Fern One Crazy Summer Quotes

dustpan that he emptied into a larger trash can. If I were him, picking up after people who carelessly dropped stuff on the ground, I’d be nothing but angry. They call it littering when you carelessly drop things. They call the careless folks who drop things by a cute name: litterbug. There’s nothing cute about dropping things carelessly. Dropping garbage and having puppies shouldn’t be called the same thing. “Litter.” I had a mind to write to Miss Webster about that. Puppies don’t deserve to be called a litter like they had been dropped carelessly like garbage. And people who litter shouldn’t be given a cute name for what they do. And at least the mother of a litter sticks around and nurses her pups no matter how sharp their teeth are. Merriam Webster was falling down on the job. How could she have gotten this wrong? Vonetta asked me again. Not because she was anxious to meet Cecile. Vonetta asked again so she could have her routine rehearsed in her head—her curtsy, smile, and greeting—leaving Fern and me to stand around like dumb dodos. She was practicing her role as the cute, bouncy pup in the litter and asked yet again, “Delphine, what do we call her?” A large white woman came and stood before us, clapping her hands like we were on display at the Bronx Zoo. “Oh, my. What adorable dolls you are. My, my.” She warbled like an opera singer. Her face was moon full and jelly soft, the cheeks and jaw framed by white whiskers. We said nothing. “And so well behaved.” Vonetta perked up to out-pretty and out-behave us. I did as Big Ma had told me in our many talks on how to act around white people. I said, “Thank you,” but I didn’t add the “ma’am,” for the whole “Thank you, ma’am.” I’d never heard anyone else say it in Brooklyn. Only in old movies on TV. And when we drove down to Alabama. People say “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am” in Alabama all the time. That old word was perfectly fine for Big Ma. It just wasn’t perfectly fine for me.

She refused to call Fern by her name, and that made Big Ma right about Cecile.

I slept lightly, expecting Fern to awaken during the night missing her truelove. Not that I wanted Fern to be heartbroken. I didn’t want her to love someone all her life and then not love or want them at all.

The Mike Douglas Show wasn’t the only place to find colored people on television. Each week, Jet magazine pointed out all the shows with colored people. My sisters and I became expert colored counters. We had it down to a science. Not only did we count how many colored people were on TV, we also counted the number of words the actors were given to say. For instance, it was easy to count the number of words the Negro engineer on Mission Impossible spoke as well as the black POW on Hogan’s Heroes. Sometimes the black POW didn’t have any words to say, so we scored him a “1” for being there. We counted how many times Lieutenant Uhuru hailed the frequency on Star Trek. We’d even take turns being her, although Big Ma would have never let us wear a minidress or space boots. But then there was I Spy. All three of us together couldn’t count every word Bill Cosby said. And then there was a new show, Julia, coming in September, starring Diahann Carroll. We agreed to shout out “Black Infinity!” when Julia came on because each episode would be all about her character. We didn’t just count the shows. We counted the commercials as well. We’d run into the TV room in time to catch the commercials with colored people using deodorant, shaving cream, and wash powder. There was a little colored girl on our favorite commercial who looked just like Fern. In fact, I said that little girl could have been Fern, which made Vonetta jealous. In the commercial, the little girl took a bite of buttered bread and said, “Gee, Ma. This is the best butter I ever ate.” Then we’d say it the way she did, in her dead, expressionless voice; and we’d outdo ourselves trying to say it with the right amount of deadness. We figured that that was how the commercial people told her to say it. Not too colored. Then we’d get silly and say it every kind of colored way we knew how.