Dream Country by Shannon Gibney

Author:Shannon Gibney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A SMALL BRICK HOUSE nestled between two colored churches. I have never been there, but everyone says that it is the most hospitable and clean-looking house in the whole part of town. The white man from the colonization society had laughed when he said that last part, his generous stomach jiggling and threatening to burst his shirt. Yasmine hadn’t understood exactly what was so funny about that, but she surmised that it had something to do with the notion that a Negro home could actually be clean. If you can’t find it for some reason, just ask anyone over there for the Medger family, and they will direct you. But I don’t think you will have any problems, there or in the voyage back home.

They had been walking for some time, farther and farther away from the slave auction, until the whole affair became a tiny dot on the horizon and, she hoped, in their collective memory.

They passed the shipyards, where poor white men worked alongside poor, but free, black men. The smell of the wood, oakum, cotton, and putty was overpowering, as was the foul language the men spit at one another.

“You half-witted bitch,” a squat man with far too much hair yelled to his humongous counterpart. “I told you that treenail was bad! But like a nigger girl’s cunt, you just had to stink up this whole process because you thought you knew better than the rest of us, didn’t you, you goddamn piss-for-brains piece of shit.”

Yasmine couldn’t help it; she stood there gaping at the man with the indecent mouth.

“Mama, when we gonna eat?” Big George asked, yawning. Yasmine broke from her reverie and started walking again, Nolan in tow, fervently hoping that the boys had heard none of it. “I need me some food,” Big George said again, the incident at the slave auction, and his overpowering need to act, clearly gone from his mind.

Yasmine felt the few coins in her purse and sighed. She hoped they would be enough to buy them a few items for the journey to the other side and whatever they might need once they arrived. She knew, however, that it would not be nearly enough to feed all of them well in the interim.

“Dinner at the guesthouse,” she told him simply, and began to walk faster. The Medger family, while being blessed enough to be free, was obviously not blessed enough to avoid working for the likes of the men in the shipyard. She shook her head; the more she saw of this state, this country, its cities, countryside and plantations, the more convinced she became that there was, in fact, no place for them here. Coloreds were like fish out of water, and she would rather eat refuse than spend a lifetime trying to learn how to swim on land. She could see the logic of the white man at the podium that day last spring, talking about how coloreds and whites were two completely separate beings who could and should never try to live together.

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