Dollbaby: A Novel by Laura L McNeal Read Free Book Online Page A

know why all you young folks think you got to turn the music up so loud. Give me a headache.”
    Doll ignored her mother’s comment and began dancing around, waving her arms in the air and swinging her hips to the beat of the music. “Be all right if I leave a little early?”
    “Now listen here. You got plenty a time to go hear Irma later. What you got up your sleeve?”
    Doll went over to the counter near the back window, picked up a fork, and started singing into it as if it were a microphone. She paused to answer her mother. “Oh, nothing.”
    “Don’t you ‘oh nothing’ me.” Queenie switched the radio back to the gospel station. “What you not telling me?”
    Doll leaned against the counter. “Me and some folks, we might head on down to the five-and-dime on Canal Street in a little while.”
    “Who? What folks you talking about?”
    “You know, Doretha, Slim, maybe Lola Mae . . .”
    “What for?” Queenie crossed her arms and gave Doll her oh-no-you’re-not-doing-that look.
    “Just, you know, to hang out.” Doll cast her eyes out the back window. She wished she hadn’t said anything. She wasn’t a very good liar and her mother could always see right through her.
    “You not trying that lunch counter stuff again, is you?” Queenie picked up a knife from the sink and pointed it at her. “Last time your friends tried sitting at the counter down at the Woolworth’s, they got arrested. Remember? Every one of them lost they jobs or got kicked out a school. Earline Murray had to make her son move out of their house ’cause they started getting bomb threats. And Jerome Smith? He almost got beat to death.”
    “That’s ’cause Jerome went on one of them freedom rides, Mama, not ’cause he sat at the Woolworth counter.”
    Doll knew her mother was about to start in on the plight of all thepoor folks who had gotten the short end of the stick, which according to her mother was just about everybody in the St. Roch neighborhood, where they lived. She slumped down on the stool, pretending to listen to her mother’s little speech that she’d already heard a hundred times before.
    “Why, just yesterday, Virgie Mae Jefferson’s son was beaten up real bad, just for sitting at the counter at the state capitol cafeteria up in Baton Rouge. And who they haul off to jail? Not the white men that do the beating. What you think gone happen if you go down to the Woolworth’s today?”
    “Calm down, Mama.”
    Queenie came over and pounded her fist on the table. “Why can’t you leave well enough alone?”
    There was nothing Doll could do but let her mother ramble. Queenie was a strong believer in the status quo. Separate but equal was just fine with her as long as nobody gave her any trouble. But Doll had other ideas. Her daughter, Birdelia, wasn’t much older than Ruby Bridges, the little colored girl who’d been escorted by armed guards to the Frantz Elementary School for Whites in the Ninth Ward in 1960 in an effort to integrate the school. It made national headlines, started white flight from the city, and riled up the Ku Klux Klan. Here it was four years later, and what good did it do? As far as Doll was concerned, nothing much had changed. She wanted something better for her daughter. She wanted Birdelia to be able to decide what she wanted out of life, not have it dictated to her, the way her own life had been. And she was willing to fight for it. She just wasn’t sure how.
    “That’s the problem,” Queenie muttered. “Most people living in fool’s garden don’t even know it.”
    “I heard that,” Doll said.
    “Well, it’s true, baby. You a seeker.”
    “What you mean, a seeker?” Doll peered over at her mother. She’d never heard her use that word before. She wondered if it was a “word of the day” from Miss Fannie’s newspaper.
    Queenie jabbed the knife in Doll’s direction. “A seeker, baby, a seeker. You looking for something you ain’t never gone find.”
    “I ain’t no