IN HELICON, ALABAMA, OLD AUNT CHARLOTTE TOLD HER aged children Christopher Columbus Jones and Queen Victoria Jones, “He’p me up to the Methodist church. I want to sit there.”
“Let me get you a fresh head rag,” Victoria said.
Chris pulled a quilt off his mother’s bed to line the wheelbarrow.
The barrow lay upside down to keep out the rain, right beside the worn steps. With difficulty, Chris righted it, but he had to take his time.
“Let me walk,” his mother was saying as she hesitated at the top of the three stairs. Her neck was bent down, but her body stood straight. She wore a clean, faded apron, and the clean head rag was a matching strip of fabric printed with now-faded red circles.
She over a hundred years old. She don’t look it, Chris thought. Dressed up, matching clothes. I look older than my own mama.
“Church folks done be gone,” Victoria said, “time we get there ’less you let Chris push you.”
They already gone, Charlotte mumbled too low for even Victoria (standing right beside her on the threshold with her hand under Charlotte’s elbow) to hear. Charlotte had felt their passing. Good children. Good girls. We come to say good-bye, one of the spirits had whispered. With utmost respect, because you the oldest living.
’Cause you seen so much, another girl-voice said. Words like distant cowbells.
We be waiting for you, when you come. The third girl had a low, patient voice, like creek-flow.
Grannie, would you tie my sash a little better?
They’d wakened her from her doze with their wispy young voices. Four spirits passing. They troubled the air over where she lay snoozing in bed. No more than breath, they wafted past, talking among themselves. Detouring. Little city girls, leaving Birmingham. They sang a hymn, so high up in the air, each with her own note but all together. They sang so high as they disappeared, grew small as four specks, into infinity.
They sang like they were already angels. Voices like chimes.
Doctor and Mrs. Doctor and their children, been several years now, not too long ago, had given her wind chimes when they visited. Sweet as church bells, Doctor had said. Maybe it was the chimes had woke her, four metal tubes stirring in the Sunday breeze.
Well, Charlotte would know when she saw the white folks leaving their church.
“You come ride in the barrow, Mama,” Chris said. “I have you there in no time.”
“I scared you spill me, Chris.”
“Never have,” he answered, looking sullen.
“No, I’ll just walk. Not but a mile. They church not even started yet. Y’all come get on each side.”
Chris felt his neck creak, his head bend a little lower—oh, just a tiny fraction of an inch closer to despair. When his chin touched his chest, he’d likely die. But not till then. Till then, his mama was the boss.
Slowly Charlotte crept down the steps. Victoria plucked the quilt from the barrow in case her mother needed to lie down beside the path and rest.
Tentatively, Charlotte sent one foot sliding forward through the raked red dust. Her shoe sole grated over the little stones under the dust. Then the other foot followed, sliding and scuffling.
“See,” Charlotte said proudly. “That’s how walking’s done. One foot at a time.”
“We’ll get there,” Victoria said. Her voice strong as the steel spring in a mousetrap.
“Reckon I’ll stay home,” Chris muttered.
His mother looked back at him and slowly smiled. “No, you come on, too, honey. Mama needs you to help her.”
So the three of them slowly progressed to the edge of the yard. Then Charlotte stopped. She looked back.
“ ‘Little house, little house,’ ” she said. “ ‘Stay still as a mouse. Don’t make a sound, and don’t fall down,’ ” but she was living in another time. She was a young woman, and Doctor, just a boy ten years old, had stopped on this very spot, at the edge of the yard. It was white family’s dwelling then, and Doctor had a long burlap cotton sack slung over his shoulder. He held the belly of the long bag bunched up so it wouldn’t drag through the woods, get caught on little sticks and briars. Straight, smart little boy, with blue-gray eyes. He was off to the fields to pick a hundred pounds of cotton. Little sister—Miss Krit—was just born, that morning, in the house, and they told Doctor-that-was-to-be if’n he picked a hundred pounds, he could hold the baby. Standing on this spot, he had looked back at the house, and made up a charm:Little house, little house, stay still as a mouse. Don’t make a sound, and don’t fall down.
It had taken Charlotte a moment to rummage around in memory to find the words, but the charm had lasted all these years. The house still stood.
“Now we can speed up a little,” she told her children, stepping beyond the yard onto the path through the woods. “I remember how this walking’s done.”
A small frail baby, Krit had been an easy birth for a woman who’d had five before. As soon as she came out, Charlotte had read her puckered face: this one would make trouble for somebody, later on in life. But so far, she hadn’t. She’d never married, taken care of her mother in her old age, was taking care of Miss Pratt, stove up with the rheumatism. And Doctor’s little orphan girl.
Today was a good day at Helicon in September, still warm enough for the pine trees to give out their piney smell. Their fallen needles, long and brown, were soft underfoot, but they could be slippery, and it was best to hold to somebody.
I wish you Birmingham gals could all just stay here with me, Charlotte thought. Where had those specks gone? Enjoy this Alabama sunshine. These good smells. This soft path. She breathed it all in, could feel her nostrils spread. Reckon y’all’s feet don’t need no earthly path. She had her faith, but it was a sad thought. Y’all mighty sweet. Coming by my bed like that, tell old Grannie good-bye.
Then Charlotte took such a mighty breath—life, life—it resounded like a snore, and Victoria said, “You all right, Mama?”
“Sure am,” Charlotte answered and quickened her steps. They’ve flown on. Hardly stayed a second, just long enough for Charlotte to get her eyes open, see the place where they’d hovered in the empty air.
She glanced to her left, saw the pond below the spring all covered with green. She wished Victoria and Chris wouldn’t let the water scum up that way. She swung her gaze to the right. Yes, there was her big rock. Even in the winter, when she sat down there, her boulder had stored-up sunshine to offer. She’d rather be buried under that rock than anywhere else on earth. Lie close to home. But that was a wish she’d never tell; she knew it was her duty to go into the church graveyard—colored side—when her time come.
Oh, she remembered now: she’d decided against dying. She was staying here. Y’all come back to visit. She sent the message out to all who had gone before. Anytime.
To her own children, she thought, Now if you waiting for me to die fore you light out for the city, you barking up the wrong tree. You be here forever, you waiting for that event. I ain’t making you leave, but I was you, I’d go while I still had some gumption.
Here was the patch of oak trees to pass. Acorns still clung in clusters up among the green leaves. Charlotte thought an oak leaf was the prettiest shape in the world—the kind with lobes, not the red oak leaf. Too pointy. When she was just a girl, long long ago, she’d seen a woman with an oak leaf branded into her cheek.
And there was a dogwood with one red leaf on it already. Always the first sign of earliest fall when the dogwood started to turn red. Now they were onto the road leading to the church.
“One foot in front of the other,” she encouraged her children. Y’all ought to just keep walking. I want you to be free.
She could hear a cardinal sing, and she sang back to it out loud, “Pretty bird, pretty bird.” Birds always sang prettiest on a Sunday morning. “I love to hear the bird choir,” Charlotte said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Victoria said with a snap in that spring steel voice.
“I do too, Mama,” Chris said, muted, and his mother pinched his arm a little so as he would know her thought:You such a good boy.
One foot in front of the other. Charlotte wished folks pent up in the cities could look down on them from one of their high buildings, see how peaceful and good things were here in the woods. Here everything just grew as it would, no matter who lived here or who didn’t. They had the prettiest woods in the world. She saw goldenrod beside the road.
In the country, they didn’t have much, but they didn’t need much.
In the country, folks got along with one another. Acted right.
She wondered sadly about the four girls and why they’d passed on so young. Good girls. Dressed so nice. They needed to be here.
Ought to have been with her, in the country. They ought to have been four real girls come to visit their grannie in the country for the summer. Well, she guessed this was autumn coming on. She remembered the dark red leaf on the dogwood. School time.
The girls needed to be here, whenever it was, enjoying the birds and the green trees.
By the time Charlotte and Victoria and Chris reached the church, those inside were saying the benediction, in unison: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you. And give you peace. Amen.” It was as though the building itself had a voice.
The sun glinted on the chrome of the cars parked all around the church. The cars were like a herd of little piglets snouting up to a sow.
“Quick, quick,” Charlotte told her children. “Let me sit here on the stump. I got to see’em come out. You all hurry on, then come back and get me. Hide now.”
Charlotte settled herself on the stump. Yes, they were coming out now, first a few men—Charlotte eagerly looked at their faces, their arms—then the women—Charlotte held her breath, appalled—then couples emerged from the door under the steeple. Every white face, their hands and arms were marked.
Covered with blood, they were. Every one of them. Stained with guilt. She could see.
Smiling and pleasant, as though nothing had happened.
No, to them nothing bad had happened for the last hundred years.