Lucky
Lucky
1999
B az was laughing so hard, he toppled onto the grass and lay there on his back. Ebby threw herself on the ground to imitate her big brother. Dried leaves tickled Ebby’s back through her shirt. The sun bore down on her, turning her scalp damp, her skin salty. Kitchen sounds drifted over the yard from her grandmother’s house toward the small orchard where she and Baz lay. She could smell the season’s peaches ripening in the tree above her. They would end up in a nice big pie before long.
She and Baz were the luckiest kids in the world.
“I heard you two making a ruckus out there,” Grandma Bliss said when they went back inside. She was chopping up parsley, her pink-painted nails and diamond ring bright against her long brown fingers. She insisted on making lunch herself whenever they visited, though she left the making of dinner and all the grocery shopping to the cook. Grandma Bliss lowered her chin, now, and looked at Baz and Ebby over the glossy, dark frames of her eyeglasses with an expression that said, You didn’t go out front, did you?
Their mother’s parents lived in a historic house with a wraparound porch that tourists slowed down to gaze at, mostly during the autumn leaf-peeping season, but also in the summertime. Ebby and Baz were never allowed to play in the front yard, on account of the tourists.
“No horsing around out there,” Grandma would say. “Let’s keep the yard looking tidy.”
But they could play in the back, which had all that space, and those fruit trees, and the tiny pond where bullfrogs would make their funny jugarum noises. Unless, of course, their grandmother was getting ready to host one of her sorority events, in which case the entire place would be off-limits. Grandma would have the driver pick them all up and take them out for a few hours while the gardeners got to work pruning and raking.
Grandma Bliss liked to remind them that hers was the oldest black sorority in existence, formed at a time when African American university students had to establish their own Panhellenic associations in order to be accepted into one. Ebby understood that the sorors met mostly to discuss community service, a vague label she took to mean helping other people, in the way that their own kids’ social club focused on volunteer projects. She just wasn’t sure why this required having a pin-neat garden when the women generally met inside and lolled around on sofas in the air-conditioned living room, picking at finger foods.
Earlier, Ebby and Baz had heard the sound of a loudspeaker approaching and had run over to the side of the house to peek. A silver van slowed to a crawl as it passed the broad driveway in front of their grandparents’ home, and Ebby and Baz craned their necks over a hydrangea bush to hear the tour guide’s voice. The guide was talking about their mother’s family. How their grandma’s grandmother had been one of the first African American female physicians in the state of Massachusetts. And how the doctor’s father had owned so much land that he’d sold some of it to the growing city of Springfield.
“The husband of the current owner,” the voice on the loudspeaker said, “is a prominent attorney, but before that, he was one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.” The guide went on to explain that Grandpa Bliss had been part of the elite corps of African American pilots who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.
“The Tuskegee Airmen flew more than twice as many combat missions, on average, than white pilots,” said the tour guide, “and still, they were made to use separate officers’ clubs from their white colleagues. When some of them protested, they were arrested. Witnessing these events influenced Lemuel Bliss’s professional direction. Bliss later studied law and went on to spend much of his distinguished career teaching, upholding, and working to refine laws related to civil rights.”
Ebby followed Baz back to the rear of the house. Baz was nodding as he walked. Ebby knew Baz thought it was kinda cool that Bliss House was a tourist attraction. But not Ebby. When other kids at school asked Ebby about her family, she didn’t like it at all. Even at age nine, Ebby felt that people were being nosy, not really interested in her as a kid. Mostly they seemed interested in her father’s side of their family, in how the Freemans came to have the kind of money that had allowed her parents to move them into their part of town.
At least, up here in Massachusetts, her family was part of local history. Her parents had always told her and Baz that they needed to watch their mouths and mind their manners, because being the grandchildren of the Freemans or the Blisses meant something in Massachusetts. That it wasn’t about their wealth so much as their heritage, education, and social refinement. The Freemans had been in the area long before it had been called Refuge County. They, too, had produced a series of African American pioneers, including their own early contributions to the ranks of local women in medicine.
Their grandfather on the Freeman side had led the campaign to change the county’s name, to reflect the role it had played in sheltering people who had escaped enslavement with the help of free blacks, whites, and Native Americans. No matter that the Freemans’ historically African American community had never been exclusively so, or that its black population had, in reality, thinned out to just a few families on opposite ends of the county. No matter that everyone else had long since moved east toward Boston or south to other American cities and suburbs.
Their family homes were still there, and the Freemans, in particular, were proud that they still lived in a house that used to stand all alone on a dirt road. The main house was now triple its original size and surrounded by other elegant homes, and their property had been profiled in style and culture magazines. Often enough that Ebby’s granny no longer bothered to frame the articles.
“Appearances do matter,” Granny Freeman once told Ebby. “I’m not saying that you have to be as fussy about things as your Grandma Bliss.” She laughed then because Ebby had opened her mouth wide in a breathy ohhh of surprise. “But your mom’s mother and I both agree on this point. Because for so long, we colored folks have been made to live with the message that our looks, our lifestyles, and our histories aren’t up to snuff. Well, we want to make sure people know that we are proud of our lives.”
But in Connecticut, where Ebby and Baz were growing up, her family had no real past to speak of. Even at her age, she could see that the one thing that made them stand out was simply being a well-to-do black family living near the surf club. There were plenty of other students from wealthy families in her class, but Ebby was the only one who was African American.
Sometimes, when Ebby was in the supermarket or at the post office near home, trailing behind her mother, she would see a question flit like a shadow across a person’s face as her mom walked by. The question boiled down to something like What are you doing here? She could read the question as plainly as if someone had spoken the words out loud. A couple of the kids at school had, in fact, said those actual words to Ebby, and they had made her feel a kind of panic. Ebby was there because she had always been there, living with her big brother, and her mom and dad, in a dove-gray house with a view of the Sound.
Where else in the world was she supposed to be?