Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [28]
It was the sun. It looked delicious in the sky to these girls who’d just been lulled momentarily by the fantasy lands of the books they’d read. The sun was like a glob of butter melting in a pan to make hot fudge or some other warm sweet thing that the uncles used to surprise and delight them with. They just needed the sweet brightness to stroke their foreheads for a while, so they walked toward the sun, headed west, even though Shern knew they were going wrong; she counted blocks so that when they were ready to turn around and have the sun at their backs, she’d know just how far they had to go.
They were quiet as they walked, no one was crying; their crying had gotten so unpredictable, like brushfires that start out of nowhere and go until they burn themselves out. For the moment the sun diminished the need to cry, and they were suspended in time and could forget that until last month they lived in a grand single home on an old-money block inhabited by professors from the university and a prominent black doctor and banker and that they were accustomed to ribeye steak, crystal chandeliers, and velvet ribbons for their hair. For the moment they could push from their consciousness that their father, a self-made man who’d amassed his fortune without college, had turned up dead, and their beautiful mother had had a breakdown.
As they watched the sun ooze and drip yellow down the sky, they were just three girls walking, big-legged, brown-skinned anonymous girls with velvety bangs, perfect teeth, and pile-lined good wool coats. Their thick-soled shoes hit the concrete in sync and echoed in a rhythm that was like a chant. The air did a welcoming hum through the branches and the budding leaves, and even the trees seemed to bend on the block where they now walked, like doormen bowing and extending their arms. There were no distractions here, no cars, no houses, no storefronts, no peddlers, not even other walkers. Just the girls, and a park across the street that was conceited and bragged out its ability to turn green in the spring, and a closed-down bread factory on the side where they walked that still scented the air with a hint of butter and flour and yeast when it was breezy out.
For the moment this was their block, and they reveled in its emptiness. They didn’t know, though, that this stretch where they now walked was always deserted this time of day, solely because of the superstitions of people who’d lived here for a while and who’d dubbed this block Dead Block.
And since they didn’t know, when they saw a figure in the park across the street climbing up the underside of a slope in the ground, tall and lean in a plaid trench coat and gray fedora, they just viewed him as an object of curiosity rather than one of fear.
They were oblivious to the haunting legend of Dead Block: that eighteen years before, Donald Booker, a neighborhood boy, a white boy, had vanished in this block of the park, around the time of the great changeover, when the whites began moving away from this neighborhood in a massive tidal wave, as the blacks rode the wave and rushed in behind them, eagerly filling the spaces as if they were playing Monopoly and landing on Park Place. The Bookers had resisted the influx, would call out, “Nigger, go home,” to the backs of the newcomers, write it out in chalk on the pavements in front of their homes, would even sit around on Saturday nights, talk about the crosses they should build, the brand kerosene they should use. But then their own personal tragedy hit; their twelve-year-old disappeared, last seen on the block where the girls now