Feathers

by Jacqueline Woodson

  “Well, first of all,” he said, “Jesus wasn’t a boy, he was like God’s son but not a man either—like a Thing-type person. Like a spirit guy.”

  Ms. Johnson and the rest of us just looked at him.

  “And second of all, he wasn’t white. He was like spirit-colored or something.”

  “What’s spirit-colored?” his friend Chris asked. “I never heard of no spirit color.”

  I could see Rayray’s little head inside his big shirt. He was frowning. “Like the color of air, brother-man. You know, like no color.”

  “When those cats put nails in him, he bled, though,” somebody else said. “What color was his blood?”

  Rayray shrugged. “Right on, my brother-man, I feel what you’re saying. Blood is red no matter who it’s coming out of. But that ain’t where I’m going, you see? That kid ain’t Jesus is all I’m saying.”

  “Say, brother,” the kid said, which was jive talk for I agree with you.

  Say, brother, I signed underneath my desk, then looked down at my hands. I had a pockmark on the center of each palm left over from the time I had the chicken pox. The marks were small and reddish brown. Sometimes when I was thinking about something real hard, they started itching. Maybe in another world, somebody would’ve thought they were nail holes, I don’t know.

  Mama lost one baby before I was born. Her name was Lila and she died when she was a month old. Something about her lungs. Something about her blood. We don’t talk about her much. But there are pictures. Sometimes Mama kisses my palms and calls me God’s gift.

  I wondered what the inside of the Jesus Boy’s hands looked like. I wondered if his mama kissed them and called him silly names. Of course when I looked up, he was staring at me again. Old Big Eyes.

  “He’s not saying he’s Jesus-Jesus, right?” Rayray asked. “He’s saying that’s—like some nickname. I know this Spanish guy named Jesus but it’s pronounced the Spanish way—not like the real guy. This kid ain’t saying he’s the real guy, right? I mean, how’s he gonna be God’s son and be in Ms. Johnson’s class? No offense, Ms. Johnson, but even if that Jesus Boy was spirit-colored, he wouldn’t be coming to Price. If he was really God’s son, he’d probably go to a private school.”

  “Like where?” Maribel said. “The Casey School closed. There’s not any private schools on this side of the highway. If there was one, I’d be going to it.”

  “Or like Catholic school,” somebody else said. “Someplace with some religion, right?”

  I saw Ms. Johnson smile a little bit. “I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying about himself, everyone, are you?”

  Ms. Johnson and everybody else looked at the Jesus Boy. He didn’t move or shake his head or anything, just sat there, staring off.

  “Are you?” Rayray asked him. “You aren’t saying you’re like God’s son, are you?”

  “I don’t think it matters,” Ms. Johnson said. “What matters is—”

  “Aren’t we all God’s children?” Samantha said quietly. She looked around the room, taking us all in. “Each of you,” she said, “is a true child of God.” She turned to the Jesus Boy. “Maybe some are truer than others.”

  Rayray just looked at her and shrugged. “Jesus don’t belong in this room is all I’m saying. And that cat’s saying he’s Je—” He stopped talking and stared at the Jesus Boy and frowned. Then we all looked at him.

  He had his hands on his desk and was looking down at them. I saw a tear fall onto his pale hand and then another one, but he wiped them away real quick.

  I heard myself saying, “He’s crying, Ms. Johnson. The Jesus Boy is crying.”

  “Dag,” Rayray said. “I didn’t mean to make him cry. I swear, Ms. Johnson. I wasn’t trying to be mean. I was just saying—”

  “I’m not crying,” Jesus Boy said real fast, shooting me a look that was so evil, I couldn’t believe it came from his face.

  “Are you all right?” Ms. Johnson said, her hand on his shoulder.

  “Yeah. I’m okay,” the Jesus Boy said, his voice soft again, so soft that maybe some of the kids didn’t hear him.

  “I lived on the other side of the highway already,” the Jesus Boy said softly. He kept looking down at his hands, like he was talking to them, like he was talking to himself. “We . . . my family didn’t belong there.” He looked up and around at each one of us. It felt like everything stopped. There weren’t tears in his eyes, but they were sad. “My daddy said it would be better here,” he said, almost whispering it. “He said people would be . . . he said people would be . . . you know, nice to me.” He looked down at his hands again. After a minute, he put his head down on his desk and sighed.

  We all stared at him, and Ms. Johnson bent down and whispered something in his ear. He nodded and she put her hand on his back and led him out of the room. As he walked out the door, I could see that his face was all squinched up but his hands were just flat and calm, hanging down at his sides. Then he sniffed and his face just sort of sagged. I put my head down on my desk and closed my eyes.

  “Is he some kind of crybaby or something?” I heard someone ask.

  “Nah,” I heard Rayray say softly. “You heard the brother-man. He’s just like a little bit lost. It be’s like that sometimes.”

  “Right on,” I heard somebody else say. “It be’s like that.”

  Usually, when Ms. Johnson left the room, we lost our minds with talking and jumping around and throwing things at each other. Rayray always acted the craziest. He could do standing backflips and usually did them in the aisle. But that day, he just sat quietly in his seat, rolling his pencil slowly back and forth across his desk. That day, the room was completely quiet. It was like we were all glued to our seats. It was like somebody had come into the room and gently lifted our tongues right on out of our mouths.

  PART TWO

  5

  When Mama’s first baby died, she and my daddy started going to a small church around the corner from our house. She said the first time she sat down in that church, all this beautiful light came pouring in through the one stained-glass window above where the pastor stood. Mama said she watched the light and the light had so many things in it—color and dust, hard and soft patches of sun. She said she sat there and leaned into that light and it warmed her and helped her understand. And what I understood, Mama said, was that the baby would always be with us—somewhere, somehow. When we needed her.

  They had named the baby girl Lila, after my mother’s great-grandmother. Mama says she saw Lila in that light, reaching out a tiny brown baby hand to her and smiling.

  I don’t know if I believe in miracles. I think things happen and we need to believe in them. But sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I’ll catch Lila smiling at me, her head covered with jet-black curls, her lips curling up over her tiny toothless mouth, her tiny hands reaching.

  6

  At the corner of North Conduit and Eastbay Road, there’s a little stream that gets deeper when there’s a lot of rain or snow. In the winter, the thinnest sheet of ice freezes over it and there’s always a rainbow bouncing off that ice.

  Me and Samantha walked down North Conduit the way we’d done for as long as I could remember. The only thing different about it all was how quiet we were. Samantha stared down at the snow, taking careful steps through it.

  “Frannie,” Samantha said after a long time had gone by. We were at the creek now. From here, Samantha would go right down Eastbay Road to her house, and I would continue on North Conduit, walking with the highway to the left of me to my apartment building. There were some dark clouds over our heads.

  “What if that boy really is Jesus? What if Jesus did come here, to where we live?”

  “Jesus who?”

  “Jesus-Jesus, that’s who. God’s son. Think about it, Frannie. In the Bible, he just showed up and then miracles started happening—people started rising up from the dead and eating bread that was his body and drinking wine that was his blood and—”

  “Yuck
!” I said, covering my ears. “Yuck on the blood-wine. Yuck on the body-bread. Yuck on the dead walking back into the world after we went and had a whole expensive funeral for them.”

  Samantha stared at me. “Listen to me,” she said, trying to sound like a very patient grown-up. “If there was a world for Jesus to need to walk back into, wouldn’t this one be it?”

  We stopped walking.

  “There’s a war going on—”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and it’s been going on since the sixties and before that there was one in the forties and the twenties and the tens—there’s always a war going on somewhere—how come Jesus didn’t choose one of those? Or how come he didn’t come back and stop this one all those years ago when it started. And plus—Jesus wasn’t a boy.”

  “People starving,” Samantha said, ignoring me and counting off her fingers.

  “Dust bowl. Depression,” I said, counting off my own.

  “Hurricanes, tornadoes.”

  “Dorothy. Toto.”

  Samantha rolled her eyes at me and started walking again. “You think I’m kidding around. And when did you start listening in social studies anyway?”

  “It sinks in when I sleep, I guess.”

  I didn’t say anything else, just started walking beside her.

  Samantha’s father preached at his own church, OnePeople Baptist, over near the mall. Mama called it a fire-and-brimstone church because either you were holy or you weren’t. Either you were gonna burn in eternal fire or go to heaven. There wasn’t some in-between. I’m neither holy enough nor bad enough to go to his church, Mama had said. But every Sunday, Samantha was there, sitting right up front with her mother, listening to every single word.

  Most Sundays, I could find a hundred excuses not to go to church with my parents. Even Sean got up to go more than me.

  My grandmother went to two churches on Sunday. In the morning she went to church with my parents. And in the afternoon she went to a different church—one she’d been going to forever. During the week, she read her Bible, so it was always in her bag and sometimes she took it out and tapped me on the head with it, saying, Maybe the information in here will get into your head that way. And if I decided I wanted to say something dumb in front of her—like Jesus Christ! after I stubbed my toe or something—then the tap wasn’t so soft. Wasn’t soft at all. As a matter of fact, my grandmother could knock you good on your head with her Bible if she wanted to. Once I’d even said, I don’t think God meant for his good book to be a weapon, Grandma. She chucked me a good one and said, Isn’t no weapon—just what I have handy, that’s all.

  Even with all the churchgoing happening around me, I’d never thought of Jesus as being much of anything. I mean, if people needed to believe he was God’s son and he walked the earth and blah, blah, blah, I wasn’t going to tell them they were wrong or right about their ideas about things. I was just going to do like I did with my grandmother—nod and hold my tongue and duck if the Bible came flying.

  Samantha lifted her book bag onto her shoulder. “I mean, it’s all so strange, don’t you think? He came to our school in the middle of the year. And it’s like he came from nowhere.” She looked at me.

  “He came from across the highway, Samantha. He said so.”

  “It’s still strange—the way he just showed up. Who crosses the highway to come here to live? Nobody. It had to be for some reason.”

  “He said his family didn’t belong there.”

  “Jesus wandered the earth that same way—looking for a place where he could be accepted. How surreal is that?”

  I tried to find the word surreal in my mental vocabulary bank where Ms. Johnson had said we should save vocabulary words so that we could grow up and have rich brains, but it wasn’t there. Ms. Johnson said the only way you can deposit a word in your bank is by committing it to memory. I hadn’t deposited surreal. I guess I must have spent it somewhere.

  “Yeah, it is surreal, I guess,” I said. “Real surreal.”

  “You know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?” Samantha said. Her Bible bank was probably as rich as her vocabulary bank.

  “Well, do you?” Samantha asked again.

  I shrugged. “You know I’m not churchgoing, Sam. I can’t even remember half my schoolwork most days, how’m I gonna know what’s in the Bible? All I know is it’s just the right size for Grandma to smack against my head every time she gets a need to, that’s for sure.” I laughed, but Samantha didn’t. Samantha was on my side about the Bible thing. She’d even said to Grandma once—“That’s not the Lord’s purpose for that book, Ms. Wright.” But my grandmother just said, “Thank you, Miss Samantha.”

  “It goes ‘Jesus wept,’ ” Samantha said. “Isn’t that strange?”

  I shrugged. “People cry sometimes. Even teachers and moms and stuff. Even you and me,” I said.

  Samantha looked at me. “Yeah—but if Abigail Francesca Wright Barnes cried, it wouldn’t get put into a book that millions of billions of people would read.”

  “Maybe it would. If I did it in front of the right person at the right time. I could be inspiring. Maybe not a whole lot of people know me now, but—”

  “It’s just all so surreal,” Samantha said again. “You wake up one day and it’s wintertime and there’s snow falling. You wake another day and there’s a new boy in your class with wild hair, named Jesus.”

  “That’s not his real name, though.”

  “Jesus wept,” she said again. “Isn’t that strange?” She put her hands in her coat pockets. The coat was pink with a white fur collar and hood. I remembered it from last year, when the sleeves were rolled up. Now the coat fit perfectly and Samantha looked real pretty inside of it. She’d gotten taller than me and I had to look up just a little bit when I talked to her.

  “He’s just some boy, Samantha. Nothing strange about that at all. And plus—Jesus wasn’t white—even your daddy says so. White people drew all those white-person pictures of Jesus, but that wasn’t his real color. You know that. That Jesus Boy is white.”

  The wind was blowing hard—a high whistling sound.

  “He said he’s not white,” Samantha said.

  “That boy is white, Samantha! You could almost see through his skin. He’s like blue-white! That’s even whiter than white.”

  “But,” Samantha said calmly, “he says he’s not white. We don’t know what the world looks like from inside his eyes. For all we know, you’re white.”

  “What?!”

  Samantha looked confused, like she was just realizing what she was saying. After a moment, her face changed, though, and she smiled.

  “Maybe Jesus is the color he needs to be when he comes to a place, Frannie. Maybe this time around he needs to be a skinny white boy—something way different from everything around him.”

  I shrugged. “As long as you’re not trying to make the brother-man brown, girl.”

  “I don’t think I’ll mention it to Daddy, though,” Samantha said, looking at me.

  “Well, you know I’m not saying anything about it. It would be up there with me saying you believed in the Tooth Fairy and Santa, wouldn’t it?”

  Samantha smiled and shook her head. She started walking backwards away from me, waving good-bye to me as she walked. Then she turned and walked faster. I watched her head down Eastbay Road, getting smaller and smaller. I stood there a long time, shivering in the cold. A part of me stood there promising myself that from now on, I’d go to church more and listen to my grandma when she started preaching. But another part of me knew that the part of myself that was making those promises was lying. The wind got harder and I hugged myself. I stood there wishing I knew what the word surreal meant—I knew I wouldn’t go home and look it up—I’m just not that kinda person. But standing there in the cold and the wind, the word felt big and important to me—like it was trying to wrap itself around me—like it was tapping itself on my head, trying to get in.

  I touched the frozen creek with the toe of my boot
. Tiny spider lines spread everywhere. I squatted down and stared at them. My face looked long and brown and shadowy in the reflection. It looked like it was breaking into a million pieces. Some mornings, I woke up feeling like the whole world was slipping away from me. Mama said it was just growing pains and soon they’d go away. I got up and turned around, wanting to yell for Samantha, wanting to hear her say some more about . . . about anything. She had all kinds of things she could believe in. Big and surreal things that took up her mind and got her thinking deep and smiling that secret I-know-some-things smile.

  I stood there watching her walk away. It wasn’t that she did believe that the Jesus Boy was really Jesus—it was that she could. I couldn’t. No way. It was too crazy, too way out there. Too . . . too far away for me. The snow was starting to come down hard again. And in the distance, the only thing I could see was little specks of Samantha’s bright pink coat—far away from me, fading in and out. In and out.

  PART THREE

  7

  “Mama,” I called, taking my boots off and leaving my knapsack by the door.

  Sean came out of Mama’s room, frowning and waving his hand.

  She’s sleeping, he signed, his hand moving over his face like it was pulling his eyes closed.

  It’s not even four o’clock, I signed back, saying the words at the same time. Sean could read lips, but most times I was thinking too fast to talk slow enough for him to understand me, so I just signed right back at him.

  She’s tired, Frannie.

  I felt something jump inside of me. Something hard and heavy.

  Don’t start your stupid worrying, Sean said. She’s just feeling tired.

  Three years ago, Mama started complaining about her belly hurting. It took a long time for everybody to convince her to go to the doctor. She was still shaken from losing Baby Lila and the miscarriage she’d had a year after that, so hospitals and doctors made her nervous.