TOO EARLY, AUNT DEE WANTED LITTLE DIANE TO CLOSE her book and go to bed.
“You try to read with a flashlight, and I skin you,” Dee said.
Diane wondered if a person could be skinned like a deer, or a rabbit, but she didn’t say anything to her auntie.
Mumbling, Dee explained she needed to put her head down quick and take her table nap. “I want this kitchen dark for my nap,” Dee said. Even the lamp on low hurt Dee’s eyes.
Diane wanted a biscuit and some molasses, but Dee would not hear of it.
“Gotta sleep, gotta sleep, gotta close these eyes right now,” Dee said.
As she watched Diane lie down obediently on her pallet in the bedroom, Dee advised her just to drift on off to dreamland. Diane wished her bed wasn’t so low.
When she heard Dee snoring in the kitchen, Diane knew her auntie had drifted off.
You need a boat to drift, Diane had thought, and she imagined herself a red canoe. What a lovely fresh-learned word:canoe. In the canoe, Diane had a paper sack with the top rolled shut, and the bag had a biscuit in it. The biscuit was wrapped in wax paper. In the top of the biscuit, somebody had jobbed a hole with her finger, and through the hole the innards of the biscuit had been saturated with molasses. Diane wanted the biscuit so bad she could taste it. And then she was tasting it, and another part of her mind knew the red canoe had taken her to dreamland.
But there were a lot of other people there too. Talking and talking. And her mother was in charge, of course. Diane dreamed she walked back into the kitchen, and she’d never seen so many people in the kitchen. Aunt Dee was sitting upright, alert. Her rooster hair stuck up straight and alert, too. Occasionally Dee said something. Dee was interested. Dee’s voice was getting high-pitched and excited. Woolworth’s, they were saying. The Crystal, White Palace. Stools and counters. Hamburgers.
Through a crack in the door, Diane saw the light of one candle burning. The electricity must have gone off, or maybe it was a secret meeting. Yes, it felt like a secret. “Pipe down,” somebody said to Dee. But there was her mother’s voice crooning to Dee, including Dee. The room was full of spirits all crowded together. Sprawled on the floor, perched on the counter. In a kitchen chair, a girl sat on a big boy’s lap. “This is a business session,” her mother said, but what was that in her mother’s voice—something warm and bubbly, something sweet as candlelight.
And streets were mentioned and different times of day. Nonviolence. Nonviolence. The syllables clamored like Halloween noisemakers. Then feet were moving. Non, nonviolence. Spirits flew up right through the ceiling. They evaporated like a pan full of water neglected on the stove. Just a little more bubbling, then a hissing, and they were gone.
Somebody put a pot of coffee in the prow of the canoe, but Diane wasn’t sure if she was in the kitchen with her mother or her mother was standing in the canoe with her. “They asleep,” she heard her mother say.
Then the voice of one man, kind and quiet, such a pretty voice, like soft fudge.
The two of them, Mama and Pretty Voice, went back into the kitchen and turned into two trees, her mother was a pine with so soft needles, and the man was an oak. A squirrel scampered over his big branches. In clusters of two, acorns hung beneath his big leaves. Their voices were like the limbs of trees sometimes entwining and sometimes stroking the wind. Diane imagined herself sitting in that man’s lap, like a big girl in a big boy’s lap. “Best biscuit I ever ate,” he said.
Then her mother was scooping her out of the canoe. You just lie over here beside Honey on his bed, she said. “Mama needs your pallet.”
Mama and Pretty Voice must have spread her pallet on the kitchen floor. They wanted to rest in the forest by themselves, not in the bedroom with the babies. Occasionally, from the kitchen floor, they whispered or sighed.
“You’re heaven,” he said.