Crossing the Line by Bibi Belford

Author:Bibi Belford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Published: 2017-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

BEFORE I KNOW IT JULY 4th comes. Ma makes a picnic and we take the trolley to Sixty-Third Street Beach, not our usual beach. A brand-new bathing pavilion just got built and Ma wants to see it. Along Garfield Boulevard I see signs pounded into the trees: NEGROES GO HOME. WE WILL GET YOU. What a lousy thing to do on a holiday.

Mary sure acts strange. She walks weird, like a peacock, sticking out her chest with her chin up in the air, and she sits all prim and proper on her towel. Me and Anna play in the sand and the water, but when I dump a bucket on Mary, Ma gets mad at me. Then Ma gets mad at Mary ’cause she walks to the pavilion without her cover-up on. Boys whistle. Gol dang. Girls are weird.

We eat our picnic and drink our sodas, a special treat Ma brought from the diner. Everybody is supposed to be drinking sodas and nothing else, now that they have wartime prohibition, but I still see plenty of folks with bottles that ain’t soda. All Chicago went crazy the night before the law started on July 1. The paper said folks spent two million dollars buying liquor.

Ma says the diner and the grocer been selling out of raisin cakes, on account of how the raisins can go belly-up and ferment into wine. I asked Ma what will happen to Mr. Beatty and his love of the poison, and she said there’s plenty of doctors that applied for special licenses just for that problem. I sure hope they help Mr. Beatty—for Timmy and his ma’s sake.

As we’re sitting there, I notice all around me are white people, no blacks. I notice these things, these days. After Foster’s daddy and the newspaper articles. I watch for these things on the street and in the paper. They say the North is the new South, the flood of Southerners bringing the race problems to Chicago when they come.

But I don’t think so. I think the race problem is like a sliver. Once you got it in you, it just takes a little irritation to make it dig in deeper and fester. And it seems a whole lot of people in Chicago just realized they been having slivers in them for their whole life.

We sit together on the blanket and watch the fireworks reflected in Lake Michigan. The booms echo off the buildings. Do they let shell-shocked soldiers watch the fireworks? What is my da thinking? Can he remember good stuff, or only bad? Does he remember fireworks with me and Mary? Or only war and death?

I won’t let him go to war again. Instead, I will go. And nobody will stop me.

I lean over so Ma can hear me. “You don’t got to worry about Da going back to war. I’m going to join up in the Field Artillery.”

“There aren’t going to be any more wars. They signed that treaty a week ago,” Ma says.

I forgot about that.

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