Chapter Fourteen

Amy turned off her nightstand lamp, stepped out of her nightgown, and climbed into bed. The cool, percale sheets gave her naked body welcome relief from the sultry, late-July evening.

She closed her bedroom door for privacy’s sake, but an inch of space between the bottom of the door and the threshold permitted a shaft of hallway light into her room.

Shadows flickered every time one of the girls who worked in her mother’s basement speakeasy and an all too eager john walked by her room to one of the third-floor rooms.

Many nights the foot traffic kept her awake well past midnight. She beat a fist into her pillow and hoped this wasn’t going to be another one of those nights.

The speakeasy was a private club for wealthy white men. Amy wasn’t allowed to enter the club—ever—but from what she could tell, the men seemed to have an insatiable desire for colored women. Her mother ensured the men had their choice of every hue of woman in the Negro race from porcelain white to coffee to ebony. Every one of the girls was beautiful and busy every night that the club was open.

For Amy, the worst part of lying awake was that the same discomforting thought always returned. Operating the speakeasy and selling bootleg liquor was how her mother afforded Amy’s boarding school tuition, her expensive clothes, and the trip to Europe last summer with her classmates.

Oh God, why did it all have to be like this? The memory of a childhood rhyme taunted her.

“If you’re black, get back. If you’re brown, stick around. If you’re white, you’re all right.”

Her mother was trying so hard to give her a white girl’s life. Why was such a life theirs anyway? All Amy wanted was to be herself; whatever that was.

She didn’t even know anymore. Black, white. White, black. What difference did it make anyway? Who made up all this foolishness? And why? Amy turned to the wall and squeezed her eyes shut to no avail.

She kicked her covers to the foot of the bed and sat up. She leaned against her headboard, but then she scooted to the middle of the bed, pulled her legs up to her chest and folded her arms across her knees. Resting her head on her arms, she breathed deeply, then let go a torrent of tears.

“It’ll be different for you, precious, I promise,” Amy said to the child in her womb.

Her declaration gave her an idea. She dried her tears and looked over at her teddy bear Mr. Scruggs. She would marry the baby’s father instead of giving the baby up for adoption. She just had to find a way to tell him that she had changed her mind; they could run away and elope like he had pleaded with her to do during her Christmas vacation.

He didn’t know she was pregnant, but she would tell him soon enough. Their situation was still impossible, but there had to be some state in this whole big country that would allow them to live in peace.

Amy reached toward her lamp, but stopped. The full moon shined bright enough into the room that she could do what she needed to without turning on a light.

She went to her closet and selected a skirt, a blouse, and her lowest heeled shoes. Within minutes she was fully dressed.

Next, she went to her bedroom door and listened for the sound of footsteps in the hallway, or on the stairs. For the moment, she heard nothing.

She started to open the door, then thought of another way out—the outside stairway on the side of the house that her mother had installed for the third-floor boarders.

The window next to her bed let out onto the stairway’s second-floor landing. She climbed out her window onto the stairway landing, and tiptoed down the wooden steps to ground level. Of all the antics she’d pulled at the boarding school, this was the first time she’d ever gone anywhere alone in the middle of the night. She would have to be careful that no one saw her. They might get the wrong idea.

She decided to go out the back gate and walk through the alleys until she was a few blocks away, but what Amy found in the backyard startled her—a parking lot for luxury automobiles. Buicks, and Oldsmobiles were squeezed in alongside Lincolns, Cadillacs, and Packards.

She worked her way through the maze, but reached the gate just as a Bentley came down the alley with its lights off and parked alongside the fence. Its occupants, two men wearing top hats and tuxedos and a woman in an evening gown, exited the Bentley, opened the gate and proceeded up the backyard walkway to the outside basement door.

Amy had to duck down between the cars in the yard and wait until the trio went inside. She heard one of the men give the secret knock: Rap, rap, rap, a long pause, and rap, rap.

She could hear strains of the player piano and a tangle of talk and laughter when her mother opened the basement door to let the newly arrived clientele in.

When the door closed, the night was quiet again, except for the hooting of a nearby owl.

A shooting star sailed across the darkness. Amy glanced upward just in time to see it disappear from view, but the sky was aglitter with millions of more stars. She gasped at the beauty of it all.

The block was dark except for the street lamp on the corner. She walked in the direction of the light.

As she neared the lamp, a young man—white, she immediately noted—stepped from the dark and stood directly under the beam of light.

At first her heart raced with fright, but then she recognized his smile. She started to run to him, and then halted before her next foot left the ground.

“Kyle, what are you doing here? This is too dangerous.”

She meant to sound angry, except the lilt and tremble in her voice betrayed her. “Believe it or not, I was on my way to see you.”

Kyle had moved closer to Amy and reached for her hand to pull her into his arms. She struggled futilely against his strength, and then relented. His breath reeked of cheap whiskey.

“Well,” he slurred, “now you don’t have to go anywhere. Furthermore, my beautiful brown sugar, I wasn’t about to let you just walk out of my life. Haven’t you figured out that I love you? To hell with my daddy and the whole damn lot of his goons. It ain’t like some of ‘em don’t have their own cup of brown sugah on the side.”

Amy hated Kyle’s calling her “brown sugah” and strained to be released from his hold, because he had ignored her longstanding request to stop doing so. He simply held her all the tighter, then kissed her long and hard.

Once more she attempted to resist Kyle’s embrace, but he ultimately overpowered her again, pulling her out of the light of the streetlamp and into the deep shadows of a nearby tree. “I need you, Amy,” he said, and kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, her chin, her lips. “I need you, and don’t want to be without you. I could care less that the color of our skin is different. Are we the same height? The same weight? Born on the same day or in the same month?”

She shook her head.

“What in hell difference can the same skin color mean? It’s stupid! I’d love you if you were polka dot and I was plaid.”

“Sure, that’s what you say here in the dark shadows of night. What happens when your friends turn against you or your father kicks you out of his house. You’ll care then.”

“Shhhhh,” he said, as he stroked her hair, “let’s not worry about any of that right now. Right now, let’s just be here, with each other.” He loved the texture of her hair, especially underneath where it wasn‘t so straightened and he could feel its strength and that it had a mind of its own.

“Look,” he said, their hands clasped in the dark, “we can’t even really tell what color either of us is. I could even be Negro and you white.” This time he kissed her full on the mouth with a tenderness that words could not convey.

Amy struggled to get free of Kyle and finally he relented, dropping his arms to his side. She stepped back and straightened her clothes.

“But Kyle, you know what’ll happen if they catch us.” She discarded her resolve to tell him that she was carrying his baby. “First, our parents would kill us, then they’d still be so full of hate, they’d probably kill each other.”

Kyle ignored her comment, and instead bent to kiss her neck, then her shoulders. Before moving to her breasts he laid his hand on her stomach.

His hand could not lay flat. Her stomach was full and rounded. Amy stiffened and tried to push his hand away, but it was immovable. He searched her face for an answer. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

His arm slackened and his hand fell away from her before she could answer.

“What difference would it have made?” Amy asked, tears swelling in her eyes the third time this evening.

She waited for Kyle to pull her close again, but he didn’t. Instead he just looked at her as if she were a stranger that he wanted to slap.

A police car turned onto the far end of the street and drove slowly past her mother’s house. The headlights of the police car nearly revealed Kyle and Amy under the tree. Neither breathed until the vehicle was well down the next block.

After a long moment of staring at each other, Kyle stepped away from Amy deeper into the shadows. Amy’s tears wet her face as she waited in vain for him to hold her again.

At last, he reached for her hand, but it was too late. Amy jerked away from him before he could get a good hold of her.

“Stay away from me, Kyle. Don’t ever come near me again.”

Ignoring her, he made a second try and successfully locked her into an embrace.

“Amy, you’ve got me all wrong. It was just the shock of finding out this way. You caught me off guard, that’s all. I mean, us, having a baby? It’s just not something I ever thought about. Did you?”

Shame burned her face. She’d not only thought about it. She’d plotted it.

“I don’t care what you meant, Kyle Browne or ever thought about. Just let go of me.”

She pounded her fists against his chest until he relented, and this time, she backed away from him. He let her go. When she reached the curb, she turned and ran across the street.

“Amy, please come back,” Kyle called after her. “We’ll figure it out. I love you. Nothing else really matters.”

“You’re a liar, Kyle Browne,” Amy yelled over her shoulder at him, “nothing but a boldfaced liar.”

His actions had said as much. She was black and he was white. He didn’t have the courage to stand up to anyone who thought they should be kept apart.

She stopped running and started walking, where, she didn’t know. All she knew was that she wasn’t going home. She’d ruined her life, all to keep her mother from attending her graduation and embarrassing her and so that her classmates wouldn’t learn that she was Negro. She could barely see through her tears.

Wasn’t there anywhere in the world that a person’s skin color didn’t matter?

She stopped and searched the heavens in hope of an answer, but a wide swath of clouds masked the stars. Clearly, the answer was no. No, there wasn’t one corner of this world where a person’s skin color did not matter.

⟞ • ⟝

Amy had no idea where she was, all she knew was that she was exhausted and desperately needed to rest.

She pressed a hand against her stomach. “Don’t worry, baby. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

She trudged on until she came to a school building. The moonlight illuminated the name inscribed over the doorway “Manual High School.” The school she would have attended if her mother hadn’t insisted she go to a boarding school.

She sat on the school’s front steps. An owl hooted from somewhere in the dark.

The homes across the street from the school were modest, but well kept. One house stood out from the others. The yard was bordered with neatly trimmed hedges rather than a fence and the upstair windows had wrought-iron balconies. The drapes in the front room window of the house were open and Amy could see that a party was going on.

It occurred to her that no one would see her if she approached the house and looked closer. She went almost as close as the porch.

What a time the partygoers seemed to be having. Everyone was laughing and smiling. The men were all handsome and wearing suits, and the women all beautiful and dressed in the latest flapper fashion. If she weren’t seeing this with her own eyes, she would have never believed that Negroes lived this well.

The most elegant of the women was a blonde only a shade darker than herself. For a moment, Amy imagined herself in the woman’s place.

The woman turned and looked out the window before Amy could move from sight. Seconds later, the front door of the house opened, and a young man stepped out onto the porch.

Amy turned to escape; only she didn’t see that she had stepped into a flowerbed. She tripped and fell head first into an arrangement of petunias.

Her face blushed hot with embarrassment as she spit the dirt out of her mouth, then rose up on her knees and sat back on her heels.

A man’s open palm reached down to help her up. “I think I’d better get you home,” said a voice she was startled to recognize.

She looked up, hardly believing her eyes. “Anthony!”

She was humiliated beyond words. Why did he have to be so darn handsome?

He waited for Amy to take his hand, then cupped his other hand under her elbow and helped her stand.

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Really.”

“I believe you,” Anthony said, hesitating before he removed a petal from her hair, “but at least come sit on the porch with me before I drive you home. I could get you some milk or punch.”

Amy could feel her cheeks burning. Before she knew it, he was settling her onto the porch swing.

“I’ll be right back. I just have to go get the car keys from my dad.”

Actually, Amy was grateful that he’d left her there alone. At least for a brief time, this house was hers. This life was hers. Anthony was hers.

The front door opened again, only this time it wasn’t Anthony who appeared. It was the woman Amy had seen in the front room. The two of them could have been mistaken for mother and daughter.

The woman took a sip of whatever was in the glass she was holding and threw the rest of it out toward the flowers. Most of the drink went into the petunias, but some of it wet the end of the swing, and the side of Amy’s face.

“Dear,” the woman said, looking down on Amy, “I don’t know who your folks are, nor am I interested in finding out. I simply want you to understand that whatever you have in mind regarding my son won’t work. I repeat, will not, work. This party is to announce our son’s acceptance into Howard University, somewhere he’ll be out of the clutches of girls like you. Am I making myself quite clear?”

Amy stared at the woman a long moment, trying to figure out how to respond. First impressions were hard to undo.

“Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And, believe me, your son is the last thing on my mind right now.

In fact, we hardly …”

The front door swung open again and Anthony hurried out to his mother’s side. “Okay, Mom. That’s enough. Dad’s looking all over for you.”

⟞ • ⟝

Anthony drove up in front of Amy’s house and turned off the ignition. Amy was thinking about what he had just said. She wasn’t sure she believed him. “You’re trying to tell me that your mother is a sharecropper’s daughter? That she picked cotton when she was growing up?”

“Hey, don’t let the fake Back East accent and the fancy party fool you. Can’t nobody cook a pot of collard greens like my mom. Grows them herself, too, in a garden in our backyard.”

Amy looked at Anthony incredulously, unable to picture the glamorous woman she’d just met on her hands and knees digging in the dirt.

Anthony seized the moment, and put his arms across the back of Amy’s shoulders drawing her close. She felt his longing as strongly as she felt her own. He leaned in to kiss her, but she offered her cheek instead of her lips. “I can’t. I just can’t,” she said.

He tried again, but she froze. She cared too much about Anthony to lead him on. “I’m pregnant,” she blurted. She felt like she might faint. She wished he’d take his arm from around her shoulders. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m pregnant.”

“Of course, I heard you,” he said. “Anything else I should know?”

Amy didn’t appreciate his humor. “Very funny,” she said, afraid to look at him.

He removed his arm from around her, but turned her face toward his. “I’m not trying to be funny, I mean. I honestly want to know if there’s anything else you want to tell me?”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Saying what?”

“That dumb thing about, anything else?”

“I don’t know,” Anthony said. “I just figure there’s got to be more.”

Amy closed her eyes and heaved a deep breath. Now he’s really going to hate me, she thought.

“He’s white, okay?”

“He? He, who?”

“My baby’s father.”

Anthony’s brow knitted, but he didn’t turn away from her.

“So, what does your mother say about that?”

“She’s making me give the baby away.”

“At least it’s not the other way around.”

“The other way around? I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I mean,” Anthony said, looking straight into Amy’s eyes, “if the father were colored and you were white, they’d eventually find him hung in a tree somewhere. My dad told me that happened to a cousin of his.”

Amy stared blankly out into the night. “What happened to the girl and their baby?”

“Don’t know. My pops also said sometimes it’s better not to ask.”

Amy looked back at Anthony. For a long while neither said another word.

“I better go in,” she finally said.

“Okay. Let me get the door for you.”

Anthony got out of the car and came around to the passenger door. He opened it and took her hand as if he were her very own Prince Charming, but the prick of pain in her stomach reminded her that he couldn’t ever be. They walked to Amy’s front door hand in hand.

Rowena startled them by opening the front door. She was in her bathrobe and a head rag, and pulled Amy inside without a word.

She slammed the door in Anthony’s face so hard that it hurt his ears, and probably woke up half the neighborhood.

Anthony walked forlornly back to his car. As he opened the door of his car to get in, he failed to pay attention to another car careening toward him. The car veered deathly close to his body.

“Better watch it, nigger,” someone yelled at him. In nearly the same instant, someone in the rear seat of the car rolled down their window and hurled spit into his face. The car’s tires screeched and burned as the car sped away.

Anthony wiped the fluid from his face only to look up and see another white boy, who looked to be practically his same age and build, staring at him from across the street. They were even dressed much the same—leather shoes, dark slacks, white shirt, dark jacket, and apple cap.

The two of them glared across at each other, but neither made a move. The duel would have to wait until another night. The sun was rising, and a police car that turned on the street was headed their way.