Front porch swings - short story - winning story of 1993 Gertrude Johnson Williams Writing Contest - includes related material

Ebony, April, 1993 by Sandra W. French

How strange, thought Zaire. They shovel dirt over the casket before the mourners are in their cars. And the dirt was the reddest, thickest dirt Zaire had ever seen. She didn't remember the dirt being this red at her parents' graves, less than 10 yards away.

"So sorry for ya loss, Sandy Etta," said a voice, forcing Zaire from distant thoughts. "Miss Belle were sure |nough good to ver'body."

"Thank you, Miss Lee Ann," Zaire found herself answering, mindful not to address Mrs. Cook by her last name, in honor of some unspoken country-ism. And heaven forbid she should simply call her "Miss Lee" without uttering her middle name. Zaire herself had not been called "Sandy," her birth name, since she visited her grandmother last summer. And now, sitting by Nanna Belle's grave in a rickety wooden folding chair whose slats pinched her behind if she moved a quarter of an inch the wrong way, Zaire was sorry she hadn't made it a point to come home more often.

Others bent down to pat her shoulder or to whisper kind expressions of sympathy. Most who did the latter were taken back by the sight of the triple-pierced parameter of Zaire's outer lobe, where she had Laced an assortment of hoops of silver and gold. Just when a mourner had regained composure, Zaire would remove the handkerchief she held close to her nose to reveal the diamond stud in her right nostril, thus compounding the poor soul's shock.

"Anna Mildred say she some kinda' militant, done been to Africa and all," Zaire heard a voice whisper. "But Miss Belle say she a school teacher up in New York," someone else remembered in hushed tones.

Zaire started down at a patent-leather heel covered in dense chestnut clay. She had torn the skin of the other heel in a crack on the sidewalk back at the church. Head lowered, Zaire looked around at the sensible Red Cross-styled low heels of the locals. "Ordinary," she muttered, clasping the hand of the undertaker as he helped her into what he probably thought was a limousine. "Scuse me, Zaires?" he asked, prong her name more like the local discount chain. Why couldn't anybody in Auburn pronounce her name correctly? "Just thinking aloud, Mr. Joe," she answered.

Ordinary, she repeated to herself as gravel bullets crackled against the sides of an antique fish-tailed Caddilac making its way down roads that might never see black top. "Mr. Joe," Zaire cared above the din, "would it be rude of me not to go back to the church? I mean, would it be an unforgivable sin if I just went straight out to Nanna Belle's to be alone?"

"Now, Zaires, people understands Miss Belle were all you had, and that you a-grieving. |Ceptin' they liable be coming by the house all evening long, few at a time, after they clean up from dinner."

Joe Colby was the owner of the small town's only funeral parlor for "coloreds, " as some in Auburn still called themselves. In fact, Mr. Joe was also the person Black Auburnites looked to for guidance when loved ones grew ill. If he wasn't a degreed physician, at least he could come out and let you know when you ought to be headed into Franklin--"town" Auburnites called it--to see Dr. Bright. Most important, though, Mr. Joe had been Nanna Belle's neighbor and suitor for many years, and had known Zaire as a child, when she first came to live with her grandmother after her own parents had been killed in an automobile accident. As the car pulled into Nanna Belle's yard, Zaire leaned from her seat in the back across the front to kiss her old friend and was not surprised to find tears in his dim, grey eyes. She removed a clean tissue from her purse and dabbed first at his eyes, and then at her own. Finally, with all the poise he could muster, Mr. Joe said shakily, "Done put away a many a friend and relative; ain't none upset me like this. And here I am, the undertaker." "Nanna Belle loved you too, Mr. Joe," Zaire answered softly.

Joe Colby slowly followed Zaire from the car up a dusty path leading to the tiny house. Zaire did not mind sharing the solitude she found on Nanna Belle's creaking porch with Joe Colby After all, Nanna Belle's home, which Zaire had imagined as a child to be massive, held as many memories for Mr. Joe as it did for Zaire. Hadn't he helped her grandmother plant the orange speckled tiger lilies that adorned the east and west sides of the house? And it had been Joe Colby's coffee that once filled the now faded blue Maxwell House cans-turned-flower pots on either side of Nanna Belle's squeaky porch swing. Zaire sat there now, rocking the swing back and forth gently with a bare foot, enjoying the fragrance of the sweet, country air. She touched a hand as worn and wrinkled as her own grandmother's had been.

"You figurin' on selling the place?" Joe Colby questioned Zaire.

Zaire had thought of nothing else in the days preceding the funeral. She stared through a window, past starched white Priscilla ruffles, into the main room of the house. Crates cluttered the main room, some packed, some not, sitting semi-circle around the "Warm Morning" coal stove that Nanna Belle had refused to give up. Zaire had begun to pack a few things she intended to take back to New York, vestiges of Auburn which she, too, was unwilling to give up. There were, of course, the family photographs, black and whites of Belle Stanton's son in his school years, striped shirts and knobby knees peeking through holey britches; and later there were images of his pre-manhood era, on the combine in the vast fields surrounding the house. Later, but before color photographs, there were pictures of Belle's son in his Army fatigues, leaning against a tank at the entrance to Ft. Campbell. Then there were the pictures most cherished by Zaire--her father marrying her mother at the Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church, Nanna Belle sitting proudly on the front pew, her ever-present Bible clutched to her breast. A second album was filled with colorful Zaires: fat, happy baby Zaires; toddling Zaires, tip-toed, barefooted, arms extended toward unseen flashes; and solemn, unsmiling five- and six-year-olds, clinging, always, to Nanna Belle's dress hem. Her smile would not return; nor would her image be photographed alone, until she could cope, but never forget, the void left by the deaths of her mother and father--a void even Nanna Belle couldn't completely fill.