High Cotton: A Novel Read online

  But there was no going back. Freedom had come on in and real life was beginning. I turned a page and started over. Capitol Avenue was wiped out. It had never existed. I forgot to ask to be taken into town to visit the bad corners and my playmates from whom I had parted so tearfully. It was like getting a second childhood, there was so much room for make-believe in the suburbs. Once I determined that the neighbors couldn’t hear what went on in our kitchen, even the arguments between my parents ceased to worry me. I used to lie awake at night on Capitol Avenue, like a civilian in a bomb shelter, hearing against my will whose father had said who was no good, whose aunt had predicted disaster, but suddenly these battles had nothing to do with me, like the peasants who merely looked up when horsemen galloped across the fields described in the mildewy book about the Wars of the Roses that Grandfather Eustace had let me keep.

  The undulating stretch of the segregated country club, which doubled as the voting precinct, gave the impression of open scenery, in spite of the barbed wire, but that was something like a conceit. The area had been farmland. German immigrants had perhaps chosen Indiana because parts of it reminded them of home, of Thuringia. In some small southern Indiana towns the street signs still bore High German script. But in our neighborhood nothing remained of those days before the Irish arrived with the railroad and their priests except a narrow black-green canal and a clapboard tollhouse with a plaque.

  The old toll road that led into the city was still called the Michigan Road. We called it the highway. Burger King hadn’t been thought of yet. NO SHIRT, NO SHOES—NO SERVICE, signs in the pancake restaurants said. Somewhere along the line the descendants of the German plowmen had become hicks, and the farms and apple orchards disappeared.

  The country club was part of the ruse, the optical illusion. Just as there were dude ranches, there was such a thing as dude country. It looked like my sisters’ summer camp: rustic approaches that twisted toward dwellings with all the conveniences. The roads of the township themselves had summer-camp names: Mohawk Lane, Deer Run Circle. Some neighborhoods in the sprawling township that made a horseshoe around the top of Indianapolis had formed “private communities,” hired private police patrols, and dubbed themselves with village names that faintly recalled the Northwest Territory: Fallen Timbers Park, New Marietta, Harrison’s Creek. Mostly there was an English ring to everything.

  We moved into the one house that had too much window for what had been cleared and built up around it. If we weren’t careful we’d strut our Negro ways in a fishbowl. A jazzy woman, my mother called her, a divorcee, sold us the house. Its look, 1950s futuristic, went with the woman’s gold go-go boots: too much redwood, too many acute angles, deep purple in the master bedroom. The jazzed-up divorcee was spoken of as the only person in the world who had had the guts to defy the invisible line, which seemed to strengthen itself with every new law passed against its fortification, and the I Love Lucy–era modernism of the house itself was not only a planet away from our wrecked boat on Capitol Avenue, I thought, but also a break with everything old-fashioned, everything on which Grandfather and the Negro Section of the Keep Smiling Union had had to put the best face.

  “We” constituted 10.1 percent of the nation’s population, had six guys in the House of Representatives, one man in the Cabinet, a woman on the federal bench, a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor winner, and I didn’t care. In giving myself up to what I thought of as the landscape of freedom, I detached from myself and from those responsible for me, as if a white neighborhood were the end of all struggle. The Lady Leontyne had gone the distance for us all. Ritorna vincitor! I was, once again, out of it, until I discovered, a few years later, the social satisfactions of being a Black Power advocate in a suburban high school.

  My isolation was difficult to maintain, not because of the urgency of the news, but because my mother would not act the part of mistress of the robes and my father had no intention of being master of the horse. My parents’ idea of their duty toward me went far beyond the custodial chores to which I tried to confine them. But in what was for me the dramatically uncharted meanwhile, I was alone, in my head at least, and even now I don’t know whether the lie owed its unfolding to the universal derangements of puberty or to my being a new black student in what I described to Grandfather, with furtive pride, as an overwhelmingly white school.

  Someone was always trying to interrupt, to get between me and the paradise of integration. Grandfather Eustace took a renewed interest in me because of Westfield Junior High School. An expert on white classrooms, he told me to call if I experienced any difficulty of adjustment or was graded unfairly—and he told me to call collect, to circumvent my father’s complaint that not only would he have to put up with Grandfather’s interference, he would also have to pay for it.

  Once my mother stopped dropping me off in the school parking lot and turned me over to the skills of the uncommunicative and unbelievably overweight bus driver, I suffered no traumas of any kind, much to Grandfather’s disappointment. He worried that I did not have the stuff to speak up when mistreated. It wasn’t like him to hunt for that kind of thing, but then his problems, like those of the rest of the minority of 10.1 percent in 1966—remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them—were not mine.

  The yellow school bus was on time on mornings that got darker and darker, mornings of rain, frost, untrammeled snow; and it was there, mud free, on mornings when the sun’s running yolk caught the moon in the ether. My new school was miles away —these were the days before court-ordered busing, before long rides were considered harmful to white students—and the bus meandered by drained swimming pools, clay tennis courts, collapsed barns, abandoned greenhouses, a colonial-style fire station, an unsuccessful-looking Catholic church with matching grammar school, and a complex called the Jewish Community Center.

  Like everywhere else, the suburbs had good, bad, and middling addresses. The school bus picked up cheerleaders with bouncy hair; sulky white trash who smoked in front of hot rods on cinder blocks in scrappy yards; nerds from the chess and visual-aid clubs who howled when the bus passed dogs in the act of doing it in the nettles; and the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto, that strip that had gone fabulously Negro professional in the early 1960s.

  With their never-wear-white-after-Labor-Day clothes-consciousness, their coordinated outfits that did homage to the seasons, clothes so new that in some cases the packing cardboard had not been removed from the collars, the black kids made a screaming tribe in the back of the bus. I sat in front with the nerds, directly behind the melting Buddha driver.

  I lost the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto at the doors to Westfield. I saw them again during gym period, when their voices reached full fire and the coach applauded the towel-snapping in the showers. But even in gym I was at a safe distance from the show-offs, having been assigned to the squad for nerds and tubbies, guys who, in a game of “burn ball,” when one team tried to murder the other with a basketball, either immediately ran into the line of fire so that they could sit for the remainder of the class period or hung back by the bleachers until they were picked off like plastic ducks in a shooting gallery.

  I came upon two or three of my fellow black students whom I had known in the banished, forgotten days of Capitol Avenue. One boy had been a playmate and then disappeared. I saw him infrequently, when our parents went to the same picnics. We picked up at these picnics where we had left off in his or my back yard, hammered at badminton birdies, and then he was gone again, waving from the back of a new Buick Electra.

  People vanished that way from my Capitol Avenue life. They simply didn’t live nearby anymore and the sledding parties on their hills came to an end. Families moved, mothers became Catholics, fathers went over to the Republicans. I didn’t pick up much in those days, like a radio with a broken antenna that has to be moved from corner to corner before it can adequately receive a signal, but in the hallway at Westfield, unable to remember the combination to my locker, I understood where many
of them had been disappearing to.

  I scarcely acknowledged my former playmate and soon he failed to notice me in the halls. It was harder to deny two popular girls from my former life. They were older, “cool” in Westfield terms, because they were loud at the black table in the cafeteria about the Tighten Up, the latest dance step, and yet their names appeared on the straight-A list of the honor roll published in the school newspaper. I never saw them on the bus.

  In Capitol Avenue terms they were real “upper shadies,” because they had never lived anywhere near Capitol Avenue and were often on their way to Cape Cod or coming back from Hilton Head. Boarded-up theaters in the “inner city” were named after their grandparents. Their hair almost bounced, their braces flashed in the fluorescent light, and they had my sisters’ permission to make comments about my “high-water” trousers. They said my cuffs fell so high above my shoes I wouldn’t have to roll them up in a flood.

  But their laughter couldn’t follow me far: the rules of Capitol Avenue no longer applied. My sisters had stuck by their school in town and that had not been easy. It was an old high school with many sentimental graduates who wept at community meetings and devised through their tears a plan to save the school from the black neighborhood that had grown up around it and was closing in. To preserve its racial harmony, the school had been allowed to go private, to give entrance exams and charge tuition. I was on my own at Westfield. My sisters’ grades didn’t hang over me, the teachers didn’t show up at NAACP meetings. No one knew who I was, and what I was I set aside every morning at 7:45.

  My new classmates were ready with batting averages, won-lost records, and the history of shutouts. The names of Queen Victoria’s nine children, nineteen grandchildren, and thirty-seven great-grandchildren did not fall into the category of anything anyone but me wanted to know. Westfield was like a stocked fish pond, brimming with opportunities. I had only to cast down my bucket where I stood. But I was like the tourist who doesn’t want to look as though it is his first trip in business class or his first attempt to buy aspirin in a foreign drugstore. I behaved as though I had been among the Westfielders all the while and was finally shedding the protective coloration that had kept me completely unseen.

  I wanted to copy the manner of the coolest boy in my grade —his shiny brown penny loafers with slightly worn-down heels; the way he spun the calculus ruler of the advanced mathematics student; the noncommittal way he let himself be detained for a moment by admirers, like the terribly rich who must always be on guard against that someone who affects social ease; the way his letter sweater tapped his hips as he made his graceful escape; and the way—never mind that my hair couldn’t “fall,” that my glasses had thickened—he swept his Beatle hair out of his eyes, moiré-gray agates that accepted the devotion of all and gave nothing back.

  Grandfather mounted a new high horse—the advantages I was about to receive, which raced too near his perfunctory “blessings we are about to receive” over the congealed canned ham and pineapple. It upset him that I was not moved to compare what he conceived of as the elaborate equipment in the chemistry and language labs of Westfield to the inadequate “learning tools” I might have had, had I gone on in the schools that served the world according to Capitol Avenue.

  The pleasure of my circumstance depended not only on my perverse wish not to comprehend Grandfather’s point, to show that I was not one of his underprivileged youth group members sweating under an obligation to be thankful, but also on superstition, on a Lot-like contract of deliverance. I couldn’t allow myself to look back, having presented myself to myself as one who had never been anywhere but where I was.

  I lived entirely at my surface, passing without reflection from class to class, like someone out for a walk noting when the clouds either darkened or dissipated. The school facilities and high property taxes of which the township was so proud that its citizens voted in referendums against absorption into the city were, for me, so intent on approval, only decoration. My appreciation was like the relief of someone who has crashed a party but isn’t asked to leave, in gratitude for which, and also from misplaced pride, he doesn’t touch a bite.

  Scene 1. The English teacher who believes the harassment of having a large family has taught him all he needs to know about being understanding calls out the scores on the Dickens multiple-choice test. He holds back the new student’s test paper for an after-class conference. “I want you to be honest with me. I can’t help you if you don’t let me know when the material is too hard for you. Now be honest with me. Did you cheat?” The hands of the surprised Negro student—“I was so conscious of having passed through scenes of which they could have no knowledge” —fly to cheeks that Clearasil hasn’t helped.

  Scene 2. The dwarfish American-history teacher begins to recite, but is drowned out by the Negro student in the second row who, in the shock of recognition, gets carried away. “Unheard beyond the ocean tide their English Mother made her moan.” The teacher squints, the way the peckerwoods must have regarded the abashed Negro student’s grandfather when he ran over that hunting dog in Brunswick, Georgia, back in the Depression. He says, “You’re going to be President of the United States one day,” which he also says to humor restless children at his moonlighting job as a shoe salesman. It sounds like “You that nigger preacher?” Fortunately, the teacher doesn’t ask the Negro student to finish the poem. The Negro knows only the first stanza, because once on a visit to Concord, Massachusetts, his uncle bought him a miniature plaster replica of the “Grave of the British Soldiers.”

  Scene 3. The coolest kid in the eighth grade says hello “first” to the Negro student in brand-new penny loafers.

  My happiness was a sin, of that I had no doubt, but even so I was not prepared to endure the punishment of following the oil stains down to Louisville to hear one of Grandfather’s chilling sermons. That faculty the adolescent has of tuning out didn’t work with Grandfather. His voice I could not ignore or daydream against. One Sunday my objections were answered with the unusual, frightening argument that Grandfather needed us. I would rather have lived with the Murdstones than be needed by anyone.

  Louisville was as quiet as a back lot. We thought the service had been canceled, the church on Chestnut Street was so still. Grandfather was deeply attached to its stained-glass windows, which were, he liked to say, much older and sturdier than he and would be around long after he had joined his crowd in heaven. I knew that the little Congregational church represented the niche Grandfather had found late in life. He had never been anywhere else in my knowing him, but the family said they couldn’t believe he had managed to stay in one place for so long. It was getting on to twenty years. “They’ll put him out,” Great-grandmother said every year when we called her on her birthday. “They’ll get to know him and put him out quick.”

  But he went on, more interested in fighting the urban renewal that had brought an interstate highway too near his church and reduced the houses around it to rubble than in saving souls. “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirit of wickedness in high places.” He was often on local radio in those days, warning against “eminent domain” and the hotbeds of corruption that low-income housing projects inevitably became.

  The dreaded stepgrandmother, clutching her cane like a throttle, pretended she didn’t see us and took her seat directly under the pulpit. She hated it that Grandfather had a family, connections she couldn’t do anything about, those extraneous mouths around the soup of the evening, beautiful soup. Old-fashioned hats with feathers moved around her in the semi-darkness. My mother, who hated to cover her head, pulled a bow from her purse and stuck it on. The gesture announced that we were officially not ourselves, that we belonged to an entity that overrode our regrets for the phone calls, television shows, and Sunday boredom back home.

  The reds and greens of the windows were bright as lollipops; strands of light touched
the floor and dyed the wood yellow. Otherwise the interior of dusty, painted brick was lost in an electric bill—conscious gloom. The small number of parishioners, my father said, was a bad sign, as if a friend’s show were having a troubled run when he’d been saying how much the public loved his act. Some old-timers settled to doze conspicuously in the rear; a great gap opened between them and the fervent ladies in front. We, Grandfather’s family, couldn’t fill up the middle sufficiently.

  I could make out the shine of hair, the glint of spectacles, and the white collars of the choir. A reedy organ began the prelude, a side door admitted a small herd of stragglers. They had the air of having “conferred upon a weighty matter,” as Grandfather would say. One jaunty man noticed us and was so indecisive about how wide to make his smile of welcome that I heard his jaw crack.

  A woman with a two-toned face, like a pinto’s hide, spoke to the stepgrandmother, who barely inclined her head before she swiveled it around. She was inelastic with complaints from the neck down, but what she could do with her head never failed to make me think there was a tank gunner operating the gears behind her sour eyes. Her steel-girder look shot right by me. Then she grinned, as if at the approach of a bride.

  Grandfather entered from the rear, alone—except for his black robe. I had the impression he wasn’t wearing it; the black robe was accompanying him, surrounding him, attending him, filling up the aisle as he came briskly forward with his hands clasped in front. The sleeves billowed and I pictured arresting officers on either side of him. If he could have gotten away with having a crucifix precede him, he would have had his congregation bowing and dipping. One could almost smell the incense as he passed.