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  Little old ladies came by and patted my head and held my hand with their withered claws and told me how cute I was and how happy they were to have the chance to say so. I nodded gravely back at them. Buxom matrons wearing too much powder and perfume hugged me messily and told me how much I looked like my mother. I nodded gravely back at them. Deacons, smelling of aftershave or coffee or cigarettes, slapped me on the back and told me what a fine specimen I was, as if I had been captured and placed in a jar in a natural history museum for their amusement. I nodded gravely back at them. They all had one thing in common: age. Not a kid in sight.

  The next day I made the first of many grand entrances into a strange classroom. I didn’t encounter much difficulty, other than the fact that all the other kids had learned to write cursive in the second grade, something I was expecting to do in third grade. The teacher dealt with this problem by giving me some books and telling me to figure it out.

  The house Dad had located on short notice was a two-bedroom farmhouse, which posed problems for a family of five. I muddled through the third grade with cramped quarters and cramped handwriting. The next summer Dad found a more suitable house in the suburbs, and we moved to another school district. My first day in fourth grade caught the teacher shorthanded when it came to desks. Since I was built along the lines of a soda straw (only with larger hands and feet), she found another slender student and we shared a desk. The other student was a cute girl named Sheila. I approved her plan.

  When we finished our lesson, we got a book on birds and leafed through it together, snickering when we got to the picture of two lovebirds. I saw this as an omen, but the next summer our family moved yet again, to a white-flight neighborhood. Just as I was getting around to writing a note that said, “Do you like me? Check a box. ⬜ Yes ⬜ No.” (OK, I never said I was quick off the line, but I heard somewhere that slow and steady wins the race.)

  I had, by this time, learned how to write at least as well as a doctor. I had also learned that classmates are like the dog that follows you home. Better not get too attached. When a little dark-haired cutie named Carolyn batted her eyes at me, I didn’t even have time to organize my note-writing materials before she became the stuff of memory. In September, a two-story frame house opened up in town a few blocks from the church. But the distance from the white-bread-America suburb to the inner-city neighborhood was a lot further than the twenty miles we put on the Vauxhall driving in.

  By now, Heidi was in a perpetual state of mourning, which helped me understand the reaction of the Israelites to Jeremiah. I refrained from digging a pit for her, sensing that the plan might not meet with universal approval. Hannah bounced from one school to another with the flexibility of a switch-hitter.

  Settling into the house was an adventure. It had a full basement and attic. In my bedroom I discovered the door to the attic stairs. I abandoned unpacking to explore, which I did with the thoroughness of a cartographer. I climbed and crawled over rafters and under dormers, blazing a trail through decades of dust and disintegrating newspapers. I noted the grimy window in the hidden alcove that I claimed, silently, as my personal refuge. It overlooked a mass of housetops and trees with the receding leaf-lines of fall. Next, the basement, which yielded little beyond flaking paint, the smell of mildew, and a monstrous beast Dad identified as the furnace.

  The backyard was a rectangle of weeds and crabgrass surrounded by a vine-covered chain-link fence. Dead leaves sloped against the garage. I went to the back fence and peered through the vines. A large set of brown eyes peered back from a dark face. I jumped back, tripped, and fell backward. A strange sound emerged from behind the curtain of leaves. I rolled to my knees and looked through the bottom of the fence.

  A Negro boy was rolling on the ground, snorting like a pig and kicking up leaves and dust. Evidently he had also been startled and was having a seizure of some kind. I tried to remember what to do, something about making sure he didn’t swallow his tongue. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I assumed time was a critical element. I was halfway over the fence, trying to disentangle my shoelace, when the snorting changed to a thin, rising and falling wail. I paused, puzzled. Obviously he wasn’t swallowing his tongue. As I stood in frozen indecision, the noise became a sound that left me both relieved and annoyed. Laughter.

  I straddled the fence, shoes crammed pigeon-toed into the wire, glaring with impatience and pique. The convulsions of glee subsided into tremors of giggles, like the fading thunder of a passing storm. I waited, looking down from my exalted position with royal disdain. However, each time the boy looked up at me, the sirenlike noise erupted, and he flopped about on the ground, mottled brown and black, dust on skin.

  My ankles complained of the impossible angle I had forced on them. I shifted my weight to my hands, but the vines were too insubstantial to support even my meager weight, and I tumbled into the yard onto the laughing boy. This development, while alarming me, only served to increase his amusement. He suffered a relapse of the snorting stage, rolling around and slapping weakly at me as he laughed.

  I struggled to my feet and looked down at him with as much amazement as annoyance. How could he sustain such spasms without internal injury? He grabbed at my leg and used me as a support to crawl to his feet, leaning against me and laughing. Odors of grass, dirt, and the musky smell of the boy’s sweat mingled in the air. I felt him quivering as he staggered against me. As if it were spread by contact, I began to be infected by his laughter and, against my will, found myself chuckling. The boy looked up from his bent stance and pawed feebly at my chest, trying to catch his breath between barks of delight. This struck me as rather amusing, and I began to laugh in earnest. We spurred each other on to greater heights of hilarity until we both collapsed on the ground and surrendered to an ecstasy of elation. It gradually faded in fits and giggles, replaced by the contented silence of exhaustion.

  I sat up. “Mark,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Yes?” He looked at my hand. Bits of grass and leaves adorned his close-cropped hair like Christmas ornaments. Now that we had recovered from our convulsions, I was able to get a look at him. He was very dark, like the dark chocolate Mom liked but none of us kids did. He was a little shorter than I was, and much stockier, which was no great feat. I had seen walking sticks with more meat on their bones than I had. His head bulged out in back as if to counterbalance his large nose and lips. He was wearing a brown V-neck T-shirt under a nappy burnt-orange sweater. Black high-tops protruded from his frayed jeans.

  “I’m Mark. What’s your name?” My hand hung out between us.

  “Marc.” He grabbed my hand and shook it as vigorously as he had laughed earlier.

  “Right. And you are?” I vibrated from the energy of his handshake.

  “Marc.” He continued to shake my hand, smiling hugely.

  I began to wonder if I had tumbled into the grounds of a private lunatic asylum. I looked at him blankly while developing an appreciation for the rigors of the life of a pump handle.

  He finally quit shaking my hand and stood up. “Only youse guys prob’ly spells yours with a K, as in Mark Twain. Mine has a C, as in Marcus. Marcus Malcom Marshall, to be exack, as in Garvey, X, and Thurgood, respectively. No relation, though. But everybody jus’ call me M.” The torrent of words gushed from him with no discernable pauses for breathing.

  I hated to admit I didn’t follow any of it. I latched onto the one part I did understand. “M?”

  “Yep. Man, you talk funny. Where you from?”

  “I talk funny? Youse guys talks funny.”

  “Alabama? I bet it’s Alabama,” he declared, undeterred by my comments.

  “Alabama?” I snorted in disgust.

  “Texas, then.”

  I was torn between pride at being a Texan and reluctance to admit he had guessed correctly. “Fort Worth,” I countered.

  “And Bingo was his name-o!” M declared with a quick pirouette of triumph and a short siren wail of laughter that was suddenly cut off.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing my arm and dragging me away from the fence.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You gots to meet Mama.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, everybody gots to meet Mama.”

  I looked back at the fence, catching a glimpse of the moving van above the vines. From a second-story window, Hannah peered out through the film of grime on the glass like the ghost in a Gothic novel. I attempted a shrug, which was difficult while being dragged across M’s backyard. I waved as we mounted the back steps, but it probably looked more like a kid reaching back toward the house in distress. Then we disappeared through a screen door.

  We maneuvered through a dank laundry room and emerged into an amalgam of potent odors. A very tall, slightly plump and very black woman stood in front of a stove. She was wearing an apron over a nice dress. Without turning around she said, “Go back an’ wipe your feet. I jus’ mopped this floor.” I looked down. The linoleum was a dull yellow, cracked and curling, but clean. I was dragged back through the laundry room to the doormat, where M and I wiped our feet and returned to the kitchen.

  “Mama, it’s Mark from Texas, but with a k, as in Mark Twain.” He shoved me forward, and I stumbled to a stop at the foothills of the black mountain towering above me. She turned around, ladle in hand, and smiled down at me with large teeth. “Hello, Mark from Texas.” She held out a hand, the pink palm enveloping my puny white hand. “Did you move in back there?” She pointed the ladle toward our house.

  I nodded.

  “Well thas jus’ fine. Careful you don’t let M talk your ears off.”

  I nodded, again.

  “Are youse guys hungry?” she asked. I looked apprehensively at the steam rising from the pots on the stove. I had no idea what was in them, but the deep odors didn’t call to the deep of my appetite. The aroma verged between a slaughterhouse and a laundry.

  M leapt as if he’d been stabbed in the flank with a hat pin. “Yes!” he cried, producing two plates seemingly from thin air. He placed them on the green Formica tabletop. Before I had a chance to say “Pepto-Bismol,” I was seated in front of a plate of limp, slimy green leaves and some unidentified meat in a watery brown sauce.

  “You comin’ from Texas, I’m sure you been havin’ some chitlins and collard greens lots of times,” Mrs. Marshall said.

  “Not that I recall,” I replied. I assumed the green stuff was the greens, so the other must be the chitlins.

  M looked at me in disbelief, and his mother said, “Well, then, you is in for a real treat!”

  I was now on center stage, the audience waiting for my next move. My fork wavered over the plate like a divining rod. I went for the meat. Two sets of eyes followed my fork to my mouth. I chewed quickly and swallowed, and waited for the taste to catch up. Not bad. Pretty good, actually. I enthusiastically went for another bite and made a devoted friend. Mrs. Marshall nodded and turned back to the stove. And not a moment too soon because the greens were another story entirely. I was able to finish them with generous portions of chitlins.

  As I was forcing down the last bit of greens, I heard a knock on the back door. Mrs. Marshall disappeared into the laundry room. A familiar voice said, “Good afternoon. I’m Matthew Cloud, just moving in across the way. I was checking up on my son, who I understand might be bothering you folks over here.”

  Mrs. Marshall laughed. “Oh no, Mr. Cloud, he ain’t no trouble. He jus’ finishin’ up a plate of chitlins and collard greens right now. That boy needs some fattenin’ up!”

  Dad walked in to see me with a forkful of chitlins suspended between plate and mouth. Hannah, evidently the messenger who had alerted Dad to my abduction, peeked her blond head around the door like a sideways Kilroy.

  “Well, I suspect you’re right about that point,” Dad chuckled, apparently amused at the sight of me tossing down the chitlins like one of the family. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to borrow him back. It’s a little matter of a dozen boxes in his room he was supposed to unpack before he took off.”

  The Amazon clicked her tongue disapprovingly, and I suddenly felt guilty. I gulped down the chitlins and jumped up.

  “Thanks.” I looked at M. “I guess I have to go back now.”

  Mrs. Marshall nodded at me. “You’re welcome, Mark. And I hope you come back when you done your chores.”

  I looked at Dad. “Sure, if it’s not too late.”

  Unpacking took until after dark, but Sunday after church I returned. M took me on a tour, starting with a basement much more interesting than mine. Poor lighting, unfinished walls, and exposed rafters gave it the ambiance of a cave. M grabbed a hammer and pounded furiously at a sixteen-penny nail jutting from one of the studs.

  “When Papa hits a nail, there’s sparks fly,” he said with respect, and swung the hammer again. “Hey, I think I saw a spark. Here, you try it, man.” I declined, but M wouldn’t rest until I had taken a few ineffectual swings at the nail. No sparks.

  The rest of the house wasn’t much different from mine, albeit in a more advanced stage of disintegration. M’s attic view faced the opposite street, so I was able to see how the other half lived as we sat on an old trunk and squinted through the grime. More roofs and trees in their final stages of abandonment.

  “That’s the school over there.” M pointed at a square roof several blocks away. “What grade are you in, man? I bet it’s fifth.”

  “Fifth.”

  “And Bingo was his name-o!” he cried and attempted a pirouette, but the cramped quarters of the attic made it impossible. He settled for a jig and a chuckle. “Me too. Which class? I bet it’s Ma Barker’s.” He stood poised for another victory dance.

  “I haven’t been yet.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He sat back down on the trunk. “What’s it like in Texas?”

  “I don’t know. Like here, only no basements. And hotter.”

  “One day I’ll go see. I’m gonna go see everything, like Marcus Garvey.”

  “Like who?”

  “The Right Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey.” He waited, but I had nothing to say. “Never met the guy,” seemed flippant.

  “Malcom X?”

  I shook my head.

  “Thurgood Marshall?”

  I shook my head.

  M looked at me for a long while with an impassive stare I couldn’t interpret, as if he were trying to make up his mind. He suddenly stood up and walked down the attic stairs; I followed him to his room. He pulled a thin paperback book from a cardboard box next to his bed and shoved it at me. I looked at the title: The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King Talk with Kenneth B. Clark. I looked back up at M, but he just walked past me and down the stairs. We walked through the kitchen to the back door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, man,” he said and closed the door behind me.

  CHAPTER THREE I was indeed in Ma Barker’s class, who turned out to be Mrs. Barker, a middle-aged white woman and not, as far as I could tell, the matriarch of a bloodthirsty outlaw gang. But you have to admit, being a fifth-grade teacher would have been a great cover.

  After school I found M waiting at the back fence.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s Meesha and Keesha’s birthday.”

  “Meesha and Keesha?”

  “The twins.”

  “I would have never guessed. What twins?”

  “Harriet’s twins. Just come on and you’ll see.”

  In the living room a sheet was spread out on the worn wooden floor. In the middle a cake slathered in white icing was graced with a single candle flickering in the drafty room. Two identically dressed babies sat on either side, looking up at the looming adults with that complacent apprehension one sometimes finds in babies.

  A girl I took to be Harriet towered over them, and me. She was wearing a purple paisley tube of some kind of stretchy material with a black patent-leather belt. Her large hands and feet left no doubt as to whose daughter she was. She wasn’t quite as dark as M, except around her elbows and kne
es. She hovered over the twins in a half-crouch, her knees together. “Blow out the candle,” she said in baby talk. The twins just looked at her.

  “Make a wish,” Mrs. Marshall said, also in baby talk and also towering. The twins blinked in unison, realigned their sights on her, and picked up where they had left off, doing their best imitation of confused one-year-old babies.

  Across the room an older man with close-cropped gray hair sat in a frowzy armchair, a newspaper open in his lap. He watched the babies dispassionately, but I thought I detected a hint of amusement.

  M strode forward. “They don’t know how to blow out a candle. They’re only one!” He leaned over and blew the candle out.

  “Now have some cake,” Harriet said.

  “Yes, eat your birthday cake,” Mrs. Marshall said. “It’s chocolate. Everybody like chocolate cake.”

  M looked from his sister to his mother with exasperation, leaned over, scooped icing off the cake with his finger, and shoved some in each baby’s mouth. Their expressions changed instantly, and they converged on the cake. Before Mrs. Marshall had time to cut us slices from the other cake set aside in the kitchen, there were three lumpy masses of icing and cake in the middle of the sheet, like an accident scene of a collision with a zebra, a penguin, and a nun. Two of them moved. M and I disappeared into the basement before we were recruited for cleanup duty.

  M dug up two claw hammers, turned off the light, and we took turns banging on a nail, trying to make sparks. We labored in shadow, silhouetted by the light from the little rectangular basement window high above us.

  I began singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” but stopped when M threatened to switch his attentions from the nail head to my head.

  “Did you read that book I gave you, man?” M asked between strokes.

  “Hey, that was only two days ago.”

  “Do you know who John Brown was?”

  I began singing again. “John Brown’s body lies a molderin’ in the grave . . .” but the silhouette of M’s hammer hung over me in the gloom and I quit.