The Summer We Got Free (9 page)

When Regina finished talking, a heavy silence filled
up the room.

Helena had tears in her eyes.

Sarah stared wide-eyed at her mother and after a long
moment said, “You never told us that. You said your father died in an accident.”

“How come you never told us that?” Ava asked her.

Regina sighed. “’Cause I don’t like to think about
it.”

Sarah couldn’t believe it. All her life she had been
told that her grandfather had died when the truck he was loading slipped out of
gear and backed over him. “You lied to us all this time? You just made up that
other story? How could you do that?”

“I just told you, I don’t like to think about what
happened, let alone talk about it.”

“You told Helena,” Sarah said. “After lying to your
own children for thirty years.”

“Y’all wasn’t ready to hear nothing like that when you
was kids,” Regina said. “So I lied. And I regretted it, too, because if I had
told you maybe y’all would have known better what can happen to Colored people
in this world and maybe things would have turned out different.”

“I’m sorry,” Helena said. “I really didn’t mean to
bring up bad memories.”

Regina was quiet now, still staring at the photograph
of her father. “It just don’t seem to be
no end to us getting
taken away from each other, do it?
I swear, if you letting your sanity
rest on the well-being of any black man, you may as well go ahead and go crazy
now and save yourself the heartbreak.”

A few minutes later, Ava was on her way out the front
door, on her way to work, when Helena came out of the dining room, holding the
pad of paper with the grocery list on it. “Did you do this?” she asked, her
eyes wide.

“Oh, I almost
forgot it,” Ava said. “Did you want to add something?”

Helena blinked, looking
confused. “No, not the grocery list. The drawing.”

There was a
little pencil drawing of Regina, sketched in detail on the corner of the page.
She was in motion, her hands out in front of her and her mouth open, as if she
was speaking. Ava said. “I guess I was doodling while Mama was telling her
story.”

“
Doodling?”

Ava nodded.

“But this is
wonderful,” Helena said. “Ava, do you know how wonderful this is?”

Ava was always
doodling in the corners of pages. Every grocery list she wrote had some sketch
in its margins, drawn while she waited for Sarah to decide whether she wanted
to buy pork or beef for Sunday dinner, or for Paul to make up his mind about
milk or orange juice. She never thought anything about it, never assessed her
scribblings
,
never
even looked at
them afterward. She had certainly never considered that they were
wonderful
. She looked again at the
drawing Helena held out and noticed that Regina’s face seemed alive with the story
she was telling. Her mouth and hands suggested movement. The tiny creases
around her eyes and the lines along her brow held heavy emotion.
It wasn’t just a scribbling of Regina
,
it
was
Regina
.

Ava took the pad and peered close at the drawing.
Helena was right. It was wonderful. Ava could see now that it was.

1953

S
arah
Haley was called Mother Haley by everyone who knew her
. She was called Mother Haley because of her standing
as an elder in her church in Hayden, Georgia, the church that both her son,
George, and his wife, Regina, had grown up in and had been members of all their
lives before moving up north. Mother Haley was devoted to her church, where she
had met and eulogized two husbands and raised her only son, and she believed in
everything it stood for, including community and family and togetherness and,
especially, judgment.

When Regina and
George had moved to Philadelphia, Mother Haley had begun visiting them once a
year at their little apartment. When they moved into the house on Radnor
Street, she called within days to say that, now that they had more room, she
was planning to visit more often. Regina assured her that it was too soon for
company, that they weren’t yet able to accommodate
her, that
the house was a mess with their belongings only half unpacked. She told her mother-in-law
that for two and a half years until, finally, Mother Haley could be discouraged
no longer. In the spring of 1953, she called to say that she was coming, that
she had already bought her train ticket. Regina told George to tell her no.

“I can’t function
when she’s here. She spends half her time telling me what I’m doing wrong, and
the other half telling me what I aint doing right.”

Mother Haley’s visits at their apartment had been hard
on Regina, for reasons she did not think the existence of more rooms would
necessarily help. Regina always believed that Mother Haley didn’t think much of
her and that she imagined George could have done better, got himself a lighter-skinned,
less-kinky-haired, better cook of a wife. Their relationship had always been
strained, from way back, when George and Regina were first going together.
Mother Haley was bossy, with other women and with men, and Regina did not take
kindly to being bossed. But George could not say no to his mother. He had been
raised to be an obedient child, to study on everything his mother and father
told him and, as a grown man, he found it difficult to break the habit.

He met his mother alone at the train station, and the
first thing she said was, "Where everybody at?"

"Regina had
to stay home with the children,” he told her.

"Why aint
she bring the
chiren
out to meet me, like she usually
do?"

“I don’t know
what to tell you, Mama,” George said, picking up her bags.

"Don't make
no sense.
I don't know what Regina be thinking."

Regina was thinking
that if she got through the week with Mother Haley in the house without
snatching the woman bald-headed, she'd buy herself

that
hat she'd seen in a store window on Sixtieth Street
and wear it to church, feeling weighed in the balance and found worthy as Job.

"Red aint
no kind of color for walls," was the first thing Mother Haley said when
she entered the house.

"I love
them,” said Regina, who had only ever tolerated the red walls before.

Mother Haley’s lips twisted into a purposeful frown.

Regina fixed ham
hocks and rice for dinner, and watched as her mother-in-law sniffed each bite,
then
tasted it with the tip of her tongue before eating it,
and she decided she'd buy herself that hat if she made it through the night
without killing her.

George did not seem to enjoy having his mother there
any more than Regina did.

"He on edge all the time," Regina told
Maddy, a couple of days into Mother Haley’s visit, sitting in
Maddy’s
kitchen, smoking and watching her friend chop
onions for a meatloaf. "And he look fit to jump off any minute. He quicker
to criticize, quicker to holler about nothing."

Maddy frowned. "I thought you said they was
close.”

"They
was
when he was
growing up. And she still always the first person he call when he get a little
raise at work, or Pastor Goode ask him to do some special job for the church.
But it's something else there, too."

"Something like what?"

"I don't know. Sometime I see him watching her
with a kind of meanness in his eyes, when she aint doing nothing but washing
the dishes or sweeping the front porch. And she aint got to do a whole lot more
than look at George Jr. before George get his drawers in a twist."

Just the day before, when Geo had run into the house
from the backyard, crying, with his knee slightly skinned and barely bleeding,
Mother Haley had said, “Don’t cry now. You a big boy, and a big, strong boy
don’t cry like that.”

George had frowned over his newspaper and said, “Mama,
he aint a big, strong boy, he only six, and he can cry if he want to.”

When George had come home later that same evening he
had found his mother holding George Jr., cradling him and talking sweetly,
saying, “You a sweet boy. Aint you just the sweetest thing?”

George had stormed up to her, his nostrils flared, his
bulgy eyes huge. “Don’t coddle him like that, Mama,” he’d said, through
clenched teeth. “You gone soften him up too much.”

“George, what’s the matter with you?” his mother had
demanded.

He hadn’t answered, had simply taken the child from
his grandmother’s arms and put him down on the floor.

“I wasn’t doing him no harm,” said Mother Haley, as
Geo skipped off happily. “I raised
you
,
didn’t I?”

George had walked away.

Regina had gone upstairs a while later and found him
lying on their bed, staring up at the ceiling, his eyebrows drawn tight on his
forehead.

"What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing."

"She's
your
mother. You the one told her she could come stay."

"You know she don't wait for me to tell her she
can do something.”

“He spent the rest of that evening alone in the
bedroom,” Regina told Maddy. “Yelling for me to shut the children up when they
played too loud.”

Maddy frowned over her meatloaf. “Well, how much
longer she gone be here?”

“Two more weeks,” said Regina, feeling tired.

The next Sunday, the
Delaneys
took up one more seat than usual on the pew at Blessed Chapel. Mother Haley sat
between George Jr. and his father, and spent much of the service straightening
either George’s tie, picking lint off either George’s lapel, and reminding
either George to sit up straighter in the pew, because, after all, they were in
God’s house, and it was bad manners to slouch on anybody’s couch, let alone the
Almighty’s.

It was late
April, and it was hot inside the sanctuary. Large fans that were mounted high
on the walls re-circulated the warm air around the chapel, lightly blowing the
feathers on ladies’ hats, aided by the hand-held paper fans with illustrated
bible stories and thin wooden handles that everyone was using to fan
themselves. As many times as his grandmother told him to stop slouching, Geo
had a hard time staying upright in his seat. The heavy air kept rounding his
shoulders and loosening the muscles of his thighs so that he slid down more and
more on the hard wooden bench. Watching Pastor Goode in the pulpit, looking debonair
despite the large beads of sweat that kept forming on his face, which he wiped
neatly away every few minutes with a simple white handkerchief, Geo wished the
man’s lips would stop moving, that the sermon would end and the music would
start again. The music was the only way he could stand church on a warm Sunday.

He wasn’t
listening to the preacher’s words, only the cadence of his voice, and whenever
it seemed to build and then come down again, Geo hoped the sermon was ending.
But then Pastor Goode would take a breath, and wait for the applause and
hallelujahs and
yes,
Jesus
es
to quiet down, and he would go
on. Geo reached into his pocket and pulled out a butterscotch candy, hoping the
sugar rush would help, and looked over at Ava, who was seated beside him. She
was staring at Pastor Goode, unblinking, looking completely focused on the
sermon. At first, Geo thought she was daydreaming about something else, but the
way her head was tilted made him think she might actually be listening to what
the pastor was saying. Geo decided to listen, too, to hear what was so interesting
to his sister.

“Devotion to the
Lord is key to our salvation. We got to follow the teachings of our savior, and
spread his word, every day of our lives. It aint always easy, living by the
word, because the devil tempts us every day. But to live any other way would
mean damnation. First Corinthians seven thirty-five:
I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you
might live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.
And devotion
to the Lord also means devotion to the church, because in here his word is
never forgotten. Out there, it’s easy to forget, to be led astray, but within
these walls you always face to face with your creator, and any child knows that
it’s harder to do wrong when you know your Father is watching.”

The longer
Pastor Goode preached, the more the corners of Ava’s mouth turned down, until
she was frowning so openly that their mother, who was seated on Ava’s other
side, nudged her with an elbow and whispered, “Stop looking so evil.” Ava sat
back on the pew and folded her arms across her chest.

When service was over, Mother Haley said she wanted to
meet the pastor, so they all went and stood in the line of people waiting to
thank Goode for his wonderful sermon. The
Liddy’s
were among them—Doris, her husband, Dexter, and their daughter, Sondra,
who was a year older than Ava and Geo. Doris fawned over the pastor so long
that Maddy said, loud enough so Doris could hear, “She see the man every day,
she can’t have that much new to say to him. Lord.”

The pastor
greeted George and Regina warmly. In the last couple of years, since they had
moved to Radnor Street and joined Blessed Chapel, George and Regina had become
favorites,
it seemed, of Goode’s. He was always talking
about how smart and capable they both were and always asking them to help out
with one or another church event or activity, which they always did, happily.

When George
introduced his mother to the preacher, Mother Haley smiled like a teenage girl.
“You a real gifted preacher.”

Pastor Goode put
a hand on George’s shoulder. “Brother, you are truly blessed to have so many
beautiful girls in your life.”

Mother Haley
giggled.
Giggled
.

Pastor Goode
reached down and put his hand on both Sarah’s and Ava’s heads. “That means
y’all little ones, too,” he said.

Sarah thanked
him disinterestedly.

Ava, who always
reacted to the pastor the way she did to Doris
Liddy
,
from a feeling that she was not really liked by either of them, stared up at him
and said nothing.

“Say ‘thank
you,’ Ava,” Regina told her.

Instead, she
said, “I don’t think people should be devoted to the church.”

Mother Haley put
a faux-lace-gloved hand over her mouth and looked ready to faint.

George grimaced.
“Ava, don’t—”

“Wait a minute,
now,” said Pastor Goode, putting up a hand to stop George interrupting.
“Exactly why is it you think that, little Miss Ava?”

Ava did not
appreciate being called
Little Miss
.
Little Misses were girls who sat with their hands in their laps and their
ankles crossed so that the lacy edges on their Sunday socks scratched together.
“Because people can’t fly if you always telling them they shouldn’t.”

The pastor
laughed. “You got quite a little imagination.”

She knew he did
not think people could fly. To accommodate his ignorance, she rephrased it in a
way he could understand. “Nobody can think for
theyself
if you always telling them what to do.”

The pastor’s
lips pulled across his face in what Ava thought was supposed to be a smile,
though there was no humor or joy in it. “People need guidance. They need to
know how to walk in the light of God. The bible tells them how to do that and
the church tries to keep them on that path.”

Ava did not like
the idea of anybody trying to keep her on a path. Her parents were always doing
that, always telling her what she should or should not do, what was proper and
what wasn’t. It made her feel like she couldn’t breathe sometimes. And she knew
that if you couldn’t even breathe, you sure couldn’t fly. She decided right
then that the purpose of church was to keep her on the ground.

When they got home a little while later, George sent
Sarah and Geo upstairs and sat Ava down in the kitchen. It was the only room
downstairs without red walls and he always chose to lecture her there, a fact
not lost on Ava.

“I told you a hundred times if I told you once,”
George said, standing with his palms flat against the kitchen table, with
Mother Haley standing on one side of him and Regina sitting in a chair on the
other side, “you aint supposed to question your elders.”

“Why not?” It was
the question she always asked and for which she had never yet gotten an answer
that made any sense to her.

“Because you
supposed to respect them.”

“Why can’t I do
both?”

George frowned.
He hated arguing with this child. He knew he had to do it, that it was
necessary, because she needed to learn the right way to behave, but she asked
questions like an adult would ask, an adult who was smarter than he was, and
that always threw him off. He had no answer for that question that would
support his argument, so he ignored it. “It aint respectful to challenge the
pastor in front of his congregation, Ava. Especially since you a child and you
don’t even know what you talking about.”

“I do know what
I’m talking about,” she said.

“Stop talking
back to your father!” said Mother Haley.

“Ava, go
upstairs and change out of your church clothes,” Regina said.

On her way out of the kitchen, Ava heard her
grandmother saying, “Lord, I swear that child aint got no discipline. George
wasn’t never
allowed to talk back to his father like that.
What y’all teaching that girl?”

***

Summer came and went quickly that year, in a burst of
haze and heat, and fall arrived earlier than expected, a thoroughly unwanted
guest. Taking its lead, Mother Haley arrived for her second visit that year,
right at the end of September, when the air was cool and crisp and smelled
shockingly like distant snow.

That was when George first stopped going home after
work in the evenings. Instead, he went over to Blessed Chapel for the evening
prayer service, led by Deacon Charles Ellis. Charles, who everybody called
Chuck, was only a couple of years older than George, and had
immediately
befriended him when the
Delaneys
joined Blessed
Chapel. Chuck was a quiet kind of man,
slow-talking
and easy-going compared to other men in the city, and George liked being around
him. One evening, just a few days into his mother’s latest visit, George
arrived early to the prayer service, and found the church freezing, and Chuck
asked him if he knew anything about heating.

“A little,”
George said.

They went down
into the basement and George helped Chuck mess with the heater, adjusting knobs
and banging here and there with a wrench until it clicked on.

“You a life
saver, George.”

“I don’t know
about that.”

“Trust me. Some
of these older folks like to get pneumonia if it get below sixty-five.”

For the rest of
that week, George helped out in any way he could with the evening prayer
services, adjusting the heater when it was too cold or warm in the sanctuary,
bringing out cushions for the worshippers to kneel on, helping the older folks
down onto their knees at the altar when it was time for the final prayer, and
then up again when they were through. During the services, George watched Chuck
closely as he read scripture and called souls to testify and delivered the
prayers. He had such a gentle way about him, a kindness in his voice and
demeanor that George felt brought to calm by.