Tomorrow's Bread Read online

  “Mm-hmm,” I say. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Uncle Ray folds his long legs into a squat beside the walk, poking at the ground, smoke drifting from his pipe.

  I look past him toward Watts Street, pulling the letter from my pocket.

  Uncle Ray stands, stretches. “What you got there?”

  “A notice from the City of Charlotte. We knew it was coming and here it is.” I hold out the envelope.

  He reaches for it, reads the front. “Mrs. Livinia Hawkins. Did you show it to Livvie?” Uncle Ray always calls Bibi by the nickname he’s used since they were children.

  “She wouldn’t understand it.”

  “Dated February 28, 1961. Why have you been carrying it around for close to a month?”

  I don’t answer, just stare into the dusk. Out in the road a pole lamp comes on, glistening in puddles.

  He sits careful on the steps, touches my foot. “We can’t know how a thing’s gon turn out.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Reverend Ebenezer Gabriel Polk sat by his dining room window, staring at motes of dust in a sunbeam that fell across his Bible. He preferred the Revised Standard Version for his personal worship, felt it was the clearest word of God, though he had not convinced his flock of that.

  The church’s worn King James stayed at the pulpit, so he could read from it during sermons, as the congregation expected. The opening pages of the old Bible recorded the history of the church. St. Timothy’s Second Presbyterian was Second Presbyterian Church Colored when it was founded in 1842. After the Civil War the elders elected to drop “Colored” and add St. Timothy. Why, he often wondered, with that pale saint’s Catholic connections?

  As he had done most of his life, he closed his eyes, wandered through the Bible, flipping pages. In his previous reading, he’d opened to Isaiah, where he was reminded to exalt the Lord and praise His name throughout all the earth. Such commands bothered him. Why would a deity need blatant worship that approached flattery? He varied his readings as much as possible, hoping for spiritual guidance. With his finger sliding down the inside column of the left page toward the end of the Bible, he opened his eyes enough to be sure he wasn’t in Revelation, which he didn’t like or trust or understand. At I Peter 4:7, he focused and began to read, “The end of all things is at hand; therefore keep sane and sober for your prayers.”

  The end of all things. Those graves. The sacred resting places that would now be uprooted, with him unable to stop the looming desecration. The oldest plots in the cemetery distressed him the most. Unmarked or poorly so, often only by a rock at head and foot, where several bodies might be in one site, given the way folks disposed of slave remains. But every one of them had souls that went on to heaven, according to what he’d been taught.

  He flexed his right leg before standing, bracing himself on the mahogany table Nettie had brought to their marriage, waiting for the fiery throbbing in his knee to ease enough for him to fix lunch. “Arthritis has got me, dear girl,” he said to the framed photo on the buffet. He loved that image of Nettie. They’d gone to the state fair, where a roving photographer caught her laughing at something he couldn’t remember. Her mouth slightly open, sunlight on her curls.

  Her death three years earlier still bewildered him. One day she didn’t feel well and the next she was moaning in pain. Then she passed. That’s how the progression of her illness felt to him. Dead at diagnosis, he’d overheard someone say at the hospital, and felt again that mix of grief and powerlessness. “Palliative care,” her doctor had told him, adding, as if there were no way he could have understood, “she won’t suffer.” How could they know, those doctors with their needles and pills, whether his Nettie suffered? He’d sat by her bed for a month, held her, talked to her as if she could hear him, while she slipped away into . . . what? His concept of heaven shifted during her final days and he could never again say with certainty that there was anything after this life.

  Through the window he saw the backhoe sitting out on McDowell. Reason told him that even the greediest of developers wouldn’t take such a machine into the graveyard to eat away at it, but the metal hulk sat there in an attitude of threat. At the last appointment with the city they’d said he had to decide on the options for moving the church. No, not options. The church had to move and there was no choice in that, but he could decide how it would be accomplished. They’d given him that much. He took their recommendations to the elders and the women’s circle, which so far hadn’t agreed on anything.

  The phone rang. He limped around the dining table to answer it. His brother’s voice rang out, “Hey, Neezer, whus up?”

  Neezer, the childhood nickname that had once been his brand—back when a boy from his gang challenged, “Hey, man, whus yo brand?” and he proudly sang out, “Neezer!” His brother never called him anything else.

  “I’m well, Oscar. You?”

  “I found a man gon help you.”

  He was used to his older brother’s sudden shifts. “What man, help me how?”

  “He gon look at the graveyard for you.”

  “All right.”

  “A white man.”

  “Who is this fellow?”

  “He do annapology, some such, digging around where folks has lived a long time, seeing what’s left.”

  “An anthropologist?”

  “Sound about right.”

  “And where did you come on an anthropologist?”

  “He hanging around Stone’s, axing whus coming down in Brooklyn. Benjy and Hildie told him about the church, that the city gon move them graves. The man lit up like he know about such stuff. I tell him my brother’s the preacher.” He sniffed loudly. “Can’t hurt to talk to him, even if he white.”

  “No, can’t hurt.”

  “Catch you later, Neezer.” And as suddenly as the conversation had begun, it ended.

  Neezer. The nickname made him feel like a boy again, the same as when certain smells brought back memories. Wet pine boards after a long rain. Smoke from a coal fire. Oatmeal boiled with cinnamon, a frequent supper when he was a child. The iron tang of blood and a whiff of Clorox from the Dutch Cleanser his mother used, trying to scrub away the stains. But the faint brown splotches were still there, the last time he’d seen the floor of the front hall in their shotgun house on East Second Street.

  “Oscar? Ebenezer? Supper!” He crawled out of the culvert, his head cocked, listening. “C’mon, Oscar, she mean it!” His brother’s skin was the color of midnight, making him invisible in the depths of the concrete runoff drain for Little Sugar. Their favorite hiding place during games of hoods and pigs, even if the other boys knew it and would find them there eventually. He ran up East Second toward home, calling back to his brother, “I ain’t gon catch no whupping like you is.”

  At the house, he crouched and jumped over the three front steps, landing flat on both feet on the stoop, which shook under his tennis shoes. “I’m home, Mama!” He opened the screen door wide, let it slam against the unpainted siding. “I’m home!”

  His mother called from the kitchen, “Any fool could hear that. Get on in here.”

  In the kitchen, Mama stirred something on the hotplate. He said, “Oscar ain’t with me, he in the—” He stopped short. His brother sat at the kitchen table, grinning.

  “Hey, Neezer. You seed a ghost?”

  “How you do that, get home before me? You was still in the pipe.”

  Mama cuffed his head. “Y’all don’t mess around in that creek. I tole you.”

  Behind her back, his brother stuck out his tongue.

  “We didn’t go much in the pipe, Mama, only the mouth of it.”

  She took a steaming pot off the two-burner hotplate. “Y’all remember the Cookley boys, last year? Both of ’em lost in that creek.”

  “Shouldna gone in it with rain coming,” said Oscar. “We not stupid like no drownded Cookley boys.”

  “Broke Elna Cookley’s heart,” she said. “Y’all wash up. Eben, get your sister and come
eat.”

  He stepped into the hallway that ran the depth of the house. “Mary Day? Supper!”

  Oscar shoved past him. “Me first! You hasta pump.”

  Outside the brothers elbowed each other until Oscar—taller, heavier, stronger—won. Neezer pumped while Oscar washed up in the cold water.

  Mary Day called from the back door, “Y’all hurry or ain’t gon be no supper left.”

  Eben shook his dripping hands, ran into the kitchen. “What we having, Mama?”

  “Mashed potatoes, beans cooked with ham bone, apples.”

  “Just bone, no meat?” Oscar wedged his long legs under the table. He wore his hair parted high on the right and combed into a kinky wave he called his New York look. He was the darkest of the children, a startling ebony. Mary Day’s smooth skin was golden, her copper-colored curls coiled on her neck. Already as tall as their mother and only twelve. He’d heard Mama say more than once that Mary Day would be bringing boys home soon enough.

  He was Mama’s favorite, something he felt, even if she tried not to show it. She’d told him once that God had blessed him with milk chocolate skin and almost straight brown hair, serious hazel eyes. She always added that he thought about things too much. But he was the one she trusted to watch after Mary Day.

  “You too skinny, boy,” Mama nudged him. “Nothing but knees and elbows.”

  Oscar reached for a heaping bowl. “Hey, Mama, pass me some them beans with no ham just bone.”

  “Seem to me if you eat like a man, you could get a man’s job.”

  “I’m trying, Mama, I tole you that.” Oscar handed Mary Day the mashed potatoes. “How’s my favorite little sister?”

  “I’m your onliest sister, Carman.” Mary Day frowned at the familiar joke.

  Oscar laughed. “You the onliest one use my brand, little sister. I’m Carman now, y’all, I keep telling you.”

  Mama said, “Carman? Not gon get you a car till you get you a job.”

  “He been doing what a man do,” Mary Day said. “I seen him.”

  Oscar’s hand shot out, but Mary Day dodged it.

  Mama looked at Oscar. “What you been doing?”

  “She don’t know nothing.” Oscar frowned at Mary Day.

  “Uh-huh,” said Mary Day. “You ax Lulu about dat.”

  Oscar stood and Mary Day ducked under the table.

  “Elmore Clarkson’s girl?” his mother asked.

  Nobody said anything.

  “What you been doing with her?”

  From under the table Mary Day said, “What a man do.”

  Lulu turned up pregnant and named Oscar as the father. Elmore Clarkson came looking for Oscar with a loaded pistol to get him to the altar, as he put it, “in a necktie or a coffin, however he want it.” Elmore’s pistol wasn’t the only thing loaded. He’d had so much to drink he couldn’t see straight, and when he got to 1024 East Second, he pulled out the pistol and aimed at the screen door. Something moved inside and he bellowed, “Oscar Polk, you gon marry my daughter, you hear me?”

  Whatever moved called out, “What you saying?”

  Elmore took that for a denial and pulled the trigger.

  Mary Day bled to death in the front hall as Neezer ran for the doctor, who said later that even if he’d been standing beside the girl when the bullet entered her chest, he couldn’t have saved her.

  Lulu’s baby came out mostly white—not likely a child of black Oscar’s. Elmore hung himself in jail, and Neezer made a vow to his mother. “I’m gon get us off Second Street.”

  CHAPTER 3

  On that steamy afternoon in July 1955, when Persy Marshall first went into Brooklyn, she left her home on Sterling Road feeling in charge of her life. No one knew where she was headed.

  On East Hill Street she was startled by what she saw: a block of unpainted shacks hugging the curb, no more than six feet of alley between them. Wooden chairs on tiny stoops, garbage cans curbside. A cloud of dust rose in her rearview mirror. She turned onto Myers Street and passed several pastel bungalows with picket fences.

  In the front yard of 704 South Myers was a sign: MRS. ROBERTA STOKES, SEAMSTRESS. She sat and looked at the blue house with its white shutters and tidy lawn, azaleas to each side of a stone walk leading to a porch with a rocker, potted begonias, hanging ferns. What would it be like to live by myself in a cozy house like this? She got out awkwardly, sliding her swollen belly from under the steering wheel and locking the car. Her heels thumped hollowly on the front porch. A note above a brass button said, “Please ring bell.” She stood for a moment by the rocker before pressing the bell.

  The woman who came to the door was at least six feet tall and fair-skinned, with the doe-colored hair of blond going silver. If Persy had seen her from the back on a city street, she would have taken her for white. Mulatto. The woman looked at her directly. “Yes?”

  “I called you several days ago. Mrs. Blaire Marshall?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you’re wanting a christening gown. I’m Roberta Stokes. Come on in.” The woman opened the screen and gestured to a chintz sofa. Angled beside the couch was a green corduroy easy chair. Starched curtains in the windows. Beaded flowers in a vase beneath a wall of photos. This could be a neighbor’s house in Myers Park.

  “Have a seat. I’ll go get my pictures. Oh, you want a Coke or a glass of water? I could make ice tea but that’d take a while.”

  “Water, please.” Persy sat on the sofa.

  She smelled something familiar, pleasant. Gardenias in a bowl on an end table by her elbow. Not a hint of brown, they must have been picked that morning.

  The woman returned with a glass of water and a photo album, sat down next to her. “This book shows what I can do.”

  Persy turned several pages. “Mrs. Stokes, your work is elegant.”

  “You call me Roberta.”

  “Thank you, and I’m Persy.”

  “No, ma’am, you’re Mrs. Marshall. That’s the way it is.”

  “All right, Mrs. Stokes.” That’s the way it should be.

  Mrs. Stokes smiled, pointed to a dividing tab in the black three-ring binder. “That section is baby clothes, christening gowns. What are you folks, Episcopal?”

  “Mostly Presbyterian.”

  “Mostly?”

  “A few Baptists and Methodists along the way. At least two Unitarians I know of.”

  “I’ve not heard of that one.”

  Persy turned a page and there it was, exactly what she’d dreamed of. Lace around the neck. Smocking created tiny gathers that spilled into the length of the gown. Long sleeves ended in cuffs with satin ribbons to tie around a baby’s wrists. At the hem, another ribbon wove in and out of the white cotton. She touched the photo. “Exquisite. Do you do all this work yourself?”

  “I do. Learned from my grand when I was a girl.” Mrs. Stokes pointed to the hem of the dress. “That’s my own touch. Can make that ribbon blue or pink, or I could leave it white.”

  She felt a kick below her breastbone. Is the baby voting for white? “How long will it take you to do this one for me?”

  Mrs. Stokes looked at Persy’s belly. “You’re what, about seven months gone?”

  “I’m due the middle of September.”

  “Shame you have to go through the heat of summer carrying a baby.”

  “I’m glad to be this far along. I lost two early on.” The words slipped out. She rarely talked about what the doctor called spontaneous abortions.

  “That’s a heartbreaking thing. Yes, ma’am. We get all excited, then bang, it’s over.”

  “You’ve miscarried?”

  “Twice, same as you. Never did get a baby that lived.” Mrs. Stokes pushed back a stray hair. “That’s maybe why I make these gowns. Started in with them after I lost number two.”

  Number two, what an odd way to put it. “Did you find out what went wrong?”

  “Midwife say it was the way of God that we can’t know. Dr. Wilkins—he’s in that blue house on Brevard—say my womb is t
ipped and the seed planted wrong. Something like that. Then Dennis, my husband, he passed. I reckon I weren’t meant to have children.”

  She sounded as if she had accepted her inability to be a mother. Persy envied that.

  Mrs. Stokes said, “But you could even have another one after this, young as you are.”

  “I’m forty-four.”

  “You sure don’t look it.” Mrs. Stokes took a small pad from her pocket. “That one’s fifteen dollars for the sewing. Some ladies like to bring me the fabric they want, or I can get it, which will be two dollars extra, and fifty cents for thread and ribbons. I like to buy them myself.”

  “That’s so little for such a fine piece.”

  “I make out. Don’t like to ask too much.”

  Persy opened her purse and took out a twenty-dollar bill. “Why don’t we make it twenty even, and you buy what you choose.”

  “It’ll be seventeen-fifty, and you don’t pay me till you see it. You won’t be obliged. I can always sell it.” The phone rang and she held up a finger, listening. “That’s me. Be right back.”

  Persy heard her say, “Hey there. No, got a lady here seeing about a baby gown.” A pause. “I sure enough be there. Wouldn’t miss a party.” A laugh. “You do that. Say hey to you folks for me.” Silence. “Helen, you on the line? If you listening, Helen, you not going to learn a thing.” A click.

  She came back to the living room. “That’s a party line for you. Some folks can’t help listening in.”

  She sat back down next to Persy, made a note on her pad. “So it’s number eight, the christening special, seventeen-fifty. I got your phone number. You mind standing up? I’m going to tell you something.”

  Persy struggled to push herself up off the sofa.

  A long look. “Now turn sideways. Um-hmm. It’s a boy. Anybody told you that?”