in the bowl. “Now you try one.”
I pulled a bullhead from the sack and rested its belly between my fingers.
Red nodded. “That’s fine,” he said. I began to cut the skin.
“Don’t you be giving Alreda no pennies,” Red said. “She show you that jellyroll for free.” I looked up. He was grinning.
“Well,” I said.
Red was right. Alreda would display her charms for nothing. But we also discovered the wonders a penny could buy. Alreda would sway and shimmy before us, bare as the day she was born. For another penny she allowed us to touch. With her eyes she guided us to touch in ways she liked. At these moments I could feel my heart beating to the tips of my fingers, and my hand trembled.
“Don’t you be skittish, Mr. Charlie, you doing good,” she crooned. Her voice washed over me like warm rain. I closed my eyes. I could hear her breathing. I felt I was floating, nudged by wind like a leaf on water.
That fall, I didn’t see Red at Miss Quesinberry’s one-room school. When I asked Miss Quesinberry about it, she told me he was attending a special school just for Negroes.
“Well, what’s wrong with this school? Why doesn’t Red come here, like before?”
“He’s colored, Charles. The district had overlooked it. But the new constitution strictly forbids the races going to school together. That’s all. There’s nothing wrong with anything.”
A tall boy on the bench behind me snickered. “Aw, he misses his little nigger friend,” he said. He tweaked at one of the temples of my wire rims.
“Mason Davis, you hush this instant!” Miss Quesinberry said. “You are never to utter that word inside these walls. Do you understand me?”
The boy slouched behind his desk.
“Well, do you?” Miss Quesinberry leaned over my desk. The wattles of her neck trembled. Her hand clenched the strop.
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said.
“All right, then. Open your books. We’ll start our lesson,” Miss Quesinberry said. The books were brand new. The ink smelled like enamel paint when I turned a page. “Commonwealth of Virginia” was stamped on the fly leaf. When the school superintendent visited, he said we had new books so we wouldn’t have to use old ones that had been touched by colored children.
After school I walked to Red’s house. He was sitting on the porch, holding the Aesop’s Fables. He didn’t smile when he looked up.
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