Free Jump into the Sky by Shelley Pearsall

Instead, I was standing on a train platform feeling almost more alone than I could stand. Even the air smelled different than Chicago. A humid soup of flowers, frying fish, coal smoke, horse manure, sweat—
    All right, I’ll admit the sweat mighta been mine.
    Pushing up my damp sleeves, I picked up the suitcase and decided it was time to move on and find the bus to Camp Mackall, my father’s army post, before I melted into a sorry pool of uselessness. But a small sign on the side of the train station caught my eye as I turned—a black hand pointed toward the back of the building. No other words. Just a pointing black finger.
    Seeing that strange sign gave me a jolt, let me tell you. Right away, my mind jumped back to Jim Crow’s warning.
Every sign you see and every doorway you go through in the South is put there to remind you which color you are. And you
better be sure you choose the right one every time
. But I didn’t know what the heck I was supposed to do. I didn’t know what the sign meant. Were you supposed to follow it or not?
    Feeling real jittery, I started around the side of the train station, not sure what kind of trouble would be waiting there. But there wasn’t much to see behind the station. Only a few empty benches with another sign above them: COLORED . A water spigot nearby had the word scrawled on the bricks above it too: COLORED .
    I let out a slow breath. So the old man hadn’t been razzing me after all.
    Wondering what else he’d said that might’ve been true, I stood there staring at the spigot for a few minutes, trying to make up my mind about using it. How dumb was it to have a faucet with your color written above it? Made me feel like I was a kid back in grammar school.
    Still, I was so thirsty after the hot train ride and all, I finally decided it didn’t matter to me what color was on the darn water. I leaned over to get a drink. Turned the squeaky spigot with my hands. Nothing happened. Put a little muscle behind it and yanked again. A trickle of rusty water splattered onto a slab of stone below my shoes and that was all.
    I stood up feeling thirstier and angrier.
    What kinda water did white people get outta their spigot?
I wondered.
What would they think if I just strolled inside their train station and tried it out?
    Well, I’d almost made up my mind that’s what I wasgonna do—water was water if you were desperate—when I spotted a Coca-Cola sign in the distance. It was hanging in the window of a grocer’s store farther down the main street, maybe two blocks from where I was standing. It was like seeing Christmas, noticing that beautiful red and white sign waiting there for me.
    At the exact same time, my fingers touched Uncle Otis’s roll of dollars in my pocket—the ones he’d slipped into my hand when he’d dropped me off at Union Station the day before. Had it only been yesterday morning I’d last seen him?
    It felt like a week.
    Well, I decided the folks at the train station could keep their colored water and I’d have myself a nice cold Coca-Cola instead, courtesy of Uncle Otis’s generosity. So, I drifted down the shimmering hot street toward the sign. Fayetteville was a nice-looking place, I gotta admit. Everything was neat and tidy as a movie set. There was a bench out front of the grocer’s store with G. W. KEETON’S & SONS painted on it and a bunch of faded war bond posters covering the windows. Pulling open the glass door, I stepped inside. The store was cool and dark after all the heat. A smell of flour and sawdust drifted up my nose. I stood there, blinking in the shadows, trying to see where the counter help was hiding, when a voice called out, “What d’you want, boy?”
    You woulda thought the shadows were speaking.
    “You got any Coca-Cola here?” I called out uncertainly. My words seemed to echo in the darkness, bouncing offthe rows of metal shelves and disappearing into the depths. Something moved in the far corner and a man emerged outta the