Though I don’t know who she is, I sense a familiarity about her, not only because she has come before and made candy in this same fashion, but also because of how she looks at me—like she’s talking to me from her eyes, saying, You remember me, don’t you?
At this point in childhood, and for most of the first five years of my life, the map of my world was broken strictly into two territories—the familiar and the unknown. The happy, safe zone of the familiar was very small, often a shifting dot on the map, while the unknown was vast, terrifying, and constant.
What I did know by the age of three or four was that Ophelia was my older sister and best friend, and also that we were treated with kindness by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, the adults whose house we lived in. What I didn’t know was that the Robinsons’ house was a foster home, or what that meant. Our situation—where our real parents were and why we didn’t live with them, or why we sometimes did live with uncles and aunts and cousins—was as mysterious as the situations of the other foster children living at the Robinsons’.
What mattered most was that I had a sister who looked out for me, and I had Rufus and Pookie and the other boys to follow outside for fun and mischief. All that was familiar, the backyard and the rest of the block, was safe turf where we could run and play games like tag, kick-the-can, and hide-and-seek, even after dark. That is, except, for the house two doors down from the Robinsons.
Every time we passed it I had to almost look the other way, just knowing the old white woman who lived there might suddenly appear and put an evil curse on me—because, according to Ophelia and everyone else in the neighborhood, the old woman was a witch.
When Ophelia and I passed by the house together once and I confessed that I was scared of the witch, my sister said, “I ain’t scared,” and to prove it she walked right into the front yard and grabbed a handful of cherries off the woman’s cherry tree.
Ophelia ate those cherries with a smile. But within the week I was in the Robinsons’ house when here came Ophelia, racing up the steps and stumbling inside, panting and holding her seven-year-old chest, describing how the witch had caught her stealing cherries and grabbed her arm, cackling, “I’m gonna get you!”
Scared to death as she was now, Ophelia soon decided that since she had escaped an untimely death once, she might as well go back to stealing cherries. Even so, she made me promise to avoid the strange woman’s house. “Now, remember,” Ophelia warned, “when you walk by, if you see her on the porch, don’t you look at her and never say nuthin’ to her, even if she calls you by name.”
