Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

the sympathy between mother and child becomes again almost what it was at the very first. At that instant I could discern in my mother, as clearly as if she had told me of it, the same almost romantic agitation that I felt. It was an excitement rooted in her fascination with grotesque anecdotes, but it went beyond that. While my mother pushed me in the swing, it seemed as if we were conducting, without words, a troubling yet oddly exhilarating dialogue about pain and loss.

In a few minutes I dragged my sneakered feet in a patch of dust to stop the swing. The light of a television had gone on inside the Barber house, and I imagined fat, pretty Phyllis Barber carefully rolling her hair on curlers, alone in front of the screen. I grabbed my mother’s hand and said, “It’s very sad, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” said Mama.

We took a shortcut home, and by the time we got there, it was time for me to scrub my grimy arms and legs and go to bed. Mama went immediately to the refrigerator and got out an uncooked roast of pork, which she stood contemplating as if it were the clue to something. She smelled of sage and dried mustard when she came upstairs to kiss Matthew and me goodnight.

Gypsies

Franklin Place, the street that ran like a vein through most of my dreams and nightmares, the stretch of territory I automatically envisioned when someone said “neighborhood,” lay in a Philadelphia suburb. The town was green and pretty, but had the constrained, slightly unreal atmosphere of a colony or a foreign enclave; that was because the people who owned the rambling houses behind the shrubbery were black. For them—doctors, ministers, teachers who had grown up in Philadelphia row houses—the lawns and tree-lined streets represented the fulfillment of a fantasy long deferred, and acted as a barrier against the predictable cruelty of the world.

Franklin Place began at the white stucco walls of the swim club, constructed by neighborhood parents for their children, who couldn’t swim elsewhere. It ran three tranquil blocks downhill to intersect the traffic of Marymount Lane, a road that traveled through Brandywine country into Delaware. Sometimes in summer, when I listened to the cicadas striking themselves into song from tree to tree, down the street and into the valley, I would imagine following that rasping chorus as it headed south—flying fast over shopping centers, split-level developments, cities, and farms until I reached the perilous region below the Mason-Dixon Line, the region my parents had told me held a sad and violent heritage for little girls like me. Beyond a self-conscious excitement when I heard this, I had little idea of what they meant. For as long as I could remember, the civil rights movement had been unrolling like a dim frieze behind the small pleasures and defeats of my childhood; it seemed dull, a necessary burden on my conscience, like good grades or hungry people in India. My occasional hair-raising reveries of venturing into the netherworld of Mississippi or Alabama only added a voluptuous edge to the pleasure of eating an ice-cream cone while seated on a shady curb of Franklin Place.

One July morning my best friend, Lyn Yancy, and I were playing a great new game in the middle of our street. The game involved standing about twenty feet apart and whacking a large, bouncy red rubber ball back and forth with a pair of old putters that belonged to Dr. Yancy. Most of our time was spent chasing the red ball, which had an eccentric will of its own. Each retrieval was an adventure—from the stand of bamboo in the corner of Reverend Reynolds’s yard (counting my father, three ministers lived on the block); from the hazardous green slope in front of the Pinkstons’ house, patrolled by a nasty little Scottie named Pattycake; from the pyracantha hedge in front of the house where the Tate twins lived, tough sixth-grade boys who sometimes extorted Sugar Babies from Lyn and me up at the swim club.

It was high midsummer, the season that is unimaginable when you are twining your ankles around the legs of a straight-backed chair in school. All that week the sky had been a fine clear blue, like a direct gaze, and the heat could stop you flat, like a wall, if you were coming out of a cool house. Backyards were full of the raw, troubling odor of tomato vines, and the colony of black ants among the dusty petunias on the slope near the train station had grown into an overcrowded pueblo. If you wore cotton socks with your sneakers and went around riding bikes and hanging from tree branches all day, and you didn’t go swimming, when you took off your clothes at night, your legs would be coated with a layer of the outdoors that ended abruptly where your socks had been, and your mother would say, “Run a tepid bath and scrub those legs and show them to me before you even get near the sheets.”

Lyn and I whacked the red ball and screeched at each other, and danced up and down the street with the spidery gait of little girls who are rapidly growing taller. We were both seven years old and looked enough like sisters to pretend it almost constantly—two light-bodied, light-skinned little colored girls with our frizzy hair in braids that our mothers had bound into coronets because of the heat. It was fun to run on the broad, newly paved street that looked like a leafy tunnel crisscrossed with shafts of greenish sunlight. We were playing mainly in front of Lyn’s house, which was big and made out of stone with mica in it and had a grape arbor and a fascinating garage that the previous owner had left filled with stacks of Scandinavian nudist magazines. Occasionally we paused in our game as neighbors pulled in and out of their driveways. There was