Gloryland by Shelton Johnson Page B

almost right away. When I woke up it was the middle of a warm summer night. The moon was almost full. Crickets were chirping, and Big Creek wasn’t too far off, cause I could hear frogs singing.
    I got up to pee. When I lay back down, I thought how worried Mama and Daddy must be, but I went to sleep anyway. Something pulled me down to the earth and kept me there through the night. At some point there was a clatter of horses cantering by, but since they never stopped, I didn’t worry too much. There was no trail to this spot, though it was just off the road.
    The sun woke me, coming down through the branches of a live oak, and everything it touched turned yellow. I got up and carefully made my way back to the road. There was no one in sight when I peered up and down, so I headed home, stopping a few times to look back. I expected the sheriff would come after me, or worse, but no one did. Maybe they thought they’d imagined me walking on the sidewalk that bright Sunday morning. Maybe I was just a shadow moving, and they mistook me for a boy named Elijah Yancy. Maybe I never slept in the woods beside the road to Spartanburg.
    That’s what I was thinking when I got to the place in the road where a narrow lane, barely big enough for a wagon, wound to the left, which was the way to the cabin. The sun was getting high again. Another morning almost done, and I could feel the heat of the day in my clothes. I glanced back again: no one, so I turned onto the road
Daddy had cleared before I was even born. I felt light, light enough to get a lift from the air. Soon my feet found the footpath to our cabin, then the doorstep.
    I started up into the cabin, and a shadow fell across me. It was big, but it wasn’t no tree.
    “Elijah,” I heard Daddy say, “where you been, boy?”
    I looked up cause I had to. Daddy filled up the doorway, making it look small and uncomfortable. When he moved away from it, closer to me, the doorway looked relieved. I knew how it felt.
    “Just walkin, sir,” I replied.
    He looked through me the way he could when he was angry, like there was something on the other side that was worth looking at but it wasn’t me. “Walkin,” he said with a grunt. “Where? Greenville? You been gone since yesterday! Your mama and I been worried sick!” There was a vein in Daddy’s neck that got big whenever he got angry, and it looked like it was about to burst. “I’d say you were walkin, all right, but in the wrong place. Yeah, we heard about you bein in Spartanburg.”
    If I’d had any doubt that he was angry, it was gone. But my daddy was good at being angry and not showing it. It was like thunder trying to be polite. You didn’t need to hear thunder to know the lightning was close.
    “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “but I just got to thinkin bout that sidewalk in town, bout how we’re treated, how it ain’t fair that even when we go to town we got to walk in the dirt!”
    I was looking at him straight on, not afraid or maybe just more foolish than I’d ever been. He looked down at me and I couldn’t read him no more. I didn’t know what kind of expression he had on cause I’d never seen it before.
    “Elijah,” he said, in a voice that had all the stiffness hammered out of it. “Boy, you don’t need to tell me bout dirt. I seen enough of it, been livin in it, you might even say it keeps me company. Dirt put those clothes on you. Dirt keeps you from gettin hungry. And one
day, I hope a long, long time from this day, dirt is gonna put you to sleep.” He still had a fire in him, and his voice rose as he talked, got faster, hotter, the words bits of hot iron cast off and too bright to look at without my eyes blurring.
    “Just got tired of it, sir,” I sputtered. “I believe I had a right to walk there since colored men built that sidewalk. I was just walkin, sir, doin nothin but walkin.”
    He laughed, low and deep, but there was iron on the edge of that laugh, and I could feel its weight and bite.