You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.

I
11
Gone
t was close to 2 p.m. when the overhead bulb flickered in the middle of
the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, signaling to Dodo that someone was
entering. The light bulb was a little tricky. Sometimes it flickered on its
own, or the shaking of the floor set it off. So when it flickered the first time,
he ignored it, because it was early afternoon—the usual slow time in the
store. Aunt Addie had gone to the icehouse for ice. Mr. Moshe had gone to
the theater. Few customers entered at that hour.
He was standing on the trapdoor ladder leading to the basement, his head
nearly at floor level, hidden behind the butcher’s case from anyone who
entered the store. It was a good thing, too, for when the light flickered a
second time, he saw Miss Chona, seated on a high chair behind the counter,
reach for her walking stick and move around to the front of the counter. She
had her back to him when she walked a few steps to reach the far end of the
counter, but when she looped around the end and moved to the center of the
room to greet the visitor, he saw her face for the first time. The alarmed
look in her eyes caused him to freeze where he was.
Miss Chona was not a woman who lost her cool easily. Despite the odd
tremors and occasional frightening seizures brought on by her disability, she
rambled around the store freely, doing all manner of tasks. If there was a
carton to be lifted, she would attempt to lift it herself. If there were
groceries to be stacked or vegetables to sort, she went at those things. She
did not like to be helped, and he’d learned to not help her unless asked. The
only time she let him do work that kept him free and rambling, because he
hated sitting still, was if she was reading. Dodo never saw someone who
loved to read so much. She read all day. She reminded him of his mother.
But his mother mostly read the Bible. Miss Chona read everything—books,
magazines, newspapers—and urged him to do the same. He had grown to
like reading in the past five months with her encouragement but not as
much as he pretended to. He faked it, mostly, just for her. He reckoned he
would one day, when he was all grown, sit and read one of the many books
she gave him instead of pretending that he did. But not any day soon. He
preferred working in the store, and playing in the yard next door with Miss
Bernice’s children. It was the only place he was allowed to roam freely. He
had come to slightly resent that imprisonment. It wasn’t fair. He should be
free to roam around the Hill like before. But Miss Chona and Aunt Addie
had drilled it into his head. Stay close. Watch out for the man from the state.
He’s coming to take you to a special school. You don’t want to go there.
Dodo had no idea what the man from the state looked like, but a flash of
fear in Miss Chona’s eyes as the customer approached the other side of the
butcher’s counter gave him pause, and he instinctively lowered his head a
few inches into the basement.
He couldn’t be seen from where he was unless someone leaned over the
counter and looked directly down into the trapdoor opening. Nor could he
see clearly who was on the other side of the counter. But he could feel, and
that was enough. Feel and smell. Vibrations, nearly as good as sight and
sound. And the feel of matters he could sense right away was wrong.
Still standing on the ladder, he pressed the back of his hand to the
floorboards on his left. He recognized the uneven bounce of Miss Chona’s
clumping footsteps as they approached the middle of the floor. This was
followed by an unfamiliar sound, an eerie clump-clump of a similar gait
coming from the store entrance. The two thumps stopped in front of the
butcher’s case not five feet from his head.
He could see Miss Chona’s face just over the butcher’s counter. The look
of alarm in her eyes as she talked to the visitor, a man wearing a fedora and
a black coat, was unsettling.
Then the man turned his head slightly for a moment, and Dodo saw the
face from the side. Panic rose in his throat when he saw who it was.
Doc Roberts.
To the white folks of Pottstown, Doc Roberts was the kind of man whose
bespeckled countenance belonged on breakfast cereal boxes. The kind,
gentle country doc. Friend to all, deliverer of babies, a wonderful man, a
Presbyterian. But for the black folks of the Hill, Doc was a running joke:
“Why go see Doc Roberts and pay to die?” He was a special fright for black
children of the Hill, center of a thousand nightmares shepherded by the
exhausted mothers who needed sleep. Mothers whose children tumbled
about restlessly past their bedtimes would burst into darkened bedrooms
and warn, “If you don’t shut your eyes right now, I’m taking you to Doc
Roberts,” which cut off the giggles and cackling immediately. Youngsters
who refused to swallow the awful-tasting cod-liver oil and ghastly country
remedies used to cure colds, fever, and unknown maladies were met with
“Suck this medicine down right now or I’ll fetch Doc Roberts. Old Doc’ll
give it to you—in jail,” and down the hatch the awful concoction would go.
Dodo was frightened of doctors. After the stove exploded in his face, his
mother waited three long, painful days gathering money to take him by train
to a colored doctor in Reading. The colored doctor firmly and without
ceremony covered his swollen face with goop and wrapped bandages
around his eyes and ears, which left him helpless. After the bandages were
removed, the trouble in his eyes had slowly cleared up, and Dodo watched
his mother weep bitterly, mouthing the words “infection” and “doc” to
Uncle Nate and Aunt Addie. But neither she nor Uncle Nate nor Aunt
Addie made any mention of taking him to Doc Roberts for better results.
Doc Roberts was trouble.
And now he was four feet off, talking with Miss Chona.
Miss Chona was leaning on the counter with her left hand, tapping it
nervously. Doc’s back was to him, so he could not read the doctor’s lips.
But Dodo could see Miss Chona’s mouth, and from his vantage point, he
saw the conversation deteriorate quickly from carefully polite to stormy.
“Wonderful weather . . . rain last week . . . has it been that long? . . . high
school . . . graduation . . . feeling well,” she said.
But she looked anything but well. Her face was pale, and he noticed her
left hand was trembling slightly. Seeing this, he grew panicked, for this was
a sign she was about to faint or, worse, have one of her seizures. He’d seen
those and they terrified him. She’d been shaky and weak in her movements
the last week or so, and that, Aunt Addie had told him, was a sign. In fact,
just before Aunt Addie left for the icehouse not twenty minutes before,
she’d made it a point to tell him to keep a careful eye on Miss Chona, don’t
let her pick up anything, and to watch her so she doesn’t fall. Stay close had
been her words. He’d gone to fetch the cartons of cans from the basement
only because Miss Chona had insisted. He tried to do it quickly, but
obviously not quickly enough, for now he was stuck in the trapdoor opening
behind the counter and unsure whether to show himself, for he didn’t want
Miss Chona to fall while he was down there. The wrath of Aunt Addie if
that happened would not be pleasant.
Just as he was about to poke his head out of the trapdoor opening, Miss
Chona lifted her left hand off the counter and pointed toward the front of
the store, which caused Doc to turn around and look toward the front door.
In that instant, with Doc’s face turned away, she shot a quick glance down
at him in the trapdoor opening and stretched her left hand out, palm flat,
fingers spread, like a traffic cop’s, as if to say “Stay there!” so he stayed
where he was.
He felt the urge to scamper down the ladder to the relative safety of the
basement, but Doc had turned to her again, and the boy stared with alarm as
the conversation heated up quickly, seeing only Miss Chona’s lips and face
from his perch below as she talked, her face reddening in anger: “Marching
in your parade . . . your problem . . . shameful . . . taxes . . . I’m American,
too,” the last she indicated angrily, pointing at Doc with a shaky hand. He
saw the back of the doctor’s neck redden and his shoulders hunch up as he
responded. They were arguing full-out now, no question, and Miss Chona’s
face, which had been surprised when the door opened, was now tightened in
rage, her eyebrows arched as she went on. “Colored people . . . Negroes . . .
don’t know what you’re talking about . . . police.” He watched Doc respond,
his head moving as he yammered something, cutting her off.
She was about to respond, but just as she opened her mouth to speak,
Miss Chona whitened, gasped, and her eyes rolled upward; she shook
violently for a second and suddenly dropped out of sight, her face
disappearing on the other side of the butcher’s case. It was as if someone
had snatched her from a hole in the floor.
Dodo didn’t need to hear to know what happened. The thump of the
shaking floor told him she’d dropped like a sack of potatoes.
He slapped a hand to his mouth instinctively, knowing from experience
that even his smallest utterances caused noises—he learned that from Uncle
Nate when they went hunting. No noise. Cover your mouth or you’ll scare
off the game. But this was no hunting trip with Uncle Nate’s old rifle that
knocked you off your feet when it spit fire out of its eye toward a deer or
squirrel. This explosion came from inside, as the fear exploded through his
body with the shuddering of the floor, and for a moment, he could not
remember where he was. Many months later, he would recall the ominous,
life-changing thump that ran through his left hand held beneath the
floorboard, and how that same left hand had smacked over his mouth so
hard he bit his own lip, hanging on to the trapdoor ladder with his right arm
wrapped around the rungs, for had that arm not been there, he would have
fallen off altogether, as his legs gave way at that moment and he became
overwhelmed with the same feeling he’d had when he was kneeling before
the stove in his mother’s house three years before and the stove exploded,
sending shards of hot iron into his chest, arms, and head that felt like a
thousand knives with a heat so intense that he felt cold for weeks afterward.
The pain in his head then was so great that it had grown into a living thing;
the burning in his eyes so unbearable that his ears, he reasoned, had shut
down to defend themselves, so that by the time the bandages were removed,
he was forced to stagger about wearing sunglasses for months, which he
hated; the business of sound having been removed from the world felt
almost secondary to the real problem: his mother’s sudden illness, her life
ebbing away as his own ears gradually closed. Then Uncle Nate, Aunt
Addie, then what? Nothing but Miss Chona and his ears. He could faintly
hear a few things sometimes. A car backfiring. The vegetable man’s horse
as the cart clomped past. But sight and sound were replaced by sight and
vibration—noises coming from inside. Inside his heart. Thus, as Miss
Chona fell, he thought he heard the sound of his own heart cracking, as if
there were a sound to it at all, breaking off, deep inside, for part of him
knew he would never see her the same again, if ever. Going . . . going . . .
gone. Just like his mother. Just like everything.
That thought pushed power back into his quaking legs and he surged
upward, braced himself quickly, and pulled himself out of the trapdoor
opening, leaping catlike onto the floor, where he crouched behind the
butcher’s counter. The counter’s face was glass. Dodo peered through the
glass case silently, breathing heavily. What he saw over the neatly
assembled pigs’ feet, sliced meats, ham hocks, cow parts, and ground beef
in the case would change the rest of his life: Doc Roberts, his back to him,
crouching over the prone figure of Miss Chona.
Every single road Dodo had taken up to that point, every turn, every
crevice, every movement, had been divided into the rules of adults from his
world that he trusted—his late mother, his uncle Nate and aunt Addie, his
cousin Rusty, Miss Paper, even the grim Miss Bernice next door. To the
outside world, he was a colored boy who was “slow” or “feebleminded” by
those who knew no better. Only careful drilling in the months before by
those same people, including Miss Chona, kept him in place at that
moment: Stay close. Play dumb. Do not leave the store. Do not venture past
Miss Bernice’s yard next door. Do not run about. Pretend you don’t
understand. To do otherwise, he understood, would be a disaster for him.
Even Miss Chona had repeated those same instructions just now, before
she’d fallen, with her outstretched hand. “Stay there,” she’d said. Stay there.
Just keep quiet. The trouble will pass.
But now . . .
It was the thought of Aunt Addie, her fury—even worse, her
disappointment—that caused him to place his foot on top of the counter and
leap over it.
He was only twelve, so sex had more to do with odd pictures in his mind
and an occasional curiosity about one of Miss Bernice’s daughters he
favored for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of. His understanding of girls was
that they were necessary, would one day be women, would be required in
his life somehow and vice versa; but in the meantime, they were
impediments in his daily quest to gather marbles, rocks, and stones, and
send them skipping across the creek that ran behind both the yards of the
Heaven & Earth Grocery Store and Miss Bernice’s house. Girls were not
important. Apparently, Doc did not agree, because he was running his hands
through Miss Chona’s hair and inside her clothes in a way that made the
boy suck wind and lose his breath.
Miss Chona had fainted completely. She’d obviously had one of her
seizures—they lasted only a few seconds—but afterward she was normally
placed on her side by Aunt Addie, who wiped her face, and after a few
minutes, she got better and usually sat up. But Doc didn’t wait for her to sit
up. He’d turned her over, and when the seizure quit, he pushed her so that
she lay flat on her back. He quickly ran his right hand across her chest and
squeezed. Then he held her there with his left hand and squeezed her chest
with the other, the hand working into her blouse, holding her in place while
he ran his other hand across her stomach, then down to her groin, pulling up
her dress, her legs exposed to the thigh, the boot she wore lying awkwardly
exposed, her blouse rumpled where Doc had run his hands so freely. It was
a memory that would last much longer than the boy would have liked.
Dodo didn’t remember yelling. And later, when asked about it, insisted
he did not yell, saying if he had, he would have known it. “I know how to
keep quiet,” he told his Aunt Addie. But that was later, long afterward.
Now, without thinking, he jumped off the counter and leaped across the
room, knocking Doc into the shelves of cans and crackers behind him.
He’d never touched a white man before, not in his whole life, and was
surprised at how soft and fat Doc felt, and how easily Doc flew backward
when he piled into him, knocking him off Miss Chona and driving him into
the shelves that cascaded groceries down on all three of them.
Doc recovered and shoved him off, but before he could rise, Dodo was
on his feet and piled into him again like a football player; Dodo was thin
but strong, and his weight and strength kept Doc in place. Whether he beat
Doc with his fists like they said, the boy was uncertain, for Miss Chona had
a second seizure at that moment, and while they usually lasted seconds, this
one was worse than the first and lasted much longer.
The sight of her struggle seemed to awaken a strength in Doc, and the
boy could feel him vibrating and knew he was shouting. Dodo ignored the
shouts, pinning him against the shelf with his head and shoulders, glancing
behind him as Miss Chona shook vigorously now, her body spasming
wildly. He felt hands on his neck. Doc was strangling him and Dodo’s
struggle for life became real now. He could feel Doc’s fury and wiggled free
of Doc’s hands and pushed him against the shelf harder, but Doc had his
wind, and the boy raised his head just in time to feel Doc striking him. He
instinctively struck back twice, hard in the face, and Doc’s mouth ceased
moving for a moment and blood burst from his lips, and at that moment, the
boy realized he was in deep trouble.
Out of the corner of his eye, Dodo saw the light overhead blink,
indicating that the front door had opened, and then Aunt Addie was rushing
toward Miss Chona. His glance at her caused him to lighten his press on
Doc, who flung him off onto the floor and crawled toward Miss Chona,
who was shaking violently, her head pounding the floor. Aunt Addie placed
her hand under Miss Chona’s head. Miss Chona’s mouth was wide open. He
saw Aunt Addie glance at the countertop, and without being told, Dodo
leaped over the counter, grabbed a spoon, and handed it to Aunt Addie. “I
tried to help,” he cried.
Aunt Addie ignored him, cramming the spoon into Miss Chona’s mouth
as Doc moved in. Both crouched over Miss Chona now, trying to keep her
from shaking so violently, Doc placing his hands underneath her back. She
seemed to shake forever.
Aunt Addie, still holding Miss Chona on her side, turned to Dodo and he
saw her lips move, saying calmly, “Get some water. Hurry.” He complied.
Several long seconds later, Miss Chona quit struggling and lay quiet, her
eyes closed, seemingly dead, surrounded by Addie and several neighbors
who had now entered and were swathing her face with towels. Dodo
glanced anxiously at the door. Doc was gone. He noticed the neighbors
there cleaning up, eyeing him nervously, rerighting the shelves and
restacking the fallen items. Several Hill residents were peering through the
front window of the store as well.
Aunt Addie wiped Miss Chona’s face and stroked her hair and
straightened her clothing, and a quick glance at him from her told Dodo she
was furious. He stepped to her and tapped her shoulder. He wanted to
explain, but she ignored him, speaking to a neighbor. He could see her lips
moving. What was she saying?
Then someone tapped him on the shoulder and pointed toward the front
door.
He looked up.
Doc was back, two policemen behind him. Over their shoulders, he
could see several neighbors staring at all of it grimly.
Doc pointed to him. Dodo read his lips clearly. “There he is,” he said.
There was nothing to do but run. He leaped up and tore into the back
room of the store, bursting out the back door, a police officer hot on his tail.
He sprinted through the yard, dodging the solitary cow that Miss Chona
kept to sell kosher milk, but when he reached the creek embankment at the
end of the yard, there was nowhere left to run. But he was a fast boy, quick
and lithe, and when he spun about, he quickly ducked and dodged under the
officer’s grasp, then dodged the second officer behind him and sprinted
back toward the building.
He knew he couldn’t run back inside. Instead, he made for the fire
escape ladder that hung from the second-floor window. It was six feet off
the ground, above his reach, but there was a crate he kept beneath it just for
that purpose. With one smooth leap, he swung himself on it, grabbed a rung
with one hand, then the other, pulled himself up, and scurried up the rungs
toward the roof.