“Why, just you look at Celia there,” Ma said, and everybody turned and watched me.
“You sure high, kid,” Chris said.
“No, I’m not.” I was careful to space the words, because I could tell by the way Ma had run hers together that she was feeling the beer too.
Pete had his guitar in his lap, flicking his fingers across the strings. “You an easy drunk.” He was smiling, the way he seldom did. “Leastways you ain’t gonna cost some man a lotta money getting you high.”
“That absolutely and completely right.” Ma bent forward, with her hands one on each knee and the elbows sticking out, like a skinny football player. “You plain got to watch that when boys come to take you out.”
“They ain’t gonna want to take me out.”
“Why not, kid?” Chris had folded his arms on the tabletop and was leaning his chin on them. His face was flushed so that his eyes only looked bluer.
“Not after they see Lena.” I lifted my eyes up from his and let them drop over where I knew Lena was sitting. I just had time to notice the way the electric light made her skin gold and her eyes gold and her hair too, so that she seemed all one blurry color. And then the whole world tipped over and I went skidding off — but feeling extra fine because Chris was sitting just a little bit away next to Lena and she was looking at him like she’d never looked at anybody else before.
Next thing I knew, somebody was saying: “Celia, look.” There was a photograph in front of me. A photograph of a young man, in a suit and tie, leaning back against a post, with his legs crossed, grinning at the camera.
I looked up. Ma was holding the photograph in front of me. It was in a wide silver-colored frame, with openwork, roses or flowers of some sort.
Pete began laughing. “Just you look at her,” he said. “She don’t even know her own daddy.”
“I never seen that picture before,” I said, loud as I could.
I’d never seen my daddy either. He was a steward on a United Fruit Lines ship, a real handsome man. He’d gone ashore at Antigua one day and forgot to come back.
“He looks mighty much like Chris,” Ma said as she cleared a space on the shelf over between the windows. She put the picture there. And I knew then that she’d got it out from the bottom of a drawer somewhere, because this was a special occasion for her too.
“Chris,” I said, remembering, “you never did tell us what you celebrating.”
He had twisted sideways in his chair and had his arms wrapped around the back. “I going in the army.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pete staring at him, his mouth twisting and his face darkening.
Ma clucked her tongue against her teeth. “That a shame.”
Chris grinned, his head cocked aside a little. “I got to leave tomorrow.”
Pete swung back and forth on the two legs of his tilted chair. “Ain’t good enough for nothing around here, but we good enough to put in the army and send off.”
“Man” — Chris winked at him — “there ain’t nothing you can do. And I plain reckon you gonna go next.”
“No.” Pete spoke the word so that it was almost a whistle.
“I’m a man, me,” Chris said. “Can’t run out on what I got to do.” He tipped his head back and whistled a snatch of a little tune.
“I wouldn’t like to go in the army,” Lena said.
Chris went on whistling. Now we could recognize the song:
Lena tossed her head. “I wouldn’t like to none.”
Chris stopped whistling and laughed. “You plain sound like Pete here.”
Pete’s face all crinkled up with anger. I thought: He looks more like a Negro when he loses his temper; it makes his skin darker somehow.
“Nothing to laugh about,” he said. “Can’t do nothing around here without people yelling nigger at you.”
“Don’t stay around here, man. You plain crazy to stay around here.” Chris tilted back his chair and stared at the ceiling. “You plain crazy to stay a nigger. I done told you that.”
Pete scowled at him and didn’t answer.
Lena asked quickly: “Where you got to go?”
“Oregon.” Chris was still staring at the ceiling and still smiling. “That where you cross over.”
“You sure?”
Chris looked at her and smiled confidently. “Sure I’m sure.”
Pete mumbled something under his breath that we didn’t hear.
“I got a friend done it,” Chris said. “Two years ago. He working out of Portland there, for the railroad. And he turn white.”
Lena was resting her chin on her folded hands. “They don’t look at you so close or anything?”
“No,” Chris said. “I heard all about it. You can cross over if you want to.”
“You going?” I asked.
“When I get done with the stretch in the army.” He lowered his chair back to its four legs and stared out the little window, still smiling. “There’s lots of jobs there for a railroad man.”
Pete slammed the flat of his hand down against the table. Ma’s eyes flew open like a door that’s been kicked wide back. “I don’t want to pretend I’m white,” he said. “I ain’t and I don’t want to be. I reckon I want to be same as white and stay right here.”
Ma murmured something under her breath and we all turned to look at her. Her eyes had dropped half-closed again and she had her hands folded across her stomach. Her mouth opened very slowly and this time she spoke loud enough for us all to hear. “Talking like that — you gonna do nothing but break you neck that way.”
I got so sleepy then and so tired, all of a sudden, that I slipped sideways out of my chair. It was funny. I didn’t notice I was slipping or moving until I was on the floor. Ma got hold of my arm and took me off to bed with her. And I didn’t think to object. The last thing I saw was Lena staring at Chris with her long light-colored eyes. Chris with his handsome face and his reddish hair and his movements so quick they almost seemed jerky.
I thought it would be all right with them.
I was sick the whole next day from the beer; so sick I couldn’t go to school. Ma shook her head and Pete laughed and Lena just smiled a little.
And Chris went off to the army, all right. It wasn’t long before Lena had a picture from him. He’d written across the back: Here I am a soldier. She stuck the picture in the frame of the mirror over her dresser.
That was the week Lena quit school. She came looking for me during lunchtime. “I’m going home,” she said.
“You can’t do that.”
She shook her head. “I had enough.”
So she walked out of school and didn’t ever go back. (She was old enough to do that.) She bought a paper on her way home and sat down and went through the classified ads very carefully, looking for a job. It was three days before she found one she wanted: with some people who were going across the lake to Covington for the summer. Their regular city maid wouldn’t go.
They took her on right away because they wanted to leave. She came back with a ten-dollar bill in her purse. “We got to leave in the morning,” she said.
Ma didn’t like it, her quitting school and leaving home, but she couldn’t really stop her.
And Lena did want to go. She was practically jumping with excitement after she came back from the interview. “They got the most beautiful house,” she said to Ma. “A lot prettier than where you work.” And she told me: “They say the place over the lake is even prettier — even prettier.”