High Cotton: A Novel Read online

  “They been saying it forever. How we can’t live without them. How much understanding there is. Son, when I was in Georgia I could have lived real good without crackers, I can tell you. There was this long line of paterolls.”

  “What?” Muriel interrupted.

  “Where you from, girl. Who whipped the slaves. They were called paterolls. The no-account trash that did the whipping.”

  Muriel’s face said that you can, after all, get blood from a turnip. But she wouldn’t leave them alone. I wasn’t sure what the men did. I knew there was a cotton mill that made sheets and bed linen in some mysterious part of town. They seemed to be part of a road crew.

  “If your wife heard you talking like that, she’d roll over in her grave.”

  “If she’s rolling over, it’s with her legs wide open.”

  I ran when Muriel ran, terrified of being left alone in the trees and not finding my way back.

  Aunt Clara said that if she ever caught Muriel taking Uncle Eugene’s silver engraved case to offer a honey dripper a cigarette again she’d give her something to cry about. It was only because Arnez was crazy about her that she put up with her, anyway. She remembered how Arnez used to carry Muriel around when she was a baby. They trailed behind their mother, whose job it had been to walk with an umbrella when my mother wanted to go into town and look at the Rexall window.

  The heat fell like an edict. The creek shriveled, exposed dry, cracked banks, like my skin was back home, my skin being why I wouldn’t explain why I refused to take off my shirt in gym. Hornets circled nests, yellowhammers dived at stunted tomatoes; I was playing Pip meets his long-lost father on the marshes and also looking out for the boy from the back line. Mine enemies are lively and they are strong. I believed in the world’s Manichaean division into bad boys without shoes and victims with glasses.

  He also lived in one of Aunt Clara’s shotgun places, evidently that’s how bountiful and given to multiplying was her father’s land. He could climb trees. He said he was going to come back for me with a BB gun and dared me to leave the back yard. I took the path of least resistance and went on saying “What larks” to myself as if he hadn’t been there.

  He returned with something like a slingshot. Little missiles whizzed by my shoulders. To get it over with, I sat cross-legged in the dirt. Some of them hurt, but I didn’t say anything. If things got out of hand I could always run and tell, though that boulevard of appeal wasn’t as trustworthy as it used to be, after a cloakroom conference with a teacher on the perils of growing up a crybaby and a tattler. It taught me that the rule of squeal-to-a-woman-never-to-a-man had its disastrous exceptions.

  A coward is a man who does not know how much he can get away with. Nonviolence carried the day. My assailant ordered me to get up and come on over the fence. Ezell smelled of lemon that his mother rubbed on him to keep off mosquitoes. He had a younger brother called Brother. Before I knew it, I was AWOL again, sneaking down the road to look at two goats that Ezell said were special. They were “nervous” goats with sad pink eyes. When I clapped my hands or screamed in front of their noses, they fainted.

  Ezell had to go home and make lunch for Brother. They had two rooms, a kitchen, and an outhouse sprinkled with lime. There were square and triangular newspaper panes in the windows; newspaper made scabs on the walls. Ezell drained catfish on newspaper when he took it from the frying pan. He fixed a plate for me. The head was still attached. Brother turned slices of white bread into grease balls and popped them in his mouth. I couldn’t move, didn’t know where to look.

  “Your grandmother is a witch. Everybody says so.”

  “So what, you’re a black nigger and you don’t have a television.”

  “We all will be called on in to Judgment,” Nida Lee said. “Father, we know that you know all about us. If you find anything contrary, remove it, cover us in Your blood. Stir up some boy before it’s everlastingly too late.”

  She just wanted to get back at me because Aunt Clara said in front of everyone that Nida Lee had once thought of wearing sequins before five o’clock. “They would have thought you didn’t know any better.”

  I would have told on Nida Lee, but I didn’t want to worsen my punishment for having gone over the fence. Arnez brought lemonade and a selection from Aunt Clara’s collection of benign picture books. I haunted the third floor, counted the days until G.C. could huff and sweat to show my mother how heavy our luggage was.

  After Opelika was once again where it belonged, down there somewhere in the Old Country, where they boiled clothes in big, black smoking pots, it got harder to get away, to winnow back into my sack. Television added tear gas, gasoline bombs, University of Mississippi at Oxford—I thought James Meredith had tried to register at Oxford University—to my vocabulary.

  And the South, as a landscape, would be, for me, always, a series of interiors, living rooms where I braced myself when I heard something crash in another room. An aging mother would explain that her daughter was sick and hurry off to see what had been broken. Before the visit was over, the daughter would appear—not as the popular, pretty thing her mother couldn’t stop talking about, but as a woman toothless as a turtle who had been drinking all day, teetering to the kitchen, which was why she kept herself hidden, covered like a mirror after a death in the old days.

  The Old Country became a sort of generalized stuffy room, no matter how many reunions of old-timers I attended. It wasn’t safe to explore the South. The old-timers themselves discouraged too much curiosity about what lay beyond the gate. It was a place of secrets, of what black people knew and what white people didn’t. No old-timer said openly that Rosa Parks had been secretary of her NAACP branch and a student of interstate commerce rulings and the Equal Accommodations Law of 1948 before she decided she was too tired to move.

  The old-timers fell silent whenever I entered the room, paused like someone in a hurry but too polite not to give directions, and then went back to the possibility that Roy Wilkins of the NAACP hated Martin Luther King of the SCLC because there was not enough real estate in the social-studies textbooks to house them both. Meanwhile, television passed on its pictures, the connecting tissue. The representations survived the subject and eventually overtook my own images, which were less durable than waxwork figures in an exhibition of Black Life at the Smithsonian.

  Aunt Clara hushed up and died in the middle of one of those undreamed-of summers, when Birmingham turned out to be like Johannesburg, the mental concertina wire between her and all manner of neighbor unmolested. That was the end of her careful packages, her many parcels of Little Women, Little Men, Nancy Drew mysteries, P. L. Travers, Hans Christian Andersen, puzzles, painted-tongue seeds, stoles, suits with the wrong lapels, chafing dishes, Uncle Eugene’s pajamas, and lavender cards that said, “I wanted you to have these ere I go.”

  Moving-van loads of things were set free by her own fingers, which had turned orange-ish from sickness and had never voted. She deeded their cabin over to Arnez and her sister until their deaths, at which time it would revert to her estate, and told Nida Lee from her colored-only hospital bed that if she came to her homegoing services not to wear any shouting shoes. An undertaker bought the house.

  3 /

  Black and Blue

  The Great Society seemed to blossom with Voting Rights acts, but dread of the meantime mixed with the pollen. John Birch Society billboards attested to an allergic reaction and for several days I thought my parents knew the lady named Selma who’d been killed on a highway in Alabama. The minister who presided over the grape-juice Second Presbyterianism of certain social Sundays began to stammer like the widower who lived on the corner, next to the filling station’s soda machine, when he harangued his steps and spilled his cup of suspiciously dark tea.

  All along I had been receiving tidings of great joy from the transistor radio I held to my ear under the covers. Runs with my allowance to the drugstore on the bad corner meant a haul of fan magazines and crossing the Mersey with Gerry and the
Pacemakers and the Beatles. A Hard Day’s Night begat, for me, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The L-Shaped Room, and The Boys. I violated curfew and slipped downstairs to soak up Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. A spokesman for the local station warned that Albert Finney might shock us.

  My bicycle became a motorcycle and anyone whose feet dragged from the back seat was Rita Tushingham. I was a bloke, like those who dangled cigarettes at the proper angle in grainy black-and-white films, though I wasn’t sure what a quid was. I was a Ted, though my parents wouldn’t hear of pointed shoes. I hoped to become a Rocker, but my parents vetoed denims under any circumstances. They were also adamant against my Mod ambitions. London, my father said, would have to swing without me.

  We weren’t Jamaican or Barbadian. We were just black, but I leapt upstream in a single afternoon from Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster to Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time. I was a working-class hero one day, the dead body surrounded by candles at Churchill’s state funeral the next; kidnapped and framed for pickpocketing in the morning, then imprisoned at night like the princes in the painting by Sir John Everett Millais on display in Chicago. In exquisite solitude I scooped out a valley by the side of the house and filled it with water for Trafalgar, which raged loud and long, until the hose caused the sunless sea to overflow into a neighbor’s basement.

  The wire mesh of our sceen porch was as black as Ray Charles’s sunglasses. I could watch the world go by, but the known world could not see me in my robes of state, scepter and orb in hand. I appeared in full regalia on the ramparts of the Tower only when my parents and sisters were not at home and the sitter was on the telephone, at which time two burgundy comforters became available, as well as a cummerbund, assorted buttons and brooches, a black lacquer cane that a bridge player had forgotten and would never find again, and a puffy black velvet hat from that region of the upstairs hall closet where my mother consigned clothing she would no longer be caught dead in.

  The steep hill of our yard became the cliffs of Dover. The street, Capitol Avenue, which I was forbidden to step into under pain of never being allowed outside again, sleepy Capitol Avenue with its regulation elms, was the English Channel. Classmates who threw rocks from their doors across the street lived in France. The school crossing up the sidewalk was Hadrian’s Wall. Then came Scotland and, farther north, the terra incognita of houses with driveways. The corner filling station down the sidewalk I cast as the Atlantic. There the game ended. Beyond the filling station were many bad corners, crumbling limestone bridges, and the serious business of “downtown.”

  The role of traitor went to Buzzy. His crimes included calling me a liar when I said I saw the Beatles at the state fair and saying that the Beatles said they would never let a nigger like me kiss their boots. Buzzy was a certifiable hoodlum: he wore sleek Stacy Adams shoes without socks. It was only a matter of time before he had his hair konked and rolled up in one of those damp scarves favored by thugs on bad corners. On a field trip to Monticello he managed to get the class so worked up that people at rest stops asked our shame-faced chaperones if we were orphans.

  Buzzy lived on Hadrian’s Wall, on the corner above the school crossing, in a house that was half painted and almost as dilapidated as our wrecked boat. Buzzy’s hill had mange. A Ford had averted another Ford and careened almost up to his porch. The grass wouldn’t grow back. He often stayed home to take care of his mother, a woman whose hair had a National Geographic wildness.

  He was allowed to stay up and drink 7-Up when his mother had company. She sometimes went through party moods. Cars parked all the way down to our house. The whole block tried not to hear the music. Buzzy wasn’t sent to bed when the adults began to talk like adults. His mother’s friends didn’t coo, pinch his cheeks, and wait for him to go upstairs in pajamas he was too old for. They came in shooting from the hip, as I saw it. He’d already tasted beer.

  He was twelve, a bulldog with fists like the muscle men’s in the back-page ads of comics. His osprey eyes gave him a clean shot at prey tromping home with pressed maple leaves, paper Halloween pumpkins, irregular Christmas stars, and Easter baskets caked with Elmer’s glue. The safety patrol was too scared to blow the whistle on him. The white principal agreed with parents that Buzzy was a candidate for reform school, until Buzzy’s mother flew out of her National Geographic remoteness and made a scene in his office and all over the hall, after which the principal took the line that no Negro boy was too young to learn to defend himself.

  Buzzy made being good look like a sort of fatalism. At most, “behaving” meant that you were sometimes left alone, left to make what you wanted of the Illustrated London News. Mostly, your waking hours were a tight schedule of obligations and activities to be gotten through quickly, like the magical checklist of your prayers. The teachers said Buzzy was being selfish when he disrupted class. But he wasn’t. He was sacrificing himself. He was the Dessalines of the fourth grade, the deep seeker who, wanting things to be different, could only hammer away at the way things were.

  Buzzy had positioned himself on our steps. “That’s my car,” he promised himself when one he liked went by. He was known to drop stolen baseball bats or to let go of my neck to stand in rapture as a Stingray roared by carrying a demon who held the thread of life in his hands. Traffic had a sedative effect on Buzzy, like a fire or a tank of fish.

  Cars were sacred anyway in Indianapolis, the “All-American City.” The miracle of speed brought out the pioneer fervor. The new dealerships behind the state house and the used lots on the fringes of the airport, decorated with placards, chattering flags, and strings of dancing bulbs, possessed the healing power of revivalist sects. Come forward, brethren, and accept this Coupe de Ville. The Memorial Day race—“White Trash Day,” Grandfather called it—was a tradition of beer cans thrown from passing cars, white Pat Boone shoes, checkered trousers, white belts, increased highway fatalities, and condoms peeking up in the reservoirs like water moccasins. Buzzy was at his least belligerent when one of his mother’s friends said he’d take him to the Speedway for the time trials.

  Sweat weakened the brim of my crown and smudged my lenses as the traitor studied the English Channel and crushed a praying mantis between his fingers. I would have mounted an honorable attack with my cane had the shushing of my robes not given me away. I stood under the August sun covered in bedspreads and ornamented like a Christmas tree.

  “Make me faint,” Buzzy said.

  He was careful with me ever since my sisters had sold their stock of car brochures to him. He’d gone into his mother’s purse while she slept it off on top of her stereo cabinet with the bass thumping through her. But I thought my appearance provocative enough for Buzzy to send my scepter like a javelin through one of the pinned-together curtains of our hermit neighbor, the Last of the Mohicans. He showed so little interest in the chance to pick on me that I decided he was sick.

  A Rolls, the first ever sighted on Capitol Avenue, purred down the street. I jumped out of my garb. “Don’t act like you never had nothing,” Buzzy said. I put my hand in my pocket too late. The old woman in the back seat must have seen me wave to her chrome. I told Buzzy that the tangerine hidden in my hat had come all the way from California.

  “Them niggers out in California crazy. My daddy saw them.”

  I tried not to interrupt, but it irritated me when Buzzy got out of his depth. Wat Tyler led the Peasant Rebellion, I had to tell him, way back in history. They burned manor houses and tax collectors, but that was in my England.

  “Is not. Watts in California,” Buzzy insisted. I gave up, collected the symbols of my authority, and withdrew.

  Unless my parents admitted that Wat Tyler’s riot happened in 1381 and the Magna Carta in 1215, I was going to stuff my ears with Brussels sprouts. I was given the opportunity to reconsider my tone in my room, where I sat folding my collars under to make my jackets like the Beatles’.

  I heard the whole neighborhood at play in the diffuse after-dinner lig
ht. My sisters had invented a new game for my friends, a combination of Go Fish and Bread and Butter Come and Get Your Supper. They christened it Call Out the National Guard. Buzzy used the switch on stragglers and screamed, “Kill, kill, kill, burn, burn, burn,” with such realism that my parents sent him home.

  “Go home, Buckwheat,” Buzzy said the next day when I walked below his hill. He waited until his mother took her nap before he hurled non-returnable bottles at motorists from behind a dead tree. I turned at Hadrian’s Wall, keeping an eye on the bottle Buzzy aimed at me, and crept through the alley where the tumble-down garages also served as clubhouses for older boys who raced tires with sticks and spoke to one another in a code as mysterious as Masonic ritual. “If you’re black step back.”

  A monster once stalked Capitol Avenue, at the end of summer or in the first days of school, whenever our small world needed him. The alarm would go up that “Chuddatabacca” was coming and fifty children stampeded down Capitol Avenue, dropping books and new paints. We crashed into the safety patrol and even went up Buzzy’s hill on our hands and knees. The screaming would go on all afternoon. Far into homework hours I could hear posses crying “Chuddatabacca” and pounding the earth.

  Unfortunately, I once turned back with Buzzy on a dare and saw the monster: an old black man, his jaw working under a straw hat, rigidly sitting on a backboard driven by a gigantic brown mule. Lizards of saliva dripped from its mouth. Its shoes were on backward, preventing the beast from getting a proper footing. It moved in sections. The wet neck bobbed down and up, its front hooves scraped the pavement, hind legs caught up, flanks quivered, and the dumb cycle began again. The wheels of the empty buckboard turned with a wrenching, iron noise.