“Oh, that’s terrible!” Clarice whispered. “Come on, let’s go inside. I’m freezing!”
Before the curtain went up, a stolid, brownskinned man, Mr. Gilpin, head of the Lafayette Players, came out and made a speech saying the Lafayette was the only Negro dramatic company in the country; and if the audience liked what they were doing for the colored community, they could make extra donations in the lobby. Clarice leaned toward Hubert. Sam heard her whisper: “You read that article in The Messenger I showed you . . . ? Where Lewis got on them so for only doing white plays with black actors . . . ?” In the light from the stage, Hubert nodded.
Then Gilpin went back in through the curtain. A moment later red drapery pulled aside from the stage.
Robeson played a Negro preacher—it was hard to see him, at least at the beginning, and not think of Papa—whose actions became more and more sinful. And he was certainly wonderful. When he got excited, his voice filled the theater. He seemed half again as big as most of the other actors, and he moved around, towering, handsome, like some half-wild, wondrous animal barely caged by the set. Canvas walls and mâché trees shook as he strode by. Indeed, the glee, the wild joy with which he embraced his sins—drinking, crap shooting, shirking his Sunday sermons, and finally falling into the arms of a no-account Negro woman and getting her with child—made those weaknesses seem almost like some socially rebellious strength. Finally, though, his congregation turned on him. He was only saved in the end by a brave black woman—Roseanne—who’d been in love with him all along and who made an impassioned speech to the black people, who’d gathered to lynch him, about his humanity and his weaknesses and how his weaknesses were really their weaknesses. (Robeson spent a lot of time on his knees in the play, though not the actress.) But in comparison to Robeson’s performance, the long-suffering Roseanne’s words to the angry townsfolk seemed preachier than any of Papa’s sermons.
Clapping wildly, Sam stood up with everybody else when Robeson came to the front of the stage to bow.
But as they were walking down to a Hundred-sixteenth Street, Hubert said, “Another weak-willed nigger and another strong-headed woman. And niggers lynching niggers? Where, I wonder, did they get that one from? Now you know the woman who wrote that play had to be white!”
Clarice was thoughtful—walking with rapid, thoughtful steps, once in a while coughing into her muff. Possibly it had made her uncomfortable too.
A blizzard rose in the last days of March; and, with only an hour out here and an hour out there, the chill effluvia still fell on April Fool’s Day. each Friday at Mr. Harris’s he went to the bank at lunchtime thirty-five or forty dollars in pennies nickels dimes quarters and fifty-cent pieces in two thick canvas sacks metal fastenings at the top through the brass bars he exchanged them for an envelope of paper money out of which back at the store Mr. Harris carefully counted Sam’s nine dollars for the week the sales girl gum-chewing Missely’s twelve and put the envelope with the rest in his inner suit coat pocket the only profit it looked like Mr. Harris allowed himself from the business Missely was Milly Pott’s weight and Milly Pott’s color but with not half Milly’s sense of humor two Fridays on Mr. Harris came in and unwrapped his scarf “Feels like snow again don’t it” and after hanging up the length of maroon wool on the coat rack’s brass hook said “Before you go downstairs Sam run over two buildings and hunt up Poonkin he’ll probably be in the cellar see if he got those boards he told me about and if he do you bring as many back here as you can carry I want to put me up some shelving downstairs in the back all right” and Sam said “A Mr. Poonkin” and Mr. Harris said “I don’t think there’s any ‘mister’ in with it just Poonkin” and he grinned gold tooth bright between the white ones in a face as deep a brown as Papa’s “Poonkin was in the Civil War you know ask him to tell you about it sometime but not on my time now get going” and in only his shirtsleeves Sam went out in the gelid noon through steely cold he hurried two buildings up the wooden planks of the cellar doors gaped between snow banks he ducked down they rose like green board wings beside him as he dropped one foot then the other to a lower step in deepening shadow “Mr. Poonkin . . .” because he was a well-bred boy and his father said you call a man mister now you hear me white or colored but especially a colored man a lot of people won’t call a colored man mister it shows you have breeding Sam stepped further down the ceiling of the cellar was crossed by tarred eight-by-ten beams bowed now and gray pipes the joints shiny with new solder low enough so that there’d be no standing easily here
“. . . Mr. Poonkin” as he trod on the cement floor that two feet on became earth a voice cracked like the ground beneath his shoes “What you want . . . ?” and the blades of light that came in at the ceiling’s edge from some cracks up to the street were much brighter it seemed than the aluminum light outside “Mr. Harris in the clothing store he sent me over here I work for Mr. Harris? and he told me to come over about some wood? you had for him? he wants to make some shelves—in his cellar?” the voice answered “Oh. Yeah . . .” and stepped forward the face wizened as a prune and what of it visible a moment passing through a beam not much bigger
As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, “Can you see anything?” it was all I could do to get out the words, “Yes, wonderful things . . .”
shoulders sagging beneath layered sweaters and two jackets the hands in knitted gloves with the fingers out the nails yellow passing through the light as they felt through cold air toward him talon-long on the floor the foot in its black shoe grated through scuffed light Sam tried to imagine that body holding together such an impoverished galaxy of details and lost all bodiliness until the voice fixed that darkly and shabbily invested corporeality “Come on back with me, and help me carry ’em” Sam wondered how old you had to be to have been in the Civil War anyway because Papa who was over sixty-five now had been a slave till he was seven years old in Georgia and that meant you had to be seventy-five eighty could this bent black man be that old on the second trip three boards was all Poonkin could carry at a time the light fell through the window high in the wall to light half a cardboard carton on the ground bottles standing beside it and as Sam took the boards from those wide withered hands webbed in gray knitting he glanced down to see what was in the box and resolved he would come back for a third load despite Mr. Harris and when he was back for three more boards they’d taken nine over so far he stood by the carton and said “Mr. Harris said you were in the Civil War” and Poonkin now he’d met him Sam could think of the man as Poonkin a title rather than a name Poonkin let cackled syllables fall like pebbles to hit the floor and skitter into the dark at no predictable rhythm “Yessir, I was in the war in ’Sippi. I weren’t but fifteen. But I had me a rifle and I hid in a’ ol’ barn behind some spruce trees, and anybody what come up to it I shot” and Sam laughed “Did you shoot rebels or Union men” the cackle failed was replaced by crackling words “I shot anybody who come up. Some of ’em was blue. Some of ’em was gray. But the ones who come up too near was the ones I shot. It weren’t like this last war. This last war, it look like about everybody got killed. But I’m still alive—and I believe pretty much most of the ones I shot is dead. But you more interested in that box than in the war, ain’t you, boy. What’s in there you want?” which was true because back in ’22 when the news had filled the papers of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb Sam and John and Lewy had begun to find in the candy stores and the newsstands in downtown Raleigh the most amazing magazines with flat spines and colored covers and titles like Adventure and Mystery Magazine and All Story Magazine and they had bought them for a quarter each and had read “Khufu’s Real Tomb” by Talbot Mundy and Adam Hull Shirk’s “Osiris” (“Have you been reading abo
ut King Tut? If so, you’ll be interested in ‘Osiris’!”) and Weird Tales and Popular Magazine and John had found a copy of Sax Rohmer’s Tales of Secret Egypt and they had traded them and they had sat in the glider together out on the back porch reading or off alone on the benches beside St. Agnes which after it had been closed down as a hospital years before had been reopened as the first building on campus or crosslegged on the attic floor reading and reading and rereading of gray-eyed suntanned Englishmen and intrepid American reporters and rich well-spoken young women who rebelled against their fathers by helping the young man anyway evil Arabs and dangerous African tribes diamonds that had been in the family for generations and rubies fixed to the jade idol’s forehead since time first dawned over the sands moonlit chases with gunshots echoing among the pyramids bullets biting into the sandstone of the sphinx’s paw as they had not since Napoleon’s time temples in the jungle the small plane’s engine growling as it settled among the monuments in the Valley of the Kings the sound of the twentieth century infiltrating the silence of a past so deep its bottom was source and fundament of time and of mankind itself and Poonkin’s voice acute to his own century said “You want those—you can have ’em. Somebody livin’ upstairs left ’em. Last white man in the building to go, too. Moved out four months ago. I used to read me my Bible,” Poonkin explained “First thing I did when the war was over was learn me to read some. Only one in my family, too; but I wouldn’t read stuff like that. Can’t see good enough to read no more nohow” and when Sam came back after working an anxious two more hours in Mr. Harris’s basement warmer by a corner paraffin heater and better lit by two kerosene lamps the magazines were in a shopping bag on a dry sheaf of newspapers beside the cellar doors closed now the bag leaning up by the brick wall when he lifted it on the paper beneath was a picture of K K K men in bedsheets holding high a torch menacing the darkness of the black newsprint from within the photo’s right framing the shopping bag just sitting there Sam thought where anyone could have taken it
Anyone at all.
That evening Sam worked late at Mr. Harris’s. When he left the store, the sky above the second story cornice was blue-black.
Carrying the shopping bag filled with a dozen and a half of Poonkin’s magazines between the snow mounded against the stoops and the slush by the cars along the curb, it struck him: it was the powerless who produced most of the myths of power, as it was the poor who articulated the most staggering fantasies of wealth—in the same way it was probably the Philistines and illiterates who perpetrated the soaring images of art and poetry, which, once they came loose from the Edgar Guests, from the Currier-and-Iveses, the rest of the world was seduced by; and real poets and artists doubtless exhausted their lives trying to make them happen. And so desire fueled the engines of the world. But because he was neither a poet nor an artist himself, Sam did not even try to hold onto the insight. And by the time he was climbing the tall stoop around the corner from the park, he had forgotten it.
Inside, Sam took off his coat, took off his shoes, pants, shirt, socks, till he was just in the long johns Hubert had given him—and put on his suit jacket. Hubert was in class tonight—and would go over to eat with Clarice in her aunt and uncle’s kitchen afterward. Sam sat in Hubert’s wing chair, took a magazine from the shopping bag, slid one bare foot atop the other . . . and began to page through for the stories about the blinding sand, the brittle mummies, the cursed scarabs, and the lean, light-eyed men whose years away from civilization had burnt them black as Arabs or mixed-blooded Negroes, dangerous men, wise in the ways of the jungle, the East, the desert, quick with their fists and fine shots to a man, who knew what to do, what to say . . . .
On the wall across from his bed, the back window had a curtain over it—and a drape. But, on finishing his fourth story in his second magazine and turning to the fifth, Sam glanced up to see the light at the drape’s edge. Frowning, he closed the pages, put the magazine down, and stood. Was there some sort of light shining up from the alley?
Sam walked across the rug and pulled away drape and curtain.
Through the window, the yard below was blinding: by the black walls, snow had ceased falling, and some high breeze had swept clouds away from—his eyes ascended to the ascent of the moon—the full orb. It blazed on the platinum alley-scape—crossed and recrossed by catenaries of clotheslines piled with white. The only things not silver, gray, or black were three windows in the wall across from him, behind the ropes and fire escapes . . . One had the yellowish hue of incandescent light. Two had the dimmer yellow from hidden kerosene lamps, flaming quietly and darkly. In one of these, the light came through cloth no thicker than a bedsheet, hanging in folds behind the glass. Even as Sam noticed, a shadow moved on it.
Yes, on the rippled textile was the shadow of a body—a woman’s body. A woman with hair, and breasts—he started—and, he was certain, wearing nothing! The slim darkness of an arm raised on ivory cloth; on the hanging folds, her silhouette turned. The sill was at her thigh, and as she strained to do something behind, he could see the apex of light between her legs as one went back. The line of a hip—her breast again. Body of shadow, body of light, held a moment—and the illumination that articulated her dimmed . . . then puffed out!
Within gray stone, the window’s rectangle was black.
The surprise of her vanishing made him gasp. With thudding chest, slowly he went down on the knees of his union suit before the painted wainscot beneath his own sill. The drape fell against his jacket shoulder, slid behind him.
Her window remained dark.
Cold air leaked under the edge of his own.
After a moment, down on his knees, Sam lifted his elbows out and up, grasped the metal handles on the lower sash, and raised it. Over the tiny chill real cold fell in under his thumbs, wrapped its feathery tickle around his chin and neck, pried inside his long-john top. Beyond the wooden trough—a black, splintered canyon in water-rotted wood—out on the dry stone a snow pillow curved away, glittering. He raised the sash another inch, then a foot—then six more inches; raised himself to look again toward that black window. His breathing had become so shallow that, now, he gasped a chest full of icy air. On his knees, it made him reel. Rising again, he leaned forward, thrust his face under the sash—brought his mouth slowly to the snow.
And kissed it.
Crystals melted before his lips—he closed his eyes—and a water bead ran along the crevice between. He opened his mouth just a little—and a cold drop rolled within, warming. Mouthing snow, he took in only the tiniest bit of air through lattices of white fire.
Two days later on his third trip underground to Times Square and Forty-second Street specifically to find it, almost by accident Sam turned to see the window full of false noses, exploding cigars, and sneezing powder—more jokes in the window, actually, than the magic tricks that had first caught his attention. The shop’s exotic name was Cathay. It also had lots of Chinese boxes for sale, and ivory carvings with black wood bases, Japanese fans and Oriental scarves that were not particularly magic at all. Maybe he had passed it before and, for all the other things there, hadn’t recognized it. But there was the top hat, the wand . . . Inside, the bearded man with the bottle-bottom glasses was a Mr. Horstein, who, soon as they got to talking, explained how he’d been a magician back in the ’nineties—oh, yes, the magic was the first reason for Cathay’s existence. The rest was all because sailors on leave and sometimes tourists liked to buy them. Clearly Mr. Horstein loved to talk to his customers. He talked about the great Harry Houdini, who, no, never came to Cathay. But Mr. Horstein had met him in Chicago and then again in Syracuse. Apparently they were acquaintances. “Not friends. But we say ‘Hello,’ as men who share the same profession.” Last year when Houdini had played the Jackson Theater, Sam and Lewy had not been allowed to go—because neither Papa nor Lewy’s stepfather would allow his children to go to a segregated theater. John’s mother didn’t mind though; and Lewy and Sam might well have snuck in with him. (Going
with someone whose parents said it was all right made it not quite so much like sneaking.) But that week John was sick and had his throat tied up with a scarf full as asafœtida.
Mr. Horstein (Sam had been in the store for almost three hours) had introduced Sam to several of his customers by now: “This is Sam—isn’t this a good-looking, intelligent colored boy? He’s a real credit, and I like to have this kind of young fellow here.”
Riding home on the subway, Sam read an article in a red pamphlet with lots of fancy symbols on the cover about astrology Mr. Horstein had sold him for a nickel: it talked about the Transit of Mercury, that happened this year, and might even—this part Sam wasn’t clear on—fall on Sam’s birthday, though such transits were more common in November than in May.
When he got home, Hubert—or Clarice—had left Views of Italy open under the reading lamp. He picked it up, turned the lamp on, and held it down under the light to look at a photograph of a hill—northwest of Siena, the caption said. The hilltop was ringed by a wall, set at equal distances with blocky towers: seven towers, Sam counted—though the caption said there’d once been fourteen.
Insistent through sleep, voices like water met him, within some dream, listening. The long sounds of morning, the tired sounds, indistinct—metal hit metal somewhere and reverberated. Someone shouted. As far away as the train tracks a siren complained of its windy wound. All muffled in sleep, signs tangled in the sheets around him, vanishing. (Who is this woman with us . . . ?) A truck lumbered east. Another one braked—and a motor started. Someone shouted—again. Something hit something else, dully. Outside, in half light, beyond the window, April snow still fell—and sounds rose; morning sounds carrying away his drowsiness. He turned under the quilt (to face the draped window), wondering if they might return it. Soft sounds slid around him, slipped over him like a sleeve, waiting in the winter-dimmed city. Outside, the black stones of Mount Morris would be a pillow of white. (A black woman clothed in white moving through the white city . . . a white woman on a cloth of light.) He could see, through the edge of the glass beside the drape, smoke spill from a roof vent into smoke, to wander up the sky, wash off in winter wisps.
Atlantis: Three Tales Page 5