THE SUMMER rolls behind us like a hot tar spreader. Ever colored person in Jackson gets in front a whatever tee-vee set they can find, watches Martin Luther King stand in our nation’s capital and tell us he’s got a dream. I’m in the church basement watching. Our own Reverend Johnson went up there to march and I find myself scanning the crowd for his face. I can’t believe so many peoples is there—two-hundred-fifty thousand. And the ringer is, sixty thousand a them is white.

“Mississippi and the world is two very different places,” the Deacon say and we all nod cause ain’t it the truth.

We get through August and September and ever time I see Miss Skeeter, she look thinner, a little more skittish in the eyes. She try to smile like it ain’t that hard on her that she ain’t got no friends left.

In October, Miss Hilly sets at Miss Leefolt’s dining room table. Miss Leefolt so pregnant she can’t barely focus her eyes. Meanwhile, Miss Hilly got a big fur around her neck even though it’s sixty degrees outside. She stick her pinky out from her tea glass and say, “Skeeter thought she was so clever, dumping all those toilets in my front yard. Well, they’re working out just fine. We’ve already installed three of them in people’s garages and sheds. Even William said it was a blessing in disguise.”

I ain’t gone tell Miss Skeeter this. That she ended up supporting the cause she fighting against. But then I see it don’t matter cause Miss Hilly say, “I decided I’d write Skeeter a thank-you note last night. Told her how she’s helped move the project along faster than it ever would’ve gone.”

WITH Miss LEEFOLT SO BUSY making clothes for the new baby, Mae Mobley and me spend pretty much ever minute a the day together. She getting too big for me to carry her all the time, or maybe I’m too big. I try and give her a lot a good squeezes instead.

“Come tell me my secret story,” she whisper, smiling so big. She always want her secret story now, first thing when I get in. The secret stories are the ones I be making up.

But then Miss Leefolt come in with her purse on her arm, ready to leave. “Mae Mobley, I’m leaving now. Come give Mama a big hug.”

But Mae Mobley don’t move.

Miss Leefolt, she got a hand on her hip, waiting for her sugar. “Go on, Mae Mobley,” I whisper. I nudge her and she go hug her mama real hard, kinda desperate-like, but Miss Leefolt, she already looking in her purse for her keys, kind a wiggle off. It don’t seem to bother Mae Mobley so much, though, like it used to, and that’s what I can’t hardly look at.

“Come on, Aibee,” Mae Mobley say to me after her mama gone. “Time for my secret story.”

We go on in her room, where we like to set. I get up in the big chair and she get up on me and smile, bounce a little. “Tell me, tell me bout the brown wrapping. And the present.” She so excited, she squirming. She has to jump off my lap, squirm a little to get it out. Then she crawl back up.

That’s her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my Piggly Wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like piece a candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole’s Drug Store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain’t the color a the wrapping that count, it’s what we is inside.

“We doing a different story today,” I say, but first I go still and listen, just to make sure Miss Leefolt ain’t coming back cause she forgot something. Coast is clear.

“Today I’m on tell you bout a man from outer space.” She just loves hearing about peoples from outer space. Her favorite show on the tee-vee is My Favorite Martian. I pull out my antennae hats I shaped last night out a tinfoil, fasten em on our heads. One for her and one for me. We look like we a couple a crazy people in them things.

“One day, a wise Martian come down to Earth to teach us people a thing or two,” I say.

“Martian? How big?”

“Oh, he about six-two.”

“What’s his name?”

“Martian Luther King.”

She take a deep breath and lean her head down on my shoulder. I feel her three-year-old heart racing against mine, flapping like butterflies on my white uniform.

“He was a real nice Martian, Mister King. Looked just like us, nose, mouth, hair up on his head, but sometime people looked at him funny and sometime, well, I guess sometime people was just downright mean.”

I could get in a lot a trouble telling her these little stories, especially with Mister Leefolt. But Mae Mobley know these our “secret stories.”

“Why Aibee? Why was they so mean to him?” she ask.

“Cause he was green.”

TWO TIMES THIS MORNING, Miss Leefolt’s phone rung and two times I missed it. Once cause I was chasing Baby Girl nekkid in the backyard and another cause I was using the bathroom in the garage and what with Miss Leefolt being three—yes, three—weeks late to have this baby, I don’t expect her to run for no phone. But I don’t expect her to snap at me cause I couldn’t get there, neither. Law, I should a known when I got up this morning.

Last night Miss Skeeter and I worked on the stories until a quarter to midnight. I am bone tired, but we done finished number eight and that means we still got four more to go. January tenth be the deadline and I don’t know if we gone make it.

It’s already the third Wednesday a October, so it’s Miss Leefolt’s turn to host bridge............