“Here I come, slowpoke!” Even though she was behind me, I could tell Tonya was smiling. Grinning in that nice-nasty way she did when she was getting the best of me, pretty as a picture and laced with venom. The words buzzed around my right ear like a mosquito, making my jaw twitch. I swatted to shoo the irritating tickle, only to find an even more disturbing sound beneath it. The pap, pap, pap of Tonya’s sneakers hitting the pavement and getting louder as she closed in on me. The noise threw me into a panic like a monster was chasing me. Soon all it would have to do is reach out a gnarled hand and it would have me — for dinner probably. The louder her steps grew the harder I ran, but it was useless. She was always faster than me.
When she passed me, soft notes of Jean Naté body splash added insult to injury. Even when she was a bitch she smelled like sunshine. Then she was looking over her shoulder and
there was the smile, all white teeth and dimples framed by pink ribbons and bouncing pigtails. Her arms and legs were pumping so fast they looked like they might break off, but the smile said it was no big deal. I wished she would run into a tree.
Reaching the front gate of the playground, Tonya slowed down and went into a victory chicken-jog, complete with flapping arms and clucking. I stopped running. Why bother? I leaned over, put my hands on my knees, sucked in deep filling breaths. If my heart beats any harder it will burst out of my chest and hop around on the street, I thought. I smirked at that imagery. That would really scare the shit out of my cousin, seeing a sloppy, bloody heart flopping toward her and making that tha-thump, tha-thump sound.
I willed my heart to pop free and chase Tonya, but it stayed in my chest. Sweat trickled off my forehead and dotted the pavement between my feet like a sun shower. “Stupid showoff!” I hissed through clenched teeth. Even with a five-second head start, I hadn’t come close to beating my cousin. Her short, powerful strides easily outpaced the slow-motion gait of my gangly giraffe legs, just like a million other times.
Tonya was eight months older than me and we had been racing each other from the moment we could both walk. That was nine years ago and I had yet to win. That wouldn’t have been such a bad thing with a school friend or one of the girls from the other block, but this was Tonya Marie Henderson. Our mothers were sisters. Close enough to be each other’s best friend and worst enemy. Their relationship revolved around husbands, houses, cars, and anything else that could be compared and bested; including every milestone, action, and ability of their daughters. Some kids pick up their parents’ bad habits, some don’t. I could not care less about the competition. Tonya lived and breathed it. When you lost to her you were going to feel it. After almost 10 years, I was tired of feeling it.
Her victory jog complete, she stood at the playground gate, hands on her hips, dimpled grin still plastered on her face.
“You give up too easy,” she said, as I trudged toward her. She spun on her heels, pigtails swinging as she headed through the open gate of the playground. “So sorry that you’re sooo sorry,” she chimed, as she skipped off toward the monkey bars.
I sucked my teeth and glared at the back of her head but didn’t say anything. In my mind I saw myself running up to the bars with my long giraffe strides. I’d reach up with a gigantic hand, wide as a bicycle wheel, and smack the shit out of Tonya right upside her head. That made me feel better. I reached the monkey bars with a secret smile.
Tonya was hanging upside down by her knees. Her pigtails hung straight down from her head like devil horns. “All hail the monkey bar queen,” she said; of course she was referring to herself. When I started climbing she said, “Stay on your side. This is the royal side over here.”
I rolled my eyes. It didn’t matter what she was doing on her raggedy half of the bars. On my half, Dee Dee-the-Daring was about to perform. Sitting on the top bars, I looked out over the empty playground and did a Miss America-style wave to my adoring crowd. They roared their love at me. I smiled and flipped into my routine. Somersaulting, swinging, hanging from my knees. I dazzled my awe-struck fans with acrobatic feats never before seen on any suburban playground in the whole US of A.
Amazing! I could hear them shouting. Incredible! They were breathless with awe.
I was about to go into my grand finale (a Supreme-Power Leap from the top of the bars) when Tonya started mumbling. Ignoring her sad ploy to distract me, I stood on the highest bars and raised my arms to the sides. Deeee-Dee! Deeee-Dee! Deeee-Dee, the crowd chanted.
I took a deep breath and jumped, landing solidly on my feet, bending my knees a little on impact. Then I stood up straight, arched my back and lifted my arms high like I’d seen the gymnastic girls do on TV. The crowd went wild! I stood tall, sparkling in their adoration, until Tonya started mumbling again.
“Here comes ol’ Eva.”
I turned to look at her. “Who?” I asked. “Evil?”
“No dummy. Miss Eva,” she said. “Get back up here before she sees you.”
I looked around the playground. No one was there but us. ”Who are you talking about?”
She tilted her head in the direction of the gate. “Look.”
There, at the playground entrance, a little brown figure swayed. It was almost summer and close to 80 degrees, but Miss Eva wore a long trench coat buttoned to her neck. Thick wool socks covered her feet along with men’s house shoes that were so big and torn I wondered how she walked in them without falling. Her snow white hair was rubber-banded into a tiny, wispy pigtail that stuck straight up on top of her head. A wooden pipe bobbed in the corner of her mouth. Silently, she hovered at the entrance like a ghostly gatekeeper whose riddle we would need to solve if we wanted to leave.
I swallowed hard and kept my voice casual. “Oh her. I’ve seen her before. She walks on our block sometimes.”
“Yeah…but look at her,” Tonya hissed.
Reluctantly, I turned my head back in the old woman’s direction and fully understood what grownups meant when they said their blood ran cold. Miss Eva had walked beyond the gate and was now standing inside the playground looking directly at us. The truth was I had seen this strange woman before, but only at a distance. Now she stood less than fifty feet away. She was very thin, almost skeletal. Her dark brown skin was smooth and tight across her little skull. And her eyes! Her eyes were twice the size of normal eyes, so big that they seemed to be sitting on her face rather than in the sockets. It was like on Scooby Doo, when Scoob saw something that really scared him and his eyes popped out his head. But those were cartoon eyeballs. These were real eyeballs, and there wasn’t a damn thing funny about them.
I scampered back up the monkey bars saying a silent prayer to the Baby Jesus to please not let Miss Eva be able to climb.
“Why is she staring at us?” I managed to get out of my suddenly dry mouth.
“Act casual,” Tonya said and swung herself upside down by the knees. “If she thinks you’re lookin’ at her, she’ll chase you with a butter knife.”
I flipped myself over, too, trying to seem occupied with anything other than those eyes and the fear that was swirling in my gut like a big mean snake. “Well, you can’t hurt anybody with a butter knife,” I whispered. ”Besides, that old woman couldn’t catch me if she had on banana peel rocket shoes.”
“Mama says you can kill somebody with a butter knife if you stab them in the temple,” Tonya snapped in her know-it-all way.”And I don’t care if she can catch me or not. I don’t want her chasing me.”
It was rare for Tonya to admit being afraid of anything. This was serious. We peeked from the corner of our eyes to see what Miss Eva was doing. She had made her way back out of the playground to the other side of the street where she was eating crab apples right off of a tree in someone’s front yard.
We gasped in shock. After years of believing that crab apples were poisonous, here, this old woman stood eating them like candy. Pipe in one hand and two or three tiny apples in the other, she was scarfing those things down like they were the last bit of food on earth. We couldn’t take anymore.
“On the count of ten?” I squeaked.
“Make it five.”
“OK. One…two…three…four.”
We looked at each other and screamed the final number together. “FIVE!”
Miss Eva must have looked up from her apple-rama and thought she was seeing double. How else would she decipher the sight of two little brown girls jumping from the top of the monkey bars like a mirror image and bolting out of the playground so fast we heard wind wailing in our ears. It wasn’t until we made it back to the safety of our own block that I realized we had been screaming the whole time.
Encounters with Miss Eva were rare, yet we lived that entire summer in fear of seeing her. Even from the safety of our own porches, a coat-wearing figure in the distance would send us scurrying into the house like rabbits. I asked my mother about the mysterious old woman one day as we shucked corn for dinner. She didn’t have much to offer. “Well, she’s a little off, but I don’t know anything about any butter knife,” When I told her about the crab apples, she paused a moment like she was trying not to laugh, then offered “I don’t know if they’re poisonous, but I really don’t think it’s a good idea to eat them raw like that.”
“She was eating them like they were M&Ms, Ma!” I demonstrated the apple-gobbling and made my eyes super big to drive the point home.
She paused again. “Just leave her alone and she won’t bother you.”
I was not convinced. From the light golden breezes of June to the heavy heat of August, she was the stuff of my nightmares, until one late summer afternoon right before school started. We were once again on the monkey bars. We had avoided them most of the summer, afraid we’d run into Miss Eva. That day, we decided to take a chance.
I stood again on the topmost bars, thanking my audience for coming to yet another spectacular show. Tonya hung from her hands, traveling across a row of bars. That’s when I heard the first ping.
Thinking Tonya had fallen, I jumped down to get a better look. I wanted to get a good laugh out before she could scramble up and brush herself off. I was surprised to find her still hanging from the bars, looking at me with the same expression.
“You fell?” she snickered.
“No. I thought you did.”
Ping! Something ricocheted off the bars and landed near my foot. It was an egg-sized rock.
Across the street, standing in the same yard where Miss Eva had scarfed apples months ago, stood three white boys. The oldest looked to be about our age, the other two (who looked like twins) could not have been more than six or seven.
Tonya jumped down from the bars and put her hands on her hips, “You fools throwing rocks?” she hollered.
“So what if we are, niggers?” one of the small boys sneered. He chucked a rock to show he meant business. It didn’t make it across the street.
I felt my face growing hot. Hearing him use that word made my stomach swirl the same way it did when Miss Eva looked at me.
My fearless cousin picked up the egg rock. “Because if you are throwing rocks,” she bellowed, “we might have to come over there and kick your sorry white asses!” Reaching way back like the show-off pitcher down at Central Little League who thought he was Reggie Jackson, she lobbed the rock across the street as hard as she could. One of the small boys let out
a little yelp as it whizzed past his ear.
“Yeah!” I added in my best tough Black-girl voice.
The older boy did a big fake laugh, holding his belly and throwing his head back. ”C’mon and try it then, ssistaaahs!”
My hands trembled with fear and anger. I knew Tonya was ready to fight, but I sure wasn’t. I also knew that if I were to run away from these three without fighting my cousin would never let me live it down. Everyone would know, and I would be forever branded a scary-ass punk.
Tonya’s voice was warrior-fierce as she yelled at the three scumbags across the street. A string of forbidden words spilled from her lips as naturally as if she spoke that way everyday. I looked over at her in shock. Where had my cousin learned to curse like that? Just then, another rock came zinging through the playground and smacked her in the forehead.
A dome of silence fell over the scene. If there were singing birds or moving cars or barking dogs in the area they had vanished. The wind that had gently rustled leaves over our heads stopped, and the voices of the boys went mute, even as their angry mouths still moved. Everything in the world stood frozen during the seconds that my cousin touched her hand to her
head and moved it in front of her face to stare at the blood in her palm. When sound returned, it was the dull thud of bone hitting earth as she dropped to her knees. Then the chaos of movement and discordant noise exploded as one voice rose above it all.
“You assholes!” I screamed.
A summer storm the night before had left tree branches scattered throughout the neighborhood. Without thinking, I picked up a huge branch, leaves and all, and flew out of the playground in a scarlet fog. The boys seemed surprised at my sudden ferocity. Me! The quiet, younger one. The smaller, weaker one. All those things I had heard about myself over the years melted away as I sped toward the boys.
How dare you? How could you? We never did anything to you! The words shrieked in my head or maybe out of my mouth in some incomprehensible language that sounded like roaring since one of the small ones suddenly screamed, then all three took off running up the street. I chased after them. When it was clear that I wouldn’t catch them, I settled for hurling the branch. It capped the older boy in the back of the head. He yelped like a hit dog and ran even faster, leaving the two smaller boys squealing and trying to catch up.
I ran back to the playground. Tonya was sitting on the ground now, holding her head and crying terribly. I helped her to her feet. She was bawling so hard I had to practically lift her off the ground.
“Y-you were great, Dee!” she blubbered. “I never s-s-saw you so mad. You got those assholes g-good.”
“Let’s just get home.” I almost added before they come back, but caught myself lest it slip out that the fearless girl from moments ago was gone, and the punk-ass had returned.
We started through the playground gate at a turtle’s pace. Tonya leaned her head on my shoulder, whimpering the whole time. I held her up with all my strength. “It’s okay. You’ll be all right,” I soothed.
As we neared our block, I looked back at the playground. A little ways behind the monkey bars was a tree. Something near it moved. Who was that? No one had come into the playground while we were there. The figure must have been there the whole time. I squinted my eyes and focused. Lifting my arm briefly from Tonya’s slumped shoulders I raised my hand in the air then quickly returned it.
Miss Eva raised her arm in response. Her butter knife glinted in the summer sunshine like a diamond.
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