The Warmth of Other Suns Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hope Baptist set out the hot platters of corn bread and collards and salted hams. Whoever made the collards worried if they were tender enough. Whoever baked the pound cake prayed that people would favor her cake over somebody else’s potato pie.
    It was the time of the year they called the lay-by, when the people left the cotton alone and waited for it to sprout. The people had turned the benches up and spread the food on the tables outside the little frame church. They called the event Children’s Day, in the spirit of Men’s Day and Women’s Day other times of the year. An event like this was all there was on colored people’s off day in the backwoods of Chickasaw County. People came in from Buena Vista, or Bewnie as they called it, and from over near Houston, the county seat, and even Okolona, arriving in their wagons and surreys.
    These were the times when sharecroppers and servants could recede into a world of their own making, where Jim Crow didn’t bother to enter. They could forget that there was such a thing as colored or white and just be. Sundays like this turned the churchyard into courting grounds for marriageable girls and young men looking for wives or diversions.
    George Gladney showed up with a bunch of other young men from across the creek in somebody’s old Model T Ford. He was twenty-two, stern-faced, and serious even then. “He wasn’t no smiling man,” Ida Mae said.
    He was from around Bewnie, which was seven or eight miles south of Van Vleet. He was among the last of twelve to fifteen children. (No one alive knows for sure how many there were; his father had children by several wives, who died young or at least before he did.) George’s mother died before he acquired much to remember her by. He was raised by an older brother, Willie, and the weight of his circumstances seemed to show in his face.
    It was getting to the time when he should settle down. So he walked up to Ida Mae that afternoon. She was eating on the grass in her Sunday dress. He introduced himself, but she didn’t pay him much attention. Her mind was on someone else, and she was mad at the moment. A boyby the name of Alfonso Banks had shown up at church that day with another girl.
    Alfonso was the love of her short life. He was friends with her brothers, older and sure of himself in a way that drew the girls to him. No one had really taken her anywhere her whole life, and she felt grown up and free when he did. Excitement seemed to follow him even when he had nothing to do with it. One time he took her to a church revival, which was the country equivalent of a night on the town. It was Alfonso and Ida Mae and Ida Mae’s big sister, Irene, and another young man who was escorting Irene that night. They drove up to the church and got out of the car, all of them young and giddy. They attracted the attention of a man named Bay-Bay, who had designs on Ida Mae’s sister. He saw them and got enraged.
    “Who is this out here laughing?” he said to them.
    They ignored him. They started up the steps, and as they walked toward the church door, Bay-Bay pulled out a gun and shot at them six times, aiming at Irene or her escort or both. He was a bad shot and didn’t hit anybody. But it was exciting and the talk of the woods and further proof to Ida Mae that Alfonso Banks sure knew how to show a girl a good time, even though he had nothing to do with it.
    She had been out with Alfonso enough to feel a kind of ownership that was implied if not outright said. When she saw Alfonso come to Children’s Day with another girl, she went up and spoke her mind.
    “What’d you bring her here for?” Ida Mae said.
    “I brought her for Children’s Day.”
    “Unh-huh.”
    Something rose up in her. She took the umbrella in her hand and knocked it across his head. “Boy, I loved that boy,” she said years later. “And he come bringing that girl over there. And I hit him all cross the head. My mother hit me with a poker when I got home.