Drive past the Piggly Wiggly where Mother guys groceries. Drive all the way down the street past the old brick school where Daddy was precinct chairman and had to stay up until the middle of the night in the school cafeteria with the American flag, counting ballots once they were removed from the padlocked metal boxes. Take the next left-hand turn. You notice immediately that the car is riding differently. It is because these streets are not paved. These streets are packed dirt, caleche the color of rust. The houses on this street are tiny, really not much more than shacks. Very few of them are even painted. You pass the grocery store for this neighborhood, a shack about the size of a boxcar, weathered wood with a tattered screen door and a wooden bench out front and two round red tin Coca-Cola advertising signs. Daddy says to push down the button on the door where you are sitting in the back seat, looking out the window. He reaches over the front seat, strains around to lock the door of the back seat behind him while he keeps on driving. This is one of the streets where only black people live. You see chickens scratching in the dirt in someone's front yard. It is Easter morning and you have just finished searching out all the hard-boiled eggs your parents dyed with food coloring for you and hid in the back yard. This year, your favorite egg was pale, spring green and had a decal of a lily on it. You wonder if the children who live on this street have finished finding all their eggs by now, but you don't see a soul outside. Something fluttering catches your eye. By the front door of one of the houses, a rough wooden cross, hammered together from two planks, is rooted in the dirt. But the cross is wearing a flowered, full-skirted Easter dress, a dress about the same size as the Sunday dress you yourself are wearing there in the back seat of your parents' car. The cross is wearing a little girl's dress like a scarecrow and that is what caught your eye. Your father continues driving down the dirt road. In a couple of blocks, when the street runs out at the intersection with a paved road and your father turns left again, you realize that you are at the far end of your very own street, that your father has taken a different route home than usual.
*****
In first grade we are learning to read from books about Dick and Jane, a brother and sister our age, and Sally, their yellow-haired baby sister. Dick, Jane and Sally live on a tree-lined street in a house nicer than ours because theirs is brick and has a garage. I am pleased to see that Jane and Sally wear dresses exactly like the ones Mother sews for me: tiny neat prints with white Peter Pan collars, puffed sleeves, buttons all the way down the back, a sash to tie into a bow, full, gathered skirts that billow above my knees when I run. My teacher notices the pretty dresses Mother makes for me and when a reporter wants to do a story with photographs for the Sunday newspaper, my teacher tells him about me. The reporter comes to our house with a photographer, and they ask me to spread out all my Dick-Jane-and-Sally dresses on my bed and hold one up, pretending as if I am trying to decide which one to wear to school that day. A flashbulb goes off, blinding me. I refuse to look into the camera again during subsequent shots.
Daddy drives the car. Mother sews my dresses on her sewing machine. Daddy steps on the gas pedal in the floorboard and the car speeds forward. Mother steps on a pedal on the floor, and the sewing machine whirs. If I stand right next to her and watch the needle go up and down, I can see the row of stitches looks just like the yellow stripes that whiz by when we drive down the highway. Mother is sewing highways into my pretty dresses. Mother is making me dresses that will take me somewhere.
Mother is making me new dresses because I am always growing, even if I'm not aware of it and don't want to. She can't even get my favorite blue dress from last year to button on me, and now I will have to give it to the poor. I love this dress and my eyes fill with tears. Mother tells me to straighten up, that I am being silly. She will make me new dresses that I will like just as well as my old ones. She cleans out my closest to make room for the new things, bags up all my outgrown dresses in brown paper grocery bags. It is Thanksgiving and time to take a cardboard carton of canned goods and a turkey to those less fortunate than we are.
Daddy drives us in the car to one of the unpaved dirt streets behind our house. We pull up in front of a weathered house with a high front porch and rickety wooden steps leading up to it. Mother and I hang behind while Daddy carries the carton up the steps to the front porch. He knocks at the door screen, and a black man wearing a white shirt and a tie and a blue dress suit answers. I recognize him as the preacher at our sister church, a church where only black people can go. It is cold and my breath comes out like smoke. The preacher smiles and shakes hands with Daddy. He invites the three of us inside where we can get warm, but Daddy says we can only stay a minute. We have only come to bring this box of groceries. The preacher's children push past him and come out on the porch to get a look at me. There are six or seven of them, and they smell like copper pennies. They are fascinated with my yellow hair and one of the older girls runs her fingers through it. I want to go inside and play with them in their front room. I can see, through the door screen, their mother standing with her arms crossed, the oval of a hooked rug on the wooden floor planks and an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove with a stove pipe. Mother hands the preacher's wife the brown grocery bags that contain my outgrown clothes. The preacher and his wife thank my parents, and then it is time for us to go. As we make our way down the rickety steps I can tell from the crackle of brown paper that the children have already begun to go through the bags of my old dresses. They are probably disappointed. They probably hoped there were some toys in there.
*******
Some time deep that winter, our teacher takes our class to the windowless audio-visual room to watch a movie. We sit crowded together in folding chairs and wait, squirming, while the teacher tinkers with the projector. The new girl in our class sits next to me. She started school late, after the weather had already turned cold, and she is behind in her school work. She is very quiet, so silent that the rest of us usually forget all about her. She is not from our town. She is not from anywhere, because she is the child of migrant farm workers. She is puny, so tiny that she seems to be at least a year younger than the rest of us. And she is pale, so white that I can see blue blood vessels through the transparent skin of her fragile wrists. The bones of my own wrists seem thick compared to hers. But I have the benefit of a father who works all he wants to in the oil field and suppers complete with meat and two vegetables and milk every night. The migrant girl's hair is white-blond, so light it is almost colorless, like the silk inside an ear of corn. Because I go to church on Sundays and am a Christian, I decide to act friendly and try to get her to talk to me while we wait for the movie to start. She tells me before she came to our school she and her mother and father and brothers and sisters followed the wheat all the way to Canada, living in the back seat of their car. Her father is hoping to find some work in the oil field so they can winter-over here until spring.
The migrant girl wears a white sweater with pearl decorations coming off of it, a dressy evening sweater intended for a grown lady. I notice that she keeps her arms folded just-so as she talks. Finally our teacher has the big reel of film loaded properly and the lights are switched off and the movie begins. It is a pearly black and white one, a movie of a play by Shakespeare, the one with the "alas, poor Yorick" skull in it. After the film is well underway I steal a sidelong glance at the migrant girl. She has relaxed in the darkness and she watches the movie images flicker open-mouthed, as if it is hard for her to breathe, as if she is all worn out and getting sleepy. Her arms have slipped down, uncrossed, and I see that her poor white sweater bears a black scorch on its front, as if it had been burned. Her sweater smells funny.
After the movie is over, late in the afternoon when it is time for us to bundle up and go home, I look for the migrant girl again. She has no warm coat waiting for her on a hook in the hallway. Instead, she pulls her scorched, white sweater tighter around her, puts her chin down against the bitter wind, and strikes off into the cold early darkness of the winter evening. I watch her walk toward the round black car that waits at the curb out front of school. When her mother opens the car door to let her in, a baby in diapers tumbles out.
That evening I ask Mother if I can go though my closet again and find more outgrown clothes to give to the poor. She reminds me that we have given all my old things to the preacher's children, and that the dresses I have left fit me fine and I need them myself. I beg her to at least let me have an old coat, and she finally agrees to let me take my sky-blue parka from last winter. I put it in a paper grocery bag, and the next morning, start off to school with it early. I get to the classroom before anyone else and stuff the bag into the migrant girl's desk so she will find it when she comes to class. Then I sit at my own desk and play dumb.
When the migrant girl arrives, I watch as she discovers the bag. She opens it, looks inside, and, with a startled, confused look, closes the bag back up and stashes it under her desk. When school ends that day I lag behind the others to watch her put on my old coat. But she doesn't. Instead, she clutches her own white sweater with the scorch tighter around her, and heads out, chin down, into the cold. It is obvious to me that the migrant girl believes there has been a mistake. She knows the coat does not belong to her. My heart aches, but I can't figure out another way to give the little girl my old coat without her knowing it is Charity. Eventually, I suppose, the teacher must have taken the grocery bag containing my old coat down to the school office to Lost and Found because when she asks who it belongs to, none of us claims it.
As I lie in my clean safe bed in my own bedroom in the house I have always lived in, I cannot fall asleep. A lump rises in my throat when I think of the colorless and puny daughter of migrant farm workers and her burnt sweater. I feel guilty about my nice home-made Dick, Jane and Sally dresses with the sensible, tidy prints and white collars. My heart hurts.
And then, something bad happens to me. I lose my own cashmere bunny hood with seed pearl decorations sewn onto it as I walk home from school one day. I call to it on the windy bluff until it is getting dark, frantically, hysterically, as if it is a lost pet. That night, once again, I cannot get to sleep. And when I finally do, I am haunted by dreams of pitiful white furry things cold and alone and scared outside in the night.
