House of Rougeaux(23)
Nelie runs toward home, walks, circles, with her book bag hitting at her ankles, through the streets searching every tree and rooftop, every light pole, fence post and patch of sky. She might see a squirrel, a brown or black bird, an alley cat. These are no more than loose leaves or gravel. Her ears hear nothing. She finds nothing.
Friday changes to Saturday. Someone has filled Nelie’s ears with cotton wool. The shadows and even the light have somehow given over to it, the muffled sounds become an almost soundless world.
* * *
Sunday. One week is all since the last one, it can’t be. The whole Atlantic has been crossed since then. The cotton wool is a filter, or perhaps it is changing, giving over again to something new. Nelie, the whistle of the tea kettle, a low gust of wind through a pipe, a bicycle bell, the church bells. The ring of a coin dropped on the stone stair. Everyone has gone inside the church now.
Nelie has one hand on the iron rail. A wind, her handkerchief, she turns to catch it, it eludes her. Something shimmers up ahead in a tree.
The highest branch, bare and black, perched there, the golden claws clutch. Silver, blue and purple feathers ripple like water, the arched neck reaches up, and the flashing eye meets Nelie’s own. It opens wide its wings, spreads its tail like a Chinese fan and leaps.
The high white walls, and the white sky. And the iridescent bird flies higher.
Nelie’s soles ring out against the brick. Faster now. Because maybe, just maybe, she can catch up.
3
Rosalie
Philadelphia, 1964
It’s the last day of February, and Rosalie Hubbard, a junior at William Penn High School in North Philadephia, is scratching out a few notes for her next article for the school paper. Cassius Clay has just won the heavyweight boxing championship and there’s been dancing in the streets. Rosalie is covering current events, and so much is happening. President Johnson has launched his War on Poverty, boys are getting sent over to Vietnam, only to come back dead or crippled or stuck on dope. Civil Rights workers are murdered in their beds. There is tragedy left, right and center, but there’s a lot of hope too.
Rosalie’s notes are a mess, since she’s riding a bus, up Broad Street, to her evening course at Temple Secretarial. The course is alright, especially since a school friend of hers is taking it with her, and the two girls share a desk. It takes the edge off the tedium of the typing and shorthand drills. Rosalie likes journalism, and photography too, but doesn’t dream of such a career for herself, not yet anyway. She does have her eye on a secretarial future though, at least as something to fall back on. Not many kids she knows go on to college, especially girls.
Stuffing her notes into her school bag, Rosalie gets off early, and so she has time to stop into her favorite record shop. She buys that Coltrane album, the one with Johnny Hartman she’s been hearing so much about, with money earned from babysitting. She holds it gingerly as she rides the bus up Broad Street, thinking how pleased and impressed her older brother, Junior, will be with the record.
* * *
A few months later, Junior goes to see Goldfinger at the Boyd Theater with his friend George Stewart, whom they always tease for having a first name for a last name. George has a high, barking laugh, loud and unstoppable, and five minutes after the blonde in charge identifies herself to Bond as “Pussy Galore” the usher comes over with his flashlight and makes them leave. Out on the street George keeps on laughing, and the next week Junior takes Rosalie to the show instead. He owes her one, especially since he appropriated the Coltrane album for himself, and then went and loaned it to George.
Rosalie is the youngest of the three, once four, Hubbard children. She dearly loves her parents and siblings, her Aunt and Uncle and cousins, and earns excellent grades in school, though she does not stand out socially. She is pretty in a quiet way, her mother says, and that little bit of acne will no doubt fade with time.
Rosalie likes to read, likes to dance, she likes to run up and down the stone stairs when she goes to the library, with her heels clickety-clacking and her book bag swinging from her shoulder. She likes Coca-Cola with ice cream in it, her mother’s yams and roast, and is awed by the young people who march and protest and fight against Jim Crow.
Goldfinger is pretty good, though Rosalie likes it less than Junior, who digs it for the gadgetry and the you-know-what. But even Sean Connery doesn’t hold a candle to Sidney Poitier, if the truth be told. Mr. Poitier has just won an Oscar for Best Actor, the first black man to win it, and Rosalie got to write it up for the school paper. All the girls at school are in love with him, and Cassius too, of course.
At the Boyd, Rosalie sinks into her plush seat. She glances over at Junior. He’s slouched down, leaning on an elbow, and flashes of color make the lenses of his glasses appear opaque. His long legs are folded up so his knees almost block his view of the screen. Junior never did so well in school but he does have a knack for mechanical things. Momma said once that Junior could already read at the start of first grade, but after Azzie died that changed.
For Junior it was like the letters got all shaken up inside his mind, and didn’t line up into words as they did before. His teachers started to say he was slow, though he surely never was. He can fix a radio or a blender or just about anything you want. Many nights he lays a towel over the kitchen table and covers it with neat rows of tools and the parts of whatever he’s working on. Silent and concentrating, with his clever hands moving like big brown spiders. He graduated high school last year and one of these days he’ll start at the technical school, but for now he’s still a delivery boy for Freihofers Bakery. Junior likes being out on his delivery routes, no one telling him what to do, swinging around the neighborhoods in the bread truck and running up to stoops and porches. He looks good in his uniform too. Cap and bowtie.