“Aw, she ain’t sleep,” Hazel said. “She over there listening to every word we say.” Feeling her momma staring, Mary giggled.
Hazel pointed at her. “We have to make our own luck. Be twice as smart, three times as good—but don’t you let them know it.”
To Mary, Jim Crow was a trickster: sometimes friend, sometimes foe. In Charlotte, he was her superhero, too, and gave her freedom to skip on the sidewalks and play in the clothing racks. At home, Jim Crow was foe to her and everyone she knew. He kept her classmates, who couldn’t cross the line like she could, on a short leash. Mary felt guilty for being able to escape, for the spurts of freedom, the luck she could never share. Not even Adelaide knew the game she and her momma played in Charlotte.
In Cottonwood, adults were dictators. You spoke only when you were spoken to, and your preferences were immaterial. There was love, and lots of food, but lists of rules:
? Use lotion.
? Go to church every Sunday.
? Keep your legs closed.
? Don’t take wooden nickels.
? Keep your hair neat.
? Don’t look White folks in the eye.
? Mind your manners.
? Don’t call adults by their first names.
There were rules about the bus, and the schools, and the sidewalks, and where they could live, and where they could work. Eventually Mary stopped asking why, because no one ever gave an answer that made sense. She did what she was told with the utmost compliance, having learned very early in life that breaking Jim Crow’s rules often meant death. Days before third grade started, Joshua Hunt, one of the high schoolers in Cottonwood, was found with a cracked skull and broken ribs in the woods, just off the path they all took to school. He’d been beaten with a baseball bat and died at home a few days later.
Additions to the warning lists were always made after an atrocity, further shrinking the width and breadth of their world.
Don’t go in that store no more.
Follow the rest of the class home down Johnson Street.
Stay from around that field.
With Joshua, there was only anger—no explanations, no takeaways to be had. An agile athlete who, at only fifteen, was invited to practice by the head coach of the White college baseball team (there was no Negro college team), his death had devastated Cottonwood, but the guilty parties boasted without fear. Mr. Atkins, who lived across the street from Hazel and Mary, was a cook at the Collins Street diner and overheard some White men admitting to have burnt a cross on the coach’s lawn for even asking the boy to attend practice. They had intended to just scare the boy, but that stupid nigger raised his bat, and we had no choice.
The woods became haunted, and Mary, like the rest of her schoolmates, started filing out in a line and around their perimeter to school. Mary hated the extreme dead of winter and the swelter of summer but found that North Carolina’s beauty prevailed all year long in the thicket of the trees surrounding Cottonwood. Icicles glistened on barren limbs in January, green fuzz sprouted in late April, and vibrant pink, yellow, and purple blooms came in early June. By the middle of September, yellow, orange, and red leaves blanketed the ground almost two inches thick, creating a perfect palette for her birthday that always seemed to match the icing on her birthday cake. That year, the autumn colors resembled the various stages of drying blood.
It wasn’t until they left the bus station on arrival in Charlotte that Jim Crow became a friend. Mary welcomed him because only then did the light change, the air lift.
It grew heavier, stickier again at the bus stop at the corner of Ardsley and Kings Drive. The last stop before the expressway, it was where her momma got off for work.
The Lakes mansion sat on the corner diagonal to the bus stop. Situated on a hill, the white brick, four-story house was in the wealthiest part of Winston-Salem, where all the houses were set back from the street, lined with thick-trunked oak and maple trees that had been growing for hundreds of years. Their boughs and that late summer’s lush green leaves canopied the road, revealing patches of sky through their entanglement.
In that afternoon’s light, the red front door of the Lakes mansion shone like a beacon. Mary had not been there in years but used her imagination about what lay behind that tomato-red door to put herself to sleep.
Mary used to believe it was Jim Crow who forbade her parents’ love, that her father had left Winston finding it unbearable to live minutes away and not see them. Hazel shattered her delusions. “He doesn’t think about, let alone love, either one of us.”
“What about my grandma? Does she love me?”
“So much, but she’s in heaven.”
“No, the one who makes me cakes. Does she love me?”
“People can tell you they love you three times a day and still treat you any kind of way when it really comes down to it.”
Knowing it was the Lakeses who made sure they had food on the table, Mary assumed that meant yes. Now entering the fourth grade, she rarely thought about the Lakeses, until her birthday, of course. The cake was always pretty, but messy after the humidity of the Indian summer melted the icing. Most of it ended up in the trash.
The bus lurched forward after the White family debarked. Mary stumbled backward against her mother, whose body caused a domino effect behind them. Mary steadied herself just in time to see the driver, with a neck the width of his head, chuckle before taking the very next turn too hard and too fast. In the rearview mirror, his face turned pink-red with laughter, and a Cheshire grin disfigured him. She’d heard about the evil that made people mean for sport. It was that day she’d see it twice: Jim Crow had the power to possess.
* * *
Hazel bought Mary a vanilla ice cream cone as soon as they arrived in Charlotte; usually a part of their end-of-the-day routine, it was a reward for her composure on the bus. Happy and high on sugar, Mary followed her mother through Ivey’s to the children’s section but became distracted by the colors in the makeup displays and ran headfirst into one of the White ladies spraying perfume.
Mary gasped as ice cream dribbled down the woman’s black suit skirt. “I’m sorry!” She took a jerky step back, and the entire scoop toppled and splattered on the marbled floor between them. Knowing she’d done a horrible thing, Mary began to cry as the woman looked around. “Who are you here with?” Her long blond braid squiggled on her back like a snake.
Mary pointed to Hazel, whose eyes hit the floor as they always did around White folks. Mary flinched when the woman barked at her mother.
“Are you just going to stand there? Clean this!”
Hazel’s head dropped chin to chest. “I’ll need a mop, ma’am.”
Mary went for the tissues on the counter—“I can do it”—but the woman grabbed her arm. “You know better than that,” she hissed. “That’s what your mammy is for.” She pointed to Hazel and then, a second later, because Hazel hadn’t yet moved, yelled. “Get them.”
“A mop would be better, ma’am,” Hazel repeated.
“You think you know better than me?” Spit flew out of the woman’s mouth.
Frozen in front of the stranger who asserted herself as a greater authority than her mother, Mary shifted her eyes as Hazel walked the ten feet to retrieve the tissues sitting only inches from the woman’s shoulder. She sank down on all fours in her best Sunday dress—the light-blue one with the lace collar that she’d gotten on sale before Easter—and wiped the floor at their feet. Mary watched the smear grow, as the footsteps of other patrons navigating around the scene became louder and continuous in her ear. They never broke their stride, immune to the sight of a Negro woman down on all fours. Mary didn’t want to look, either, and her eyes drifted to the second floor, where a White girl about her age was peering down over the rail.
The sweet smells of milk and vanilla invaded Mary’s nose, making her feel claustrophobic and then sick. It was the day she lost her appetite for ice cream.