The Future Has a Past by J. California Cooper Page A

in your nice little town long.” He knelt down again. “My name is Silki Gains. Hey, come on down here, let’s get to work on these here weeds.”
    Without another thought Luella looked around for her trowel and garden gloves; they were near him. She moved to reach for them and his hand closed around hers. “If these all the tools you got, let me finish this row. I got to go anyway; got to get to work, then you can take over.”
    He gave her a job. “Here,” he let go of her outstretched hand that hung in the air a second in time. “You gather them little weed piles up and put em wherever you put em.” Luella did as he bid her to do.
    He finished the row, asked to wash his hands, went into her house, washed them, came out, put his hot hand on her shoulder and smiled and left for his job at the factory, saying over his shoulder, “See you next time!”
    Luella was left standing in a now darkened garden with a trowel in her hand which she held tighter, trying to feel him as she remembered his smile, those eyes, that smooth skin, that thrilling voice.
    She was up and out early the next morning. Hair brushed and tied back with a bright pretty kerchief. Dress, not new, but flowery fresh and too nice for yard work. She worked in her garden longer than she had worked in it for a long time, even under the steadily rising heat from the sun.
    But . . . he didn’t come.
    Luella did that every day for a week. Silki hadn’t come back. But the garden was doing grandly. Better than usual. The collard greens and mustard greens, onions, tomatoes, okra and a small plot of corn fairly flew up out of the ground. The vegetable garden looked healthy and smelled wonderful.
    Things were growing inside Luella, also. Feelings. Thoughts of Silki made her heart thrill a little. Questions every young girl thinks about, only for Luella more so, because she was not such a young girl anymore. When she bathed, she rubbed the rag slowly over her body, looking at the skin on her plump arms and legs. Feeling the texture of the hair under her arms and everywhere. She examined her feet, her toenails. Her hands, her fingernails. “I will stop biting them.”
    That week she spent a little more bank money for a bottle of perfume with matching cologne and body powder, a pale lipstick and a jar of perfumed Vaseline for her skin, face and all. She thought of the money Preacher Watchem had of hers and she determined to put her foot (now with the polished toenails) down. “Preacher or not!” she spoke to the kitchen walls. “I need some new clothes! Spose he ask me out? I didn’t see no weddin ring on his finger!”
    Now, Luella didn’t know, but Silki had been watching her every morning. Corrine had noticed him, now and again, but didn’t have time to just stand and watch him from behind her curtains, so she thought he might be in the area waiting for someone else, waiting mongst the trees for shade. But Silki had a plan.
    Silki had given himself his new name. Actually he was born Cecil Ray Picket, the fifth child of nine, in a sharecropper shack in Mississippi. Even his busy mother noticed he was different from her other children; he was a dreamer, always staring off into space, sucking his tongue dreaming up ways to stay out of work and out of the sun out in the fields. Of the year or two he was allowed to go to the one-room school, he made good use of the time by learning to read and count. He was not far ahead of his class, but with more interest because the stories in the books were so different from his life and he hated his life.
    Silki found every excuse to stay out of the fields with his father and was often “sick” enough to stay in the house with his mother. He was smart enough to do everything he could to help her around the shack; sweeping the floors, raking the tool- and junk-filled yard, feeding chickens and weeding the house garden and . . . holding a baby and reading to his mother as she worked. The woman was so proud to have a child