Whistling Past the Graveyard (19 page)

“I ain’t a runaw—” I jumped out of my chair and stood with my whole body stiff. She heard the police call me that, but I couldn’t let her believe it. She’d send me back to Cayuga Springs for sure.
“I’m speaking. You may have your say when I’m finished.” She looked me in the eye and waited until I nodded. “I know most runaways have a reason for their actions, and I wanted to give you time to tell Eula and me the full truth. But time has run out. Ideally I’d check things out before you left me, make certain you really do have a mother in Nashville, but as things stand, I can’t. As long as Eula is escorting you, Nashville is still your destination. We just have to figure out how to get you there in short order.” Miss Cyrena looked at Eula. “Perhaps it would be best to leave James here with me. I can arrange for him to be taken to the police and returned to his family.”
“He was give up!” I said. “Eula told that true, nobody wants him.”
“That doesn’t matter, child. Eula had no right to take him in any case.”
“You can hide him while we stay and build up our money,” I said. “It won’t be long.”
Miss Cyrena shook her head. “There’s no hiding in the Bottoms.”
“I’ll leave by myself,” I said. “The police ain’t lookin’ for Eula, just me. I started out for Nashville by myself anyhow.” As soon as I said it, my chest felt like it’d been hit by a baseball bat. How could I leave Eula and not make sure she was all right? And baby James . . . But I was the one they were looking for. “Nobody knows about Wallace. If I go, they won’t bother Eula, right?”
Eula and Miss Cyrena both said, “No!” at the same time. Then Eula finished, “You ain’t goin’ anywhere alone.”
“That’s a fact,” Miss Cyrena said.
“If you don’t go to Nashville with me, maybe they’ll never find you,” I said. “Maybe they’ll decide somebody else killed Wallace and you can go on livin’ here with Miss Cyrena bakin’ pies.”
“What about James?” Miss Cyrena asked. “How are we to explain a white baby?”
“You said you’d take him to the police, have him give back to his momma.” As soon as I said that, I got a cold spot in my belly. Baby James needed me as much as Eula did. How could I let him get handed off to just anybody? What if they couldn’t find his momma? What if she was a bad person? But if it kept Eula out of trouble  .  .  . My thoughts was getting all tangled again.
“If Eula stays, that will be impossible. There will be too many questions. I have connections, but there’s a limit to how much they can do.” Miss Cyrena got up and started to walk back and forth across the kitchen. “No. We have to get you two out of here. I’ve got some money put by, but it’s in the bank and I can’t get it until Monday. Then it’ll take the time to fix the truck . . .” She shook her head. “No. That just won’t work.”
“We ain’t leavin’ James,” I said. “He’ll go with us. Momma will figure it out. Eula said he was abandoned. Nobody’s looking for him. Momma can say she found him on a church step.”
Miss Cyrena stopped for a second. “It might be better if a white woman handles getting him to the authorities.”
I nodded. “Momma will take care of it. She’s famous, and famous people can do things.”
Miss Cyrena started to say something, but closed her mouth back up.
Then she started pacing again. “As for Wallace’s death, perhaps no one will investigate. Awful things happen to poor black men all of the time and the police look the other way. If they do come after you, you acted in self-defense, Starla can testify to that. But James must be turned over to the authorities long before it comes to that.”
“You right,” Eula said, but it was so quiet that I could barely hear her. “But I ain’t sure I can live with that. I done wrong and need to account.”
“Eula, the only one who needs to account is Wallace. And he’s before his maker doing that right now. If you hadn’t acted . . .” Miss Cyrena stopped. “Well, things would have been worse, so very much worse.”
She went over and hugged Eula tight. She was so much shorter than Eula her arms went around Eula’s waist and her head was against Eula’s chest.They stayed that way for a bit. I stood and watched, feeling again like a polar bear with regular bears.
Miss Cyrena let Eula go. “You’re welcome to come back to me, once you have Starla to her mother and James safely in the hands of the authorities. I can help you get set up with a new life somewhere. Here in town if you like.”
“Eula’s staying with me and Momma!”
Eula stayed quiet, but she looked a little unsure.
“One step at a time, Starla. Eula needs to know she has options. She’s spent her whole life being told what to do. It’s time for her to have the right to choose.”
I felt a little bad then. “Yes, ma’am.” Eula loved the baking business. She wanted a baby like James, but she’d kinda got stuck with me by accident. It made me a little squirmy wondering what she would choose.
“All right,” Miss Cyrena said. “We just have to figure out how to get you there quickly and safely.”
She fetched a step stool, then opened the cupboard and reached high on the top shelf. When she climbed back down, she had a coffee can in her hands. “I’ve probably enough in here for bus fare and still leave you a little extra. Of course, you can’t leave from here. I’ll drive you to the station in Jackson. We’ll leave before light. Hopefully we can get you on an early bus and you’ll be in Nashville by tomorrow evening.” She started moving around the kitchen and talking faster and faster. “I’ll pack lunches. You two will have to pretend not to know one another. We’ll wrap James up so nobody can see he’s white.” Then she looked at me. “But first we’ll have to deal with that hair.”
“Huh?”
“Your hair. It’s too easily spotted; makes you stand out.” She hurried out of the kitchen. Eula and I looked at one another as we heard her ratting around in the bathroom. When she came back, she had a towel with black smudges all over it in one hand and a box in the other. “Lucky for you, I color Mrs. Washington’s hair for her; she’s so sensitive to the fumes she has to sit with her eyes closed and her nose pinched, but that woman is so vain.” Miss Cyrena shook her head. “If it gets rid of gray, it should tone down that red.”
I covered my hair with my hands. Mamie had threatened to dye my hair lots of times, saying it might take some of the wild out of me. Each time I’d got more attached to its redness.
I looked at Eula. “Don’t let her.”
She said, “Couldn’t we just put a hat on her?”
“It’s over ninety degrees out. That would flag her up more than her red hair.”
Eula shook her head real sad as she took the box from Miss Cyrena.
An hour later I was looking in the bathroom mirror at a girl who didn’t look like me. I put a towel over my hair and I came back. I took it off and looked at the black-haired me again.
Mamie was wrong. I felt wilder inside than I ever had. Me and Eula was upstairs packing up our stuff with the curtains closed, lit up only by a flashlight. Miss Cyrena was downstairs in the kitchen feeding baby James so he’d be ready to travel.
All the sudden, there come a holler from outside, awful name-callin’, then a crash and a flash of light. I was close to the window, so I jerked the curtain open. Right before Eula yanked me away, I saw the Jenkins truck speed away. The one headlight made me sure. They was still hollerin’.
I heard Miss Cyrena running toward the front of the house.
“Fire! Fire!” Her feet thudded back toward the kitchen. “Fire!”
Eula and me near knocked one another over trying to get down the stairs first. I stopped dead at the bottom in front of the open door. Flames was lickin’ across the porch floor.
Eula pushed past me and run to the kitchen, just as Miss Cyrena come running back with a soup pot full of water.
“Starla! Water!”
That snapped me back to myself. I run to the kitchen. James was laying on the floor, squallin’’cause he wasn’t done eating.
By the time I grabbed a pan and was back to the front door, Eula and Miss Cyrena was headed back to the kitchen. I flung water onto the fire and saw people on the other side, flingin’ water themselves. After I’d made three trips, the fire was small enough some man come up on the porch and stomped the last flickers out. I heard glass crunching under his shoes.
“Now you gonna listen to us?” he asked, kinda nastylike considering Miss Cyrena was the one whose house got fire throwed at it.
I wished I’d broke out both headlights, then them Jenkins boys wouldn’t’a been able to see to drive down to the Bottoms tonight. I started to shake a little. What if we’d been asleep like we was supposed to be? Would that fire have ate the whole house? Would we have got out?
Cletus was standing just off the steps. He was looking at me funny. I couldn’t tell if he was sorry for me or mad at me. Some of the others were looking at me, too, their eyes white in the moonlight.
I turned around and went back inside the house. But I kept my ears outside.
“You not gonna be satisfied till they burn you to the ground.” I recognized Mrs. Washington’s voice.
I wanted to stomp out there and tell them it was my fault, not Miss Cyrena’s. But all of the sudden the whiteness of my skin made me too ashamed.

21

M

iss Cyrena parked her car around the corner and two blocks away from the Jackson bus station. We’d been careful when we left Miss Cyrena’s at four o’clock in the morning. Careful nobody was following, especially somebody with just one headlight. Miss Cyrena figured four o’clock was ’bout the safest time to bolt. She said the drunk ones was too far gone and it was too early for anyone else to be up and out.

She’d been right. We didn’t even see a car moving—except for the milkman’s truck—as we drove out of that town.
Now the sun peeked up over the tall buildings. There were so many of them! Jackson was the biggest city I’d ever seen. I wanted to jump out and take a look around, but Miss Cyrena said we had to follow the plan—and me looking around Jackson wasn’t in it. I know I’d already caused Miss Cyrena enough trouble by doing what I wasn’t supposed to. I’d self-promised not to disobey her again. I did hope I’d get back here someday. I wanted to get up high in one of those buildings and see how far I could see. I wondered if people looked like bugs from up there. I bet you could drop water balloons from a window, duck back, and never have anybody know where it come from.
Then I got a thought. Nashville was a city. Would it have tall buildings, too? Maybe Momma lived in one and I could try my water-balloon idea before we moved to our big house with horses and whatnot.
“You all wait here while I go and purchase tickets,” Miss Cyrena said. “That way you won’t be seen together near the station.” She turned around and looked over the seat at me. “Do you remember everything I said?”
I nodded. Then I safety-pinned the note on my shirt that Miss Cyrena had printed before we left her house. I felt like a stupid baby wearing it. It had my pretend name and my momma’s famous name:

Sarah Langsdon
Destination: Nashville / Lulu Langsdon Emergency call: 601/KL5–2942

It was Miss Cyrena’s phone number. If somebody called, she was going to pretend to be my grandma I’d just visited.
“I know you can fabricate a whale of a story, Starla,” she said, looking serious, “but please stick to the one we discussed. If I get a call, it’s important that our stories match.”
“I know. I know.” Miss Cyrena’s story was boring; a dumbbell could remember it. I had been visitin’ my grandma in Jackson and was headed home alone on the bus to Momma. Big deal. I could think up something a whole lot more exciting; this story didn’t even have anybody dyin’ in it.
She turned back around. “All right then. Here I go.” She opened the door and we watched her walk down the street toward the bus station.
I was kinda excited, this was my first time on a bus,’cept for a school bus anyhow. Eula didn’t seem excited. She seemed nervous, looking around like she expected somebody to come and arrest her.
“Stop lookin’ so guilty, you’ll give us away. We’re just gonna be riding a bus,” I said. “Easy as pie.”
She looked at me.“Remember when we bakin’, and what I say about overworked crust? You and me, we done pushed our luck ’bout as far as a body dare. We overworked crust. Things ain’t gonna turn out good.”
“Once we’re on the bus, what can happen? We’ll get to Nashville by tonight and find Momma.”
“I hear ’bout plenty that happen on a bus. Plenty. Specially to colored.”
“What you mean? What could happen on a bus even if you was colored?”
“You right. Nothin’ gonna happen on the bus.”
“But you said—”
“You got that ad-dress from your memory yet?” She shifted and put her arm on the back of the seat to see me better. I shook my head and my cheeks burned. I only had to come up with one thing, one thing, to help us get to Momma, and it was hiding from my brain. Miss Cyrena had been worried about where we was gonna go once we got to Nashville. I’d told her that my momma was famous and would be easy to find. She said that wasn’t good enough. She wanted an address. That’s when my brain got stuck. I couldn’t think of one thing about Nashville—even the name of the recording studio on Momma’s record disappeared. I told her Mamie never let me write to Momma, so how could I know an address? Then Miss Cyrena had asked if I got mail from Momma. I don’t know why I didn’t think of the return addresses on my birthday cards before. Trouble was, every card had had a different address and I didn’t pay much attention—Momma was supposed to come and get me. I wasn’t supposed to have to find her.
I’d been closing my eyes and trying to picture the last birthday-card envelope in my head, just like Miss Cyrena said to. I remembered a street that started with a
B
on one envelope. And another one with a street that was a number. I didn’t remember which one came first, or the whole name of either one. Miss Cyrena said to watch the street signs when we got to Nashville, in case one made my memory come back.
Eula reached back and patted my knee. “It’ll come.” But her face didn’t look like she believed it.
I was just getting ready to make Eula tell me what happens to coloreds on the bus when I saw Miss Cyrena. She was almost running back down the street. Her pocketbook bounced against her hip and her hat slid sideways. She held two tickets in her glove. (Even though we’d had to hurry when we left her house, she’d made sure she was presentable so nobody’d give her “a second look.”)
We got out and met her on the sidewalk with our suitcases, Eula with her grip and me with one from the charity box. Miss Cyrena called it an “overnight case.” It looked more like a box than a suitcase. It was black patent leather with a picture of Barbie on the top. I had a little canvas bag with baby James’s stuff from the charity box, too. And, course, our sack lunches.
“No time to waste.” Miss Cyrena handed one ticket to me and the other to Eula, who was getting baby James wrapped up in a thin blanket from the charity box, so no one could see his face. “The bus is boarding. It’s not an express, so it’ll take longer. But it’ll get you out of town immediately.”
She took the baby’s bag from me and handed it to Eula. I wished I could go with her so she didn’t have to juggle all of that stuff. But Miss Cyrena had been real clear on her plan.
“Eula, you go first.” She grabbed Eula in a hard, quick hug. “Bless you. And remember what I said about coming back.”
Eula nodded. “I can’t thank—”
Miss Cyrena shooed her on. “No thanks needed. Just keep your head down and stay safe.”
Eula picked up her grip and hurried away. She held baby James so tight to her chest, I was afraid he might not be able to breathe.
Miss Cyrena said to me, “Keep that phone number.” She tapped the note on my shirt. “Call me if you have any troubles. Collect.”
She looked up. Eula had turned the corner.
“Now you. Remember the story. Your grandma dropped you at the station and had to get on to work.” She nodded as she talked, like she was agreein’ with herself. “I called the bus station from a pay phone and told them you’d be traveling alone and to inform your driver.”
“Yes, Miss Cyrena.”
“And don’t even look at Eula. That shouldn’t be a problem at the segregated stations. But on the bus, you need to treat her as you would a stranger. Once you get to Nashville, walk out the front entrance to the bus station, turn right, and walk two blocks. Eula will meet you there.”
“I know. I know.”
“And if you don’t find your mother—”
“I will!” She’d been getting my back up with all this talk about my momma not really being in Nashville, not being famous enough to find.
She closed her eyes for a second. “But if you don’t, go to a Baptist church—a colored Baptist church. Someone there will help you.”
“I got it!” I wasn’t nervous, but she was making me get that way. I just wanted to get on that bus and go.
I was surprised when she grabbed me in a hug. It was over almost before I could blink. “Take care of yourself. Take care of Eula.”
“You don’t need to tell me. I’ll always take care of her.”
She nodded. “Go then. Before the bus pulls out without you.”
That thought put fire under my feet. I ran as fast as my Red Ball Jets would carry me.