Fame and Glory in Freedom, Georgia

by Barbara O'Connor

  At school on Monday, I couldn’t keep myself from smiling nearly all day. Even when Hannah Bates told me I smelled like cat food, I kept on smiling like I didn’t care. And you know what? Maybe I didn’t care.

  I tried to catch Harlem’s attention at recess, but he was too busy shuffling his feet around in the dirt while the other boys played basketball. Once the ball landed near him and he picked it up. Everybody was waving their arms and hollering for him to throw them the ball. He threw it towards Jason Marks but missed by a mile, sending the ball bouncing off into the bushes. Everybody yelled names at him. Retard. Freak. Names like that.

  When the afternoon bell rang, I raced down the hall.

  “Harlem!” I yelled over the clang of lockers.

  He looked in my direction but didn’t stop.

  When I caught up with him, I held up Miss Delphine’s dictionary. “Look what I got.”

  “What’s that for?”

  “To study,” I said. “Miss Delphine gave it to me.”

  We let the swarm of kids push us through the front door of the school, then moved on down the sidewalk away from them.

  “You remember her,” I said. “The one who brought the apple pie with me? She lives next door to me.”

  Harlem looped his thumbs through the straps of his backpack and glared down at the sidewalk. His long legs and giant feet took such big steps I had to jog to keep up with him. It was clear he wasn’t going to talk much, so I shut up and just listened to the squeak squeak of his sneakers.

  When we got to Elite Tattoos, Harlem threw his backpack in the corner. The smell of popcorn drifted out of the back room.

  “That you, Sue Ann?” Ray called.

  “It’s me,” Harlem said.

  Ray pushed the curtain aside. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He squinted through the smoke. “Hey, buddy,” he said. That seemed nice to me, Ray calling Harlem “buddy” like that. I bet Harlem liked it, too.

  “Mr. Moody wants to see you,” Ray said, making his cigarette bob up and down.

  Harlem started up the stairs and I was right behind him. I was dying to see old Mr. Moody’s place. But Harlem stopped so suddenly I ran into the back of him.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  I shrugged like I didn’t care and watched Harlem disappear up the dark stairway.

  I climbed onto one of the stools at the counter.

  “Who’s Sue Ann?” I said.

  Ray dropped his cigarette stub into a soda can. It sizzled when it hit the bottom.

  “Friend of mine,” he said.

  “Has she got tattoos?”

  Ray grinned. “A couple.”

  I watched him toss magazines into a cardboard box on the floor. Finally I had a chance to study his tattoos. A scaly green snake with glaring red eyes crawled down from his shoulder, winding around and around his arm. There was a black spiderweb on one elbow and letters on each of his fingers that spelled out “L-O-V-E” on one hand and “H-A-T-E” on the other. But the best tattoo was peeking out of the top of his shirt—an eyeball with wings.

  We both looked up at the sound of footsteps on the floor overhead. A door closed and Harlem came downstairs. He unwrapped a grease-spotted napkin and laid it on the counter. Potato chips.

  “Thanks,” I said, reaching for a handful.

  “So, how are we gonna study?” Harlem said.

  I wiped a greasy palm on my jeans and took out the dictionary.

  “Miss Delphine says we should start with ‘A’ and work our way to ‘Z.’” I opened the dictionary and flipped to the start of the “A’s.” “I’ll call out some words to you and then you call out some words to me.”

  And so it went. “Abacus. Accent. Admirable. Affectionate.” Harlem getting them right and me getting them wrong.

  But Harlem, he didn’t get mad. He’d just shake his head and spell the word for me real slow.

  “Now you spell it,” he’d say.

  And I’d spell it right and he’d say that was good and we’d move on to the next word. Harlem made a list of the ones I missed in a notebook and then every once in a while he’d call out one from the list. If I missed it again, he still didn’t get mad. Just spelled it slow and waited for me to get it right.

  Ray sat on a metal folding chair by the window, smoking and nodding and chuckling and looking out at the sidewalk every now and then. Waiting for Sue Ann, I figured.

  We kept on. Word by word. “Assess. Atrocious. Attire. Authentic.” By four o’clock my head was spinning and I was sure relieved when Ray said it was time for us to quit.

  Harlem handed me the notebook. “Study these for tomorrow,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to ask him if he was crazy, but then for once in my life I had the good sense to hush up. I put the notebook in my backpack with the dictionary.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  That night, while Colleen talked on the phone to some boy who didn’t even go to school (a secret I planned on using to my advantage someday), I propped my pillow up in bed and opened Harlem’s notebook across my knees. I looked at the first word, then slapped my hand over it and looked up at the ceiling while I whispered the letters one by one. I lifted my hand just a crack and peeked at the word. I got it right. I felt a smile spread across my face.

  I went down the list, from “abridged” to “assumption.” I put a red mark by the ones I got wrong and I whispered those again.

  Then I tucked the notebook under my pillow and closed my eyes. Harlem Tate might look mean on the outside, with that frown and those glaring eyes. But on the inside, he was someone being nice to me and helping me spell. Nothing mean about that, now, is there?

  8

  I ran over to Miss Delphine’s, my backpack bumping so hard against me it like to knocked me over. When I got there, she was pushing Pop’s wheelchair out onto the porch.

  “It might be too cool out here for him,” she said. She pulled his food-stained bathrobe closed and tucked a blanket over his lap. Pop’s head bounced on his neck like a rag doll’s. A string of drool dripped out of his mouth and landed on his hand. Miss Delphine whipped a tissue out of her pocket and wiped it off. Takes a good heart to do that, I thought.

  “Are you too cool out here, Dad?” she said.

  Pop shook his head and said, “No,” with a gravelly kind of voice.

  Miss Delphine patted his arm, and his crooked mouth turned up just a tad like he was smiling.

  I tried to picture my own daddy in that wheelchair, and then I worried that my heart wasn’t nearly so good as Miss Delphine’s.

  “I’m going to Harlem’s after school, so I won’t be here today,” I said. “I just thought I’d come by and say hey.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did,” Miss Delphine said, combing Pop’s hair real slow and gentle. “How’s the spelling going?”

  “We’re doing ‘B’ today,” I said.

  I sat on the porch steps and watched her comb with one hand and smooth with the other. Comb and smooth. Comb and smooth.

  “I just think this is so exciting, you and Harlem being together in that spelling bee and all,” Miss Delphine said.

  She didn’t have her makeup on yet and she looked different. Younger. Like a kid, almost.

  “Mitsy Rayburn and Jenna Little made two hundred flash cards,” I said, trying not to look at Pop when he made mumbly noises.

  Miss Delphine tucked the comb into the pocket of Pop’s bathrobe and sat on the step beside me.

  “Well, so what?” she said. “That don’t mean diddly-squat.”

  “I guess.”

  She put her arm around me and squeezed. “Come on, now, my little Birdie,” she said. “You got to have faith.”

  “Okay.”

  “I bet your mom and dad are proud as can be,” she said.

  I nodded. “Daddy’s gonna change his truck-driving schedule so he can come to the spelling bee.”

  Miss Delphine smiled in that twinkly-eyed way of hers. She brushed my hair out
of my eyes. “Let me give you a perm.”

  “No way.”

  “A body wave, then.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “How about just a trim?”

  “I tell you who could use a haircut,” I said. “Harlem.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded. “He looks like a hippie or something. I swear.”

  Miss Delphine laughed. “Then you bring him over here. I’ll fix him up.”

  “I bet he won’t come.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, what am I gonna say? ‘Hey, Harlem, how come you want to look like a hippie? Why don’t you let Miss Delphine cut your hair?’”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll think of something.” Miss Delphine slapped my knee and stood up. “Now you better get yourself to school, Miss Bird.”

  That afternoon at Elite Tattoos, I sat across from Harlem at the card table by the window. Ray was at the counter, flipping through a magazine with race cars on the cover. It seemed like the tattoo business was kind of slow.

  “‘Biennial,’” Harlem said.

  I closed my eyes and used my finger to write invisible letters in the air. “‘B-I-E-N-E-A-L,’” I said, then opened my eyes just enough to peek at Harlem. His face told me I got it wrong.

  Harlem wrote the word in his notebook and then spelled it for me, slow and patient, just like the others.

  I slumped against the back of my chair. “We might as well give up,” I said. “I can’t do this.”

  “Okay.” Harlem slapped his notebook shut and stood up.

  “Good, then let’s play checkers,” Ray said.

  I jumped up. “Wait a minute. You mean you’re gonna quit? Just like that?”

  “You’re the one who quit,” Harlem said.

  “I did not!”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “You did,” Ray said, lining the checkers up on the checkerboard.

  “Well, I didn’t mean it,” I said. “Jeez, y’all have to take everything I say so serious?”

  Just then the bell over the door tinkled and Mr. Moody came in carrying a bulging garbage bag that clattered and clanged with every step. There must have been about a million cans in there. I wrinkled my nose. The smell of garbage and stale beer hovered in the air around that bag.

  “Bring this upstairs,” Mr. Moody said, thrusting the bag at Harlem.

  Ray and I watched Harlem carry the clattering bag up the stairs behind Mr. Moody.

  “I hate him,” I said.

  Ray lifted his eyebrows. “Who?”

  “Mr. Moody.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s so mean,” I said. “And he chews tobacco. That’s gross.”

  Ray swept the checkers off the board and into a shoebox. “Aw, he just wants to be left alone.”

  I picked a checker up off the floor and tossed it into the shoebox. “All he ever does is hunt for cans,” I said.

  Ray lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. “He likes to fish,” he said, snapping his lighter shut with a click.

  “Where’s he fish? I never saw him fishing anywhere.”

  “I took him out to my place at the lake once.” Ray scratched his spiderweb elbow. “Maybe I’ll take him and Harlem both out there sometime.”

  “I like to fish,” I said.

  Ray smiled, making his eyes crinkle up at the corners. “Then you come, too.”

  “How come Harlem lives with him, anyway?” I said.

  “I’m not exactly sure.”

  “Didn’t you even ask?”

  “Mr. Moody pays his rent and stays out of my business, so I stay out of his,” Ray said.

  “Harlem’s daddy’s in prison and his mama choked on a chicken bone at the Holiday Inn,” I said.

  Ray laughed so hard he started coughing. “Is that right?” he said, wiping tears from his eyes.

  I felt myself blush. “That’s what I heard.”

  “I reckon that’s as good a story as any.”

  “Then what’s the real story?”

  “Beats me,” he said. “But I guaran-dern-tee you it’s not as good as that one.”

  I’ve always been one to ask what I want to know, so it was against my nature that I hadn’t just up and asked Harlem why he had come to Freedom and what he was doing living with Mr. Moody. I guess there was just something about him that told me to go slow.

  But when Harlem came back downstairs, I knew I couldn’t wait another minute.

  “How come you’re living with Mr. Moody?” I said.

  A cloud moved over Harlem’s face for one tiny second; then he said, “Family problems.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  Ray cleared his throat and shuffled his feet around, but I ignored him.

  Harlem shrugged and stooped his shoulders like he was trying to be smaller. “Just problems.”

  “Is Mr. Moody related to you?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you like him?”

  Harlem tossed his head to get the hair out of his face. “Yeah.”

  “Everybody calls him the Can Man,” I said.

  Harlem picked up the dictionary, thumbed through the pages until he got to the “B’s,” and said, “‘Boutique.’”

  I took a deep breath, lifting my shoulders clean up to my ears and then letting them drop with a long, loud sigh. Then I pushed Harlem’s notebook across the counter towards him and tossed him a pen.

  “You might as well add that to the list,” I said.

  Harlem wrote “boutique” in his notebook and then he said, “You’re doing good.”

  I felt my mouth drop plumb open. “I am?”

  He pushed his hair out of his eyes and nodded.

  “Really?” I said. I guess I wanted to hear him say it again.

  “Really,” he said.

  He must have seen the doubt in my eyes, ‘cause he said, “‘Boutique’s’ a hard word.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “‘Boutique’ is a hard word.”

  We weren’t even finished with the “B’s” yet and already I was beginning to think I really did have me a friend.

  9

  “Cable. Censor. Collapse. Compile.” Me and Harlem were moving right along. When Ray didn’t have a customer (which seemed like most of the time, if you ask me), we studied at the tattoo parlor, calling words out to each other from Miss Delphine’s dictionary. Then I took Harlem’s notebook home to study the words I’d missed. Harlem had only missed one word so far. “Cantaloupe.” I’m sorry to say that when he missed that word, I couldn’t help but bask in the thrill of it, jumping up and hollering, “Wrong! That’s wrong! You got it wrong!”

  Harlem had looked like he’d just sat on a bee—surprise and pain all wrapped up together—and I felt sort of bad that I hadn’t been calm and patient like he was every one of the hundred times I missed a word. But I guess that was the difference between me and Harlem.

  It seemed like a day didn’t go by that I didn’t marvel over how smart Harlem was. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t hardly say a word in school, why he just sits there and gets laughed at and acts like he don’t know what’s going on.

  So one day I just up and asked him.

  “How come you let everybody think you’re dumb when you’re not?”

  His face got red and he said, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean like today, when Mrs. Moore wrote those sentences on the board and she asked you to say which words were adverbs.”

  I sat in the back of the room near Harlem and I had seen all those faces smirking back at him. I had watched him slump down in his desk and shrug his shoulders. And I had known that if anybody in that room knew an adverb from a noun, it was Harlem Tate.

  Now I watched his face and tried to read his thoughts, but I couldn’t.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Harlem sure was a puzzle.

  The day we started on the “F’s,” Ray got a love letter. I knew it was a love letter ’cause it reeked of p
erfume.

  “Peee-yew,” I said, holding my nose for effect. “I can smell that love letter from here.” I fanned my other hand in front of my face.

  Ray grinned.

  “Is that from Sue Ann?” I said.

  “Nope. Wanda Billingsley.”

  “You ever been married?”

  “Twice.” Ray tucked the letter into his shirt pocket and popped open a soda. “The first time ‘cause I was stupid and the second time ’cause I was dumb.”

  “Ray was married to Miss South Carolina,” Harlem said.

  “Runner-up to Miss South Carolina,” Ray said. “But Miss Nag-Me-to-Death-and-Spend-All-My-Money-in-One-Day would have been more like it.”

  Me and Harlem laughed.

  “You ought to meet Miss Delphine,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure what Miss Delphine would think about a man with a flying eyeball tattoo. But Ray was nice and Miss Delphine had a way of looking through the outside of a person and getting right on in to find the good part—the inside.

  I gazed out the window and thought wouldn’t it be nice if Miss Delphine and Ray met each other and then they liked each other so much that they got married. Ray would move into Miss Delphine’s place and me and Harlem would go over there for dinner every night. And since my daddy is a truck driver and travels so much and Colleen is so hateful, Mama would say it was okay if I go live with Miss Delphine and Ray, so I do. And then Harlem gets fed up with that awful Mr. Moody, so he moves in over there, too. And then Miss Delphine and Ray adopt me and Harlem as their own and we all go to work in the tattoo parlor.

  “‘Facilitate.’” Harlem interrupted my daydream.

  “How come you want to look like a hippie?” I blurted out. “Why don’t you let Miss Delphine cut your hair?”

  Now, how come I had to go and say that out of the blue like that? Sometimes my mouth just decides to talk, and before I know it, I’ve gone and said something I wasn’t even planning on saying.

  Harlem’s face got red and he looked down at his giant feet.

  Now when I needed my mouth to say something, it wouldn’t. Just clammed up and left me sitting there feeling bad.