Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

Evelyn felt herself collapse inside. “Oh, I wish you would have said all that straight out. We could have avoided all that other—”

“I didn’t know how to say it until now. If I had known, I woulda, but I didn’t know how to say it.”

They held each other tighter.

“A month is a long time. I’ve heard of men getting less,” she said. “There’s a lot we could do in a month.”

“I could stand here just like I’m standing right now and be content.”

Evelyn looked around. The evening was just starting to come, and the street was filling up with people hustling home for dinner. “It’s so early in the night,” she said. “I got at least a few hours before my daddy starts looking.”

Over the next week, Ruby stayed in bed, and their mother catered to her, extra honey buns and jars of pig lips. While Ruby napped, Mother would sit at the table plodding through beads of the Rosary, her mouth moving in silence. While she prayed, Evelyn stood in the bathroom mirror, spraying her wrists with her sister’s perfume, reddening her cheeks with her lipstick. She even borrowed Ruby’s new clothes; her favorite was a short black slipper satin dress that reached her knees. It left her shoulders bare, so she begged Miss Georgia to spare ribbons of material she could drape over them. Then she’d stand in the mirror and just stare at her reflection. She began to understand why it took Ruby over an hour to get ready to see Andrew. For most of that time, she was already complete, but she was surveying her work, admiring it, spinning around and catching it from distinct angles. Now that Renard was leaving, Evelyn intended to spend every minute with him. She invented outright lies about where she was headed, more out of habit than out of concern for what her parents would think. Her mother barely lifted her head as Evelyn’s heels tapped against the hardwood floor, but her father burrowed into her lies, seeming more fascinated by the evidence of her new disregard than by the content itself.

That night, as she sat on the front porch waiting for Renard, her daddy walked outside to smoke a cigar.

“I’m just going off to study with some of the girls from school,” she hurried to say, to ward off any serious conversation.

Silence.

“We have a big final coming up, and I joined a study group.”

Her father sat beside her, and the swing creaked under his weight. “Don’t lie to me, Evelyn.”

“The girls came to me, I didn’t need it, but I wanted to help people who weren’t as well off as I am,” she continued.

“You know we don’t lie to each other in this house.”

“Like I said, I didn’t need it, but I thought about what you always say. ‘To give is to get. The Lord sees people as interchangeable and so should we.’ So I didn’t need it, but I remembered how you felt on the matter, and I obliged them.”

He sighed. She hoped he could feel the punch she intended.

“Look, little girl, I know what you’re doing, and I can’t lock you up.” He lifted his palms then dropped them at his side.

“Your mother must have told you how I feel. I know you don’t agree now, but I promise one day you’ll have some perspective. If you even waited a few weeks, you might see your old man knows what he’s talking about. I’m not the smartest man, but I’m not new to this world, Evelyn. I’ve sheltered you and your sister, so you think life starts and ends on Miro Street. You don’t know it’s only easy for you because I made it easy. A different kind of man might not.”

“He’s going to be a doctor just like you, Daddy,” Evelyn said, but her voice was shaking.

“He’s going to try to be a doctor,” her father corrected, “and Lord knows I want to see him succeed, but the odds are some obstacle is going to come along and trip him up. And it doesn’t mean he’s not a good man, it’s the world we’re living in, baby; it’s the world I want to protect you from.”

He reached for her hand, and she yanked it from him, dropped it on her own lap.

“I hear he’s going off to war, huh? Real heroic. Going off to fight somebody else’s battle when the real work could have been done here. Imagine how many lives he could have saved in New Orleans. I don’t just mean that literally. It does something to a young Negro boy to see me walk in his house to deliver his mama’s babies. I see it every time in their eyes, and it’s an awesome wonder to watch their pride develop inside.”

“He didn’t have a choice. He was drafted.”

She could hear her daddy’s soft chuckle, then out of the corner of her eye she saw the smirk.

“Oh, okay,” he said in a soft tone. “You’re right.”

But in his resignation, Evelyn understood that she was wrong. She remembered the conversation earlier that day in the alley; he hadn’t actually said he was drafted. She had just assumed that he was. But why would he volunteer? Of course she had heard of men who did, men who thought aligning themselves with this country would benefit them in some regard when they returned. Renard and Andrew had debated that very issue their first night over for dinner, but it had been Andrew who was promoting that angle. Renard, she thought, hadn’t agreed. At the heart of her shock of course was the fact that if he had volunteered — and her father’s tone had convinced her he had — he hadn’t discussed it with her first, and what did that say about his feelings for her? What did that say about the likelihood they would make it through this?

She put the matter out of her mind; she had so little time left with Renard and she didn’t want to squander it, but she hated her father just then for the very trait that typically endeared her to him, that he was always right, and her anger stripped her of anything else she might have said. She fumed inside, but she quivered too. If she were to speak, she didn’t know if she would strike him or cry out.

“You could have any boy in this neighborhood, in this country, I might dare to say. You have your whole life ahead of you. Who knows whom you’ll meet out there? You’re so young. You don’t know what it means to have choices. Don’t throw your life away over a low imagination.”

Low imagination , it might as well have been her nickname, she’d heard those words so often growing up, but never out of her father’s mouth. No, that was her mother’s expression for her, applied about once a week, usually after Evelyn said there were no groceries in the kitchen when there was rice, green beans, and salt pork. Or when she bought the beef the butcher offered her instead of demanding the choice cut. But this time her daddy had adopted his wife’s tool, kneaded it into Evelyn’s chest with his fingers.

Miss Georgia snuck out on her porch just then, and Daddy waved. Then he reached for Evelyn’s arm one more time. She made a show of refusing him so Miss Georgia could see it, and he sighed, tapped his cigar out, and walked back into the house.

Evelyn began pumping her legs harder. The cool wind slapped her face as she swung, and with each lift, she quieted inside. There was no more pretense. She would go to see Renard and stay out as long as she pleased, and everyone would know where she was, including Miss Georgia, who peeked out from behind her zinnias.

“It’s a beautiful day, little girl, isn’t it?” Miss Georgia called out, but Evelyn didn’t respond.

She just stared back without flinching; there were tears leaving her eyes, but she could hardly feel them.

It was harder to maintain her guard with Renard. He’d found a patch of grass across the street from the Sweet Tooth where they could sit, and he’d bought a bag of crawfish from Dufon’s, picked meat out for her the way her father always had, the juice of the heads trickling from his mouth. But she barely touched them.