Mulberry. Paulette Boudreaux

      “Just who do you think you are?” I was mad enough that I would have hit her if she had been standing on level ground with me. As it was, she towered about thirty feet above me in my mulberry tree, eating my mulberries and possessing the nerve to tell me I couldn’t climb up and join her. Nobody had ever told me I couldn’t climb a tree. Nobody. Not even my own momma. And every kid in the neighborhood asked my permission before they climbed my tree. They could climb any other tree in the neighborhood, even the other mulberries, but not this one. This one was mine. It grew in a large open field across the road from my family’s house. The rough, knobby bark of its trunk was as familiar to me as the soft wrinkly skin of my knees and elbows. The slender lumpy flesh and rich sweetness of its berries were mine to savor. And mine alone, unless I decided to share. I’d staked my claim on this tree ages ago. Everybody understood that, and this new girl would too before the day was over.

      Her cheeks bunched out in a derogatory way and she spit a mouthful of purple-red already-chewed mulberries at my feet.

      “I’m Esther Denise Rawlins. That’s who I am,” she yelled. “I’m queen of this here mulberry tree.”

      “I’m Madeleine Genell Culpepper and ain’t nobody climbs this tree without my say so ’cause this is my mulberry tree. And you ain’t no queen. You a ugly, high-yellow cow!” These were some of my worst insults, the ones I had learned from hanging around my mama and her friends. I knew that no Negro female who liked herself even a little bit liked being called a cow. And high-yellow? Well high-yellow was something a lot of Negroes found it advantageous to be in Mississippi, but nobody liked being called high-yellow to their face.

      “What’d you call me?” Mulberry juice dripped from the corners of her mouth onto her thin face, which was the color of fresh-cut pine.

      “You heard me. I called you ugly, I called you high-yellow, and I called you a cow.”

      She stood stock still for a moment, hugging the trunk of my tree with her arm, her feet planted on my favorite branch, the one that jutted out from the trunk like a long narrow thumb. Her face turned pink under her yellowish skin. “I’m going to whip your butt when I get down out this tree.”

      “You and what army, you skinny, yellow, nappy-headed cow?” I had taken note of the wild mane of frizzy brown hair that framed her face like a straw hat. Hers was the first afro I’d ever seen. No self-respecting Negro female in my community wore her hair in its natural state in Mississippi in 1963. It made her look insane.

      “You better not still be out here when I get down out of this tree.” Her back was to me as she descended from her perch.

      “I ain’t scared of you, or nobody else.”

      I was too indignant to think about the fact that she might be bigger than me, or a better fighter than me. It turned out that she was almost a head taller than me and a better fighter. She fought like a cat, clawing and biting at me with manic tenacity. I don’t know how long we rolled around in the dirt trying to damage each other before we were pulled apart by my mother. She walked Esther to her grandma’s porch and made her go inside. Then she led me into our house and gave me a lecture that included, “Maddy, you’re getting to be too close to grown to be fighting in the dirt like that. Animals act like that. You need to start acting like a lady so folks can treat you like one.”

      She kept me in the house with her for the rest of the day, doing housework, a round of chores that I hated. While my brothers’ happy, high-pitched voices floated in through the windows, I moped in the shadowy confines of our house helping Momma clean and wash laundry. As I was pinning the clean wash to the line outside, Esther came over to apologize.

      “My grandma says I need to make up to you, otherwise I’m going to be playing by myself all summer ’cause you’re the only other girl around for miles. I already hate it here. Playing by myself all the time, I would hate even more. So I apologize for hitting you first.”

      “Accepted,” I said, without even turning to look at her. I was mad about all the housework I was doing because of her. I waited for her to walk away, but she didn’t. She hung around in the yard, doing I don’t know what, since I refused to turn around. I kept reaching into the wash bucket and pulling out the wet clothes that I had rubbed on the washboard so hard earlier that my knuckles were scraped raw in places.

      “What you doing that for?” Esther asked after a while.

      “Punishment.”

      “I’d rather be beat.”

      Her words, like her hair, were insane. I turned to get a better look at a crazy person up close. What I saw was a girl a little bit taller than me with mean red welts on her wiry arms and legs.

      “Who did that to you?”

      “Grandma.”

      “Ma Parker?”

      “Y’all call her that. She my grandma.”

      “What’d she hit you with?”

      “Extension cord.”

      That old Ma Parker could hit someone with enough force to raise welts was unimaginable to me. Esther had picked up a plank from the ground and was swinging it like a baseball bat. She clearly had some mastery of pain that I couldn’t even guess at. Watching her, I started to cry.

      “Cut that out,” she yelled, “or I’ll never be your friend. I hate crybabies.”

      It was the sincerity in her voice and fear on her face that made me stop. Suddenly something in her seemed admirable. I thought again of being her friend. I wanted to keep her from harm. While I was subject to the whims and commands of the adults around me, I was sure my world was safer than hers. I could keep her safe if I brought her into mine.

      During the next few weeks we became fast friends, and we were inseparable as we roamed the neighborhood, exploring the houses, the woods, and the creek. My family lived at 1 Harvest Quarters, a three-minute walk in from the main street. Esther’s grandma lived at 2 Harvest Quarters. The last house along the curved road was number 21.

      Before Esther arrived, I had never set eyes on the houses from numbers 9 through 20. Occasionally, the long processional from the neighborhood to the local school included children from some of those houses, but their attendance was so irregular that I had no more than a nodding acquaintance with any of them, except one who had been in class with me since first grade, Percy Blakely. I disliked him on principle because all the other kids in my class did, and because my mother had taught my brothers and me that we were better than the other kids in the quarters and that we were not to associate with them. Momma had even forbidden me to go any farther than 5 Harvest Quarters, the last house she could see from our front porch. The only