“I can make time,” I say. “I need to do something physical. And peaceful. But I understand if you’re too busy,” I add. I soften my voice. “I know you have your hands full.”
“She ain’t too busy,” Buddy says from the couch. “And she needs someone to talk to besides me and Mama, don’t you, Ellie?”
Ellie’s lips form a tight line. “Let’s go out front,” she says to me, walking toward the door.
I nod. “Goodbye, Mrs. Hockley,” I call, but the old woman doesn’t seem to hear me. I smile down at Buddy. “Bye-bye.”
“You tell your daddy ‘hey’ from me,” Buddy says. “He was a good mayor. Not like that girl we got now.”
“I’ll tell him,” I say, and I follow Ellie outside.
On the porch, she turns to face me. “I’m afraid I might have spoken too soon about the yoga,” she says. She looks through the screen door as if she can see her brother and mother in the living room, but all I can see is the square light of the TV. “Mama is in worse shape than I thought … mentally, and my brother’s going downhill faster than I anticipated,” she says. “Hospice is involved now, but I worry about leaving them alone for too long. And I’ve gotten busy with some other projects. Doing a bit of writing and keeping in touch with a couple of organizations back in San Francisco. Helping them out.”
“Oh, I understand,” I say, but there’s something weird going on here. Maybe she’s already grieving her brother and mother. Her only family. I remember how I felt that last month of my mother’s life as Daddy and I journeyed with her toward the inevitable. I didn’t know night from day back then. The faraway look I see now in Ellie’s eyes had been in my own during those last few weeks. I was never quite in the present, but rather in that place that hovered between hope and reality. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” I say. “Please let me know if there’s any way I can help.”
“Well”—she holds the za’atar in the air—“you already have. Mama won’t eat it but Buddy and I will both enjoy this.” She looks down Shadow Ridge Lane toward my house. “Is the lake still back there?” Her tone is casual, but something in her face tells me the question is loaded.
“Ugh, yes,” I say. “Jackson—my husband—and some of his friends cleared a trail that goes in a big loop through the woods behind our house. It doesn’t quite reach the lake, but you can see the water from the trail. There’s all these vines and probably poison ivy and snakes you’d have to go through to get to the lake, and the water doesn’t look … It looks gross, at least from where I was standing.”
Ellie is looking down the road as though she can see straight through my house and the forest behind it to the lake. “Once upon a time, it was a pretty little lake,” she says. “There was a path that went right by it and I would walk that way to school every day.”
“What school?” I frown. There is no school in that area that I know of.
“There used to be a school a quarter mile or so past the lake,” she says. “Grade school. They tore it down when they built the new one when I was twelve or thirteen.”
“Wow,” I say, trying to picture how different my backyard must have looked then. “It’s got to be strange for you to be back here after so long.”
She turns and looks squarely at me as if she’s coming back from wherever her memories had taken her. “Stranger than you can imagine,” she says. “And if I could control my own life, I wouldn’t be here at all. But here I am.” She holds up the bag of za’atar. “Thanks again.” She reaches for the door, my cue to leave.
“Enjoy it,” I say as I start down the porch steps. Ellie doesn’t go into the house right away and I feel her eyes on me.
When I reach the sidewalk, she calls out, “Kayla?”
I turn to look at her. She has one hand on the door handle, the other clutching the bag of herbs. “Take the tree house down,” she says, and then she adds, “Please,” and I know there is more that concerns her about that tree house than just a few old rotting boards.
Chapter 18
ELLIE
1965
Dear Brenda,
I’ve thought about you every day since I left, hoping you’re feeling better and that you and Garner are as happy as you were on your wedding day. I miss you so much already!
I’m only about twenty miles from home but I might as well be on another planet. I also don’t feel quite like Ellie Hockley any longer. During my week in Atlanta, I think I went through a sort of metamorphosis, one that I’m still experiencing. It was phenomenal! Martin Luther King actually spoke to us! I was so close to him. I know you don’t share my excitement about that sort of thing; I wouldn’t have been all that excited about it a month ago myself, but it’s part of the change in me I’m talking about. I understand now how important it is for Negroes to be able to vote. I won’t go on about all that. I just wish I could sit down and talk to you about it.
So, I arrived in Flint Sunday morning. We spent the night in a run-down special education school. Then today we were driven to the homes we’ll be staying in while we’re working in the area. I’m the only white girl working “in the field,” as the other one, Jocelyn, decided to stay in the school building and do office work. I’ll be canvassing out in the boonies. Remember when we went to Turner’s Bend to meet Reverend Filburn? Well, that was like New York City compared to where I am now. It’s very rural. The houses are mostly spread out from one another, some a half mile apart! I will definitely be getting my exercise as I walk from house to house. Only one of the students has a car here, but he’s not allowed to use it in his assignment. He has to walk like the rest of us. Most of the people in this part of Derby County are sharecroppers. They are so poor and they live in terrible conditions. Honestly, it’s so much worse than I imagined.
Curry Barnes is a local man who is helping our leader, Greg (Reverend Filburn), drive us around. He’s twenty-five or so and a serious chain-smoker. He’s the one who drove me to my assignment today, taking me way out into the country. He turned onto this “road” that is more of a path, full of ruts from the last rain. I was certain we were going to get stuck or blow a tire. Then he just dropped me off in front of this tiny old shack, winked at me, and said “Take care of yourself,” and I can tell you, I never felt so alone. There wasn’t another house anywhere that I could see, though there were tobacco barns and fields all around me. I took pictures and I’ll send some when I get them developed. You won’t believe what it’s like.
The whole house is about the size of your bedroom. I went up the rickety steps and knocked on the door. An old dog laid there on the porch and it was so hot, he didn’t even bother getting up to see who I was. All of a sudden, four little girls ran out the door and onto the porch and they were all over me! They knocked me down with their exuberance. I didn’t bother getting up. I just sat there, a sweaty mess, with these kids laughing and climbing on me and running their hands over my hair and my face and then the littlest one—GiGi—settled herself in my arms. She smiled up at me and I felt—it’s hard to describe—I wanted to cry. The children were so cute and so happy, but they live in such a sad place.