IN THE WOODS, A VERY OLD MAN IS TALKING TO HIS mother, whom white people have called, for long years, Old Aunt Charlotte.
They stand at the edge of a clearing where their ancient shanty leans into a mean wind.
“Mama, I gots to go,” he says. “They say there’s a march coming to Montgomery. Black folks marching for freedom.”
“Look at the sky,” she says. To the south, the sky is blue, but from the north gray fluffs, shoulder to shoulder, are coming in. “There’s snow in them clouds,” she adds. “I seen it before.”
“Been so long—”
“I can remember. You could, too, if you tried. Forty, fifty years ago. It snowed. Way down here. You remember. Snowed from Birmingham all the way down here and to Mobile and the Gulf.”
“Mama, I was just a boy then.”
“No, you wasn’t. Not any more than you’s a boy now.” Not quarreling. Banter. Entertainment. Making the time pass with a few sparkles in it.
“I had white hair, then?”
“Sure ’nuff.”
They stand together in front of the small dun house with boards soft as worn denim and look at the sky. Each can see that a few specks of white are striking the face of the other, skittering off their cheeks.
“Mama, I gots to go. I got to take my own steps. I come home again.”
But if he raises up like that, Charlotte knows what could happen, what has happened to the uppity.
She holds out her hands and snowflakes float into her palms. The sky has become a uniform gray except for a few bays and inlets of blue far to the south.
“I’m leaving,” Chris says. “Gots to freedom walk.”
“We’ll send for you,” Charlotte says to her son, “when the roof’s back on.”
He looks at her strangely. “I loves you, Mama. You done the best you could, by everybody. White and dark.” He starts to walk the path through the woods.
CHARLOTTE SPITS HER snuff onto the ground. “I can make snow, too,” she says. “Brown snow.” She chuckles, looks wickedly at her daughter. But Victoria has her blunt nose tilted up, studying the clouds. Charlotte looks with her. What a multitude of snowflakes!
“It’s cold,” Victoria says. “We need to move inside.”
“You can go, baby. Hurry and you’ll catch Chris on the path.”
In a few patches around the yard, the snow is beginning to stick. It looks like white scabs.
Victoria turns toward the house. She slowly crosses the yard and climbs up the step.
“I’m going to enjoy this snowfall,” Charlotte says to no one.
It’s good to be alone. Just herself and the house and yard. The sky. She settles herself on one of the two steps to the dogtrot. Soon all the rake marks in the red dust will be covered. She’ll see a pure field of snow, whiter than the best field of cotton. “Y’all should of left long, long ago,” Charlotte says quietly to the vacancy. “This ain’t no place for y’all younguns.”
Now there is enough snow on the yard to resemble a threadbare quilt. In the woods, snow is nesting in bright white clumps in the pine needles. “Come on, snow,” she says. “Let’s cover this.”
She holds out her hand. On her palm, she catches a clump of snowflakes. She can see a few sparkling spines sticking out from the glob. After the snow melts in her palm, she tastes the moisture that came down as snow. Her tongue is a warm dove on a cold nest. She wipes her wet hand on her dress.
From behind her, Victoria silently leans down to place a folded quilt over her shoulders. Charlotte looks down at the pad of quilt to see which one it might be. A thick, nice one, pieced curvy to suggest an inlay of blue and yellow ribbons on a white background.
She relaxes under the thick warmth. Then she says, “This be so pretty. All this.” The house faces east, and she looks at the land from north to south. “I’m thankful I’m here to see it.”
She sits for half an hour, and all the cold red dust is blanketed with snow. Charlotte smiles broader and broader at the falling snow. “Tha’s right,” she says from time to time. “Come on.”
Birds are flying around like they’ve gone crazy. A blue jay cuts across the yard screaming. Some smart sparrows are perching on a limb, fluffing out their feathers. “Y’all better eat,” she advises them. “Ain’t night yet.”
She sits on the steps till she begins to turn to stone. The gray sky is darker now with the approach of night, and still the snow is falling. The woods and the yard are beautiful. The quilt slides from her narrow shoulders, but Charlotte no longer feels the cold. She tries pinching her cheek, but the flesh is too stiff and hard with cold to pinch up. She can feel her fingernails scratching at her skin.
“Time to come in,” Victoria says behind her.
Charlotte prepares to enter her home. Her daughter’s hand is under her elbow, helping her. It takes a while to unfold her body, but once standing, Charlotte looks up once more. From on high, the snow comes right down into her eyes. She blinks and looks and blinks again. She can scarcely get her fill of it, thick as it falls. All that long drifting down of snowflakes, just to fall on her! But she goes inside.
A FEW EMBERS glow in the fireplace.
Victoria takes a newspaper from the top of the knee-high stack and crumples it fiercely into a loose ball, which she throws onto the embers. While the paper ball flares up, she lays fat pine kindling in the flame, and then with her bare hands she lifts a big lump of coal from the scuttle and throws it into the grate. The kindling catches right up and begins to snap and pop. Charlotte smells the burning turpentine in the pine sticks and draws the aroma deep into her lungs. For a moment she feels she is a pine tree, a young one, ready to grow tall and strong.
Crawl in bed.
Charlotte looks up and sees the ceiling. She has forgotten the ceiling. She wishes it was gone and the roof, too, so she could look right up through the rafters and see the sky, have the snow fall on her face while she lies down.
Plenty of covers. Charlotte has always kept her winter bed with three quilts. A soft, old-friend quilt closest to her. Old on bottom, newer, newest. Newest, hardest, and prettiest on top. Still, she wishes she’d not left the freshest quilt outdoors, the white one with the wavy blue and yellow ribbon design.
Fend for yourself, she says to it. She means to sound encouraging, but the pretty young quilt is too far away to hear; she feels sorry for such a pretty quilt out there, alone in the cold.
“Live forever,” she says out loud. She remembers them all in the room: Doctor and Mrs., the three children. “I will,” she promises the little girl. Blessed girl.
“Victoria,” she calls. She hears her voice like a dry leaf, full of veins and fissures, spreading and crackling itself across the room. “See you in the morning.”
Victoria backs up to the fire, lifts her skirts high in back to roast her legs and fanny.
Now close, eyes, so I can see.
THERE ARE HER FOUR schoolgirls, hovering.
Sing me, she says to the Birmingham girls, the bombed Sunday school girls. Sing high, sweet cherubims, and not a hint of hate.
With a wish, the ceiling is gone, and the roof.
Lying straight and comfortable under her quilts, she begins to rise. She tilts slightly to pass between the open, snowcapped rafters. From the top of a rafter, she pinches a little snow and puts it like snuff between her lower lip and gum. Rising higher, she passes into swirls of snow. Her mattress comes right along under her, the quilts flapping at the sides while she ascends. Jesus is raising the dead, like he’d promised he’d do and did do, when he walked the earth.
Black is the night. She reaches out her hand through the snow to try to catch a sparkling star, tiny as a wedding diamond. But oh, the groaning below, mouths distorted in pain. Still, she can ask it of them, and she does. Sing me!
From all around her, through veils of falling snow, the spirits are gathering.