Lena by Jacqueline Woodson Read Free Book Online

Long time ago, I used to think the same thing but I had to sit and think hard about it. Our daddy’s a grown-up. Nothing a kid could do to make a grown-up start doing the things he did.”
    Dion nodded.
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    â€œYou spend some time thinking hard about it too, Dion. Think about somebody coming to you and you don’t want them being there—that’s not you doing something bad, okay?”
    She nodded again, her lip still quivering.
    â€œIf Mama was alive things would be different. But we have to figure out stuff by ourselves and right now I’m figuring it’s too cold to be standing out here crying and hungry.”
    Dion sniffed, then pulled away from me and wiped her eyes. She looked like a tiny little kid in her big peacoat with her eyes all red.
    â€œWas Mama good, Lena?”
    I bit my bottom lip again, remembering. “Sometimes I’d come home from school and you and Mama would be in the kitchen making bread. And the sun would be coming through the kitchen window making everything all gold and warm. You’d have flour all up and down your arms and Mama would kind of look at me over your head and smile all proud.”
    â€œWhat would I do?”
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    â€œYou’d hold up your arms for me to hug you and then I’d hug you and get flour all over me. You thought that was the funniest thing.”
    I pulled Dion closer to me. “And then later on, we’d sit by the potbelly stove eating bread and jelly and drinking hot chocolate. Maybe that’s why you love hot chocolate so much, ’cause of that time.”
    â€œMaybe,” Dion said. “Where was Daddy?”
    I shrugged. “Out. Maybe he was working. Or drinking. I don’t remember.”
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    We walked awhile without saying anything. When I was real little, I remember my mama and daddy standing at the bedroom door smiling in at me. He used to have a nice smile. And I remember him asking me whose little girl was I and me saying, “I’m Daddy’s little girl.” And then he’d tickle me.
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    â€œCan I still miss him, Lena?” Dion asked. “Even though?”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “You can miss him.”
    And we walked on, Dion’s missing him outright and my missing him tucked away deep inside, in a long-ago place where I had to think real hard to feel it.

Six
    Mama was born in Kentucky. Somewhere near Pine Mountain. I wanted to get us to that mountain, see Mama’s home. I didn’t know what would happen after that, but maybe those mountains, Mama’s mountains, could tell me.
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    My family wasn’t always broke. There was a time when things were all right, when we always had something good to eat and Mama making us those pretty dresses. Before the coal was all gone and before Mama’s cancer, we wasn’t rich or anything but we got by.
    People see somebody poor and they think it’s ’cause the person don’t want to work or don’t have good sense or something, but that’s not always true. People all the time looking for a way to blame a person’s troubles on the person. In Chauncey, people would look at me and Dion like we was dirt sometimes. Besides the dresses Mama used to make, I don’t remember having something new. After she took sick and our daddy wasn’t working regular, shirts and pants just sort of showed up at our house, buried deep in the back of a box or wrinkled at the bottom of a bag of clothes. When I started going to Chauncey Middle School where most everybody dressed so nice, I tried to make my clothes look a little better. Got a secondhand iron for two dollars and I’d run it over my stuff and Dion’s every morning—figured if the clothes were clean and ironed, they didn’t have to be new. People looked anyway. Called us whitetrash. White cockroach. Cracker. There’s not a name I haven’t heard somebody call me. After a while, the names kind of settle inside