When she said his name his arms prickled. Oh, he had it, all right. Had it bad.
“And him.” She shivered. “He seems the most vivid of all.”
“We ought to. I mean, we are real, no matter what you think.”
She gave him a kind smile. It was utterly without belief.
“How did that happen?” he asked. “That thing on your head?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m just making the point that what has happened once might very well happen again.”
“No, but I’m curious.”
“I was struck by a brick. It was our first trip north. We came to the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey. We came in the Jim Crow car.”
“What’s that?”
She looked at him unbelievingly, almost scornfully. “Where have you been living, Eddie? In a bomb-shelter?”
“I’m from a different time,” he said. “Could I ask how old you are, Odetta?”
“Old enough to vote and not old enough for Social Security.”
“Well, I guess that puts me in my place.”
“But gently, I hope,” she said, and smiled that radiant smile which made his arms prickle.
“I’m twenty-three,” he said, “but I was born in 1964—the year you were living in when Roland took you.”
“That’s rubbish.”
“No. I was living in 1987 when he took me.”
“Well,” she said after a moment. “That certainly adds a great deal to your argument for this as reality, Eddie.”
“The Jim Crow car . . . was it where the black people had to stay?”
“The Negros,” she said. “Calling a Negro a black is a trifle rude, don’t you think?”
“You’ll all be calling yourselves that by 1980 or so,” Eddie said. “When I was a kid, calling a black kid a Negro was apt to get you in a fight. It was almost like calling him a nigger.”
She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then shook her head again.
“Tell me about the brick, then.”
“My mother’s youngest sister was going to be married,” Odetta said. “Her name was Sophia, but my mother always called her Sister Blue because it was the color she always fancied. ‘Or at least she fancied to fancy it,’ was how my mother put it. So I always called her Aunt Blue, even before I met her. It was the most lovely wedding. There was a reception afterward. I remember all the presents.”
She laughed.
“Presents always look so wonderful to a child, don’t they, Eddie?”
He smiled. “Yeah, you got that right. You never forget presents. Not what you got, not what somebody else got, either.”
“My father had begun to make money by then, but all I knew is that we were getting ahead. That’s what my mother always called it and once, when I told her a little girl I played with had asked if my daddy was rich, my mother told me that was what I was supposed to say if any of my other chums ever asked me that question. That we were getting ahead.
“So they were able to give Aunt Blue a lovely china set, and I remember . . .”
Her voice faltered. One hand rose to her temple and rubbed absently, as if a headache were beginning there.
“Remember what, Odetta?”
“I remember my mother gave her a forspecial.”
“What?”