I groaned slightly and scribbled, “He won’t even talk to me!”
“Still got 2 weeks. Maybe he’s still thinking about it,” wrote Hallelujah.
Two weeks. What if Papa said no? What if I really was forced to quit school with only a seventh-grade education? That was worse than my aunts. At least they all made it through eighth grade. And my poor mama, only sixth. But at least she was pretty enough to have a man like Mr. Pete want to marry her. But I wasn’t pretty like Mama, so I wasn’t expecting someone like Mr. Pete to whisk me off to the courthouse and marry me—?then take me off to Chicago so our children could go to those good schools they bragged about. And I certainly wouldn’t have the opportunity to get myself educated like Aunt Belle. Because I didn’t have the grit to defy Ma Pearl the way she had.
My chest tightened as I wrote, “How will I ever leave Mississippi if I can’t get an education?”
Hallelujah frowned and wrote back, “You will get an education.”
“How do you know?” I wrote.
Hallelujah sighed and scribbled. Then he smiled and handed me the note. It read “Just pray. Have faith. God will make a way.”
“Stop sounding like a preacher!” I wrote back.
Hallelujah grinned at my note. He loved it when he sounded like a preacher, even though he didn’t want to be one. “I wanna be a surgeon like Dr. T.R.M. Howard in Mound Bayou,” he often said. “And I’m gonna be the first Negro to attend that new medical school Ole Miss opened in Jackson.”
I didn’t really care at that point to be the first Negro to do anything. I just wanted to be the first person in my family to graduate from high school.
Hallelujah handed me the note again. “Can Miss Johnson talk to Miss Sweet?”
I wrote back, “She thinks Miss Johnson is stupid.”
Hallelujah wrote, “I think she’s cute.”
I smiled and wrote, “She’s a grown woman. You’re a boy.”
With a sly grin and raised brows, Hallelujah scribbled, “So?”
I wrote, “What do you know? You think catfish-eyed Queen is cute.”
Hallelujah blushed, lowered his head, and scribbled on the paper: “Stop passing notes in church.”
And I did. I was out of paper.
Chapter Thirteen
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24
THE ONLY GOOD THING ABOUT REVEREND JENKINS forcing us to go to church on Wednesday night was that he fed us afterward. Well, we fed ourselves. Every family brought something to share with everybody else. Like a repast. Except no one had died, unless you count the Holy Ghost, who was killed the minute he set foot in Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church.
During the night I realized that I had drunk way too much of Miss Doll’s sweet tea. This time Queen wouldn’t be the only one peeing up the pot through the night.
The pot was kept in a tiny room off the side of Fred Lee’s room. For some reason it was called the back room, even though it was actually on the side of the house. The room served as our indoor toilet, without the proper plumbing, of course. Besides keeping the pot in there for nighttime use, the back room was also where we took our daily wash-ups and twice-a-week baths in a number-three tin tub.
I made my way into the dark room and gently waved my hand before me until I hit the string that hung from the light bulb in the ceiling. Strangely, this pretend-it’s-a-bathroom was the only room in the house with electricity. Mr. Robinson, promising Papa that he would convert the room so that it had an actual toilet, with indoor plumbing, had wired the room for lights first but never got around to getting the plumbing put in. But at least we could see without having to light a kerosene lamp when we needed to use the pot at night. Too bad the only privacy was the double sheets hanging in the doorway.
After giving my bladder some relief, I crept back through Fred Lee’s room using the moonlight as my guide. I felt my way along the wall until I reached the sheet that hung in the doorway of the room I shared with Queen. When I pulled it back to enter, my heart nearly stopped. I thought I was seeing a ghost. Instead it was Queen, fully dressed and climbing out the window.
My gasp startled her. She stopped, one leg on the floor of our bedroom, the other hanging out the window.
“Queen!” I said, my voice between a shout and a whisper. “What you doing?”
Queen just stood there with her eyes bucked and her mouth gaping. She was wearing one of the new outfits Aunt Belle had brought her—?a light pink pantsuit that fit her curvy body like a second skin. Ma Pearl would kill her if she found out she’d sneaked clothes out of the chifforobe. Well, maybe not, since it was Queen.
Letting the sheet drop to shield our room from Fred Lee’s, I tiptoed in. “Where you going?” I whispered as I got closer to Queen.
She placed a finger to her mouth and shushed me. She brought her whole body inside the room, then peeped out the window.