One Summer Day

by LN Lewis

With acknowledgement of and thanks to Ambrose Bierce 

It was the last Saturday in August, and Elvira was leaving for Oberlin.

Mr. Caspar Granville was taking pictures outside St. John The Baptist Church of Elvira with David and Helen Webster from Websters’ Dry Goods; Elvira with David Moton from Moton and Sons Undertakers; Elvira with all of her students from Mary Groves School; Elvira with Reverend Elmer Coldwater, pastor of St. John The Baptist, and all of the worshippers.

And then Caspar Granville took photos of Elvira, her mother and me, the three of us holding hands. Our girl was dressed in gray: gloves, dress, hat, and veil. Eleanor had on her old blue dress with a new lace collar. She had pressed my pants to a crease and found some black poplin to sew me a suit jacket with a black ribbon necktie.

“Mama, Papa, you all look so handsome. I wish Mr. Henry could see this.”

Eleanor gave her a kiss. I just nodded. 

We took a carriage to the station with George and Dorcas Lemon, Elvira’s guardians on the train ride to Oberlin, Ohio. Once she got there, I prayed Cocker and Euclid would keep her safe.

I work at the graveyard on Parker Road, and I know every soul in the place. Who comes in and who goes out. I cut the grass, trim the hedges, and put falling headstones back up. I also do yard work around town. Eleanor sells chicken and eggs, takes in laundry and sewing. We do everything we can for Elvira.

I’m a fair reader, but I’m better with numbers. My teacher, master, and the man who give me my name was Mr. Alexander McCarty. One minute he’d be whipping me, the next he’d be showing me measurement, area, volume, x, y, z. He liked whiskey, numbers, and sometimes he liked me. He was so far gone into his whiskey that when the War ended and freedom come, he didn’t notice. I stayed on, playing chess and fixing his drinks until he died. Before I fetched the doctor, I took his rubber poncho and filled it with books, and when I left that house for the last time, I stayed off the roads. Those books would have cost me my life ten times. 

Next couple of years, I close to starved. No matter how hard I worked, I got little pay, or no pay, same as slavery. I took to stealing, and probably somebody would have found me out and let me dance on a rope, but Mr. Jim Griggs took me in at the graveyard. I was already tall and skinny as a scarecrow, young, hungry, and strong. Mr. Jim let me sleep in his little shack, and he showed me off to some medical students. That’s when I started making real money. So much money, that by the time Mr. Jim died, I had enough saved to buy a ring for Miss Eleanor Weathers. For a while I wondered if such a pretty girl could love a black scarecrow like me. Well, Mrs. Eleanor McCarty proved her love was real and true. Then I worried I would lose her love if she ever found out what I do at night. God help me, she never will. 

That same God blessed us with just one child, Elvira, and she is bright like a diamond. We were having a birthday supper, Elvira giving us her snaggletooth smile with two teeth missing, eyes shining, hair in ribbons and braids.

“How old am I?”

“You know how old you are, lady bug.”

“I’m six years old. Miz Dorcas say three hundred sixty-five days in a year. That’s two thousand one-hundred-ninety days.”

I figured a minute and said to Eleanor, “She’s right.”

“How old are you, Papa?”

“Now, hold on there. You don’t ask Papa that.”

Eleanor knows I don’t know what day, much less what year I was born. But I didn’t mind. I was just staring at Elvira, amazed.  

Elvira kept me amazed and scared. One day at the post office, she whispered too loud that the postmaster was giving me the wrong change. I dragged her out of there. Halfway home, I put one knee in the dust and my face level with hers. 

“Don’t you ever do that.”

“Papa, he was wrong. Seven cents wrong.”

“Listen to me … If you mess with those people, they’ll take you away.”

I studied her and watched her mouth slowly fall open.

“They’ll take you away. They’ll take me away. They’ll take your Ma away. And you won’t see us ever again.”

Finally, I saw what I needed to see in her eyes. Fear.

“You can’t let everybody see everything inside you. That’s your treasure. Sometimes you got to hide your treasure. I got some treasure. You want to see it?”

We stopped at the house, took a drink of water, and walked an hour more. We could see Mas McCarty’s empty, falling-down house through the trees.

“Are we going there?” Elvira asked nervously.

I was trying to remember where my hiding place was. It was deep in the woods on the east side of McCarty’s house. I broke off a walking stick, put Elvira on my back, and pushed through the oakleaf and ninebark. Past the fireplace stones of some long-gone cabin, there was my hollow tree. I stirred the stick inside it for a good while to make sure I wasn’t reaching into a snake nest, then pulled out the rubber poncho. The books tumbled out: Elementary Treatise on Mathematics, Cocker’s Arithmetick, a book by Mas McCarty’s good friend Euclid …

When we got home, we could smell greens and ham hocks. Eleanor told me, “A little boy came by for you.” I knew what that meant.

About midnight, I fixed myself a cup of coffee, and then I took the back roads to the graveyard. I was waiting with shovel and spade when the medical students, Mr. Canby and Mr. Honig, arrived in a buckboard. There was not much conversation. They had read the death notice for Mrs. Phyllis Cranton in the newspaper, and that is who they wanted. We made our way through the dark to her grave, and undid my work of the day before. We got the coffin out of the grave; I took out the screws, lifted the lid, and ripe death hit us. I rolled Mrs. Cranton on to their tarp, they wrapped her up, and turned to hurry back to a box on their wagon. 

“Mr. Honig,” I called. He came back and dropped a five-dollar bill in my hand. I had the coffin back in the ground and half-covered before they trotted away.

At the end of the school year, there is always a celebration. We meet at the church, bless all the children, and have a picnic. Elvira was eleven years old, almost as tall as Eleanor, and a little thinner than we would have liked in her white lace dress. Her teacher, Mrs. Dorcas Lemon, took us aside. 

“Mr. Jess, Mrs. Eleanor, I can’t teach her anymore.”

Eleanor’s eyes got big, and my heart started beating fast. 

“Why not? Why can’t you teach my daughter?”

“She knows too much. I can’t keep up with her. She can help me teach, but I just can’t get her any money yet, because she’s so young. Maybe in a year or two …?”

We nodded.

“Elvira must go on. Her education can’t stop here. Your daughter could do anything. Why, she could even be a doctor.”

Dorcas Lemon saw the look on my face and then added, “Or many other things.”

So, Elvira started teaching the little ones at Mary Groves School, and Mrs. Dorcas put out the word until she found a retired teacher in Columbia willing to give Elvira private lessons. Henry Armstrong arrived on Monday after supper. He was younger than I expected, with thin, yellow hair, a beaky nose, and watery blue eyes. He stared a moment at the Euclid and Cocker on the table next to the lamp.

“Well, Elvira, let’s get started.”

That evening, he did most of the talking, and I could hardly understand a word of it, but Elvira answered him, sure and certain.

So, time went by: burying in the daytime, unburying at night; doing laundry and selling eggs; teaching school and studying with Mr. Henry. We sat in the back room, listening to the lessons in the front room. Sometimes I could understand exactly what they were saying, and I didn’t like it.  

“That horse,” said Mr. Henry, “was the finest animal I ever owned. There was not one thing that Germanicus couldn’t do: bow, Spanish walk, dance, stand. But the one thing Germanicus could not take was butterflies.”

I could hear Elvira giggling.

“If that horse saw a butterfly, he lost his mind. We were in a Fourth of July parade, and I was feeling proud because Germanicus was getting so many compliments. What a fine beast. So stately. Just splendid. Then along came a butterfly. That horse tore me through a marching band, the Temperance League, about a thousand school children; raced a half-mile down Gervais Street, turned on Barnwell and nearly brained me against a tree …”

Elvira was laughing hard now. When Eleanor marched out, the laughing stopped.

“Can I get you some coffee, Mr. Henry?”

“No, I’m fine, thank you. Let’s get back to the reverse power rule …”

We all stood at the front door to tell Mr. Henry good night. Fifteen-year-old Elvira looked like a grown woman, bright-eyed, full lipped. I wanted to haul her to the back room and put a lock on it. Mr. Henry was also bright-eyed with red on his cheeks, but below that red was hollow, and his jacket and shirt hung on him.

He started telling us about a school in Ohio called Oberlin. He was writing someone there, telling them about Elvira. Going there would take a lot of work and some money, but we should think about it. 

“And they’ll let in a colored girl?”

“Oberlin accepts everyone. White and colored, girls and boys.”

We watched Mr. Henry walk into the darkness. 

“Oberlin College …” said Elvira.

“That man is sick.” Eleanor was trying to see through the darkness, but he was gone.

“Mr. Henry?”

“Yes, Mr. Henry. That man is not long for this world, and I don’t want him bringing whatever he got up in here.”

“Don’t you want me to go to Oberlin, Mama?”

Elvira did a lot of writing and collected letters from people all over town saying she was upright, Christian, hardworking, and bright. A Monday in April, Mr. Henry arrived. He had gloves on. One hand was holding a handkerchief to his lips, the other was holding out a letter. Elvira was accepted to Oberlin. She would only need to pay half the amount in the coming year. The number took our breath away.

School ended in May, we had our celebration picnic, and the little teaching money Elvira was getting ended. Days got longer and hotter, and usually my business picked up, but this year, there was a spell of good health. Nobody was dying. Nobody to bury in the daytime, nobody to unbury at night. I tried to get more yard and handyman work. Eleanor did as much laundry, sewing, and egg selling as she could. Elvira picked buckets of blackberries, made cobblers, and she and Eleanor sold them door to door. We lived on boiled peanuts and sweet potatoes, boiled peanuts and collards, or just plain boiled peanuts, but the coffee tin of money stayed half empty. A Monday came, and Mr. Henry didn’t show. Next day I got the news. Henry Armstrong was dead. I came home to find Elvira, red-eyed, sitting out back shelling peanuts.  

“Can I come to the burial tomorrow?”

The day was fiery hot, and the few mourners around Henry Armstrong’s grave didn’t stay long. When the last one left, Elvira came out from behind a tree, a bunch of black-eyed Susans in her hand. I finished shoveling dirt over Mr. Henry.

“That was all his people?”

“I guess.”

“That was such a poor funeral …”

“I think his people had money once, but their money ran off after the War.”

She carefully set the flowers on his grave.

The next day was a long one, chopping weeds and cutting down a tree at the Murchison place. I headed home under a dark sky. The clouds were boiling, and the air smelled like a storm. When I got in the house, the smell of peanuts hit me at the door. 

Eleanor said, “A little boy was here for you.”

Around midnight, I got up, made coffee, and went out. The wind kept trying to tear the hat off my head, thunder was rumbling, and I walked along, thinking: I had enough of this. I’m no fool. If I do this much longer, I’m bound to get caught. Or one of those medical students is going to get tired of paying a black man and will turn on me. 

First, I’m sending Elvira to Ohio. Then I’m sending Eleanor with enough money to get settled. And by next Spring, I’m gone. They say there is all kinds of opportunity for a black man up north … The wind was roaring now, the rain was hitting sideways, and at every ten steps, the world was lighting up, bright as day.

I was first at the graveyard, as usual. Mr. Honig and somebody new, some student named Jessup came riding up. Jessup stared up at me in a flash of lightning. Those two probably thought themselves tall, but I was looking down at both of them. 

We found Henry Armstrong’s grave, and in the blowing rain, I started digging, my shovel pulling up heavy loads of mud. I finally reached the coffin. All slippery and wet, it took the three of us to get it out. I removed the screws, slid off the lid. Mr. Henry was lying there, as white as his burying clothes. In the next blaze of lightning, I saw bright red blood on his chin, bright red across the breast of his burying clothes. Then he sat up.

Mr. Honig and Mr. Jessup screamed and ran in two different directions. They whooped and hollered back to their carriage, and the splashing of horse hooves faded away. Mr. Henry blinked in the pouring rain. He sat in his coffin, white as white as bone, but black as I am, he probably didn’t see me until the sky lit up once more.

“Jess McCarty?” he asked, looking at me, then around him, like he was waking from a dream.

“Mr. Henry,” I answered. “Begging your pardon, sir.” And I raised that shovel high.

About the author

LN Lewis is a graduate in Spanish Literature from Howard University and currently lives in Detroit. She received a Walt Disney Fellowship for her one-act play, "Miss Marie’s Last One." Her work has appeared in Catalyst, Jet Fuel, New Millennium Writings, and the anthologies Stories to Change the World; Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience; and Undeniable: Writers Respond to Climate Change. February through March 2022, LN Lewis was an Artist Associate at the Atlantic Center for the Arts under the guidance of writer Jaquira Diaz. 

About the illustration

The illustration is African American Man, photograph, ca. 1890s, by the DeVinney Studio. In the public domain, via the Missouri State Museum.