No Place Safe (4 page)

Cleo folded her arms under her breasts, as though she was cradling them, an absentminded habit she’d developed to hide the psoriasis that had plagued her elbows and forearms for as long as I’d known her. A hundred or so pigeons gathered around our feet in anticipation of being fed, but moved away quickly when they discovered our hands were empty. I watched white and black people walk through the park—business people, fast-food workers, homeless men, government employees—and wondered if there was any truth to what Cleo said.

“You’ll change, going to school way out there. Next thing I know, you’ll be talking white.”

“No I won’t.”

“And acting white, too.”

“
No I won’t.
” I knew how weak and childish it sounded. But what else could I have said? I hadn’t prepared for an argument defending who I was to the person who knew me better than anyone.

“I won’t hardly recognize you anymore.”

I wasn’t sure which feeling took me more by surprise—the anger, or the hurt caused by her words. More confusing was how far apart we already were, even before school had begun. I hadn’t set foot on the new school’s property, and already I was being called a sellout. There was little worse than being told by my own that I’d forget who I was, as though any neighborhood, any dialect, any race of people surrounding me could pull the brown skin from my flesh, my soul right from my heart.

“I’d better start walking toward Five Points if I want to make the next bus,” I said, hoping the heat growing behind my eyelids wouldn’t show how she’d wounded me before I could walk away. I don’t recall how many times we talked after that, but I know it wasn’t many more.

*

It was my fading friendship with Cleo that made me start one with Cassandra, the girl next door. She had lived there a couple of years by then, but we were never tight because I had Cleo, and the sometimes friendship of the popular girls at school. Also there was something about Cassandra I always thought strange and put me off from her—the way she was like an old lady and a little kid at the same time. She had the forgiving and innocent ways of a four-year-old, but none of the adventure of one. Cassandra never wanted to do anything, content to sit on her porch and watch everyone else even though she was only thirteen. She even had the physical presence of an old person, standing back on her legs so they bowed backwards, hands on her hips, looking tired but willing to call up enough energy to give a sermon on the dangers of whatever the rest of us kids were doing.

On that day, Cassandra and I, along with two girls from the neighborhood we sometimes hung out with, all decided it was too hot for doing anything but sitting around, so we went down to the girl’s house with the card table on her patio, protected by the shade of a big magnolia tree. Cassandra was reluctant to leave her porch, where she sat fanning herself with a folded newspaper and remarking on how fast people were driving down our street, but she followed us anyway.

Like most Atlanta streets outside of downtown, there were no sidewalks, so we had to walk in the street. This caused Cassandra no small amount of stress when cars flew around the curves going forty-five miles an hour instead of the thirty posted on the sign the city had planted in my yard. The speeders didn’t live on our end of the street, where people had what Ma called
pride of ownership
. They lived on the other end, in apartments and Section 8 housing that either a landlord or the government owned. Today when I pass through (because my mother still owns that house and we have family living there), I see drug deals made openly at the stop sign where I once caught my bus, and I only make a rolling stop, fearful of being caught in the middle of a deal gone bad.

Twenty years earlier, my street had been part of a solidly middle class neighborhood. In the summer of 1979, it was slipping toward the lower end but I didn’t know that. I saw mostly well-kept houses, large yards full of white oaks and peach trees, and at least one car in each driveway, even if they were older models with neglected dents aged with rust or patched with Bondo. I was just glad I didn’t live in an apartment building as we had the four years before Ma bought the house. No more listening to the man above us pee in the morning, or the rhythmic banging of a headboard against the wall of the bedroom my sister and I shared, accompanied by sounds that made Bridgette ask whether the couple next door was fighting. My street was full of trees, houses were far enough apart that no one knew your business unless you wanted them to, and we had a pool in the backyard that made other kids on the street envious.

“Sitting under all those trees, we’ll be eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Cassandra said in a low voice so the others couldn’t hear while we walked to the girl’s house. I ignored her. “Plus, they have that small creek running behind the house. Mosquitoes love hanging around water.”

“Then go back home.”

“That’s okay. I put on some Skin So Soft this morning. That should keep some of them away.”

Our game was Spades, playing in pairs. There were five girls, and Cassandra was more than willing to be the odd girl out. She sat in a chair on the periphery of the card table, barely moving except to swat away mosquitoes. We almost forgot she was there.

After we bid our books, me certain that my partner was overconfident in the number of books she could win, we started into another game. From three houses down, I could hear the woodpecker going at one of the apple trees in my backyard. Every summer he returned, as if circling the branches and trunk with shallow holes was a pilgrimage. Our world was quiet except for the bird, and the occasional tiny thud of shiny red magnolia seeds falling from grenade-looking pods. It was at least a month too early in the season for the seeds to be falling, and I briefly wondered what omen my grandmother might read into it. We focused on our card game and didn’t talk about how the humidity pressed down on us like a shroud, because that would have only made it feel more miserable.

One girl cleared her throat. Silence can make teenage girls uncomfortable if it goes on for more than a minute or two, so the rest of us were grateful.

“I can’t wait until school starts,” the girl said, causing us to look up at her with worry she’d taken ill with the heat stroke. “High school, I mean. It’ll be fun to be in high school.”

“There’s nothing special about it,” Marie said. She was the oldest, on her way to tenth grade, and she belonged to the Beautiful Family, as I called them. There were four kids—two boys and two girls—all of them pretty. They came in all shades, from red-bone to cocoa, but all had flawless skin that seemed gilded, the same full lips, the same round eyes and lush eyelashes that made me think of babies. The girls I wanted to look like, the boys I wanted to go with, but neither thing ever happened.

The rest of us listened to Marie because not only was she the oldest and beautiful, she was also worldly. Her mother was a teacher, and she, like her sister and brothers, spoke in the most beautiful way—every syllable enunciated, no lingual short-cuts taken, and sometimes with words I’d have to pretend to know and then look up in my
World Book
dictionary later.

“It’s just more of the same. College is what I’m looking forward to.”

“What about the football games and pep rallies?” I asked.

“Oh, and the pep squad,” my Spades partner said. “I’m going out for the pep squad.”

“And all the cute boys,” from Marie’s partner.

“All what cute boys? The boys are the same ones you knew in eighth grade. Everyone’s the same, just in a new building. Status quo.” Marie laid down a card with a slapping sound, as if to say,
And that’s that
, and won the book.

“Not for Kim,” Cassandra said from behind me, startling everyone because we’d come to believe there were only four of us. “The boys will be different ’cause she went to private school, and now she’ll be going to George High with us.”

“I’m not going to George. I’m staying in Catholic school.” I was waiting for the fall-out, the questions about whether I thought I was too good for public school.

“Now that’s a strange religion,” Marie said, repositioning the cards in her hand. “Not strange, but with so many rituals and symbolism. So dark. I guess you have to be Catholic to understand it.”

I was happy Marie was there. With a few sentences, she made it seem like my decision was too bizarre to question, too complex for the other kids to understand, and made me seem slightly exotic all at the same time. I was certain she’d become my best friend, fill in the opening left by Cleo, but that never happened, either.

*

The dead boys weren’t enough to take my mind off starting high school. I’d been in Catholic school since kindergarten, and was headed to a Catholic high school. People were sometimes surprised to learn black Catholics exist, even other black folks. We had all the traditional doings at our church, like the holy water, stained glass windows with the Stations of the Cross, and the smoky pot the priest waved around to fill the church with the spicy scent of incense. There was the constant kneeling I had to do, so that by the time I was five or six, I’d learned to hate the kneelers that never had enough foam covering them to keep my knees from hurting. As a younger child, I’d always thought of the kneelers as one of the many burdens Catholics were supposed to bear for Jesus having saved us from our sins.

But everything else about our church was Southern Baptist or AME—the gospel music, the unintentional fashion parade put on every Sunday by the women parishioners, and the fund-raising fish dinners held in the church basement. True, no self-respecting Catholic would ever fall out in church—we were too low-key for that—and it was rare to hear an
amen
in response to the priest above more than a murmur, but we did have more flavor than your usual Catholic church.

Now I was going to an all-white Catholic high school in an all-white neighborhood across town in Northeast. At the beginning of eighth grade, Ma and I had our minds on what it would take to get me into a good college, and when the Knights of Columbus offered me a scholarship to attend the school that we normally couldn’t afford, we had to accept. I had no idea what it would be like, but if it was anything like what I experienced when I took the entrance exam for the school, I expected to be uncomfortable.

On the day of the exam, I woke up nervous, my stomach pulling at my insides from every angle. It didn’t help matters that Ma got me there late. I had to depend on her to take me because there was no bus to the test site. When I arrived, the other kids were already seated and the proctor was just about to hand out the tests.

In a room of about two hundred kids, it seemed mine was the only dark face, and everyone looked at me as if I’d walked through the wrong door. It was the first moment that the term
CP time
—colored people’s time—held any meaning for me, even though I’d heard the term before. The experience only deepened my addiction to punctuality. I just held on to my number 2 pencils like I dared anyone to take them from me, and walked in like I’d been coming there all my life. When I got the acceptance letter, I wished I could show it to every kid and teacher who looked at me funny. It wasn’t until later that I realized I’d be sitting next to a lot of them come late August.

Now it was two weeks before class started, and I was stepping off the bus in front of the school with plans to buy my books for the first semester. My school was way out in Ashford-Dunwoody, a place I’d never heard of, much less visited. All I knew about that part of Atlanta was that it was rich and white. The whole experience was like walking into the Twilight Zone.

The campus, as they called it, looked nothing like I expected. It was huge, and the soccer field alone was bigger than the space that my old school stood on, including the blacktop where we had recess and the new building they had to add on when the old building got too crowded. Everything at the new school was green grass except for the parking lot and driveways, and the school itself sat about an eighth of a mile off a road that looked like something from a fairytale, with its huge magnolias, houses set far off the road and buffered by rolling green yards, and nothing remotely commercial for at least a mile or two. There was even a babbling brook running alongside the school’s property, as if it were a scene pulled from the pages of a children’s book.

My old school sat forty feet off busy Gordon Street in the West End, across from a mom-and-pop grocer, and shared a block with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and a New York deli. The deli had the best ham po’ boys, and even though I gave the place up after noticing a couple of roaches crawling up a wall behind the man working on my sandwich, I ended up coming back a few months later because the food was good, cheap, and I’d worked hard to block out my memory of the roaches. Across the street was the Shrine of the Black Madonna bookstore and two blocks down was the Wren’s Nest, home of Joel Chandler Harris, the author who gave the world Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, and the tar baby. Even as a child, I saw the irony in how such different literary messages were housed just a few doors apart.

I had talked Ma into a new outfit just for the occasion, but it didn’t look anything like what the other kids were wearing. They looked like younger versions of their parents. The girls wore denim skirts, vests covering plaid shirts with matching satin ribbons tied at their necks. It seemed every boy in the place was wearing a white cotton shirt with dull beige pants. It was an understatement to say I stood out: I didn’t have at least one parent in tow and I was wearing my skintight jeans, gauzy peasant shirt, and lace-up wedge-heeled sandals. And
everyone
was white. Lucky for me I had Ma’s blood, and could always fake like I just didn’t give a damn, even when I did, because everyone was staring at me.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to think about the new school and how foreign a place it was, how it was clear I wouldn’t be a candidate for a picture in next year’s catalogue. The current issue, creased and worn by a daily search for answers that might relieve my fear that I’d chosen the wrong school, sat on my nightstand brimming with the earnest and happy faces of dull beige boys and white cotton girls. Next thing I knew, the summer was over and I was on the bus heading across town to my new school. It was still dark outside because I had to catch a 5:30 bus to get downtown in time to take a connecting bus at 6:10. I tried not to think about the two dead boys as I walked through Central City Park.