Wingfoot Lake

(Independence Day, 1964) On her 36th birthday, Thomas had shown her her first swimming pool. It had been his favorite color, exactly—just so much of it, the swimmers’ white arms jutting into the chevrons of high society. She had rolled up her window and told him to drive on, fast. Now this act of mercy: four daughters dragging her to their husbands’ company picnic, white families on one side and them on the other, unpacking the same squeeze bottles of Heinz, the same waxy beef patties and Salem potato chip bags. So he was dead for the first time on Fourth of July—ten years ago had been harder, waiting for something to happen, and ten years before that, the girls like young horses eyeing the track. Last August she stood alone for hours in front of the T.V. set as a crow’s wing moved slowly through the white streets of government. That brave swimming scared her, like Joanna saying Mother, we’re Afro-Americans now! What did she know about Africa? Were there lakes like this one with a rowboat pushed under the pier? Or Thomas’ Great Mississippi with its sullen silks? (There was the Nile but the Nile belonged to God.) Where she came from was the past, 12 miles into town where nobody had locked their back door, and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park under the company symbol, a white foot sprouting two small wings.