The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

  His knees were bleeding. He brushed himself off and worked his way back to the railing. Then he just stood there, looking out at the rink like a sailor looking out to sea. Or a bull rider who’d just been bucked.

  Nelle stepped back into the rink from the grocery.

  “Nelle,” I said, “he is gonna bust himself wide open.”

  “Naw,” she said, flipping the switch on the jukebox like only she knew how to do, to make music play without even putting in a dime. “Boy’s been dreaming about this. Been coming in here all summer, acting like he just wants to buy a Coca-Cola, but eyeing that rink like it was Christmas. Let him go.”

  “Ramblin’ Rose” came on the jukebox and flooded the rink with Nat King Cole, that old silky voice of his making the hot air feel softer.

  “Go over there and turn on the big fan,” Nelle said, surprising me. She never turned on the huge industrial fan at the end of the rink for just one person. It cost too much money. When you’re in business for yourself, you watch your expenses, she told me.

  I did like she said, then followed her back into the grocery. I took a sip of my Crush and asked, “Nelle, aren’t you a little scared of what might happen?”

  Nelle leaned on the broom handle, lit a Pall Mall with one of her kitchen matches, and told me, “Calla, girl, comes a time when you run your own business, you got to make your own decisions. This grocery, this rink—they’re my career. A career’s a whole lot bigger than nickel-and-diming your whole life long. And you’re damn right, I am scared.”

  I looked at her for a minute, wishing I understood everything she was saying. “Well,” I said, “this makes me scared, too.”

  “Go on home now. Go see if your M’Dear needs you.” She walked back over to watch Cleveland skate.

  I stood in the doorway between the grocery and the rink. The light coming in through the doors and windows was hot—ugly, mid-afternoon Louisiana hot. I had a jangled, snaky kind of feeling winding tight up in my body.

  Then, out of the blue, Burr Jenkins sashayed in to the grocery, looking like King Kong. Burr was one of the older kids, must have been around seventeen or eighteen. He acted like he was ruler of the rink for the last three summers. Taking girls in his arms, skating backwards, sneering at kids who couldn’t skate as good as him, acting like he owned the whole entire place. You could tell by Burr’s face that he didn’t know that brown cold drinks cause pimples.

  He stopped cold when he saw Cleveland. “Nelle know that nigger is out on the rink?” Burr yelled at me.

  I ignored him.

  “I asked you a question,” Burr said, and lit himself a cigarette. “Nelle rent the nigger those skates?”

  “Why don’t you go crawl back under your rock?” I told him.

  He looked at me under those hooded eyes of his, like some lizard. I never knew how so many girls found him sexy with that old greasy ducktail of his. Then he stared out at Cleveland, who didn’t seem to be aware of either one of us.

  Burr finished his cigarette and ground it out on the floor. He threw me one last sneer, then turned around and stomped out the door.

  Out on the rink, Cleveland was getting the hang of it. Still falling down, but not taking as long to get back up and start again. Those long legs coming out of those cutoffs made him look like a wobbly baby deer out on a gravel road. He skated to my end of the rink, and I could see the sweat on his skin. That’s when I noticed that his skin wasn’t exactly black. It was more like dark roast coffee with a tiny bit of evaporated milk in it, just a few drops. I just drifted into a trance, watching that boy skate for the first time. I looked at his hair. Earlier, I had thought it was true black, but then I saw that it had some dark brown and maybe even some auburn in there. It was beautiful.

  When he finally circled the entire rink without falling down once, Cleveland threw his head back and let out a little whoop. I couldn’t stop my hands from clapping. But Cleveland wasn’t paying me any attention. He was smiling to himself, pleased with the day. Just putting one foot in front of the other, happy skating boy, his mama’s son, sweat glistening on his skin, singing Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” right along with the jukebox.

  I turned for a second to look at Nelle, who was back in front of the grocery fan, blowing down the front of her blouse to cool herself off. She looked pretty pleased with herself.

  But just then Sheriff Ezneck’s car roared into the parking lot, spinning dust and gravel everywhere, lights flashing and siren blaring, breaking up this quiet, lazy afternoon. We hardly ever hear a siren in La Luna. When we do, we make the sign of the cross and we run to the window. But not today. He must have been in La Luna, rather than at the jail in Dry Creek or across the river up near Claiborne. Otherwise, he could never have reached us that quick, being a parish sheriff not from La Luna.

  At first I thought, There must be a car wreck out on the road.

  Sheriff Ezneck busted through the skating rink entrance. He was a big heavy man, strong as an ox, with a scalp-close crew cut. I don’t think he even saw me standing in between the rink and the grocery. He did see Cleveland. And the second he did, I knew that we were in trouble.

  “Cleveland, look out!” I shouted. Sheriff Ezneck charged out onto the rink floor, dead-set for Cleveland, moving awful fast for a fat man. I turned to run into the grocery, but before I could even call out Nelle’s name, she came sprinting out of there. She didn’t throw me a glance, just raced straight across the rink after the sheriff.

  Sheriff Ezneck ran up behind Cleveland, grabbed him by the waist of his cutoffs, and bulldozed him down to the floor. Cleveland never even saw Ezneck coming. His head hit the floor first—I could hear it, like a pumpkin thrown against a wall. I could see blood along his scalp line, blood oozing onto those tight black curls. I wanted to run out there, hold his head. Then Ezneck was kicking Cleveland in the ribs and head with his cowboy boots. I hated those boots: pointy-toed, snakeskin, black and shiny, with little swirls tooled along the instep. The cruelty of the kick, the pointed toe against his skull.

  Cleveland curled his body into a ball, trying to cover his head with his hands. His knees, already raw from his earlier skating falls, were bleeding onto the rink floor.

  “Boy!” Sheriff Ezneck barked. “What in hell you doing on a white rink?”

  Nelle planted herself between them, but Ezneck didn’t stop kicking. His boot hit her calf, then her bare ankle, then up higher under her knee, which took her down.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” I screamed, terrified, running over to Nelle, who got back up in an instant.

  “Grab the boy,” she whispered to me. “Grab Cleveland.”

  I could smell him. I could feel the dust on his skin, see the tears on his face, and feel the heaving of his body as he sobbed. But it was the blood on his hair that I couldn’t take my eyes away from. Blood flowed from his head in every direction onto the dusty wooden floor. It mixed with the dust to form a strange reddish brown pudding. I screamed, “Stop it!” There was so much blood, and it kept on coming out, Cleveland’s blood flowing. Stop it! He needs that blood. The blood he needs, wasted for nothing on the floor.

  Ezneck lunged for Cleveland and me, out of control at this point. But Nelle stepped in front of him again, blocking him, shunting from side to side. “For God’s sake, Ezneck,” she said. “He is a little boy! This is a child.”

  “Get out of my way, woman!” he shouted, his breath snorting in and out like a hog.

  “Ezneck,” she said, “I rented the boy the skates. You got a bone to pick, you pick it with me.”

  “You’re obstructing justice. This is against the law, and you damn well know it.”

  “Well,” Nelle said, talking real slow, like she had all the time in the world, “just what do you plan on doing about it, Ezneck?”

  I saw his eyes get real small, and his jaw was clenched so tight he could hardly talk. “Get outta my way.”

  “You are the one on private property!” Nelle said, sounding almost as mad as he was.
Then she stopped herself. “Look, Roy, it’s a hot afternoon. Why don’t we just calm down here? Go on in the grocery, have a Coke, and talk this thing over? What you say?”

  “Nelle,” he told her, “I always knowed you was a odd kinda woman.” Then he reached his hand down to his crotch and hitched himself up. “But I never knowed you was also a nigger lover.”

  “Get out, Ezneck. Get off my property,” Nelle said. Not loud. Just final.

  “You don’t talk to me like that, woman. I’m a sworn officer of the law. You either step aside or I run you in with the jigaboo.”

  “I ain’t got nothing better to do. Business is slow this afternoon.”

  Drops of blood were starting to clot on Cleveland’s left eyebrow. I knelt by him and pulled a Kleenex out of my back pocket and tried to soak the blood up. Oh, how delicate his head was, a little shell holding his dreams. And his hopes. What did Cleveland hope for, and how will this change everything? God, I see it—the blood, the thin line between our heads and the world, Cleveland’s head, Cleveland’s world, split open for nothing there on the floor where we all skated, white hand in white hand.

  “Goddamnit, girl,” Sheriff Ezneck shouted at me. “I wouldn’t touch that bleeding nigger with a meat hook.”

  And I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. Meat hook. He wouldn’t touch Cleveland with a meat hook.

  Ezneck eventually put handcuffs on Nelle and Cleveland and dragged them both out toward the sheriff car. Those skates must’ve hung pretty heavy on Cleveland’s skinny legs. I followed them out to the parking lot and watched him stuff Nelle in the front seat, Cleveland in the back.

  “Ezneck,” I heard Nelle say, “how stupid can you be? How stupid can you be?”

  I ran to Nelle’s side of the car. I could hardly talk, I was crying so hard. “What should I do, Nelle? What should I do?”

  “Call your mother to come and get you,” Nelle said. Then she took a deep breath and whispered to me: “See what’s in front of you. Don’t let those tears cloud your eyes, Calla.”

  Then the blue-and-white sheriff car screeched out of the parking lot, and I could feel the dust it stirred settle on my face, mixing with my tears, making my face feel gritty. When I rubbed my eyes, it felt like sandpaper.

  They kept Nelle overnight in the parish jail over in the ugly town of Dry Creek. Not La Luna. When Cleveland got out of jail a couple days later, he looked like somebody had beat him over every inch of his body with a baseball bat. You could not recognize his face. He could not walk by himself, his mama had to help him. I know because I rode with M’Dear when she drove Olivia and Bertha over to the jail to pick him up. Nelle didn’t come. She said she couldn’t bear it. To see Cleveland like that shocked me to my core. I could hardly breathe when I saw him. For a long time after that when I closed my eyes I still saw him.

  At the end of that summer, the licensing board gave Nelle a lot of trouble about renewing her business license. When she finally got that cleared up, they gave her trouble about the rink meeting fire code. Finally, some agency told her if she didn’t air-condition the entire rink, they’d close the whole place down. So she put four window air conditioners on the rink side, and another one in the grocery.

  Nelle had to start charging a dime more to rent roller skates. Somebody had to pay to run those air conditioners. But those things didn’t put out like the old fan did. Matter of fact, it felt a whole lot hotter in there than it ever was before.

  I think that maybe we all have a calling. I got mine in a tiny instant when I blinked and saw the blood on Cleveland’s hair.

  There are doctors who sew up cuts. There are people who know how to lead marches. There are leaders who sometimes do what is right. I want to be a beautician. I want to heal hair that’s wounded or maybe on people who are wounded. And bring out some beauty in a world that can sometimes seem ugly. Because we are one family, really. Like M’Dear says, We are all brothers and sisters under La Luna’s sweet healing light.

  Chapter 6

  SUMMER 1965

  I remember the day that I began to feel that Tuck was okay. It happened one day when we were playing on the cotton truck, jumping down into the high truck bed full of cotton, and Tuck said, “Look! Look, Calla, this boll of cotton feels like a Christmas tree.”

  I said, “Tucker, what do you mean? That does not feel anything like a Christmas tree.”

  “I think it’s what country people put under their trees. But we never really had Christmas, so I’m pretty dumb to even talk about it.”

  “Then you haven’t ever had a Christmas tree,” I told him.

  He didn’t say anything for a while, but just as I was fixing to shimmy up the wooden side of the truck to jump down again, Tuck said, “We never had a Christmas tree when I was growing up.”

  That made me feel bad. “I promise you can come to our house and see my tree decorated and all.”

  “Don’t tell me you promise,” Tuck said. “People who say promise are always just lying.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Didn’t need anybody to tell me that.”

  Then I knew he’d had buckets full of things promised to him that just never came true.

  “Well, now you’re in La Luna,” I told him, “and none of us are gonna lie to you.”

  Again, Tuck got real quiet, then finally said, “Well, okay.”

  I decided that was good enough and threw a handful of cotton at him. I just wanted the puffy whiteness of cotton to touch him, to make Tuck see that at least cotton didn’t lie.

  After that we became friends.

  Sonny Boy and Will were so different. Sonny Boy had kind of reddish blond hair, and he was strong and muscular. He could still lift me up, just lift me right up. And M’Dear—he could lift her up too! We’d be dancing, all of us just kind of hanging around in the kitchen, and he’d just pick M’Dear up at the sink and lift her right up in the air.

  And Sonny Boy would do anything, anywhere! One day he got in trouble for riding his Stingray bike off the flatbed cotton truck at Papa Tucker’s. He just rode his bike with himself on it straight off onto a gravel road, rolled over, and got brush burns all up and down his body. M’Dear had to put Mercurochrome and Band-Aids all over him. And I told him he was an idiot.

  When I went to his bedroom, M’Dear had a fan blowing up on him. I said, “Sonny Boy, how are you doing, you crazy thing?”

  He said, “Well, it hurts, but it was worth it.”

  That’s just the kind of boy he was.

  And Will, he was so quiet and sweet. He always dressed nice. I don’t know how he came up with his clothes, but he’d find things at the swap shop like a white linen jacket and a little cotton vest that cracked us up whenever he wore it. And his music playing was getting to be known even outside our parish. He was happy to dance with the rest of us but didn’t get wild.

  Sonny Boy would sing and dance like James Brown, and his routine was pretty darn good. Now, it turned out that Tuck didn’t mind pulling out the stops. He got so carried away his loafers barely stayed on his feet. So he kicked them off and danced in his bare feet to polish off the number! We all clapped and stomped. He was so shy afterward. It was two people inside of him. Now, Eddie tried to dance like James Brown, and he did give it his all. But his all wasn’t very much as far as I was concerned. But Renée clapped and said, “Oh! You’re just like James Brown—except you’re white!”

  Then Sukey said, “Renée! Gosh! That was a stupid thing to say.”

  Well, I guess Renée could be really kind of sissy and slightly dumb at times. That’s just Renée. My brothers and my friends can be goof-balls sometimes, but I still love them.

  Anyway, we all hung out together. Of course, we went to Nelle’s Shop ’N Skate.

  It was so much fun to skate there! I became a better and better skater all the time. In fact, I was so smooth that if they had a roller-skate Olympics down here, I would have been in it.

  Tuck turned out to be a pretty good skater. I mean, ri
ght off the bat—that shocked me. He put on a pair of skates, and he was around and around that rink before I knew it!

  “Hey, Tuck!” I said. “How’d you get so good?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it just comes natural to me.”

  Well, everything comes natural for you, I thought. “Well, goody-goody for you.”

  Then Nelle came and chimed in, “I don’t want to just see y’all drinking Coke without having a bite to eat.”

  So she went back to her kitchen and threw something together—some good fresh Holsum bread, mayonnaise, a little mustard, if you wanted it, and ham. Maybe some tomatoes if she had them. You’d cut that thing in half—mmmm! It was so good! “If you eat this with your Orange Crush,” Sonny Boy said to Renée, “it is a full meal.”

  Renée looked horrified. “Well, I don’t know. For me a full meal is supposed to be hot, like shrimp and rice with salad or something like that.”

  “Renée,” Eddie said, “that’s just what I like to eat!”

  Brother. Those two lovebirds should just go out of my ear’s reach for a while.

  “I think that just Cokes are full meals,” Sukey said. “They’re filled with everything. Mama doesn’t care if I have a Coke for breakfast. In fact, whenever I wake up and it’s hot outside, I drink a Coke. My mother’s got the whole refrigerator just filled with Cokes.”

  I started drinking Cokes, just a little. M’Dear allowed us to have one Coke a day. But Cokes for breakfast?

  But we were allowed to have belly-wash, which is what we called the drink you make out of these big bottles. You’d pour the liquid inside into water, and it made it all orange, which was called “orange belly-wash.” Or you could get it in different flavors like raspberry, depending on what Nelle ordered.

  Grape was my favorite. The grape drink in the purple bottles it came in—I loved to see it! It was like grape bubblegum, it was so dark. And then once Nelle mixed it with water and poured it over ice, it was perfect! She used it straight for her snow cones.