Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) Read Online Free PDF Page B

bell sleeves and a removable head. The holes for my eyes had stitching around the edges so the fabric wouldn’t fray. At the top of the head, the mask wasn’t as round as I’d envisioned it would be. In fact, it was rather pointy. I wouldn’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost at all, yet it did remind me of something I’d seen before but couldn’t quite put my finger on. No matter. My heart raced at the prospect of venturing out into the night.
    Conrad’s eyes got bigger and rounder when he saw me in my costume. It seemed to remind him of something else, too, and because he was older—fifteen and already in high school by then—he surely must have known exactly what it was. He looked at my mother with what appeared to be bewildered disbelief. There must not have been too much riding on it, though, because she merely shrugged him off with a cryptic smile.
    “Remember your manners,” she told me as I stepped up onto the landing by the front door. “And don’t wander off from Kim and her dad.”
    Outside, the evening was warm. I saw plenty of superheroes bought right off the shelf and packs of homemade Star Wars characters pieced together by all the kids whose parents had taken them to see the movie. (I recognized them from the lunchboxes and stickers my friends carried to school, though I didn’t know them firsthand or why they’d caught most everyone else up in an intergalactic frenzy.) Older kids out on their own in hastily conceived costumes scared me, they were so riled up with freedom and lust for candy. One had thrown a paper bag on his head like the Unknown Comic; others were draped in makeshift togas or parents’ bathrobes.
    For every three or four times I shouted “Trick or treat,” one person handing out candy would point at me and ask what I was supposed to be. When I answered that I was a ghost, most seemed relieved, though one or two appeared to remain skeptical. Once, looking up for an explanation of all this adult confusion, I caught Kim’s dad shaking his head, an expression of mild exasperation plastered to his face. I knew this had to do with me and with the silent conversation that had taken place between Conrad and our mom, but I couldn’t figure out what the precise terms were. What if I asked Kim’s dad what the fuss was all about, and his answerwas that I had done something wrong? Or what if my mother had made a mistake in her rush to be done with Halloween? Wouldn’t it be worse if all the to-do revealed that the error was hers and not mine? It didn’t even occur to me that no error had been committed, only a subtly calculated act, a trick instead of a treat, directed not so much at me but at the very ethos of the holiday itself. If I had, my child’s mind could not have unraveled the convoluted logic that had driven a black woman from the Jim Crow-era South to dress her daughter, even only allusively, as one of the most despicable emblems of racial hatred, as someone worse than the devil himself.
    I’m not sure I can claim a clear understanding even now. My mother was in her early forties that autumn, nearly the same age I am now. The KKK, with its flaming crosses and its lynching sprees and the ghastly apparition of those white hoods, would have been real to her—not merely symbols of an earlier era but artifacts of a time she had known, specters from the real-life stories that would have haunted her childhood. Was stitching up a mini Klan costume for her unsuspecting five-year-old a way of depleting the image of whatever lingering private terror it might have held for her? I suspect she wasn’t fully conscious of what she’d done until she’d done it, at which point the only thing to do was remark to herself, “Ain’t that a blip,” and then get on with things. Of course, none of this occurred to me then. At the time, I did what any five-year-old would do. I continued along, holding out my bag, smiling my biggest, most exemplary smile, even though nobody could see it