The Last Holiday Read Online Free Page A

that had been planned, and eventually beyond six years, which landed me in the same school my mother had attended, St. Joseph’s. The period from a
skinny, chocolate, preschool-aged mischief maker to my short-pants uniform at Catholic school seems hardly a blink in retrospect. As I grew up I was blessed with the run of an aging neighborhood in
the southern section of town where I was always near a “cousin” or someone who recognized me as a descendent of a family that was near legend in South Jackson. I was an heir of Bob and
Lily Scott. My every appearance was a reminder of some hazy happening from the halcyon days before Cumberland Street was even paved, and before Jackson was large enough to show up on state
maps.
    All the Black folks lived in South Jackson. A substantial percentage of the community members were from my grandparents’ generation. It seemed that the numbers were split between folks who
were easing toward senior citizenry and those of school age. The hole was in the middle—people my mother’s age. Those were the folks who had left Jackson and Tennessee for factory work
and urban life in the north or farther west: St. Louis, Memphis, and Chicago. Somehow their children, like me, all ended up in Jackson with their grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
    The most popular sport in the south was baseball, and the stands for the little league games were always fairly crowded with mature community experts. My game was somewhere between mediocre and
all right, but my pitching reminded them of “Steel Arm Bob Scott,” my grandfather, who once pitched for the local team. My ripping and running in general through the dusty streets
brought back stories of the four Scott children who had run and ripped twenty years before I arrived. Everyone remembered them, so Jackson felt like a town full of parents and grandparents. I was
welcomed everywhere. I was identified and respected in Jackson as a Scott: “Bob Scott’s boy.” I was identified as though the Herons did not exist.
    I didn’t mind being connected to Bob Scott. I just didn’t know him because he’d died the year before I was born. Under consideration, I decided that most things that were
important had happened just before I was born: my grandfather, the Second World War, Jackie Robinson, the things that were important to people in church or on the front porch at night. They had
gotten all their living done, and their accomplishments were strung out behind them like pearls on a leash. Lazy evening conversations would allow us all to take figurative walks through the
gardens where those highlights of their lives had been planted.
    My grandmother had been born Lily Hamilton, in Russellville, Alabama. It was an appropriate name for a delicate, fair-skinned woman with raven-black hair that nearly reached the floor when she
let it down to brush it. She was scarcely more than five feet two inches, and never more than a hundred and ten pounds. She was a laundress. Her first job had been for the railroad, cleaning and
preparing the tablecloths and place settings for the club car diners and the uniforms for the porters and conductors who worked on the rail on the two passenger trains that shuttled between Miami
and Chicago. To facilitate that job she had moved to Jackson, Tennessee, roughly halfway between those two points. Once I landed in Jackson, every summer I rode on either the Seminole or the City
of Miami, back and forth to Chicago to see my mother.
    By the time I came to live with Lily in 1950, she was “taking in” laundry for a living. She did her job at the house on Cumberland Street for individual, private customers who
brought their clothes to the house and picked them up a few days later. I don’t know how she started doing that job or how she got her customers, but among the people she provided this
service for was the mayor (though he had started bringing his clothes before he was mayor), the chief of police (though his wife and