Gloryland (8 page)

How long could this sidewalk be? I didn’t know I was breathing hard, but I started to notice how hard it was to breathe, how hot it had become even under those magnolias, the air thick and sweet like the trees were sweating molasses.

Finally the sidewalk ran out. My knee twinged as I stepped off the whiteness into the soft give of ground, and I was all right, but I could hear people whispering even louder than the magnolias. I still had to walk back through town, but now I was afraid, really afraid. I turned and started walking along the sidewalk in the dirt, feeling my shoulders slump, my back begin to ache. Then I remembered why I was there and looked up again, into all of those faces looking down at me, those cold white faces. I looked right back and smiled up at them. It wasn’t funny, nothing was funny, but I smiled anyway.

I got back up on the sidewalk like I had every right to, and I didn’t even say “pardon” or “excuse me.” I walked back through town and people talked, well, it was more like yelling without being loud, but I didn’t care what they were saying, cause now I was going home. I was leaving this town, their looks, their words, leaving everything behind me, and when I made it off that sidewalk again, stepping onto dirt was such a relief. It was as close to a blessing as I’ve ever felt, the feel and give of the dirt on this Sunday. It seemed to welcome me home. The same ground that held those magnolias high above me
kept me standing and walking high above the world too. I’d never felt so alive before, and all it took was stepping up just a few inches onto that sidewalk.

 

As I went out of town on the same road, I could feel people still watching me, so I kept walking where I should. As soon as I thought I was out of sight, I headed off the road and into the shade of trees. I was still breathing hard, but my heart was slowing down. I found a place that looked like someone’s old garden, but abandoned. A few bees were droning round roses, lilacs, strawberries. It felt so peaceful and safe that I lay down in the grass and went to sleep almost right away. When I woke up it was the middle of a warm summer night. The moon was almost full. Crickets were chirping, and Big Creek wasn’t too far off, cause I could hear frogs singing.

I got up to pee. When I lay back down, I thought how worried Mama and Daddy must be, but I went to sleep anyway. Something pulled me down to the earth and kept me there through the night. At some point there was a clatter of horses cantering by, but since they never stopped, I didn’t worry too much. There was no trail to this spot, though it was just off the road.

The sun woke me, coming down through the branches of a live oak, and everything it touched turned yellow. I got up and carefully made my way back to the road. There was no one in sight when I peered up and down, so I headed home, stopping a few times to look back. I expected the sheriff would come after me, or worse, but no one did. Maybe they thought they’d imagined me walking on the sidewalk that bright Sunday morning. Maybe I was just a shadow moving, and they mistook me for a boy named Elijah Yancy. Maybe I never slept in the woods beside the road to Spartanburg.

That’s what I was thinking when I got to the place in the road where a narrow lane, barely big enough for a wagon, wound to the left, which was the way to the cabin. The sun was getting high again. Another morning almost done, and I could feel the heat of the day in my clothes. I glanced back again: no one, so I turned onto the road
Daddy had cleared before I was even born. I felt light, light enough to get a lift from the air. Soon my feet found the footpath to our cabin, then the doorstep.

I started up into the cabin, and a shadow fell across me. It was big, but it wasn’t no tree.

“Elijah,” I heard Daddy say, “where you been, boy?”

I looked up cause I had to. Daddy filled up the doorway, making it look small and uncomfortable. When he moved away from it, closer to me, the doorway looked relieved. I knew how it felt.

“Just walkin, sir,” I replied.

He looked through me the way he could when he was angry, like there was something on the other side that was worth looking at but it wasn’t me. “Walkin,” he said with a grunt. “Where? Greenville? You been gone since yesterday! Your mama and I been worried sick!” There was a vein in Daddy’s neck that got big whenever he got angry, and it looked like it was about to burst. “I’d say you were walkin, all right, but in the wrong place. Yeah, we heard about you bein in Spartanburg.”

If I’d had any doubt that he was angry, it was gone. But my daddy was good at being angry and not showing it. It was like thunder trying to be polite. You didn’t need to hear thunder to know the lightning was close.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “but I just got to thinkin bout that sidewalk in town, bout how we’re treated, how it ain’t fair that even when we go to town we got to walk in the dirt!”

I was looking at him straight on, not afraid or maybe just more foolish than I’d ever been. He looked down at me and I couldn’t read him no more. I didn’t know what kind of expression he had on cause I’d never seen it before.

“Elijah,” he said, in a voice that had all the stiffness hammered out of it. “Boy, you don’t need to tell me bout dirt. I seen enough of it, been livin in it, you might even say it keeps me company. Dirt put those clothes on you. Dirt keeps you from gettin hungry. And one
day, I hope a long, long time from this day, dirt is gonna put you to sleep.” He still had a fire in him, and his voice rose as he talked, got faster, hotter, the words bits of hot iron cast off and too bright to look at without my eyes blurring.

“Just got tired of it, sir,” I sputtered. “I believe I had a right to walk there since colored men built that sidewalk. I was just walkin, sir, doin nothin but walkin.”

He laughed, low and deep, but there was iron on the edge of that laugh, and I could feel its weight and bite. “Boy, most people when they’re tired, they just go to sleep. Lord, I got me a child when he gets too tired, well, he goes walkin where no colored child should ever be walkin.”

Then he turned, stooped like he did before going inside, and went in the cabin. He went over to the table that was halfway set for dinner and sat down. I couldn’t see Mama anywhere.

“Elijah, come in here,” Daddy ordered, with a sigh emptying his chest of air. “Come on in and take a seat.” I knew by how he said “Elijah” that I was in trouble. He stretched out the “li” so much I thought my name might snap in two.

“Elijah,” he began, “how long you been colored?”

I was taken back a bit. I didn’t know what to say and was too afraid to open my mouth.

“Well,” he went on, “I been colored most of my life, and in that time I’ve learned a few things. First is, I know I’m in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and in Spartanburg, Elijah, colored people know their place if they want to have a place, you understand what I’m sayin?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“‘Yessir,’ you say, so you hear me, but you ain’t listenin at all, are you? If you’d been listenin to me every day you been alive in this house, you’d know that only a crazy fool would do what you did.”

Now he was standing over me, tall like one of those magnolias in town, but there was just the smell of sweat and mules on him. The
chair was lying on the floor behind him. I never heard it hit the floor, but it lay there on its side, still rocking a bit. Except for that sound, it was too quiet for a cabin with two wide-awake people in it.

I tried to open my mouth, tried to speak, but nothing happened. I held in everything I didn’t dare say. And then I saw the light in his eyes begin to cool, and Daddy sighed. His shoulders eased closer to his body, and he seemed suddenly sorrowful, as if the weight of all the days he’d spent living in Spartanburg County had suddenly fallen upon him. He bent over, picked up his chair, set it right, and sat down again, letting out another long breath.

He put his hands out for me to see, turning them over so I could see his palms. They were lined with deep creases, cracked and blistered, the hands of a man who had worked hard every day of his grown life. The fields outside our cabin were there because of those hands and their strength. You didn’t need to hear him talk about yesterday or last week or last year, all you had to do was look at his hands. My daddy’s hands were torn up by something no one should hold for so long, it had opened them up and tilled them like a plow opens the earth, and what was ever put in those rows to grow, those dark lines in my daddy’s hands?

“Look at these, boy,” he said. “Look hard and long at them.”

He raised his hands closer to my face, so close I felt their warmth. Then he dropped them and took my hands in his, their roughness like broke leather. I saw how small I was in his hands, my smooth hands almost nothing in his.

“These,” he spoke again, “were the first hands that held you when you was born.” He looked at me again like he was remembering that day. “You and your mother are the only things I ever held that were good and sweet to hold. These hands have held things I pray you never have to, and there’s nothin I’m afraid to hold if it means keepin you and your mama safe and whole. But . . .” He stopped, looked out the window. Listened.

“There’s one thing,” he said firmly, “no man should ever have to hold. You see, holdin you when you was born, that’s my right as
your father, but I got no right to hold you when you die. That’s for someone else. And I hope when my time comes it’ll be your hands helpin me along to a better place. That’s your right.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I don’t understand.”

“Understand this, Elijah,” he said, his voice getting hard again. “If you keep on not understandin your place in this world, then these hands will be holdin you, but you won’t feel them cause you won’t be here no more. You’ll be dead. You’ll have spoken your mind, you’ll get it off your chest, this pain you got, and all you’ll get back for it is a rope round your neck. So if death is what you want, well, you keep talkin and walkin, and Death’ll find you. But I’ll be the one have to put you in the grave, and I’ve had to carry a load or two in this life, but I’m tellin you that’s one load I don’t want to carry. Not you in my arms, not my boy, not that way!”

He was breathing heavy now, his eyes looking out at me and somewhere far off all at once. I said nothing, looking away at the walls and floor and table. I was good at saying nothing when Daddy was making a point. I wondered where Mama was, and Grandma Sara. Later I found out they were out looking for me, calling on our neighbors for some word of my whereabouts.

After a while Daddy started again. “I’m hopin,” he said, “hopin you remember our conversation today. Don’t ever forget who you are and where you are, boy. And don’t get that confused with who you think you are, and where you want to be. You hear me, Elijah?”

“Yessir,” I said, and that was all that came from my wanting and going to walk on the sidewalk in Spartanburg under the shade trees where the white folks walked after church on Sundays.

Daddy turned and walked out the door, leaving me alone, and I remember thinking I’d hardly ever been alone in that house, and how that felt, and how it must’ve felt to Mama and Daddy and Grandma Sara. Fearing that someone you love will just walk away one morning and you’ll never see them again. In that quiet I remembered something my parents and Grandma Sara could never forget.

Once I had a brother.

I
knew the conversation with Daddy about walking wasn’t over. I’d opened a door without knowing it and walked through it when I got up onto that sidewalk. And now that door wouldn’t close.

When you’re a child it’s hard to think about leaving home, ever, cause home is so many things. My father’s hands, his arms. When I was real young I’d pretend to be too sleepy to walk to my bed, and Daddy would pick me up and carry me. To be lifted off the ground in his strong arms was about the safest place there was. Nothing could ever go wrong there, no hurt could ever get to me. I couldn’t imagine being somewhere far from that embrace.