Gone Missing in Harlem by Karla FC Holloway

Author:Karla FC Holloway [Holloway, Karla FC]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northwestern University Press

14

A Wild Tangle

IN THE DAYS BEFORE SHE STITCHED TOGETHER HER WHITE DRESS, Selma pushed her daughter’s pram down the street. She walked the three blocks past her elementary school, PS 119, beyond the pawnshop, and toward the corner where the church stretched across one side of the block and then down the other. It was a long walk, but she had a particular destination. The first week she’d gone to the park with Chloe. But then she found a more secluded spot in the churchyard that felt safer. When she got to the corner church, she walked past its massive stone steps, turned the corner, and pushed the pram past the row of arched windows to where a small iron gate opened onto the side yard. Down that stone path lay the gardens and burial grounds. She reached inside the gate (she knew it latched from behind), lifted the lever, and maneuvered the shaded pathway toward the back.

The grounds were small, but there were enough headstones to show the church had some history—folks to bury as well as folks to baptize. If the groundsmen left a pile of newly turned earth pushed up against the far wall, it meant that somewhere would be a cleared space waiting for a Saturday service. There would likely be a tent lying folded nearby, ready to erect to shelter the family. Early on the day of the burial, the undertaker’s maintenance men would drop off some wooden chairs, just enough for immediate kin and not too many to fit under the tent, along with a lectern where the Right Reverend would speak whatever final words there would be. Folks buried in this churchyard had means. Episcopals were select like that. Even though they were colored, the seriousness of their rituals matched any of the white congregation down in Manhattan. They were the only Harlem church with a burial grounds, and even though a lot of the tombstones there did not belong to black folks, and had been established before Harlem took on its newest group of immigrants, the colored congregation took pride in having one—especially if they could afford to occupy one of the few plots left for members only. The congregation spent a good deal of its annual budget on keeping the grounds pristine. Selma took notice of the preparations, and whether the clearing was small and made to fit a child’s casket rather than an adult’s. This Saturday’s body was almost certainly a child’s. The small grave waiting to receive the casket and the tiny pile of dirt beside it seemed a mere mound barely rising past the earth it would need to fill.

Selma learned how the day’s patterns practiced a churchyard routine. She knew when the sunlight would hit the bench under the chestnut tree, which patch of violets were ready to open and spill over and cover the in‑ground markers, what shadows would hit the stained-glass windows and hide the figures so it seemed as if someone were missing from the biblical text she’d memorized as a child.

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