Midnight Without a Moon(24)

Monty pressed on. “If they know who did it, why won’t the sheriff do anything?” He looked from Ma Pearl to Papa and back again. “Why wouldn’t his family allow NAACP involvement?”

When nobody answered Monty, my chest tightened. I wanted the sour conversation to stop. Aunt Belle’s coming home was the highlight of my summer. Now Ma Pearl was about to ruin it. But before I could open my mouth and risk getting a backhand slap from Ma Pearl, Fred Lee opened his.

“What do them letters stand for?” he asked, his voice timid.

Everybody stared at him as if his skin had suddenly turned white and his hair blond.

After a moment Monty displayed all thirty-two of his gleaming white teeth. “NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” he said. “The organization was formed in 1909 to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”

He sounded like my teacher Miss Johnson reading from the history text. Poor Aunt Belle. She was about to marry a walking, talking Encyclopedia Britannica.

“One of our biggest concerns now is to eliminate these Jim Crow laws in states like Mississippi,” he continued, “and to prevent decent young colored men like yourself from swinging from a tree with a rope around your neck.”

Ophelia the Ogre’s eyes popped.

“Or getting shot in the head for wanting to vote, like Levi Jackson,” said Aunt Belle, cutting her eyes at Ma Pearl.

Ma Pearl bolted up from her chair and charged at Aunt Belle. “Git outta my house with that crazy nonsense,” she said. She towered over Aunt Belle and pointed toward the door. “Go on back to Saint Louis with that crazy aunt of yours.”

The Saint Louis spectators looked as if they’d get up and run any minute.

Monty draped his arm around Aunt Belle’s shoulders and pulled her closer. With new assurance, Aunt Belle stared hard at Ma Pearl, unmoved by her threat. “I came to visit my family,” she said, her voice calm and steady, “and I won’t leave until my vacation is over.”

Ma Pearl planted thick fists on her thick hips. “You won’t be bringing that mess up in my house,” she said. “You ain’t go’n git me run off this place. Everybody can’t run up north.”

Papa stood up and put a hand on Ma Pearl’s broad shoulder. “Have a seat, Pearl,” he said quietly.

Luckily, the tension broke for a moment when Ophelia wiggled in her seat and asked where the toilet was.

Ma Pearl’s head jerked toward me. “Show that gal where the toilet at.”

The toilet. The toilet! My mind raced. The toilet was outside. I stared at Ophelia in her fancy beige suit and wondered whether she knew that as well.

After a gulp, I waved her toward the door and said, “Follow me.”

Though her outfit was dainty, her walk certainly wasn’t. Big-boned Ophelia looked like a man in women’s clothing. And she had a voice to match.

Still, I was jealous. Especially as the sophisticated scent of her perfume filled the air around us as we strode through the meager surroundings I knew as home. After walking through the front room with the rundown furniture, Grandma Mandy’s room with its mothball mustiness, and the kitchen with its antiquated woodstove and icebox, I felt about as proud as a barren hen. By the time we reached the back porch, I was wishing I had simply walked around the outside of our little unpainted house instead.

“Watch your step,” I said as we descended the steps from the porch, warning her not so much about the steps, but about the drops of chicken poop scattered throughout the backyard.

Ophelia fanned herself with her hand as we walked the path to the toilet. Her makeup had begun to glisten with sweat. “It’s so hot down here,” she said. “How do you stand it?”

“It ain’t hot in Saint Louis?” I asked.

“Not this hot,” she said, wiping sweat off her forehead.

Before we even reached the toilet, its odor attacked the air and wiped out the sweet scent of Ophelia’s perfume. She wrinkled her nose. “Good God, that thing stinks,” she said.

“It’s a toilet,” I said. “It’s supposed to stink.”

Ophelia laughed a throaty laugh. She pointed at our outdoor toilet and said, “That nasty thing is not a toilet. A toilet is inside a house. A toilet gets flushed after it’s used. And it smells like pine after we clean it.” She laughed again and said, “That filthy thing is an outhouse.”

I balled my right hand into a fist. But I quickly mustered all the strength I could find to relax it before it slammed into Ophelia the Ogre’s ugly face.

While she stood there laughing, her face uglier than it was before, I unhooked the latch and yanked open the toilet door. “Go ahead. Use it.”

She covered her nose with her hand. “I don’t have to use it. I just wanted to see what it looked like.”

I planted my hands on my hips and gave her a dirty look. “You had me walk out here in this heat for nothing?”

Still shielding her nose from the stench, Ophelia nodded and said, “I’ve heard about these things, and I wanted to see one for myself.”

After that, I really wanted to punch her in that big ugly nose she was guarding. Instead, I slammed the toilet door, hooked the latch in place, and stormed back toward the house. I couldn’t believe I was missing important conversation in the parlor just to show some ungrateful northern spectator what an outside toilet looked like.