Read Online Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall - Free Book Online Page A

Thorne had dragged in a length of old carpet and had the older boys nail it to the slick plywood.
    I was grateful to be sitting in the back of her room. She had her hair done up nice now, and she smelled of English lavender. I wanted to please her, and it came easy. I had long since left Claudie and Eulogenie behind. It was Eulogenie’s fault. If Claudie wanted to stay back and read Dick and Jane till she was old and gnarled up, it was fine by me.
    In this class, there were only four of us white kids. I watched the other three stumble over the simplest of spelling words and felt sorry to be counted as one of their color. After that, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but my whiteness.
    I wondered what that would be like, having shiny dark skin, pale palms, and pink crevasses on the heels of my feet. In the most secret places of my heart, I wondered too about their private parts, how far dark extended, and if their organs inside were the same color as mine.
    I imagined I was one of them, my hair twisted up in a hundred tiny braids and threaded with beads. If I were black, I’d wear African clothes and sandals made from the tires of safari jeeps. I’d speak Swahili and lift my chin and be proud. My eyes would be big and brown, my lips full, my backside high and rolling when I walked.
    I also wondered what it’d be like to come upon a colored boy and find he was the love of my life. I imagined kissing him, my hands touching his short, fuzzy hair. Like Lucille Maytubby, the world would abhor me.
    It was then I knew there was a “them” and a “me.”
    It opened my eyes and tore me apart.
    I suspect that Miss Izzie Thorne caught on to my thinking. I saw it in the way she looked at me—like I was part of some memory she thought was past.
    That very afternoon, I went home, stripped off my clothes, and looked at myself—long white arms and pointy elbows. I pulled off my socks and studied my feet, whitened from winter. I thought of Auntie and dark Uncle Cunny, stared at the concaveness of my belly and the length of my legs. Deep in my bones I felt an ancient division and realized something I hadn’t before. My lack of popularity wasn’t because I was smart, not at all.
    Nobody liked me because I was white.

    One fall afternoon, I was swinging upside down from a limb of the oak, when I looked over to see a face looking back. It had a long set of jaw and forehead bones, with skin so thin and pale I could see the blue veins. A lick of yellow hair hung like a question mark, and I’d never witnessed such green, green eyes.
    “Hey!” I said. “What you doin’ in our tree?”
    “Ain’t your tree.” This boy had the longest of legs and was now sitting on a branch, just passing the day. “This tree’s on the river, and can’t nobody own a river.”
    “Our property’s right down to the water, then.”
    “Show me,” he said. “Where does it say?”
    I let go of the branch and landed on the soft bank. “What you doin’ up there, anyway?”
    “I live here,” he said.
    I thought of the crows I could see from my window, and their high, raggedy nests. “People don’t live in live-oak trees.”
    “Can if they want.” He gave a great tumbling swing, sprang up on his feet, and hopped away among the branches.
    “Don’t you have a home somewhere?” I asked.
    “You’re lookin’ at it.”
    “And how old are you?”
    He sucked on his top lip. “Old enough, I guess.”
    Was this boy, I wondered, all right in the head? I should go in and tell Auntie to call the sheriff and maybe Uncle Cunny and his friends, besides.
    “I got to go in now,” I said. And I did, sidling away without turning my back.
    In the kitchen Aunt Jerusha was putting a cold supper on the table—sliced cucumbers and tuna and bread and butter. It was just her and me. I sat in my chair and tore at a crust. “Auntie, how come there’s a boy in our tree?”
    She went on with her peeling and slicing. “I reckon he likes it up there,” she