A Place at the Table Read Online Free

it, surrounding his grandson in grit and starch. And then he left James down there while he rode his horse to relatives who lived more than fifty miles away, asking them to send a telegram to New York saying James was coming. If Granddaddy were to send it from Cutler, someone in town might inform Hicks, who might inform the men who had lynched the boy, who might be waiting for James when he arrived at the station to board the train.
    Alice was so lonely in bed at night, without James curled up on his cot in the corner of her room. She lay next to Mother, silent and rigid, biting her fist, trying not to think of anything, because there was nothing she could think of that was okay. Nothing was safe. All of this time living in Emancipation, and nothing had ever been safe.
    She lay like that for a long time. So stiff, so scared, she did not know how she would ever feel calm again. How she would ever again sleep. But then she must have fallen asleep, because she was dreaming, and in the dream she found the sow. On her own, walking through the woods, she came upon the animal, rooting in mud. She was even bigger and nastier and uglier than Alice had remembered. The sow looked at Alice with her mean black eyes and snorted. And then she was charging toward Alice. She was going to knock Alice down. Alice put her hands out. Alice put her hands out and her nails, sharp as the spikes on a bear trap, sank into the sow’s hair-covered flesh. And then the sow disappeared and it was the hung boy Alice was embracing, the hung boy Alice couldn’t release, the hung boy whose mouth was still stuffed with feathers. And suddenly Alice knew the awful truth. The hung boy was James. It was James who had been whipped and hung from a tree. It was James who was dead.
    Every night they listened in fear for the sounds of men riding onto their property, looking for the boy who had dared to claim his worth equal to theirs. But the men never showed up. Still, James stayed hidden in the cellar for three days, until his exodus was fully arranged. When he finally emerged one early, early morning, with only a moment to say good-bye to Alice, James appeared even paler than before. Alice had been staring at her brother since before she could remember, but during that first brief absence—followed by a longer, final one—she must have forgotten how light he really was. So light was he that for a moment Alice believed she was looking at a white boy.

Part One
Bobby in Georgia

1
R OYAL A MBASSADOR
    (Decatur, Georgia, 1970)
    S ome people think being a Royal Ambassador is just like being a Scout, but boy, are they wrong. It’s better! Cause everything we RAs do, all of the games and craft projects and circle shares and stuff, is in the name of Christ. And as our RA leader Mr. Morgan says, nothing is as sweet as Jesus, not even Coca-Cola. Mr. Morgan even has a T-shirt that has “Jesus” spelled out in fancy letters like it is on the Coke bottle, and beneath that it reads, “Is it!”
    Once I drank a whole one-liter bottle of Coke by myself and I got so fidgety my hands were vibrating like our seventy-two-year-old neighbor down the street, Mr. McDade, who Mama says has the shakes. Mama made me run around the house ten times just to get out some of my energy. At least she didn’t hook me up to the zip line, which is what she used to do with my brother Hunter, who’s wild.
    Daddy built the zip line a long time ago, as a sort of a comboChristmas present for all three of us Banks boys. It runs through the backyard, just before the land turns to woods, where all sorts of squirrels and rabbits and frogs live. What the zip line is, really, is just a long wire stretched tight between two trees. And there’s a handle on wheels that runs along the wire. You walk up the hill to the starting post, grab the handle, lift your knees, and whoa! There you go. Sometimes Daddy will give me a big push to start, and that’s the best because then I go flying through the air, the