Beyond Molasses Creek by Nicole Seitz

I’m laid back feeling the sun on my face, the boat rocking all this way and that. I sit up right slow and just looked at her. I reckon I’d never thought of it that way— that being colored was the worse thing there was in the world. I knew it then, because it all made sense when Miss Ally looked at me, studying me. “I don’t agree with them though,” she told me. But I knew she was thinking hard on it like I was. Here she was, a young girl in a boat with the pret’ near worse thing in the world.
    I still at that age could not understand the differences between us. I don’t claim to be the smartest person out there, but dad-howdy, I was a God-loving body just like any white folk. I was.
    Least, I thought I was till Mama laid that whooping on me and told me I had no business being with a white girl. Who did I think I was and did I think I was better than everybody else and don’t I know she a cracker and we don’t mess with crackers lest we want trouble and Mama didn’t want no trouble. She done had all the trouble she needed so far. What she left me that day was this: not one more sneaky thing out of me with that white girl or she’d ship me off to go live with my cousins in that one-room house on John’s Island with the meanest man I ever seen, my uncle Percival. There’d be no schooling for me, just hard work in the fields day and night.
    I tell you, that did it for me for a good long while. It did. It was hard, but I never had any contact with Ally till she started leaving me notes in an old Co-Cola bottle at the end of her dock. I seen it odd-like shining in the noonday sun and come close enough to snatch it and take a better look. By that time I was pushing thirteen and struggling not to get into fights at school. The last thing on my mind was white girls. Until I read those first words I knew were meant for me: I’ve missed you. Where have you been? Meet me tonight. I have something important to tell you .
    Well, with the soul of a thirteen-year-old boy pent up in my body, how in creation could I ever resist an invitation like that?

EIGHTEEN
The Radio
    Ally 1963
    â€œY OU CAME .”
    â€œOf course I came.”
    Silence. Water rippling. “I haven’t seen you since . . . It’s been a few years.” The moonlight shimmered on the black glassy creek. Marsh grass tickled my legs. I could barely see the lights on at home. My parents were already asleep. “I could hear her whipping you that night,” I told him. “It was all I could do, listening to it. I cried and cried. Put a pillow over my head.”
    â€œWeren’t so bad.” His looks had changed. Even in the faint light of the moon, I could see he was almost a man now, and his voice was lower. A lot lower. It sent chills down my spine, and I found myself unable to look him in the eyes.
    â€œYou said you got something you wanted to say,” he prompted.
    â€œYes, I do . . . I’m sorry.”
    â€œSorry for what?”
    â€œSorry . . . that we’re so different. Sorry that everybody thinks a colored and a white person should go their separate ways. Sorry about what happened to you that night you got caught . . . with me. I think if people just took the time to know—”
    â€œAlly, stop.”
    â€œNo, really—”
    â€œI said stop.” His voice was barely a growl. He clenched his fists and looked around toward his house to make sure no one was watching. Then he whispered, “Things have changed, Ally. It ain’t the same. We ain’t kids no more.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œIt means we cain’t see each other.” The words hung there in the air between us and then like mist they vanished, taking my breath along with them.
    â€œBut why, Vesey? I mean, I don’t want you to get in trouble anymore, I don’t.”
    â€œYou cain’t know what I go through. You cain’t know. I walk to