The Dry Grass of August Read online

  NEGROES

  Observe Curfew!

  WHITES ONLY

  After Sundown!

  Daddy would approve of such a sign. I hoped Mary hadn’t seen it. Her head was against the seat back, her eyes closed.

  Mama pulled into a motor court and asked me to go with her to see about rooms. We passed a lawn jockey with a grin on the black face, white teeth gleaming. Mama told the man at the desk, “I’ve got four children, one of them still a baby, and I brought my girl along to help. We don’t mind sharing with her, but she must have a bed to herself.”

  “Can’t have your children sleeping with her.” The man touched Mama’s hand. She jerked it away. He frowned. “They’s a nigger hotel downtown where she can stay, then y’all can c’mon back here.”

  Mama flinched. She never used that word. She said colored or darkie or Negro. Daddy said she was mired in euphemisms.

  “Well?” the man said.

  “I won’t have her staying off by herself.” Mama’s voice was low and sharp. She left the office, pulling me behind her.

  We found a place that would have Mary, the Sleep Inn Motel. The man who ran it walked outside with Mama and pointed to a cabin behind his office. He looked at Mary standing by our car. “That your girl?”

  “Yes.”

  He rubbed his mouth. “She can just let herself in.”

  As soon as we got in our room, Mama called Uncle Taylor. “Hey! We’re at Wickens, Georgia, well south of Atlanta, making good time.” She said, “Uh-huh. No, no problem. We found a place that let her stay.” Mama listened, then said, “I can’t talk to him right now.” Did she mean Daddy? Another pause, then, “We’ll see y’all tomorrow; can’t wait.”

  After I put on my pajamas, I wanted to go see if Mary was okay. Hot as it was, Mama made me wear her bathrobe so I’d be decent. When I got to the cabin, I was shy to knock on the door. Mary stayed with us when Mama and Daddy went out of town, but it was our house, and I never minded walking right in the den where she slept on the pull-out sofa. I knocked softly.

  Mary called out, “Come on in, Jubie.”

  The door opened into a small room. The bulb hanging from the ceiling didn’t give off a lot of light, making the room feel close and hot, even with the one window open. The air smelled of dust and soap. Mary was in the only chair, a wooden ladder-back like we had in the kitchen at home, but with one leg shorter than the others so that she was slightly tilted. There was a tattered white Bible in her lap.

  “How’d you know it was me at the door?”

  “Who else would visit me so late in the evening?”

  “Might have been a gentleman stopping to see you.”

  “Might have.”

  She wore a blue chenille robe and white terry cloth slippers. Her reddish-brown curls were free from her combs. I’d heard Mama say that Mary used a henna rinse, and I liked it that Mary had vanity.

  She pointed to the bed. “Sit yourself down, girl.”

  I sat and had to grab the footboard to keep from falling backward.

  Mary asked, “You never been on a straw tick?”

  I tried to find a way to sit, but the bed pulled me down. I scooted upward and put my back against the headboard, my left leg dangling off the side. “How can you sleep in this thing?”

  “That’s what you do with a tick, sleep in it, not on it.”

  “What’s that squeaking every time I move?”

  “Got ropes underneath, not springs like you used to.”

  “That would keep me awake.” I swatted at a mosquito that buzzed my ear.

  “You doing okay, Jubie?”

  “Except for being crowded in with everybody, our stuff all over, and here you are with a whole room to yourself.”

  “Sometime it pays to be a darkie.” She rocked on the uneven chair.

  I hooked my toe through a hole in the rag rug. “Where’s your bathroom?”

  “What you think this is, a castle for colored folks? There’s an outhouse, little ways into the field, and the pitcher and bowl there.”

  “Got any water in it?”

  “The lord of this here moe-tell let me fill it from a tap outside. I’m better off than I might’ve been.”

  “This room has nice ambience.” I tripped over the word. I hadn’t said it out loud before.

  “Another new word, huh? What’s it mean?”

  “That your room has a good feeling to it.” I struggled off the bed. “Is that a family Bible?”

  “It was my grand’s. Got our dates in it.”

  “Could I see?”

  She opened the front cover of the Bible and handed it to me. “Be gentle. It’s got more’n seventy years on it.”

  I held the book carefully. In many different hands, there were records of births and deaths, marriages and baptisms. The dates in Mary’s Bible went back much further than what Stell had recorded in ours. One entry said, “Mary Constance Culpepper, born September 20, 1906. Married Pharr Lincoln Luther, May 18, 1925.”

  “That’s you.”

  “It is. Got a birthday coming. Be forty-eight.”

  I’d never thought about her age. Her caramel skin was smooth. “I didn’t know you were so old.”

  She threw back her head and laughed, showing her front tooth that was framed in gold. “I like you more and more, June Bentley Watts, more and more.”

  I looked back down at the Bible. “Your husband died in a wreck, right?”

  “Yes, one night coming home from work. Doctor say it was his heart.”

  “A heart attack while he was driving?”

  “Might be. Never know for sure.”

  “Is that your wedding ring?” I pointed to her left hand.

  She nodded. “Pharr got it engraved, our initials and date.”

  I touched the next page of the Bible. “Do you have two brothers and a sister?”

  “Only got my one brother left now that I know of. Sister died having her fourth child. And my baby brother, we hasn’t heard from him in twenty years; I s’pect he’s gone.” I couldn’t imagine not knowing what had happened to Stell or Puddin or Davie.

  “You were the second oldest, too, the same as me.”

  “That’s right. My mama had two born dead before Sister, but I don’t reckon they count.”

  I handed her the Bible. “I’d better be going so everybody can get to bed.” I touched her shoulder. “Night, Mary. Lock up behind me.” I sounded like Mama.

  “No lock on that door. If it had one, I’d use it.” She had the Bible open and was looking down at it when I left.

  In our room, everybody was asleep but Mama. She was brushing her teeth, standing in the bathroom with the door open. Her hair was pulled back to keep it out of the cold cream she used to cleanse her face, her skin glistening in the light over the sink. She looked at me in the mirror. Her mouth was all foamy, and she held her dental bridge in her left hand while she brushed with her right. She rinsed and spat. “Get to bed now, Jubie, and don’t make any noise.” The words lisped out through the hole where her front tooth was gone. Stell told me Daddy knocked it out. Mama never talked about it. “You need to tinkle before you climb in?”

  “No, ma’am.” I draped her bathrobe across the footboard of her bed and lingered there. I tried not to look at her, but I didn’t often get to see her without her tooth.

  “What is it?” Mama asked, her bridge back in place.

  “Mary has an outhouse instead of a bathroom, and a pitcher and bowl like Aunt Rita has in her living room, only the ones in Mary’s room are for using.”

  “I paid more for that cabin than I did for this room, and it’s just fine. Get on to bed now.” Mama reached to turn off the light as I climbed in next to Stell.

  I lay there in the dark, listening to my family breathe. Somebody made a throat noise, Puddin, or maybe Mama. Way off, a dog barked over and over. I wondered if Mary heard it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Five days before we left for Pensacola I was sitting on my bed, listening to t
he sound of our neighbor’s mower. I peeked out the window. Carter Milton was naked from the waist up, his muscled shoulders red, his back broad. He looked like a man working in his yard, not the boy next door. Why was he so crazy about Stell? That morning she’d told Mama I was hiding in the tree house when Mama wanted me to go grocery shopping. That was a lie, but no matter what Stell says, Mama always believes her.

  I opened the window. Carter stood in his driveway, drinking a Coke. I called out, “Meet me by the hedge.”

  The house felt empty. Mama still shopping, Puddin out back with Davie, and Stell at a planning meeting for the cheerleading squad. I could hear Mary in the kitchen. I tiptoed downstairs, hoping to slip out the front door. I was in the foyer with my hand on the doorknob when she said, “Hey, Jubie.” She stood in the hallway, holding a dish towel. “You gone go out?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  “Your mama want you here to put away groceries when she gets home.”

  “I need to tell Carter something.”

  “Stell Ann’s boyfriend?”

  I shrugged and ran out to meet Carter by the boxwoods that separated our front yards. His eyes were topaz in the sunlight. I snapped a twig, stripping the leaves into my hand to make a bracelet. “You want to hear stuff from Stell’s diary?” I popped the tip from one of the leaves.

  He wiped his forehead. “You think there’s something in it about me?”

  “You can find out for a dollar.”

  “Okay, sure, Jubes. When?”

  I liked him calling me Jubes. “Half an hour, the tree house.”

  While I was looking for Stell’s diary, I found her piggy bank hidden in a cardboard box on the floor of her closet, behind her summer shoes—white ankle straps, black patent pumps, bone flats. I turned her piggy bank slowly. I could hear paper money rustling, the clink of heavy coins. My bank never had anything but pennies in it.

  I used a bobby pin to pull a dollar bill through the slot in the bank. After my next babysitting job, I’d put a dollar and a quarter back. Stell would never know. With the loan from her bank and the dollar from Carter, I could go to the Manor Theatre with Maggie, my best friend, to see Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which Mama said was racy. She hadn’t seen it, but she didn’t trust anything with Marilyn Monroe in it, not to mention Jane Russell. I’d buy the latest Space Cadet comic, get popcorn and a grape Charms at the movies, and ride the bus home.

  Before I put the piggy bank back in its box, I stretched out on the floor and stared up into her skirts, all hemmed to fall exactly two inches below her knees.

  Her diary was not in her closet, not in her dresser, her bedside table, or under her bed. I finally found it on a shelf in the sewing room, behind a box of patterns. She’d written on the front, Estelle Annette Watts. Her Diary. 1954. I noticed exactly how it was hidden before I took it so I could be sure to put it back the same way. Stell Ann had radar for things out of order.

  A few minutes later I stood on the island of trees that divides Queens Road West, waiting for a car to pass. The tree house, in the middle of a stand of oaks on the last vacant lot from Selwyn Avenue to Kings Drive, was built by kids from several blocks around with lumber they swiped when our house was under construction. Carter was lying on his back, staring up through the leaves. His crew cut was thick and blond, curling back from his forehead like Tab Hunter’s. There was a line of fuzz on his cheek above where he shaved.

  He sat up. “Hey, little squirt.”

  “Call me that again, the deal’s off.”

  “Right. There’s nothing little about you anymore.”

  My cheeks burned.

  “Did you bring it?”

  I nodded and climbed through the doorway, sitting down with my legs folded on the rough boards so I wouldn’t touch him. I pulled the diary from under my shirt, where I’d stuck it inside the waistband of my shorts. “I’ll read you two pages for a dollar. You got the money?”

  He jingled some coins in his pocket. “How’d you know which two pages?”

  “Geee-e-e-e-ez, it was really tough.”

  “So read it.”

  A breeze carried the scent of aftershave. Maybe he was wearing it for me. I sat back against the tree trunk and opened the diary at a scrap of newspaper that marked the place. “Okay, here goes.” I thought about Stell.

  “Well?” He reached into his pocket and brought out two quarters and a half-dollar.

  I began reading.

  “Friday, July 30, 1954. I went to the club dance tonight with Carter and we had a perfectly wonderful time. He brought me a corsage of blue carnations. How did he know the exactly right shade to go with my dress? Probably Mrs. Milton asked Mama. I wore my new silver sandals. My dress has these darling off-the-shoulder sleeves, and Carter didn’t know where to pin the corsage, but Mama did it. Daddy took five pictures and I thought I’d die, because Carter probably thinks I asked Daddy to take the snaps. He was drinking, but not drunk, and he was really nice.”

  “Holy cow.” Carter sat up. “I hadn’t had a thing to drink.”

  “Daddy. She means Daddy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Carter held my hand in the car all the way there. Chappie Barrett was green over my dress. She didn’t say so, but I could tell. Hers was all the way up to the neck with long tight sleeves and was putrid yellow. I think it’s the white one she wore to the prom, renewed with Rit.”

  I turned a page.

  “Is that a whole page already?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m paying for this?”

  “I danced a lot with Carter, once with Reid Henderson, and Ross—”

  “She has his name underlined, with no last name.”

  “I know who she means. Go on.”

  “—and Ross asked me three times but I only danced with him twice. I could tell Carter didn’t like it. We went to Papa’s Kitchen after with a bunch of kids, and Carter kissed me when we got home. I thought I would die of rapture.”

  I snapped the book shut.

  “That’s all?”

  “Yep. Gimme the money.”

  “There’s nothing else in there about me?”

  “Not a word. I’ve read the whole thing.” He handed me the coins, warm from his hand. I wanted to touch the curly hair on his arms. He stood and grabbed a limb, swung away from the tree, and jumped to the ground. “Later, gator,” he hollered, taking off toward his house. I called back, “While, dile,” too low for him to hear, and stretched out in the tree house, holding Stell Ann’s diary and the coins.

  She had mentioned Carter again, in a passage where she said sometimes she thought about dating other boys. In May she’d heard that he went out with another girl. Stell and Carter had a fight about that.

  “I’m gonna tell.” A loud whisper startled me. Puddin climbed into the tree house. She kneeled next to me, hands on her hips, her lower lip stuck out. A shaft of sunlight turned her hair into a cap of gold.

  “You’re gonna tell that I’m in the tree house?”

  “About Stell’s diary.” She twisted her arm and picked at a scab on her elbow.

  I shoved her. She fell over, howling. I jumped on top of her, straddling her waist. “I’ll smack you if you say that again.”

  “You won’t.” Her face was red, but she wasn’t afraid.

  I crumbled beside her. “Daddy’ll whip me.”

  “Did Carter kiss you to make you read Stell’s diary?”

  “He gave me a dollar.”

  Puddin sat up, her hand out. “Gimme it and I won’t tell.” “The whole dollar? I’ll take the whipping.”

  “Seventy-five cents?”

  I slapped a half-dollar on her knee. “Fifty cents. That’s all.”

  She crawled toward the door, the money in her fist. “Oka-a-ay.”

  “Promise you won’t tell.”

  “I promise.” She scrambled down the ladder and ran off through the trees.

  Maggie and I talked about the movie all the way home from the theatre, walk
ing because I didn’t have enough left for the bus. “Couldn’t you just die over Marilyn Monroe?” she said.

  “She’s not a natural blonde.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s a brownette. Her real name is Norma Jeane. I saw pictures in Photoplay.”

  We turned onto Westfield. Reid Henderson passed us on his bicycle, tossing newspapers onto porches. I tried to picture him dancing with Stell Ann. I waved. “Hey, Reid, neat bike.” But he didn’t turn around. I raised my middle finger to his retreating back. “He’s so spastic.”

  Maggie snickered in that fake way she has when I say something she thinks might be clever.

  “What name would you have, if you were a movie star?”

  “Anything besides Margaret Elizabeth,” Maggie answered, imitating her mother’s British accent. “What about you?”

  “Loretta. I don’t know what last name, but my first name would be Loretta.” I loved the sound of it rolling off my tongue.

  “That’s a colored name.”

  “Maggie!”

  “Well, it is.”

  “I’m keeping it.” But I wasn’t as crazy about it as I had been.

  We passed Mrs. Gibson’s house and I saw Daddy’s car parked in our driveway.

  Maggie turned to go home. “Bye, Loretta.”

  “Bye, Margaret Elizabeth. Oh, hey, Mags, wait!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t forget. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, not Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

  “Natch! I’m no dumb blonde.”

  We linked arms and swung in a circle before she spun off for home.

  I opened the den door to a shaded silence that made me want to go back through the breezeway into the sunlight. Mama heard me walking through the den. “June? June Bentley, come here.”

  Mama was standing by the stove when I got to the kitchen. “Hey, Mama. Maggie and I went to see Seven Brides again. Where’s Mary?”