Jump into the Sky Read online

  Maybe the rain was reminding me of Chicago, because Aunt Odella crossed my mind a lot as I packed for the trip. Kept remembering how she’d packed the same suitcase the month before—how she’d folded all the pants and rolled all the socks and how neat and precise her work had been.

  Mine was a suitcase casserole.

  Wondered what she’d think about me taking off for Oregon. Peaches and Cal couldn’t make up their minds about whether or not I should write to her about what we were doing. Cal thought if she’d sent me all the way to North Carolina to find my father, she probably wouldn’t care if I went to Oregon to keep looking for him. On the other hand, Peaches said if something happened to us on the trip, nobody would know where I was. “Think how his family would feel if Levi up and disappeared.”

  I didn’t say, Well, it has happened in the Battle family before.

  Finally, I ended up sending a short letter to my aunt that probably wouldn’t arrive in her apartment mailbox until we’d reached Oregon anyhow. Hoped the news wouldn’t upset her too much when she got it. She didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d ever go and topple over, but people can surprise you. All they need is one loose brick somewhere. Tried to add a little humor at the end by telling my aunt I’d let her know if I happened to meet John Wayne. She liked Westerns a lot.

  Before we left North Carolina, I splashed through the downpour to say goodbye to MawMaw Sands, like I’d promised. Despite the rain, she was sitting in her usual chair, wrapped in a ratty blue blanket against the chill. With only her eyes showing mostly, she coulda been a war refugee in a newspaper picture.

  “You feeling all right, ma’am?” My feet hesitated halfway up the steps.

  “I’d be feeling better if you remembered your manners and took off your hat when talking to me, seeing as how I’m old enough to be your great-great-granny,” she snapped.

  Ducking under the porch roof, I swiped off the cap I was wearing against the rain. Still casting an irritated glance in my direction, she tugged the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “So, you must be here because you’re leaving town.”

  “Yes ma’am. Tomorrow.” I nodded uncomfortably, fiddling with the hat in my hand. The whole porch felt different. No fat bumblebees buzzing. Or cats lazying around. Just drippy vines and baskets hanging heavily from the roof. Felt as if the whole scene might tumble down into ruins at any moment.

  “Get me that basket from over there.” One skinny arm poked out of the blankets and gestured sharply at the Keeper of Secrets basket. “I want you to have that one,” the woman said, pointing at the same basket she’d shown me before.

  Heck, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to take one of the old lady’s nice baskets as a gift. Not when I knew how much they cost and how much hard work they took to make. Plus, what would I do with a basket in Oregon? Tried to tell MawMaw Sands to keep it.

  “Now, who else am I gonna give it to?” she retorted. “You take that basket like I says, Levi Battle. Don’t give me none of that sass.”

  You can see I didn’t have much choice. So, I picked up the basket from the porch corner and tucked it under my elbow. Mumbled a polite thank-you.

  “You remember what it’s called?”

  “Yes ma’am.” I nodded. “Keeper of Secrets.”

  “You gonna take good care of it, right?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Whenever you meet up with your daddy, don’t you forget what I’ve told you about how hard it is to be the keeper of secrets, especially when everybody else around you has their doubts. It ain’t easy being the basket, no sir, it ain’t.”

  Good grief, the old lady was talking in circles. I wasn’t following much of anything she was saying.

  “And you remember how every basket in this world is made of sweetness and pain. You can’t have one without the other. They all get woven together, light and dark, smooth and sharp, bad things and good.” MawMaw Sands paused and gave me a hard stare. “You listenin’ to me, boy?”

  Told her I was—although, to be honest, my mind had been wandering back to Aunt Odella and thinking about how she was fond of giving out presents with important reasons attached to them too. It almost made you regret opening them. For instance, she once gave a neighbor lady some Odorono deodorant for Christmas. Lady never spoke to us again.

  “Well, I sure hope you remember what I said, Levi Battle, and I didn’t waste my last breaths telling you everything I know.” MawMaw Sands rose slowly from her chair. “Now I’m getting chilled from all this rain, so I’m going in. But let me shake your hand first, since it’ll probably be a while before I see you again.” Her old hand reached out for mine, and it felt strange to touch her sandpapery fingers for the first time. I shook them carefully and said goodbye.

  “Take good care now, you hear? Don’t you grow up to be too tall for your boots,” she said. Then the old woman turned and shuffled slowly into the house, leaving the porch cold and empty.

  Tell you the truth, I felt a big lump of sadness rise in my throat when I closed the gate behind me for the last time. BASKETS FOR SALE. Read the words once more and patted the cat who was sitting next to the gate like a sorry mop of orangeade fur. Glancing back, I could see the curtains of the house move a little as MawMaw Sands watched me leave from behind them—probably making sure I was being careful enough with her gift.

  Early the next morning, we rolled past MawMaw Sands’s house and out of Southern Pines for good. Everybody was feeling blue. The rain was still coming down in a slow drizzle and we were squeezed together in the front seat of the truck, sticking to each other worse than paste on stamps. Cal kept peeling his arm from the side of mine to wipe circles in the steamed-up windshield, just trying to see where he was going. Victory whimpered and cried in Peaches’s lap. It was pure misery.

  Between being late getting started and getting wet as we loaded the truck, nobody was in the mood to give the town a fond backward look as we drove off. Big ruts of muddy water filled the clay streets of Southern Pines, and Cal seemed to nail each one. Hard.

  “Sweet and sugar, can’t you take it any easier, Cal?” Peaches said in a tight voice, shifting Victory onto her shoulder as we bounced along. “You gonna ruin all our things.”

  What she meant was our food. Stuffed into our suitcases and bags was enough chow to feed an army because Cal and Peaches said we couldn’t count on buying anything good on the trains, being the color we were. “Me and Peaches, we lived in the South all our lives, so we know all the tricks,” Cal told me. “Trust me, our food tastes better than whatever stale sandwiches they’d try to sell us. And who knows, maybe things will be different in the West. Maybe we’ll get to eat our meals in the dining car at tables with white linen tablecloths.”

  In case that didn’t happen, we were carrying two loaves of bread, along with four cans of Spam and tuna fish for sandwiches. Plus a few pickles and apples. We’d brought two thermoses full of sweet tea and one of lemonade. A pound cake wrapped in wax paper. One bag of fried fish and another one of fried chicken nowhere near as good as Aunt Odella’s. Cal had thrown in a pound of peanuts too, when Peaches wasn’t looking. “In case we get captured by the Japs,” he’d whispered to me. There wasn’t much chance of that, of course, unless our train grew wings and took off across the Pacific on its own.

  Maybe it was the bumpy roads or how we were packed together like sardines in a can, but the closer we got to the town of Fayetteville, the more dread I felt. Seemed as if the air inside the stuffy truck was slowly disappearing, and it wouldn’t be long before it was all used up. “Could you open your window some?” I mumbled to Cal when I couldn’t stand it a minute longer. By then, I was sucking eggs and my stomach was in knots, let me tell you.

  Peaches cast a worried glance toward me and cranked down her window fast. “You feeling sick, Levi?” She tugged a blanket farther over Victory’s head to keep her dry as rain splattered through the open windows on us all.

  “How’s that?” Cal shouted over the rush
ing noise. “You doing any better, Legs?”

  But the feeling of doom only got worse. Heck, I didn’t know what was going on. There was no reason why I shoulda been feeling as bad as I was. I told Cal maybe it would be a good idea if he stopped the truck. The wheels skidded on the gravel as he turned onto the roadside and swung open his door. “Come on, I’ll give you a hand,” he said, as he helped to pull me out of the truck.

  Now, I thought being on the good solid ground would help, but the feeling didn’t go away one bit. The world seemed to be closing in on me. Clouds were falling on my head.

  “What’s going on, Legs?” Cal leaned closer, squinting at my face. Raindrops speckled the shoulders of his olive-green army jacket. “You worried about something?”

  That’s when the reason came crystal clear to me. Fear—that’s what was eating me up. Like I said, fear isn’t something I’m used to feeling too often. But it had grabbed hold of me now and was shaking me hard. I was afraid. Gut-bellied afraid. Afraid of going back to the town where I’d nearly been killed over nothing. Afraid of seeing the store. The storekeeper. Who knows what else.

  Before I could stop myself, I was pouring out the whole crazy story, telling Cal everything. How it had been a blazing hot day. How all I wanted was a soda pop. How I’d never seen a real gun before in my life. The story tumbled out in random pieces, probably not making any clear sense. “Thought the fellow was gonna shoot me then and there,” I said. “Right in the middle of his store. Nobody woulda known a thing.” I barely got through the part about hiding in the field and getting as sick as a dog—before my teeth were clattering together so bad, I couldn’t keep going with the story.

  But I guess Cal had heard enough.

  He didn’t say a word at first, just pulled off his army cap and smacked the rainwater off it. “That ain’t right,” he replied finally, his voice low and angry. “You being put through all that shameful stuff when you first got here. You were just a kid from up north. How was you supposed to know right and wrong?”

  “Well, I learned my lesson anyhow,” I said, and tried giving a shrug like it didn’t much matter now. “Never gonna make that stupid mistake again.”

  “It still ain’t right.” Cal jammed his army cap back on his head. “Me and Peaches, we’ll keep watch over you in town. You gotta trust us. We know where to go and where not.” Cal draped an arm over my shoulders. “Just remember, Legs—you and me, we’re on the same side in this war. We got your behind covered, if something ever happens again. You just remember that.” He broke into a grin. “Shucks, I got so much rifle range training, I could blow the cap off any soda bottle you wanted.” He pretended to blast away at a row of bottles. “Blam. Blam. Blam.”

  “What in the world are you both doing out there?” Peaches leaned out the open truck window, glaring. “Victory’s fussing and we gonna be late.”

  Me and Cal headed back around the truck. All Cal said when we got inside was how the fresh air had done wonders for me. And I gotta admit, I did feel better after spilling out my soul on the side of the road.

  It’s probably still there today, who knows.

  It wasn’t until much later—long after we’d left Fayetteville and North Carolina in the dust—that Cal told me how lucky I was. How it coulda been way worse. There could have been anything in that soda I drank, he said. Spit. Laundry soap. Even rat poison. He knew of colored folks who’d found themselves in places they shouldn’t be, where they weren’t welcome, and they’d been poisoned and almost died. “Not trying to scare you,” he’d said. “But it’s something you oughta know, Legs. Evil’s everywhere in this world, same as good. You just gotta be careful.”

  Tell you the truth, I wished he hadn’t told me. There are times in life when being ignorant is a whole lot easier.

  23. The World as a Colored Person

  With all my carrying on, we got to the train station in Fayetteville way later than we were supposed to. I didn’t even glance in the direction of G. W. Keeton’s store in the distance. Didn’t want to see one worthless corner of that place. Me and Peaches sat on the colored benches behind the station, while Cal hurried to drop off his truck with an army lieutenant in town who’d agreed to buy it. The money he was getting for the truck would pay for the civilian train tickets we needed. I tried paying for part of mine with the leftover money from Aunt Odella, but Cal wouldn’t take one cent. “I still owe your daddy for half the poker games I lost to him,” he joked.

  Seemed strange to see Cal returning on his own two feet. You had the feeling we’d really gone and done it now—our wheels were gone. There was no turning back. I think all of us breathed a little easier when our train rumbled into the station and we could stop worrying about what would happen if it didn’t. As the drizzly rain fell on our shoulders while we waited to board, I thought about the old man who’d ridden with me before. Could still picture him hunched over his worn-out guitar, strumming the strings and singing his made-up tune to me:

  Wish I was a little rock a-settin’ on a hill,

  Without another thing to do, but just a-settin’ still.

  It woulda been nice to see him again, you know what I mean? Maybe apologize for being as green as I was back then and ask him for some good advice about Oregon.

  But this time, the conductor waved us to the end of the train instead of the first car. You could hear him call out, “Negroes to the last car. Negroes to the last car.”

  We shuffled toward a wood-sided caboose that looked as if it was a leftover from the last century. Inside, there were rows of seats with shabby cushions that seemed to be missing most of their stuffing. As if the accommodations weren’t already bad enough, people started shutting all the windows and yanking down their window shades. The whole inside of the car plunged into a damp, yellowish gloom.

  Peaches, who was sitting in front of me and Cal, turned around and pointed at the shade on mine. “Why don’t you pull it down before we leave the station, Levi?”

  I shrugged and told her I was fine. Figured we didn’t need to worry about any coal dust getting in, since we were about as far as you could get from the locomotive and still be on the train. Plus, I liked seeing the world as it passed by.

  Peaches’s eyes darted nervously toward Cal. “You tell him to pull his shade closed a little,” she insisted loudly, like that dumb window was a matter of life or death.

  I looked to Cal for some explanation of why she was suddenly acting so nuts. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s a good idea to close the shades, Legs.” His voice dropped to a quieter mumble. “Down here, some people who don’t know any better throw rocks at the windows of the last car.”

  “What?” Wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

  “Boys. Mostly just ignorant boys with nothing better to do. If they see a car full of colored folks, they toss a few rocks at it, just being kids, you know.” Cal’s expression was embarrassed. “Always better to keep the shades closed until we get farther outta the South, just to be safe.”

  You had to wonder where our mixed-up world was heading. That’s what I thought as I yanked down my shade like everybody else. Counting Cal, there were five colored servicemen in the caboose—soldiers who were going off to defend our country, and yet they had to hide their faces behind paper shades so they wouldn’t get hit by rocks? We had a few mothers like Peaches, with babies in their arms too. What kind of people would throw rocks at helpless babies and their mommas? Or U.S. soldiers?

  I have no idea how long we sat inside the stuffy, clattering caboose as it rumbled northward. Seemed like an hour or two at least before folks finally started lifting up the shades and peeking out. Cal nodded at ours and said, “Think we’ve gone far enough to open up the windows. Why don’t you give us a little air now, Legs, and we’ll have some of our special war rations.”

  I wasn’t feeling real cheerful or hungry, but I followed orders.

  Cal dug around the food basket until he found our stash of peanuts. Opening up the paper bag, he stuck
his nose inside and took a big snort of the dusty, peanutty smell. “Mmm-hmmm.” Scooping up a handful in his palm, he started eating them like there was no tomorrow, leaning over every once in a while to fling the shells out the open window next to me.

  Watching those little bitty pieces fly away got me thinking about how nice it would be if your color was something you could take off whenever you felt like it. What if you could crack open your skin like a peanut shell and toss it away whenever you needed to be free of it? Order whatever soda you wanted in the store. Ride in the nice comfortable train cars with upholstered seats. Then put your brown shell back on again. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to be white. Just thought it would be nice to have the chance to be free of who I was every once in a while.

  When I told Cal what I was thinking about, he shook his head and gave me an odd look. “Holy smokes, they must teach you some strange things in those schools up north.” He balanced a peanut between his thumb and forefinger. “See, I think you got it all backward. You’re looking at being brown as a bad thing. But you aren’t considering all the good things in this world that got brown shells. Take peanuts, for instance. They’re brown-skinned.”

  He dug around in his front pockets until he found a half-eaten candy bar. “Chocolate. That’s a sweet brown shade. Trees …” He pointed out the window. “They got brown bark. And where would this world be without trees?”

  “Buckeyes.” I remembered the hundreds stuffed under my bed back in Chicago. “They got brown shells.”

  “That’s getting kinda tricky.” Cal dug out another handful of peanuts from the bag and started cracking shells. “But okay, Legs, I’ll give you buckeyes as a possibility.” He nodded at the farm fields alongside the tracks. “Dirt. Almost all of it is a shade of brown. In fact”—a triumphant smile flashed across his face—“since dirt covers the whole world, you could say the earth itself has brown skin.” He stuck one finger in the air like he’d just hit upon his best idea. “So, that must mean the whole world is a colored person!”