Free Such Sweet Thunder by Vincent O. Carter

her small face: sharp eyes, sharp nose, wide thin-lipped mouth — like Toodle-lum’s — and a sharp tongue.
    “Aw, let ’im come!” said Carl soulfully.
    “Yeah, let the li’l niggah come,” Turner encouraged. “Your momma won’ care if you come out a the yard just a little while, will she, buddy?” He smiled a devilish smile, eyes twinkling.
    “Where?”
    “Tell ’im, smarty!” said Tommy.
    “Yeah! Yeah, I’ll tell ’im!” Sammy replied. All eyes were immediately fixed upon his face. His little round eyes grew so bright that all of the meanness seemed to have burned out of them. Slowly, majestically, he raised his skinny little arms and lifted his head beyond the tops of the tall trees, as though he beheld a great vision in the sky.
    “Yeah, I’ll tell ’im!” Sammy was saying: “I know a place! A r-e-a-lpretty place! Where you kin git a-l-l you want to eat! Anything you want! All you have to do is ask for it!”
    “Aw, you crazy!” Tommy said.
    “Crazy
nothin’!
I’m
tellin’
you, you kin have — have — fried chicken, if you want it!”
    “What you mean, if you want it?” Etta exclaimed. “Huh?”
    “An’-an’ —” Sammy stammered, “ice
cream!
An’
cake
, man!”
    “Hot dog!” Carl said, licking his lips.
    “Yeah!” Sammy continued, “an’ chili, an’ ice-cold watermelon! An’ dill pickles an’ wineballs —”
    “Let’s go!” he declared.
    “Yeah! Let’s go!” Etta cried.
    “Shucks!” Tommy declared, “you niggahs is
crazy!
”
    “Don’ go then!”
Sammy yelled angrily. “Come on, gang!”
    “Where is it?” he asked, moving anxiously, timidly through the gate, surveying the forbidden world outside with fear and wonder.
    “I’ll show you,
man
!” said Sammy.
    They walked through the lot behind the empty house. The sun burned hotly on the grass. Grasshoppers crawled along the fuzzy stems of the tall sunflowers and settled on the leaves. Flies buzzed in and out of the cool cellar, which had a musky rotting smell from garbage thrown into the caved-in lower floor. His eyes sought out the hole where he had thrown the cat. He saw the edge of the paper. It had a bright pink bloodstain on it. Flies swarmed around the paper.
    They trooped down the alley, and he looked left and right in wonderment, regarding it with the reckless and yet wary abandon of a prisoner just escaped from prison. His eyes ravished the houses and faces of the lower half of the alley, which he had only seen until now under quite peculiar circumstances: when he went to the store or to the movies or for a walk with Viola and Rutherford, or when he went to pay Aunt Rose a Sunday visit. From the standpoint of adults he had seen it, from the vortex of the lower end of a triangle, or looking down from the unstable height determined by the length of a pair of masculine or feminine legs. Fleetingly he had seen it, from the front porch in the evening after supper, once from the floorboards of a little one-story house to the ticking of a silver clock blazing in the sun.
    Down the alley he moved, toward the avenue end, a cobblestoned corridor bordered by squatting half-pint houses with little two-chair porches and four or five or seven steps leading to the alley.
    They passed Old Jake’s house, a condemned one-story house with windows of cardboard. And Old Lady’s house, a two-story house with a huge sprawling roofless porch that ran the building’s full length.
    Th-th-th that o-o-ol’ wu-wu woman’s at least at least a hundred an’ tw-tw-twenty!
he heard Unc Dewey declare.
    “Aw Unc!” Viola had exclaimed, “you oughtta be
ashamed
of yourself for tellin’ ’um like that!”
    “Th-th-th-think I-I’m lyin’ huh? Huh? Well, le-le-let me tell you one thing, bbbbaby, when mmm
my
momma was ssstilla a a li-li-little girl, th-th-th-that ol’ woman was was st-
still
a ol’ woman! She had gr-gr-gray hair an’-an’-an’ gran’-gran’-children!”
    “She is pretty old, Babe!” said