High Cotton: A Novel Page 3

  I’d never seen so many black people whom my parents didn’t know. Of course I didn’t have that word yet. I’d not even heard “black” used as a term of abuse. The Dozens, as winos called insult rumbles among pre-teens under netless basketball hoops, were still on the list of things to look forward to. Grandfather, the son of a race man, said “Negro” in public, and the way he said it left no doubt that the N was capitalized. But when Grandfather said “Negro” he described an abstraction.

  Synaptic delay prevented my making the connection between Grandfather’s parishioners and the offhand “we” of my parents’ front-seat talk, talk that concerned the way “we” were treated at lunch counters on the off-ramps to hell. In my heart I believed my mother’s story that she was the real Shirley Temple. My nerve endings finally passed on the news when I found myself walled in on all sides by Negroes about to define themselves.

  We accumulated like pennies near the military mall, between a statue of a grim Abe and a fountain. A sculpture of a wood nymph had been stolen and everyone said that the caravans of police cars were to discourage further theft. Compared to the storms to come, some half-dozen assassinations later, our march around the huge patriotic parking lot was like the haphazard, casual milling around on the lawn after church—patent-leather huddles of busy men canceling dates, aviaries of women in pink hats and white gloves. “Give me some sugar,” they said when they bore down on children to pass out kisses. The most meddlesome among the ladies removed their gloves to straighten bow ties or smooth down hair. The nastiest moment came when they licked their fingers to rub dry skin from my cheeks.

  We walked through a gauntlet of spectators, sunburnt men with toothpicks and milkshake straws rotating like cranks in front of their thin lips and women who looked as if they did their hair with egg beaters. More goblins came to stare from the tops of coupes and from the carved doors of the Scottish Rite Cathedral. My sisters and I, with our acute myopia, our bottle-bottom lenses, kept a fix on my father’s jacket, on my mother’s jacket, vanished with them and bounced back behind the ear-nose-and-throat man and the pediatrician.

  Even the judge who had won a grand slam and gone into cardiac arrest at the last bridge tournament rose from his sickbed to fall in step. They came, though this was before the chance of getting on television had begun to be “factored in.” It was strange to see people who would have died rather than be accused of having flowers that “showed off” call undue attention to themselves smack in the middle of town, in front of so many others who were keeping quiet, arms folded, not about to join in.

  Up one side of the plaza and down the other grownups were loud in public. How long? Not long. They made noise and the songs were almost like church, only faster. In church the hymns were dragged out. On the street people sneaked through verses, and then bore down hard on the end, as if they were stomping out a fire. I saw something nervous and steely in the excitement, expressions like that on my sister’s face when she made up her mind to go without training wheels even if it meant hitting the telephone pole.

  We didn’t know what to do with our hands. One section wanted to lock arms, another wanted to clap. There were no stars at the head of our procession to show us what to do. My parents said the city fathers and the quislings among us had scared them off by saying outsiders would get what was coming to them. My parents and their friends agreed that they hadn’t needed speeches after all. It didn’t matter how long an audience had been sweating, nobody ever willingly cut short a speech. Leaders, especially, were driven by the code that said, “I’ve written this out and you’re going to hear every word.”

  The march had started well enough, but without speeches and banners there was no point to come to. The protest broke up, people left abruptly, rolled away like beads of mercury. My new shoes were covered with dust as fine as powdered ginger and I wanted to hurry home, to sink back into that state where good news for modern Negroes couldn’t find me.

  Grandfather said he’d never met a rich white lady he didn’t like, which was more than he could say about the Negro movers and doers he’d dealt with in his time. Old Eleanor was worth more than the whole WPA. What the country needed was another aristocrat in the White House, a Puritan to scorch confusion, a man with a name as solid as Thorndike or Augustus.

  He thought back to the Depression, when the Rockefellers on holiday in the Sand Hills were moved to donate copies of Collier’s to the churches. My father said we didn’t want charity anymore. Grandfather had his theories about good whites and bad whites. My father said some of us needed whites more than others. Grandfather said we would not catch the whites he needed by trying to stretch “Congo” lines from our front porch all the way to Money, Mississippi.

  We could never tell what would set Grandfather off. He said my father knew precious little about discrimination in the army, since he’d spent most of the last war trying to dodge the draft. My father said Grandfather hadn’t exactly crossed the Rhine either. Grandfather said He would have mercy on whom He would have mercy. The beige stepgrandmother switched channels to National Velvet. She was annoyed that our old set didn’t pick up ABC.

  Grandfather said that if my father had wanted to keep studying and not die peeling potatoes for white second lieutenants he should have gone to a good school like his. My father said that Dr. Mays had been more of a father to him than Grandfather had. Grandfather said my father would not have been at second-rate Morehouse in the first place had he not been expelled from second-rate Fisk for calling the French teacher queer. We were sent to bed.

  “See you in the funny papers,” my mother said. I turned away. I had come down with something that couldn’t be cured by three cheap words and a squeeze.

  The next morning Grandfather and I were alone in the kitchen. We both wore “flesh-colored” nylon stocking caps. His was knotted in back. I had on two stocking caps. The feet drooped over my ears. I was in a Cleo the Talking Dog phase. I got up with the earliest light, lapped chocolate milk from a bowl on the floor, lay down by the back door, panted, and tucked my paws up under me.

  Grandfather looked at me, a severe expression I was to see again years later when I had to confess in person that I’d flunked a course, which meant my chances of getting into his alma mater were dwindling, and at a time, he said, when blacks were wanted so desperately that any park ape who could manage long division was admitted. Grandfather’s look said he knew my brain was damaged but not in any way he could pin down.

  “Come here, and on two feet, if you please,” Plessy vs. Ferguson contemplated Brown vs. Board of Education. “I want to tell you something and you remember it, you hear? You might not see me again.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Never you mind. I’m not coming back and that’s a fact. Your daddy has no right to make you live here. He has no right to turn you into a dog.”

  Grandfather, as ever, was true to his word. He didn’t come to see us again until we invaded the white suburbs.

  2 /

  Old Yellow

  My friend the television set had begun to send awful pictures from the Old Country. Nice Negroes, in 1962, before mothers and children went to war over “naturals,” looked like disciples of Father Divine—austere hair, correct clothes. “Put it in the bank, not on your back.” But being or looking like someone who came from a decent home wasn’t protecting anyone down there.

  I worried that when the plane landed in Atlanta we’d be put in jail; that when I was stung by a bee in my grandmother’s garden the hospital would not allow my mother to visit. Maybe there were signs over the raised marble water fountains, maybe my mother pretended not to see them, maybe the old woman with Parkinson’s disease who sat two seats in front of me was white, I couldn’t tell, but even if there had been a law against Jim Crow trains, blacks were so scared we would have sat in the colored car. Going to visit Aunt Clara in Opelika, Alabama, demanded, like taking a vow, that a part of the self must die.

  I liked my mother’s Aunt Clara bec
ause in her photographs she had an organ and looked like Miss Havisham in the film Great Expectations. When her driver, G.C., came to fetch us from the dinky colored waiting room in a powder-blue Cadillac, I liked her even more.

  Opelika slept in a liverish tranquillity, and it was clear to my sisters and me that we would have nothing to do with the town proper and had better not ask why. My mother didn’t know the name of the movie house because nice people did not let themselves be foisted upstairs to the buzzards’ roost. That summer of surreptitious feeling even strolls for a Sun Drop soda at the drugstore with the tin FROZEN-RITE signs that Aunt Clara owned were in doubt. G.C. said that cracker youth, “Kluckers,” sometimes rode around in darkened cars, just to frighten people, but everybody knew that Opelika had no facilities worth integrating. “I guess folks go to school.”

  Exhausted camellias sagged over lawns. Those were the fine houses of Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, G.C. said. Yes, my mother said, every house was owned by the same people and she hoped I would never meet them. Then came an intersection, and immediately after it the scent of spearmint from either side of Aunt Clara’s blue drive.

  Her house, a respectable structure of glazed brick fronted by four sleek columns, peeked at the road—Avenue A, the battered pink post said—through a regiment of willows and wretched dogwoods. Avenue A continued downhill, unpaved as it entered the Bottom. We didn’t have to be told who lived there.

  Aunt Clara waited inside the front door. She had never been a beauty but passed for one because of her light, almost transparent skin—green veins were visible in her face. There was something girlish in her step, in the way she arranged her pleats and hands when she sat, handed around questions, cups, and crystal tumblers of Nehi. Small, with a high forehead and a little colorless hole for a mouth, swabbed by many years of liking herself, Aunt Clara was accustomed to being, if not admired, at least talked about, and if not for her looks or heart, then for the strand of pearls that lay like a pet against the folds of her neck and the sea pearls that dangled below her unconvincingly dyed black hair.

  Uncle Eugene had been dead for some time, but Aunt Clara did not lack for company. Arnez, Muriel, and Nida Lee busied themselves around her. Childless, Aunt Clara had sort of adopted Nida Lee. She sent her to school and Nida Lee worked at a small college in Holly Springs, Mississippi, when she was not living across the road from Aunt Clara’s drive, ready with talk like a wet mop while “Miss Clara” opened magazines.

  Nida Lee came out of her corner gushing, extremely tall, fat and alarming. She got me alone in a window seat and said we were going to get better acquainted. She announced and won a contest to see who could identify what tree in the pampered forest that deluded me was Aunt Clara’s foxwood, her laurel and cherry. I was not to overlook the peach trees, the fledging Cedar of Lebanon, and was clearly old enough to appreciate skyrocket juniper. Her voice rising, she made me approve patches of parsley and thyme, and cluck over what should have been marigolds.

  We weren’t used to a nice elderly black lady telling anyone to shut up, but then we also weren’t used to Nida Lee’s maddening tidbits of news—“Negro socialites” had tried to crash the opera at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. She said the next thing you knew they’d be dining in the Magnolia Room at Rich’s Department Store. Aunt Clara said she would not frequent establishments where they stroked the dog with one hand and fed customers with the other.

  Nida Lee had a savory item up her sleeve. Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. I’d never heard the word before. My mother acted as though Nida Lee carried a dead mouse in her mouth.

  “What is it, Nida Lee? We’re not paying you any mind,” Aunt Clara said.

  Arnez said after lunch she would show me the little house in the back yard where they once had peacocks and still kept chickens if I promised not to get dirty. “They don’t do nothing but poot all night, but it’s good for the flowers.”

  “Cousin Arnez, aren’t you hungry?”

  “I ate.”

  “She’s not your cousin,” Nida Lee said behind a door.

  “Who is she?”

  “The maid.”

  Arnez lived quietly in one of Aunt Clara’s shotgun cabins across the creek with her old mother and her sister, Muriel, who was paid to fidget with scissors. I was to hear them on the footbridge as they came to and left work, the weight of Arnez’s slow, even tread, the staccato of her sister’s high-strung steps, running ahead, turning back, and catching up. Muriel’s head had destroyed her life. Her hair was shorter than mine. It wouldn’t grow and she’d tried everything.

  Most of the elderly people I visited kept their living rooms separate from real life as I knew it. Plants and slipcovers and an undemocratic fastidiousness around the obligatory bowl of stuck-together rock candy I took to be a natural part of getting on in years. Aunt Clara’s house had no hierarchy of dishes, no child-free zones, hostile borders, or speed limits, but the rooms themselves slowed me down. Her house was a zoo of things, dewdrop prism lamps and fire screens, a wild preserve for the pedestal sideboard, the painted sofa with potpourri sewn into the cushions.

  I was perfectly free to study the living habits of lyre-backs in the vestibule, rockers, tables, mirrors, walls, secret doors, and gilt settees maybe because Aunt Clara counted on my not daring to. A sign on my mother’s face said, “Don’t feed the rugs.” Around the ancient Steinway was a deep ditch; another moat protected the famous organ in its nook of flocked paper. Even Aunt Clara seemed like an exhibit, part of the uncontrolled decor, a specimen in the menagerie of ceramic dog figurines.

  She grew up in a family that thought of itself as inhabiting a middle kingdom. Back in the days when white scholars argued that high yellows were the tares among the wheat, that were it not for frustrated mulattoes blacks would not agitate, it was consoling to think that the majority of whites lived and died under the curse of being “poor white trash.” Her mother believed that the Also Chosen should give to Jim Crow the subversive inflection that the custom of segregation shielded nice Negroes from the contamination of whites. But Aunt Clara was as obsessed as Thomas Jefferson with the “algebraical notation” of blood mixture.

  Aunt Clara’s grandfather was a “boss mechanic,” a carpenter, blacksmith, and wheelwright known by his nickname, “Handy.” Family memoirs said what a black family back then would want them to say: that he was “seven-eighths Caucasian and possibly one-eighth Negro,” would never consent to be whipped, and didn’t know who his parents were.

  Aunt Clara’s Uncle Sterling claimed that when he worked as a “shaver,” an errand boy, after the Civil War he overheard a Union colonel who considered himself an expert on nigger trading say, “The mother of that boy’s father was a beautiful white girl from one of our best families. It seemed to be a case of real love for a young mulatto, a trusted man, a servant. The child was taken away and sold as a slave and to this day the secret has been kept.” Maybe Uncle Sterling trusted his memory when his white colleagues were hoodwinked by the story and urged him, a professor of religion, to write it down.

  Aunt Clara’s father, also called Handy, was born around 1856 in Roane County, east Tennessee. His mother had the “personal care” of the food repository, but after slavery, Uncle Sterling, the author of the memoir, was capable of saying, “their best years were behind them.” Three of thirteen children survived. They went the folkloric seventy-five miles on foot for the chance to go to college. Walk, believer, walk.

  After Clark University and the Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Handy settled in Opelika, as presiding elder of the Methodist Church and friend of day laborers and sharecroppers who had driven their herds from the border states at night, which meant that the cows were probably stolen. He published inspirational allegories about necromancers, “Mr. Truth” and “Mr. Lie,” and was the bane of many a minister. His reports had the power to deprive them of their churches, to transfer them into oblivion. It was said he made even his bishop nervous.

  Aunt Clara was born in Ope
lika—in 1896 perhaps and at home certainly. She was always “molting her years,” trimming her age, my grandmother said. Her cards were already on the table, one of which foretold clouds of muslin, colored subdebs, and Clark University. “A lot of important people fell through chapel.”

  When Uncle Eugene began to court her, he’d walk her home to Avenue A. Finally, her mother sailed from the house and down the lawn: “You may call on her if you wish, young man, but you may not talk to her on the street.” When they married he was a shadow surgeon called in by white hospitals, strictly off the record, and had a lucrative side business in secretive cases: performing abortions on whites.

  The newlyweds orbited around her parents, and after the old folks were gone they demolished the house and took their time putting up an expanded version of the original. She and Uncle Eugene used their light skin to get what they wanted, which was mostly to enjoy the theater up North. Then Uncle Eugene died, and as they say, some of her went with him. More of her kept leaving; eventually Aunt Clara stopped going out to places where she’d meet people, even church, and had her hair done at an undisclosed location. She was sensitive about being hard-of-hearing.

  The recluse on the hill, she lived, in the Southern phrase, on the inherited capital of family responsibilities, which had dwindled to reading the obituaries and keeping up a strong correspondence with cousins in Philadelphia, Washington, Jersey City, with her sister in Atlanta, and her brother who, after the Great War, sold his Packard, married a French-Canadian girl from Winnipeg, took a job with the railroad at the Manitoba end of nowhere, and never set foot in Opelika again.

  She had been educated to be a teacher, like her mother before her, like all her female relations. It was a “holding pattern” profession. “Ariel was your mother’s favorite.” Aunt Clara was disappointed by my response to Tales from Shakespeare. Our personalities, insofar as they existed under the detention-center conditions of good behavior, were colors for her to squeeze out, assets or liabilities that somehow reflected on her. “Why, you’re the darkest one in the family.”