Colored Heat-Chapter 2

Chapter Two

                I wasn’t much older than Lulabelle when I arrived in Ransom that June to visit my grandmother.  She was in her late sixties and in poor health, and I had driven down from New Jersey to see her and spend the summer seeing America and enjoying the Texas heat.

                I had been raised in two cultures: the suburban sprawl of northern New Jersey during school months, and the smalltown serenity of Ransom in the summers.  My happiest moments were those summers, enjoying the company of friendly Texans, the daily heat, the swimming pools.  I was related in some way to about half the white people in town, it seemed, and, being a polite little boy, they all loved me.

                As I grew, my friendship with my grandmother deepened, as I began visiting summers in my early teenage years.  I would go alone and stay with her for a month or so, and her friends and cousins liked to see me, partly, I suspect, because I cared for my “old nana.”

                After missing a few summers, I planned my big trip to Texas after my junior year of college.  I owned a bright yellow 1966 Chevrolet Caprice at that time, with over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer and no air conditioning.

                I had driven down the East Coast as far as Atlanta, stopping briefly along the way to see friends in Norfolk.  At Atlanta I turned west, driving diagonally down through Mississippi and Alabama, passing through New Orleans on my way to Galveston.  After a week with my paternal grandfather, I aimed my car north up Interstate 55, toward Ransom.

                Never having driven myself there before, I was at a loss when I pulled into the main part of town.  By coincidence I recognized the apartment where my grandmother had once lived, above a garage, and stopped when I saw a man and a woman standing in the dirt driveway, talking.

                “Hi,” I began.  Their faces were kind but curious: I was six-one and skinny, heavily tanned, with a T-shirt and cutoff jeans and a strange car.

                “My grandmother used to live here,” I said.  “Do you know her?  Mary Lovett?”

                “No, can’t say I do,” replied the man, smiling at me.     “We just moved here ourselves,” his companion added.

“From Pennsylvania.  We lived by Route 22.”

                “That’s funny,” I said.  “I live right off Route 22 in New Jersey.”

        “Where does your grandmother live?” the man asked.

                “North 14th Street,” I replied.  “I think it’s a new development for old folks.”

                They directed me over to the west side of town and I managed to find my way into the development of senior citizen housing.

                The streets were short and arranged in groups of squares, with three or four buildings to each side of a block.  The buildings were of sand-colored cinder blocks, one story each, and two units to a building.  My grandmother lived on the right side of one, and I was very glad to see her, frail as she was.

                My grandmother, Mary Lovett, has been a Texas girl all her life, divorced in the 1940s and raising my mother with the help of her parents from then on.  She had worked as a bookkeeper at the Ransom City Hall for many years, and when that job fell through she took another at the city’s cotton gin.  I remember her coming home from that job, her face and arms red and rough, covered with white cotton fibers.  After that she became a dietician at Well-Rest, the old folks’ home for colored people and poor whites.  One evening she came home drunk and fell down the long flight of stairs leading to her apartment above a garage.  She lay in the snow with a broken back for hours before being found, and she was never free of pain from that day forward.

                Her later years were a whirlwind of medical problems: back surgery, colon cancer, and lung cancer brought on by a lifetime of smoking.  By the time I arrived at her apartment she was a shell of her old, strong self.  She weighed less than a hundred pounds and moved slowly, forever attached to oxygen tanks of various sizes.

                Yet she was happy to see me and I was happy to join her.  I moved in to stay for the summer, sleeping on the pull-out sofa bed and parking my Chevy on the nearly empty street out front.  I didn’t know it, but the next day Ransom would be the site of a murder, and I would find myself assuming the unlikely role of investigator.