Ain't No Sunshine (3 page)

Our shopping trips never lasted too long, but they were a great escape for me. This time, before we went to pay for everything, my father did something very odd.  He went over to the ladies’ section and started looking around.  I thought he was going to buy something for my mother until he picked up a little yellow dress.  I was completely confused.

"Will this fit Ruthie?"  I don't remember if I answered him or not, but it didn't matter.  He was so fixated on the dress he wouldn't have heard me anyway.  "Yellow is her favorite color isn't it?" he asked. This I knew for sure.  She was always running out of yellow crayons.  If she could she would color everything yellow.  She had even somehow managed to get her cottage painted yellow.  I nodded yes as we walked toward the register.  Why was he buying a dress for Ruthie?

"Hello, Reverend Phillips.  How are you today?" the cashier asked.

"I'm doing just fine, praise be to the Lord."

"Oh, is this for a niece of yours?" she asked when she came to the little yellow dress.  I wondered if my father would lie to save face, but he didn't.

"No, it's for a little Negro girl that lives near my house."  The cashier looked almost disgusted as if the dress was suddenly tainted.  "As you know," he added, "I have just opened the doors of my church to the Negro community."  By “opening his doors” he meant allowing them to sit in the balcony, which was even hotter than where we sat.  But I guess that was more than what other churches were doing.  "I think all people should have a chance to repent of their sins and be blessed with God's glory, don't you?"

The cashier nodded guiltily in agreement.

"I'm just trying to make sure that when they come before the Lord, they look somewhat presentable.  And if I have to do that one little child at a time, I will."

"You're such a kind-hearted man, Reverend.  God bless you."  It made me sick the way people fawned over him like he was heaven incarnate.  He fooled everyone into thinking he was just simply angelic.  In public, his light brown eyes would glisten and gleam with kindness and sincerity, but at home I was sure those eyes were from Satan himself.  He did things like this once in a while just to convince people of his goodness.  Ruthie wouldn't be fooled.  She knew the truth about him.  She would reject the dress.  I knew she would.

"Thank you, young lady." My father tipped his hat and kissed the cashier's hand.  She grinned like an idiot while she put all of our purchases in a bag.

On the way home, we stopped at Ruthie's house.  He wanted me to wait in the car, but I got out anyway when he wasn't looking.

"No, thank you, sir.
  I don't need another dress," I heard her say.  I knew she wouldn't take it.  My father had a strange look on his face.  No one ever told him no except Matthew, and that always led to a fight.  Suddenly, I got afraid.  What if he tried to hurt her?  But he didn't get angry.

"How about I make you a deal?  Just try it on. If it fits and you like it, you don't have to take it off." Ruthie stared at the dress.  It was too much of a temptation.  It was a pretty dress, I guess, covered with lace and bows and all that frilly stuff girls like.  And it was in her absolute favorite color.  She couldn't resist.

"Okay," she conceded as she started to walk to her room to try it on.  He grabbed her little hand.  Ruthie was always very little for her age.  I think it came from her being born two months premature.

"You can change here.  It's okay," he said.  Why did he want her to change in front of him?  I started to feel sick.  I didn't know what all of this meant, but I didn't like it.  Something wasn't right.

Months went by without any more run-ins between Matthew and my father.  Life felt kind of normal except for the occasional strange episodes between my father and Ruthie.  I remember him saying he was trying to help the entire Negro Community, but I only saw him buying things for her.

That fall Ruthie and I went back to school.  We were going to Kindergarten.  It was the first time we would be going to the same school.  Our town was far behind the rest of the nation when it came to matters of integration.  That was partly due to the prejudices of old rich racists and partly due to the fact that there was just not a lot of diversity in our town.  We didn't even have a colored school. The few colored kids were bused an hour and a half away to the nearest integrated school.  Last year, instead of making that bus trip, my mother taught Ruthie at home.  I loved to play sick sometimes so I could stay home with them. 

"Did you know my mommy, Miss Marjorie?"  Ruthie asked my mother one day during her reading lesson.  I had stayed home that day with a "stomachache."

"I did.  She was my best friend," my mother said. I had never heard her talk about Mabel before.  It hadn't even occurred to me that they might have been friends.

"Did it make you sad when she died?"

"I was very sad, Ruthie."  My mother started tearing up. 

"Don't cry, Miss Marjorie," Ruthie said as she hugged her.  "I get sad when I think about her sometimes, too.  But, we still have each other."  My mother smiled weakly and returned the embrace.  She regained her composure and tried to continue with the reading lesson, but Ruthie's curiosity had not yet been satisfied. 

"Did you know my daddy?" 

"Yes, I did," my mother answered suddenly turning cold.

"What was he like?"  My mother closed the book and looked Ruthie directly in the eyes.

"He loved your mother very much.  But he's gone and he's never coming back.  Don't think about him."

"If he loved her, why did he leave her?  Why did he leave me?"  My mother couldn't answer those questions.  How was she supposed to know what was going through the mind of Ruthie's father?  Ruthie would have to be satisfied just knowing that she was a product of love.  That was more than I could say for myself.

Now that we were in the same school, I got to see Ruthie even more often.  In the mornings, she would come over right after her bath, and my mother would dress her and fix her hair.  After breakfast, we would
hop
in the car, and Matthew would drive us to school.   We could've taken the bus, but I think Matthew enjoyed spending time with us.  In school, we were in different classes.  I thought it was because they thought Ruthie wouldn't be prepared since she didn't go to preschool, but it was really that they still wanted to keep the Negro kids separate from the white.  They were all shocked when she surpassed everyone in her class due to the education my mother had given her. 

I always wished we were in the same classes, but it still made me happy to know that she was only a few doors away.  Sometimes I would collect all the yellow crayons in my classroom, tie them together with a bow like a bouquet, and take them down to her classroom as a gift.  I knew she would be running out frequently.

My mother had prepared Ruthie academically, but I don't think she was ready for school, socially.  She had only been around her grandmother, me, and my family and she wasn't aware of how nasty other people could be, especially children. 

"Why don't you go back to the jungle, monkey," Paul Morrison said to Ruthie before spitting in her hair. Then he pushed her down before running out to the playground. Ruthie didn't jump up and retaliate like most kindergartners would. Instead she calmly stood up, closed her eyes and smiled. She was able to look inside herself and find a happy thought to get her through. I hoped that happy thought was about me.

I wasn't as forgiving as Ruthie, however. I ran outside and found Paul about to board the merry-go-round. I tackled him and started pounding his face into the dirt.

"Stephen, stop it," I heard Ruthie say seconds later. "He doesn't matter.
Stop, Stephen, stop."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ruthie crying. She was crying because of me. I didn't want to cause her any more pain, so I stopped punching Paul and started to get off of him. That's when he hit me with a sucker punch to my left eye before running away.

"Why did you do that?" Ruthie asked, holding ice to my eye. Kids pointed and shook their heads as they walked past us sitting outside the cafeteria.

"He shouldn't have done that to you."

Ruthie shook her head. "Now they're going to pick on you, too. You get picked on enough at home."

The white kids at school did call me names for a few weeks, but it didn't last.  They soon forgot about me and just went back to tormenting Ruthie. Unfortunately, she didn't even get relief from people of her own race. The colored kids teased her because she was too light-skinned.

***

Matthew picked us up every day from school.  Fridays were special days.  Instead of going straight home, we would walk around and look at the scenery of our quaint little town. Horse-drawn carriages looked more appropriate on the street than cars did. Sometimes we went to the park to play, but we always stopped at the ice cream shop on Main Street.  Ruthie and I would wait outside while Matthew went in and bought us a sundae to share between the three of us.  I don't remember there being a "whites only" sign, but it must have been implied since Ruthie never went in.  One Friday after ice cream, we didn't take the normal way home.

"Where are we going?"  I remember asking.

"I have a surprise for you.  Both of you," he said as he tousled Ruthie's already messy hair.  My mother always fixed her hair into two neat and adorably curly pigtails in the morning, and by lunch it always resembled
a desert
tumbleweed.  She was also notorious for getting paint and markers in her hair.  My mother gave up asking her how it got there; Ruthie never remembered.

Matthew's surprise for us was a Golden Retriever that he had bought from the pet store.  Ruthie was so excited that she squealed and danced around it and scared the puppy so much that he
wet
on her, but she didn't care. We spent the entire trip home arguing over what to name her.

"I think we should call her Yellowbird," Ruthie said.

"But she's not yellow; she's more of a gold color," I said. "And she's not a bird."  Matthew laughed.  I was always very literal even as a child. 

"She doesn't have to be a bird to be called Yellowbird, Stephen.  And gold is a type of yellow," she said, annoyed that I was taking the fun out of the naming process.

"She's got a point there, Stephen." Matthew cleared his throat and tried to sound serious.

"Why don't we name her Goldie?"  I said.

"That's not creative at all.  Where's your imagination, Stephen? I'm calling her Yellowbird."

"Well, I'm calling her Goldie."  We never did decide what the official name of the dog was.

One weekend a couple of months after school started my father went out of town.  Matthew thought it was a perfect occasion to try to make Ruthie's picture come true.  He organized a picnic by the lake.  It wasn't exactly like the picture; the sun wasn't a bright saffron color, Ruthie's grandmother didn't come because she felt ill, it was chilly and nearly all the leaves had fallen off the trees, but it was still my best childhood memory.  My mother actually smiled and laughed as Matthew playfully chased her through the trees.  When night came, Matthew made a fire and we all snuggled around it together.  I didn't want it to end.  But it did.

That night while I was sleeping, my father came home.  He and Matthew started fighting, but somehow it felt different.  It was worse.  I heard terrified shrieks from my mother and what sounded like furniture being thrown against the walls.  Suddenly, Matthew burst into my room and told me to go to Ruthie's house.  When I didn't move fast enough he picked me up, put a blanket around me, and carried me to the back door.  Then my mother screamed the most gut-wrenching scream I had ever heard.  I turned to see what was going on, but Matthew pushed me out of the door.  All I saw was my father dragging my mother by her hair with one hand and waving his rifle with the other.  Matthew tried to wrestle the gun away from him.  When I heard a shot fire, I ran away as fast as my feet would carry me to Ruthie's cottage.