The Dry Grass of August(33)

“Okay.”

“You know I can’t write you back.”

“Yes.”

“I can write. Just you can’t be gettin’ no letters from me.”

“I know.”

Mary tapped my shoulder. “Bus leaves in ten minutes. We better go.” She handed Leesum his ticket.

As Mary and I walked through the crowded station, I looked back at Leesum until I couldn’t see him anymore.





That night Uncle Taylor took us all down to the beach to lie on blankets under the stars. A steady breeze blew in from the water, bending the sea grass, and jazz music drifted over the dunes. Lights from a ship moved slowly across the gulf.

I lay back under the stars, thinking about the kind of music Leesum listened to. In my mind I was already writing him a letter.

“Oh, Taylor, how delightful this is,” Mama said. “If I lived here, I’d be on the beach every night.”

“Lucky there’s a gulf wind,” said Uncle Taylor. “Otherwise you’d be cursing the mosquitoes.”

“Look!” Stell cried. “A falling star.”

“Star,” said Davie.

I made a wish about Leesum.

“A meteorite, actually,” Uncle Taylor said. “There are a lot of them in August.”

I smelled the lemony scent of his aftershave.

“I could sleep here,” Mama said.

“Polaris, the North Star!” Sarah said. “And Ursa Major, the Big Dipper.”

“The Milky Way.” I gazed at the cloudy trail of stars across the sky. Where was Leesum on his long trip back to Charlotte? Did he have a window seat? Could he see the Milky Way, too?

Uncle Taylor was saying, “That’s right, our galaxy. Visible from dusk to dawn.”

“Taylor’s always been able to read the sky,” Mama said. “Ever since he was your age, Sarah.”

“And my big sister’s always bragged on me.”

I loved the sound of his voice. What would it be like to be his daughter?





CHAPTER 13

Every spring Mama brought out the hand-cranked ice cream freezer and had Mary take it apart to make sure the wooden paddles hadn’t rotted over the winter. In June, when strawberries appeared at the A&P, we began our weekly trips to Jackson’s Ice House for rock salt and bag ice so Mama could make ice cream. When we got there, I looked across McDowell Street at the House of Prayer for All People, and the place where Daddy Grace stayed when he came to town—a red, white, and blue mansion with music floating from upstairs windows . . . a choir, a piano, tambourines, drums.

At Jackson’s, men wearing heavy gloves used tongs to lift the dripping frozen blocks from a conveyor belt, stacking them into walls of ice in the delivery trucks lined up at the loading dock. Sweat ran down their faces, summer or winter. Puddin pestered the workers for slivers of ice and I shivered nearby, staring at the House of Prayer parsonage. Colored people dressed in their finest went up stone steps to a wraparound porch. I thought about climbing those steps, knocking on the door, being the only white person going into such a place.

One Saturday when we were at Jackson’s, I saw a gray-haired Negro in a cream-colored suit in a rocking chair on the porch of the mansion. People milled around him, visiting with one another, overflowing onto the steps and into the front yard. Boys fanned the man as he rocked. He had a thin mustache, black curved lines that started at his nostrils and flared out over his top lip. From time to time he raised a knuckle to his face and nudged the tips of the mustache, first one side, then the other.

Daddy came to get me and he looked across the street. “What a mess.” On the way home he said, “The niggers donate their hard-earned money, and it’s not even a real church. Daddy Grace, what kind of name is that? He’s Daddy Give-Me-All-You-Got. I hear he’s got a belt buckle made of solid gold.”

Stell was fascinated with the House of Prayer. When she read in the paper about the annual parade for Daddy Grace, she begged Mama and Daddy to let her go. “I want to learn about other religions. Jubie can come, too. Mary can take us.” She talked about it for days.

Mama said Stell was worse than water wearing away a rock. “I guess there’s no harm in just a parade. Let me tell your father.”





I was ready early, sitting in the kitchen, drinking a Coke, when Mary walked in, cloth violets on the lapel of her purple dress, her chestnut hair pinned up under a pillbox hat of flowers—mauve, scarlet, lilac. Her eyes shone and rhinestones twinkled at her ears. She smelled of Cashmere Bouquet.

“You look beautiful,” I told her.

“Thank you. Where’s Stell Ann?”

“Here I am.” Stell had on her pink cashmere cardigan, draped over the shoulders of her beige linen dress. She wore wrist gloves and carried a pocketbook that matched her beige heels.

“You a fine young lady,” said Mary. “And you looking good, too, Jubie.”

I was a mud hen in my brown corduroy jumper and white blouse. I stared down at my patent leather Mary Janes. They made my feet look bigger than ever.

We got on the Number 3 bus to ride downtown. Stell and I sat on the bench seat behind the driver, and Mary walked to the back. Her skinny calves and big purple shoes made me think of Minnie Mouse. A yellow line across the floor of the bus separated the front from the back. Farther toward the rear, the faded remains of an earlier line crossed the rubber floor mat. When the bus company realized there were lots more coloreds riding the buses than whites, they moved the line forward a few feet. Even so, the back of the bus was packed. A boy stood so Mary could sit. Stell and I, the only whites, were alone among the empty seats in front.