I Dwell in Possibility. Toni McNaron

that word. Though I often took spiteful pleasure in disobeying my mother, about this subject I lived up to her demand. I did that because I loved Hettie and Josephine more than almost anybody in my life and because they loved me back through the dense barriers of race. But their love had to filter through an ingrained and justified fear and hatred of my whiteness. They surely made distinctions between me and the faceless white boys who shot up their front yards with BB guns. For all I know, they defended me against names used within their own world for the racist bigots who lounged on the street corners of town. But the trap of racism held us, so I have to live with knowing that my love for them was mixed with my liking having power over someone in my world, and their love for me was interlaced with ambiguity and maintained at perhaps too high a price to their own sense of selfhood.

      A black man named Charlie Teague mowed our lawn once a week and helped my mother in her large garden. He was very big and dark and full of an infectious laugh that hid his worries from whites. While he cut the grass or weeded, he sang or talked to himself. His monologues were hard to follow, since the whole left side of his face was full of Brown Mule chewing tobacco. After my disaster with snuff, I stood in awe of him: how did Charlie stay upright with all that raw tobacco lodged in his mouth? Every five minutes of so, he shot out a long, straight stream of juice that arced perfectly through the hot air to land with a mighty splat on the sidewalk or in the gutter or the dust.

      I felt proud when Charlie deigned to talk to me instead of himself. He would stop work, wipe sweat off his face, and listen to my latest story. During the 1940s, like most children, I had a helmet and machine gun. I also carried an old World War I medal my father had given me, and a lot of hostility that emerged when I played soldier. Charlie indulged my fantasies by calling me Sergeant, or, when he felt especially playful, Sarge. He would pretend to take orders from me about mowing or weeding, answering me with a mock salute and a “Yessir, Sarge, whatever you say.”

      One July day, Charlie was working in our side yard, overgrown with high weeds because my mother had recently been in the hospital to see if a lump in her breast was malignant. He was using a big sickle that had once been fire engine red and was almost as tall as I. Deciding that I wanted to swing that sickle, I asked Charlie for it. When he demurred, pleading that it was too heavy for me, I commanded him as a white army sergeant to let me use that tool. He obeyed as a black hired man.

      Feeling cocky, I swung the big blade out to the right. That part went fine, but then the sickle fell back toward me, grazing my right big toe. A large slice of me went with it, stuck to the grassy blade, and my toe began to bleed. Afraid it would not stop, I held my toe under the yard hose, since cold water had often stopped my nicks and cuts from bleeding. This had no effect except to make little pools of reddish water in the dust. Charlie was scared speechless and did not even bother to say “I told you so.” What difference would that make to my hysterical mother when she found out that he let me swing the blade?

      After a long time, my blood slowed enough for me to walk a few steps in my sandals before having to mop my toe. I sneaked into the house and ran for my room to put on socks to hide the wound. Lunch was ready, and Mamie expected me to take Charlie’s tray out to him as I usually did. He ate what we did, even if he had special dishes that stayed in the basement. His tea was served in an old Blue Plate mayonnaise quart jar full of ice cubes and a lemon slice. Once I asked why Charlie’s dishes were kept in our basement when Hettie Holmes’s special plates were just stacked on a separate shelf in the kitchen. Whatever Mamie said, the message was that since Charlie was a man, he did dirtier things than Hettie when he was at home or on the streets.

      Eager not to arouse any suspicion by my delay, I hurriedly pulled on the darkest blue and red socks I owned, strapped on my sandals and walked to the kitchen to get the tray. By now my toe was throbbing, but I refused to limp or show any signs of pain. When I took the tray out to Charlie, he was still wearing a look of terror, but I smiled innocently and told him just to call if he wanted more corn or iced tea. Back inside, my socks soaked up the blood, and I got through lunch. When I took them off, later, blood had clotted so thickly that the right one had to be gently peeled away. I never told on Charlie, and Charlie never told on me. Occasionally one of us would make a veiled reference to “the blade” or “that big toe” and fall into gales of laughter.

      Every fall I saved enough of my allowance to let me buy Charlie a Christmas present: several plugs of Brown Mule and a quart of Mogen David red wine, his favorite thing to drink. Mamie gave him old shirts and pants of my father’s plus some food she made. Charlie always showed delight over his presents, laughing more than usual, breaking off an extra big chew of tobacco since he felt flush with his supply from me, talking loudly about “what wonderful white folks ya’ll are.”

      Like other black people in my life, at some point Charlie simply vanished. By that time, I had stopped asking where they went or why they no longer came to our house, but I never learned to stop missing them.

      In 1950, while American soldiers were killing Asians in Korea, I entered a high school full of white boys who rode through the black section of town at night and on weekends, shooting it up or throwing glass bottles into streets, onto lawns, against sides of houses. All that seemed very far away to me as I struggled vainly to keep my starched Peter Pan collars straight, my bobby socks rolled to just the right length, and my lipstick on past second period math. I had trouble making friends my own age and often felt lonely. I have almost no clear memories of those years.

      But I do remember sitting on my bed for hours, looking out my burglar-barred windows at the alley, the three houses down its slope, and further off, the expanse of dwellings that made up the black neighborhood. In my yearning for something I could not have named, I romanticized the people who lived there even as I continued to benefit from my automatically privileged position. We were all caught in the web of southern racism and sexism. Those blacks who lived in solid brick houses on paved streets in the center of their community near churches and food markets were imprisoned by their color. Once out of their neat yards filled with tall red-orange callas and prize-quality roses, they were as vulnerable as their poorest fellows living in wooden shanties along dirt roads full of potholes. Similarly, though hardly with the same possibilities of permanence, when I ventured away from my house and yard into the larger world of white teenage activities, I felt like an exposed failure, no matter how many A’s or honors I accumulated.

      One night during this time stands vividly in my memory. I awoke to an eerie glow, sat up in bed, and raised my shade. Columns of flame deep inside the black section frightened me enough to cause me to wake my parents. We heard faint sounds of one or two fire engines though the flames ranged over blocks, burning out of control. (Blacks depended on the city of Fairfield for public services, so I suspect one or two engines was all they ever got.) I sat on the edge of my bed crying until almost daylight, long after Mamie and Daddy had gone back to bed and encouraged me to do the same. The flames finally subsided, replaced by ominous clouds of black and then ugly grey smoke. To me, it seemed as though that smoke came from the people, not the fire. Years later when I saw pictures of columns of smoke from the ovens of the Holocaust, I would flash back to that night in Alabama.

      Though I searched the white newspaper for several days, I found no word about the big fire. There was lots of news about the local domino club’s victory over a neighboring team, majorettes from Fairfield High who attended a conference of other majorettes, the latest discount on chicken at the Piggly Wiggly—nothing about what must have been the worst fire in my town’s history. I wanted to go see where it had been, but my parents refused to take me near the place. When Josephine came to work the next day, I asked her about it, but she brushed me off, saying, “Some folks say white boys from the high school lit a Coke bottle filled with gasoline-coated rags and threw it into some lady’s yard, but I’m sure it was just old newspapers stacked in a building.” I remembered the stories about boys at school who routinely invaded the black world, looking for idle amusement, and I knew who started the fire. Breaking my silence about that fire now, forty years later, I feel a ferocity coupled with that sense of helplessness that was to wash over me more often the older I got.

       Child’s Play

      “Toni’s so talented—she can amuse herself for