Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [30]
“Anthony.”
“Anthony’s your last name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rosalind Anthony.”
I nodded.
She smiled. “That’s a good name.”
“It is?”
“Sure. It flows like a poem.”
“It does?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t you hear it?”
I repeated my name in my head and tried to listen, but it didn’t sound like a poem to me. It just sounded familiar and plain. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Mara Nightingale.”
“Nightingale?”
“That’s right.”
“Like Florence Nightingale?”
She looked away, shaking her head. “No, not like that. Florence Nightingale was a white woman.”
“So?”
“I’m colored.”
“So?” I said again.
She gave me a sharp look before asking, “You ever been friends with a Negro?”
I pretended to think about that for a minute, though I knew right away what the answer was. Finally I shook my head.
“See?” she said, sounding triumphant.
“See what?”
“It matters that I’m colored.”
“It doesn’t matter to me.”
She didn’t respond. She seemed to be trying to gauge whether or not I was telling her the truth.
I asked, “You ever been friends with a white girl?”
She dropped her eyes then, but her face relaxed. She looked away, bit her lip, shook her head.
“Well then?”
“Well then, what?” she said.
“You want to be friends?”
She smiled again. “All right. I guess so.” She glanced at my lap, back up at me. “You’ve got ice cream all over your shorts.”
I looked at the tiny puddles of pink polka dots on my navy blue shorts. “You want some?” I asked, holding up the cone.
She shook her head. “No.” Then she added, “Thanks.”
“I better eat it fast.” I licked the ice cream, the cone, and my hand in an attempt to clean up the mess.
Mara looked at the notebook in her lap, then closed it.
“What were you writing?” I asked.
“A poem.”
“Can I hear it?”
An emphatic shake of her black braids. “It’s not ready.”
“Okay.”
“But I’ll read you another one, a poem I didn’t write.”
“All right,” I said with a shrug.
Mara looked down at the yellow cover of the notebook, where she had written a poem in black ink. She paused just a moment before beginning to read in a clear, strong voice. “ ‘Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.’ ” She looked at me, as though to make sure I had caught the image of that broken-winged bird. I nodded while wiping at my chin with the back of my free hand. She went on, something about life becoming a frozen field of some sort, but I’d stopped paying much attention to the poem, so captivated was I by the passion in Mara’s voice and the look of intensity in her eye.
When she finished she sighed deeply and raised the notebook to her chest, as though to hold the words close to her heart. “That was nice,” I said. “Who wrote it?”
“Langston Hughes.”
“Never heard of him.”
“No, I expect you wouldn’t. He was a Negro poet. He died not long ago. Last spring. May 22, actually.”
I cocked my head. “Did you know him or something?”
“No,” she whispered sadly.
“Well, he wrote a nice poem,” I said again.
“He wrote a lot of nice poems. Someday, I’m going to write poetry as good as his. I’m going to be a writer like him and like . . .”
When she didn’t go on, I asked, “Like who?”
She shrugged. “No one.” Her hand went to a locket the size of a dime that hung around her neck. She gave the locket a squeeze, then slipped it beneath her blouse.
“I’ve got to go now,” she said. “Here come my mom and dad.”
Approaching us from the direction of Woolworth’s was a large man and a slender slip of a woman. The woman carried a shoe box under her arm. Both were dressed neatly, in formal church clothes, though as they came closer I could see their garments were worn and faded, the man’s dress shirt frayed at the cuffs.
“You ready to go home, baby?” the man said. His face was dark and wrinkled like a prune, while his hair was a woolly white cap. He walked with a certain stiffness in his joints, as though, like the Tin Man, he needed oiling. He’s old, I thought. Older than most of my friends’ fathers back home. Certainly older than Daddy.
Mara jumped up from the bench, the notebook held tight in her crossed arms. “I’m ready,