River, cross my heart (3 page)

The police precinct was located on Volta Place, too, and proximity to it gave Ina Carson unquestioned authority on the moral turpitude of most of black Georgetown. On Saturdays, foot traffic on Volta Place usually included bowlegged, listing, colored drunks prodded by nightsticks up toward the Number 7 precinct. And the late night quiet was often punctuated by the thumping and thwacking of billies upside colored heads, male and female.

The goings-on in Bell's Court, an alley settlement of "dirt-poor Negroes" situated in the middle of that block of Volta Place and extending back to P Street, frequently gave Ina reason to shake her head and purse her lips and were often the subject of conversation with her cousin Alice. Aunt Ina strictly forbade Johnnie Mae and Clara to venture down the alleyway that intersected Volta Place in the middle of the block. The noisy, card-playing folks packed in practically on top of each other in wooden shacks in Bell's Court were, in

Ina's opinion, an embarrassment to the colored race. Most were "just this minute" up from the Deep South and hadn't had schooling and didn't know the first thing about city living. You could hear them hoo-rawing after their half-naked children and cursing each other any time of the day.

Across from Bell's Court, on the north side of the street, stretching northward a full block, was a playground surrounded by a vine-covered metal fence. Nestled within the fence, guarded by ailanthus, were swings, a sliding board, a sandpile, and a swimming pool. The pool's shimmering aqua water promised cool-as-a-cucumber refreshment to anyone who was allowed in. Colored children were not allowed in. Johnnie Mae, Clara, and their edible playmates—gingerbread Mabel, caramel Lula, black-coffee Hannah, Sarey the banana, and Tiny, the tall, slim girl colored the same as the skin ot an eggplant—were kept to the periphery of this paradise.

Johnnie Mae overheard Aunt Ina tell her mama that some of the children of Miss Helen Pear had gone in there. The Pears were colored, but had been allowed in the pool because the white people hadn't known they were colored. Aunt Ina had witnessed the folderol when the truth became known and the Pears were marched off the premises in their swimming suits and taken into Number 7 for a strong reprimand. Aunt Ina said that Mr. William Pear had been made to pay a big fine.

With no errand to run that afternoon and lulled by food and quiet talk, Clara fell asleep. Her head rested on the wm-dowsill and a string ot saliva slid onto the hand propping her cheek. Aunt Ina's chin fell to her bosom and her hands were still except when a fly alighted on her face. Swatting and snoring lightly, the two rested in the husky late afternoon air.

Johnnie Mae slipped out of the house and left Aunt Ina and Clara dozing in the front window. She crossed the street and stood at the fence outside the whites-only playground. Honeysuckle blossoms twined in and out oi the crisscrossed rods of the fence that ran the length of the playground. The vine's blossoms hosted hundreds of yellow jackets that might easily be mistaken for buds. Johnnie Mae brooded that the honeysuckle had surely been trained to the fence to draw the yellow jackets so they would sting colored children and discourage them from peeping through the fence.

Johnnie Mae found a spot under a large tree where she was concealed from the view of those in the pool but could still see inside. She lay with the tree's roots running under her stomach, her hands linked behind her head. Johnnie Mae stared at the swimmers. Some floated, some dove from the board and swam the pool's length, and some stood around giggling and showing off. A redheaded boy pounded his chest, strutted along the edge o{ the pool, and teased a group of girls nearby. Johnnie Mae seethed at the profligacy of the pale girls who lined the edges of the pool bobbing only their feet in the water. They wasted the pool's exquisite coolness on giggling and wiggling. Why didn't those girls cut through the water and let it rinse all the sticky sweat off them? Why didn't they want to show up that redheaded boy?

"I'd show that redheaded boy some stuff," Johnnie Mae muttered to the girl in her soul who bristled with angry pride and only grudgingly accepted the injustices that grown folks wouldn't talk about. "I can swim better than any of 'em! If they let me in there, I wouldn't just sit on the side!"

"How come we can't go in that pool and swim?" Johnnie Mae had repeatedly asked Aunt Ina since the beginning of

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summer. The girl's moaning and moping about swimming in the "white people's" pool had begun to test Ina's patience. Johnnie Mae was Ina's heart and she'd always been able to see straight down to the nut of the girl. She knew that Johnnie Mae understood full well how things were for colored folks— even here in Georgetown, where things were a bit better.

"You don't need to be over there anyway," Aunt Ina had answered time and again. "Those people ought to know bet-ter. They built that children's playground on top of an old graveyard. That's hallowed ground. They had no business disturbing the dead by building a children's playground over their heads. Be glad you're not in there. I recall they found many a false tooth and finger ring in there when they turned over the ground. That's no place for children to be playing. The dead want to rest." All Aunt Ina was doing was trying to thwart the child's questioning. She knew well enough that this reasoning didn't cut any mustard with Johnnie Mae.

And exactly who, Johnnie Mae wondered, were "they," anyway? Was President Coolidge the one? Was he the head white person who said colored couldn't swim in the pool? Did the white people get together in secret meetings and decide that colored people ought to step to the back door and couldn't go into the restaurants and sit down to eat? Were all the white people in on the plot?

Last night, stretched out for sleep on pallets on the second-floor porch, hoping to catch what cool breezes might come along, Johnnie Mae and Clara had listened as the voices of their parents wafted up from the kitchen. Willie and Alice turned over the question that Johnnie Mae had been peppering them with as well: "How come they won't let colored children swim in the pool on Volta Place?"

Willie shook his head downward toward his shoes. "That girl's got a worry, Alice. She don't understand this thing, and she's not gonna let go of it easy."

Alice flared to her daughter's defense. "Nor should she! What reason they got to keep them out of that playground, or the school, for that matter? We pay our rent money the same as these others around here. Some of the colored own their own homes here. Still they say our children can't play in the playground."

Willie was afraid of his wife's passion. He was a man who plowed under any strong emotion. Coming up on a tenant farm, Willie had been raised by people who reached the end of the day too tired to talk about their tiredness. Bereft of parents, then grandmother, then sister, Willie had grown up taciturn, though easygoing. But his Alice was a geyser — a hot spring—boiling up with the sense of injustice. And she knew full well the price colored folks paid for such anger.

"We've not been here long enough to spout off about what is and isn't right," Willie said.

"What you talking about, man? How long've we got to be in a place before we spout off? You saying this place is no better than Carolina? What we leave Carolina for?"

Not wanting to hear the answer to her own question, Alice rose quickly to scoop their two coffee cups from the table. She extinguished the coal oil lamp that stood on the table between them. She didn't want to see Willie's face now. She didn't want to see his face and recall how frightened he'd looked when she had first started talking about leaving Mara-bel and coming to Georgetown. Sometimes that look still flitted across his face. Alice knew that sometimes he was still frightened that they'd come so far from their home.

It had been Alice's idea to leave North Carolina for Washington. She'd caught wind of better times in Washington from folks who'd moved and come back to carry the tale. The smell of the city's promise stayed in her nostrils until she'd been able to convince Willie. He hadn't wanted to chance it. But he'd been fearful that she would find a way to go without him and he didn't want — couldn't stand the thought — that the soft and pretty, dimpled Alice would leave him.

Alice had wanted to come and here they were. It would always be between them that she had wanted to and so they had come. The white people here seemed the same to Willie as the white folks in Marabel. A different style of coat, but cut from the same cloth. He knew the realization of this bothered Alice. So he thought he'd spare her pride by denying it. "Taint quite as bad. These white folks aren't quite as mean as Carolina," he said softly. Lightning bugs chased each other in through the wide-open kitchen windows and back out into the pitch dark.

In truth, Washington, especially Georgetown, was quite a bit different from the rural town in North Carolina they'd come from. There was work here — plenty of it — for folks who wanted to work at something besides farming. Here a man or woman could latch on to something other than the rear end o{ a mule or a cow's titties. There was better schooling for Johnnie Mae and Clara and no stepping off the sidewalks to let a white person pass. Still, the white people ruled the roost here. That was no surprise. But there were also many well-off colored people here: doctors, dentists, schoolteachers. And there was more quiet in the night here. No riders breaking up the calm with hooves and ropes and fire.

Listening to her parents, hearing the angry resignation in their voices, did not help Johnnie Mae understand who the "they" were who circumscribed their lives. It didn't help her know whom to blame for being locked out of the magical coolness of the Volta Place swimming pool. This pool, so small in reality, but so much a symbol of the line drawn around her life by prejudice, had become an obsession. Throughout the stagnant July days, a clear but fanciful image of herself stroking lap after lap the length of the pool dominated Johnnie Mae's thoughts. She imagined the pale girls of the periphery gaping in surprise, not at the audacity of this colored girl using their playground and their pool, but at her absolute, consummate skill. The boys would fall back in wonderment too. In this picture Johnnie Mae mounted the diving board, threw back her head, brought her arms around and above her head, and sailed off the edge of the board. She was so fluent and graceful that she was able to glide under the blue-green water without causing even a ripple on its surface.

It got caught on debris along the riverbank, still white, still tied in a bow. Before the onlookers came, before divers for the city came, before the dredging equipment was lowered into the water, Press Parker, a workhorse of a man with short muscular legs, dove in near where the white ribbon was caught on a piece of driftwood. Parker, who had been whitewashing a bungalow on M Street, was the first man on the scene after the five girls started hoo-rawing that Clara had been swallowed by the river. He didn't put down his paintbrush before he started running toward the commotion so there was a trail of white down M Street leading straight to the spot where he dove into the river. His paint-speckled cap flew off his head and landed in a tangle of weeds.

Mabel, Lula, Hannah, Tiny, and Sarey had pulled Johnnie Mae to the bank and let her slip to the grass. Her chest rose and fell spasmodically. Her head thrashed about, and ropes of green water and mucus ran out of her nose. For a few moments the girls had simply run circles around one another,

screaming. Hannah and Mabel had recovered first and scrambled up the hill, calling out for help.

Word of the tragedy traveled in relay fashion up the street toward the St. Pierre house, where Alice Bynum was working that day. The coal-black boy whom people called Snow, whose name was really Clarence Simpson, had been wading with the girls earlier at Higgins Hole. He saw Mabel and Hannah come barreling over the rise to M Street. They called out that Clara was missing in the water. A moment later, Press Parker raced past him like a bullet. Snow took off down M Street bellowing, "That little girl done drownt! That little girl done drownt!"

He shouted into the faces of passersby, setting off a tizzy of panic in each one. At the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street, Snow stopped and told all he knew to a knot of people. Miz Belle Dockery, as soon as she got the scant facts, headed toward the riverbank with no regard for four-wheeled conveyances. The traffic cop in his narrow booth at the middle of the intersection blew his whistle at her back as Miz Belle Dockery careened in front of a car. She didn't stop, and the cop abandoned his post to follow her.

Overhearing the talk, Lexter Gorson, who shined shoes in front of the Farmers' and Mechanics' Bank, puffed north on Wisconsin Avenue. Eventually he grabbed a passing boy and held him in a viselike grip until the boy swore he'd go nowhere but up to the St. Pierres' house on Dumbarton Avenue and tell Miz Alice Bynum that one of her girls—this much they knew—had fallen into the Potomac at the Three Sisters.

Alice felt a spreading panic in her stomach as soon as she saw the boy's bulging eyes. She put down the bowl of cake batter she had been stirring, knocked the boy against the screen

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door, and ran out the back gate, setting the blood-red rosebush bucking and snapping. She swooped her skirt and apron up and held them against her chest.

As the news spread, colored people rained down Wisconsin Avenue, the seventy-five steps from Prospect Avenue to M Street, and every other north-south artery in Georgetown, then turned west toward the Three Sisters. At the corner of P Street and Wisconsin Avenue, Mahmoud Hadad, a Syrian cobbler, stood in the doorway of his shop and attempted to piece together the crisis. He caught at words and snatches of words uttered by the people hurtling themselves toward the river. By the time Alice Bynum reached his store, he had summoned his youngest boy, Omar, and instructed him to unhitch the horse and cart tied to a post at the curb. "Boy, drive this cart!" he yelled. Hadad grabbed Alice around the waist as she was passing his doorway, and he swooped her into the back of the cart with him. "Drive down to the river, boy!" Alice fell back against Mr. Hadad, quickly righted herself, and gripped the sides of the cart. As they overtook people running in the street, the tassels and bells on the horse's bridle flew. Mr. Hadad yelled, "Move, ya! Move, ya!"