“Isn’t that just a hoot? Because when I was younger, he told me I should be like him. And you and him couldn’t be more different.” Muggy paused for a moment. “What is a son to do with such a father?”
After that, Isaiah knew better than to say anything else about it. Muggy’s father was as successful a businessman as Greenwood had to offer, but he was also a notorious double-dealer, with both his butcher business and his family.
He flaunted women freely throughout the district. Shamelessly embarrassing his demure wife and, Isaiah was now realizing, his son, too. While Muggy mostly spoke positively of his father, these rare moments of doubt were becoming more common and more apparent to Isaiah. Muggy was beginning to disapprove of his rogue father’s fraud.
It was a strange position to be in, Isaiah thought. Wedged uncomfortably between an outwardly buoyant best friend’s lifelong denials and a town’s relentless gossip. Greenwood chattered about Muggy’s father from as far back as Isaiah could recall. A crook, a shyster, fast-talking know-it-all, they’d called him. But above all, they labeled him a horrible husband, which was a source of irrevocable shame in Greenwood.
In the district, some men philandered, quietly stepping out on knowing wives in the dark of night, terrified of consequence. But Muggy Sr. was brazen. Uncompromisingly cheating. Grinning with all of his teeth as he grabbed ahold of a young, dainty willing hand while walking up and down Greenwood Ave. He relentlessly made his widely desired wife look both a fool of a woman and a victim to be rooted for. Isaiah long thought Muggy’s father was the fool for not appreciating and respecting such a woman.
Muggy’s mother stood up straight, and Isaiah couldn’t recall a single wrinkle in her wardrobe, not one in the decade and a half he’d known her. She was easy to smile but never on his level. Her chin held a steady posture high in the air like a gazelle. And on the rare occasions when she was seen with her husband, she made him look like a shrimp of a man. Sad, short, and wider than he was tall. He wasn’t on her level, either, and maybe he knew it. Maybe that was the point.
She’d taken the brunt of the Greenwood gossip since she dared to stand tall alongside a spouse so unworthy. But to look at her, no one would know she was affected. Isaiah recalled Muggy once justifying his father’s public cheating as his mother’s fault.
“If a man steps out,” Muggy had long ago told Isaiah, “don’t look at the man himself. Look instead at the man’s wife. God punishes such a woman with eternal sadness and shame for not satisfying her husband.”
Isaiah would never forget it because it was both shocking and pathetic in its callousness and disrespect. But now Isaiah wasn’t sure Muggy still believed that. Now, it seemed, Muggy saw glimpses of his father in the same way Greenwood saw him—as a complete, irredeemable loser.
A shocking sizzle ran across Isaiah’s forearm, making him jump into the air.
“What the hell was that?” Isaiah shouted.
Muggy laughed in response. “Oh, calm down. Just a glowing matchstick. Won’t even leave a mark.”
Isaiah held his slightly burned skin with his free hand and sat down next to Muggy. “Why would you do that?”
“I’m trying to figure out who you’re daydreaming about,” he said. “You don’t just keep that kind of information from your best friend. Who is she?”
Isaiah shrugged. He knew that he couldn’t be honest and tell him he was actually thinking of Muggy’s mother and father. Their friendship was built on different things, shallower things. But Muggy was not entirely wrong.
Since yesterday, all of Isaiah’s thoughts were shaded by Angel Hill. A deep brown hue of Angel, catching ahold of every light in her vicinity. Turning impossible turns. Generating heat in his icy heart, canceling out a quadrant of anger that he couldn’t figure out how to rid himself of before he saw her dance. She was a Black magic he’d never witnessed, spinning the congregation around her pinkie in a matter of minutes.
Angel Hill, he would’ve said out loud to any other kind of best friend. Angel Hill, he might have divulged to a comrade more empathetic of the existence of a love like that. Angel Hill, he wanted to climb atop the empty bleachers and yell back at Muggy, but he wouldn’t understand. A Black boy spun so tightly after magical dancing by a deep dark girl wearing ankle-length white? No one would.
ANGEL
Angel stopped in front of Deacon Yancey’s light green house, bent forward, and took one long drag of the upright purple flower.
“Hello there,” she said to the verbena. “You, my friend, have perfect posture. You should be a dancer.”
When she stood back up again, Deacon Yancey was making his way onto his front porch holding a coffee mug.
He bowed to her as if she were royalty and said, “Your praise dance yesterday, Miss Angel, left the whole world a little bit better. Join me for a cup?”
Though it would only make her later for school, she nodded. “Of course, Deacon.” He was lonely, after all. His wife of twenty-seven years had died the year prior.
She walked through his squatty white gate to find a hidden field of more peeping verbena—red, pink, and a hybrid orangey swirl. The sight stopped her, and Deacon Yancey walked down to stand by her side.
“They’re confused,” he said before taking a small sip of steaming green tea. “Poor, sweet things don’t realize my wife has passed on to glory. Have a seat on the swing, I’ll bring you the best cup of honey tea you’ve ever had in your life.”
As he disappeared into his small home, Angel breathed in crisp, hot air and watched the world from the vantage point of Deacon Yancey’s front porch. His view of Greenwood was wholly different than the one from her own porch swing. For one, she could see the back field of her school from there. She squinted at two boys skipping class and hanging near the back of the wooden bleachers. It was Mother Wilson’s son, Isaiah, and his friend Muggy Little Jr.
Being from such a small town, there was no avoiding others within it, but every time she caught herself about to pass Isaiah and Muggy in the halls, she purposely found an empty classroom nearby to detour. The few unfortunate times she’d run into them, they laughed at her for no reason at all.
Muggy especially was hard-boiled toward her. He’d called her ugly multiple times and even tried to trip her once when she wore a floor-length, long-sleeved, flowered dress to school. He’d pulled at her plaits throughout middle school and made her cry in elementary for too many reasons to name. He must’ve been born mean, she thought, because all she had to do was walk by him and his friends for them to double over in hysterics like her existence alone was enough to evoke laughter. But Isaiah was kinder. His nature clearly less abrasive. He simply didn’t stand for anything. Isaiah went along to get along; that much was obvious to Angel, and she did not respect it.
Isaiah had come by Mount Zion for Sunday school the day before. She tilted her head. He’d even stood up after she danced, and clapped a little. Angel tried not to notice such things. Her praise dancing was for herself and the Lord, but there he was on the front row in an open ovation.
Angel watched as the cigar smoke rose from the bleachers. She tried to compare the Isaiah she’d always known to the one on the front row of church yesterday. It crossed her mind that maybe he was putting on for his friends. Maybe he wasn’t a follower on the inside as he’d always seemed on the outside. But it surely wasn’t her job to teach him how to stand up for what he believed.