1959
Maddy and Malcolm noticed the change right away. They had always loved Ava, from the first moment they saw the child, and they knew that mostly everyone else on the block, and in the church, felt the same way. They all talked about her all the time, said how special she was, how different, how they had never known anyone like her, how she seemed to have been sent to them by God, to remind them of the happiest moments of their lives and the best things within themselves, and to show them what freedom looked like, how it moved and spoke and sang. But when that tarp came down, when everybody saw those shackles, something shifted.
A week after the uncovering of the mural—which had been immediately covered up again, not with a tarp this time, but with white paint—they could see the change, plain as day. Sitting on her usual pew at Blessed Chapel, a few seats down from Ava, Maddy saw June Johnson, who was sitting a few rows ahead of them, peering over her shoulder at the girl, the look on her face plainly disdainful. A few minutes later, Marilyn Porter, who was ushering that Sunday, standing by the wall with her white-gloved hands clasped in front of her, whispered something to Clarence Nelson, who was standing beside her, and they both looked over at Ava and frowned in unison. Throughout the service, it happened at least a dozen times. Some people glanced at Ava as they passed by, on their way to the restroom or perhaps the water fountain, and frowned or rolled their eyes. Others were more openly contemptuous, turning around in their seats to glare. A few times, Maddy noticed, they did not direct their sneers at Ava alone, but let their eyes graze Regina, too, and, once or twice, their entire family.
Malcolm was watching, too, though not from his usual pew. He no longer wished to sit with the Delaneys, and instead sat with his brother across the aisle, where Vic had moved his whole family, giving up their long-standing seats. Malcolm had been outraged at the unveiling of the mural. He had always liked Ava, and had even let it slide when she had drawn those filthy pictures at the funeral, telling himself that, despite his initial reaction, she was a good girl, and the good things about her outweighed the bad. But when that tarp came down, he knew in an instant that he had been wrong, and that he, and all of them, had been duped. She did have the devil
in her. It was plain to see. And he refused to be fooled any longer.
Doris didn’t notice the change at all. She wasn’t a woman who paid that much attention to what people were feeling. But she heard plenty of whispering. On the pew right in front of her, Lillian leaned over to Rose and said, “I can’t believe they had the nerve to bring that child in here after what she did.”
“Girl, you aint never lied,” Rose whispered back. “Soon as I saw her, I felt this rush of heat. I thought I was gone faint right there in the aisle.”
Doris thought that was probably just due to the temperature inside the church, but she wasn’t one to deny people their occasional dramatic flourishes. Personally, she didn’t see what all the fuss was about. She had known from the first moment she saw Ava that the child was just too much.
When Pastor Goode stepped up into the pulpit, Malcolm thought he looked tired. He could understand why. A few days ago, the pastor had confided to Malcolm that he wanted the Delaneys out of the church. He didn’t feel like he could throw them out, because they were still so well-liked by so many people, so much of the congregation was still loyal to them. He said it was up to the rest of them—those who agreed with the pastor and understood why there was no place for the Delaneys at Blessed Chapel until they got control of that child of theirs—to let the family know how they felt.
Now Pastor Goode stood looking out at them all, a look of intense worry on his face. “The Lord sets down a path for us from the day we are born. We may not see it, we may not understand what it is, but we can be sure it’s there. God’s plan for us is that we walk that path. If we walk it, it will lead us to Him and the kingdom of heaven. But the devil will try to lead us astray. He will try to convince us that we know what’s good for us better than the good Lord. He will bring into our lives people who seem good at first, who appear to be of God, but who are really Satan’s minions. We must not be tricked. We must believe in God’s plan, for us and for our neighbors and friends and everyone we love. We must all act in service to the Lord. And, when called, the righteous among us must take an active hand in the Lord’s plan.”
Malcolm looked around. Half the congregation was nodding their heads and muttering, Yes, Lords and Amens. Malcolm wondered how many of them realized who the pastor was talking about. The other half of the congregation looked worried, disturbed, as if they were unsure of what, exactly, the pastor was trying to say, but thought it might be something they didn’t like. Regina and George exchanged a look of serious concern. Farther down the pew, Ava’s eyes were narrowed as she looked up at Pastor Goode. The sermon went on from there into more general-sounding and less controversial territory. When the service ended and the usual mingling and socializing in the aisles began, Malcolm noticed that, like him, quite a few people kept their distance from the Delaneys, their usual greetings, their hugs and kisses and hand-shakes, not offered. Some people said hello but withheld the attention they had always showered on Ava, some of them only smiling, or barely smiling, in her direction, others not acknowledging her at all. All this Malcolm was sure Ava’s parents noticed, too. When Elder Smith walked right by them without a word, he saw Regina and George frown at each other. Right after that, though, Deacon Brooks came up and shook George’s hand, hugged Regina, and put his arms around all three siblings, and his usual post-service conversation, about the traffic he’d had to endure on Baltimore Avenue on his way to the church that morning, commenced. Jane Lucas was as friendly as always, as were many other people, but it seemed to Malcolm that Ava’s admirers had been cut by more than half, and were continuing to diminish by the hour.
After service, as the Delaney family made their way out of the church, Regina noticed that Geo wasn’t with them. “Where’s your brother?” she asked Ava and Sarah, sounding tired and stressed.
“Bathroom, I think,” Sarah said.
“Ava, go get him, please.”
Ava frowned and turned back into the entrance.
Sarah leaned against the door and watched her sister as she headed for the steps that led down to the church basement, where the restrooms were. Sondra was standing at the top of the steps, off to the side a little, laughing with her friends, and when she saw Ava coming, her laughter stopped, and all mirth left her expression. What replaced it was a look of loathing, of almost cartoon-like hatred, and Sarah half expected smoke to come out of Sondra’s ears. She laughed to herself, then watched as Sondra moved a couple of inches closer to the steps and, covertly, without looking down, slid her foot into Ava’s path. Sarah stopped laughing. Everything slowed down, as Ava, who did not notice what Sondra was doing because she was examining the drawings she had done on her program, stepped forward. Sarah opened her mouth to call out to Ava, but no sound came.
Ava stopped, half a step from Sondra’s foot, as Geo’s voice called to her from the other side of the lobby. She turned and frowned at him. “Mama’s looking for you,” she said, and skipped off in his direction. Sarah watched as Sondra retracted her foot, looking disappointed.
1976
The next morning, Saturday, Regina was awakened by the sound of her own muttering. She got up carefully from the bed, trying not to wake Sarah. She grabbed the dress she had left hanging over a chair the night before, her purse, and her shoes, and crept out of the room. In the bathroom, she dressed and brushed her teeth, then stepped out into the hallway and listened. No one in the house was stirring. She crept down the steps and when she got to the front door she stopped. It seemed to her that there was something on the other side of the door that she didn’t want to see, something that would tear her up, but she couldn’t think what. “Maybe it’s gone rain,” she muttered to herself, and then wondered why rain would stop her. “I guess if I just take a umbrella I be alright.” She grabbed an umbrella from t
he umbrella stand and went out the door.
On the bus, people looked at her sideways, as if she was crazy or something. When she noticed a couple of teenagers pointing at her and whispering, she thought they must be looking at something out the window behind her.
She got off the bus at the corner of Fifty-First and Baltimore, and when she stepped out into the street a car slammed on its breaks and honked loudly.
“Get your crazy ass out the damn street!” the driver yelled, slamming his hand against the steering wheel.
Regina gave him the finger, then stepped back onto the curb and waited for the light to change.
Baltimore Avenue was a wide, busy, two-way road, much more heavily trafficked than Radnor, and louder for it, with cars and trucks rolling up and down it in constant succession. The houses along Fifty-First and Baltimore were narrower than those on her own block, but taller, standing three stories high and, because of their lack of width, there seemed to be many more of them, all crammed together along the block like books on a shelf.
She walked down Fifty-First Street, looking for the house number she’d gotten from the phone book the night before, under the listing for Charles Ellis. A couple of times, she got confused, and thought she was back on her own street, and wondered why the houses looked so different. Finally, after walking up and down the block twice, she found the correctly numbered row house, with a green awning and, hanging over the front porch railing, flower boxes full of violets. She walked up the front steps, the metal point of her large umbrella dragging against the cement. She stepped up onto the porch, rang the doorbell, and waited. She remembered that Lena always used to get up early on weekends and do all her cleaning before her family could get in the way. Regina used to see her all the time, out on her front porch in the mornings, beating out rugs and sweeping. That was so many years ago, though, and she wondered whether Lena, who was older than she was, still had that kind of energy. She didn’t have to wonder about it long. After just a few seconds, the front door opened and Lena stood there, holding a dustcloth and some furniture polish, squinting at her through the screen door that still separated them.
“Regina?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“Hello, Lena,” Regina said. “I’d like to talk with you. Can I come in?”
Lena hesitated.
“I’m sorry to drop by unexpectedly,” Regina said, and she realized she was speaking unnecessarily loudly, so she lowered her voice. “I know it aint good manners. But what I need to say ought to be said face to face. It won’t take long.”
Lena stood there a long moment and then, finally, the screen door opened, and she gave Regina a strained smile. “Of course,” she said. “Come on in.”
Inside, the house was as narrow as it appeared from the outside. Regina propped her umbrella against the wall and followed Lena down a hallway, past rooms lit only by the new daylight coming in through the windows. It had been a long time since Regina had been inside anybody else’s house, besides the houses she worked in. She eyed the furniture, which was at least a decade newer than anything she owned, and well-kept, cared-about in a way she herself had not cared about any item in her own house in seventeen years. All along the walls, there were framed photographs of the Ellis family, of Chuck and Lena and their children and, Regina supposed, their grandchildren, of whom there appeared to be many. She got confused again and wondered why Chuck and Lena looked so old in the photographs. They were both around her age. Then she remembered that she was old, too, and that many years had passed since she had known them.
They entered the kitchen, which was very warm, and which looked very like the kitchen of the house Lena and Chuck had lived in on Radnor Street. This did nothing to help Regina’s confusion. “It’s now,” she muttered to herself. “Not then.” She took a seat at the table and Lena offered her lemonade.
“No, thank you,” Regina said. “Your lemonade taste like shit, Lena. It always did. And I aint gone stay long, anyway.”
Lena frowned and sat down at the other end of the table.
Regina didn’t know what she had come there to say. She knew that in the last couple of days, ever since she’d found out that Chuck had been in the house, she had thought about Lena a lot, after not thinking about her much at all for nearly two decades. She had wondered how she was doing, what her life had turned out to be like, and she had felt compelled to reach out to her. Now, sitting there at the table with her, she decided she must have come to talk about George and Chuck. “Twenty-some years ago, I sat in your kitchen—not this one, but one that looked a lot like it,” she said, more for herself than for Lena, “and you asked me about our husbands. I guess you remember that.”
Lena nodded. “Yes. I remember.”
“Well, back then I wasn’t ready to talk about it, I guess.” She paused, trying to remember whether or not she had been ready to talk about it then. “No, I definitely wasn’t,” she said. “I never have been ready. But I’m ready now.”
Lena looked down at her hands in her lap. “Maybe I aint ready to talk about it no more,” she said.
“Well, then you aint got to say nothing,” Regina told her. “Just shut up and let me say what I got to say.”
Lena sighed. Nodded.
“Back then, I was trying not to think about it. All them years, from way back when me and George was first going together, I tried not to. And I did a good job of it, too.” She felt her head clearing a little and what she was saying made more sense to her. “I managed to push it back, way back, in my mind, and not look at it. But that changed when we moved onto Radnor Street and George met Chuck.”
Lena shifted in her chair.
“After that it was harder to ignore it, to not see it. Shit, it was plain as day.” She laughed, loud and deranged-sounding, even to her own ears.
Lena looked a little scared.
“Still, I wasn’t gone talk about it and let it be real,” Regina went on. “I had three children and a house to take care of, so I kept it in. And I hated George. Hated him.”
She remembered watching George with Chuck one Thanksgiving, them laughing and whispering together, and she being filled with loathing, stuffed with it like the turkey, and how it had felt as if she wouldn’t be able to hold it in, that it would bust her open at her seams, and spill out like the dressing from the bird’s opened-up carcass.
“I held it in for so long. Even after their friendship ended, I still felt like Chuck was there, that George still thought about him. And I kept on hating him.” She sighed, and shook her head. “When my son died—” she stopped. Her son hadn’t died. What was she saying? But he had, hadn’t he? “I went crazy. I lost my mind. I wanted to die myself. But I remembered I still had two children to provide for, so I pulled myself together best I could, and I kept on keeping George’s secret, because providing for them still meant doing that. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” Lena said. “But I already figured all this, Regina.”
“Well, you aint figured what I’m gone say next, so you just sit tight,” Regina said. “Lately I been thinking, wondering why I’m still keeping it. My children is grown. My house is paid for. But here I am, still keeping it in, and still hating George. Why didn’t I confront him once Ava and Sarah was old enough to take care of theyselves? Why didn’t I toss him out on his sorry ass?”
Lena looked as if she was thinking about the question, trying to figure it out. Finally, she said, “Why didn’t you? Why don’t you?”
“Because hating George is who I am now!” Regina said, slapping her palm on the table to stress the point, and causing Lena to jump. “My anger, my disgust, is everything to me! These past years, I aint gave a damn about hardly nothing. I aint took care of myself, or my house. But I took good care of my hate for my husband. I nurtured it, kept it feeling new, looking shiny. It’s the most well-kept thing I own.”
Lena stared at her, the lines around her mouth deepened.
“But now I’m old and sick and mean,” Regina
said. “You see this hardness in my eyes?” She leaned forward and opened her eyes wide so Lena could see. “I’m tired of it,” she said. “‘Cause, you know what? It aint no joy in it, Lena. Not one bit. And it aint never been none. So, why I’m doing it? Why I spent all these years doing something that aint brought me a lick of joy?” She laughed, and this time it didn’t sound crazy, at least not to her own ears. “I see now what I got to do,” Regina said. “I either got to leave, or let it go. And since I’m too damn old to leave, I’m letting it go. Right here, right now. I came here and tell you that, Lena. In case it helps you in any way.”
Lena just sat there, not saying anything, with a look on her face that was half surprised and half thoughtful, as if she was still trying to figure out what Regina was talking about, still trying to make sense of her sudden appearance, but still understood everything she had said.
Regina stood. “Thank you for letting me barge in on you, Lena.”
“Regina,” Lena said, getting up, too. “I want you to know I never agreed with Pastor Goode, or believed in what he did to you and your family. The only reason I didn’t get in touch with you after your son was killed was because of Chuck and George. I just wanted to keep my distance from that. But I always hated what the pastor was doing. It’s the reason I told Chuck we had to leave that block, because I couldn’t stand to watch what was going on over there. Y’all didn’t deserve that.”
“Thank you. I appreciate you telling me that.”
“I been at Blessed Chapel since I was a child. Since way before Ollie Goode became pastor. His uncle, the pastor before him, wasn’t like that. He was a kind man.”
“You mean his father?”
“No. Arthur Goode was Ollie’s uncle, his father’s brother,” Lena told her. “Ollie’s father died when he was young, and his uncle took him in.”
The Summer We Got Free Page 25
