Ma Pearl grabbed her chest as if her heart had suddenly failed. “Lawd, I knowed we shouldn’ta let you go up there with Isabelle.”
Ma Pearl might not have known how to read, but she certainly knew her letters. With a grunt, she read them one by one. “N-A-A-C-P,” then the name, “Lucy Isabelle Carter.” With a flip of her wrist she flung the card back at Aunt Belle. It landed on the floor. “Didn’t know I was raising no dirn fool,” she said.
Aunt Belle picked up the card and placed it back in her purse. “I’m not a fool, Mama.”
Ma Pearl stared hard at Aunt Belle. “You is a fool. All y’all fools,” she said, motioning toward the sofa at the three Saint Louis spectators.
Their eyes bucked.
“Mrs. Carter, I assure—”
With a pudgy pointed finger, Ma Pearl cut off Monty. “You got her into this, didn’t you?”
“Monty didn’t get me into anything, Mama,” said Aunt Belle. “I’m a grown woman. I make my own choices.”
“Stupid choices,” Ma Pearl said. “Messing with them folks won’t do nothing but get a Negro kil’t. Where was they when L. B. Turner ’n’em run Albert’s boy off the road and shot him?” She paused for an answer, then said, “They sho’ wadn’t here to stop ’em.”
“So they know who did it,” said Monty.
Ma Pearl was dumbfounded. She had put her own foot in her mouth, as she liked to claim about other people.
Monty pressed on. “If they know who did it, why won’t the sheriff do anything?” He looked from Ma Pearl to Papa and back again. “Why wouldn’t his family allow NAACP involvement?”
When nobody answered Monty, my chest tightened. I wanted the sour conversation to stop. Aunt Belle’s coming home was the highlight of my summer. Now Ma Pearl was about to ruin it. But before I could open my mouth and risk getting a backhand slap from Ma Pearl, Fred Lee opened his.
“What do them letters stand for?” he asked, his voice timid.
Everybody stared at him as if his skin had suddenly turned white and his hair blond.
After a moment Monty displayed all thirty-two of his gleaming white teeth. “NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” he said. “The organization was formed in 1909 to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination.”
He sounded like my teacher Miss Johnson reading from the history text. Poor Aunt Belle. She was about to marry a walking, talking Encyclopedia Britannica.
“One of our biggest concerns now is to eliminate these Jim Crow laws in states like Mississippi,” he continued, “and to prevent decent young colored men like yourself from swinging from a tree with a rope around your neck.”
Ophelia the Ogre’s eyes popped.
“Or getting shot in the head for wanting to vote, like Levi Jackson,” said Aunt Belle, cutting her eyes at Ma Pearl.
Ma Pearl bolted up from her chair and charged at Aunt Belle. “Git outta my house with that crazy nonsense,” she said. She towered over Aunt Belle and pointed toward the door. “Go on back to Saint Louis with that crazy aunt of yours.”
The Saint Louis spectators looked as if they’d get up and run any minute.
Monty draped his arm around Aunt Belle’s shoulders and pulled her closer. With new assurance, Aunt Belle stared hard at Ma Pearl, unmoved by her threat. “I came to visit my family,” she said, her voice calm and steady, “and I won’t leave until my vacation is over.”
Ma Pearl planted thick fists on her thick hips. “You won’t be bringing that mess up in my house,” she said. “You ain’t go’n git me run off this place. Everybody can’t run up north.”
Papa stood up and put a hand on Ma Pearl’s broad shoulder. “Have a seat, Pearl,” he said quietly.
Luckily, the tension broke for a moment when Ophelia wiggled in her seat and asked where the toilet was.
Ma Pearl’s head jerked toward me. “Show that gal where the toilet at.”
The toilet. The toilet! My mind raced. The toilet was outside. I stared at Ophelia in her fancy beige suit and wondered whether she knew that as well.
After a gulp, I waved her toward the door and said, “Follow me.”
Though her outfit was dainty, her walk certainly wasn’t. Big-boned Ophelia looked like a man in women’s clothing. And she had a voice to match.
Still, I was jealous. Especially as the sophisticated scent of her perfume filled the air around us as we strode through the meager surroundings I knew as home. After walking through the front room with the rundown furniture, Grandma Mandy’s room with its mothball mustiness, and the kitchen with its antiquated woodstove and icebox, I felt about as proud as a barren hen. By the time we reached the back porch, I was wishing I had simply walked around the outside of our little unpainted house instead.