The Great Gilly Hopkins

She went straight to her room, took the brown suitcase from under the bed, and unpacked it. Then she ripped out a sheet of paper through the rings of her notebook, lay down on the bed, and pressing on her math book, wrote:

1408 Aspen Ave.

Thompson Park, Md.

Dear Courtney Rutherford Hopkins

I received your card. I am sorry to bother you with my problems, but as my real mother, I feel you have a right to know about your daughter’s situation.

At the present time, it is very desperate, or I would not bother you. The foster mother is a religious fanatic. Besides that she can hardly read and write and has a very dirty house and weird friends.

She started to write “colored” but erased it, not sure how Courtney might react.

There is another kid here who is probably mentally retarded.

I am expected to do most of the work including taking care of him (the mentally retarded boy) which is very hard with all my schoolwork, too.

I have saved up $39 toward my ticket to California. Please send me the rest at your earliest convenience.

She wrote “Love” then changed it to

Yours sincerely,

your daughter,

Galadriel Hopkins

P.S. I am very smart and can take care of myself, so I will not be a burden to you in any way.

P.S. Again. I have checked the cost of a bus ticket to San Francisco. It is exactly $136.60 one way. I will get a job and pay you back as soon as possible.

She listened at the top of the stairs until she heard Trotter go into the downstairs bathroom. Then she crept into the kitchen, stole an envelope and a stamp from the kitchen drawer, and ran to the corner to mail her letter before the rage could defrost and change her mind.

THE ONE-WAY TICKET

Not everything in the letter to Courtney had been absolutely true, but surely the part about Trotter being a religious fanatic was. She read the Bible and prayed every day, always joining Mr. Randolph’s grace over the food. Besides, anybody who started for church at nine in the morning on Sunday and didn’t get home until after twelve thirty had to be peculiar.

Sunday mornings were torture to Gilly. The church was a strange little white frame building stuck up on a hill behind the police station, built when the city was a country town instead of part of the metropolitan Washington sprawl. The church didn’t fit in the modern world anymore than the people who went there did.

The children’s Sunday-school class, in which both Gilly and W.E. were lumped with the five other six-to twelve-year-olds in the church, was presided over by an ancient Miss Minnie Applegate, who reminded her seven charges every Sunday that she had been “saved” by Billy Sunday. Who in the hell was Billy Sunday? He sounded like a character from the comics. Billy Sunday meet Brenda Starr. Also, Miss Applegate neglected to say what Billy Sunday had saved her from. A burning building? The path of a speeding locomotive? Or indeed, having been so luckily preserved, what good had her pickling accomplished for either herself or the world?

Old Applegate would do things like lecture them on the Ten Commandments and then steadfastly refuse to explain what adultery was.

“But, Miss Applegate,” an eight-year-old had sensibly asked, “if we don’t know what adultery is, how can we know if we’re doing it or not?”

Gilly, of course, knew all about adultery. In whispered conversations between Sunday school and church, she offered for sale not only the definition of the word but some juicy neighborhood examples (which had lately come to her attention, thanks to Agnes Stokes). In this way she gained seventy-eight cents in coins previously designated for the church collection plate.

The preacher was as young as the Sunday-school teacher was old. He, too, was high on getting saved and other matters of eternal preservation. But his grammar was worse than Trotter’s, and, to Gilly’s disgust, he’d stumble over words of more than one syllable whenever he read the Bible. Nobody but a religious fanatic would put up with such gross ignorance for over an hour every week of their lives—nobody but religious fanatics and the innocent victims they forced to go to church.

Unlike some of the women, Trotter didn’t carry on over the preacher at the church door, which made Gilly bold enough to ask her once, “How can you stand him?” It was the wrong question. Trotter sucked in her breath and glowered down at her like Moses at the Israelites’ golden calf. “Who am I,” she thundered, “to pass judgment on the Lord’s anointed?” Would anybody but a fanatic say a thing like that?

Mr. Randolph went to the black Baptist church. The same taxi that took Trotter and the children to the white Baptist church dropped him off on the way and picked him up on the way home. Gilly noted that the black Baptists dressed fancier and smiled more than the whites. But their services lasted even longer, and often W.E. would have to run in and get the old man out of his service while the taxi meter impatiently ticked away. It was usually past two by the time they got out of their Sunday clothes, cooked dinner, and finally sat down to their long, lazy meal.

The Sunday after the futile dusting, Mr. Randolph surprised everyone by refusing seconds.

“Oh, you must know, Mrs. Trotter, how it pains me to say No to this exquisite chicken, but my son is coming over about three.”

At the word “son,” something clanked inside Gilly’s chest. Suppose the son noticed that something was funny in Mr. Randolph’s living room? The chair on the opposite side, the books rearranged? Suppose he knew where the money should have been?