Celeste's Harlem Renaissance Read Free Page A

need to rest.”
    “I been resting since I got home,” Poppa told her. He turned to me. “In 1883 a little girl and her folks were staying at the Morehead Hotel by the bay. This child wasn’t more than two or three years old. Her daddy bought her a bunch of red balloons from a vendor fella and gave ’em to her. He tied the strings around her waist. Right off those balloons lifted her clear up in the air! They carried her over trees, church steeples, the lighthouse, over the bay. She screamed and screamed. Her daddy ran in circles, jumping up to grab after her. Her momma fainted.” He paused, shaking his head.
    “Some fishermen hopped into boats and paddled after her, but their boats couldn’t keep up with that wind blowing those balloons so hard. There was only one thing left to do. Know what it was?” He raised his eyebrows at me, then continued. “Shoot the balloons one by one, and bring her down before she got blown out to sea.”
    I wrapped my arms around Poppa’s right arm and laid my cheek against his shoulder, feeling his bones against my face. What if Poppa changed the story, and the men shot
her
instead of the balloons? I imagined myself clutching balloons above the waves while poisonous Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish circled hungrily beneath me.
    “Each balloon they shot brought the girl closer to the water. Suddenly she disappeared. The men paddled around and called out her name. But it was like the tide had swept her out to sea, and the sea had sucked her down.
    “Feeling sad, they headed back to shore. That’s when they saw her sittin’ on the sand, wet and scared but all right. The people back at the Morehead Hotel saw the men returning with the little girl and cheered so hard her momma came out of her faint. When they put her child in her arms, Momma fainted again, and so did her daddy.”
    “No such thing happened, Cece.” Aunt Society shook her head, as always. “Filling your girl’s head full of such nonsense.”
    “You weren’t any older than that girl, so how would you know? Society, you can sure kill a happy mood. Girlio, why you like that story so?”
    “ ’Cause I love balloons.”
    “I do, too.” He laughed until he started to cough.
    After we told each other good night, I ladled out hot water from the pot on the stove into a basin and carried it into my room to wash up. It was warmer there than in our tiny lavatory. Afterward, I took out Dede and, thinking about the balloon girl and Poppa, softly played my song poem, “Forsythia.” How awful it would be if something happened so that Poppa and I couldn’t get to each other! I thought about that and played louder and slower until Aunt Society yelled, “Put down that thing and go to bed, Celeste!”
    “Yes, ma’am.” In bed I decided that the next time I wrote in my journal, I’d draw a picture of Momma in heaven dressed in white, with wings and a halo. Poppa and I’d hold yellow and red balloons, floating in the sky after her. And at the bottom of the page I’d draw Aunt Society in her wheelchair, sewing, and crying, “Come back, Celeste, come back!”

Chapter
Two
    W ednesday after school found me working with Poppa at the Stackhouse Hotel drugstore. I’d make fifty cents today and on Saturdays, sweeping and scrubbing the floor, washing containers, and dusting and straightening everything. Right now, though, I was skimming through our Colored newspapers — the Raleigh
Independent,
the
Baltimore Afro-American,
the
New York Age,
and the
Chicago Defender.
I always searched through the
New York Age
to check for articles about the
Brownies’ Book
magazine contest that we Butterflies Club writers had entered. We still hadn’t received any word of the results.
    Besides newspapers and medicine, people bought white sugar, Mrs. Smithfield’s Lady Baltimore cakes and cinnamon loaves, fragrant Parisian soaps wrapped in dainty lavender paper, men’s socks and ladies’ silk stockings, hair baubles and ribbons, needles and