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Y’all know anybody closer to this area looking
for help?”
    Malcolm didn’t, but Maddy thought she might know
somebody. Jobs were hard to come by, though, and she thought a favor like that
might be better saved for someone she knew longer than a few minutes. Just as
that thought was occurring to her, Ava ran by at full speed towards the kitchen
and Maddy felt warmed up again. “I know a lady over in Bala Cynwyd looking for kitchen help,” she said. “I’ll
introduce you to her.”
    “Oh, thank you,” said Regina, looking thrilled.
    There was a tap-tapping on
the screen door behind them and they all turned to see what looked like a
little white girl standing with her face to the screen, her hand cupped over
her eyes, trying to see inside. “Hello!” she called. “Is Maddy and Malc in there?”
    Regina went and opened the screen door. The grown
woman standing there was not white, but light-skinned with dyed red hair, and she
was so short that she barely reached past the doorknob.
    “Oh. Hi. I’m Doris Liddy .
How you?”
    She had seen Malcolm and Maddy making their way over
to their new neighbors and had come over to remind them that they were due at
the church. “Pastor hold a meeting every second Saddy morning with the leaders of the church groups,” she explained to Regina, once
she had been invited in. “Maddy and Malc is
co-secretaries of the events board. I’m vice president of the women’s group. Y’all been over to the church yet?”
    “We planning on attending service tomorrow,” George
told her.
    “Oh, good. It’s always good to know God-fearing folks.
In the city, you never know how people is, and I don’t trust nobody that don’t
go to church.”
    “Doris, you don’t hardly trust nobody that do,” Maddy
said.
    Doris shrugged. “Well, like I say, in the city you
just never know.” Doris really never knew about people in the city, the
country, or anywhere else. She was a naturally suspicious person and she
expected that wherever people were gathered wrong-doing was taking place in some form or another. Her mother always used to say that
the only thing more suspicious than a whole bunch of coloredfolks together in one place that wasn’t a church was one white man by himself,
anywhere. She never said how suspicious a whole bunch of white men were together,
because she didn’t have to.
    Ava ran in from the kitchen, sounding all by herself like
a herd of cattle on the wood floor, and Doris feared the little girl would run
right into her and knock her down, before she stopped abruptly beside her
mother. She looked up at Doris and didn’t say anything.
    Doris had also been among the dozen or so residents of
Radnor Street watching from windows as the Delaneys moved in. She, too, had been unsure about going over to say hello, but unlike
Maddy and Malcolm, she knew exactly why. It was this child. There was something
about this child, something about the way she played, that Doris didn’t like.
It was in the way she ran, so fast and uncontrolled. It was in the reach of her
arms as she spun herself around, unconcerned with bumping into things. It was
in the spring of her knees as she jumped up and down on the sidewalk, not caring
that if she fell it would be a hard landing. In all her movements, there was no
restraint. She played as though she had no fear of falling. Doris had known that
quality in younger children, babies just walking. But by this child’s age, fear
was supposed to have taught itself to her, and should have been present in her
play. But it wasn’t. That seemed to Doris to be disrespectful. To whom, she had
not decided. God, maybe. Or her parents,
whose job it was to keep her safe. How could you keep safe a child who
played without fear? Doris didn’t like it. She didn’t like it from the start.
    She had been raised, though, not to insult people, or
their children, in their own house. So, when Maddy smiled down at the child and
said, “Aint she something?” Doris nodded,