpan so she wouldn’t hear him. The clanging would drown him out and she could be free to think about her Cousin Elnora’s visit.
*****
When Elnora finally arrived, she was just as Lena remembered. Decorative. Colorful. As lively as the county fair. Michelle and Leland, Jr. showed off new clothes, new words, and new mannerisms. Michelle even wore a dress with the back out and had her hair in Shirley Temple curls.
“Who fixed your hair like this?” Mary Gladys pulled one of Michelle’s spiraled curls and watched it spring back. She, Lena and Michelle sat on the ground under the shade of an elm tree, inspecting the toys Michelle brought from New Jersey.
“Stop! You might mess it up!” Michelle tilted her head out of Mary Gladys’ reach.
“You don’t have to be so biggety. I was just looking at it.” The glimmer seemed to fade from Mary Gladys’s eyes, the way it always did when her feelings were hurt. “I just wanted to know who did it.”
Michelle turned her head quickly as if to make her curls shake. “Why? You can’t get yours like this.”
“You don’t know if I can or not.” Mary Gladys picked up a stiff pink doll from the ground.
“The beauty parlor.” Michelle stuck out her tongue at Mary Gladys. “So there.”
“You ain’t go to no beauty parlor, girl,” Mary Gladys said.
Michelle stood up and put her hands on her hips. “I did too. One of Mama’s friends who work there took me. She live on my mama’s street.”
“Don’t nobody care,” Mary Gladys said, looking at the ground and brushing the wild strands from her plaits. “Besides, my mama say she gon fix me some curls like that, one day.”
“Your hair too nappy for these kinds of curls.” Michelle blew a curl from her forhead.
“Naw it ain’t,” Mary Gladys said with uncertainty.
“Ah, anybody can get their hair like that,” Lena said. “It’s just that our mamas straighten our hair and don’t have to spend all that money in the beauty parlor. Too much money to be spending on somebody who all the time playing outdoors and making their hair go back.” Lena had heard her mother say such things and she figured that should shut Michelle up.
“Aw, you all just jealous.”
“You all?” Lena and Mary Gladys said at the same time and looked at each other.
Michelle rolled her eyes.
Lena looked at the things Michelle brought from New Jersey and picked up a piece of chalk from a small chalkboard. “Your Mama bought this in New Jersey or down here?” Lena broke the chalk and wrote her name on the small chalkboard that lay on the ground. A soft wind whisked through the hot July afternoon, stirring the branches hanging low on the trees.
“In New Jersey,” Michelle said. “I wanted a tea set, but she say, `don’t need no tea set. Git something do you some good’.”
“That’s nice,” Mary Gladys said as she braided a plait that had loosened. “I don’t see how come you don’t play with it. You could write on it and everything, just like in school.” She brushed back her short frizzy plait, then smoothed her dress under her legs.
“Just don’t want to, that’s all.” Michelle placed her plump hands under her behind and leaned back. “When we was in New Jersey, we ate at this place where they had music and this woman come round to the table and ask us what we want. It ain’t nothing like that down here,” she said smacking her lips. “It was a res-ta-rant. Bet you ain’t never been to no res-ta-rant.”
“You all the time trying to be so proper,” Mary Glady chided. “Don’t nobody want to go to no res-ta-rant.”
“You just mad cause you ain’t never been nowhere.” Michelle glanced at Lena and then pointed. “And you ain’t neither.”
Lena and Mary Gladys looked at each other, and then Mary Gladys kinked her nose. Lena suddenly wished Michelle were back in New Jersey. She seemed more stuck up than usual.
“Bet I know something yall don’t know,” Michelle said.
“What?” Lena looked up from the chalkboard, thinking that Michelle was losing her up-north accent by the minute.
“Bet yall ain’t never seen a man’s thang,” Michelle spoke casually and propped her head in her hand.
“Aw-aw-aw,” Lena sang out and then covered her mouth with her hands. Her eyes widened. “Girl, you better shut up, don’t you gon get a whupping.”
“You ain’t seen one neither,” Mary Gladys said.
“Did.”
“Did not.”
“Did too. You know my mama’s friend, Mr. Calvin? Well, I saw . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she looked from Mary Gladys to Lena.
“Girl, what you talking bout?” Lena asked.
Michelle straightened her back and spoke with authority. “Well. . . see. . .” She rolled her eyes upward.
“What, girl?” Lena shouted. “What?”
“See, where we stayed, they had this toilet at the end of the hall, see . . . and all the families on the floor had to use the same one. . .”
Lena dropped her chalk. “Go-o-od, that’s nasty.”
“Well, least it ain’t outdoors,” Michelle shot back.
Mary Gladys tossed her head. “She making that up.”
“Yall shut up. I’m trying to tell you.” She leaned closer to Mary Gladys and Lena and whispered while she ran her hand back and forth across the dry dirt. “I had to go to the toilet one night, and he was in there with the door open and I saw him. He act real funny reeling and doing like this.” She swayed her head.
“He see you?” Mary Gladys asked.
“Yep.”
“What he do?” Lena asked.
“He turned around like this.” Michelle mimicked a drunken stagger. “And then he shook it at me and stuck out his tongue.”
“Aw-aw,” Lena put her hand to her mouth. “You tell your Mama on him?”
“Naw.”
“How come?” Mary Gladys asked. “I’da beat him up with a stick.” Her eyes moistened and she looked at Lena.
“Then the next day, he come talking bout, `Commere and set on Uncle Calvin’s knee’.”
Lena frowned. “He ain’t none of your uncle. Let’s go tell our mamas!” She threw down the chalkboard and jumped up. “I’m telling!” She started up the hill.
“Lena! Lena!” Michelle ran behind her. “Come back! I made it up! It didn’t happen! I made it up!” With Mary Gladys behind her, Michelle caught up with Lena and grabbed her arm. “You can’t tell Mama cause I made it all up.”
“I told you she was telling a story,” Mary Gladys said. “Come on, Lena.
They moved slowly back to the tree, Lena and Mary Gladys’s arm locked together and Michelle walking slightly ahead.
Lena wasn’t sure whether or not Michelle made up the story, but she did know there was something about Calvin she didn’t like. When she first saw him, he was standing before the mirror combing his hair, all the while shining each shoe on the back of the opposite pant leg. When he saw her looking at him, he winked and something about that wink made her angry.
“Let’s play school,” she yelled, determined to change the subject. “I want to be the teacher.” She waved her hand impatiently.