Glory Be Read online

  “My mother told me about this,” she said. “But they both work fine. It doesn’t seem right.”

  Just then a little colored girl walked up and sat down on the hot sidewalk. When she splashed her white leather sandals in the puddle that had leaked from the fountain, all I could think was how mad her mama was gonna be when she saw the dirt she’d stirred up.

  Out of the blue Laura asked that colored girl, “Would you like a drink? Do you need someone to lift you up to reach the water?” She held the girl up to the white people’s fountain to take a sip! I stood there with my mouth hanging wide open.

  As long as I’d been alive, there were two fountains side by side here across the street from Fireman’s Park, where I played most every single day of the summer. One was for whites only, the other for coloreds. That’s the way it always had been, and here this Yankee was helping a little colored girl drink out of the wrong fountain.

  I looked across to the park. Had anybody caught us breaking the rules?

  “Ruth Ann! Get on out of there.” The boy hollering at the little girl must have been her big brother because he grabbed her hand and jerked her away from that whites-only fountain quicker than anything. He held that little colored girl’s hand, tucked his chin, and took off. He turned around once, making sure we weren’t chasing after them.

  Laura looked from the fountain to me and back again as the colored boy and girl disappeared around the corner.

  “What difference does it make which one we drink from?” Laura asked. “The water tastes the same.” And she stepped up to the wrong fountain to get herself another long drink.

  Oh, boy. I had a lot to teach this girl about Hanging Moss, Mississippi.

  The next afternoon Jesslyn was upstairs with our bedroom door slammed shut, playing a sappy Elvis song on her record player. I plopped down in a kitchen chair to watch our cook, Emma, fixing supper, same as she’d done almost every single day since I was born.

  She poured sweet tea into a tall jelly glass full of ice cubes. She sat next to me and stirred milk and two spoons of sugar into the coffee in her plain white cup. When she handed me my tea, I pressed our palms together. “Look here, Emma,” I said. “My hand’s the same as yours.”

  She shook her head and laughed. “Glory, sweetie, our hands aren’t a thing alike. But they match up pretty good.”

  I looked hard at our hands together. Emma was right — they were different. Mine were getting nearly as big as Emma’s, but her hands were the color of her coffee. Mine were white as Wonder bread. Still, Emma and me, we fit together like that Praying Hands statue over at Daddy’s church.

  When Emma pulled our hands apart, she slid a postcard across the kitchen table. “I saved you this, to mark the place we stopped reading our Nancy Drew book,” she said. “Came from one of your daddy’s church people. Says here on the back, they were visiting in Tennessee.”

  “‘See Rock City,’” I read out loud. “Maybe someday I’ll see Rock City,” I told Emma. Right now, I could count on one hand the places Jesslyn and me had been. “This postcard’s nice. I’m putting it in my Junk Poker box,” I whispered, then I smiled at Emma. “To bet with.”

  “Don’t let me hear you talking about betting, Glory. Your daddy, Brother Joe, will skin you alive if he catches you and your sister playing that Junk Poker card game. And betting! That goes against your daddy’s church teaching.” Emma stood up, opened the icebox, and put the fried chicken inside, for later.

  Ever since our mama died, before I could hardly remember, Emma’d been worrying over Jesslyn and me. Eat your green beans. Stay inside with the shades pulled down when it’s hot. Watch crossing that street. Mostly, I paid attention and did what Emma said. But when it came to Junk Poker, that was different. I tucked the postcard into our Nancy Drew book to save for my next card game with Jesslyn.

  To get Emma’s attention onto something else, I said, “Guess what, Emma. I met a girl at the library. Her name’s Laura and she’s from up north. She drank out of the wrong water fountain over at the Courthouse. I told her not to but she wouldn’t listen.”

  Emma didn’t answer. She was listening, though.

  “Reckon she’ll be my friend? She doesn’t talk much, and when she does, she talks funny ’cause she’s a Yankee. Miss Bloom says her mama’s here being a nurse. You heard of a place out on the highway, called some Freedom Clinic thing?”

  Emma shook her head. She still wasn’t talking, so I started on something new. At least her mind was off my Junk Poker postcard.

  “Frankie says the pool’s gonna close,” I told Emma. “He says it’s a secret. Claims there’s cracks needing fixing or a broken fence. You think there’s cracks in our swimming pool?”

  I could see Emma’s jaw twitching. She was trying hard not to say something. She stood at the sink washing her coffee cup over and over like the Queen of Sheba might be coming to our house for a tea party.

  When Emma finally turned around, I stood up and crossed my arms across my chest. “What?” I stuck my chin out. “Are you mad at me?” I asked her.

  Emma reached out and put her arm around my shoulders. “I know about that clinic.” Her voice was soft and low. “And I doubt your swimming pool has half the cracks as some pools I know about. But you stay clear of all that. Don’t be worrying about what you can’t fix, Glory honey,” she said.

  I grabbed our Nancy Drew book and stormed off.

  That night after supper, our daddy, Brother Joe Hemphill, head preacher of the First Fellowship United Church, took his second dish of cherry cobbler to the front porch to practice his sermons for preaching on Wednesday night and next Sunday morning. Emma was nowhere to be seen. And it looked to me like Jesslyn was up to no good.

  “Why’d you do those dishes all by yourself?” I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes. She hadn’t even asked me to help with drying. “Where’s Emma?”

  “Emma went home early.” Jesslyn wiped her hands on the dish towel, slipped the pearl ring that used to be our mama’s back on her finger, then turned around and gave me one of her looks.

  “What for?” I asked. “Emma never goes home early.”

  “Something about company at her house.” Jesslyn smiled at me like the world was one big happy family. “I wanted to help out.”

  If Emma had been standing in our kitchen right then, she would have been telling me, “Gloriana June Hemphill, you are too nosy for your own good.” Even though Emma might call it snooping, I didn’t believe Jesslyn would be washing and drying those dishes for the pure D. niceness of it. I had to be nosy.

  Jesslyn pranced upstairs to our room. I followed her. While she primped in front of the mirror, I reached under my bed for my secret shoe box of treasures. Shells from the times we visited our grandma in Florida, two Jesus bookmarks I’d won at Vacation Bible School, my Cracker Jack whistle, a bag of collected bottle caps, ten copper pennies, wax lips. My new Rock City postcard. I’d saved it all to bet with.

  “Wanna play Junk Poker?” I asked.

  With the way Jesslyn glared, I might have well asked her to play Patty-Cake. “I’ve got better things to do,” she said. “Besides, I dumped my shoe box out.”

  “What’d you do that for? You made up Junk Poker when we were little, before I could hardly count to twenty-one and beat you. Now that I’m getting good and winning all your junk away from you, you don’t want to play with me?”

  Jesslyn smiled into her mirror, dug through the mess of lipsticks and bobby pins on her dresser, and pretended I wasn’t in the room.

  “Why’re you getting so dressed up?”

  “Mind your own business, Glory.” She flipped up the curl of her hair and painted on Persian Melon lipstick. I untied the purple bow on my Buster Brown shoe box and lined up my Junk Poker treasures on the bumpy chenille bedspread.

  Jesslyn smeared Vaseline on her eyebrows, a trick she learned from her stuck-up pep squad friends. Says when they march up and down the football field, shiny eyebrows give them “a movie star look.�
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  I blew on my Cracker Jack whistle. “Where’re you going?” I asked her.

  “If you must know,” she said, dabbing Evening in Paris perfume behind her ears, “to the library with Mary Louise. To plan her birthday party.”

  “Sure are getting fixed up for the library.” I held a shell up to my ear, pretending to listen to the ocean, biting my lip thinking about how Jesslyn didn’t care one bit about my birthday.

  Our daddy knocked real quiet on our bedroom door. I stuffed my treasures in my shoe box quick. “Everything okay, girls?” he asked. He never was one for much talk unless he was in front of pews full of people waiting for the Good Word.

  “Daddy, now that I’m going to high school, I’m too old to be sharing a room with Glory.” Jesslyn gave him her I could never do a thing wrong look. “She’s bothersome. And messy. I want Mama’s old sewing room.”

  Last summer when the ceiling fan stirred up the heat, Jesslyn and me had pushed our beds close together. During the night we kicked off our sheets and flipped our pillows to the cool side. Finally we gave up on sleep, pulled out our secret shoe boxes, and played cards. Now here she was tossing out all her junk for our game and wanting to move to the sewing room!

  “I’m not messy.” I straightened the perfect spines of my Nancy Drew books standing like soldiers on my shelf. “Look at Jesslyn’s stuff.” Mascara wands and hairbrushes, perfume bottles and powder boxes were piled on a stack of dog-eared movie magazines.

  Jesslyn gave me the eye — again. “I have private things.” The way she said private made me want to yank open her dresser drawer and steal her diary.

  “Besides, Emma uses the sewing machine in there,” I said. “There’s just that little bed. With my quilt on it. You can’t have my quilt.”

  “Now, girls, don’t start fussing.” Daddy raised a hand to hush us. “Let me think on this,” he said, heading back to his sermon.

  “I’m fixing to walk over to the library,” Jesslyn told him, smiling. But our daddy was halfway down the steps already.

  “I’m going with you.” I pushed my Junk Poker box under the bed.

  “You are not. Stop sticking your nosy self into my business.” Jesslyn smoothed the wrinkles out of her skirt for the third time.

  “How come we never do stuff together anymore? Last summer you bought me a diary for my birthday present and taught me how to jump double Dutch. Now you pitch a fit if I walk to the library with you.”

  “Mary Louise and I don’t need you hanging around while we’re planning her party.” Jesslyn smiled in the mirror one last time and did a little dance down the stairs.

  Mary Louise, my fanny. I peered in that mirror at my dishwater blond ponytail and tried to imagine myself in Persian Melon lipstick. Or my hair done up in Jesslyn’s big brush rollers. Jesslyn’s hair flipped up at the ends. Mine looked like it hadn’t seen the right side of a brush all day.

  I followed Jesslyn down the stairs, but the back door banged shut in my face before I could ask her any more questions.

  I grabbed a Dreamsicle from the kitchen freezer and headed for the porch.

  “Daddy, I’m going over to the library,” I called.

  He looked up from his Bible. “Be careful. It’s getting dark out,” he said. “And maybe you can walk home with your sister?” Then he picked up his pen and started writing on his sermon again.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, wondering whether Jesslyn was even at the library.

  I skipped down the front steps and headed off to find my sister.

  I hid behind a giant oak tree and looked into the library window, then over toward Fireman’s Park. Jesslyn was nowhere to be seen. I licked ice cream from my Dreamsicle off my fingers, wiped them clean on my shorts, and pushed open the heavy door into the library.

  Still no Jesslyn.

  I’d been helping Miss Bloom all summer so I knew my way around the library. I sneaked downstairs past the storerooms. I turned the corner near a box of old newspapers that stunk worse than dead catfish. Just as I was about to give up ever finding my sister, I caught a whiff of Evening in Paris. A rumbling floor fan made it hard for me to hear, but that was definitely Jesslyn’s voice coming from inside a room down the hall. That was Jesslyn’s perfume, too. Another voice chimed in that didn’t sound one bit like Mary Louise Williams planning a birthday party. I pressed up against the wall, holding my breath.

  “I love Elvis Presley. I have every one of his records,” Jesslyn was saying.

  “Me, too. But I had to leave them back in North Carolina when I left so fast,” I heard a voice say. “Elvis and me — we even have the same middle name. Aaron. Did you know Aaron is Elvis’s middle name?”

  As if Jesslyn didn’t own a scrapbook full of Elvis stuff and even a plaster of paris Elvis statue. She was liable to stand up and start singing “Love Me Tender” right then.

  I held my breath and leaned around the door for a look. There was a boy with long sideburns! Sitting real close and talking to Jesslyn! I ducked back before they caught me.

  “You look a little bit like Elvis,” Jesslyn was saying. I almost gagged.

  “Maybe we can drive up to Memphis to see Elvis’s fancy house,” the voice with the sideburns said. “Or maybe Tupelo, where Elvis was born. You reckon your daddy’d mind?”

  Now as sure as I knew my own middle name, our daddy, Brother Joe Hemphill, would no sooner let his daughter drive out of town with a strange boy with the same middle name as Elvis than he’d let her fly to the moon.

  “My daddy won’t mind a bit,” my sister said.

  Lordy, Jesslyn was in trouble for sure.

  I hurried out of the library, back across the street, and sat down at the kitchen table to drink a glass of cold milk. Daddy sat next to me, working on his crossword puzzle when Jesslyn waltzed in breathless like she’d seen the real Elvis.

  “Hey, honey,” Daddy said. “You get what you needed at the library?” He went back to his puzzle.

  “Yessir, Daddy.” She didn’t even look at me. “And Mary Louise and I were talking just now. We need to go to Memphis to buy stuff for her birthday. And our batons for pep squad.”

  “Batons? Don’t you already have a baton?” Our daddy glanced up but he kept his #2 pencil perched right on the paper so he wouldn’t lose his place. “Do you know a six-letter word for a mythical creature?”

  Jesslyn stood with her hand on her hip. She did that a lot lately. She didn’t answer Daddy’s crossword question. “The one I need is a fire baton. I’m learning how to twirl fire.” She dragged fire out like she was about to star in Mr. Ringling’s big-top circus.

  Now, you’d think Daddy would have at least put his pencil down and thought a little bit about his oldest daughter traveling to Memphis to buy a fire baton, but no, he kept on worrying over that six-letter word for a mythical creature.

  “I’ll think on it,” Daddy finally said.

  “Mary Louise’s cousin is driving. She’s had her license for a long time,” Jesslyn said.

  “That her aunt Betty’s girl?” Daddy knew most everybody in Hanging Moss.

  My sister paused for one quick second before answering. “No, sir,” she said. “It’s somebody you’ve never met.”

  The next morning before anybody woke up, I pulled on my blue shorts and T-shirt from yesterday and tiptoed downstairs to talk to Emma. She was already singing and humming to herself, what sounded like a churchy song. Emma might have been old enough to be my mama, but she wasn’t much taller than me, and her singing voice was high and tinkly. I stopped for a minute outside the kitchen door to listen. I dearly loved hearing Emma sing.

  “What’re you doing?” I asked.

  Emma smiled. “Cooking biscuits. With bacon, like always.” She took the bacon out of the icebox. “Where are you off to today, honey?” she asked.

  I chewed on a hangnail I’d been working on all week. “I wanted to go swimming, but Jesslyn’s acting ugly, so maybe she won’t let me come with her. Besides, what if the pool’s
already closed?”

  Emma didn’t answer. Just went back to turning the bacon in her black skillet. I twirled my ponytail and stared at a speck of dust on our red tabletop. My Nancy Drew book sat open to the chapter we’d been reading yesterday. I opened and shut it to the rhythm of Emma’s quiet humming.

  “Emma, you think something’s really broken at the pool?” I flipped the book cover back and forth.

  She got quiet before she answered. “What’s broken is that some folks don’t seem to like anything changing. Everything’s got to stay the same in this part of town,” she said. “I bet nobody ever thought how it’s just as hot over where I live as it is where you live. Somebody ought to be fixin’ that broken-down slab of concrete they call a swimming pool near me.”

  I shut my book. Emma didn’t usually say stuff about her side of town and my side of town. I never even considered how she might not have a nice place to cool off. I loved our community pool — my pool, I liked to call it!

  My pool had a snack bar, lounge chairs, swimming lessons, and lifeguards. And I’d had my July Fourth birthday party at my pool most every year since I could swim. If I could remember back far enough, I even pictured my mama holding me while I put my face in the water for the very first time.

  I started to ask more about Emma’s pool, but when she poked a long fork into the bacon like she was spearing something hateful, I swallowed my questions.

  Frankie showed up just when the bacon was cooling on the kitchen table. He’d come right through the back door and made himself at home.

  “Frankie, do you hear bacon sizzling all the way down Church Street?” I asked him.

  “Can just about smell it,” he answered. He pushed his red hair off his forehead and straightened his glasses. “Smells good.”

  “Here. Have yourself one.” Emma handed us toasted biscuits with bacon inside. Frankie and me sat on the back steps eating biscuits and licking butter off our fingers, being quiet together like we do sometimes. Then I got an idea.