A Simple Distance Read Online Free PDF

the yard from the likes of us, that Sally Johnson first called me a jungle-bunny.
    Then there was the time in first grade, early spring because my birthday is in May—May 18, Peace Day on the calendar, and also the day Mount St. Helens erupted and we learned for the first time that there were volcanoes in America—that Meghan Callahan, for a joke, sang “Happy Birthday” to me at recess, back behind the dodge ball circle, and when it got time to sing my name, instead of singing, Happy Birthday to Jean, she sang, Happy Birthday to the black girl, Happy Birthday to you . As if I didn’t even have a name.
    Until Margaret in the fourth grade, I was the only black student at Lincoln School. Abraham Lincoln Elementary School.
    Margaret was in my class. She was tall and thin and almost ran faster than me, even though everyone knew I was the fastest kid at Lincoln, period. Faster, even, than any of the boys in both the fifty-yard dash and all the way around the block. But Margaret didn’t know that. She was new. So she kept trying to beat me in the fifty-yard dash, and it got me angry because sometimes she almost did, and she didn’t seem to know when to quit. Margaret moved into the duplex next to Sally Johnson’s, on Forest, just off Chicago Avenue, right across the street from Wright’s home and studio.
    When the tourists walked the area with their portable tape players and headsets, they’d go past the other Wright houses, but they’d stop inside his studio. We’d sell them lemonade on the corner in the summer.
    Then one day Margaret wasn’t at school. She just stopped showing up. Sally said Margaret’s front lawn had a cross burned on it with fire, and that Margaret’s family had moved away immediately. Right when Sally said it, I knew it was her brothers who’d burned that cross.
    I just couldn’t figure out why. Why they’d never done that to us; why Sally and I were friends, her parents feeding me lunch sometimes, once even inviting me up to their cabin, the one they built themselves by hand, all the way up in Northern Wisconsin, even though Sally didn’t tell me where they all took poops at night and when I stepped right in the middle of some, Sally and her brothers and her dad all just laughed. I thought maybe they hadn’t burned a cross on our lawn because we didn’t move in right next door to them. We were all the way on the other side of the block. Or maybe they hadn’t burned a cross on our lawn because my dad looked white, or because I was friends with Sally, or because our moms were friends.
    But I never could figure it out. And I sort of felt like I had something to do with Margaret leaving, like I should have protected her or something because her skin was just like mine. And even though I’d never really liked her, wished she’d given up on the fifty-yard dash business like everyone else, when she left it felt scary, like I was all alone.
    * * *
    I printed out the Sharon S. case, tossed it on the top of Cynthia’s file, and left for the day, catching the bus back to Oakland stuck somewhere between disgust and despair. Because when one of us gets burned, we all scar. And right then, I was the one holding the match.

CHAPTER 6
    Perhaps my mother was expecting a signal, my small gray hatchback to turn into the drive, because she startled when I unlocked the front door. She was talking on the phone, sitting on the futon and watching the side window, which would have allowed her to see my car pull in, if only I had driven instead of taken the bus.
    How can you defend her, Lillian? What she’s done to me. It’s as if she doesn’t care about her own mother! Oh look, she just walked in. I should go … All right, I will. You take care too, dear.
    Tell Auntie Lillian I say hello, Mom.
    Jean says hello … All right, I will. Bye, dear.
    My mother always calls long distance on other people’s phones because she can’t afford it herself. I had no idea how long she’d been on, but the fact that she