Celeste's Harlem Renaissance (5 page)

“That was something I remembered from a St. Paul sermon,” I whispered. I didn’t believe those words.

The wagon slowed and stopped. Colored people strolled around on the train station platform, shouting over the train and motorcar noises. Poppa helped me down to the ground. I saw Mr. Smithfield in his black jacket, black pants, and black cap. He waved at us to come over. I heaved my feet along like I wore horseshoes instead of my Buster Browns. Mr. Bivens handed my valise to Mr. Smithfield and my lunch basket to me. I held tight to my schoolbag and violin.

Poppa whispered, “I love you, girlio. Gimme a kiss and a big smile. You’ll be back soon and I’ll be fine. Everything’ll be all right.”

I set down my stuff, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and squeezed until he coughed. My face was too crumpled up to give him a good smile. My tummy was twisted up so bad it probably looked like a pretzel. The next thing I knew, my things and I were stumbling up the train steps behind Mr. Smithfield. “You play my niece on this trip,” he said. “Follow close, now.”

Our Colored section of the train was crammed with grown folks, children, boxes, coal dust, and steamy air that reeked like rotten vegetables. Mr. Smithfield showed me to a seat by a woman and across from a frowning, skinny-as-a-beanpole, bald-headed boy pushing at three small children. The boy shoved at them as if he was trying to keep them stacked like the books on our bookshelves. “Don’t talk to nobody but these nice folks here,” Mr. Smithfield said. “I’ll watch your valise.”

The woman yawned and smiled at me. “That your kinfolks?” She pointed out the open window to Poppa and Mr. Bivens waving on the platform. As the train wheels screeched into motion, I waved back until I couldn’t see my father or even the train station anymore. Mr. Smithfield shouted out greetings up and down the aisle while babies cried and people talked, laughed, and hollered. We rolled faster away from stores, streets, and people I had known all my life. Soon we were speeding past tobacco barns, people bent over in newly plowed fields, then woods.

Poppa was gone, and so was everything else that I loved.

Chapter
Four

T
hat bald-headed skinny boy nudged me with his shoe. “Stop that sniffling and moaning,” he snapped. “You wake up these younguns and I’ll make you rock ’em back to sleep. Anybody got a right to cry is me. You don’t see me crying.”

“Don’t be barking at me,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I just stopped crying as best I could. He was right. Nobody else around me was boo-hooing like this. I noticed that he had the thickest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a boy. And a crease-like dimple in his right cheek, like Poppa had. I loved dimples, I guess because Poppa had them.

“If they wake up Momma, she’ll pop a knot on my head, see,” he explained, but not as snappy, nodding at the sleeping lady beside me. “Momma’s knots hurt.”

“I guess you got your hands full both ways,” I told him.

“You’re darn tootin’ I do.” He sounded almost proud. “Where you headed by yourself?”

I hesitated. I didn’t even know this boy’s name. Aunt Society had drilled me about “Don’t talk to strangers on the trolleys, trains, and out on the street.” I decided to remember my manners and not be a stranger. “My name’s Celeste Lassiter Massey,” I said politely. “And who are you?”

“Big Willie Madison. So, where you headed?”

“New York City, to visit my Aunt Valentina. She’s —”

“Girl, you’re talking so low I can’t hear you,” he said. “Speak up! But don’t yell.” He pointed to the sleeping children.

I repeated myself. What I wanted to ask was, “Why are you called Big Willie, being so skinny?”

“Aunt Valentina’s a big Broadway star and a famous singer and dancer.” Maybe I was stretching her reputation a bit, but it sounded right to me!

“This train’s probably burning coal my daddy dug. He’s a coal miner, see, the best around, and a union man. Him and his crew go way inside a mountain. He’s also been so far down in the ground he says he almost hears folks talk Chinese.” Big Willie grinned. “They call him Coal Dust Willie, ’cause everything he eats and breathes and wears is full of coal dust. We’re going to Richmond, Virginia, then West Virginia to meet up with him for the summer, then we’ll hike on back down here to Eagle Rock come fall.”

“You mean he makes coal, like what they burn in stoves?” I liked his smile, too, showing that crooked front tooth. I liked that he was dressed neat, in a stylish brown knickerbocker knee-pants suit and stockings. A matching golf cap lay on a bag by him.

“You can’t
make
coal.” Big Willie snorted. “You dig it out the mountain or the ground first. My daddy’s in the mines from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. He coughs a lot, and can spit it farther than anybody else.”

He pointed to a black grape-sized bump on his dark brown chin. “See this big chunk a coal on my face? Daddy says that shows I was marked to be a miner, so I’m gonna work in the mines with him. What I really want to do is be a baseball player. I can fling a chunk of coal and hit a can off a fence twenty feet away, and I’m only fourteen. I can spit good, too. But I don’t cough.”

I was trying to take in everything he said. I knew a lot about oil and kerosene, but not much about the coal-mining process. I did know that any kind of dust wasn’t good for the body, though. After all, I was going to be a doctor, and often read Mr. Hodges’s medical encyclopedia and other books. Big Willie’s father probably spit and coughed so much because of the coal dust in his lungs. “Baseball player sounds more like it, since you got those long arms,” I told him. “I bet you’re a good one.”

He nodded slightly. “Better believe it! I’m gonna get on a team, too, after I’m through with the coal mines.” He stopped talking to push his brothers and sister around again. Poppa played second base with the Raleigh Colored Rangers on Saturday afternoons, until Momma got sick. I bet Big Willie would hate being in a dark, dirty coal mine when he’d rather be out in the sunny, fresh air throwing balls. I kept my mouth shut about that part.

I was glad to talk with somebody my age — and a boy — for once. I liked bald-headed boys. Momma said you could see the shape of a man’s brain better when he was bald-headed. If his head was round at the top and then narrowed toward the neck, that meant he had a big brain and was smart. Like Big Willie’s head was. Him being so skinny — though at least he was tall — made me want to fix him a big meal and fatten him up.

Celeste, you’re a mess,
I told myself, and laughed inside. Wouldn’t Aunt Society have a fit if she saw us and could read my thoughts! I smiled at him again and he smiled back. I closed my tear-swollen eyes, trying to imagine him pitching on Poppa’s team. Maybe the train ride to New York wouldn’t be so bad if everybody was as friendly as Big Willie was.

Next thing I knew I was waking up to the train jerking to a crawl, then halting, and Mr. Smithfield yelling, “Richmond! Richmond, Virginia! Everybody for Richmond, get off here.” I struggled up straight from where I had been leaning against Mrs. Madison’s shoulder.

“I didn’t sleep, watching these kids. But you were cuttin’
Z
s louder than the train whistle,” Big Willie said, and slapped his knee, cackling.

“Was not. Listen, when I get to New York I’m gonna write to my friends back home about you going to work in a coal mine.”

“How’re you gonna write about that when you never been in one?”

Well, he had a point there. I pulled Poppa’s stamps envelope from my schoolbag, wrote Aunt Valentina’s address on a penny postcard, and handed it to him. “How about you write to me when you get to the coal mines, and tell me what it’s like? I’ll pass the postcard on to my friends. I mean, if you want to.”

“I reckon I can do that.” He slapped his knee again, and woke up the kids.

Mr. Smithfield swayed over right then and touched Mrs. Madison on the arm, which probably saved Big Willie from getting that knot on his head. “You look happy, Celeste, so you must be getting along all right. We’re here long enough to let folks on and off to refresh themselves. You need to do anything?”

I shook my head. I was hungry but I didn’t want to eat yet. I was afraid I’d run out of food before I got to New York. I moved out of the way so Mrs. Madison could leave. She and Big Willie rounded up the triplets, bags, and boxes, and headed up the aisle. Big Willie clapped his cap onto his head. “Promise to write me back if I write to you,” he hollered.

“I will!” Suddenly I remembered. “Come to the Great Negro State Fair in Raleigh in October if you’re back in Eagle Rock. It has pitching contests. I’ll be there!” Or at least I prayed I would. I hoped he heard me. They rounded a corner for the steps and then they were gone.

I waited in the now empty, dimly lit train car. Mr. Smithfield said it would be a while before the train would move. What if somebody got on and grabbed me? I pulled my schoolbag and Dede closer for comfort. What if a bat flew onto the train and got into my hair? Aunt Society said bats liked to pull out bad girls’ hair. She sure pulled mine out, though I didn’t consider myself bad. Ole bat! She washed and combed and yanked on my hair like she was out plowing a field.

But right then I could have even put up with her. And what if Aunt Valentina was as mean as Aunt Society said she was? What if she made me work all the time and fed me turnips and burnt bread? I turned my head to the window and burrowed my head in my coat. Poppa and my friends said I’d see and do exciting things, having such a wonderful, good-looking Aunt Valentina. I remembered how she’d looked the last time I saw her: shapely gams, which was what Mr. Smithfield called her legs; gingertoned smooth skin; pretty white straight teeth; long black hair; and almond-shaped brown eyes, which made her look a little bit like she had Asian or Mexican in her. Though she didn’t.

I guess I’d said so much about her to my friends over the years and talked about all New York City’s great sights that they’d assumed I would be rip-roaring ready to go. But I wasn’t. I just wanted to go home!
Well, pray for the best, Celeste,
I told myself. I tried to imagine myself standing on the Statue of Liberty torch and shaking hands with the bears and elephants at the Bronx Zoo. But all that stuff scared me, so instead I just daydreamed about the time when we Butterflies had gone to the movies one Christmas.

I must have dozed off, because off in the distance, then closer, I began to hear
Clickety, clackety, clack. Clickety, clackety, clack.
Beside me a tiny man wearing a top hat and beard danced. He sang in a high-pitched whine. Was I dreaming about Abe Lincoln? When his right arm jerked, his hat sprang up. He was tipping his hat to me!

Now I knew I was dreaming. Or was I having hysterics? Folks said girls and women had hysterics when they talked or acted strange or fell out foaming at the mouth. Aunt Society never foamed at the mouth, but she sure talked and acted strange a lot. I squeezed my eyes shut and this time kept them shut until Mr. Smithfield shook me. “You need to relieve yourself,” he whispered. “You have another long ride ahead. Leave your stuff. It’ll be safe.”

I staggered after him into the cold early-morning light, but took Dede and my schoolbag with me. I could survive without my lunch but not without them. He pointed to an outhouse several yards away. My stomach was squirming and rolling again nervously. I hoped going to the outhouse would calm it down, but it didn’t.

When I returned, several new people had come into our car. One was a thin man in shirt and pants standing — I noted with a start — near my seat. When I sat down, he sat down beside me, smiling. Mr. Smithfield shook his hand. “Cece, this is Sandy Smalls, the puppet man. Mr. Smalls, my niece, Celeste.”

I smiled back and nodded, but didn’t speak. When Mr. Smalls opened a suitcase, I saw the tiny man — a wooden puppet! — inside. He wore a painted red-and-blue-striped suit and a white shirt. Mr. Smalls screwed a long, narrow stick into the puppet’s back. Singing softly, Mr. Smalls made the puppet dance by flicking the stick and gently thumping on a wooden paddle that it stood on. The puppet’s jointed arms and legs swung rapidly in time to the thumping and flicking. I had seen puppets like this at our state fair but never any so close.

“This is Mr. USA,” he said as the train began to move. “Would you like to help him dance?” I thought I was too old for puppets, but not this time! I told him yes, softly, and took the stick. Mr. Smalls began humming again, patting his foot and rhythmically thumping the other end of the paddle situated on his knee. I flicked the stick a couple of times. “Oh, my goodness gracious!” I whispered when the puppet jumped. I stared, waiting. Then I realized that
I
had to move the stick to make the little man dance. This was fun!

Mr. USA and I danced until full daylight arrived, when around us folks and babies stirred, stretched, yawned, and talked. Mr. Smalls stored Mr. USA back in the suitcase.

“I’m going to write to my friends back home about you and your puppets after I reach New York.”

“You gonna like where you’re going?” he asked softly.

“I — well, it’s because of Poppa,” I said. I told him about Aunt Society, too, and my poetry and the
Brownies’ Book
magazine, Big Willie, and — oh, my little lips just flapped! I guess Mr. Smalls’s kindly eyes made me spill the beans.

“When you’re up in that big town thinking about home, talk to this little lady,” he said. He opened his suitcase and lifted out a small wooden girl puppet with a yellow and red dress and black shoes painted on her square feet. He screwed a stick into her back and handed her and a paddle to me.

She was beautiful. “I shall keep her all my life,” I breathed. Remembering to speak louder, I thanked him over and over. “What’s her name?”

“Whatever you want to call her,” he said. “I been making puppets since I was a boy. I’d carve them from pine splinters in the pine tar camps where me and my folks lived. We worked in camps outside Loris, Bucksport, and Conway, South Carolina. I sold ’em to make a little money. Now I just make ’em to give away. I get my real money from making tables, chairs, stuff like that. No more pine tar camps for me!”