Free The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis Page B

seemed. Hattie had managed to pay for most of the dress, and Cassie cleaned houses to pay the rest. Cassie was the first Shepherd to attend a prom. Hattie didn’t say much, but she spent a long time pressing the dress and then laid it out on Cassie’s bed as gently as she would a newborn baby. It was pale green and softly shining. Layers of chiffon frothed around the skirt when it moved. Six kept going into his sisters’ room to look at it lying on the bed. The dress was so delicate and pretty it could have taken flight and floated out of the window.
    Cassie and Bell were in the bathroom rolling Cassie’s hair into curlers. “Six,” one or the other called, “bring us some more bobby pins.” Or, “Six, tell Mother we’ll need the hot comb in twenty minutes.” He came when summoned and hung around the bathroom door watching his sisters. When she wasn’t busy with Cassie’s hair, Bell stood behind him with her hands on either side of his face rubbing his cheeks absentmindedly, the way she would a cat. His sisters were prettier than anyone Six knew. They gabbled to each other like bright birds. Bell went downstairs to light the hot water heater. By the time she returned, Cassie had put the stopper into the tub, and the hot water rushed out of the faucet in a loud steaming torrent. The water was hot enough to cook an egg. Six sat on the edge of the tub. One of them, maybe Cassie, asked him to get a clean towel from the hall closet, and the other had made a joke that he was their butler, and they’d laughed. Six was just about to stand for an exaggerated pretend bow when he lost his balance and fell into the tub. Hot enough to cook an egg. So hot that for a long while Six couldn’t breathe or cry out. He felt as though his flesh was sliding off of his bones. Cassie screamed. She screamed as she pulled him out and screamed as she laid him on the floor and screamed as he flailed on the tile. He heard Hattie shouting and footsteps, many footsteps, coming down the hallway, and then, mercifully, he blacked out. He woke in the ambulance to his mother’s hands moving on his feet and legs, fluttering over him as though her hands had become butterflies.
    “ THE SCARS DON’T LOOK so bad, you know,” Reverend Grist said. “And glory to Jesus you still here.”
    “Glory be, sir,” Six replied.
    Six dressed and breakfasted, and he and Reverend Grist got in the car and drove through the town—the Reverend wanted Six to see a genuine southern municipality. Down at the revival site the ministers would be praying and studying their Bibles in preparation for the afternoon service. It was Saturday, and they would start at four.
    “There’s gonna be a crowd this evening like you never saw.”
    “Everybody here is so church going as all that?” Six asked.
    “The revival’s the only game in town, so to speak. Not much round here for folks to do, save the pool halls and the drinking places, but they can go to those anytime. The revival’s entertainment. But that’s alright—they come for whatever reason they want to, then it’s the Lord that occupies Himself with their souls. Amen.”
    The town was five blocks of storefronts and a five and dime. The reverend pointed out the post office and a little place where a woman he called Aunt Baby Sugar made the best sweet potato pie in the state of Alabama. “They have a entrance round back for Negroes to buy something and take it home,” Reverend Grist said.
    The white people looked almost as badly off as the Negroes. The women Six saw wore faded dresses and their hair was stringy, or they were fat and red-faced. The men were sweaty and their shoes weren’t polished. Negroes skirted the white people on the sidewalk; one man nearly fell into the gutter as he hopped off the curb to avoid colliding with a white woman who was walking toward him. The town seemed to be comprised of equal numbers of each race. In Philadelphia, Six rarely saw white people aside from the teachers at