“Well,” he said. “You heard. Franklin my name. But everybody call me Red. Momma say the day I was born my hair so bright all the people call me that. She say even my skin was red day she showed me to people.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s a nickname. I’d say Red is about as good a nickname as somebody could have.”
“You mind I call you Charlie?” he asked.
“Just don’t do it in front of my mother.”
“They ain’t no danger in that,” he said.
That fall Red and I became friends. Not once do I remember my mother being in earshot of Red, although we often spent time in the company of his. Red lived with his mother, Sarah, in a one-room wooden shack by the railroad tracks just outside Jerusalem. The shack was roofed with tin. Red and I would sit on the little front porch and listen to the rain drum on the tin. Sometimes the wind would blow the rain spilling from the roof onto our faces, and it felt cold as ice. If we had found a toad in the shade under the house, we’d turn it loose and watch it hop down the steps, big drops spattering its back, until it made its way under the house to shelter.
Red’s mother was a tall woman, tall as a man. Her eyes were queer, the eyes of a being who could cast spells over creatures or men. They were large, set far apart, the color of amber. Sometimes she caught me staring at her but she never scolded. She would smile faintly and look away. Her hair was always wrapped in brightly colored scarves, and she would carry water to the house balancing it in big jugs on her head. She was thin, so thin her ebony skin looked drawn over her bones.
“People say she been bony ever since I was born,” Red said. “Course, I ain’t got no way of knowing, cause I flat out don’t remember. People say she got some kind of blood flux. Say that’s why she don’t have no more children than me.”
“Where’s your daddy?” I asked.
“Don’t rightly know,” he said. “Ain’t never seen him. Some people say he got killed. Momma don’t seem to know.”
“People say my daddy was killed, too,” I said. “Out west. By an Irishman.”
“What’s that?”
“A foreigner. They about starved out. So they came here. You can tell them by their red hair.”
“Well, I ain’t no Irishman.”
“Course you’re not. Not everybody has red hair is an Irishman.”
“Humph,” he said. “I’d whole lot rather be a red-headed nigger than some foreigner.”
“Me, too.”
Red’s mother cooked hoecakes right in the coals of the hearth. She grew little green peppers in her garden she would hang from the rafters of the shack in the winter. She seasoned her batter with the peppers and they made your tongue burn and your eyes water. Red loved her hoecakes and I learned to love them, too. One time we tried seeing who could hold one of those dried peppers in his mouth the longest. I spit mine out right off but Red held his until his face turned red and his freckles were black as peppercorns. Tears were running down his cheeks, and still he held the pepper. Then his mother came in and caught us. She laughed out loud when she saw Red’s puckered face. Then she quit laughing and switched Red good.
Sometimes Sarah would sit with us on the porch as we listened to the crickets and katydids. She would smoke a corncob pipe to help drive off the mosquitoes. She stretched her long legs down the steps, and the skin of her legs glistened. One evening a colored girl in a faded dress ambled along the road. She was barefoot, and a strap of her dress had fallen from her shoulder. She paused and plucked a stem of marsh grass and placed it in her teeth. She was older than Red and me, with fascinating curves and shapes. We leaned forward, studying every motion.
“Get on there, girl,” Sarah said. “Don’t you be lollygagging here front of my porch!” The girl said nothing and moved on. She looked back over her shoulder.
“What you two gawking at?” Red’s mother said. “I’m gone tan your hide, boy, you don’t act like you got some sense. Mister Charlie, that go for you, too. Don’t you reckon your momma be missing you? Best get on home. I make you some more hoecakes tomorrow.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
The next week, after a thunderstorm, Red and I caught some fat night crawlers in the grass behind the shack. We put them with sand and grass in an old bucket and tucked them in the shade of the house pilings. The next afternoon, we carried the bucket to a little pool on Flag Run, near the school, with our cane poles and a burlap sack.
The bullheads were biting, and each of us was bringing one in with nearly every cast. We hoisted them up, gasping and sucking, their bellies yellow in the sunlight, onto the bank. We unhooked them as quickly as we could, put them in the sack in the stream, weighted the mouth of the sack with a big rock, and baited our hooks. When we ran out of night crawlers, we started to search the marsh grass along the stream for crickets.
“What you two doing?” the colored girl asked. Her hair was tied in braids. I recognized her. She was the girl we had studied from Red’s mother’s porch.
“Who spying?” Red asked.
“Alreda,” she said. “I ain’t spying. What you doing?”
She looked pretty in a flowered smock made from a flour sack.
“Fishing,” I said.
“We catching crickets,” Red said.
“You a cute white boy,” she said. “I seen you at Red’s. What your name?”
“Charlie,” I said.
“Charlie,” she said. She closed her eyes. “Mr. Charlie.”
“Don’t you be studying about no name,” Red said. “We trying to do us some fishing. Why don’t you get on?”
“Mr. Charlie, you want to see my titties?” she asked.
“I mean it, girl!” Red said. He picked up a clump of sod.
Alreda lowered the front of her smock. She let me look, then pulled it back over her shoulders.
“I show you my jellyroll for a penny, Mr. Charlie,” she said.
“He ain’t got no penny!” Red said. He threw the sod. It landed with a smack on her ankle.
“You little nigger!” she said.
Red picked up another clump. “You get on!” he said.
Alreda scurried up the bank and out of sight.
“Look here, Charlie,” he said. “Look the size of the damn cricket was under that sod.”
Red and I gathered a few more crickets in my handkerchief. We baited our hooks and caught more bullheads and slid them in the burlap sack. Then we gathered our poles and headed to Red’s house.
“Look here, Momma,” he said, hefting the sack.
Sarah smiled. “I got some corn meal. Clean them and I’ll cook them up for supper.”
Red found a bowl and a knife in the kitchen. We carried them and the sack to the marsh grass on the other side of the road. Red pulled a bullhead from the sack.
“Them spines, see, you don’t want one to poke your hand, Charlie. Sting like hell.” He cradled the bullhead between his fingers and cut the skin around its head. He cut the skin around the spikes and pulled it back, pinching with his thumb against the knife blade. He threw the skin in the grass. Then he ran the blade down the backbone to cut the fillets. He tossed the head and spine into the grass. He held the fillets up.
“See yonder?” he said. He put the fillets in the bowl. “Now you try one.”
I pulled a bullhead from the sack and rested its belly between my fingers.
Red