Fire from the Rock Read Free

it!” Sylvia cried out to her mother and her aunt. When she thought about her little sister lying there with her leg wrapped up, she understood how Gary wanted to fight rather than pray.
    Her mother didn’t respond, only continued to scrub pots that already gleamed, and Aunt Bessie finished her tea. The kitchen was silent.
    Finally Aunt Bessie began to hum an old spiritual that Sylvia heard every Sunday at church. Sylvia’s mother joined her gradually, her alto voice low and full of sorrow. Sylvia, feeling unsettled and confused, sat there quietly, picking at the pattern in the tablecloth, listening to their voices drift up like soft smoke.
    Wednesday, January 2, 1957
    I love my new diary. Mama seems to know what I need even before I ask. When I looked in my stocking on Christmas morning, there it was-a pale green, leather-looking, golden-trimmed little book with a tiny lock and key.
    The pages are thin—all clean and smooth with little blue lines just waiting for me. I had planned to fill the first page with lovely words and ideas, but instead I’m forced to write about that dog, that blood, my sister’s screams. I hate old Crandall! Is that a sin? I’m sure Daddy would say so. I don’t care. Crandall needs to be put in a pen full of vicious snakes with poison fangs or something horrible like that—maybe even wolves or tigers or hyenas-and left there overnight! But maybe not. When I really think about it, it’s not hatred I feel, but hurt. Why do people have to be so mean?
    I don’t know how adults deal with stuff like this every day. Mama is very proper, which gets her in trouble with white folks sometimes. They say she’s “putting on airs,” but she’s really just being herself. She won’t go out of the house without her white gloves and a black straw hat. When we take the bus downtown to shop, she makes me wear my white gloves, too, even though for the life of me I cannot figure out why we need gloves in the middle of summer. But she says if you think of yourself as a lady, then no matter how the world treats you, you will always know that you are a lady inside. Mr. Crandall’s dog didn’t care whether Donna Jean was a lady or not. It just saw a little colored girl and jumped on her, the way it had been trained to do. White gloves and thinking like a lady would not have helped.
    Even Daddy doesn’t get much respect. He’s so smart he could quote the whole Bible, and his sermons get everyone in church rocking, but nothing outside the church ever changes. White folks like the Crandalls don’t care how hard we pray or how loud we scream hallelujah. They still hate us.
    I need more than hot, sweaty emotion. It’s time for something real to happen.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1957
    Mama, do I have to wear that new dress to school?” Sylvia asked at breakfast. “Why can’t I wear something really neat, like a poodle skirt? I am so tired of being in junior high!” Sylvia was anxious to get to Horace Mann High School, where she hoped everybody would stop treating her like a kid.
    â€œYouth is a treasure that’s wasted on the young,” Sylvia’s mother said absentmindedly.
    Sylvia sighed with exasperation.
    â€œWho’re you trying to impress, Sylvie?” Gary teased. “I’ve seen Reggie Birmingham looking at you at church like you were a hot roast beef sandwich!”
    Sylvia smiled and blushed. “Like you look at Anita Carver?” It was Gary’s turn to smile. “I dress to please myself!” Sylvia replied with as much dignity as she could.
    She could tell she wasn’t fooling her brother, and she really did look forward to seeing Reggie again. Since she saw him almost every Sunday at church, and every day at school since kindergarten, she’d never even considered him as a member of the opposite sex. He used to be just Reggie—as inconsequential as a bug. But somehow this year