Read an Excerpt
Me
People ask about the boy behind the door inside the house me.
Mostly Sister gets the questions.
She chases away boys girls too sometimes who wander onto our property to gawk and stare at me the one folks hardly see but everybody knows about.
Me and Sister
Hattie and me are twins not that we match exactly.
She’s two inches taller
I’m two minutes older a boy.
Eleven though I seem younger.
Maybe that’s why Hattie likes to boss me around.
But I’m the captain today anyhow.
Which means she’s got to follow my rules.
My Condition
Sometimes
I feel as small as a flea as little as the space between the numbers on a watch.
It makes living hard staying inside easier than leaving the house.
Right now
I’m on my knees on the couch by the window staring out—like usual.
Hattie’s to the right of the porch next to the gravel walkway in front of the bushes Gran asked her to trim yesterday.
It’s a boy’s job my job but given my condition
Hattie gets to take my place more than I’d like not that I like toting pails feeding chickens milking.
The Way Things Are
We live in Seed County, North Carolina.
Daddy is in Detroit working.
Here, it’s me
Gran and Hattie in the house.
Uncle comes by now and again.
He don’t like me much.
Hattie’s Way
How many times you got to call a girl before she answers?
One time?
Two times?
Ten?
“Hattie Mae!” I say again.
Outside past the porch she squats low picks up a rope that came from Detroit wrapped around a box of new dresses sent to her by Daddy.
She holds both ends swings that rope over her head jumps
HIGH
sends dirt flying.
Still she ignores me.
Could be she’s mad at me.
This is the third time this week I said
I’d go outside try to anyhow.
Only I can’t.
Sister’s Song
Sister is dressed for Sunday when it’s only Wednesday.
She sings while she jumps hops skips.
“Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack . . .”
But as soon as her song starts it stops.
“Everybody’s got a condition,” she says.
“Pastor wheezes when he preaches.
Sneezes come spring.
Still he gets out the house.”
I get out at night, at least.
If folks looked up, there I’d be on the roof under the sky talking to Hattie the only one allowed up there besides me.
My rules even when I’m not the captain.
Lighthouses and Blue Moons
Sister takes her sweet time walking up the pine front-porch steps sawed and nailed in place by Granddad, who built the house.
Halfway between the porch and me she stops gives Gran a hug reminds her that there’ll be a blue moon in a few months’ time.
Who don’t know that?
The almanac calls the second full moon in a month a blue moon.
It don’t happen too often.
Which makes it a big deal important unusual.
Gran calls it a wishing moon.
What you want for, wish for or need on that day is yours according to her.
Which is why Hattie is nagging me so.
If I’m to be rid of my condition she believes we need to get to the ocean on the night of the blue moon get to the lighthouse too where I was when everything changed.
Which means
I have to get out of this house first.
Only I can’t.
Why don’t folks understand that?
Ma would.
Hattie in the House
Hattie comes inside when I say I don’t feel so well.
Sister swears it’s nothing.
Just me worrying or about to.
Still she puts her hand on my forehead.
Feels like something.
Needles poke my legs.
Fire burns my toes and fingernails.
My insides hum like guitar strings just plucked.
It’s my nerves playing tricks on me
Doc Edwards claimed during his once-a-month visit.
Feels like something worse.
“Hattie,” Gran says from where she sits rocking on the porch,
“leave him be.”
Hattie stands behind me.
Hugs me.
Brings up Doc Edwards.
I shiver get cold to the bone.
My worrying is a worry to my soul brain blood and everything that makes me me
Doc Edwards said before he left town for good.
“Get him outside in the sun.
Drag him if you must,” he told Daddy not long after the accident plus a few more times besides.
Daddy never did. Never would.
He understands me good as Ma.
Ma’s Twin
Uncle said it was a fool’s errand that sent me to the ocean that night with Ma chasing after me.
More About Uncle
Uncle never did trust up-north big-city fast-talking pointy-toed-shoe-wearing folk
Negro or white not even Daddy at first.
Till Ma introduced him to Daddy’s cousin Sarah.
She’s our cousin and our aunt now.
They married ten years ago.
Got no kids just each other plus a big white house.
Uncle came back south when Gran got sick.
Ma followed.
For just a spell they both said.
Then he got a job with the railroad.
Ma started teaching.
Six-two pecan brown
Uncle dresses in clothes plain as paper bags.
Brown brown always brown.
His car is fancy, though.
His house has three floors. He built it himself.
Some nights I stayed with them. He liked me then.
Ma
If it wasn’t for Ma
I would believe what people say about me that I’m peculiar
odd a coward.
That night
Ma called me brave
strong her little man the smartest boy in Seed County.
I never told anybody that.
Rooftop
On my back on top the roof laying on a blanket with my toes aimed at the sky
I forget my troubles.
The moon lights up the night.
Lights me up inside fills me up calms me down.
Hattie too.
Sister is nearby with her birds.
Standing in front of cages stacked wide and high
Hattie looks after her treasures doves that think they’re hawks.
Twelve in all.
Only Nutcracker is free right now.
Above My Head
Nutcracker flaps his wings heads for his favorite spot a chicken-wire fence Daddy put around the roof so we don’t fall off.
Hattie sets another dove free then another till there’s ten of us on the roof one complaining—
me.
The others coo peck at seeds corn kernels dry peas that Hattie scatters in the cages on the roof and me.
I close my eyes again think about Buck Rogers who is nothing like me.
Full-grown white he lives in the twenty-fifth century five hundred years in the future.
Ray guns.
Starships.
High-frequency impulses.
I never heard of such things before his radio show.
Uncle doesn’t like it one bit.
Says Buck and me do the devil’s work by meditating on places
God never wanted folk to go
Venus
Neptune
Pluto the Milky Way the moon.
When I think on them and other things above
I don’t fear anything.
Night Trains
The train runs along the track behind our house.
Black spitting steam it heads this way on its way to the station.
Hattie’s birds squawk and swoop.
I
pretend
I’m in first class on my way to Sirius.
Captain Me
Hattie sits beside me in a rain barrel I sawed in half.
I check the controls—
buttons and knobs whittled out of wood hammered and nailed into place with my very own hands.
Sister shifts gears using an old ax handle she swings in the air.
“Ready?” I ask.
Sister salutes.
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Head protector?” I ask.
She pats her helmet
Gran’s old church hat covered in tinfoil.
“Check,” she says.
“Rocket fuel?”
Sister lifts a seltzer bottle full of well water.
“Enough for a month, sir.”
“Jet pack?”
“Yes sir.”
We got suspenders strapped on our backs stitched to feed sacks filled with dried peas handmade by Gran.
Hattie Mae licks her baby finger.
Holds it high.
“Good news, James Henry. Yesterday’s storm did not excite the wind too much.
We should make it to Neptune in record time without being blown off course.”
I bolt the cabin door shut. “Ready?”
“Set,” Hattie says.
“Blast off!” we scream.
The train rolls by.
Houses rumble and shake including ours.
Smoke from the engine nearly blinds us.
Still
I see coloreds and whites on different planets.
Neptune not that far away.
To Outer Space and Beyond
“Space rocks!” Hattie Mae hollers at the top of her lungs.
Her birds know their parts.
Most times they stay in their cages but before we got started she set ’em free eight of ’em anyhow.
Pullman circles the roof—
Squawk!—
dives down grabs buttons with his claws drops ’em on us.
Aberdeen named after Ma goes for the acorns.
Other birds pick up sticks just like Sister trained ’em.
Our anti-radiation tinfoil hats get hit from every which direction.
It doesn’t hurt us any.
It’s our rocket ship that’s damaged.
The engine cuts off.
“Sssssssss,” Sister says.
The cabin light follows.
Birds go back in their cages.
In the dark without power we drift off course—like Buck Rogers.
Down down down our spaceship goes till we’re in a part of the universe we never saw before.
Sister pulls out a flashlight.
The head is covered with cheesecloth.
Light rays shoot from it like sun through fog.
“It’s . . . so empty out here. Quiet,” I say.
Sister screams, “Aliens!”
I zap their tentacles with cow’s milk.
Point to our instruments spinning out of control.
Hattie grabs her throat. Coughs. “We’re losing oxygen. . . .
I . . . I’m dying . . . James Henry.”
She faints the way them movie stars do at the picture show flopping over the side of the rocket ship eyes crossed.
I stand up. “I . . . won’t . . . fail . . . you . . . Sister!”
“Oh goodness,” I hear Gran say from inside the house.
“The whole dang town can hear ya.”
With all my strength
I give the instruments a good hard kick.
Hattie comes to. “Thank goodness.”
Sits up claps.
A few hundred million miles later we’re floating through space in peace.
Captains Ain’t Afraid
I
shut down the engine.
“Have you ever seen anything like it, Hattie?”
“Not in all my born days.”
I unbuckle my belt decompress the hatch like Buck.
Open the door.
Check my oxygen levels.
Take off my helmet and breathe.
Space air smells sweeter than earth air.
More like them green-apple pies Gran bakes and wins prizes for.
“Up here we can drink from any fountain.
Sit in any seat we want.”
Hattie nods, then follows me out.
“When we meet those space people don’t be scared, you hear?” she says.
I beat my chest. “I’m the captain.
And captains ain’t afraid of nothing.”
Hattie floats past me because there’s no gravity in space.
Tiptoeing behind birdcages, we search for stuff we came with earlier chicken feet tree bark rabbit teeth eggshells stomped to pieces.
Things we astronauts call by other names meteorites space dust moon rocks.
“Space critters sure are messy,” Sister says.
Kneeling she picks up pine needles drops ’em into medicine bottles calls ’em alien bones.
The sound of Gran’s bell a cooking pot she hits with a wooden spoon finds us way up here in outer space.
“Suppertime! Y’all come,” she says.
We keep exploring filling our helmets with our finds lose track of time until I hear something.
“Squeak.”
I
freeze.
Seems like my heart stops too.
Hattie Mae swallows. “It’s nothing.”
It’s them and she knows it.
Sister keeps to her space job collecting marbles we plan to trade with space pirates in case we need to bargain for our lives.
“Squeak.”
My fingers find my mouth.
I chew my nails.
Between bites, I ask if she heard what I heard.
Sister lies. “No.”
“You had to, Hattie. I know it.”
I back up find the darkest part of the roof the space between the cages and the fence.
Squatting
I squeeze my eyes tight.
“Squeak.”
“Squeak.”
“James Henry. We know you up there.
You coward.”
The Baker Brothers
“Titus Baker, take this.”
“Ouch!”
Sister pitches coals over the chicken-wire fence like baseballs.
Her aim is always perfect.
Titus Baker finds that out soon enough.
“Hattie Mae,” he shouts up to us.
“Your brother’s got it coming, and you know it!”
I try to keep myself calm.
But my mind ignores me like always.
Run.
Go in the house.
Hide under the kitchen table.
My forehead gets wet as water.
Drips sweat.
I rub my eyes but cannot wipe my thoughts clean.
So
I take off running.
Pecans fly over the chicken wire like bullets hit my chest sting my neck chase Hattie’s birds rattle the rest still in cages.
I go back to where I was.
Hattie follows.
Crouching low beside me
Sister reminds me that there’s a blue moon coming and when a blue moon shows up everything is set right again.
“Everything?”
My hands tremble like collards in a December wind.
“Even me?”
I think of myself the way I used to be.
Brave.
“Even you, James Henry.
Which is why tomorrow you have to start practicing getting out the house and used to the world again.”
I want to agree but my thoughts won’t go along.
They ruminate pester worry me.
What if she’s wrong?
What if I make it to the ocean and drown once and for all this time?
The Baker Brothers Plus One
“James Henry!”
The Baker brothers live up the road a piece.
Their father’s cow always breaks free finds its way to our house.
The brothers—five of them—are mean as ground hornets.
“Want to go swimming?” Titus shouts.
He’s the eldest Baker boy.
“Don’t let me come down there,” says Hattie.
Them Bakers standing with their cousin Red bring up other things that scare me fire crowds leaving home folks touching me all except Hattie, Gran, or Daddy.
“Sister,
you won’t let ’em get up here, will you?” I ask.
“No, Brother. I won’t.”
“Gran won’t either, will she?”
“Never, James Henry.”
“And if they come they won’t find me, right?”
“They won’t get past me, James Henry.
I’ll always protect you. You and me twins.”
“But what if there’s lots of ’em sometime?
A whole crowd of ’em.
A town’s worth of kids trying to get to me.
Then what?”
“They know, James Henry, that I
can whip the whole lot of them, if I must.
We’ve been on the moon, haven’t we?
To Ursa Major and back.
Me and you can do anything.”
“Anything.”
“Yeah, twins are like that.”
I get on my knees.
Breathe in slow and easy.
Remind myself that long as Hattie is with me,
nothing bad can truly happen.
But then I smell it.
SMOKE.
Sister Saves Me, Again
Hattie tells me to stay put
Not to look.
Not to think what she already knows
I’m thinking.
What if the house burns down?
What if Gran can’t get out?
What if we’re trapped up here?
What help would I be?
I couldn’t even save Ma or Dog.
Just stood there.
Not even Hattie knows the whole story.
More smoke floats up to our planet.
I cover my nose and mouth.
Hattie calls for two birds
Wilma named after Buck Rogers’s assistant and Pullman named for the dignified hardworking sleeping-car porters who formed their very own union.
“Get ’em!” she shouts.
Hattie ain’t the captain. I am.
Sometimes she forgets that.
Like now when she jumps over the chicken-wire fence leaps to the ground with her arms wide as dragon wings.
I run to the chicken wire cheering.
The Bakers and their cousin Red run too up the road in every which direction.
Anybody would,
with Hattie and her birds chasing ’em.
