Black Angels

Book by Murphy Rita

Angels

Summer 1961

I believe in angels. Black angels. If I come across white angels in a book at the public library, I take out my burnt umber Crayola and cover them in their true skin. I color them all shades of deep brown and black, but my favorite is midnight black. A black so black it is almost blue, like the tar Mama paints on trees in the backyard after a spring storm to stop the open places from bleeding.

I believe in angels because I've seen them. They first appeared to me last month just before school ended. Leaning out the upstairs bathroom window brushing my teeth, I looked down on their heads. Three naked black girls with creamy white wings, throwing stones on my hopscotch board. They had long braided hair that reached to their bottoms. They carried translucent disks that looked like halos under their arms. They giggled to one another and rose up into the crab apple tree, picked blossoms for their hair and flew away.

The angels come every day now since the trouble started. They sit on the barn roof or in the herb garden, eating angel food out of small bundles tied to the end of a stick. They often stay for the afternoon, as long as my dog, Chester, is tied up in the garage. They do not care for Chester. Whenever he sees them or smells their food, he barks until they fly away. He doesn't understand how to behave in the presence of angels and I'm not sure how to teach him.

I live in the small town of Mystic, Georgia. "Halfway between somewhere and nowhere," Mama says. A town divided down the center by the Macon County Railway and by the color of people's skin.

I live on the east side of town. The white side.

I never talk about the angels to anyone. I'm afraid there would be trouble if I did. Last summer, Samuel Johnson wandered over from the black side of town and picked some tomatoes out of old Miss Hempstead's garden on Fern Street. They whipped that boy. Sent him back to his mama crying like a baby, though he was almost ten. That's the way it is in Mystic. You have to know where you belong. And the angels belong on the west side of town.

I have one brother. Ellery. He is fourteen years old and has short frizzy brown hair. My daddy had the same kind of hair. Whenever Mama gives me a shampoo, she whispers a sincere prayer of thanks to the Almighty that I was blessed with beautiful Brower hair like her own. Long and dark and wavy.

Ellery usually plays marbles in the driveway before breakfast, but since school ended he's been spending all his time in the garage fixing up an old bicycle his friend Shelby gave him. He has replaced almost every part of it from the brakes to the handlebars. He's trying to turn it into a Bowden Space Lander, which just came off the assembly line this spring and is displayed in the front window of Nickel's Hardware Store. It is the wildest bike I've ever seen. The fenders wrap around it like a skirt and a headlamp in the shape of a cone sprouts from the front of the red fiberglass frame. It's something a spaceman would ride on the moon. How Ellery plans to transform his piece of rusted junk into a sleek, shiny moonbike is beyond me.

He's planning to ride it to the Macon Carnival in August and enter it in a special contest they have there for old bikes made new. I can't imagine anyone getting excited about such a thing, but for the past two weeks it seems to occupy Ellery's every waking moment. Ellery won't let me within ten feet of the garage when he's out there, and when he's not, the bike is covered in old sheets and tucked away in the far corner behind the workbench.

"Celli, you got a match on you?" He calls out of the small open pane on the garage door that he broke with one of his baseballs last week.

"No, Ellery. You know Mama doesn't want you playing with matches."

"Oh, come on, Celli. I got a good reason for wanting it."

"You think you got a good reason, boy," Sophie says, poking her head out the kitchen window. Sophie does the housekeeping and watches us when Mama isn't home. "You children get on in here and eat your grits, or I'm giving you both a bath down in the creek, you hear me?"

Ellery emerges from the garage with a hammer in his hand. "Geez, Celli. You talk so loud. You got a big mouth."

"I do not. You do. I have a beautiful mouth."

"That's right, you tell him, girl." Sophie reaches one arm out the door and grabs a broom off the porch, letting the door snap hard behind her.

Ellery takes off his goggles, closes the garage door and heads up the back steps. I run up behind him, slip under his arm into the kitchen. He swats me with his hand, but it finds only air. Ellery is three years older than I am and although we used to get along when we were little, lately everything I do bothers him and everything he does bothers me.

The kitchen smells like bacon and coffee. Sophie keeps a close eye on Ellery while we eat breakfast to make sure he doesn't have any frogs or snakes in his pockets. He has been known to bring such creatures to the table. When Mama catches him, she calmly tells him to put them on the porch until he is finished eating. Sophie, on the other hand, starts into screaming and makes such a fuss Ellery has to take the critters all the way down to the orchard, which is nearly half a mile from the house, then wash his hands twice before he can come back into her kitchen and touch any of her food.

Sophie is the biggest, most beautiful black woman I have ever met. She is allowed on the east side of town because Mama hires her. The only reason a black woman would be invited into a white person's house in Mystic is if she's cooking or cleaning for them. That's what Sophie does for us, plus a whole lot more. Mama says Sophie has been with us so long she's part of the family. She stays with us on Sundays and for the month of July, when Mama goes off to visit our spinster aunt, Etta, up in Atlanta.

"The life of a spinster is a real fine thing, Celli," Mama tells me. She says Etta can move around in as much silence as she pleases, tend her garden without interruption and read a book all morning in bed.

I tell Mama she can stay here and do all those things. Ellery and I will be quiet and she can read anytime she wants to. But she says it's not the same. She says a mama has got to get away once in a while to remember who she is in the world.

Mama has been going to visit Etta every July for the past ten years. We used to live right next door to Etta with my daddy before he left. In a big old house on Seymour Street, around the corner from the Bubble and Snap, where Daddy played drums every Friday and Saturday night. I don't remember much of that time. I was only one on the night of the big storm when Daddy walked out our front door and never came back.