Page 27 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Don’t you want to come to the Les Dames Amis social tonight?” Adele asks, but I don’t. They convinced me to go with them once. We met in the private room of a restaurant on Jefferson Avenue where the Creole businesses cluster. It was the three of us among a group of women from back home, their made-up faces various shades of brown, their voices drawling and sweet. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

“I asked Bea,” Claire says. “She said she’d love to have you as a guest. You still have a standing invitation to join.”

“You know how I like to give Clément my attention on the weekends,” I say.

Adele shrugs. Claire purses her lips. Lionel grabs his keys and Clément and I slip into his car.

“You’re choosing me over Les Dames Amis?” Lionel says once we’re on the road. “Even though Bea herself wouldloveto have you?”

“They talk about her like she’s the queen.”

“Pretty sure that of Les Dames Amis, she is.”

Clément climbs onto my lap, sets his hands on the dashboard, peering out the window. “When will we get there?”

“It’s gonna be a while, little man,” Lionel says. “We’re driving to where the rich people live.”

Half an hour later, a white man in a polo shirt and blue jeans waters his front lawn, unsmiling, as we climb out of the car. Clément sticks close to my side, arm tight around my leg. “What are we doing here?” he asks in a small voice. Maybe my apprehension is catching. Or maybe he understands enough about the world already to know that we’re out of place.

Lionel sets his palm atop Clément’s curls. “We’re gonna see some birds do tricks,” he says.

“What kind of birds?”

“Pigeons.”

I push Lionel with my elbow, keep my voice low so only he can hear me. “You drove us all this way for pigeons?”

“Not just any pigeons. You’ll see.” He leads us up the walk with a skip in his step, hands in his back pockets, calling, “Hey there, J.J.,” as though he and this man are friends. J.J. stiffens, doesn’t return the greeting. Lionel should know better. There’s an invisible, unspoken, ever-shifting set of rules here. Al learned it first. We were newly off the train and he went to see about a job as a clerk in a record store. “True, we are hiring,” the man behind the counter had said. “But we aren’t hiringyou.” Al was crestfallen. He almost didn’t answer the Columbia want ad from the next week’s paper. How were any of us to know, in this so-called city of opportunity, given the absence ofWhites Onlysigns, given the vast array of its residents’ skin tones, given the dizzying number of languages spoken on the streets, just who exactly the opportunities were for? Even our Compton neighborhood had, just a couple years before, seen a cross burned on a colored grandmother’s lawn.

And here Lionel is now, leaning casually against the shiny railing of this white man’s front steps. Up to me, to put our host at ease. “Thanks so much for having us, Mr.…?”

He relaxes at the question. A flicker of a smile, taking me in. “Baker.”

“Mr. J.J. Baker is going to show us some birds. They around back?”

“They are. I’ll take you there soon as I finish up watering.”

The lawn looks well soaked to me, but J.J. goes over it all again. Lionel paces the house’s perimeter, peeks over the fence to the backyard. Eventually, J.J. shuts off the water, makes a show of winding the hose and hanging it up, just so. Clément tugs on my sleeve. “Mommy, pick me up.” I heave him onto my hip.

Finally, J.J. unlatches the side gate and we follow him to a freestanding shed at the far end of the lawn. Somewhere close, birds coo and patter and flap. As we get nearer, I see them behind the wire and wood, stepping side to side and craning their necks, fluffing their feathers, pale gray and cream and charcoal and blue.

“Wow!” Clément says, squirming in my arms to get a better look.

“Wow is right, little man. These are some fine birds.”

“Since when are you interested in all this?” I ask Lionel.

“The owner of the house I’m working on raises pigeons like these. We watched them fly one day and it was asight. Mr. J.J. was there, got talking to him. Haven’t gotten the birds out of my mind since.”

As Lionel talks, J.J. stares at me. “You aren’t married?” he asks. I’ve been resting my left hand on the wire, my ringless finger on display. “A pretty girl like you?”

“I’m widowed. My husband died in the war.” My thousandth time saying it.

“Ah,” he says, and looks away. “Condolences.”

“So,” Lionel says. “We gonna fly these birds or what?”

“Am I holding you up? Didn’t realize you were in such a hurry.”