Still, she stood there, hesitating, because it was really easy to make grand declarations in your mind but not so easy to follow through on them. It didn’t feel right to leave without saying good-bye, or without Adam.
Then Mama and Adam were back in the kitchen, looking frantic, and Red heard a very unfamiliar sound from the living room. It was the sound of ammunition going into a rifle.
Dad had a hunting rifle—Red didn’t know what sort it was; she did not like the guns that he kept in the hall closet and he practically never used. Dad had hunted with Papa when he was younger—just deer because deer were everywhere—but he confided to Red that he never liked the killing part so much as he liked the walks in the woods, and when he got older he stopped doing the hunting and stuck with the walks. But he never got rid of his hunting rifle, never sold it off or gave it away, and Red wondered why.
“I might need it someday,” Dad had said.
“There’s a pickup truck full of guys out there with guns,” Adam said, grabbing Red’s arm and pulling her toward the back door like she hadn’t wanted to go just there a minute ago. “About six or seven of them, and one of them is Martin Kaye and he’s yelling for Mama and Dad to come out. It doesn’t seem like he’s here to offer assistance in our time of need, either. Seems like it’s a truckload of racists that want to eliminate miscegenation, and since you and me are the result of said miscegenation this doesn’t mean anything good for us, either.”
“What?” Red said, shaking him off. “For real? Everybody’s dying and they’ve got nothing better to do than go around trying to earn their white supremacy badge?”
“For real, Delia,” Mama said. “You and Adam have to go now.”
“You and Daddy can’t stay here, either,” Red said, panic rising up. “Those motherfuckers will torture you. Or worse. Mama . . . you don’t know what they’ll do to you.”
“Watch your language, Delia,” Mama said. “I know very well what they want to do. I know better than you. When I married your father it was not exactly a common thing for a black woman and a white man to walk hand in hand. I got spit on enough times to know there were people in the world who thought we were doing wrong. Although I never thought Martin Kaye was one of them. He was always polite to us.”
“He had to be,” Red said. “And now he doesn’t feel he has to be, so he’s going to hurt you and Daddy because of it.”
“I do not want to be burned alive, Red, let’s go,” Adam said.
Adam had much darker skin than Red did, and he was clearly thinking of that and how those motherfuckers (she could think that even if Mama didn’t like her saying it) would see him as a black guy. He was not even considering their parents—his brain was all about Adam.
“We can’t leave Mama and Dad, you dummy,” Red said, looking from one to the other.
She heard then the slow slide of the front window coming up, and the barrel of Dad’s rifle scraping against the sill. The open window made it easier to hear the voice outside—Martin Kaye, their neighbor from just about a mile up the road. The same man who always said, “Hey Shirley,” to Mama when they passed in the grocery store and asked after her health. That man. That man that Red and Adam had known all their lives was outside now with a bunch of his friends and all those friends were holding weapons and they had come to kill Red’s whole family.
“Mama and Dad already decided to stay, you said so,” Adam said, his teeth gritted. “Come on, come on, you’re the one who’s been so goddamned eager to leave.”
She had been the one so eager to leave, but that was when they were all leaving together. That was before the leaving meant men who would do Dad and Mama harm while Red and Adam scampered away.