A Sky Full of Stars by Linda Williams Jackson

Author:Linda Williams Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Chapter Seventeen

Saturday, December 3

I REMEMBER ONCE, WHEN I WAS ABOUT ELEVEN YEARS OLD, I asked Mama if I could go to Greenwood with her. Often when she, Mr. Pete, Sugar, and Lil’ Man would come to visit, they would giggle and grin about the games they had played along the drive.

I Spy. That was the name of one of the games. And sometimes they would continue playing it even after they had reached the house.

“I spy with my little eye . . . something green,” Mama said.

“A leaf!” Sugar cried.

Mama grinned slyly and pointed at the bottom of the tree. “Fooled ya,” she said. “It’s the stuff on the bottom of the tree.”

I smiled and said, “It’s called moss.”

Mama frowned at me and quit playing the game.

After that they never again continued their games once they reached our house. Though the games sounded silly and pointless, they made me long to go for a car ride along the highway just the same. Now, two years later, I was finally in a car, riding along the highway, but I knew I was too old to play a game called I Spy with Hallelujah and Reverend Jenkins. Besides, there wasn’t much to see except harvested cotton fields. And every town we drove through looked the same—​like Stillwater. I don’t know what I expected, but I was a little disappointed that I discovered nothing new on the drive from Stillwater to Mound Bayou.

But driving into Mound Bayou was totally different. Not only did it look different, it felt different. It felt safe.

“Here we are,” Reverend Jenkins called from the front seat. “Mound Bayou. Mississippi’s all-Negro town. Founded by Negroes. Run by Negroes.”

Hallelujah peered back at me from the front passenger seat and smiled. I smiled back.

Reverend Jenkins continued. “The late, great Booker T. Washington himself once praised Mound Bayou as a place where a Negro can get inspiration by seeing what other members of his race have accomplished.”

Booker T. Washington was a name Miss Johnson had mentioned often, but there was nothing written about him in our history texts. Miss Johnson said he was so smart that he advised presidents even though he himself had been born a slave. I supposed Mrs. Robinson and her church club had never heard of him, since they felt that colored children couldn’t learn as fast as white children.

“And I agree with Mr. Washington,” Hallelujah chimed in. He gestured toward the window. “You see these stores? Negro-owned. Every last one of them.” He turned to me and grinned. “If that doesn’t convince you that colored people can do the same things as whites, I don’t know what will.”

As Reverend Jenkins’s car slowly cruised down a main street, it wasn’t the stores that I took note of. It was the people. They all looked the same. They all had brown skin. Like me. And they all walked together on the sidewalk—​no one was stepping aside so someone of a lighter color could have more space.

I gasped as we approached

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