When little girls say they want to be like their mothers, I was definitely one of them. I saw that M’Dear’s hands were doing much more than just washing dirt out of a person’s hair. Much, much more. I saw that washing and setting a person’s hair could sometimes change her world. That was something I never lost.
Chapter 3
MARCH 1961
My friend Sukey had thick, short, straight black hair. And the largest jewelry collection of any girl I knew. I met her when we were in the third grade at La Luna River School.
M’Dear and Aunt Helen had taken me and my best friend, Renée, to see Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea at the Moon Palace Theater. Renée and I have known each other almost since we were born. We played together every day and had both discovered Nancy Drew. We had secret codes and we knew things that nobody else did. We were so close that each of us had pajamas and toothbrushes at each other’s house.
Before the show Renée and I went to the ladies’ powder room off the lobby, and there was a petite little girl with black hair and very blue eyes standing next to the sink. Her hair was cut short and she had this very cute turquoise satin purse with mysterious things inside, and I couldn’t see what all. There were two other girls standing next to her.
“That’s it,” the short-haired girl said. “Your time for looking at my royal jewels is over.” One of the other two girls said, “Please let us look some more.”
The girl smiled at Renée and me, and we smiled back. I was glad to have her smile at me, but I would’ve liked it better if her turquoise purse was mine.
“No, I’m sorry,” she said to the little girls. “I have to go. I have people all over town waiting for me.”
I washed my hands, then I edged myself over and stared inside the turquoise purse. All I could see before that girl shut it so fast was that it had a velveteen lining and a little place inside where ladies put their compacts. But she just snapped it shut like that! Right in my face. Not one iota of courtesy in that girl’s body.
“You could’ve snapped my nose off,” I told her.
“Well, don’t put it so close into my pocketbook.”
If I had that pocketbook, I would call it a “purse.” Someone who didn’t even know what to call it should not even have that little turquoise purse.
I just took Renée’s hand, and we went back into the dark theater where M’Dear and Aunt Helen were sitting. We didn’t even give that purse girl a good-bye.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is about a submarine named the Seaview that’s supposed to save the world after a meteor starts a fire in the sky. The fire is making the earth really hot, and everyone will die if the fire can’t be put out. Well, that’s the way it is here in La Luna every summer! Everybody thinks they will die of the heat, but they never do. After a while Renée and I got tired of listening to the movie people talk about the heat, so we slipped out of our seats again and we went back to see if that girl was still in the ladies’ room. She was, and this time she was taking a younger girl’s hard-earned allowance money.
I whispered to Renée, “Nancy Drew!” which was our private code for needing to do something brave. I pushed the ladies’ room door all the way open and said, “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
The purse girl didn’t even look at me.
“Shut up,” she said. “If you shut your big mouth, I’ll show you my treasures.”
She charged us a nickel to open her purse and let us try on her jewels. She had a plastic ring, three Mardi Gras necklaces, a silver dollar, a charm bracelet that was very heavy and smelled like iron, a purple ring with purple and green rare gems, and another ring that was 24-karat gold. “In case you didn’t know,” she said.
Then she pointed to a ring with a big white clear stone. “That diamond used to belong to Elizabeth Taylor,” she told us. When I asked her where she got her hands on all those jewels, she just looked at me and said, “That’s none of your beeswax. I am doing you a big favor just by letting you look at them.”
Renée pulled on my elbow and whispered, “I think we better leave her alone.”
But I said, “How do we know that those jewels don’t belong to someone else? How do we know she didn’t steal that ring from Elizabeth Taylor?”
The girl said, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave this ladies’ room on the double!”
So we left and went back into the theater. But I was bored with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I thought there’d be more sea monsters, but the only thing exciting was when the giant octopus attacked the Seaview. I whispered to Renée, “Let’s go back to the ladies’ room again.”
Sure enough, that short-haired girl was still there, and this time she was wrestling with a bigger girl. “Help!” she said, “help me! This girl is stealing my royal jewels!” “Nancy Drew!” I said, and jumped in and helped push the bigger girl away. “Leave her alone! Those are her jewels,” I said.
That other girl asked me, “Are you two in cahoots?”
“No,” I told her. I didn’t know what the word cahoots meant, but I wasn’t saying so.
Then that bigger girl pointed to this little green bracelet that the short-haired girl was clutching. “I just got that bracelet out of the machine with my own quarter!” she said. “And this little pipsqueak jumped up and grabbed it out of my hands. Do y’all know how long I had to work to get that quarter?”
She took another big swipe to try to grab the green bracelet, but the short-haired girl jumped up on the sink, just jumped right up there before you could blink! Ping! Easy as that, like a bunny.
“No!” she was saying, “it’s mine! This is my emerald bracelet! Mine! Help me, please, these are my special treasures. Mine and mine alone.” She was almost crying then.
“How do I know you are telling the truth?” I asked the bigger girl.
Just then, the short-haired girl jumped down from the sink and skittered out the door.
“Do you know her?” the big girl asked me.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Well, she is a dirty rotten thief!” she said, and headed out the door. Renée and I were right behind her, wondering who the girl with the jewels really was.
One warm afternoon a week later, M’Dear stopped at the library to pick up a record that she was going to use in our next recital. As she and Aunt Helen chatted with some friends, Renée and I checked out some more Nancy Drew books. Then we walked on home, went into the backyard, and sat down under our old chinaberry tree to read them. Little daffodils and crocuses had sprouted up and dotted the grass around us with bright yellow and purple, and all the air smelled sweet. Suddenly, a girl dropped down on us, right out of the tree! Like a coconut!
It was the short-haired purse girl. “Thank you for helping save my rare treasures,” she said. She was wearing a little green top and shorts. You could just tell she was pretending to be Peter Pan.
“Well, I just hope that really was your green bracelet and that you didn’t steal it.”
“I did not steal a single thing. I only came here today to show you my jewels. If you’re going to accuse me of stealing, I will just leave right now.”
“No, please. Show us what you have.”
“Okay,” she said. “Because y’all were so nice to me, y’all can try them on for two cents. I won’t charge you my normal price of a nickel. You get to view them for only two cents! A very big savings and bargain to y’all for one and only one day only.”
She opened her turquoise purse, pulled out a handkerchief, and laid everything out on it. She told us that the bracelet the big girl was trying to get was truly a ceremony bracelet, found only on small islands far away.
“The only reason that I even have it,” she said, “is because my father was a prince, but he died. He left my mother the jewels of his kingdom to show his love, and my mother allowed me to keep some as my very own.”
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
She rolled her eyes up. Her eyes were huge. You co
uld skip rope inside them. “Sukey,” she said. “My name is Sukey.”
“I have never heard that name before. Where does it come from?”
“From a kingdom far away and long ago.”
Renée was reaching back and straightening her ponytail, taking it in and out of its barrette, something she always does when she is nervous. “Renée, that’s not good for your hair,” I told her. “You’re going to break off that outside part and have short hairs all over your head.”
“You sure act like you know a lot about hair,” Sukey said.
“M’Dear—that’s my mother—is the beautician at the Crowning Glory Beauty Porch, and she knows everything there is to know about hair, that’s a known fact.” I reached out to touch Sukey’s shiny black hair, but she jumped away.
“Sukey, what’s your last name? Where did you come from?” I asked. “Where do you go to school? Who are your parents? Why haven’t we ever met you before?”
“You better stop asking me all those questions or I’ll take away my jewels and you’ll never see them again. Then I’ll hit you on the head.”
Well, I figured she was bluffing, like Sonny Boy does when somebody tries to make him afraid. And besides, I was bigger than she was.
“I was just asking,” I told her.
“My royal mother, whose name is Queen Sally, and me came here from another town, and we live in a very big castle over there.”
She pointed in the direction of Pearl Street, toward the part of town where most of the Negroes live.
“There’s no castle over there,” I said.
Sukey started closing up her little turquoise pouch of jewels, and she began to cry real tears, not alligator fake ones.
“Welcome to our town,” Renée said quickly, trying to distract her. “My name is Renée Jeansonne. I am in third grade at La Luna River School. My daddy is the pharmacist at the La Luna Drugstore. His name is Mister James Jeansonne, and my mother’s name is Mrs. Anita Jeansonne. I like welcoming new people such as you to town. We don’t get a lot.”
Sukey looked at her like she was shocked that Renée was being so nice. All she could say was “Oh.”
I felt so bad for asking Sukey all those questions when I should have been nice like Renée. So I told her, “I am Calla Lily Ponder. M’Dear’s name is Lenora Ponder, and my papa’s name is Will Senior, and they have Will and Lenora’s Swing ’N Sway Dance Studio. You can come and dance with us sometime.”
“Well,” she said, “my name is Sukey Signette and my mother’s name is Sally, and we just moved here from Shreveport, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, before that, and Beaumont, Texas, before that. But La Luna is where Mama grew up. Where she and—um, well, he wasn’t my real father, but my mama’s first husband—they both grew up here.”
“I guess that makes you a princess, huh?” I said. “But your real father was the prince, right?”
Sukey started rubbing her face in her hands. “Kind of,” she said, so softly I could hardly hear her.
“Well, we’re glad you came to live here with us,” Renée told her.
“Okay,” Sukey said to Renée, and she lifted her hands from her face. Her face was all blotchy. I watched her as she gathered her jewels piece by piece, the ones that really looked like Mardi Gras necklaces, the emerald bracelet, her silver dollar, the rings of purple and green rare gems, the solid gold one, and the big white Elizabeth Taylor diamond that glinted in the light coming in through the canopy of the chinaberry tree.
Back at home, helping M’Dear peel and chop up potatoes to boil, I told her about the emeralds and rubies in the ladies’ room, and about Sukey. “Scrub those potatoes good, you hear,” she said to me.
I asked her, “With all those jewels, why do you think Queen Sally and Sukey live over there in that part of town?”
M’Dear turned to me and told me she knew Sally, Sukey’s mother, from when they were little girls through the middle of high school, when Sally left La Luna.
“So is it true, M’Dear? Was Sukey’s father a prince, and are Sukey and her mother royal?” To think that I had a new friend who was a princess!
M’Dear told me, “Sukey is royal. I’m not so sure the jewels are real, but all people are royal, Calla. They don’t need to own jewels. That’s better, really, because then nobody can steal them.” M’Dear plopped our bowl of peeled potatoes into the pot of boiling water. Then she reached over and caressed my cheek.
I could hardly get to sleep that night. How could I sleep after just finding out that we are all kings and queens, princes and princesses?
Chapter 4
1962
Every summer morning I woke up early, pulled on my swimsuit, and ran down the piney path to the river. Swimming in the La Luna River, watching that sunrise, was my way of praying.
And I loved climbing trees. I loved discovering branches that would hold me up while I looked out on the ground. I would put my head close to the bark and I could hear the tree breathing, and I would kiss the trees.
I imagined that the trees and I were dancing. After all, M’Dear taught me that everything danced. In my closet up on a shelf where I kept my special things—feathers, marbles that my brothers didn’t like because they were chipped—I kept branches from trees I loved. I was known for being a scrambler up trees, so I could reach the tiny ones.
“It’s your long legs,” my brothers would say. “You have the longest legs on a girl that we’ve ever seen.”
One particular morning, when I was nine years old, I had a little extra time after my swim and it just felt too early to be climbing trees, so I walked around town. I liked seeing La Luna before it woke up. It made me feel like my town was a baby sleeping, all sweet and good.
I loved to visit the La Luna Garden Café where Leon was up at four every morning making the French bread to go with the gumbo or red beans and rice or cold shrimp dumped out on newspaper. Some people like Saltines, but my family and me like French bread on the side to balance out the zing of the cocktail sauce. Leon was one of my buddies. He was going to join the Marines soon, something that made me sad. Why do people have to go off to war, leaving us back home never knowing if they’ll come back? But he promised he’d be back. He didn’t talk much, but whenever I showed up, he smiled and gave me big hunks of fresh bread on a paper plate, with fresh butter on the side. I would put the butter on and quickly eat the fresh bread, letting the butter drip down the front of my swimming suit, knowing I could quickly rinse off under the outdoor shower when I got home.
We didn’t have a Greyhound bus station in La Luna, so the bus just stopped behind the Garden Café. There I was, all dripping with butter, when the bus pulled up that morning. Nobody from around here was getting on, so I watched to see if anybody got off. Almost always it would be someone I knew: Mrs. Matthews coming back from Shreveport, where her son Michael had a job. Or Janie Gerard coming back from seeing her boyfriend, who was stationed at Fort Polk.
The Greyhound bus door swung open, and I wondered who might be coming home from a trip this time. Eating my French bread, concentrating on each bite—oh, it tasted so good that I called out, “I’m telling you, Leon, you have outdone yourself. This bread is perfect!”
And that’s when I saw the stranger! He was a kid about my age. I kept waiting for some adults to get off with him, but he was the only person to get off the bus. All by himself. With blond hair sticking up all over the place, scruffy-looking all over. I watched the bus pull away, the sound of that big engine and the smell of those fumes. Who could be out here this early in the morning?
He caught my eye and then he turned away. Leon was back inside the shop, so it was only this scruffy-looking boy and me. He carried a suitcase in his arms. The handle on the suitcase was broken, and something about him seemed broken too. His eyes darted around like he was trying to get his bearings, but didn’t want me to see him doing it. But I did see. There I was, standing there barefoot, with a towel wrapped around my waist.
I wiped some butter off my chi
n and walked over to the stranger.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you looking for?”
“None of your business,” he said, and then started walking away from me in the direction of the River School.
“Where’re you headed?”
“None of your business.”
“I’m Calla Lily Ponder,” I said, stepping in front of him. “You want some French bread?”
“I could step on your toe if I wanted to.”
“Why do you want to do that?” I asked.
Finally he looked at me. “Just leave me alone.”
“Okay, I can take a hint,” I said, and started in the direction of home.
When I was about a block away, the stranger yelled, “Where’s the Tuckers’ house?”
“I’m headed in that direction. You can just follow me.”
“No,” he said. “I was just curious.”
Sheesh. “Okay, it’s down this way,” I said, and kept on walking. I wasn’t going to stand around while someone treated me like I had a bad case of cooties. But I couldn’t help turning around just once to look at him.
Later at lunch, M’Dear told us that the Tuckers’ grandson had come to live with them. “I want y’all to be very nice and welcome him to La Luna,” she said.
We all answered, “Yes, ma’am.”
We had to wait an hour after lunch before we could go back down to the river and swim.
That afternoon, Sonny Boy, Will, Renée, Sukey, me, and our friend Eddie were laying on the beach. I can remember the swimming suit I had that year. It was a racer-back, showing almost nothing, and my legs stuck out so long and skinny. Renée wore a one-piece with a strap around the neck and strawberries on the front, with a little ruffle down the side, all modest. Her hair was almost white-blond in the summers. And Sukey wore a little yellow two-piece. Sukey was a tiny thing.