Read Online Behind You by Jacqueline Woodson - Free Book Online Page A

slowly up and down the rows and rows of dead people or crouching all close around some tiny grave. Makes a body wonder if the dead know what Sunday is and get all ready.
    My daddy’s grave is in a lot about a quarter mile in then another twenty feet to the left. KENNEDY MAYARD SR. it says. Something about the way his name looks there makes me wish gravestones wasn’t stone—it seems real permanent that way. Like it’s saying, You better believe he’s dead!
    I make a fist and pound it against my heart a couple of times, then throw the peace sign at him. My moms fixes the plastic flowers around the gravestone. We stand there a little while without saying anything. Then I’m feeling my dad right there with us—his arm around my mom’s shoulder, his big hand rubbing my head.
    My moms pulls her coat tighter and says, “Sure is windy today, isn’t it?”
    I look out over the cemetery. Even though it’s only the third day of November, I see the first few flakes of snow.
    Me and my moms stand there watching it come down—all soft and slow and cold.
    It’s strange the way death connects people. I wasn’t real tight with Miah when he was living, but now here I was, standing in a brick-cold cemetery, feeling my dad everywhere and knowing that me and Ellie and Miah’s moms and pops and everybody who’d ever lost somebody they’d been tight with—we all . . . it was like, I don’t know—like a continuum—and we’re all a part of the same something. We ate our breakfast and did our work and had conversations that were stupid and conversations that weren’t so stupid. At night we closed our eyes and hoped sleep came quickfast. And with all of our living going on, our dead peeps were there—everywhere. Watching over us, holding us up, giving us some kinda reasons for going to church and school and the basketball courts. Always right there, making sure we kept on keeping on. I guess if anybody asked, I’d tell them we were all doing what the living do.
    I take my mom’s hand, pull her a little bit closer to me. She smells like cold weather and perfume.
    â€œYour daddy always liked himself some snow,” my moms says.
    And we stand there, freezing our behinds off and watching it fall.

Norman Roselind
    WHEN I FIRST MOVED TO FORT GREENE, WHAT I LOVED MOST were the trees. The city had planted saplings back in the sixties and now the trees stand like soldiers up and down the block. As though they’re guarding the residents of Fort Greene from harm. I wish I could say they do. It amazes me that they’re still standing—that anyone or anything is still standing. The trees change—leaves bud, grow green and wide, wither, turn red and brown, then fall. Again and again. Year after year. When Miah was a little boy, he’d climb up and swing on the lowest branches and invariably, some adult would lean out of a window and say, “Miah, get down off of that tree and let it grow like you grow.” For some reason, that always made Miah laugh—the idea of a tree having the same upward journey as himself.
    Some mornings, I sit on my stoop and look at the Times, see the way the world is stopping and the way it just keeps moving on. Amazing how it keeps moving on. Amazing how people can melt themselves into each new day.
    This morning, Nelia was sitting across the street on her stoop. Used to be our stoop.
    The wind was blowing hard. It’d been cold last night and the day felt like it was trying to warm up but not doing a good job at it. Nelia was leaning over her writing. Her hair was getting longer and it sort of fell down a bit over her face in a way I’d never seen it do. Miah’s death had added some years to her and thinned her up. At some angles she looked like the Vassar girl I’d fallen in love with years and years ago. Then she looked like an older, more beautiful version of the woman I’d walked