Read An American Story for Free Online

Christmas Eve when Daddy took us to see the displays.
    High on homemade sweets and overexcited by the magic of the Christmases Mama conjured for us then, we claimed the streets of our hometown for a night like victorious GIs on town pass. Those Christmas Eves sauntering around downtown St. Louis in the winter chill ogling the dazzling store windows and mechanical Santas were the only times I ever felt like a citizen. It was the only time we had full access to a nonblack neighborhood without having to worry, the only times we saw what the other 99 percent of America looked like and where all our tax dollars were going.
    We oohed and aahed, pushed and shoved, fought and made up in the unstable kaleidoscope of alliances and insurgencies, détente and stalemate that demarcate the universe of six siblings required by family law to be all the friends any of us would ever need. Daddy would stay on the fringe of our family stroll, righting a toddler splayed on an icy patch, deputizing the two oldest to get hot chocolates, lifting six-year-old me high enough to see over some other father’s fedora. Simultaneously wary and relaxed, like the bodyguard of a minor monarch’s third son, he managed to seem both with us and employed by us. Chain-smoking cigarettes he rolled from his ubiquitous Prince Albert can, he nodded and made a measuring eye contact with passersby. Those polite eyes said, “Jes lookin at the lights. Not going to steal anything. Please don’t ruin our Christmas.” The aggressive tilt of his head, the square of his shoulders, and the promise of a rapid response from the muscles he rippled at will made the “please” revocable.
    I never asked to see St. Louis on any other occasion; I knew somehow that our Christmas Eve freedom was a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, good for one use only. I didn’t mind; my world was full. Whites, and the wide-open spaces they occupied, were not real somehow; for me, they only existed on TV, another place we couldn’t live. We could watch, though, and I didn’t aspire to more. I accepted these things as organic, like humidity and hand-me-downs, and took comfort in our close-knit, all-black world.
    Holidays were my mother’s especial forte. She spent the entire week leading up to one cooking. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, she got out that big cauldron of a cooking pot she only used for such occasions and started stuffing produce, little leafy sacrifices, into it. The greens varied enough to fill a botany text: mustard, turnip, spinach. Then she’d put in barrels of black-eyed peas, butter beans, and cabbage, and mounds of fatback, salt pork, and ham hocks to season the lot. Then, best of all, while the smell of roasting turkey insidiously infiltrated the house and trenchers of cornbread bubbled, Mama started peeling sweet potatoes into the big silver cook pot for sweet potato pie. That pot was big enough to cook Hansel and Gretel in; big enough to concoct a potion for spell-casting! Days passed as she peeled and peeled, humming her tuneless, bumpy dirges.
    Book in hand, I glued myself to a kitchen chair. Hours went by as I watched her hands fly at their work yet still retain the precision of one deactivating a time bomb. After an indeterminate period, without warning, she stopped peeling, slicing, humming, and lined up the pie shells she’d prepared.
    â€œMa,” I asked, “how many potatoes is that?”
    â€œHmmmm?” she murmured.
    Cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, coconut, whipped cream—the smells of the all-too-infrequent holidays. The smell of Mama’s magic.
    â€œBut, Ma,” I asked, shivering and tingly at the cosmic forces swirling around us in the aromatic kitchen, “how you know when you done peeled enough?”
    As usual, her repetitive motions had lulled her deep into a reverie and she didn’t answer. Had she not learned how to detach herself and float away from her crowded home and its