Whistling Past the Graveyard (16 page)

When we pulled out of her driveway, Miss Cyrena said, “I’ll take a little detour so you can see the school where I teach. This part of town is called the Bottoms. It’s low and prone to flood, which is why most of the colored live here.”

“Why would you want to live here if it floods a lot?”

“The colored don’t choose to live here. It’s where they’re allowed to live.”
I got to thinking. Most of the colored in Cayuga Springs lived in one neighborhood, too. Mamie had said it was because they liked to stick with their own kind. Miss Cyrena made it sound like they didn’t have a choice.
“What if you wanted to live somewhere else?” I asked.
“It would depend on where that somewhere else was.”
“Like if it was in a white neighborhood or a colored?”
“Yes.” She stopped for a minute, like she was making up her mind about something. “That’s something that many of us are trying to change. We want Negros—all people—to have all of the same choices available as whites.”
I thought about how mad Mrs. Washington had sounded when she and Miss Cyrena were talking about the N-double-A-CP. “Doesn’t Mrs. Washington want that?”
Miss Cyrena looked at me like she was surprised by my question— and not good surprised. I held my breath, afraid I’d made her mad and she was gonna take me back home.
“Everybody wants equal rights, Starla. Everybody. They don’t all agree on how to make it happen . . . or about how much misery they’re willing to take on to get them. It’s a complicated world and takes dedication and a willingness to take some risk to evoke change.”
Miss Cyrena was starting to talk confusing. But she still got me thinking. Eula had said that because I was white, I could do anything I wanted. I started to feel a little guilty about my skin, even though I couldn’t help the way I was born.
I sat up straighter and looked around. “It’s real pretty here, lots of trees. I’d live in the Bottoms if I lived in your town.”
Miss Cyrena looked at me with sad eyes. “You have a very good soul, Starla.” Then she said, “There it is. My school.”
I looked on both sides of the street but didn’t see a school. “Where?”
“Right there.” She pointed to a building on my side of the street. It looked like an old church with all of the colored windows taken out and plain glass ones put in.
As we passed, I looked to see behind it. “Where’s the playground?”
“The children play in the back and side yards. We don’t allow them to play on the side where the alley is.”
I turned in my seat so I could see behind the school as we passed. Most of the grass was worn away. “Where’s the swings? And the tetherball poles? And the monkey bars?”
“Our money is all used up buying books and supplies. There’s none left for playground equipment.”
“Oh.” I felt real sorry for those kids.
“We get by. The children are used to making their own fun. It encourages creativity. And Mr. Baker is very good at organizing games. We do have some balls for kickball, dodgeball, and such.”
I thought about the swings at my school. Everyone always raced out the door to get one at recess. Course the boys like Jimmy Sellers didn’t. They took their sweet time, then pushed out whoever was in the swing they wanted and took it. They were real good at not getting caught by the playground-duty teacher, too.
“Do you have bullies in the colored school?”
Miss Cyrena looked over at me. “The colored school is filled with children who are just like the children in the white school. Some good as gold. Some shy. Some real smart. Some struggle with letters and numbers. And, yes, there are bullies. And just like in the white school, we try to change their ways.”
I thought on it for a minute. It sure didn’t seem to me that anyone at my school was trying to change Jimmy Sellers’s ways. He knew just what to say to the teachers, just how to smile and “Yes, ma’am” until they believed his bull-hockey stories. I was real glad he was going to Jr. High next year.
I wondered if the teachers at the colored school were that dumb, too. Since Miss Cyrena was a teacher, I guess asking her would be disrespectful.
“What school do you attend?” Miss Cyrena asked. “I mean,
did
you attend when you were living with your grandmother.”
Eula had told me that she told Miss Cyrena the same story I told her: my grandma had died and I was going to live with my momma in Nashville. But Eula was even smarter about it than me. She didn’t say she was our maid, ’cause we couldn’t afford a maid if we couldn’t afford money to send me to my momma. Eula told Miss Cyrena she’d been helping my sick grandma as a Christian charity, on account of Eula’s cousin being a maid for a friend of my grandma’s. It made sense to me. But I didn’t know where she said my grandma and I lived.
“Oh,” I said, real easy, “I went to the elementary school.”
“Which one?”
Uh-oh. “There’s only one in town,” I said, like that was the only answer.Then I asked a question to change her thinking. “Where are we taking the first cake?”
“Slattery’s Diner. Luckily for Eula, their baker is down with the shingles. They’ve ordered nine pies and two cakes.”
“Nine?” That only left one pie for somebody else—plenty of cakes though.
“That’s their specialty. Everyone in town goes there for pie.”
Miss Cyrena slowed the car down all of the sudden, way down to creepin’. I looked up and saw we were crossing the railroad tracks.
“Don’t want to upset the cakes. That system Cletus designed works well, but we can’t be too careful.”
I’d watched when Cletus Washington put the stacking wooden boxes into Miss Cyrena’s trunk. He’d also made some for the backseat. The trunk one fit like a puzzle, and I figured he was real smart to make it. I was surprised when I found out he didn’t go to high school, even though he was fifteen. Instead, he worked at the lumber mill and knew all about wood. He wanted to build furniture someday. I bet he’d make real good furniture.
After we crossed the railroad tracks, we passed Applewhite’s Dairy. I wondered if that was where Eula had hid on the loading dock when she’d been running from the Jenkins brothers. We passed a few other businesses: a propane-gas bottler, the Ford car dealer, a little orangepainted root-beer drive-in with a covered place for the cars to pull under to stay out of the sun and rain, the Chevy car dealer, a produce market with big baskets of watermelon and cantaloupe out front. And then the houses started getting bigger, with good paint and nice grass. There were lots of them, not just a few like in Cayuga Springs.
Once we got to the center of town there was a yellow-brick courthouse with giant, round columns in front. As we drove around the block, I could see that even though most of the building was square, parts of it was round, too, like when they was building it they couldn’t make up their minds.
There was a Sears and Roebuck store, two jewelry stores, a JCPenney, two grocery stores (Miss Cyrena said there were two more on the edge of town; one of them was the colored grocery where she bought our baking stuff ). We passed a brick library with light posts on each side of the front steps and a green-tile roof, three drugstores (Miss Cyrena said two of them had lunch counters), a Goodyear store that took up a whole corner, a Ben Franklin five-and-dime, and lots of churches. They even had a hotel! And that’s just what I could see. Miss Cyrena said there was a new “shopping plaza” out by the fairgrounds that had stores, too.
We turned onto a street that had a big patch of grass and trees down the center. Cars went one way on one side and the other way across the grass. It was real pretty.
“Here we are,” Miss Cyrena pulled into an angled parking place. “You wait here while I take in the baked goods.”
I was itching to go into the drugstore two doors down; curious if they had different penny candy than the one in Cayuga Springs.
“Starla,” she said in her teacher voice. I could feel her looking at me.
I took my eyes off the drugstore and looked at the front window of Slattery’s Diner. The special today was chicken fried steak. “Huh?”
“Look over here at me,” she said.
I did.
“Stay in the car.”
I nodded. Plenty of people was on the streets, women with hats and pocketbooks and kids mostly. Maybe I’d just ask one of the kids about it.
“Don’t talk to anybody through the windows, either.”
What good was it to be in town if I couldn’t find out anything?
“I mean it. This town might be bigger than where you’re from, but it’s still small enough that people talk. We don’t need a dozen questions about why you’re here with me.”
I crossed my arms and slumped down in the seat. “Might as well have stayed home.”
“I can take you back home right now and come back to make my deliveries.” She had her teacher brows all raised up like they do when they pretend they’re letting you make a decision on your own.
“Okay, okay.”
Miss Cyrena went into Slattery’s. I looked up and down the street. A kid came out of the drugstore wearing wax lips and holding a sucker that was about six inches long and looked like it was made of coiled ribbon candy. It was striped and shaped like a long, skinny cone. I’d never seen one like it.
That got my curiosity going.
I looked at Slattery’s. No Miss Cyrena yet.
I had to hurry if I was gonna shoot down there and take a look at that candy section. Once me and Eula was making some money, maybe I’d be able to take a dime, come back, and buy one of them twisted suckers. I hoped they was only a dime. No way to know without looking.
I jumped out of the car and closed the door nice and easy, just in case Miss Cyrena had her teacher ears pointed this way. Once when we was in first grade, Patti Lynn and me was talking to each other across the aisle just by movin’ our lips, not even makin’ a whisper. Mrs. Kessler heard our lips movin’. She made us both stand at the front of the class until recess. Teacher hearing was as good as Superman’s.
I hustled myself right on down to the drugstore. Lucky the candy was near the front. Most of the stuff was the same as Adler’s had. But there was them long, skinny suckers wrapped in clear cellophane, sticking up out of a box made special with holes for the sticks. They was all different kinds of stripes. I was wonderin’ if every color was a different flavor when I heard a dog scream—a scream, not just a yelp. That dog was hurt bad.
I run out of the store. There in the middle of the street was a blackand-white dog limpin’ over to the curb, holding one of its back legs up off the ground. A truck was driving on, not even stopping after hitting it.
My red rage exploded. I took off running after the truck.
It slowed down.
Maybe it was coming back! Maybe the driver just saw what he done and was coming back down the other side of the grass.
But he turned left.
I run at a diagonal across the grass, puttin’ on my jackrabbit speed.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Stop!”
The truck slowed down just a little and a guy with long hair hung his head out the window.
I heard Miss Cyrena calling me now.
“You hit that dog!” I yelled at the man.
He gave me the finger and sped up.
I slowed down. I couldn’t catch him now.
Miss Cyrena was yelling my name, her breath making it bounce. I turned and saw she was running my way.
“He run over that dog!” I said, pointing toward the drugstore.
A man was putting the dog in his car.The sound of the dog’s whimpers made me flash hot all over again. If I’d been sitting in the car like I was supposed to, I could have jumped out in front of that truck and stopped it.
“You should have stayed in the car.” Miss Cyrena was mad enough that she was grittin’ her teeth.
“But—” Drugstore or not, I’d have been out on the street when that poor dog screamed.
She took me by the arm and hurried me back toward her car. “No buts. There are plenty of people out here to worry about that dog. And you just drew a dangerous amount of attention to us.”
“So what?” I said, getting my back up. I wasn’t sure if I was more mad at that man for hitting the dog, for me not catchin’ him, or Miss Cyrena for making such a fuss. “Nobody knows me.”
“They all know me.” She opened the passenger door and set me down. She looked down at me with her lips all pinched up. “And that truck you were just chasing belongs to Jobie Jenkins . . . one of the men who bothered Eula.”
My mouth come open. “But I didn’t see no flag.”
“Of course you didn’t. You were chasing it from behind.”
My stomach flipped over. “But . . . but . . . they don’t know I’m with Eula. So everything’s okay.”
Miss Cyrena took a big breath. She was shaking. “Probably so. As long as he didn’t see me chasing after you. Then they’ll know how to find you if they want.”
She closed my door and walked around the car. When she got in, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make trouble. I’m so dumb!” I hit my head with the palm of my hand, like I could knock the troublemakin’ part out.
She looked at me and sighed. “Oh, Starla.” Then she touched my cheek. “It’s your generous and caring heart that made you go after that man. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m sure everything is fine. I doubt he noticed me.”
But as she turned the key to start the car, I caught the worried look in her eye.

Miss Cyrena stopped at a gas station and gave me a dime to buy a bottle of Co’Cola from the red cooler out front. When I lifted the lid and stuck my hand down in that icy water to pull out a bottle, I wanted to jump in with my whole self. Between my red rage and my shame over making trouble, I was plenty hot.

I fished out a sliver of ice and run it on my neck. Then I pried off the cap with the bottle opener on the side of the cooler. I took such a big swig, it burned my throat going down.

Miss Cyrena drove us to a park near her house and stopped the car under a tree. There wasn’t any kids playing, but I could see why. This park didn’t have swings or anything, just a worn path between invisible bases where some kids had played baseball. Miss Cyrena said the city didn’t come mow in this part of town very often, so the men in her neighborhood took turns doing it. She said some of them only had a nonpower mower; some no mower at all.

“How do they cut the weeds”—I couldn’t call it grass—“then?” “They use an old-fashioned scythe.”
When I didn’t know what that was, Miss Cyrena explained it. It

sounded real tiring.
“They must like their kids a lot,” I said.
“They do it for the community. We have to look out for each other,

especially when things are difficult.”
“Are they difficult now?”
She sighed and nodded. “And only going to get worse I’m afraid.

Change doesn’t come without struggle.”
“Change? Like what you was talkin’ about the other night?” “Um-hmm. The fight for civil rights is just now sparking. They’ll be