The Dry Grass of August(51)

Stell wiped her mouth with a napkin. “I’ve always wanted to go to a revival.You remember when we went to see Daddy Grace and I—”

“Where’s this meeting?” Daddy asked.

“Just outside town.We can walk. I’m sure Mary would like to go.”

Mama looked at Daddy. “Or they could use the Chrysler.”

“Not on your life,” Daddy said. “She already wrecked the Packard.”

“That wasn’t my fault!” Stell shrieked.

Daddy looked sorry. “What time’s this thing?”

Stell smirked at me. “Not until eight, and it’s only five thirty.”





I watched my feet while we walked, trying to keep my tennis shoes from getting too dirty before we got to the meeting. Stell had polished her white patent leather flats with Vase-line; they were glopped with a paste of grease and red dust.

I remembered something I saw in a newspaper in Claxton. I wanted to ask Mary about it but wasn’t sure how. School would be starting soon, and there was all sorts of speculation about how we’d be affected by something called Brown versus Board of Education. The Supreme Court. Colored and white kids going to school together. I’d seen a picture in the paper of a Negro girl in Washington who was going to a white school because the Court said she could.The girl stood in front of her house with her mama and daddy. The words under the picture said it was little Alysha Alderman, but she didn’t look little to me. Her skinny arms dangled from the sleeves of her dress, and she was almost as tall as her father.

“Mary, did you go to school when you were a girl?”

“How else you think I came to read and write?”

“Your mama could have taught you.”

“Mama never read nor wrote, not in her life.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“In what used to be a house, till the land around it got farmed out. The people moved on, leaving a rotten barn and a decent farmhouse.”

“Who was your teacher?”

“We had first one, then another.Wore them out because all of us was in the same room, even ones too young to be in school, but they had to be someplace while they mamas would go clean houses, do mill work. Then they was us older ones. I kept going till I was fifteen and had to go do houses my own self.”

“You know those signs we keep seeing, ‘No Browns in Our Schools’?”

“I know about that.”

“That’s because of Brown versus Board of Education,” Stell said. I’d never thought to ask her.

“That’s it,” said Mary. “But I s’pect your mama’s right. Won’t see Negro children going to school with white children here. Not for a while. But it’ll happen. Just people needs to register, vote. Take time, but we do it.”

She meant her people, not us.

The rest of the way to the tent meeting, my mind was filled with thoughts of what it would be like to go to school with coloreds. Would they sit beside me? Were they smart enough to learn? Mary was. Leesum was. The way Mama and Daddy talked, mixing blacks and whites in school would be horrible, but maybe they were wrong.

We saw a lake in a field, a rowboat tied to a pier. A platform with a stub of a diving board floated out in the middle, and two colored boys sprawled on the float. A girl stood at the end of the board, holding her arms over her head, hands together, pointing toward the sky. She leaned over the end of the board until she fell in, then climbed up and did the same thing again. I could have showed her a thing or two about diving.At the far end of the pond, a woman was fishing, the float on her line making rings on the water.

Long before we got to the tent we could see it, a huge khaki box growing out of the grass. A man and three children trotted down the road.

“We gone be late, Daddy,” said one of the children.

“Naw we ain’t,” said the man, “if you runs fast.” He touched his hand to his hat as he passed us.

At the path that led to the tent, Stell brushed the dust from her legs. Mary smoothed down the skirt of her dress, straightening till she seemed a foot taller.

In the dusk, the tent glowed, with yellow light pouring from every opening. As we approached, I heard a jumble of voices, a girl giggling. A man shouted something I didn’t understand. Whatever he said made the girl laugh so hard she choked.

Mary spoke to a man standing by the entrance, smoking. “Evenin’.”

“Yes’m, yes’m.” He nodded to us.

“We comin’ to de meetin’,” Mary said.

“Yes’m, you and the young misses?”

“That right. That right.” Her head bobbed up and down. “Have it started?” She sounded like our yard man.

“No’m, and still plenty room.”

“Mary, why are you talking—” She grabbed my hand and looked at me in a way that hushed me.

She asked, “It okay we takes a seat?”

His head bobbed back and forth. “Fine, just fine.”

Inside the tent the air was warm and damp. Too many bodies too close together. We stood in the aisle. People turned in their seats, looked at us. Silence moved across the tent. An old woman stood and held her hand out to Mary.

“Evening, Sister.You visiting the meeting?”

“Yes’m, me and de girls. I works for dey mama.”