BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR childhood is a wall. You struggle with some half-remembered incident and it is like a loose stone in the wall. The loose stone may be a chance word or two or some almost forgotten person out of the past who jostles the memory—in this story the memory of a young man who thought he had forgotten the confining complexity of his four-year-old world. Tommy is eighteen now and his mind is busy with the present and the future. It isn’t easy for him to point his mind back into the past when he was four years old and lived with three big people in a big city. He knew one as Mama and one as Daddy, but last and most important was the one he called Winnie.
Tommy remembered Winnie. Tommy remembered how he loved Winnie. When he was four years old he was pleased by the color of her. There was a sense of something that came down to him over the side of his bed, something soothing to him. It was the voice, a warm, quiet, affectionate voice, and a way of touching him that was both playful and respectful. Of course when Tommy was four years old he did not know that he wished to be respected. This only came to him when he was able to look back, as he was doing now. All he knew then was that a certain kind of contact made him laugh or smile or just feel good without having to smile. It was Winnie who knew best how to do this sort of thing. It was not what Mama and Daddy liked to do, which was to get a response out of him whether he felt like it or not. They liked to hear Tommy break out into a certain kind of laugh and often they would tickle him or fuss with him until they got him to make the kind of sound they were waiting for. Sometimes they would have him do this for their guests. It would make everybody laugh and then they would all go downstairs to their cocktails feeling satisfied.
Then Winnie would come. He would not see his parents again until the lights were out and he was almost too sleepy to know whether or not they had remembered their promise to come up and kiss him good night. Meanwhile he would have Winnie. Winnie with her assured way of talking to him, her way of knowing when to play or use playful talk and when to leave him alone to his thoughts. Winnie understood things like that. She made him feel like somebody, not just something to play with and show off to friends. For instance, if Tommy was examining a door knob, as he often liked to do, she would not gush all over him and say, “Ooh, Tommy likes the door knob? Tommy likes the door knob!” and then laugh absurdly. Winnie simply would say, “You see, Tommy, now you know how it works, and when you want to lock or unlock it you turn this latch up above—here.”
And she would show him once and expect him to know how to do it.
So it was all these things, the voice and the manner, her way of treating him as one human being to another, her soothing color—or maybe it was the many things he loved about Winnie that made the color seem nice, too.
He couldn’t remember how far back he remembered the color, for Winnie had tended him in his crib and attended his graduation from the crib to his first real bed. In those first years with Winnie he didn’t know—or he didn’t know he knew—that there was anything special about the color of Winnie as compared with the color of Mama and Daddy. Daddy was whitish except for his chin and the sides of his face that were a sort of bluish. Mama was a sort of pale pink with red lips and often she had some flaky white stuff on her nose and reddish-orange circles on her cheeks. But Winnie was the color of the coffee that Daddy liked to drink with the cream in it. Sometimes Daddy would let Tommy pour the cream. Tommy didn’t know why, but it made him feel very important when he poured the cream into his daddy’s coffee. One morning when he felt he was pouring especially well, he said, “Look, Daddy, I’m making a Winnie color.”
Daddy made a face and looked around as if Tommy had said something bad. Tommy could not understand the look on Daddy’s face. He always felt nervous when his father got that look on his face. Tommy knew he had done something wrong but he could not imagine what it could be.
Daddy looked at his son very solemnly. “Tommy, I want you to remember this,” he said. “You must never never mention Winnie’s color again. It is not nice to talk about people’s color.”
But that summer they had gone to the shore and Tommy remembered friends of Mama’s telling her what a wonderful tan she had. Yes, and what about Daddy, picking Tommy up in his arms and saying, “Our little puppy—he’s getting as brown as an Indian.” What about Daddy? If it was all right to talk about people’s color sometimes, why wasn’t it …
He had been ready to point this out to Daddy, but his father would not let him talk.
“I want no argument about this, Tommy. Just remember, it is not nice, it is never good manners, to talk about people’s color. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Daddy,” Tommy said. He frowned very hard, the way he had seen his father do when he was listening to somebody he did not agree with. But frowning did not make it any clearer.
“Now run along and let Daddy read his paper.”
Daddy mussed Tommy’s “rat’s nest,” as Mama called his curly straw-colored hair, and smiled to show that he was no longer angry and that he considered the incident closed.
Tommy went up to his room to be alone with his thoughts. Why, oh why was it bad manners to mention the color of a person? It was only a year or so before that he had learned his colors and Mama had been very proud of how quick he was in telling blue from green and red from yellow. And then he would say, “That sheep is white,” and, “That cow is brown,” and Mama would hug him and say, “Wonderful, Tommy!” and have him do it all over again when Daddy came home from work. Now if it wasn’t bad manners to know the color of a sheep or a cow, why was it so wrong to say the color of a person?
He thought he knew what his mother would say. Something like, “Now Tommy, you’re too young to worry about such things, just do as Daddy says.” So he decided to ask Winnie. Winnie was his friend and would tell him the truth if she knew.
That evening after Daddy and Mama had gone out for dinner, he and Winnie were alone in the nursery and she was reading to him about Winnie the Pooh. He always thought that was very funny. Instead of Christopher, she would use his name in the story, so it would be Tommy Robin and Winnie the Pooh. That always made him laugh. Sometimes he would call her Winnie the Pooh. Usually, as soon as she had finished the story-poem, Tommy would say, “Oh, again! again!” Often Winnie would have to read it five or six times before he had had enough of it for one evening. But this time, when she had read through it once, he didn’t say, “Again! Again!” He made a frown face like his daddy’s and looked at Winnie, looked and looked at her without saying a word.
Finally Winnie gave a little laugh and said, “Tommy, what’s wrong? Do you see something on my face?”
“You have a nice coffee-’n-cream-color face,” Tommy said.
“Thank you, Tommy,” Winnie said. “I’m glad you think it’s a nice coffee-’n-cream-color face.”
“But Winnie Pooh, why is it bad manners to say it’s a nice coffee-color face?”
“What on earth are you talking about, Tommy boy?” she said. And she nibbled his ear a little bit. From the time when he was a little baby he had loved to have her nibble his ear.
He told her about pouring the cream on his daddy’s coffee and what Daddy had said about never mentioning Winnie’s color again. But he liked Winnie’s color, he said. It was a lot prettier color than a pale white or a silly old pink. And it was true. He would always remember Winnie’s color. It wasn’t exactly cream-in-coffee. It was a light golden brown, something like honey color. It was—thought Tommy for many years—just the right color for skin to be.
Winnie took him on her lap. She raised her hand to squeeze his ear lobe gently—he always liked her to do that too—and he noticed, perhaps for the first time, that the palm of her hand was quite white, as white as Mama’s. He felt confused by all this white-and-coffee-color difference. There was something about it, he was beginning to sense, that was very big, like the night and the sky and death, something that was outside of him and yet that he was a part of and would have to try and understand.
“Tommy, I wouldn’t say this to every four-and-a-half-year-old boy,” Winnie began, “but you have good sense. Some people can understand things at four that other people won’t understand when they’re forty-four. There’s nothing really wrong with saying what color a person is. I don’t mind being my color. I think it’s a nice color, too. The reason why your daddy says it isn’t nice to mention it is because most people are glad to be white. They’re afraid their being white and my being coffee color will hurt my feelings. But there’s nothing wrong with being coffee color. The only thing wrong is the way some people feel about other people being coffee color or chocolate brown or coal black.”
“Chocolate brown is a nice color, too,” Tommy said.
Winnie nuzzled his cheek and said, “Maybe the time will come when people will all be just people and won’t pay no mind to whether they’re coffee color or peppermint stripe.”
“Peppermint stripe would be fun,” Tommy giggled.
“Children are the nicest people,” Winnie said. “Children just seem to start out knowing all the things that big people forget and sometimes never get to know again.”
Tommy was pleased. While he understood this only a little better than what his daddy had said (and mostly not said) at breakfast, he knew that Winnie was trying to talk to him as a person, the same way she explained door knobs and other interesting things to him. He still felt pretty puzzled, but somehow he was reassured. He hugged Winnie and squirmed his face into her neck. “I wish I could grow up to be your color, Winnie Pooh,” he said.
Winnie laughed, and then looked at him sadly, but with her eyes still smiling.
“You’re a something,” she said, as she often did, and the sound always pleased him, though he didn’t know why. “You’re really a something.”
One evening when Tommy was almost five, Mama and Daddy came to his bedside to tell him they had to take a trip to California. They would be back as soon as possible and they hoped he would not mind.
“Is Winnie going?” Tommy wanted to know.
“Of course not, Tommy. Winnie will be here with you.”
“As long as Winnie stays I don’t care how long you’ll be away,” Tommy said.
Tommy’s mother started to cry. She was so hurt that for a few minutes, until Daddy talked her out of it, she was saying that she would never be able to go and enjoy herself if she thought her baby no longer knew who his mother was. Tommy didn’t want to make his mother cry, but it all seemed silly. He liked his mother tucking him in at night. But she wasn’t Winnie. His mother was always going and coming and talking on the phone. She was terribly busy doing things that had nothing to do with Tommy. Winnie was with him all the time. All except one day a week when she went off somewhere and left him alone. She always brought him something when she came back. Tommy would run out and throw his arms around her and nuzzle into her neck and say, “Winnie, Winnie Pooh, what did you bring me?” And Winnie would say, “Oh, nothing, why? Do you think I have to bring you something every time I come back?” And Tommy would laugh and start hunting for his present, in the pocket of her coat, or in one of her clenched hands, or in her purse or even inside her gloves. It was one of their favorite games. It was great fun. It was always easy to find. Sometimes when Daddy played jokes like that he made it too hard to find and Tommy would get tired and his daddy would tell him he must learn not to give up so easily and then it wasn’t fun any more.
About the best fun he ever had was the first week when he was alone with Winnie while Mama and Daddy were off in California. He had her all to himself at last. Though the memory of it would fade later on, he would never forget entirely the pleasure of being a small boy alone in the house with Winnie. He would remember how soft and warm Winnie felt in bed beside him and how good it was to curl up against her. Tommy liked to pull the covers right over both their heads and play tent and pretend there were wild bears prowling around in the forest of the bedroom. Winnie would play with him as long as he wanted and she was very good at pretending about bears. Most big people didn’t know how to pretend, but Winnie did.
The first Sunday afternoon they were alone was Winnie’s regular day off, but since she would be unable to have any time off until Tommy’s people were back from California, Winnie decided to take Tommy with her for a visit to her sister and brother-in-law’s. He noticed that Winnie’s sister Cloretta wasn’t light coffee brown like Winnie. She wasn’t as pretty and warm-skin-looking at all. Why, she was as white as Mama and Daddy. When he realized that, he was glad in a way. Winnie was his special person and it seemed right that she should be a special color, the color of maple candy, taffy, honey and all the good things that he liked.
There were two people who asked him to call them his Aunt Cloretta and Uncle Floyd, both white and offering him candy and gum, and then there was a friend of the strange Uncle Floyd called George. George worked with Uncle Floyd in some kind of business. All during the afternoon George kept looking at Winnie. They thought Tommy was busy exploring and eating candy but he could see the way the man was looking at her. He kept looking at her, and even when the others were talking he kept looking at her.
George said he had a brand-new car and he wondered if Winnie would like to go for a turn around the block with him. Winnie looked at George and then at Tommy and acted as if she could not make up her mind between them. Her sister Cloretta said, “Go ahead, Winnie. I think it’ll be nice for you. We’ll keep an eye on Tommy for you until you get back.” Tommy didn’t want Winnie to go off and leave him, even with these people who gave him candy and gum. Tommy was very glad when he heard Winnie say, “I’d better not. I gave his folks my word I wouldn’t let him out of my sight until they came home.”
“Then let’s take the kid with us,” George said. “You’d like to go for an auto ride, wouldn’t you, sonny?”
Years later Tommy would not recall what George looked like. But he would be able to recall how he had feared and distrusted this stranger, who was paying more attention to his Winnie than anyone ever had before.
When it was time for Winnie to take Tommy home, George said, “I sure envy you, kiddo. All alone in a house with a beautiful gal like that.”
He was looking right at Winnie. Winnie told him to hush. Tommy couldn’t tell whether Winnie was angry or pleased. George insisted on driving Winnie and Tommy home. George did all the talking. He told Winnie about his job and the things he wanted to do. He said he was a surveyor for the county, working under Floyd. When they saved up enough money they were thinking of going into private business together. George said he would like to live out of town—a little house in the country where he could keep a few chickens and grow his own vegetables—but first he had to find the right girl. Tommy did not like the way he kept looking at Winnie. Or the way he went on talking to Winnie, just as if Tommy wasn’t there at all.
And it made him feel irritable that Winnie kept her head turned around toward this other man and was hardly bothering to look at him. He was used to having Winnie pay attention just to him and to nobody else.
As Tommy got out of the car he slipped and fell down. He lay on the sidewalk and bawled and felt terribly injured and Winnie had to pick him up and kiss the spot where he had hurt himself. George stood around helplessly, trying to tell Winnie, above Tommy’s screaming, that he felt this was much more than a casual first meeting and that all he could think about was how soon he could see her again. Winnie hardly heard George, because she was so busy hugging Tommy and saying things to make him laugh so he would be himself again. She carried Tommy into the house and settled him down to his evening routine. In the bathtub Tommy laughed until he was almost hysterical because it had been a hard day and the man was gone and Tommy and Winnie were together again.
For the next few days Tommy did not notice anything different about Winnie. Then one night Tommy’s lights were out—all but the one in the bathroom that was left to guide him through the darkness—and Tommy was supposed to be asleep, when he heard the murmur of grown-up talking. He thought maybe his mama and daddy had come home from California and he got up to find out what they had brought him. He hurried down into the living room and there was that man George talking to Winnie.
“Tommy, Tommy, it’s after ten o’clock,” Winnie said.
“I have a stomach ache,” said Tommy.
“I think you’re just tired and need your rest,” Winnie said.
“No, it hurts me, it hurts me here.” Jackie Coogan, in his most tragic moments, could not have pointed to his abdomen with a more piteous expression.
“I think he’s a little faker,” that man George said.
“But I can’t take a chance,” Winnie said. “He’s like my own child.”
“You’d be tougher on your own kid,” George said.
All the while Tommy was whimpering as if trying to control himself while in great pain.
“I’m afraid all this is making him nervous,” Winnie said.
“My God, you take care of him from daybreak until his bedtime, isn’t that enough? Is he supposed to own you day and night? I think it’s unwholesome.”
“Shh, please George, don’t upset him,” Winnie begged.
“I’ll see you Saturday night, Winnie,” George said. And then he spoke to Tommy rather crossly. “Now you get over this bellyache business, son.”
Tommy kept waking up and complaining so often of feeling funny in his tummy that Winnie let him sleep in her bed the rest of the night. “Tommy boy, maybe I am spoiling you, but you’re my own little Tommy boy, aren’t you, my own little Tommy boy.” Tommy wished that night would never end and that he could just go on and on safely cuddled up against Winnie in Winnie’s bed.
When Saturday night came Tommy got up an extra time to get a drink of water. Winnie came in to warn him not to use any more excuses for getting out of bed. He noticed something special about Winnie. She had red stuff on her lips like Mama and she was wearing a dark purple dress instead of one of the white or gray ones she always wore. And she had a flower in her hair. She looked very pretty with a flower in her hair, but Tommy knew what it meant. Tommy couldn’t understand why she should pay so much attention to another grown-up when she was only supposed to look after Tommy.
After Winnie turned off his lights again and kissed him good night, he stayed awake on purpose. After a while he heard the front door opening and there was a little grown-up murmuring and then it got quiet again. He sat up and listened and then he swung himself carefully out of bed. It was double disobedience because he didn’t even put his slippers on. He crept down the stairs and spied into the living room. Winnie was on the couch with that man George and he had his arm around her and she was letting him kiss her. She said in a funny kind of whisper, “George, George, stop,” as if she were frightened, but he kept on holding her very hard and pushing his mouth against hers and she sort of sobbed as if she were crying, “Oh George, George darling, what are we going to do?” and he said in that definite way he had, “We’re going to get married, that’s what we’re going to do.” Then Winnie said, “George, I don’t know, I know we love each other, but …”
George interrupted. Tommy was very conscious of it, because he had been warned so many times not to do that. His voice sounded awfully mean and angry to Tommy. “To hell with it. That doesn’t worry me. I want you, Win, and I don’t care how it looks to a lot of narrow-minded dopes.” Winnie’s answer was so much softer that Tommy could hardly hear it. “I know, I know, darling, if we could go away somewhere, but here in this country people would …”
“The hell with ’em,” George kept saying. “I say the hell with ’em. The hell with ’em.”
“If I looked like Cloretta,” Winnie said. “If I could pass …”
“You’re twice as beautiful as Cloretta,” George said. “You’re beautiful, Win. Just keep remembering that. You’re beautiful and—and—a wonderful human being.”
“George, I want to,” she said. “You know I want to but I want to think. I’m not sure. I’m afraid.”
“Well, I’m not,” George said. “I still say the hell with ’em.” He started kissing her again.
Tommy went back to his room and started playing boat in his bed and pretty soon he had all the blankets on the floor and then the sheets were pulled out from the mattress. He got to doing jumping tricks on the bare mattress and he pulled the pillow out of the pillow case and then he pulled the pillow case over his head and kept on jumping up and down higher and higher until he toppled off the bed and bumped his funny bone.
Winnie came running in and saw the tangle of bedclothes and Tommy suffering on the floor and this time she didn’t feel sorry about the bump on his funny bone (which seemed to have spread to his head as well), she was angry at all this extra work he had made for her to do and she said, “Tommy, you’re a little rascal. I’m really angry this time.” Tommy looked up at her as if his time in this world was running out. “Has the man gone?” Then she got even angrier and she said, “That is no business of yours,” and Tommy lost his temper and scratched her and she lashed out and slapped him for the first time in her life and Tommy got purple red in the face and bit her hard on the arm and she screamed and grappled with him and threw him down on the bed with all her might. Then they both cried hysterically.
Later he crept into her bed and she seemed glad he had come and kissed him and hugged him and called him her own darling little Tommy boy. Tommy thought about her kissing that grown-up George and he put his arms tight around her to keep her from getting away.
In the days after that Tommy noticed things about Winnie he did not always know he was noticing but that he would be able to remember later on when he was old enough to look back and see the whole thing as a life and not just as bits and pieces of the troubles and pleasures of being four. Winnie was very good to him, but she was edgy and moody. Once while she was rocking Tommy in her arms she started to cry for no reason at all. Tommy remembered snatches of a strange conversation in the kitchen between Cloretta and Winnie when he was supposed to be playing outside one afternoon. He couldn’t remember all the words but he could remember that Cloretta wanted Winnie to marry their friend George. And Winnie said she couldn’t make up her mind, because there would always be the problem of where they could live and what to do about children. Cloretta said she and Floyd had been afraid of that, too, and they were solving it by not taking any chances. Winnie shook her head and said she wasn’t sure she could do that, she loved children and would love to have George’s children, but something inside her told her it was wrong. Cloretta put her white arms around the creamy coffee-color shoulders of her sister and told her the right thing to do was the thing she, Winnie, wanted to do—that Winnie had always made herself too much of a doormat for the people she worked for—“like the way you work yourself to the bone for that little brat Tommy.” It was time that Winifred Harris started living Winifred’s life, Cloretta said, and wasn’t just some white folks’ Winnie. Tommy knew that Aunt Cloretta wasn’t his aunt and that she was on George’s side and that if they had their way they would take Winnie away from him forever. Tommy hated them and wished he could dump them all in the garbage truck, and he thought of all the horrible things he would like to do to them for trying to steal his one and only Winnie Pooh away from the Tommy she belonged to. He could not understand why grown-ups were so mean. Except for Winnie—and even she had been playing some no-fair tricks on him lately—there weren’t any grown-ups in the world who really cared about Tommy.
One evening when Winnie was serving Tommy his tapioca pudding, he said, “Winnie, are you going to go away and leave me and marry that man and never come back here ever again?”
Winnie said, “Why, Tommy, you know I’d never leave you alone. What gave you that idea?”
“I heard you talking with Aunt Cloretta.”
“Goodness me, little boys have big ears.” Then she said, “Tommy, it’s true that I’m thinking of marrying Mr. Higbee. I’m twenty-eight, and well, most people my age have been married for years. Your mama and daddy were married before they were twenty-eight and you, why you’re going to be so handsome that some nice girl is sure to grab you long before you’re twenty-eight. But don’t you worry that I’m going to leave you until your mother and father are back and we’ve found someone else to take my place. I have a cousin called Emily who is awfully sweet and who would just love to take care of a nice little boy like you. And I’ll bet pretty soon you’d forget all about your old Winnie and you’d love your new Emmy Pooh even more.”
“I don’t want you to leave me,” Tommy said. “I want you to stay with me for ever and ever.”
“I wish you couldn’t hear through walls so well,” Winnie said, “because this whole thing may never even happen at all. So there’s no sense worrying about it ahead of time. I’m not going to leave you for a long, long time no matter what happens.” Then she hugged him, squeezed his ear lobe and said, “I’ll probably stay with you so long that you’ll be the one who finally wants to get rid of me.”
“I never never will, Winnie Pooh,” Tommy said. “I want you to stay with me for ever and ever.”
“Now eat your tapioca,” she said. “You are a something. Only four years old and worrying about these grown-up things.”
The big thing that happened to Winnie Tommy remembered very well. It was like the “Winnie-color” talk he had had with his daddy at breakfast. It was one of the things that made Tommy acutely conscious of Winnie as a color instead of just as a person with a kind of skin that seemed particularly pleasing to him. Maybe Tommy remembered this scene because it was so loud, even louder and more frightening than George had been. Or maybe it was because he had been old enough to realize—even at going on five—that his rivalry with George had come to its turning point.
Late that Sunday afternoon Winnie’s mother and father had come to visit. He was a large man with a muscular paunch, reddish, gray-streaked hair and a mottled, orange-freckled face. She was shorter than Winnie and a little dumpy, but the color of her skin was almost exactly the same as Winnie’s, only maybe just a shade darker, as when you’re making chocolate milk and you put in a few extra drops to make it just a bit more chocolaty. They seemed to be polite, dignified people, and everything was perfectly peaceful and friendly until Winnie put Tommy to bed. Tommy had half-forgotten about George and he had run his legs off all day and he went off to sleep without even thinking of the second glass of water. But in the middle of the night a terrible grown-up shout from downstairs shook him out of his sleep and made him feel all trembly and scared inside.
“You’re a nigger! Never forget you’re a nigger!”
The strange, ugly word shook the house. Tommy sat up in bed, and though he had never heard the word before he knew in some instinctively wise way that it had something to do with his daddy’s saying, “Never, never mention her color again.” Tommy did not understand, but he knew there was some problem of one person being white and another person being coffee color that made grown-ups terribly nervous and angry and confused and violent.
Tommy crept halfway down the stairs and peered through the slats of the banister. He could see Winnie’s father, but he could not see Winnie. Winnie’s father was angrier than he had ever seen anybody in his life. He had seen Mama and Daddy arguing, but he had never seen one grown-up bawling out another one the way this big man with the freckled pumpkin-color face was bawling out poor Winnie the Pooh. “You’re a nigger,” he was shouting, and the word cut through the house like an angry whip. “Maybe you’re ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths per cent white, but you’re still a nigger. And niggers don’t marry white men. Maybe in the last world and maybe in the next but not in this one, God damn it. What if your baby is white? He’ll grow up to hate you! And what if he’s black or high yeller like you? Your husband’ll hate him. And what if you don’t have any, like Cloretta? You’ll end up hating each other. God damn it, I tell you, Winifred, we won’t allow it. We don’t want to see no more trouble in this miserable world than there’s in it already. Look at me, a high-school education, but a redcap all my life because I got a drop or two of the wrong kind of blood in me. Somewhere back there in your great-granddaddy’s time some white man started this thing and now we got a family that ain’t black and ain’t white, just a bunch o’ poor miserable nigger in-betweeners. So I say, no, we won’t let you. It’s bad enough with Cloretta who we always feel funny about visiting because she’s living white. But you’ve got color in your skin and you can’t rub it off by marrying white.”
Tommy didn’t hear anything from Winnie. He heard Winnie’s mother say in a honey-soft voice, “Baby, Papa’s not mad at you. He’s just mad at the way things happen sometimes. But he loves you like I do and he’s trying to help you from getting into something that’ll hurt you later on.”
It wasn’t her father’s angry voice, but her mother’s soft and loving one, that made her cry. She got crying the way Tommy did sometimes when he started choking on his sobs. It wasn’t the soft, wet kind of crying, but the dry, hard kind that gets tighter and tighter in your throat. It sounded awful. It sounded as if she was dying. And when she ran out of the room and up the stairs she had her hands over her face and couldn’t even see Tommy. She ran into her room and slammed the door and threw herself on the bed and cried that hard, dry cry for a long time into her pillow. It was awful hearing her cry like that. Tommy wanted to go in and see her, but he was afraid to. His daddy had been right to warn him. There was something powerful and evil about the color of a person. There was something about the color of a person’s skin that was never, never to be mentioned in public.
Tommy crawled back into bed and thought about that. He thought about that harder than he had ever thought about anything in his whole life. Then he turned on his light to go to the bathroom and Winnie heard him and came in. She wasn’t crying any more. There was a kind of set look to her face that made her look very serious. “Tommy, you don’t have to worry,” she said. “I’m not going away. I’m not going to get married. I’m going to stay here with you as long as you need me.”
Boy, was Tommy happy! He jumped up and down on his bed and sang, “Winnie isn’t leaving, Winnie isn’t leaving, goodie, goodie, goo—ooodie, Winnie isn’t leaving.” Then he hugged her and bounced on her lap and chanted his kindergarten sing-song again and nuzzled into her neck. She nibbled on his ears and tried not to cry. He was so happy, so happy that it would take him many years to forget this moment of triumph. “Oh, goodie, oh, goodie, I knew you wouldn’t leave me, I knew it, I knew it, I knew you wouldn’t leave me,” he sang. Winnie’s eyes were wet with a strange, bitter kind of relief and she said, “Yes, I suppose I did too.” Then she gave him a fond pat on the back flap of his Dr. Dentons. “Now scoot into bed. You should have been in bed hours ago. And I’m a little tired, too.”
Tommy settled back in bed with the lights out, smiling into the darkness and chanting, “I’ve got Winnie back, I’ve got Winnie back, I’ve got Winnie back …”
Tommy kept waiting for the night when George would come and Winnie would tell him. It would serve him right for all the things he had done to Tommy. He had made Tommy realize for the first time what it might feel like to lose somebody you loved very, very much. It served him right. It served him right.
But George never came to the house again. Whether Winnie phoned him or wrote him or just how she did it Tommy never knew. The little snapshot of George stayed on her dresser, but that was all. It stayed there for years. But later on Tommy would be able only vaguely to associate it with any actual person, much less an actual threat.
When Mama and Daddy came home from California they were pleased to find everything in order. Tommy was in good health and fine spirits and the house was spotless. “Well, I’m glad to find everything so peaceful,” Mama said. “Did anything happen?” “No ma’am,” Winnie said. “Oh, yes, one night when it rained we had a leak in the upstairs hallway. But except for that, you’ll find everything just about the same.”
Winnie stayed with Tommy’s people for about nine more years, until Tommy was almost fourteen. When he was six they had had to scold Winnie for babying Tommy. She still tried to dress him when she should have known he was old enough to dress himself. Winnie couldn’t seem to learn not to fuss around Tommy. She worried more than his mother about such things as his being out on drizzly days without his cap and rubbers.
When he was fourteen, Tommy said, “Mom, Winnie’s driving me nuts. She’s always picking at me to wear this or do that. I wish she’d mind her own beeswax and leave me alone.”
Tommy’s parents talked it over and decided, difficult as it was to face, that Winnie had outlived her usefulness. She could not stop doing for him all those little things that no self-respecting teen-age boy can stand. “I dread having to tell her,” Tommy’s mother said. “She’ll go off into one of those old-maid hysterics and I won’t be able to stand it.” So they gave Winnie a six-weeks’ summer vacation and near the end of it they wrote her a letter explaining the situation, giving her a liberal severance pay and promising to keep their eyes open for another position for her.
Early one fall when Tommy was getting ready to leave for college, Winnie came to call on them. She couldn’t have picked a more inconvenient time, but she had meant something to them once and they didn’t know how to turn her away without hurting her feelings. She said she hadn’t seen Tommy since he was grown up and she hoped they wouldn’t mind if she dropped in for just a few minutes, as she had loved him so much as a little boy that she just couldn’t resist stopping in to see how he had turned out. Tommy was embarrassed at all this mushy stuff, but he remembered a few things about this old nurse of his, and as long as she didn’t take too long he didn’t really mind seeing her again. He couldn’t remember too much about her, although now that he looked at her it began to come back to him about her high-yellow coloring. In the tinted picture in the family album she was quite handsome with her honey complexion and her dark, wavy hair dropping nicely to her shoulders. Her hair was streaky gray now and she wore it up in a rather severe, old-fashioned bun. Dad had said she had been “a knockout—a regular sun-tanned Loretta Young,” but she looked faded and bony now, although she did have nice eyes.
“So you’re Tommy,” she said. “To think you’re my own little Tommy boy.”
Tommy squirmed. He wondered how long this was going to take. He tried to think of something to say. “Well, how are you these days, Winnie?”
She tried to make a joke of it. “Oh, all right, I guess. Still pretty spry for an old maid.”
The words were like stones in the wall that stood between the eighteen-year-old Tom and the Tommy boy of his childhood. Loosening the stones that stood in the way of his remembering, he was thinking of his old Winnie, his Winnie Pooh, and once more he was stepping through into that dim yet feverish past when he had loved this coffee-colored stranger with all the narrow intensity that charges and confines a child’s world.