Wallamelon
Nisi Shawl
* * * *
[Insert Pic wallamelon.jpg Here]
Barbecue in the backyard; stereo shoved over by the bedroom window, blasting out “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the MGs: these spells for the enchantments of my childhood gave rise to “Wallamelon.” These spells—plus the responses I got when I answered that perennial question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “A magician,” I always replied. Not with a tuxedo, a tall hat, and rabbits, I patiently explained. I wanted to do real magic...
“BABY, BABY, BABY! Baby, Baby, Baby!”
Cousin Alphonse must have thought he looked like James Brown. He looked like what he was, just a little boy with a big peanut head, squirming around, kicking up dust in the driveway.
Oneida thought about threatening to tell on him for messing his pants up. Even Alphonse ought to know better. He had worn holes in both his knees, begging “Please, please, please” into the broken microphone he’d found in Mr. Early’s trash barrel. And she’d heard a loud rip the last time he did the splits, though nothing showed. Yet.
“‘Neida! Alphonse! Come see what me an Mercy Sanchez foun!” Kevin Curtis ran along the sidewalk towards them, arms windmilling, shirt-tails flapping. He stopped several feet off, as soon as he saw he had their attention. “Come on!”
Oneida stood up from the pipe-rail fence slowly, with the full dignity of her ten years. One decade. She was the oldest kid on the block, not counting teenagers. She had certain responsibilities, like taking care of Alphonse.
The boys ran ahead of her as she walked, and circled back again like little dogs. Kevin urged her onto the path that cut across the vacant lot beside his house. Mercy was standing on a pile of rubble half the way through, her straight hair shining in the noonday sun like a long, black mirror. She was pointing down at something Oneida couldn’t see from the path, something small, something so wonderful it made sad Mercy smile.
“Wallamelons,” Kevin explained as they left the path. “Grown all by they selves; ain’t nobody coulda put em there.”
“Watermelons,” Oneida corrected him automatically.
The plant grew out from under a concrete slab. At first all she could see was its broad leaves, like green hearts with scalloped edges. Mercy pushed these aside to reveal the real treasure: four fat globes, dark and light stripes swelling in their middles and vanishing into one another at either end. They were watermelons, all right. Each one was a little larger than Oneida’s fist.
“It’s a sign,” said Mercy, her voice soft as a baby’s breath. “A sign from the Blue Lady.”
Oneida would have expected the Blue Lady to send them roses instead, or something prettier, something you couldn’t find in an ordinary supermarket. But Mercy knew more about the Blue Lady, because she and her half-brother Emilio had been the ones to tell Oneida about her in the first place.
“Four of them and four of us.” Oneida looked up at Mercy to see if she understood the significance.
Mercy nodded. “We can’t let no one else know about this.”
“How come?” asked Alphonse. Because he was mildly retarded he needed help understanding a lot of things.
Oneida explained it to him. “You tell anybody else, they’ll mess up everything. Keep quiet and you’ll have a whole watermelon all to yourself.”
“I get a wallamelon all my own?”
“Wa-ter-mel-on,” Oneida enunciated.
“How long it take till they ready?”
They decided it would be at least a week before the fruit was ripe enough to eat. Every day they met at Mizz Nichols’s.
Mercy’s mother had left her here and gone back to Florida to be with her husband. It was better for Mercy to live at her grandmother’s, away from so much crime. And Michigan had less discrimination.
Mizz Nichols didn’t care what her granddaughter was up to as long as it didn’t interrupt her t.v. watching or worse yet, get her called away from work.
Mercy seemed to know what the watermelon needed instinctively. She had them fill half-gallon milk bottles from the garden hose and set these to “cure” behind the garage. In the dusky hours after Aunt Elise had picked up Cousin Alphonse, after Kevin had to go inside, Mercy and Oneida smuggled the heavy glass containers to their secret spot. They only broke one.
When the boys complained at being left out of this chore, Mercy set them to picking dried grass. They stuffed this into old pillowcases and put these underneath the slowly fattening fruits to protect them from the gravelly ground.
The whole time, Mercy seemed so happy. She sang songs about the Blue Lady, how in far away dangerous places she saved children from evil spirits and grown ups. Oneida tried to sing along with her, but the music kept changing, though the stories stayed pretty much the same.
There was the one about the girl who was standing on the street corner somewhere down South when a car full of men with guns went by, shooting everybody. But the Blue Lady saved her. Or there was a boy whose mom was so sick he had to stay with his crazy aunt because his dad was already dead in a robbery. When the aunt put poison in his food he ran away, and the Blue Lady showed him where to go and took care of him till he got to his grandparents house in Boston, all the way from Washington D.C.
All you had to do was call her name.
One week stretched, unbelievably, to two. The watermelons were as large as cereal bowls. As party balloons. But they seemed pitiful compared to the giant blimps in the bins in front of Farmer Jack’s.
Obviously, their original estimate was off. Alphonse begged and whined so much, though, that Mercy finally let him pick and open his own melon. It was hard and pale inside, no pinker than a pack of Wrigley’s gum. It tasted like scouring powder.
Oneida knew she’d wind up sharing part of her personal, private watermelon with Alphonse, if only to keep him from crying, or telling another kid, or a grown-up even. It was the kind of sacrifice a mature ten-year-old expected to make. It would be worth it, though. Half a watermelon was still a feast.
They tended the Blue Lady’s vine with varying degrees of impatience and diligence. Three weeks, now. How much longer would it take till the remaining watermelons reached what Oneida called “The absolute peak of perfection?”
They never found out.
The Monday after the Fourth of July, Oneida awoke to the low grumble of heavy machinery. The noise was from far enough away that she could have ignored it if she wanted to stay asleep. Instead, she leaned out till her fingers fit under the edge of her bunk’s frame, curled down and flipped herself so she sat on the empty bottom bunk.
She peeked into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was still asleep; his holstered gun gleamed darkly in the light that crept in around the lowered shade. She closed the door quietly. Her dad worked hard. He was the first Negro on the police force.
Oneida ate a bowl of cereal, re-reading the book on the back of the box about the adventures of Twinkle-toes the Elephant. Baby stuff, but she was too lazy to get up and locate a real book.
When she was done, she checked the square dial of the alarm clock on the kitchen counter. Quarter to nine. In forty-five minutes her mother would be home from the phone company. She’d make a big breakfast. Even if Oneida wasn’t hungry, it felt good to talk with Mom while she cooked it. Especially if Dad woke up; with Royal and Limoges off at Big Mama’s, the three of them discussed important things like voting rights and integration.
But there was time for a quick visit to the vacant lot before then.
The sidewalk was still cool beneath the black locust trees. The noise that had wakened her sounded a lot louder out here. It grew and grew, the closer she got to the Curtis’s. And then she saw the source, an ugly yellow monster machine roaring through the lot, riding up and down over the humps of rubble like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. And Kevin was just standing there on the sidewalk, watching.
There were stones all around. She picked up a whole fistful and threw them, but it was too far. She grabbed some more and Kevin did too. They started yelling and ran toward the monster, throwing stones. It had a big blade. It was a bulldozer, it was pushing the earth out of its way wherever it wanted to go. She couldn’t even hear her own shouting over the awful sound it made. Rocks flew out of her hands. They hit it. They hit it again. The man on top, too.
Then someone was holding her arms down. She kept yelling and Kevin ran away. Suddenly she heard herself. The machine was off. The white man from on top of it was standing in front of her telling her to shut up, shut up or he’d have her arrested.
Where was the Blue Lady?
There was only Mizz Curtis, in her flowered house dress, with her hair up in pink curlers. No one was holding Oneida’s arms anymore, but she was too busy crying to get away. Another white man asked what her name was.
“Oneida Brandy,” Mizz Curtis said. “Lives down the street. Oneida, what on Earth did you think you were doing, child?”
“What seems to be the problem?”
Dad. She looked up to be sure. He had his police hat on and his gun belt, but regular pants and a tee-shirt instead of the rest of his uniform. He gazed at her without smiling while he talked to the two white men.
So she was still in trouble.
After a while, though, the men stopped paying attention to Oneida. They were talking about the rich white people they worked for, and all the things they could do to anyone who got in their way. Kevin’s mom gave her a crumpled up Kleenex to blow her nose on, and she realized all the kids in the neighborhood were there.
Including Mercy Sanchez. She looked like a statue of herself. Like she was made of wood. Of splinters.
Then the white men’s voices got loud, and they were laughing. They got in a green pick-up parked on the easement and drove off, leaving their monster in the middle of the torn-up lot.
Her father’s face was red; they must have said something to make him mad before they went away. But all Dad did was thank Mizz Curtis for sending Kevin over to wake him up.
They met Mom on the way home. She was still in her work clothes and high heels, walking fast. She stopped and stared at Dad’s hat and gun. “Vinny?”
“Little brush with the law, Joanne. Our daughter here’s gonna explain everything over breakfast.”
Oneida tried. But Mercy had made her swear not to tell any grown-ups about the Blue Lady, which meant her story sounded not exactly stupid, but silly. “All that fuss about a watermelon!” Mom said. “As if we don’t have the money to buy one, if that’s what you want!”
Dad said the white men were going to get quite a surprise when they filed their complaint about him impersonating an officer. He said they were breaking the law themselves by not posting their building permit. He said off-duty policemen went around armed all the time.
Aunt Elise brought over Cousin Alphonse. They had to play in the basement even though it was such a nice day outside. And Kevin Curtis and Mercy Sanchez weren’t allowed to come over. Or anybody.
After about eighty innings of “Ding-Dong, Delivery,” Oneida felt like she was going crazy with boredom. She was sorry she’d ever made the game up; all you did was put a blanket over yourself and say “Ding-dong, delivery,” and the other player was supposed to guess what you were. Of course Alphonse adored it.
Mom let them come upstairs and turn on the t.v. in time for the afternoon movie. It was an old one, a gangster story, which was good. Oneida hated gangster movies, but that was the only kind Cousin Alphonse would watch all the way through. She could relax and read her book.
Then Mom called her into the bedroom. Dad was there, too. He hadn’t gone to his other job. They had figured out what they were going to do with her.
They were sending her to Detroit, to Big Mama. She should have known. The two times she spent the night there she’d had to share a bed with Limoges, and there hadn’t been one book in the entire house.
“What about Cousin Alphonse?” she asked. “How am I supposed to take care of him if I’m in Detroit?”
“You just concentrate on learning to take better care of yourself, young lady.”
Which wasn’t a fair thing for Mom to say.
After dark, Oneida snuck out. She had stayed inside all day, exactly as she’d promised. Now it was night. No one would expect her to slip the screen out of her bedroom window and squirm out onto the fresh-mowed lawn. That wasn’t the kind of thing Oneida ever did. She wouldn’t get caught.
The big orange moon hung low over Lincoln Elementary. Away from the streetlights, in the middle of the ravaged vacant lot, it made its own shadows. They hid everything, the new hills and the old ones. It was probably going to be impossible to find the watermelon vine. If it had even survived the bulldozer’s assault.
But Oneida walked to the lot’s middle anyway. From there, she saw Mercy. She stood stock still, over on Oneida’s left, looking down at something; it was the same way she’d stood the day they found the vine. Except then, the light had come from above, from the sun. Now something much brighter than the moon shone from below, up into her face. Something red and blue and green and white, something radiant, moving like water, like a dream.
Oneida ran towards whatever it was. She tripped on a stone block, stumbled through the dark. “Mercy!” she shouted as she topped a hill. Mercy nodded, but Oneida didn’t think it was because she’d heard her. She ran on recklessly, arriving just as the light began to fade, as if, one by one, a bunch of birthday candles were being blown out.
Oneida bent forward to see better. The light came from a little cave of jewels, about the size of a gym ball. A blue heart wavered at its center, surrounded by tiny wreaths of red flowers and flickering silver stars. As she watched, they dwindled away and were gone. All that was left was a shattered watermelon, scooped out to the rind.
Magic! Oneida met Mercy’s eyes. They had seen real magic! She smiled. But Mercy didn’t.
“Blue Lady say she can’...
widez2