Alligator Bayou - Donna Jo Napoli [52]
The dim air hangs dense with rose perfume. It makes me woozy.
Patricia takes the ribbons from her hair. She ties them together in a long string. Then she takes my shirt off Bedda and she ties Bedda to the trellis with her ribbons.
I put on my shirt and peer at her in the shady dark. I don’t know what to say. “How do you make sweet potato pies?”
She laughs. “Roast the biggest ones in the fire. Then peel them and squish them and add chopped pecans. And butter, if y’all got it. If not, milk. If not, it don’t matter. And sugar. Or, if you like the taste, molasses. Or skip it. Only thing matter is the pecans. Then put it all in a baked pie shell and stick it in the oven. Easy.”
“Much obliged.”
“So that’s how it is?”
“That’s how what is?”
“Ain’t you going to kiss me hello?”
And I do.
“Want to go out to the party?” she asks.
“No. I want to stay here, with you.”
She laughs, again. “Too bad for you.” And she leads me out to my first American Fourth of July.
nineteen
A few days later Patricia and I are walking the clay road to Milliken’s Bend. Both of us have errands there. Her feet move quick. “If anyone come, you go off the right side,” she says. “I go left.”
“Why?”
She lets out a whistle. “You something else, all right. For a murderer you sure don’t know nothing.”
My cheeks sting as if I’ve been smacked. “Don’t you say that.”
“Say what?”
“That I’m a murderer.”
“All Eye-talian men murderers.” She laughs.
“How can you laugh? I told you about those newspapers to make you understand. It’s the worst lie I ever heard.”
“It ain’t no worse than saying all colored men rapists.”
I stop. “Your uncles and brother and Rock and Ben—they’d go crazy if they heard you say that.”
“Mortified.” Patricia looks back at me, but she doesn’t stop walking.
“What’s that mean?”
“How they’d feel. Mortified. Like you want to die. Like you felt when you read those newspapers. But it’s the truth. The plantation owners’ truth. And if you don’t learn to respect that truth, you done for.”
“Respect a lie?”
“A lie they believe…well, Calogero, that kind of lie can kill you. Really kill you. Not just mortify you.”
“Murderers.” I run to catch up. “It drives me crazy that they believe that. That’s why they can start that stupid rumor that my uncles shot an old man and some little kid.”
“Just ’cause that drunk soldier wobbled out of the grocery on his own two feet and because that little loud-mouth thief, Jerome, go around bragging he got a bellyache from eating your watermelon—you mean because of that it’s a lie? Don’t be dumb, Calogero. Them facts don’t change nothing. You listen to me. Anybody come along this road, you dive to the right, I go to the left. Get out of sight fast. And if they stop, run.”
“It’s barely daylight. Who’s going to come?”
“Just dive. And hide.”
“What would they do if we didn’t hide?”
“An Eye-talian boy and a colored girl? Y’all crazy?”
“Sicilians have Negro girlfriends in New Orleans. My uncle told me.”
“Well, this ain’t New Orleans. And I hope you never find out how this place act.”
I think of Dago Joe. I didn’t tell Patricia about him. “I’m going to find out. You’re my girl.”
“Oh, so you kissed me and now you think you own me?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You meant my heart, huh? Well, I’m hanging on to my heart a while longer.”
I want to say my heart is hers. But it doesn’t seem right after what she just said. I look up and down the road. No one’s coming. “Should we walk through the fields?”
“Five miles to Milliken’s Bend. And so hot, the trees be bribing the dogs for a shower. Any other path will take longer. Walk fast and stop moaning.”
“I ain’t moaning.”
“Listen to that: ‘I ain’t moaning.’” She sashays in front of me. “You talked normal for once. Not like some schoolteacher.”
“Frank Raymond.”
“Right, he yours. But Miss Clarrie, she a teacher, too. And y’all talk the same. She from somewhere far away. New Jersey. You want to hear her talk?”
“You bet I would.”
“Well, Mr. Calogero,” says Patricia in a pinched, formal voice. She stretches her neck long, so her head seems to wobble