Gloryland by Shelton Johnson

brighter all the time. Shadows under the elms made the ground look as if it were gone, like I was walking on nothing. It was all right for me to spend my life walking on this nothing, but not on that sidewalk in town.
    Pretty soon I could feel the ground getting harder and hear town getting closer. Someone’s dog was barking, a door slammed, and somewheres off, a rooster was letting everyone know that I was coming. It’s strange how when you’re going somewhere you really shouldn’t be going, you get there mighty quick. Part of me wished I hadn’t got there so fast. But something made me keep walking, keep my feet moving toward that sidewalk up ahead, but I was so afraid that I dropped my head now, and watched my dirty shoes go forward on their own, pulling me along.
    People were already walking there cause church had just let out. I
could feel the stares, which were empty like the black shadows under elm trees, but colder. I caught the scents of manure and hay from a livery stable to my right, but I didn’t look at it. I knew it was there, like the beauty shop on my left that colored women couldn’t use.
    I kept walking and I knew when I was beside the butcher shop that wouldn’t take credit from colored people, no, I didn’t need to smell blood to know where death kept a business, or maybe it was the funeral parlor up ahead that only served whites, though Mama once told me we’re all the same color to worms. I stared at that shop wondering who would make my coffin on the day I died, and maybe this was the day. I kept looking even after I passed, so I didn’t notice I’d turned slightly toward the sidewalk till my right foot bumped up against something hard.
    I lifted that foot and put it down squarely on the sidewalk. I leaned forward, pushed off, and brought my left foot up right next to it. Then I was standing on the sidewalk where no colored person was supposed to stand. It was just a few inches off the ground but the sky seemed closer and bluer. I felt if I reached up with my hands, they would turn blue cause the sky was so close. I felt giddy, but I didn’t know if it was fear or being up so high. It was just a few inches, the distance between where I’d been and where I was, but it could have been a mountain.
    I didn’t move right away. Looking down, I could see each sunlit pine plank and how they fit together like they’d always been lined up side by side, like the sidewalk came whole from a mill and colored men had nothing to do with it at all. The sweat of the men who had built it was soaked into the ground under those boards, where eyes couldn’t see. There must’ve been pools of blackness down there, but only insects could taste the salt.
    I looked up and saw Spartanburg like it had just come out of the air. The fear hit me again and made my head too heavy to keep up. The trees whispered as I began to walk, head bowed. In front of me and behind me were white people, but they were just bright pieces moving in a fog of perfume, branches, shadows, and light. I
could smell them and hear them moving all around me. Eyes were going through me cause I wasn’t there, I was a shadow under the magnolias.
    I could feel my breath pick up as my feet went up, down, up, down. I was walking on whiteness all broken up under the shade, the trees breaking up the sun and casting it down to silence. I was looking at feet, lots of feet moving toward me or away from me, and a few shoes not moving cause their owners were sitting on benches off to the side, pairs of them just sitting there, nice shoes pointed at me as I walked by. Black trousers, white dresses, scuffing of boots along the sidewalk, tap and scrape of a cane, knees bending, creases on pant legs, dust staining cotton dresses long enough to sweep any darkness off the sidewalk, white enough to bleach any stain out of it.
    “Who’s that boy?” I heard someone ask behind me.
    I didn’t turn around, just kept walking. But I looked up quickly then and smiled