The Lucky Stone Read online

  “I’ll let the sun heal me,” she’d fuss. “Give the sun just one more good day.”

  “Grandmother, you need the doctor,” Mama would almost cry.

  “The sun be my doctor if it’s all right with you,” my Great-grandmother would say.

  But finally Mama and Daddy took her to the hospital. And every day without missing I would walk to the hospital with dogwood or candy and every day the nurse wouldn’t let me see my Great-grandmother.

  “No visitors.” That’s all she would say. No reason or nothing. No visitors.

  Well, this one day I went over to the hospital and the nurse’s place was empty. I didn’t even think about it; soon as I saw nobody was there I went looking for my Great-grandmother. Found her too. She was in the fourth room I tried, a little tiny old lady in a big old bed. Not enough sun or nothing. I was in the room before she saw me.

  “Ohhh, it’s my Baby, my Sweet Tee Baby.” She laughed. She was so glad to see me.

  And I ran to the bed and hugged her hard because I was so glad to see her too. And I started to cry.

  “Why what is the matter, Tee?”

  “Oh, Grandma.” I was talkin and cryin at the same time. “Grandmama, I ain’t never gonna have no boyfriend and nobody will ever love me but you, and I couldn’t even get in here to see you and I ain’t gonna never have nobody.”

  My Great-grand hugged me hard.

  “Hush your mouth, girl,” she laughed, “hush up now. You talk like you ain’t kin to me. You’ll have the ones you want and the ones you don’t. Sweet Tee, they be on you like bees to the cone. And you ain’t done with me neither, not yet.” And she seemed to be laughing more.

  Well, that old nurse came in just then and made me go.

  “When you get home, look on my dresser. Don’t forget. Look on my dresser,” my Great-grandmother called to me on my way out.

  That evening after my Mama and Daddy went out to the hospital I went into my Great-grand’s room and sat in her chair. Her room smelled old and warm and sweet like she did.

  I went over to her dresser like she told me. I looked at the pictures all framed in lace and gold. There were aunts and uncles I didn’t know. And Mama when she was a little girl and Mama’s Mama, my Grandmother and my Great-grand’s own daughter who was gone before I was born.

  And right by the picture of Mama’s Mama was a lace hanky with an envelope half folded in it. And the envelope had my name on it! Tee!

  I unfolded the hanky and took the envelope over to the rocker and sat down and opened it up. There was something inside warm and black as night, a stone with a letter scratched on one side like an A. The stone!

  Oh, I held it and kissed it and rocked and cried in that chair and that was where they found me when they came in that evening. My Mama and my Daddy and my Great-grandmother well again!

  They laughed when they saw me sitting curled up asleep in my Great-grand’s chair with the lucky stone clutched in my hand. They say they did anyway.

  Next day I got in the mail my very first valentine, a big red heart edged in lace, and my Great-grandmother laughed and called me Honeycone, and it seemed like I smiled all day. It was the prettiest thing I had ever seen and it was signed just J.D., and I didn’t even know that anybody called by that was looking at me when I watched him in school so much.

  The world is a wondrous place.

  Now that is the story of how I got my lucky stone and how it started being lucky for me. There is more to it than that though, and someday I might tell you about that too.

  Be sure to read another Lucille Clifton favorite.

  It is the summer of 1948. Satchel Paige is up to the majors, Ralph Bunche is at the U.N., and each evening twelve-year-old Sooky and her family listen to Amos and Andy on the radio. Uncle Sunny, the veteran of the Second World War, spends the long summer evenings following a ghostly nun across the Grider Street bridge. And one night Daddy takes everyone to the hardware store to see a newfangled invention called the television. But mostly, for Sooky, it is the summer when sin breaks out all over the body of her best friend, Tallahassie May Scott, because she wasn’t saved.

  0-385-32126-0

  Available now from Delacorte Press

  Published by

  Dell Yearling

  an imprint of

  Random House Children’s Books

  a division of Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Text copyright © 1979 by Lucille Clifton

  Illustrations copyright © 1979 by Dale Payson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-53795-9

  v3.0