Fire on the Mountain Read Free Page B

yours?”
    “No, these are just regular shoes.” Yasmin held up one foot, clothed in a golden brown African high-top of soft leather that shimmered like oil on water. “Yours are special, honey. The living shoes are something new, just developed; you can’t even buy them yet. The Olduvai team helped get this pair from Kili especially for you. To apologize for keeping me over.”
    Harriet thought this over. So are they from you or them? she wondered. She picked up one slipper; it was warm and cold at the same time, and felt creepy. They looked like house slippers.
    Why couldn’t her mother have brought her beautiful shoes, like her own?
    “The only thing is, they’re like earrings,” Yasmin said, kneeling down to slip the shoe on her daughter’s foot. “Once you put them on, you have to leave them on for a week.”
    “A week?”
    After Harriet went to bed, Yasmin sat up, brooding. “Don’t be discouraged,” Pearl said. “The child has missed you. Plus, even though she doesn’t say it, all this Mars business troubles her too. Be patient with her.
    Now come over here, child, and let me fix your hair.”
    Harriet got up early so that she could walk to school with her friends one last time. It felt funny to want and not want something at the same time. She wanted to get home to Nova Africa, but she would miss her friends here in the U.S. She waited with the girls on the street in front of the school, hoping the bell would ring, hoping it wouldn’t. The new shoes looked like house slippers with thick soles.
    “Harriet, did you hurt your foot?” Betty Ann asked.
    “My mother brought me these from Africa,” Harriet said. “They’re living shoes, so I can’t take them off for a week. They’re like earrings.”
    “They look nice,” Lila said, trying to be nice.
    “They don’t look like earrings to me,” Elizabeth said.
    “They gave my granny shoes like that in the hospital,” said Betty Ann. “And then she died.”
    “Oh, wow,” the girls all said. Harriet’s mother pulled up to the curb in her long university car, too early. The girls were used to the little inertial hummers, and the university’s Egyptian sedan was twenty feet long. Its great hydrogen engine rumbled impressively. Harriet didn’t tell them they were driving it because her mother was afraid to fly.
    Yasmin watched from the car while the girls traded hugs and whispers and promises-to-write and shell rings—all but Harriet and one other, white girls; all in the current (apparently worldwide) teenage uniform of madras and rows of earrings in the Indian fashion. No boys yet. If Yasmin remembered correctly, they lurked in the background at this age, in clumps, indistinguishable like trees.
    The precious living shoes she had brought her daughter looked shapeless and drab next to the cheap, bright, folded-over hightops the Merican girls were wearing. Yasmin watched as Harriet tried to hide her feet. Well, what did they know about shoes out here in the boondocks?
    “What’s this?” Harriet said, opening the car door and eyeing the doctor’s bag on the front seat.
    “This is your great-great-grandfather,” Yasmin said. “Let’s put him in the back seat. He won’t mind. He’s only twelve, anyway.”
    It was good to hear the child laugh. On the way down the Valley, Yasmin suggested to Harriet that after dropping off her great-great-grandfather’s papers at the museum in Harper’s Ferry, maybe they should spend the night. “It’ll give us some time to hang out together before we head back to Charleston, and work, and school. I can tell you all about Africa.”
    Harriet liked that idea. She reached back and opened the bag. It had a funny pill smell.
    “I knew great-granddaddy fought with Brown,” she said. “I didn’t know there were any secrets.”
    “Brown and Tubman,” Yasmin corrected. Why was it always just Brown? “And it was great-great. And he didn’t actually fight with them. And I didn’t say secret papers. The