Come a Stranger Read online

  “You’ll come back? Come back real soon,” Alice asked from her chair.

  Louis and Kat hurried out to join Mina. Samuel trailed along. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Ask Mina.” Louis sulked, because he wanted to stay longer.

  Mina realized she didn’t know the answer, except “Home.” Then she added, to Samuel’s solemn face, “I’ve got things to do,” although she wasn’t sure exactly what they were.

  Even carrying Louis on her handlebars, she stayed ahead of Kat, racing along the black roadway all the way.

  CHAPTER 14

  August just lay down on Crisfield like a dog, panting, too hot to do more than hang its tongue out. All day long, all the long days, the heat built up and the air hung heavier and heavier, as the hours rolled on by and the sun rolled across the sky. About four times during August, Alice called Mina up in the morning. “I’ve gotta get out of here and some friends are going up to the mall,” she’d say. “I’m going stir-crazy,” she’d say. “Can you possibly watch the children?”

  Mina would ride out there to find Alice waiting on the porch, looking fresh and cool from a shower, her perfume a cloud around her, her hair done up fancy. Alice would go off for the day and Mina would stay with the children. Sometimes Louis came along with her, and sometimes Kat too.

  They’d clean the house, while the heat was still bearable, then go on up to the creek for the worst of the day. Alice was usually back by the time they returned, in the late afternoon. Sometimes she’d be silly and giggly, and they’d all get silly together. Sometimes they’d find her sleeping on her bed, with her shoes off and her dress getting crumpled. If Alice was asleep, Mina would stay around either until she woke up or Mr. Shipp got home.

  One of those afternoons, the storm that had been grumbling in the distance all afternoon finally broke. It woke Alice up, but she kept the kids inside with her. Mina and Mr. Shipp went out on the porch to watch. Rain beat down on the high stalks of corn. Wind blew the dark clouds across the sky and pulled at the branches of the trees. Lightning, visible for miles out here, it seemed like, cracked down through the sky. The thunder growled. The air cooled in the slanting rain. They didn’t talk, Mr. Shipp and Mina; they just stood there watching and listening, leaning against the posts. Mina didn’t know what expression was on her face until, as she turned around from the tail end of the storm to go in and say good-bye, Mr. Shipp said, “This is your kind of weather, isn’t it?”

  “I like it,” Mina told him, careful as she always was to try to be exact with Mr. Shipp. “But I wouldn’t say it’s my kind of weather. Or the only kind.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said, and she thought he did.

  Riding home along the slippery roadway, riding right through the shallow puddles when they crept up the side of the road, Mina wished she knew Mr. Shipp well enough to ask him about dance camp. She almost never thought about it, partly because she was having a good summer, partly because she didn’t want to. But when she did think about it and try to understand, she couldn’t think because it was like teeth in her heart. She couldn’t think while those sharp teeth were cutting away. All she could do was replay that scene with Miss Maddinton and all the things Miss Maddinton came so close to saying she might as well have said them right out: That Mina had only been allowed to go, and given the scholarship, because she was black. That she wasn’t good enough and she never had been. That she was just a way for the camp to get money from the federal government, which it used to train the real dancers.

  But how could Mina have been so stupid about herself? Unless Miss Maddinton just never could see the truth, because she always only saw that Mina was a black, different. That meant it didn’t mean anything what Miss Maddinton said. But Mina had been wrong about her friends there, even Tansy, about them liking her. She remembered walking into her single room and the teeth cut into her heart.

  Maybe she would ask Mr. Shipp about it, about how he managed. Maybe in another couple of summers she wouldn’t be embarrassed to ask him about it. She could believe what he’d say.

  With the Shipps, Mina felt like a big sister, older, wiser, more responsible. Being a big sister suited her. Mr. Shipp said he wished she’d come back to New York with them. “But you’d hate it, down in Harlem,” he told her. Mina knew from that that he hated it. He thought Alice liked the city, but Alice said she didn’t. “If we could move downtown,” Alice said, “but it’s so expensive, we can’t. It would be something, though, to walk out of your door and see nice things in the store windows. I do that, sometimes, when my mother-in-law comes to take care of the kids. I take the bus to Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street and just walk on down, looking in the windows. Oh, Mina, you’d die if you could see the things they have. But Tamer’ll never leave Harlem, not in a hundred years. How’d they call him up in the middle of the night, if he wasn’t nearby? Everybody needs him, and especially when they’re in trouble. I tell him, sometimes, he should open a law office and start charging people. But I worry, because some of those people, they’ll turn on you for no reason. I wish he’d let us move, before one of them cuts him up.”

  One day, they were gone. Mina felt curiously aimless then. She played Scrabble with Miz Hunter in the afternoon, but half her mind was on where the Shipps would be, and what their apartment was like. She got Miz Hunter talking about them and that eased the empty feeling a little, even though the old lady was pretty critical of Alice and her butterfly ways.

  The day after the Shipps drove off up north, a few days before school began, her father came home. Mina’s mother took one look at him and chased him off to bed: “You’re skin and bones, you look like you haven’t slept for a week, and listen to that cough. You’re not a young man anymore, Amos Smiths, and I’ve half a mind to tell that board what I think of them, sending you all over the place.”

  “It’s good to see you too, Ray,” Poppa said, giving her a bear hug before he went obediently upstairs to flop down on the bed and fall asleep.

  Mina’s father spent about a week in bed, letting the deacon take that Sunday service. He was mostly tired, Momma said, telling them not to worry, and he had a feverish cold, and she was going to get him healthy before she let him go back to work. And that was all there was to be said about that.

  Mina watched this and thought that Alice would never talk like that to Mr. Shipp. But the Shipps loved each other, like her parents did. Mina thought there were times when Alice should talk like that and take care of her husband; and she thought it would be better if her mother prettied herself up more, like Alice did, because she thought her father would like that.

  Mina thought about a lot of things, but almost never about the dance camp and the people up there, the white people. She wanted to write them a letter and tell them. She wanted to get famous, really famous, and be on a talk show and laugh at them. She wanted—she wanted not to feel so restless and unhappy with things. She was eager for school to begin, so she’d have something to do.

  Once school started, Mina sat in her seventh grade classroom like a storm about to explode across the sky. She could take down some branches, she thought, and she could knock out electricity. She looked around her, at the black kids who made up more than half of the class, at the white kids, and she felt all her smartness and all her energy building up, ready to be used. She knew where she was heading: so far to the top that nobody would come close even to her heels.

  The second day of school, Mr. Bryce, the principal who also taught them Social Studies, came in to administer a battery of achievement and aptitude tests. He took the class with painful slowness through the filling-in of their names and school, their ages and the date. Then he started to explain about the rules, how they weren’t allowed to talk or ask questions, how they had to concentrate and do their best work because these tests were going to be used for placement, now and in the high school.

  Mina never minded tests. But Rachelle, sitting next to Kat, raised her hand. Mr. Bryce went on talking, about
going back to check if you had time at the end of each section, about how to erase the answers so the machines that corrected the tests wouldn’t get it wrong. Rachelle sat there, with her hand up. Mr. Bryce looked at her occasionally, but didn’t call on her. Finally, Rachelle called out, “Aren’t these tests biased in favor of the whites?”

  Mr. Bryce, who was of course white, looked at Rachelle for about half a minute. “I hope,” he finally said, “that you’re not in the habit of speaking before you’re called on.”

  “I was just wondering if that got considered, in the scoring,” Rachelle asked. Her voice wavered a little bit, like a violin losing the note. “Because if it’s not, I wonder if I should take this.”

  “I don’t think you have any choice if you’re in this school system,” Mr. Bryce said.

  Uh-oh, Mina thought. He wasn’t any too pleased with that question, or with Rachelle. “Let’s just take it, ’Chelle, and get it over with,” she said.

  Mr. Bryce’s eyes turned to her, and he wasn’t too pleased with her either. Rachelle shrugged and didn’t say anything more. Mina got set to get to work. She knew what Rachelle meant. There had been magazine articles about how these tests were designed for people who had grown up in the white environment. But Mina didn’t see what they could do about that. She felt helpless, because there weren’t any tests designed for blacks that she’d heard of, so the only tests there were were biased toward whites, and you had to take the tests. There wasn’t anything she could do about the situation, and she didn’t like that feeling, not one bit. But she didn’t think they could give her any test she wouldn’t do well on. They hadn’t yet. She felt powerful, sitting there with the two sharpened pencils in front of her, waiting to begin. Maybe the test was biased, but they weren’t going to be able to trip her up with it.

  Mina went up to Rachelle during recess, to apologize for butting in. “Yeah,” Rachelle said.

  “I only did it because he was threatening to expel you,” Mina explained.

  “He was not. He couldn’t do that.”

  “I don’t know if he could, but it’s what he was thinking. Don’t you think, Kat?”

  “Do you think that’s what he meant by ‘in this school system?’” Kat asked.

  “I think,” Mina said.

  “I was so angry, I barely listened,” Rachelle said. “Although, come to think of it, I’m not so sure I care. We’re just diddling our days away in school. Letting them think they can have it all their own way.” Rachelle was short and round and liked a fight.

  “You know what the Bible says: ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,’” Kat reminded her.

  “That’s okay for you,” Rachelle said, “but my father’s sick, and my mother can’t find work and they keep jiving her about welfare . . . as if they owned the world.”

  “I know how you feel,” Kat said. “I’m really sorry.” Kat meant what she said. It was in the tone of her voice, she really did feel sorry for Rachelle, and in a good way, not a pitying way. “My mother says there are some times so bad, you don’t know how you’ll get through them.”

  “Your mother? Really? But she looks like—” Rachelle didn’t finish that sentence.

  “Well, they don’t own me,” Mina said. “I’m just glad we only have one class a day with Mr. Bryce.”

  “Tell me about it,” they both said. Then they all laughed and linked arms, to stroll together on around the playground.

  Mina had other things to think about than school, or her own stormy feelings, for a while after that. Miz Hunter took sick, and the sickness settled in her chest. She was dying. She knew it, but she still didn’t want to go into the hospital. Mina’s mother nursed her, and a lot of the older people came to sit with her when Momma had to go off to work. Mina was needed at home. She kept a supply of food going over to the little house and kept their own house running. Louis helped out, as much as he could. The second Saturday of school he spent the whole evening working with her to make up coffee cakes for the next morning. But Miz Hunter died that night, just slipped away in her sleep, Momma reported. It was a good death, after a good life, Momma said. Mina, despite feeling a sadness like slow, steady rain, knew what her mother meant. It was as if Miz Hunter came to the end of her road and stepped off onto the next.

  The funeral was Tuesday. Both Mina and Kat missed school to sing in the choir for the service. The choir sang, “You shall reap just what you sow.” Poppa’s eulogy was about Miz Hunter’s whole life and the good things she sowed. He read it out to Mina Monday evening, to hear how it sounded. She was looking forward to hearing him read it out in church.

  Looking out over the solemn faces in the crowded church, Mina saw the door open. Mr. Shipp slipped into the room.

  She saw Mr. Shipp and her heart flopped painfully over in her breast.

  Mina stared at her father, not hearing a word he said. She just hadn’t known, she hadn’t even suspected. She had never figured it out, how much she had missed Mr. Shipp, even though she had noticed how he kept walking across her nighttime dreams. Her cheeks felt hot when she understood.

  She didn’t mind. Just the opposite. She was just surprised that she hadn’t known that the hollow place she’d been feeling inside her wasn’t an empty place at all—it was the place where her feelings for Tamer Shipp were waiting to be given their right name.

  Now she knew what that was, she knew how she’d missed seeing him and his family, missed hearing his ideas, his mind laid out for her to understand in Sunday sermons. She always and every day wanted to watch him walk into a room, and maybe smile. She wanted to look into his eyes and see all the complicated and comprehending feelings he gave to the world.

  Watching him, as he knelt for a brief prayer then sat back in his chair to listen, Mina wondered how the sky felt when a lightning bolt blazed through it. She thought that was about the way she was feeling, right then. She looked away from him, understanding: During the trip down from Wilmington that July afternoon, the long car ride, the long lunch, Mina had fallen in love with him. She’d fallen so fast, she didn’t even know until now how deep she’d fallen.

  She didn’t know if Mr. Shipp looked at her, because she didn’t dare look at him again. Besides, she thought, bringing her mind back to her father’s eulogy, this wasn’t the time or the place. She brought her mind back to Miz Hunter, even though that was no less confusing than anything else in her life. She was sorry Miz Hunter was dead. She would miss the old lady’s presence in the little house next door, she would miss their conversations. But Miz Hunter’s trials were over now, and she was resting now.

  When the choir stood up to sing Miz Hunter out of the church, it was “Deep River” they sang. They sang it a cappella—just the voices, singing. Mina’s voice sounded to her all filled up with sorrow and gladness for Miz Hunter, over Jordan now, just like the song said, and with joy to see Mr. Shipp, and with belonging, here in her father’s church.

  “Where you going to, Missy,” she remembered Miz Hunter asking, all the time. Everybody was going someplace, she thought, singing out deep, watching the people follow the coffin out while the choir sang them on their way. Miz Hunter was just way on ahead now, over Jordan, sitting down to the gospel feast in the song.

  Mina didn’t know about this place where Miz Hunter had gone to, nobody did for sure. But she did know for sure that she’d go where she wanted to go—in this world that had Tamer Shipp in it. Not just go where somebody else said she had to because she probably wouldn’t be able to do any better for herself, because she was black.

  CHAPTER 15

  Mina didn’t know what Mr. Shipp thought of her, except that he approved. She knew he was a married man, and he loved his wife, and he had a family, and she was years too young for him. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t love him. But sometimes she wished she’d never met him, or he hadn’t been the one to come pick her up that day in Wilmington. Sometimes she envied Kat the way she moved from crush to crush, with no boy ever really mattering to her
for himself. Kat was having a good time growing up.

  Sometimes, Mina just daydreamed about Tamer Shipp. Some of her daydreams were goopier than others. Often, he was there in her night dreams, and now she knew why. She wondered if she was ever in his dreams, although she doubted it. She wondered what he’d think of her and how she was doing in school. She thought he’d approve. Half the reason she was working like she was was for Tamer Shipp.

  She paid attention in classes, not surprised that she knew any answer the teachers asked for. She did her homework, and then some. She did a lot of reading on the side and a lot of that was the books her sixth grade teacher had recommended to her, books about blacks and books by blacks. Math, Science, Literature, Language Arts, the perfect papers just kept rolling back to her. It didn’t surprise Mina that it was so easy for her.

  She also made sure that everybody in the class knew who she was, Mina Smiths, knew that Mina Smiths wasn’t going to come in second to anybody, knew that Mina Smiths was someone to be reckoned with, t-rou-ble. They thought she had to be who they wanted her to be, but they didn’t know anything about her.

  Mr. Shipp knew something about her, she thought.

  She wondered what he would make of Mr. Bryce and the Social Studies class. The course was the history of Maryland, with Fridays given over to current events, when everybody had to report on a newspaper article. She knew what she made of Mr. Bryce, who ran a military-strict classroom where everything had to be done exactly his way, even the place where the date went on your papers and the way the date was written, first the number, then the month, then the year. There was only one particular set of words that made an answer right. Social Studies met at the end of the day. Mr. Bryce came in expecting them to behave badly, seventh graders at the end of the school day, and he sat on anything he thought might be trouble before it could even begin.

  Mr. Bryce was an overweight middle-aged man whose hair was thinning and who had the big belly of a man whose once athletic body hadn’t been exercised for a long time. At first, he’d call on Mina, but after a couple of days he dismissed her questions, without seeming to hear them even though he was looking right at her. He ignored questions about blacks during the colonial period, whether there were free blacks as well as slaves in Maryland, about what legal rights a free black had. He didn’t even call on Mina after the first few days. He didn’t like her, he really didn’t like her. The look on his face when he took attendance told her that he thought she was trouble, and she’d better look out.