The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  “That’s horrible.”

  “They were headed for the dump anyway,” Ava said.

  “Why were you throwing them out?”

  “They were taking up too much space. I didn’t care about them, so I was throwing them out.”

  Helena frowned. “You said ‘most’ of them were burned.”

  Ava nodded. “A lot of them I hadn’t brought outside yet.”

  “You took those to the dump?”

  “No. After the first pile got burned, Mama and Mr. Liddy got into a shouting match. After that she made me keep the rest. They’re still down in the cellar.”

  “When’s the last time you looked at them?” Helena asked. “That day?”

  “I didn’t even really look at them that day.”

  Helena stood up. “Let’s look at them now.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe seeing your paintings, and remembering what you felt when you made them, will bring it all together again.”

  The cellar was cooler than the rest of the house by several degrees and it smelled of damp earth and old wood. They moved past broken furniture and trunks spilling out old things and came to a closet beneath the stairs. Ava opened it and tugged a string hanging down from the ceiling, and a light bulb burned on.

  The whole closet was full of paintings. Dozens of them, all stacked in piles.

  Helena reached in and grabbed one from the nearest stack, a one foot by one foot square of canvas affixed to a wooden framework. She held it up to the light. It showed people at an outside gathering on a city street, eating and laughing, calling out and waving to each other across porches, and playing double Dutch and ball games in the street. On one end of the block, the heavy trees of a park reached over into frame and, at the other end, a church stood, stone gray and solid-looking. In the background, row houses loomed in strange angles that jutted forward, so they, along with the church and the park, seemed to surround the people on all sides and almost extend out from the canvas.

  “It’s amazing,” Helena said. “It feels like being on a city street, looking up and around and seeing almost nothing but buildings, nothing but bricks.”

  Ava stared down at the painting. There was a confined feeling to it, with the park and the church holding everything in. But the people seemed unaware of being trapped, the language of their bodies loose and open, their arms extended in greetings to one another, their laughter almost audible off the canvas.

  Helena held up another painting, this one of George with a beak for a nose. She stared at it, her face flushed with wonder. She held up a third painting, a self-portrait of Ava as a young girl, stark naked and holding a red-dripping paint brush. The colors, like in all the paintings, Ava thought, were well-chosen. There was a lushness, a density of pigment, that pleased the eye. And, too, there was a quirkiness about the paintings, an underhint of humor alongside some trouble or grief. All of them were like that. Strange and bold and flushed with color.

  “Why did you stop?” Helen asked her.

  “I don’t remember why.”

  “Try.”

  Ava looked at the painting of herself holding the red dripping brush and tried to think, tried as hard as she could to remember. “I tried not to stop. But after a while, I just couldn’t do it anymore. Whatever it was that made me want to paint, I couldn’t feel anymore.”

  “And you never felt it again?”

  “No,” she said.

  “What was it you felt?” Helena asked her. “Can you remember the feeling of wanting to paint?”

  Ava shook her head. “No,” she said, and she noticed that the room felt smaller suddenly, and warmer.

  “Try, Ava.”

  Ava could feel a tightening in her chest, and her breath coming slower. “I can’t remember,” she said. “I can’t remember.” She felt her throat closing. She could not get air in. She felt Helena’s hands on her face and heard her voice saying, “Ava, what’s wrong?”

  The room was getting smaller and smaller, the air thicker. She felt dizzy and she grabbed hold of Helena’s arms and tried to keep herself up, but her limbs were going numb and she couldn’t feel Helena there. Her knees buckled. She crashed hard onto the cool floor.

  Ava heard footsteps pounding against the cellar stairs and when she opened her eyes, Helena was bent over her on the floor, her face close, her hands on Ava’s cheek and forehead. “Ava, can you hear me?” Ava could feel Helena’s breath on her lips.

  “What the hell happened?” It was Paul, standing over them now, looking panicked. Behind him, Regina and Sarah were making their way down the stairs.

  “What’s the matter with my child?” Regina asked, looking a little crazed.

  “She collapsed,” Helena told them.

  Regina rushed to Ava’s side, crouched down on the floor beside her.

  “I’m alright,” Ava whispered, trying to sit up.

  “What you talking about, collapsed?” Paul asked, as Helena and Regina helped Ava into a sitting position.

  “She fainted, I think,” Helena said.

  Ava’s head throbbed. She put her hands on either side of it and held them there.

  “Can I get you something?” Helena asked. “Water?”

  Ava nodded. She felt shaky.

  Helena sprinted up the steps, her hard shoes like hammers on the old wood. Ava closed her eyes. She felt arms around her shoulders and knew it was Paul. She felt Regina’s hands on hers. No one said anything.

  In a few moments, Helena was back. “Drink this.” Her hands shook on the glass.

  Ava took Helena’s hand. “It’s okay. I’m alright.”

  Helena nodded, but she looked afraid.

  Ava drank the water, then said, “I need to lie down.”

  Paul took the glass and handed it back to Helena, then bent down and lifted Ava off the ground. He carried her up the basement stairs and all the way up to their bedroom, and laid her down on the bed. Regina soaked a washcloth with cold water and pressed it gently against her daughter’s forehead. Helena and Sarah stood in the doorway.

  “Y’all don’t need to hover,” Ava said. “I just got a little lightheaded. I’m alright now.”

  Paul was sitting beside her on the bed, staring at her with a strangely eager expression. “You aint…I mean, could you be…”

  She squinted at him through the throbbing in her head. “What?”

  “Pregnant?”

  She shook her head and the throbbing worsened.

  He frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I can’t be pregnant, Paul.”

  “The doctor said it aint no reason why not.”

  “I am not pregnant!” There were half a dozen tiny explosions in her head then, and she closed her eyes.

  “Ava, calm down,” Regina said.

  Paul frowned. “Then what’s wrong with you, Ava? ‘Cause something sure as hell is. And don’t give me that ‘I’m fine’ shit again.”

  She didn’t answer him. She wanted him to go away and leave her alone.

  Paul stood up. “I’m calling the doctor.”

  “They’re gone at five,” she said.

  “Well, I’m calling tomorrow.”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “But something’s wrong, and I want to know what.” He sat back down on the bed again. “You need anything?”

  She shook her head, no.

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek, leaving his lips pressed against her face for a long moment, and she felt suddenly claustrophobic, and put her hands against his chest and pushed him away. He looked hurt and got up and walked out of the room.

  “He just trying to help,” Regina said. “He worried.”

  “But I’m fine,” Ava said. She looked from Regina to Helena and Sarah in the doorway. “Please stop hovering. Really.”

  When they left, she closed her eyes.

  It had been the look in Helena’s eyes that made her swoon. It was the same look she had se
en there days ago, when Helena had brought her the sketch on the grocery list and, in her eyes, Ava had seen the greatness of the drawing. This time, though, it had been much more intense. In Helena’s eyes, in that moment, there had been a captivation that Ava recognized, though she had not seen it in so many years. It was the look Miss Maddy had given her at four. The look Kenny Goode and Malcolm Hansberry and Sister Kellogg, and everyone else had all given her, all those years ago. It was the reflection of what they had all seen in her, what they all recognized in her from the time she was a small child, and in that moment Ava had seen it in Helena’s eyes, too. This time she had seen that she was great, not just the paintings, but Ava herself. That she was extraordinary. And, for no reason she understood right then, seeing it had caused her to fall.

  Standing at the bottom of the stairs, Ava could hear her family in the kitchen, the usual dinner preparations underway. Quietly, she moved through the foyer and opened the front door, slipping out of the house without making a sound. She walked quickly down the front steps onto the sidewalk and walked down the street, passing neighbors who watched her with curiosity and dislike. When she got to the steps of Blessed Chapel, she paused, and looked up at the stone structure, its stained-glass windows catching the light of the late day. She pulled open the front doors and stepped inside.

  She did not have to go looking for Pastor Goode. He was right there by the altar, as if waiting for her.

  1959

  Ava sat in the bishop’s nook, behind the pulpit at Blessed Chapel, across the desk from Pastor Goode, who was writing frantically on a pad of paper, his eyes narrowed, his lips twisted in concentration. She sat watching him, and after a couple of minutes he looked up at her, smiled. “Well,” he said, setting the paper aside. “That’s Sunday’s sermon done.”

  She had gone there because her mother had informed her that the pastor wanted to see her. She had no idea why. Now she blinked at him, waited.

  Goode cleared his throat. “You a smart girl, Ava. I always thought so.”

  Ava just stared at him. She had never forgotten what he had said at Sister Henrietta’s funeral, that she had the devil in her. She knew he believed that. She’d known by the look in his eyes when he said it.

  “And you are gifted,” he went on. “Talented like no child I ever knew. I can’t deny it. It would be a sin to deny it, because that’s God-given talent, and denying it means denying the work of the Lord.”

  “The Lord?” she asked. “Last year you said it was the work of somebody else altogether. What’s the Lord got to do with it now?”

  “I spoke in haste that day,” he said. “But since then, the Lord has allowed me to consider things differently. I heard about what happened with you and that art contest the city had.”

  It had been a contest for amateur artists, all Colored and all living in West Philadelphia, sponsored by the arts and culture department of the city. Ava had entered one of her paintings and Regina had taken her down to where the competition was taking place. There had been a hundred other artists and Ava’s painting had been chosen the best of them all. But the judges had assumed that Regina was the artist, and when they discovered it was Ava, they insisted the contest was not open to children, and gave someone else the prize. There had been a very short article about it in the Philadelphia Daily News and, as a result, an art school in New York City had invited Ava to enter the painting into their annual competition for Colored artists in the tri-state area. Regina had already agreed to take Ava up to New York next month for the judging. Since all that had happened, nearly a month ago, most people on the block had come up to Ava and expressed disapproval of the arts and culture department and their actions, but Pastor Goode had not been among them. She wondered why he was pretending to care now.

  “There’s a way you can use your talent to serve this community right here,” he said. “I’d like to have a mural painted on the back wall of the church. Something beautiful and uplifting. Something that will call souls to our church and to the Lord. I’d like you to paint it.”

  “I don’t do religious art,” she said.

  “You an artist, aint you?” he asked. “Don’t all great artists have religious works? What’s the name of that one who did the Sistine Chapel?”

  “Michelangelo.”

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  Ava had spent hours looking at photographs of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, studying every inch of it. That, and Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, painted in the early 1500s for the chapel of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan. And, Ava’s favorite European painting, The Supper at Emmaus, depicting the moment when the newly-resurrected Christ reveals himself to two of his disciples, painted by Caravaggio in 1601.

  “Well, maybe so,” Ava said. “But why you want me to do it?”

  “Because the Lord spoke to me,” he said. “He spoke to me and told me that you are the person to do it.”

  She did not believe him, but it didn’t matter. Since the scandal at Miss Henrietta’s funeral, she had been trying to think of a way to use her talent to benefit the people around her, instead of always upsetting them.

  “Alright,” she said.

  He smiled and looked genuinely pleased. “Good. I’m glad we can come together. I know you think I’m some kind of tyrant—”

  “Are you?” she asked.

  His smile slipped, but he got control of it again quickly. “No, Ava,” he said. “I’m only trying to do the Lord’s work, the way he calls me to do it.”

  Work on the mural started that next week. The back wall of the church was partially covered with lime plaster, creating a canvas that was twelve feet by twelve feet, bigger by far than any Ava had ever used. It was covered with a large tarp and left to dry. While she waited for the canvas to be ready, Ava sketched her idea for the mural. It would depict the congregation of Blessed Chapel, some of them on their knees at the altar. Before them, there would be a bright light through the stained-glass windows.

  When the plaster was firm, but not quite dry, when she could press her thumb against it and make a thumbprint in its surface, Ava set to work transferring her sketch to the wall. Scaffolding was erected and, at the pastor’s request, Vic Jones showed Ava how to raise and lower it according to her needs. From up high, she could see out over most of the block while she sketched, and most of the block could see her. Though the pastor asked everyone not to crowd her, not to distract her from her task, people passed by often, and most stopped at least long enough to eye her work. Ava was sure this was exactly what Goode had intended. With so many eyes on her, she would have a very hard time adding anything to the mural that might be considered controversial, if in fact she were inclined to try.

  She sketched the scene onto the wall in pencil. It took an entire weekend, a whole Saturday and a whole Sunday. When it was done, she began painting. She worked for a few hours every day, from the time she got home from school until just before dusk. The church provided all the supplies she needed, large bottles of paint in myriad colors, dozens of brushes. While she painted the details, Geo helped her by painting the background, according to her instructions, using the colors she selected.

  “We really high up here,” Geo said, looking down over the scaffolding.

  “We aint even six feet up right now,” Ava said, painting the face of one of the churchgoers.

  “I guess.” He looked a little worried.

  Miss Lucas came by and waved from the ground. “Y’all need any help?”

  “Sure,” Ava said. She lowered the scaffolding and Miss Lucas climbed on.

  “This gone hold all of us?” Geo asked.

  Ava nodded. “It holds four adults.”

  Miss Lucas helped Geo paint the background, while Ava continued to paint the faces. The next day, she came by again and helped. The day after that, Miss Maddy spent an hour filling in the color on the figures’ clothing, again according to Ava’s directions. Ellen, Miss An
toinette, Mr. Malcolm, Rudy, and Juanita all helped.

  One afternoon, when the mural was almost finished, as Ava stood on the scaffolding, painting the cushions on the altar, Sondra came around the back of the church and stood below her, her arms folded across her chest, watching. She didn’t say anything at first, but even in silence she was menacing.

  “I guess you think you some real hot shit now,” she said, loudly, so Ava could hear from her high perch.

  Ava ignored her. She hated to be bothered while she was trying to paint, and of all the things there were to be bothered by, Sondra seemed the worst possible one.

  “I wonder what would happen if one of them ropes snapped,” Sondra said, and turned and walked away.

  Later, Geo came and helped with the last of the painting. He stood looking up at the scene, a trace of a frown on his face.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Ava asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “This aint what I expected, I guess.”

  It was a beautiful painting, lush and buoyant as anything she had ever done. But there was nothing about it that pushed, nothing that made him feel uneasy.

  They finished the mural that day, and that evening, as Ava was pulling the tarp down over it, Pastor Goode came around the back of the church.

  “Hold on, now. Let me have a look at it,” he said.

  He stood back and looked it over, his head moving up and down, and from side to side. Ava knew that the painting was aesthetically good, even wonderful, and that it was what Goode had wanted. As he took it all in, a smile spread across his face, and he nodded his approval. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “It’s the Lord’s work.”

  Ava knew exactly whose work it was and she had the calloused hands to prove it, but she was tired of fighting this man, so she said nothing.

  “We’ll be uncovering it right after morning service,” he said. “I’m proud of you. You have used the gift God gave you to praise him, and that’s the best use of any gift. I used to think you was out of control, that you didn’t understand the importance of what I’m trying to do in this church, and in this community. But now I know the Lord has a plan for you, Ava Delaney. All you have to do is stay on his path, and you gone be just fine.”