Smoke.

When I remember that house, I see it through a cloud of smoke. Our house was just an overgrown shotgun shack, set back from the street in the middle of a dusty red yard. I don't remember anyone ever painting it, but chips of white paint always dangled from its weathered gray boards. Inside, the rooms were dark and airless in fall and winter. The dampers on the wood stoves that heated them never seemed to work, so everything happened in a blue-gray haze of smoke.

And there was another kind of smoke, too, from the gaggle of men who came to share their cigarettes, dirt cheap in our Tar Heel town, and themselves, with my mama and her sisters. "The aunts," we kids called them. Maisy, Rose, Caroline, and Ginny were tall, brown-skinned women whose voluptuous bodies were as sensuous as their names. Their beauty would bring them what passed for luck in this small, mean town - and undeniable pain.

My girl cousins quit school in the tenth or the eleventh grade to take dead-end jobs that would pay them just enough money to buy bright, cheap dresses at Belk's and flowery colognes at Woolworth's. Like the aunts, they frequented the county's juke joints, about the only recreation allowed colored around here not so long ago. My cousins and the aunts became queen bees who trailed a cloud of workers and drones behind them. But instead of honey, they produced a bitter pot liquor fermented from misery and deprivation.

I escaped to a six-room tract house in the second-best colored section in town - a house that is filled with air and sunlight year-round, that smells of lemon furniture polish and gingerbread baking, not wood smoke and cheap perfume. I sit here on our newly painted porch swing, resting a bit before putting supper on the table. A breeze ruffles the leaves of the oak tree my husband Artis' first wife planted right after they moved here. That tree must be nineteen - no, twenty - years old.

I see that, next door, the Johnsons have parked their new Cadillac, with the list price stickers still glued to the side windows, on the curb, instead of in their garage. Well, they've never been exactly humble. And the Christians, our neighbors across the street, have decided to sell. A yellow-and-brown Century 21 poster nudges their neatly clipped hedges. Marian Christian wants to live in Desire Heights, up on the hill where the rich Negroes dwell, so I guess that's where they'll move to.

My husband Artis says that right here is good enough for us. He's cut back to working just a single shift at the funeral home. Started calling himself semi-retired. Artis has a job where he don't have to take low from some white man, a young wife, and the children he always wanted but had to walt a long time for. My husband, at least, is satisfied. I sit and rock a while longer. Then I don't see so clearly. Dusk, creeping up on me, makes the air smoky blue.

I recall seeing my cousin Kathleen's face through a veil of steam, as well as the wood smoke that always shrouded our rooms in fall. She was scrubbing the new hair under my arms with a rough bath cloth, and I stood stating at my feet, ashamed about having to reveal my budding twelve-year-old body to someone else's scrutiny. She plunged the cloth back into the tin basin of soapy water, wrung it out nimbly, and began to wash my chest. I pulled away, shocked by the tingles that shot through my tiny breasts when she touched their nipples.

"I can do it myself," I said, reaching for the cloth.

She pushed my hand away.

"I'm big enough to take a bath, Kathleen. Been doing it since I was three or four. So let me have that washrag."

"If you had good sense you wouldn't be running off causing all this fuss," she muttered. "If you ain't got sense enough to keep your butt where it belongs, you ain't got sense enough to wash it neither."

I smoldered, the anger a pit of banked coals in my naked belly. She was just four years older than me. Who was she to be telling folks what they could or couldn't do?

She scrubbed my back and arms, jerking my lanky body into whatever position she wanted it. I was as tall as she was, but I didn't shove back. All of the fight had been whipped out of me that day. The welts left by Maisy's switches stung as Kathleen attacked the dust that covered my skin, reminding me that neither of us was boss.

"I didn't run off," I said. "I decided to leave, that's all."

I took the scratchy old towel she handed me and wiped my back dry. Then I eagerly pulled a hand-me-down nightgown over my head, glad to cover my mysteriously changing body.

"Decided to leave," Kathleen mocked me. "I 'spect you get your talkin' proper from the same place you get half-assed notions like running away from here. Where a nigger child gonna run to anyways? Your mama needs to make you keep your nappy head outta all them books."

She had hit bedrock, but I wasn't about to let on.

In the library books I checked out, children - boys and girls with rosy cheeks, store-bought clothes, and dogs named Spot - were always running away. And a kind, blue-eyed officer named Fitzpatrick or Kelly would find them and bring them home. There they would be welcomed with the tears and embraces of relieved mothers and fathers. Two fat, thick-necked officers had tossed me, like a peck bag of potatoes, into the back of their patrol car and driven across the tracks. One of them kept breaking wind. The only tears in our house upon my return were mine after my mama whipped my behind.

"What would I want to stay around here for?" I mumbled.

"'Cause you gotta stay somewheres," Kathleen said, matter-of-factly.

"My mama don't pay me no 'tention, nohow," I replied.

"Your mama ain't so bad," Kathleen said.

She picked up the basin and walked across the room. I followed and raised a window. She tossed the bath water out. We watched the dirty water dance through the air and create an orange spot in the red clay of our grassless yard.

I kept following Kathleen, unwilling to let our conversation ebb.

"What you mean Maisy ain't so bad?" I asked.

"Stop being sassy, girl. Your mama don't be letting you call her by her first name," Kathleen warned.

She plopped down on the rollaway bed in one comer of the crowded room, and I pulled up a cane-bottomed chair and sat down in front of her. She looked at me warily. Then she shrugged her thin shoulders.

"Maisy don't drink too much. And she go to work most of the time. And she make sure her younguns got something to eat," Kathleen said.

I couldn't dispute this list of my mother's virtues. But I could think of plenty that I didn't like about what Maisy did do.

"But my mama don't give me no money so I can go on field trips. I don't have enough clothes. Eva got more clothes than I do and her mama's in prison. And my mama beats us, 'specially me," I said, the words spilling out and giving form to thoughts I had never before trusted outside of my head.

Kathleen was silent for minutes, her dark eyes shining like the reflecting pool at what we still called the white people's park.

"I didn't say that Maisy be perfect, June," she said. "She do like the mens and keep having babies. But, she try with you all. She ain't like my mama. She don't give up."

"I don't see much difference," I said. "All four of the aunts is pretty much the same."

"No. The aunts is different in some ways," Kathleen said.

"How?"

Kathleen leaned forward, and I was surprised to see tears in her eyes. People at our house didn't cry much. Maybe they were all cried out.

"When me and Buster was real little, so little I'm surprised I remembers it, Ginny took us out behind the depot downtown," Kathleen said. "She was drunk. But I don't think that's why she done it. She made us lay down on the railroad tracks. The night air was cold and the rails was like icicles against my back. We was shivering and our teeth was chattering. Buster started to cry. Ginny laid down across us and told him to hush. First we heard the train's whistle blow and then it was chugging along fast, coming at us - "

The front door creaked open, and Marshall's tiny yellow face appeared around its corner.

"Boy, you bettuh shet that door and stop lettin' the heat outta here," Kathleen scolded.

"But Mama, I gotta go potty," Marshall whined.

Kathleen stood wearily, scooped her son up, and hurried outside to our wood-and-tarpaper toilet.

It was a Friday night. Soon the house overflowed with smells, sounds, and smoke. The men played poker and sipped home-brew. Sam Cooke oozed from the hi-fi. Laughter bubbled through full lips slick with grease from the mess of porgies Kathleen had fried and was selling. Aunt Rose kept one eye on liquor sales and the other on the door. You never knew when the cops might up and raid a colored house. Aunt Caroline showed the crowd how to do the dog, her snug red dress riding up to reveal big brown legs that distracted the men from their game.

"Lawd a mercy," a man in overalls said, forgetting his hand as he stood to get a closer look.

"The Lawd sho' done a good day's work when he made them there legs. He don't be havin' to have mercy on nothin' 'bout 'em," Amos from the sawmill said.

A Wilson Pickett side dropped, and Aunt Caroline began to do the jerk, her full bosom bouncing in time to the backbeat.

"Man, I tells yuh," Amos said, pulling out a yellow bandanna and wiping his sweating forehead. "It got to be jelly, 'cause jam don't shake like that."

Next thing I knew, Caroline had grabbed my arm and pulled me out onto the floor.

"Yeah, junior flip, show us what you can do," somebody teased.

My face flamed, and I tried to work my way through the crowd to my usual place on the sidelines. But the aunts wouldn't let me. Rose closed in on the other side, putting her own special touches on the jerk. Maisy, who had been curled up with Ernest, my brothers' daddy, wasn't about to be left out. Even Ginny took a break from talking to herself for long enough to show that she could still make some moves.

"Don't fight the feelin!" Amos yelled.

I gave in to the music, jerking and shinga-linging, and doing the four corners until I thought I'd drop. Caroline, Rose, Ginny, and Maisy matched me step for step. You would have thought that they were still young girls instead of middle-aged women weighted down with all the dangers that our world knew. We danced, all of us tireless and suddenly free.

Kathleen never told me the end of that story. Over the years, I came to know the meaning of what she was saying without asking. The aunts finally parted. Rose married a widowed man with a passel of kids and went to live in Chicago. Now she's a Muslim. Maisy died of leukemia five years ago. And no, the two of us never did see eye-to-eye. Wasn't long after Maisy passed on that they sent Ginny, Kathleen's mother, to the asylum in Goldsboro. She had been heading there for years, I can see now. Walking around talking to herself. Peeing on the floor just like a child. And screaming at people, even complete strangers, "You know you done me wrong!" Kat didn't seem to take it too hard. She still lives with Aunt Caroline. My brothers joined the service as soon as they turned seventeen. All I hear from any of them is a card with a funny-looking stamp from Germany or Korea at Christmas.

I hadn't even seen my cousin for more than a year until the child's wake. Things changed. You can find me at a Links' meeting or choir practice, but not in a bootleg house on the wrong side of town. But they are my kin, so I nagged Artis until he took me and the kids over there.

I walked into that old house, sniffing. It's bigger now, with a couple of bedrooms and an indoor toilet added on. But the woodburning stoves still smoke. I put the bean salad and coconut cake I had brought on the table with the rest of the food and made sure that Junior and Dora had full plates to keep them busy. Then I eased down into a chair as rickety as the ones we had when I was a child in that house. Kathleen sat on the sofa. She was dry-eyed and held a canning jar of bourbon in one trembling hand. Her face was puffy. Drug use, I'd heard (but not believed), until I'd seen her for myself.

There was a pretty good-sized crowd - thirty or forty, people, I'd say. Some of 'em I hadn't crossed paths with since I finished high school, packed my bags, and moved into the Y.

"You's looking mighty fine there, June. And them babies of yours is growing like beanstalks," Miss Ina Mae Higgins said. She's one of the women who used to run with the aunts until she got religion years ago.

"Thank you, Miss Ina Mae," I said. But my face went hot. It didn't seem right for her to be congratulating me on my children then and there.

The lot of us talked about the usual things - the weather, the black candidates running for City Council, and how Reynolds wouldn't pay folks a decent wage no matter what - until Buster arrived.

He came stomping into the room, as high as a Georgia pine.

"So, look at my big sister sitting over there. How you, Miss Cool?" he sneered at Kathleen, his deep voice slicing through the din. "You wouldn't guess that that woman sent her child out of this house so sick that he dropped dead on the way to school."

Buster laughed so hard that he had to flail his arms to keep from falling.

Artis and another man grabbed him and pushed him into a chair across the room from Kathleen.

Aunt Caroline stood up awkwardly. Her legs were so swollen with bursitis by then that she had to use a cane. She slowly walked over to Buster.

"Boy, don't you be shamin' this fam'ly," she said, shaking her gnarled fist at him.

"What you mean, Aunt Caro? I think you got the wrong person," he said, glaring at Kathleen.

"Man, you oughta cool out. This ain't the place for that," Artis told him.

"Then where the place be?" Buster asked, with that serious but befuddled look drunks get sometimes. "At the graveyard when they buries Marshall?"

We stopped talking. It was as if Buster had choked the breath out of us all.

Kathleen stood up, and I saw that her always small frame was now wasted further by abuse. She carefully placed her glass of liquor on a scarred end table. She shrugged her bony shoulders and smiled wryly.

"Sometimes people don't be who they wants to be," she said softly in that silent, smoky room. Then she walked, with a quiet and surprising dignity, through the door.

It's dark now - a darkness unbroken except by fireflies, a street light at the corner, and the flicker from the Davises' hibachi. They're cooking out on the patio, and a breeze brings me the smell of smoke.

I take off my glasses and rub my eyes, remembering how they used to smart when I came home from the hosiery mill after inspecting a couple thousand stockings every single day. I was always so tired. During my night classes at business school, I could barely keep awake. Sometimes I'd doze off in the middle of taking dictation. But I made myself finish. They had just started letting us into Massey, and I wasn't going to leave without that piece of paper that would mean I could get a real job - not minding cracker young ones or cleaning someone else's house. Of course the whites tried to stop me. You know the kind of things they do. My books would disappear from my locker. Or they'd pretend they couldn't understand what I was saying. One teacher always wrinkled her nose when she came near me as if something smelled mighty bad. But I was as stubborn as they were.

I had started keeping company with Artis after his wife ran off to New York with that musician. The aunts said he was robbing the cradle. But I knew I wanted stability and that he would deliver - kids with a daddy for life, food on the table three times a day, and a house I could make a home. I was willing to pay the price for it, even if that meant never dancing again.

I've been with North Carolina Mutual for five years now. I work in an air-conditioned office. My only occupational hazard is secretary's spread. Our house is paid for. The kids are healthy. Even white folks don't seem as mean as they used to. I know I'm supposed to be satisfied. Artis says it would insult God for a Negro to ask for much more. But I can't forget the smell of smoke and the pain, spiked with pleasure, that went with it.

"June? Woman, I'm hungry!" Artis yells through the screen door.

I push myself up from the swing and pull the door open. I shake my head to clear the cobwebs away. Ten minutes later, the four of us sit around the big dining room table. Artis tells Junior to sit up straight and pours Dora's milk. I close my eyes and bless our food.

Joy Gray has been trying to capture the world in words for nearly as long as she has been able to speak. After working as a journalist for several years, she turned to writing fiction.