Dr. J Read online

  Our building ahead is lit up, the rectangular windows in even rows like boxes of cereal on Miss Pete’s shelves, and I plunge back into the woods where the diggers haven’t yet dug and above me is the sky and below me is the dark ground and my sneaker sole against the earth is like the slap of a card laid down in the pitty pat card games my mom plays with Uncle Brunson and Aunt Estelle. I breathe, the cool air filling me, and soon, soon I will be faster than Freda and Juanita and Joe Farmer and no one in the projects will be able to catch me.

  I look both ways, run across Beech and down the concrete path, beneath the three bare rims and through the ajar glass doors of the entrance of Parkside Gardens and then make the turn and jump.

  I make it to the fourth step from the top.

  And I turn and jump, turn and jump.

  I burst into 3D, into the overwhelming warmth, the smell of something frying, the hot-breath smell of meat roasting and the metal and steam smell of vegetables boiling in a pot. The kitchen blasts with heat, the hiss of gas, sweat coming off Mom’s brow, her apron wet with whatever she’s wiped off her hands, the pans rattling and sending forth even more heat.

  “We’re eating soon,” Mom says, smiling down. She lifts me, sets me on the counter, takes a cloth and wets it with warm water and wipes my face, my upper lip, picks a bit of leaf out of my hair. “There.” She puts a hand over my heart and she detects the hard, fast beating and she smiles. I move my face close to my mom’s face, so close I can feel her breath coming out, smell the soapy smell of her skin and the perfume of her hair.

  She sets me down.

  She gives me a pile of plates that I am to bring out to the yellow-linoleum-topped table under Dr. King’s photo. I lean against the chrome legs, which are cool through my pants. “Freda, Marky,” I say.

  Freda ignores me. Marky looks up.

  “Let’s eat.”

  I return to the kitchen, collect forks, spoons, and knives, cloth napkins, glasses, and a third-full milk bottle. Marky comes over, breathing hard, his face squished and serious. Marky is a sickly child, I’ve heard Mom tell Uncle Al. If anything is going around, Marky will catch it twice.

  Al tells Mom that Tonk, that’s my dad, was a sickly child. He grew out of it.

  “But the asthma,” Mom says. “That’s a fright.”

  Marky comes over, climbs onto a gray cushioned chair. “You wash up?” Freda asks.

  Marky shakes his head. I help Marky down, take him by his hot, soft hand to the bathroom where I stand him on the inverted milk crate and pull his arms out so his hands are under the cold water.

  I rub the hard rough soap over his hands under the stream, flick a few drops into his face, which makes him flinch, then laugh, and then tell him to dry himself with the brown towel.

  Now Mom and Freda are both seated, waiting for us before Mom says the blessing—As you have provided for us in the past, so you may sustain us throughout our lives, while we enjoy our gifts, we may never forget the needy and those in want. Lord, we thank you—and we bow our heads and Freda and I look at each other and she rolls her eyes like she does whenever Mom takes too long with the blessing.

  Then Freda adds, “And thank Evlith!”

  “Hush,” Mom says, ladling out the chicken and mashed potatoes. I eat my food in steady bites. We’ve never missed a meal, never didn’t have clean clothes. There’s kids who don’t get breakfast, kids who wear the same clothes every day. Kids down on Franklin Avenue, in the Wilklow Projects, who are no-food poor. Mom won’t let that happen to us. But I know we’re not as well off as some. Mom used to take us down to Hempstead Assistance where we would pick up government cheese, a block of pinkish brown ham, some powdered milk, and she called it the subsidy. But we didn’t like the cheese, wouldn’t drink the powdered milk, so she said there was no reason to keep going back.

  Mom says there are holes everywhere. Everyone’s got a hole in their life somewhere, missing something, someone who’s not there, some soul gone up to heaven and left behind a hole. We have a hole, I think, and that’s Tonk, my dad, who’s not here, who lives with Uncle Al, only we don’t see him as much as we do Uncle Al. But we don’t compare ourselves, we’re not trying to copy anyone else’s life because we have us four. Freda. Marky. Mom. Me. Look at how we’re all growing so fast. Especially me.

  “June, you’re gonna be taller than I am before you know it,” Mom says.

  The man of the house. I’m getting longer and longer.

  Jumping higher and higher.

  We clear the kitchen, pile the plates by the sink in a teetering castle of white enamel, silverware threatening to slide off the top, empty milk glasses standing guard. Freda has pulled the milk crate into the kitchen and she stands next to Mom, whose slippered feet are on the braided cloth rug. Mom is washing, steam rising up from the sink, and Freda is in a hurry, grabbing each plate out of Mom’s hand and running the dishcloth over it too quickly, so that one of the plates slips and crashes into the sink, and the shatter causes Marky to yelp.

  “Freda!” Mom shouts.

  Freda is rushing because of Evlith.

  I don’t know who or what Evlith is, but it’s on The Ed Sullivan Show tonight and Freda has been talking about it all day and Marky and I are excited because Freda is so excited, but now she dropped a plate, smashed it in the sink, and Mom is shaking her head, angry at Freda, and I wonder if she’s going to take the belt to Freda like she does me when she’s angry at me but, no, Freda doesn’t get hit, she stands there quiet and still as Mom collects the shards piece by piece and drops them in the white metal bin by the Frigidaire.

  We all gather around the TV. Freda, Marky, and I sit on the rug, watching some children’s choir sing, and Marky and I are wondering what Freda was so excited about and we ask, “That’s Evlith?”

  I still have my lisp.

  “No!” Freda says. “That’s not Elvis.”

  After the children in their gray robes shuffle off, Ed Sullivan comes back on and he introduces the next act and this man comes on in a slick suit, with a guitar strapped around his neck, and he starts singing, and there’s the sound of girls screeching underneath him and even Freda starts screaming and Marky and I turn to see her and she jumps up, and while Elvis is wobbling back and forth, swinging his hips around, Freda goes up and kisses the TV screen.

  3.

  At home I’m June, short for Junior. Outside the house I’m June or Jule.

  Julius Winfield Sr. walks with me, my hand in his big hand, his fingers wrapped all the way around my wrist. He wears a green cap, a mechanic’s uniform, blue with oil stains, a patch on his chest, cuffed pant legs above black work shoes with soft soles. He says that when the new park is done, he’ll play ball with me, and dominoes, and teach me Tonk, his favorite game, a card game popular in South Carolina where he grew up.

  “And they call you Tonk!” I say.

  He nods, smiles down at me. “Yes they do.”

  Tonk. Tonk. Tonk. I roll the word around in my mouth. That’s Daddy.

  “I’m the man of the house,” I tell Daddy.

  He shrugs. Something about what I’ve said seems to make him unhappy and his expression goes stern.

  We are walking toward Hempstead Village, where we are going to get haircuts, my first in a real barbershop.

  “Have to look sharp to feel sharp,” Daddy says.

  I nod.

  “I can jump three steps,” I tell him. “I can jump out of the swings. I’m the fastest boy. I can jump over the benches.” The last part isn’t true, but I want it to be true so much that it feels true.

  He looks down at me again. His smile is back. “Your momma could jump. Played ball at Bettis Academy back in South Carolina. Callie could play.”

  I’ve seen a photograph of my mother, seated at the front of a group of black women in basketball uniforms. Mom is in the center holding the ball, a serious expression on her face.

  “How’s Marky doin’?” Dad asks.

  I shrug. “Wets the bed. He’s wheezy
.”

  “Boy has the asthma,” Daddy says.

  I nod, trying to look thoughtful.

  I’m proud to be with my daddy; I want everyone to see.

  We’re out of the projects, walking down the hill where the bigger kids race soapbox derby cars, and then I jump up on the curb and we are walking down Peninsula toward the Calderone and Rivoli, the movie theaters where for a quarter we can see the movies, even the Elvis movies my sister likes, and then Robert Hall, and then we are at the barber where my father puts me in a seat and a white cloth is thrown around my chest and neck and my father tells the barber to cut my hair so there’s a part in it down the right side. The smell of menthol and camphor is so strong I can feel it in my eyes, a stinging, and the sound of the scissors swishing is like sword fights in a movie, and I close my eyes as he trims above my forehead and I turn and I see my father, his cap off, smiling, trying to make the barber laugh at something. He turns to me, and he looks at me serious and stern, and then winks.

  The barber brushes the back of my neck with powder that smells sweet like soap and I try to see how I look different with my new side-parted hair. I had imagined a change, and that a more grown-up boy would be in the mirror, but looking back is the same me who walked in. I glance at the men in the barbershop, cigarettes sending up ribbons of smoke, collars opened at the necks revealing gold chains and crosses. A fat man chews gum and looks at a newspaper. There are magazines in a stack near the entrance, brightly colored illustrations of soldiers and sailors and athletes on the covers.

  Daddy pays the barber a half-dollar and then says he is going to get Mom some groceries, and takes me into the Grand Union where he lets me pick out a box of animal crackers that I struggle to open and Tonk finally reaches down and opens for me while we walk around the store, gathering milk, bacon, potatoes, bread, butter. He carries the two large sacks in his long arms, his hands bearing the weight under each bag, a smile on his face. I am proud. I have heard Mom complain to her pitty pat friends that Tonk doesn’t pull his weight, doesn’t contribute enough to his kids, loses his money playing cards. But here he is, with two bags of groceries and Mom will have to let him in now, not lock the door the way she sometimes does when Dad comes over and wants to see us, shouting through the door, “You don’t give us nothing, nothing. You can’t see them.”

  And Marky and me crying to Mom to let Dad in.

  And one time he climbed down from the roof to our window ledge, tapping at it so we would let him in. He crawled inside and hugged us both and said, “Don’t tell Mom I’m here.” Mom heard us in there laughing and came in and told him, “You had your fun, now get out.”

  We climb the hill to Parkside Gardens and he’s humming a song and I try to make out the tune but I can’t and he smiles down at me and I tell him, “Dad, when we get to the Gardens I’m gonna show you something.”

  He nods.

  Here is what I want to show him. I am going to sit in the swings, and pump myself up higher and higher, and then Geronimo out as far as I can. I can already jump higher and farther than any other boys my age. Dad sets down his groceries, shakes out a cigarette, and lights it, nodding.

  “So let’s see June, let’s see.”

  I pump my legs and the swing rises back and forth and I climb higher than I’ve ever gone, higher than anyone has ever gone, as high as you can go and not flip over the entire swing set, and at the highest point I jump, both sneakered feet in front of me, my hands in the air. I jump as high and as far as any child in the history of the world, so far that my father’s cigarette stops midair in his hand on its way to his lips and his mouth drops open because he can’t believe how far I can jump.

  4.

  One morning Mom doesn’t go to work. She says, “Get up, we goin’ to Batesburg,” and I rub my eyes and Marky begins jumping up and down in his bed and Freda sniffs his diaper to see if he peed and then says, “Good, Marky, you’re dry.”

  Mom was up late last night, the kitchen hot from the oven and pots of frying oil as she prepared chicken and biscuits in a pile I could stick my arm in up to my elbow. She’s already packed three suitcases, one for each of us, and told us we don’t need much more because it’s summer and we won’t hardly wear nothing playing in the dirt next to Gilbert and Bertha’s house. We washed up quickly, and Marky and Freda ate a boiled egg and I had cereal and Mom told us to go to the kitchen and grab some empty pop bottles to pee in on the way.

  “I don’t like stopping,” she said.

  She takes a tin pot filled with chicken and then comes back for another filled with biscuits and then the three of us follow, Freda carrying her and Marky’s suitcases while I carry my own. We climb into the blue Oldsmobile 98 and Mom noses it out onto Beech and says, “It’s summer, time for seeing family.”

  She drives, angry at every stop for the time we are losing, the money pouring into the gas tank, the sodas we demand because we are parched from chicken and biscuits. She doesn’t want us drinking too much because then we’ll want to stop some more. She says, “Save the bottles for the car,” so we don’t have to stop.

  She tries finding side ways and stone bridges and cat roads, making failed attempts to skip tolls, but this ends up with us lost on back roads and I have to pee so bad I pull it out and fill up a bottle and toss it out of the car. Then Marky tries the same thing but pees on the seat and himself and looks at me, shaking his head, begging me not to say nothing about it to Freda or Mom and I keep it quiet and Marky sits in his own pee until Mom sniffs it and says, “Might as well stop.”

  “Marky wet himself.”

  We don’t have air-conditioning and the cities pass on the radio dial in crackles and screeches as we slide down Route 1, Newark, Elizabeth, New Brunswick, Trenton, and then into Pennsylvania where we pick up Uncle James Simpear Abney, or Simp, and Aunt Margaret, who will share the driving with Mom and who hates stopping just as much. Simp takes a look at me and nods his head.

  “Growing big!” he says to Mom.

  “Chicken?” she offers.

  Simp takes the wheel in one hand and in the other manages to hold a thigh piece while he fiddles with the dial till he finds a station playing the Platters’ “Twilight Time.”

  “Is this Evlith?” I ask.

  “Elvis!” Freda shouts. “With an S. And no!”

  We make this drive every summer, and every summer, at some point in the drive, Mom and whoever she’s sharing the driving with become real quiet because they say we are passing a certain line.

  “The Mason-Dixon Line,” says Mom.

  Below this line colored folks were slaves.

  And I know from previous visits that below this line is where we can’t use the same bathroom as white people or drink from the same water fountains or even eat at the same restaurants. In Hempstead, we can eat wherever we want and pee in all the same bathrooms. My school, Prospect Elementary, is half-white and half-black and the only rule is boys can’t go into the girls’ bathroom, which my friend Archie Rogers once did on a dare but that I told him he shouldn’t do, because, well, that’s the rules.

  Where we live, white kids and black kids play together. Down around my grandma’s house in Batesburg, we never see a white child.

  We follow Route 1 all the way through Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, deeper and deeper south through hot, buggy air that leaves our windshield splattered with carcasses. We sleep in fits, our mouths dry and hanging open, waking up when we feel a bug stuck to our tongues or when the thirst is so powerful that separating our tongues from the roof of our mouths makes a sound like an STP sticker coming off a school notebook. An afternoon. A sunset. And then the road signs coming up out of the night, the leaping red Mobilgas horse, the inviting orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s, the walking bear in nightcap of a roadside motel, and then crossing into North Carolina a sign that says welcome to klan country.

  Mom and Simp stop at the shoulder to switch seats, us kids climbing out to pee and then quickly back in, the operation as efficient
as a pit crew.

  “When we gonna get there?”

  “Soon,” Mom says, “morning.”

  Freda sleeps. Marky sleeps. I sleep.

  The car pulls up onto the tall grass in front of Gilbert and Bertha Abney’s and the bump of the car over dirt and rocks wakes us all and we can see Gilbert sitting on the porch and standing and waving and here are my cousins, Bobby and Vincent and Shirley, and there’s Uncle Melvin and Melvin Jr. and Aunt Chloe and her kids Charles and Cynthia, and we emerge from the car, smelling of chicken and exhaust. The summer sun is high and we are surrounded, hands and fingers rubbing our hair, men picking us up, women giving us hugs, dogs barking and sniffing at us and getting their noses into the pot where the chicken had been.

  “Look at you, June!” Uncle Melvin says. “You taller than Bobby!”

  Bobby is Lucinda’s boy, he’s a year younger than I am, and whenever we come down here, he’s who I run with.

  “You playing ball, June?” Bobby asks.

  I nod.

  “What?”

  “Football, basketball, baseball,” I tell him. “I play anything.”

  They made a park near our house, I tell Bobby, a big park with a clubhouse where we can check out balls and bats and roller skates and whatever we want.

  “Bobby, watch out,” Freda says. “June is fast. The boy can run.”

  “And jump!” I add.

  Gilbert and Bertha’s house is yellow and brown, the foundation resting on cinder blocks. A whole mess of chickens live in coops in the shade under the house. In back is a copse of dogwood and beech trees that we run through and play cowboys and Indians, Bobby showing us how to take a mop handle and turn it into a cowboy horse by tying string around it for the reins. He takes me fishing by the pond where we sit on the sloped bank and cast over water lilies and cattails. We catch bass and perch that Bobby shows me how to kill by taking the tail and thumping it against a flat rock. Crows watch us from the crook in the dogwoods, their feathers so black they’re reflective. My grandma breads the fish in flour and fries them and we eat in the backyard, our hands greasy and tasting of our own sweat and the pond water.