A Fine Dark Line Read Online Free Page B

balloons like the one that had been found in Callie’s room.
    It was my job to sweep out the concession and the little porch veranda in front of it, and I would watch Daddy pick up the trash with a stick with a nail in its tip. He’d poke stuff and put it in a bag, but he always seemed to poke those balloons with a vengeance. It slowly began to dawn on me that those particular balloons had about them a mysterious, perhaps even sinister quality that I had not previously suspected.
    Rosy Mae and I had a kind of deal. I’d keep watch for her when I was sweeping the veranda, or when I was inside the concession and could see Daddy out the windows. I also had such good ears Rosy Mae called me Nub’s big brother. If I heard Mom coming home or saw Daddy finishing up, I’d step inside and call her name in a tone that meant she should get up, stash her magazine, grab a duster, start moving about.
    And she was quick at it. The magazine would disappear inside the big paisley-colored bag she brought every day, and she’d start flouncing about with that duster. And to see that big woman flounce was something. She looked like a bear dusting her den.
    ———
    O NE MORNING , Rosy Mae’s day off, a Saturday, I was out on the veranda sitting by my daddy in one of the metal lawn chairs as he whittled on a stick and talked about the new Jimmy Stewart movie showing that night, Vertigo . He said that he wouldn’t really get to watch it because he had so much work to do, and he hated that because he loved Jimmy Stewart, and thought onSunday he might just show it for the family and have friends over, but Callie couldn’t have any of hers. She could watch, but her fun was to be limited.
    I listened to this, liking the idea, especially about Callie not having friends over. I was really enjoying her punishment. I was also envious that she made friends easily. In the short time we had been in Dewmont, she had made a lot of them. She was so pretty, so fun, all she had to do was show up and the boys were falling all over her, and the girls, though maybe jealous of her at first, soon warmed to her as well.
    Well, most of them.
    “Can I invite a friend?” I asked.
    “Sure. Who?”
    “Rosy Mae.”
    Daddy turned to me, said, “Son, Rosy Mae’s colored.”
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    He smiled at me. “Well, she’s all right. I like her. But white people don’t spend special time with coloreds. It’s just not done. I haven’t got a thing against her, you see. She’s all right in her place, but if I invited some of our friends over, I don’t think they’d want to sit with a colored and watch a movie.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, coloreds are different, son. They aren’t like you and me. Good upstanding white people just don’t spend a lot of time around niggers.”
    This was all something I should’ve known, I suppose, but in No Enterprise I had been sheltered. There, the only coloreds I had seen were those driving mule-drawn wagons with plows in the back.
    And there was Uncle Tommy, who sharpened knives and fixed household goods. He lived down by the creek in a one-room shack with an outhouse out back. I knew the colored people I had seen were poor, but it wasn’t until that moment Iunderstood they were different, considered inferior to whites. And though I had heard the word nigger before, I realized now that it could be said in such a way as to strike like a blow, even if spoken to a white person.
    It also occurred to me that Daddy and Mom didn’t have any true friends in Dewmont, and they had most likely spent more hours with Rosy Mae than anyone they might invite.
    Daddy, sensing I was disappointed, said, “If you want, you can invite a friend of yours. What about that Richard kid? He looks a bit like a hooligan to me, but I reckon he’s all right.”
    “Yeah. Okay. Maybe.”
    “You think he has lice?”
    “He scratches a lot.”
    “That hair looks buggy to me.”
    Richard was all right. I liked him. But I realized right