How High the Moon Read online

  I was on my way over, too, when the fishing lures caught my eye. I stopped in front of the display. They were all the colors of the rainbow, all at once. They were shiny and silvery, with pinks and blues and yellows and greens. They were shaped like miniature versions of big fish. Long and pointy. Round and flat. I traced my finger over a yellow-and-green lure with black stripes and flecks of pink. “Beauty,” I heard myself say, though I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. I looked up, but it seemed nobody had heard me. They were too busy listening to Millie talk about the circus.

  “The clown picked me to get up on the stage. I was so scared!” Millie Parker was six years old and had a bit of a little-girl crush on me, I think. If Myrna and Ella came to the store without me, she always asked where I was and when I’d be coming in again. Often I caught her looking at me and smiling. Even though she was only six, it still made me feel kinda embarrassed for her to be looking at me all dreamy-eyed.

  “Oh, she liked it, though,” Mr. Parker teased. “She thought she was a movie star.”

  I still held back, mesmerized by the fishing lures.

  “Bonnie whipped up this peach batch just this morning,” Mr. Parker was saying.

  “Why don’t you try it out, Ella? Let me know if it’s a winner,” Mrs. Parker added.

  I glanced over when I heard her. Mrs. Parker was a tall woman, with light brown hair that she pulled off her face into a pile of curls on the top of her head. Her eyebrows were furry as caterpillars and almost met in the middle. The most fascinating thing, though, was her eyes. They was two different colors—one was a brilliant emerald green, and the other one was hazel.

  She walked over to Ella and tucked a loose curl behind her ear. She didn’t even look at Myrna. She favored Ella, calling her “pretty” a lot and playing with her hair. Ella didn’t seem to mind too much. She mostly minded it ’cause Myrna did.

  “We’ll call it a breakfast taster cone. No charge.” She smiled and headed to the back.

  Mr. Parker dropped the large empty barrel on the floor behind him and reached for the cones.

  “Thank you!” Myrna and Ella called out.

  Millie shouted to me, “Hiya, Henry!” She waved. “Are you all going fishing? I wanna go! Daddy, can I go fishing with Henry?”

  “Millie, you know you can’t go fishing. You’re going into town with your mama today, remember? You should be getting ready.”

  Millie pouted and dropped her head dramatically. “I’m sorry, Henry. I can’t go with you.”

  “That’s okay, Millie. Another time,” I said. She ran out the back, calling for her mama.

  Millie had been asking to go fishing with us since forever, and her dad always gave her some reason that she couldn’t.

  “Come get your peach cone, Henry! It’s a brand-new batch!” Ella said.

  I started, my mind still on the lures in front of me, then I quickly walked to the counter and held a hand out to Ella to take the cone before I thanked Mr. Parker.

  After Myrna finished paying for the rice we were meant to get, Mr. Parker handed her the rice and a sack of sugar.

  “This is a little something extra for Granny. I know it’s been hard to come by with the war rationing going on,” he said.

  Myrna beamed. She put the rice in her bag and handed the sugar to Ella to carry. “Thank you, sir.”

  Thanks to the war, it’d been about a year since the country had started watching how much sugar we used. Suddenly there was a limited supply. Our favorite pies and cakes didn’t come so often. Only on real special occasions.

  As we headed to the exit, Deputy Ryan entered the shop. Poppy always said he looked too young to be carrying a gun, and it was true. I don’t think he’d lost all his baby fat yet. Had a face like one of them baby angels you’d see in paintings in museums and churches.

  “Dang, you folks really do like your ice cream,” he said, pointing at our cones. “It’s a bit early, ain’t it?”

  Myrna and Ella shrugged. Then Ella said, “But it’s good!”

  He let out a short snort and headed for Mr. Parker inside.

  Once we were on the front porch and the door had closed behind us, Myrna glared back inside. “I don’t like him.”

  “Oh, why you got to be hating everybody? He ain’t that bad,” Ella said.

  “What do you know, Miss Pretty Girl?” It came out singsongy and laced with mean. Ella’s nostrils started to flare and Myrna stepped in closer to her, pulling at her braids. “Ooh, what pretty hair! What pretty skin!”

  “Cut it out, Myrna!” Ella moved away, off the porch, but Myrna followed her.

  “You don’t look like all them other Negroes, Ella. You is special!” She pulled a braid and flung it into Ella’s face.

  “Stop!” Ella slapped Myrna’s hand away from her hard, and I practically felt the hot sting of it. They were both frozen and silent for a moment. Then Myrna cut Ella a nasty look, sucked her teeth, and walked on for the creek.

  I held back. Ice cream covered most of my hand. I hadn’t been able to take a lick of it. I couldn’t think straight.

  “Ella,” I said quietly. My left hand was still in my pocket. Frozen there.

  She turned to me. “What, Henry? Dang, boy! You a mess!” She walked back to me on the porch and wiped my hand off. “What’s wrong, Henry? Don’t be mad about that Myrna. I’m not. She’ll say I hit her, but she deserved it. You saw her. She asked for it.”

  I stole a quick look over my shoulder to be sure no one was looking before I turned to Ella and finally pulled my hand from my pocket. My palm was clenched so tight that I could feel my fingernails making deep crescent-shaped ditches in the center of my hand. My fingers hesitated to relax themselves, but finally did.

  Ella stared at my open palm and the colorful, speckled lure in my hand. Her jaw dropped as she sucked in a quick rush of air.

  Her eyes moved to mine. “Henry. No.”

  I shook my head and closed my fist again. “I know, I…”

  She stared at me, still in disbelief, waiting for me to say something. “No. There’s nothing… No. You gotta go put that back. Now.”

  “But I can’t,” I said, and gestured toward the store, with the deputy inside.

  Ella bit her bottom lip hard and frowned. She seemed to search for our answer among the wooden floorboards of the porch.

  “Okay. Then we both go in. I’ll ask Mr. Parker if he got any kites.”

  “Kites? Ella, kites don’t come in till first week of summer.”

  “Right. And then I’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, you don’t? How come? When you gonna get some? You have any left over from last summer?’ That’ll give you plenty of time, right? You don’t need no more time than that.”

  “I’m sorry, Ella. I don’t know what I was thinking. I—I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Let’s just do this. ’Fore it’s too late. ’Fore he realizes it’s gone.” Ella pushed open the front door of the shop and we walked square into the deputy, who was on his way out.

  “You kids are still here? What you hanging around for?” He was scowling at us while flicking a toothpick about with his teeth.

  “Forgot something,” Ella said, head bent and barreling past him before he had a chance to ask any more questions. I followed, hoping to God he couldn’t see the moisture collecting along my hairline. I didn’t say a word. I knew anything that came out would be accompanied by a telltale stutter. Behind me, I heard the bell over the shop’s door. I looked over my shoulder and saw the deputy head down the porch stairs and climb into his patrol car.

  “Back so fast?” Mr. Parker asked. He walked straight to us. Ella quickly tried to move farther into the store and distract him there so that I could easily get to the lure display unseen, but Mr. Parker closed in fast. He stopped directly next to the lure cabinet.

  “Yes, sir. We was wondering…” Ella wandered off to the far right of the store and pretended to be looking for something there. “Do you have any kites?”

  “Ella, I think you kn
ow we ain’t got no kites. It’s October,” Mr. Parker said. His gaze turned away from Ella and toward me. His eyes narrowed just a hair as he looked at me, my dripping cone, and my clenched fist. My eyes darted away quickly. I committed myself to staring at the ground. Praying for invisibility.

  “Well, sometimes I think you have some leftover ones hanging around. I think I seen some over here the other day.” Ella was desperately trying to get him to follow her. “Mr. Parker? Over here, I think. Around this area, I think I seen ’em.”

  I could still feel his eyes about to burn a hole in me. “Henry?”

  I looked up.

  Mr. Parker’s eyes were what you’d call aquamarine. The color of the ocean in the tropics. Clean, clear blue. But I wasn’t feeling any kind of tranquillity. Looking into those eyes, I began to feel my legs quake. The more I tried to stop the shaking, the more obvious it became.

  “Yes, sir?”

  He folded his arms across his chest, took a deep breath, and let it out slow. Finally he spoke.

  “You don’t eat that cone, I might never give you a freebie again,” he said, and turned away from me and walked to Ella. “So you say you think there’s leftover kites around here, huh?”

  He knew. I was sure he knew. But he didn’t say nothing.

  I quickly dropped the lure back in its place and wiped my wet palm on my pant leg. Peach ice cream had dripped all the way down to my elbow. I licked at the cone and used my soggy napkin to clean myself the best I could, then I walked over to Ella and Mr. Parker. Granny always told me to take deep, long breaths when I was feeling nervous, and that it was a sure way to calm you down. I got three good long breaths in ’fore I reached them. They were bent over, down near the paper and pencils.

  Ella saw me walk up. Her eyes lit up and she tried to hide her smile.

  “Funny,” she said, straightening. “I was sure I’d seen some summer kites here.”

  Mr. Parker stood and turned to see me behind him. He put a hand on my shoulder and walked me back toward the front of the store. Ella walked with us.

  “Well, we’ll have more come May,” he said. When we reached the lure cabinet, he stopped, looked inside, then looked back to me, but I pretended to be fixed on the door. He patted my shoulder, then continued walking me to the front door. “Y’all better catch up to Myrna. You’ll catch heck if you make her wait too long.”

  Once we were outside and had crossed the road, I turned around and saw Mr. Parker standing out on the porch watching us go. He smiled at me and folded his arms across his chest. I smiled back.

  I don’t know what got into me. Why I did something so foolish. But I knew I wouldn’t do nothing like that again. It wasn’t who I was. I think maybe Mr. Parker had known that before I even did.

  ella

  Henry and I didn’t say nothing to Myrna about what he done. We just went about fishing and even caught a few ’fore the end of the day. Only one was big enough to bring home, though.

  I’d been so nervous about Henry taking that lure, and then so busy trying to keep Myrna from asking what took us so long, that I almost forgot about the mean things she’d said to me. It wasn’t the first time she’d given me a hard time ’cause of how white folks treated me, and her words burned.

  It was true that some white folks treated me real nice, stroking my cheeks, patting my head, telling me I was pretty, the way Mrs. Parker had. But there were some that sucked their teeth as I passed by. Some even looked at me like they smelled something bad and turned their heads. Or gave me a sharp elbow to the ribs. White folks and colored.

  “Light-skinned.”

  “High yella.”

  “Zebra.”

  Aside from how my hair curled up and my skin being lighter, I didn’t look so different from other colored folks.

  Granny says Myrna’s jealous. She says Myrna wishes she had lighter skin and hair with more curl than kink. That’s plumb crazy. Myrna is beautiful. She’s tall and slim. Got a real elegance to the way she walks, like she’s a queen or a princess. She has long black lashes, and her eyes turn up at the corners a little, like a cat’s. Henry likes to make fun of that, but I think they make her look mysterious. Her skin is as smooth and pretty as a chestnut. She’s even got that red just under the surface that makes her cheeks glow. All that talk of Myrna being jealous of me is nonsense. Granny just doesn’t wanna admit that Myrna is mean.

  We call Myrna our cousin, but she ain’t related by blood.

  Granny and Poppy decided to keep Myrna and raise her as their own after her real mama died. She always been our family, but still, every year, when the holidays come around, she gets kinda sad seeing everybody with their folks. I’m always sure she’s thinking about her mama. Wondering about her daddy. I often wonder about mine, too.

  I was only a baby when Mama, and Henry’s parents (Mama’s sister, Rhoda, and Rhoda’s husband, Teddy), all moved from our little town of Alcolu, South Carolina, to the big city of Charleston. They all went there looking for work, since there were plenty of job opportunities in Charleston. Mama and Rhoda quickly found work cleaning houses, and it wasn’t long ’fore Teddy found work at a filling station. Me and Henry stayed behind with Granny, Poppy, and Myrna.

  For a while, they’d come see us on weekends and holidays. Granny would cook up a big meal with peas and greens, chicken and gravy… and bread pudding! There’d always be bread pudding. But after a while, they only came once a month. Said it took a lot out of them (time, effort, and money) to make the trip every weekend. Henry and I were too little to notice much. Even so, Granny insisted on continuing to make weekends special, cooking up nice meals and playing music on the phonograph.

  After only two years in Charleston, Mama decided to up and move to Boston. A real big city! She said there were better job opportunities there, but everybody knew she wasn’t moving to Boston to find better cleaning jobs. She was headed up there ’cause she had an itch. Granny said she’d always had it.

  Mama wanted to be a singer, and not just in the choir of our local Clarendon Baptist church. She’d done plenty of that her whole life and she was ready to move on. She wanted to make records you could play on your phonograph, or hear on the radio. She wanted to get on the stage, decked in fancy gowns and glittery jewelry, pouring tears into a microphone. She wanted to make people smile and cry and applaud.

  Charleston, big as it was, was too small for Mama’s dreams.

  When she went, everyone in Alcolu quietly shook their heads and whispered. They readied themselves for Mama’s big disappointment.

  But my mama went and proved them all wrong.

  Some years later, my uncle Teddy got called to serve in the war. Though he never talked about it, I think Henry was scared all the time. Afraid he was gonna come home to news that his mama had received a telegram, like the one our neighbor Mrs. Fields got. Or the one Robert Smith’s family got. Whenever I heard Henry saying his prayers at night, I’d hear him spend an extra-long time praying for his daddy fighting far, far away. Henry got letters from him all the time, about Italy where he was stationed, or about friends he’d made, or funny stories he’d heard. There was always a drawing, too—something that happened that day, or something he saw, or a portrait of a friend. Once he drew a picture of himself, sleeping on the beach, smiling, while two crabs danced on his shoulder.

  I’d never known my daddy. Granny said he’d moved out west a long time ago, before I was even born. Mama never talked about him at all. I tried not to think about it that much. Poppy had been all the daddy I could ever want. When I was little, he used to lift me up to smell the blossoms in trees. I’d stick my face in the center of a saucer magnolia and try to sniff in its fragrance. He taught me how to build a birdhouse and a doghouse. He taught me how to ride a bike. All I ever learned about the stars, like which one is the North Star, which ones make up Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper, how to locate the Milky Way, I learned from Poppy.

  And sometimes I’d just sit out on the porch with him. Not doing noth
ing. Not saying nothing. We’d just be. Together.

  It’s not like I needed my real daddy, but I wanted to know who he was. And now that I was gonna be living with Mama, I could find out.

  myrna

  I never even knew my mama.

  The way Granny tells it, one night, real late, a skinny teenage girl arrived on the front porch with a perfectly round basketball belly, just about ready to push that baby out right there and then. They’d never seen her around the county before, but Granny’s one of only two midwives in all of Clarendon County. She’s been delivering babies almost her whole life. Colored folks (and even some white folks) from all over Clarendon County came to Granny to help them give birth to their babies. Not everybody could afford to go to hospitals, and most hospitals wouldn’t take Negroes, anyway. After my mama, though, Granny stopped practicing so much.

  Granny and Poppy said they were pretty sure my mama had run away and had nowhere to go, or not anywhere she wanted to go back to. First she said she lived with her brother and mother in Charleston, but later she cried that she needed to get back to her daddy in Wando. The next day she said she didn’t have no family at all. That night, she rocked the tiny baby she’d named Myrna for hours before she closed her eyes and didn’t wake up again. Granny said she was simply too frail for the birth.

  Poppy spent the next two weeks going into every town between Alcolu and Charleston, asking about my mama, who called herself “Eve,” but he couldn’t find a brother and a mother. He couldn’t find a daddy in Wando. Nobody seemed to be missing a pregnant girl.

  I bet my daddy doesn’t even know I exist. Sometimes I’ll pass by a man in town, or at the store, outside the bus station, by the river, riding a horse and buggy… I’ll pass by him and wonder, Is that him? I’ll nod hello and wonder.

  If he saw me, would he recognize me? See my mama’s eyes, or his eyes, in my face? Would he think that, just maybe…