High Cotton: A Novel Page 10

I’d traveled far, I thought, as a Pullman porter would have, back in the days of miles of smiles, when Westfield sent the journalism club to the Midwestern Music and Art Camp in Lawrence, Kansas. I laughed into my sleeve when Grandfather said the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas had been named for a man whose prize-winning editorials were in defense of lynch mobs.

  I had a Negro roommate. He and I were the Only Ones in the dormitory. He said it was obvious why we had been assigned together. We never even said good night to each other after that. I envied his trick in the cafeteria, which was to follow a low-flying mosquito and squash it so that the blood splurted across the tiles.

  He was taken up by juniors from Minnesota who dressed like Jimi Hendrix and painted psychedelic posters under something called black light. He was followed by seniors from California who had come out against Vietnam, seen Janis Joplin kick the balls of her lead singer on stage, gone to R-rated Mike Nichols films, and feigned twisted ankles so that they could get codeine prescriptions at the infirmary. He sat with a guitar on the dorm roof.

  He was the Most Popular Black Kid at Camp, which didn’t leave me many choices among the remaining titles. I became the Most Religious Black Kid at Camp. I was taken up by nuns. My calling included dropping in uninvited on the Sisters of Charity. They jumped out of their chairs to put on their habits and awaited my condemnation of the riots in various U.S. cities.

  I’d told the whole dorm that I was a Roman Catholic, thinking my title as Most Religious Black Kid demanded that I go one better than the Most Popular Black Kid, who styled himself “a lapsed atheist” and could sing an hour’s worth of hymns without a break. The Catholics at camp, even the wildest of them, went to “folk Mass” in a chapel of folding chairs. Because I assumed that Roman Catholics were different from mere Catholics, and that it was rare for us to find the proper Mass, I thought it was a safe lie. Then, in a panic, I purchased a book on the subject by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, though it was too late to cram effectively. I entered the confessional and said “Hi.”

  Fortunately, Vatican II had replaced Latin with whatever. The young priest pressed me into service as an altar boy and was very patient with my blankness under pressure. He cued me, the backward, thick, terrified Negro, in a gentle, forgiving way. It happened in movies, the fugitive who has slipped into a dead doctor’s identity pulls off difficult surgery. But by the time the Host was elevated, everyone from the dorms thought my mari performance deliberately comic, a comment of some kind on the Goody Two-shoes-ness of the abstract fish on a green felt banner, and the arts-and-crafts renditions of the Stations of the Cross. I felt almost popular. Afterward, the damp priest dared me to admit that I wasn’t really Catholic and began my instruction with a highly unorthodox version of the miracle of procreation. To appease him, I said I wanted to be a priest.

  “What about the sex drive?”

  “I’m a Negro. I don’t need one.”

  Our fishbowl back in Indianapolis had a guest lodger—Grandfather, the arch darky. Retirement in Pensacola had not worked out. “The Lord created Florida for the benefit of devils,” he said. He was en route to San Diego, where he would or perhaps would not accept a temporary post. The stepgrandmother had stayed behind in their pink bungalow of sleep-depriving acoustics to once again pack up the houseplants.

  He’d done his homework and shared with me the information that the Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo landed at Point Loma in 1542. An Episcopalian army chaplain had gone to San Diego in 1850. The Baptists arrived in June of 1869 and the Presbyterians two days later. His Congregationalists founded their Logan Heights Church in 1886. Of course the Catholics had come first, in 1769.

  He was ironing trousers. It was, I thought, just like Grandfather to call upon me to sit and have a chat with him while he hummed his way through some hopeless, darky task. I said I had embraced the Catholic faith. Grandfather gingerly laid his trousers over a hanger and said that he had to send my father to a Catholic school in Georgia because back then you couldn’t trust the public schools. Places like Westfield didn’t exist, not even for the whites.

  He asked if I’d been confirmed out there on the plains of Kansas. He said he had never known me to have the patience to take or read instructions, which was why I had broken everything I’d ever been given. He said I knew less about the infallibility of the Holy Father than the boys from the peanut fields he used to watch over when he led a Bible camp for boys from the peanut fields on Kings Mountain in North Carolina.

  To have a “profitable exchange,” all Grandfather needed was somebody sitting there between the washing machine and the dryer—if that. He was as inclined as ever to express opinions, but the subject matter had begun to shift. The contemporary world slipped now and then from focus and the past, the cotton fields across from his house on Sunset Avenue in Augusta, reappeared. The movement of his talk was fitful, like someone dabbing with a rag at spots on a wall or plugging leaks wherever they appeared.

  When he talked about preaching it was as though he was himself preaching again. I could tell from the way he threw his voice: he was projecting. He also used to run a camp that instructed preachers. “The time came for us to put theory into practice. Mr. X, will you take the pulpit today and preach exactly as you would this coming Sunday morning to the three hundred members of your church? So he did. The experience was a revelation. All the techniques of harangue were revealed. The barker selling his wares was there. The angel Gabriel suddenly appeared as an escort for the faithful up to the pearly gates. The heat of his presentation waxed warmer and warmer. He became so loud the walls could not contain his nonsense. So it thundered out. Stray dogs hastened to the windows in canine anxiety to see what the noise was all about.”

  The memory took him straight back to where he stood: in our basement, folding and ironing, and he fell silent. I knew it, but sympathy would have encumbered my brand-new youth. I ran away from the point, with my world unfolding and his closing down. I reached the top of the stairs first and hit the light switch.

  The days grew short again. Hikers were no longer seen on the towpaths along the township’s canal. Mown grass gave way to the melancholy of burning leaves. Every lawn had its crackling, acrid, black-and-orange pyre. San Diego waited. The stepgrandmother didn’t know what to do with the boxes and we didn’t know what to do with the suzerain among us who, in my eyes, lowered himself in order, he said, to earn his keep, and succeeded in driving even the taciturn handyman up the wall.

  My interest in the Roman Church subsided along with my allergies. The distance of Westfield’s teachers I accepted as professionalism. Grandfather wanted to have a talk with the zoology teacher. My parents would not miss Parents’ Night, I said. For all his expertise on white schools, I didn’t trust Grandfather. Westfield wasn’t like the grammar school on Capitol Avenue, where the science teacher who managed to drill through the thickest heads was every parent’s friend.

  Grandfather himself was an escapee from that tight, closed world where every Negro was said to know every other Negro and no distinction was drawn between classroom and home. He said in his day Negro schools had good teachers because they weren’t hired anywhere else. But my father hadn’t discovered until graduation day at Howard that its president was an old friend of Grandfather’s. Grandfather didn’t stay for the commencement exercises because my uncle was to graduate the same afternoon from M.I.T., which was, to Grandfather, the better occasion. Perhaps he wanted to make an appearance at Westfield precisely because of his regard for white schools. I wanted to tell Grandfather to go out and find his own white people.

  Instead, he took a newspaper and shovel to clean the dog’s pen. A greater mortification was to come. It was my turn to host the meeting of the Westfield journalism club. Grandfather took over the preparations. Sandwiches wouldn’t do, he said, and besides, he knew a lot about shrimp. My mother threw up her hands. She said the most I could hope for was that he would take a powder before the Saturday that
was so important to my reputation. I had a new identity. I was young, which superseded my classification as a Negro.

  “You know more crackers than anybody,” Grandfather said.

  I tried to keep the door to the den closed. Boys in crew-neck sweaters and penny loafers debated with girls in wraparound denim skirts and Weejuns. Grandfather found a reason to slip in every five minutes. The empty soda cans had to be removed, the bowl of potato chips refreshed. He was sure that he moved unnoticed, like an impeccable waiter of the old school, but he was an adult, my grandfather, and his presence, his hovering, caused an impatient hush. So closely watched, the group couldn’t sparkle, and every point on the meeting’s agenda lost its flirtatious quality. Grandfather’s gray suit enraged me, as did his courteous smile, which could have been seen from the moon.

  He reappeared with a silver tray ceremoniously balanced on the palm of his hand. I’d never seen the present his congregation had given him in recognition of his years of service, but I guessed immediately what he was carrying, though the engraved dates of his ministry in Louisville were covered for the moment by a mountainous wheel of shrimps impaled on toothpicks.

  It wasn’t a dream. I didn’t wake up, and the tray wasn’t safely packed away in Florida with the boxes of houseplants. Whether he valued it so little or thought the use of it a grand gesture, I followed the formal cargo as if it concealed a bomb. His name, which I knew swirled in the center, was still hidden. Grandfather turned and scraped here and there. I imagined that he forced the tray under the noses of my guests.

  The social arbiter of the ninth grade recoiled. “Never touch the stuff,” he said. “I’m kosher.”

  Grandfather answered the boy’s light smile with his own generous, crystalline formation. “Who is the greatest Jew that ever lived: Moses or Albert Einstein?”

  I took advantage of the distraction to relieve Grandfather of the unclean thing and rushed it from the room. It crossed my mind to throw it in the garbage. I ran back to calmly rid myself of the chaperon, to sweep him away like a smashed idol.

  5 /

  Heirs of Malcolm

  I was a slave in heaven. Spitballs and shouts of “Dr. Thomas,” or, more familiarly, “Tom,” hit my neck on the school bus. What I had heard behind my back was soon said to my face in the halls. “You must think you’re white.” No elegant variation, no trapdoor synonym, no you-laid-them-in-the-shade explanation occurred to me, but I learned that persecution was something you could deposit in the bank of manipulations.

  Teachers stirred themselves in the direction of my betterment when they noted the price I was made to pay for my unpopularity with the black table in the cafeteria. I was the Also Chosen and withdrew large sums of indulgence from that account, even ran up an overdraft. I believed in the then often-cited genealogy of field niggers and house niggers. When I needed to blame a poor performance on something outside myself, I had only to hint that the field niggers were after me again. Supply and demand.

  My fellow black classmates pulled such faces I was asked to interpret the anger. Nothing about me could make whites feel bad, as if I had been inoculated against carrying terror. It had been a short journey from tossing around paper airplanes with the Star of David inked on the wings in class at junior high school to high-school club meetings in the mute, motionless, tchotchke-free mansions of the far north side.

  Our handyman broke his silence to inform us that some of our neighbors had decided we were all right because they saw a lot of white people coming in and out of our house. “Let there be a whole mess of firmament,” de Lawd said in Green Pastures.

  Then came the Revolution, that loss of the meridian, brought to the suburbs by elder siblings on Easter break. The Revolution drove up in Day-Glo vans, electric Kool-Aid Volkswagens, and souped-up convertibles. One of my sisters could be counted on to bring home the longhairs, the other sister to drag in the militants. Chrysanthemum tea and patchouli oil, bubas and dashikis were added to the ritual of waiting for the sleepy holiday meal no one knew how or wanted to know how to cook anymore.

  One sister fidgeted at table next to the pacifist, the draft resister whose sunburn peeled as he held forth on the subject of humbling himself before his fellow creatures, of not wearing shoes in order to get in touch with the cosmos. The other suffered next to the soul brother, the sullen Omega whose fraternity hell week consisted of barricading the campus offices of “the white racist power structure”: one or two petrified deans. My father could forbid signing up for the big peace demonstration as far as his lungs carried, my mother could cry about celebrating Kwansa instead of Christmas all she wanted, and Grandfather, when he was on the scene, could rebut until the night’s sermonette vanished into a fuzzy dot. Nothing could stop the Revolution.

  The Revolution was useful as a provocation. It came in handy as a face-saver in my tug of war with my parents. When I sneaked off to “the Ruins,” the monument in a suburban park designed to look like a desecrated Greek temple that was off-limits because parents read more than we thought, I talked Revolution with drifters who said they had been around the psychoexistential complex. The real thing was coming along soon, which meant that we didn’t have to do anything but wait to be picked up like strays at the curb and given a good home.

  One morning I couldn’t figure out why school seemed so eerie and reduced. I got such looks that I went into the boys’ room to check the mirror. In the cafeteria, when I saw the empty table where the black students usually congregated, I remembered that it was the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death. There was no holiday, not then, but I had not stayed home, had not kept away, like the others, out of instinct. I stopped wondering if I would ever overcome.

  I went over the top, “copped an attitude,” which the school counselor, irritable from a diet of the CBS Evening News, took as a personal betrayal, and walked out of class rather than relive the indignities of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Never mind that the Revolution was tardy and hollow, had come late to the suburbs, like foreign films, certain music, bell-bottoms, and pot. Revolutionary defiance was expected of me and, whites and blacks agreed in my case, long overdue. My best friend, Hans Hansen, admitted: “I used to think your people were lazy. Now I understand. It’s sickle cell.”

  “All Power to the People.” When the local chapter of the Black Panther Party, such as it was in 1971, invaded Central Meadow High School, five bad-ass dudes explained to the spellbound student council how much interest had accumulated on the promise of forty acres and two mules, and they injected into the bargain a good dose of guilt for the car keys and movie money that bulged in most pockets. “The American empire is everywhere, even in your back seat.”

  “You all are betraying the Jews of Warsaw,” a voluptuous woman in a black beret and a black turtleneck screamed from the back of the auditorium. “You have got to get hip to this thing. Get out of your bag. Get out of that mind-set about the feel you grabbed in the back seat of the driver’s-ed car. Get out of that thing about who is or who ain’t going to let you wear jeans to school. You have got to get hip to some real facts.”

  The head dude silenced Sister Sheryl, as he called her, arguing that they had come to us in the spirit of revolutionary discipline. She would have to restrain herself until called, although he respected the burning desire for liberation that caused her to speak out of turn.

  She never got the chance to address us. Security guards, county mounties, and the sheriff’s department crashed through the doors. Somebody had spread rumors of hand grenades and bazookas. The ROTC had real hardware locked up in its shed behind the football stadium, but images of Fred Hampton, Huey P. Newton, and more had come flocking. Sister Sheryl raised her big fist above the heads of her horrified escorts: “Remember the servants of the people.”

  I saw Sister Sheryl again some weeks later, as I was waiting on the steps of the cavernous, deserted public library. Cardinals in the bare trees looked like punctured balloons. A fringe of dirty, melting snow decorated the empty
War Memorial Plaza. The dark concrete looked like a lake at night. She was carrying a sack of buffalo wings. Hundreds of tight, furious braids radiated from her scalp. She had no overcoat, no gloves.

  I followed her implacable back and called out her name. She trudged on, then whirled around, ready. “Sister Sheryl?” I stumbled over myself. She breathed this way and that, shifted her package from one arm to the other, dropped a look my way now and then. I didn’t know why I’d stopped her, unless it was the enthusiasm that makes you run up to a famous person in a store. I thanked her for her righteous message to the Central Meadow student council. She said nothing.

  “Sister Sheryl?”

  “My name is Egba now.” She sized me up, asked me what community work I had done. I left out the four-letter words with which several eight-year-olds had requested the end of my affiliation with the Inner City Tutors’ Hall. She said that I might be useful to the new organization, the Heirs of Malcolm, which she had founded after her resignation from the moribund Panthers.

  I didn’t have a black turtleneck. I was also the only boy in the senior class without a driver’s license. I didn’t know how I was going to sneak into town for the meeting. There was no question that my commitment would have to be clandestine. I tried to explain my transportation difficulties to Sister Egba in what I thought of as hip, bad-corner terms. She cut me off.

  “I don’t give a damn where you live. I don’t give a damn about wheels. Now deal, brother man.” She gave me her back, reached into her sack for the company of a buffalo wing as she stalked around a corner.

  Hans Hansen agreed to deliver me to my destiny. He had a motorcycle and an MG as well. He wasn’t quite so sure that black people were the only people who could free the world, or that the world needed freeing, but he wasn’t going to stand between me and the honor of being a fighter in the revolutionary process.