High Cotton: A Novel Read online

  He rushed back, in 1921, with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree, to Harvard and Thomas Nixon Carver, his gruff professor of economics. He would have remained forever in the Indian summer of graduate school had he not, between lectures on socialism and single taxism, fetched his bride from the Lucy Lane School and Hampton College, an Augusta girl with misleading Pre-Raphaelite hair, and embarked on the first of his several calamitous meditations as a businessman. “Teach us, O Lord, to know the value of money. So many of us are spending what we do not earn,” Du Bois said.

  Long before white people began to jump from windows, Grandfather was broke, beating a retreat from South Station. It was the custom, back then, for black passengers to carry food; once over the Mason-Dixon line they were not invited to the dining car. Grandfather trained his young family in knee pants to ride hungry rather than see his wife tote a basket.

  When the price of bread had fallen, when the breadlines were segregated, when his children were deposited at the table of his mother-in-law, the black people of Savannah asked Grandfather why he kept a box of day-old bread by his steps and received the white hobos who hated him. He said, “Christ said feed the poor.” Blacks did not take to the boxcars and roads, for fear of being picked up and sent to the chain gangs. “If someone reported you, you were gone.” But tramps walked down Route 17, the coastal highway, all night long on their way to hunt for winter work in Florida.

  Grandfather reinvented himself as a gentleman farmer purified by error. Mistake number one: in 1926 he resigned after six months as principal of Booker T. Washington, the new high school in Atlanta, to become one of the millionaire strivers fawned over in the upbeat Negro press. After speculations in steamship cargo, livestock futures, mechanical washer wringers, and asphyxiated baby chicks not a foot of top soil from what his mother and father had left him—if they had—remained to be put up as collateral. “The poor die differently from everyone else,” he said.

  Grandfather resigned as superintendent of schools for a county that, in deference to his Yankee education, had paid fifteen instead of twelve dollars a week. He pushed off on a bicycle to sell life insurance for a dime. When that didn’t work, he traded in his trouser clamps for a Model T and sold policies for a quarter. They said he had just enough charm to snare quail. Then he walked out of Thunderbolt because his colleagues at Georgia State College were “teaching some ignorance.” Success didn’t like him, his brothers said.

  “What is more aromatic than a pig roasting on a cold, clear morning?” Grandfather learned to farm from catalogues and almanacs. He wouldn’t say who made the down payment on the six sandy acres outside Savannah where he studied the Depression, the “siege of misery and want.” To pay for fertilizer, he taught algebra and English at Dorchester Academy, a vague Congregational church school in the sticks that was nevertheless better than the county schools.

  Wanting his respect for nature to be of the transcendental variety, he suppressed the truth of how hard he worked his land. As it turned out, it took more than philosophy for a black man to dig brass out of the hills.

  Figs and pomegranates, unsuitable to the climate, wilted. His brothers said that Grandfather could grow or breed everything, he just couldn’t sell anything. Vandals destroyed the plum, the pecan, the umbrella china trees, and Grandfather played, with delicate outrage, the hand he was dealt. He heard the screech owls in the persimmon and obeyed: Arise and go to the city.

  The Holy Spirit, his heritage, had been waiting, like medicine on the shelf, and never mind that he pretended he had accepted a position with the family concern, much like his classmates back on Beacon or Chestnut Hill whom he could not afford to dream about. Never mind that he went into the church because, in the end, he had no place else to go.

  Old Esau had been a kind of down-home Misnagid, but Grandfather signed on with the Congregational Church, the smallest denomination in the black South, in remembrance of what he thought of as the hale New England character and the abolitionists who had swarmed out of the North to plant schools in the red clay. The faithful beat their cardboard fans of lurid funeral-home advertisements like wings, waiting for the zeal of His house to eat up Grandfather even a little bit. “If you can’t whoop and holler you might as well do something else,” an experienced preacher with a hip flask told him. Perhaps in some cupboard of Grandfather’s mind the Congregational Church was an extension of Boston’s Somerset Club.

  Back then, to belong to the Congregational Church, a black had to pass the “paper-bag test”—“bright and damn near white.” Grandfather was the darkest bag they’d ever let in. His constant worry was not that he was a black man but that he was a dark black man. Of his brothers and sisters the ones he liked least also happened to be the lightest. The condescension of high yellows hurt. He was easily riled around his wife’s family. Their almond complexions told the old Dixie story. His mother-in-law was the daughter of a governor’s son. She had seen her father only once, when he slapped her mother. She married a boy who also sprang from mustard and cracker seeds. They wore their fair skin lightly, as a trick on governor’s mansions. They could have crossed over, and that, combined with their shrewd business sense, provoked Grandfather.

  He told his wife that because her mother was a bastard her mother was no good. “Don’t ever become an educated fool,” my grandmother’s mother once told me, her blue eyes slitted with contempt for the Big Dipper pilots she had known, chief among them Grandfather, the king of spades.

  She said the smartest man she ever knew, her mother’s father, could read only a little. He was also the meanest man who ever lived. He worked for the railroads. Because of the Indian in him, she said, he had a girlfriend at every stop. The whites couldn’t take away his job until they stopped using wood to fuel the engines. He never forgot that his life was a living battle and had never tried to dress it up as anything else. Great-grandmother sucked her dental bridge and said that Grandfather’s revelation, his maiden sermon ventilated before the sinners of Yamacraw, had about it, like everything else he did in those mongrel years, a touch of the psychotic.

  He once gave a sermon fifty miles south of Savannah. The church in the little clearing was so rustic you could see between the slats. He told the turned-up heads that if they wanted to believe in God, they had to walk the last mile and accept those who hated them. “Write me as one that loves his fellow man.” The black people, some in overalls, said it was the most wonderful sermon they’d ever heard. Even so, the church did not ask Grandfather to hurry back. They were used to hell-raising preaching. They wanted to be told that they couldn’t be thieves, that they couldn’t be fornicators.

  The schoolteacher among them had never heard of “Abou Ben Adhem.” He didn’t doubt that Grandfather loved the poem, but he suspected that Grandfather also loved his love of it, and how much this love had impressed the whites who had come just to hear him, taking it for granted that the front pews had been reserved for them. Unsuspecting, Grandfather climbed into his used Touring Hudson with the canvas top that rode like a tractor, thinking he’d introduced them to one of the higher things in life.

  Grandfather needed his history with him at all times, like an inhaler. He ran over a hunting dog in a colony of peckerwood cabins. “Come quick, this nigger done killed our dog.” In his secondhand suit from Millsby Lane & Son, Grandfather brazened an apology. A white man in yellow galoshes squinted. “You that nigger preacher? That dog wasn’t worth a damn. Let him go on.”

  But Grandfather wasn’t that easy to get rid of. Drive the nail where the wood is thickest—in the hollow, motor idling, quoting Longfellow to the rednecks of Brunswick, Georgia, a pastor who would be free all his life of the moans and groans and writhings of the evangelical, appalled by the gold, by the grasping glitter of the modern usurpers of the old faith.

  For all I knew as a child Grandfather Eustace came from an Oldsmobile. He rarely made the trip to see us, because we lived on the wrong side of Indianapolis, “right there with the hoi polloi.” Ours was
the ugliest house on the block, Grandfather Eustace said, and for once my father didn’t hand him any backtalk. In the spring it submitted to new coats of paint, and after the wood had absorbed enough labor, the house looked even more like a wrecked boat tossed on a hill. The hawthorn bushes declined to grow, but dandelions flourished, which meant that the taciturn handyman had to come twice a week with his rotary blade mower.

  The retired Baptist minister and his deaconess looked out at our patchwork yard from their apprehensive, gingerbread perfection, and who knew if the neighbor we called the Last of the Mohicans on the other side could see what we saw, that the boat’s insides were beyond hope.

  When his Oldsmobile pulled up in front of our seventeen steps, the squirrels ran, unwanted presents and my mother’s interrupted doctoral dissertation were resurrected from under our beds. Time went out the window when he came and the skies seemed to gloat and sing “We are holding back the night.” I knew from the first that I had to be on my guard, had to get my face ready for the next humiliating test, to plan on my way to the basement how to skip by him without inciting too much fuss because, like the unchained boxers on the block, Grandfather bit hard.

  Imposing in manner, conditioned by an order in which the shortest distance between two points was a zigzag, Grandfather sucked up the air, left behind that carbon-dioxide feeling. He had his specialties, one of which was to remind people that if they had heeded his advice they wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. For instance, Savannah’s trade in naval stores had collapsed by 1941. The federal government wanted to build a huge troop camp. Blacks who had only scraps of paper as titles of ownership from Reconstruction days were going to have their land bought or condemned or confiscated. Grandfather out with his grub hoe spotted the planes mapping boundaries. He suggested to neighbors to take options and sell: war was war. They ignored him, because he was always telling them what to do, and were displaced. Years later he was still saying they should have listened.

  The most Grandfather’s second wife dared to say was that he talked like a man who was born knowing. Grandfather sometimes turned on us like a rigged trap, and of course the benevolent gaze of the sage became the glare of the patriarch. He was not an accomplished minister for nothing. If an adversary was innocent of one crime, some other transgression lay hidden in the shrinking heart. Grandfather invoked the Book, sent out the verses on guilt patrol. An avalanche of wisdom from Deuteronomy, Kings, or Wendell Willkie shook the bulbs in the ceiling.

  His accusing looks were as coercive as his ability to summon Scripture. His mahogany skin may have lost its burnish, but his cider-brown eyes were still almost too expressive for his own good—in his day it was often dangerous for a black man to reveal too much intelligence. Grandfather was a consummate actor. Assured of his lines, his script, when my father got him on the ropes Grandfather would leap over him with something like “Grieve not thy father when thou art too full.” His eyes would relax and he seemed on the verge of laughter, as if to ask, How about that? Like the ring of it? We always gave up. Reason was easily stoned by Old Testament wrath.

  Grandfather’s performances were seldom concluded without the handkerchief for the sorely tried brow. He had strong, elegant hands and was meticulous about his appearance, his granite-colored hair, custom-made shirts, and pliable, hand-sewn leathers. His communicants demanded their money’s worth, especially the sick and the shut-in, who swooned, he thought, at his neat creases and metaphors, and all those women who waited for the lilt of his prayers.

  We endured long pauses before he accepted the flags of truce. He ignored conciliatory conversation, which was a trial for him. Grandfather concentrated on newspaper headlines upside down under plants, on my sisters’ fried braids, on the screams of our playmates in the alley, until he couldn’t bear to see us deprived of his talk. All smiles, he’d rub my stupefied head for luck, signaling that these sparrings were a form of family fun.

  It was 1960 and Jesus wasn’t waiting at home plate anymore. My parents went to church only when they wanted to be seen. Grandfather had baptized my sisters and me over his very own font, down in Louisville, Kentucky, for the time being, and the New Testaments he’d given us were requisitioned by our Sunday-school staff. My parents pulled us out after they heard some of the pre-Scopes notions we were fed, including the axiom that children who placed their hands in mailboxes were snatched up by Satan.

  My sisters had gone into the Sunday business of selling automobile brochures from car lots that wouldn’t give my father a loan. They also did a fast trade in civil defense pamphlets: get shielded, drop flat, bury your face, don’t rush outside after bombings, don’t drink water from open containers, do not listen to or repeat rumors. They hid the contraband in Mad magazines, in Tom Brown’s School Days, one of those out-of-place, out-of-time things Grandfather liked to read from, more for his pleasure than ours, and worked nearby out-of-bounds streets, because customers who didn’t know us could be relied on not to make troublesome phone calls. I was paid to stay behind.

  The engine of Grandfather’s old shoe surprised us counting up the day’s take of quarters. “Say ‘Howdy’ to your Old Moon.” He swatted his way through the pattern of gnats that danced over our steps and nowhere else on the block. We packed quarters in our socks. He said we looked as if we were facing the dentist’s chair.

  Grandfather’s beige second wife brought up the rear, limping, the mark of her childhood trial, polio. He used her, a woman, to express things he could not. He was always saying that she was dying to see us, but we knew better. She was not my grandmother, not like my mother’s mother. Grandfather’s real wife was gone, dead from cancer in 1941. She and her intriguing curls had eternal rest upstairs in the hall closet, in a department-store box of photographs. My aunts said that before they were sentenced to hard time in a shoofly boarding school in South Carolina their stepmother had worked them like chars. We got back at the second wife by not calling her by any name.

  Grandfather said it was a good day to duck out on his assistant pastor, because the National Baptist Convention was meeting in Louisville. The offices of that brotherhood inspired the worst sort of contention among the members. The battles were known to upset Dr. King’s stomach. Factions came to blows in elevators and in hotel lounges. “Please, Lord, hold steady this hand while I cut this man.”

  The reader of faces waited in his what-have-we-here pose: hands on his hips. Secrecy is the overprotected child’s dissent, but Grandfather already knew what was up. We didn’t have to throw our parents to the lions that day. Tornado Watch, when my sisters piled blankets and cans in the southeast crevices of the basement, had been overthrown by Freedom Watch. I didn’t know what protest was, but my sisters said that the clothes laid out for us showed that protest was up there on the charts with Easter.

  The movement that had not waited for Grandfather’s consent infused everyday life with a longing that made intercessors unnecessary. A multitude discovered that it had immediate, unimpeded access to the burning truth, and maybe for that reason Grandfather didn’t think much of it. He wasn’t quoting “Abou Ben Adhem” anymore. Talk of love as the “ultimate creative weapon” made him cringe. His God was not personal, open; He was formidable and avenging.

  Suffering was redemptive, but some things, after so many years, were buried too deep and might lose their spell if brandished in the streets. Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit alone, saith the Lord, which clearly did not include “running locofoco with every who-shot-john.” Parading around and eating at Woolworth’s were, to Grandfather, neither sane nor courteous. “That Bond boy ought to know better,” he once said. “He didn’t come from just any home.” Grandfather thought his sudden appearance would force my father to give up his plans.

  We had to hear about the time Grandfather went to a symposium at Talledega College in Alabama. Trains didn’t run from Birmingham to the little black college. The teller at the bus station window wouldn’t let him buy a ticket and sent him to the other sid
e. The same teller appeared at the other window. She sent him back to the first one. Eventually, she tired of his passivity and sold him a ticket. He spent the night outside rather than stand in the crowded Jim Crow waiting room. On returning home, he wrote to the officials of the bus line demanding that they correct the inequities of segregated travel.

  Once, he continued, he was en route to a budget meeting of the General Synod. He and another minister stopped at a restaurant where they could buy food but not sit. “It was my personal privilege to get an appointment with the owner of the firm. In the closeness of his private office, the three of us—God, he, and I—had a quiet talk together.”

  We went downtown anyway, without the mandate of heaven. My sisters were made to leave their genuine U.S. Army sergeant’s helmets behind. My father had to grip the steering wheel with paper towels, his palms were sweating so much.

  A buffalo would have been less out of place than a skyscraper in the downtown Indianapolis scenery of faded brick department stores and mock Prussian monuments. The two movie houses were chaste, but Union Station had a reputation for estuaries of piss and men in the terra-cotta archways with aluminum foil wads full of stolen wristwatches.

  The vast War Memorial Plaza spread out toward the state legislature. The Depression had tabled indefinitely plans for a brilliant reflecting pool. Instead, asphalt extended five blocks from the national headquarters of the American Legion to the entrance of a colossal chunk of limestone that featured a pyramid lid. Replicas of gaslights alternated with ailing trees to commemorate the natural resource that, after railroads and slaughterhouses, was responsible for the boom-town designs of the “Crossroads of America.” A stately obelisk pulled the blank pavement together, and tanks along the perimeter were a popular attraction.