COLORED HEAT
by Jack Seabrook
Chapter One
Lulabelle sat dangling her bare feet over the side of the wooden porch. A Dr. Pepper was sitting next to her, little beads of sweat running in tiny rivers down its dark, glassy sides, pooling around the base and running into the cracks between the boards of the old porch.
She kicked her feet carelessly back and forth as her fingers reached for the bottle. “Old ice house over there,” she thought. “Wish it still had some ice in it.” She tried to imagine the big blocks of ice that would have stood stacked inside the wooden frame building, cut from the frozen pond and waiting, packed in sawdust, to be delivered by the horse-drawn ice wagon. “Sure could use some of that right now.”
It was not summer yet in Ransom, Texas, but it was already hot as hell. It was Juneteenth, the biggest holiday of the year on the colored side of town, for it was on June 19, 1865, that the slaves were told of the Emancipation Proclamation. Of course, Abe Lincoln had signed the papers sometime before, but news traveled slowly in those days. Some say Texans delayed telling their slaves that they had been set free, but I’ve never been able to confirm that.
In any case, it was Juneteenth in Ransom, Texas, and it was a hundred degrees in the shade, if you could find any. Usually the best place to sit was under a pecan tree, but Lulabelle Mackenzie didn’t have a pecan tree, only a front porch.
Lulabelle was sixteen years old and a student at Ransom High. School had been out for awhile now, though, and there wasn’t much to do, especially without a car or a license to drive one. She thought about walking down to the main street to see if she could catch a ride out of town to Bowman’s Creek to cool off, but she realized that all of the colored folks would be heading for the parade through town in a little while and, while she didn’t really care about what happened in 1865, she decided there and then that she would go to the parade, too, just to see who else showed up.
She went inside her house, leaving her bottle of Dr. Pepper on the porch, and put on a pair of leather sandals she had bought at the discount store the summer before. The straps rubbed the skin behind her ankles, but she thought they looked nice.
Lulabelle studied herself in the mirror hung on the bedroom wall. She was a tall girl, big boned, with her kinky black hair straightened and pulled down in an attempt to arrange it in a flattering style. She had a wide face and rather dull features, but she was unassuming and had many casual friends. As she walked back out the front door to head for the parade route, she let the wooden screen door slam behind her on its spring. She did not lock the door, though she left no one at home. On her side of town, no one ever locked their doors, for there was nothing inside worth stealing.
* * *
There were no sidewalks in Ransom, except in front of the downtown stores, so Lulabelle walked in the street. It had been paved once, many years ago, with a sort of tan concrete that ended up looking like huge blocks of road rather than a long black ribbon. The concrete was now spalling around the edges, reduced to pebbles in some spots, and weeds grew through cracks in the middle of the street.
Lulabelle walked along the street in the hot morning sun, her sandal straps rubbing her heels, singing softly to herself an old song she had heard her mother sing many times at the ironing board. Lulabelle liked to sing it to herself, though she only knew a chorus and one verse and it got rather tiresome singing the same thing over and over.
At the corner of Maple Avenue she turned onto South 12th Street and began walking toward town. On the corner was Ruby’s Palace of Beauty, where Earl swept the floor. She had had her hair done there right after her birthday and she still remembered the way the oils smelled, the smiles of the women, the endless talk.
“I think I’ll stop in a minute and see Earl,” she thought, really just wanting to be a part of the life going on inside the small house. But when she opened the screen door there was a note on the main door: “Closed for the parade.” Of course, she thought, who would get their hair done on Juneteenth? Who would work? She let the screen door slam back in place and walked back out to the street, up South 12th another block, then another, crossing Elm and Buford. Three houses down on the right was the old Crane house, with a big porch and some of the railing hanging off into the front yard. On the porch sat Peter Crane in his wheelchair.
“Hi, Mr. Crane,” waved Lulabelle as she walked by.
“Hold on, girl,” he yelled from the porch, waving a bony arm her way. Peter Crane had been paralyzed in an accident at the cotton gin twenty years before, when the machine jammed and he climbed into the works to try to repair it. His spine snapped when the gears started to turn; he was the victim of his own talent for repairing machines. He now sat, day after day, in the shade of his front porch, in a rocking chair that he had no power to rock. His daughter carried him out in the morning and in again when the sun went down. He weighed about 85 pounds.
Lulabelle walked across the parched grass in front of his house and stood, respectfully, at the foot of the three wooden stairs leading up to the porch. “Yes, sir?” she said, looking up at Crane.
“Y’all goin’ to the parade?” He cocked an eye at her.
“That’s right, Mr. Crane.”
“Well, that’s fine. I wonder if you could bring me back a bag of those peanuts they sell on the corner of North Beaton?”
“Sure, Mr. Crane, I’d be happy to.”
“Here’s a dollar.” He pulled a wrinkled bill from his shirt pocket and Lulabelle bounded up the steps to accept it.
“I’ll be back later with those peanuts, Mr. Crane. Is there anything else I can get you?”
“Naw, girl, that’s all. Just a bag of peanuts for an old, wrinkly elephant--even though I’m not much bigger than his trunk these days.”
The girl and the old man laughed, and he watched her from behind as she walked across the grass and down the street, recalling vaguely the days when he could have done more than watch.
* * *
About 20 minutes later, Lulabelle approached downtown. Ransom’s downtown was not much different than
downtowns across America, but it did have one singular feature--the main streets were still made of red brick and had
never been paved. No one had ever seen the need; in fact, the bricks were still in such good shape over seventy years
after being laid that the town fathers felt the savings on maintenance made them look pretty smart.
Lulabelle, of course, walked on the sidewalks. The town itself never did very much to mark the celebration of Juneteenth--no flags waved outside stores, no banners flew above North Beaton Street. No, this was a holiday observed by the residents only, and only a very specific group of them.
Lining the sides of North Beaton Street were a hundred black men and women of various ages. The older ones were in folding chairs, with the women in sun hats, fanning themselves dreamily and listening to the chatter around them. The old men were either in folding chairs, leaning expectantly toward the street and smiling, or standing in small groups, exchanging stories.
The level of activity grew as the age of the observers declined. The younger married couples stood about, talking cheerfully and gesturing; all were dressed in their Sunday best. The younger men flirted with the girls, and the children ran gaily about on the sidewalks, in and out of the street, as their parents alternately chided and cheered them.
Lulabelle saw James Riordan, a boy from school, standing with a group of several young men and women, and she joined the group. “Hi, James,” she said, brightly, and he stepped aside slightly to let her into the group.
James Riordan was six feet tall and slender, dressed in slacks and a shirt with several buttons open to reveal a dark, hairless chest. His teeth gleamed as he grinned; “Hey, ‘belle,” he said. “We were just talking about the bakery. I heard your brother got in some trouble last week?”
Lulabelle’s brother, Raymond, was a maintenance man at the Oak Street Bakery, one of the most visible businesses in town. It was known for the pecan pies it shipped all over the world.
“Yeah,” said Lulabelle, “he told me something about that, but I haven’t seen him in a few days. I think he may have gone over to Powell for the holiday.”
Just then, horns began to blow in the near distance and the parade began. Around the corner of North Beaton Street came the first of the cars, decorated with streamers and balloons. In the first car, an open Cadillac with a lime green paint job buffed for the occasion, sat Reverend Barlow and his wife, driven by their eldest son, Jeffrey. The Reverend was in his black suit; Mrs. Barlow was in a powder blue suit with a pillbox hat and a veil.
“Check her out!” said a girl behind Lulabelle. The little group laughed. More cars followed. There was the owner of the colored food store, Mr. Jenkins, old man Wrightson, and a car with several residents of Well-Rest, the colored nursing home.
Lulabelle and James stood by the curb, laughing and enjoying the parade. The children ran in and out of the street, dodging the slow-moving cars and each other. The old folks sat in their chairs and nodded and smiled.
Suddenly there was a soft popping noise from behind the crowd, and Lulabelle jerked forward, stumbling into the street. Her friends looked on, stunned at first, not sure what had happened.
But she wasn’t smiling. There was a small hole in the back of her head and a bigger one in front. She fell to the ground, her face landing sideways on the street, dark blood beginning to flow and pool in the cracks between the red bricks.
Peanuts lay beside her, spilled from her hand, as James and the others gathered around her silent body and began to call for help.
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