Lunch-Box Dream

Lunch in a Jim Crow Car

Get out the lunch-box of your dreams.

Bite into the sandwich of your heart, And ride the Jim Crow car until it screams Then—like an atom bomb—it bursts apart.
—Langston Hughes

Cleveland

Bobby

Ricky,
Bobby's older brother

Marion,
their mother

Grandma,
their grandmother

Atlanta

Louisa Thomas (Weeza)

Jacob Thomas,
Louisa's younger brother, age nine

Hershel Thomas,
Louisa's husband

Ruth Vann,
Hershel and Frank's mother

Ellis Vann,
Hershel's stepfather

James and Jimmy Sharp,
residents of the city

Dalton

Frank Thomas,
Hershel's brother

Olivia Thomas,
Frank's wife

Cora Baker,
Olivia's younger sister, age fifteen

Irene and Albert Baker,
Olivia and Cora's parents

One of the men began to hum, then hum with his mouth open, then sing.

Cast of Characters

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Author's Note

Thursday, June 11, 1959

They called them chocolate men, Bobby and his brother.

You didn't see them on the East Side, high over Euclid, except once or twice a week and only early in the morning.

Where did they come from? There were no chocolate boys and girls in his school or at church. There were no chocolate ladies living in his neighborhood. There were no chocolate families at the park or the outdoor theater or the ball field. And yet the men came every week to his house.

That morning, as he lay on the grass by the sidewalk, Bobby heard them coming again.

First there was the roar and squeal of the big truck. That was far up the street. It was early, the time when the sun edged over the rooftops, but warm for the middle of June. Bobby was sharpening Popsicle sticks into little knives while his brother watched.

“Hurry up,” Ricky said.

Or not, thought Bobby. You have to do this properly. To sharpen a stick correctly you scraped it slantways against the sidewalk seams, and it took a while. With each stroke, you drew the stick toward you or pushed it away from you in a curving motion, like a barber stropping his razor in a Western movie.

Bobby wanted a thin blade, and his cheek was right down there above the sidewalk, with one eye squeezed shut to focus on the motion of his hand. The concrete scratched his knuckles, whited his skin, but you had to do it that way. You needed to scrape the stick nearly flat against the sidewalk to give you the thinnest blade.

Bobby would use the knife for little things. It could be a tool, or a weapon in a soldier game; it might be used to carve modeling clay, or as a casually found stick that on the utterance of a secret phrase became a lost cutlass of legend; or as a makeshift sidearm for defense on the schoolyard; or as nothing much, a thing to stab trees with or to jab into the ground to unearth bugs and roots or to press against your pocketed palm as you walked through stores downtown.

If his mother found one, she tossed it away.

Or he suspected she did. He had seen his sticks snapped in half in the wastebasket and he didn't think his brother threw them there. It was Ricky who had taught him how to shape the knives, though he didn't make them himself anymore. And it wasn't their father, because he was hardly home these days.

“Hurry up,” Ricky said.

“This one will be good,” said Bobby, taking his time to get the sharpest edge. “Maybe my best.”

The truck moved, then stopped, then moved and stopped closer. The boys looked up. They watched the chocolate men jump off the sides of the truck. The ash cans were loud when they scraped them over the sidewalk and into the street, dragging them with leathery hands. Their yelling was not like the sound of the brown men and women who sang and played pianos on television. They approached, crisscrossing the sidewalk.

“That's it,” said Ricky. “I don't want to be here when they come. I'm going in.”

Bobby scooped up his knives, and the two boys ran inside. Ricky, a year older, was faster. They pulled the living room drapes aside and through the big window saw their cans being scraped and lifted.

“That one guy's huge.”

“Did you see that? He took both Downings' cans at the same time.”

Thick bare brown arms raised and shook the cans, the truck swallowed the trash, the cans were swung back and set down, and the men were on to the next house and the next. The boys watched from the picture window until the men disappeared down Cliffview to wherever they had come from.

“Let's go out back,” said Ricky.

“I want to watch TV,” Bobby said.

“No, let's go out back. I have a tennis ball.”

“Bring the cans into the carport, please,” said their mother. “Then breakfast. I have something to tell you.”

“In a minute, Mom,” Ricky called. To Bobby he said: “Let's go out back first.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“We're going to drive Grandma home,” their mother said after she found them in the backyard and shooed them into the kitchen.

Ricky looked up from his plate of French toast. He pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose and blinked. “What, where?”

“Grandma. Home,” she said.

Their mother was tall and slim, still young, and wore a print summer dress and sandals. As she spoke, she leaned back against the counter with the sink behind her. She smelled of lotion and egg batter and cinnamon, and her face was strained.

“We're going to drive Grandma home to Florida.”

Bobby glanced over at his grandmother. She was sitting at the table between him and his brother, but talk often floated around her as if she wasn't there. She was Hungarian. Her accent was heavy and her English was slow and odd. She had come over from Hungary in the 1920s and said “vindshield vipers.”

“Drive?” Bobby said, licking his fork and wondering what lay behind his mother's expression. Was it something he had done? Not coming in when she first called? Or hadn't he heard her on the phone that morning? Had his father said something to upset her? “Will our car even make it all the way?” he asked. “It stalls a lot. And smells when it rains—”

“No, not Suzabelle,” she said. “Not our car. We're driving Grandma's car. She wants it down there with her.”

Bobby looked at Grandma longer this time. Her eyes were trained on his mother. Grandma's face was pouchy, wrinkled, hollowed since he'd last seen her months ago, and strange to kiss, like kissing a soft cloth bag, as he had to do every bedtime. Her skin was olive like the circles he noticed under his mother's eyes. Was that a Hungarian thing? Would he get them, too?

“It's good on the road,” his mother said. “The Chrysler.”

Bobby had nearly forgotten about the big green car. It had been parked around the corner for three weeks doing nothing because no one drove it. They called it Grandma's car, but Grandma didn't really drive it. She didn't know how to drive.

“All the way?” said Ricky. He sat back in his chair, away from the table, as if ready to talk in place of their father. “It's a thousand miles, you know. A thousand miles from here to Florida by car.”

Chuckling, Bobby thought to himself: It's a thousand miles by buses and trains, too! Or maybe not, he thought. Ricky studied maps and knew distances, so maybe not.

“Probably close to thirteen hundred miles, depending on your route…” Ricky added, so Bobby guessed he really did know how far it was.

“Yes, I know,” said their mother, pulling a narrow spiral-bound notebook out of a stack of papers on the counter, “but we're going to make a vacation of it. And on the way…”—she let her eyes float from Ricky to Bobby and back—“…we're going to stop at battlefields. The Civil War battlefields in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia—”

“Battlefields?” Ricky dropped his fork on his plate and roared. “Are you kidding? Battlefields? Yes! Mom! Yes!” He jumped from the table and stomped up and down loudly on the kitchen floor. “Georgia? The Atlanta Campaign! Chickamauga! Yes! And yes! And yes!”

“Richie—” said his grandmother. “Please—”

Battlefields, thought Bobby. He wondered if his grandmother knew what they were. What did she know about the Civil War? He looked at her face now that it was turned toward his brother. She was old, but he didn't know how old. Seventy? Eighty? Then he remembered his mother had told him she was born in the first year of the century. So she was fifty-nine. Was that still old?

Grandma had arrived three weeks ago, after being driven by a friend from Florida to visit Grandpa's grave in Youngstown. They had then continued on to Cleveland, leaving Grandma and her car with them at their house on Cliffview Road. Grandpa had died four months before.

It was Bobby's first death.

That was something.