Iris hung back behind him. He could see her trying not to look at the small darkened apartment with its folding table covered with a plastic cloth, coffee cups filling the sink, and an open jar of Maxwell House on the counter, spilled wet grains around it. A few wet-looking Cheerios circled the garbage can, a roach crawling over them.
His mother finally wiped her eyes and looked over at them. She took in Iris’s hair, her tight T-shirt, and the jean shorts, and something in what Aubrey could see of her eyes against the backdrop of TV light flickered. Lit up. Then just as quickly dimmed again.
Fast nights make long days, his mother said softly. That’s all I’m going to say right now about you and your friend Iris.
C’mon, Ma, Aubrey said. She goes to Catholic school!
And you know what they call people who went to Catholic school, right? She turned back to the television. They call them Mom and Dad.
Iris smiled, but he didn’t find it even a little bit funny.
A commercial was on now—raisins dancing across the black-and-white screen.
Aubrey stood there, not wanting to go farther into the living room. Aside from the couch and TV, there were two straight-backed chairs, a small coffee table, and a dark green throw rug. Behind the couch, his mother kept two suitcases packed—one for him and one for her. They had always followed the water. But here in Brooklyn, now that he had Iris, he felt like he was where he wanted to always be. Felt like he was finally on truly solid ground.
It’s nice to meet you, Iris said.
Nice meeting you, too.
They were standing in the hall separating the living room from his mother’s bedroom. The apartment was a railroad, with one small room off the back where Aubrey slept in a single bed with a striped blanket made out of something that itched in the summer and wasn’t even close to warm enough in the winter. Until he’d been inside Iris’s house with its upright piano beneath framed portraits of ancient family members, he hadn’t thought of him and his mama as poor. But now, in the dim room, with Iris breathing gently at his shoulder, he could see that was the case. He reached behind himself for Iris’s hand. The strange thing was the shame that came with knowing this. He tried not to inhale the cheap Lysol smell, tried not to look at the vase filled with dusty plastic flowers.
I just wanted you to meet her before I walked her home, he said.
He went over to his mother and kissed her gently on the forehead. I love you, Ma.
The deep knot in his throat was the realization that from day one they’d always been in survival mode. Holding on. Clinging to living. Part-time paycheck to food stamps to part-time paycheck again.
Love you too, baby. Take one of these stamps and bring me back a Diet Coke. His mother pressed the stamp into his hand, looked into his eyes for a moment.
And use the change, she said, to get you and your new friend a little something.
7
As sure as my name is Sabe I’ll tell you that if you want to survive, you have to put money everywhere. In your secret sewn-in coat pockets, inside those suede shoes you don’t wear anymore but can’t get rid of because they remind you of the years-ago time when you went out dancing on a Saturday night. You put your money underneath flower vases and candy dishes, tied up in handkerchiefs stuffed way back in your dresser drawer. You have to know that the bank’s not always going to be open, might even say they don’t have your money anymore, and where are you then? What have you got?
Listen. Those Tulsa white folks burned my grandmama’s beauty shop to the ground! They burned up the school my mama would have gone to and her daddy’s restaurant. They nearly burned my own mama, who carried a heart-shaped scar on the side of her face till the day they laid her in the ground. Imagine them trying to set a two-year-old child on fire. That’s all my mama was—just two years old and barely running when the fire rained down on her. Her own daddy snatching her up, but not before that piece of wood from her mama’s beauty parlor landed on her cheek and left its memory there all her life. Two years old. Those white folks tried to kill every living brown body in all of Greenwood, my own mama included. Every last one. That was 1921. History tries to call it a riot, but it was a massacre. Those white men brought in their warplanes and dropped bombs on my mama’s neighborhood. God rest her soul, but if she was alive, she’d tell anyone listening the story. I must have heard it a hundred times by the time I was school age. I knew. And I made sure Iris knew. And I’m going to make sure Melody knows too, because if a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story. If they had burned my mama up, I wouldn’t be here now. But I’ll tell you this much—if I live to be a hundred and ninety-nine years old, I will never go to that state, as God is my Witness, my Savior, my Rock. You will never see Miss Sabe’s foot in the state of Oklahoma.
The old folks used to say that from the ashes comes the new bird. There wasn’t much they had left after the fires, but my mama’s people packed up what they had and went up to Chicago, where my granddaddy’s brother was a doctor. Even though Chicago had had its own troubles back in 1919, time had passed and my granddaddy’s brother was doing well for himself. Married a nurse and they lived in a big house on the South Side. Fine clothes. Real silverware. Two kinds of meat every night. A maid. Lord. Sad thing was the nurse couldn’t have children so among those four grown folks, my mama was their life.
Lord. Lord. Lord. Even with all that fine living, that fire stayed with my mama. Caught her up in the night as a child and woke her sweating and screaming. That’s why I don’t buy it when people say children don’t know. That they’re too young to understand. If they can walk and talk, they can understand. You look at how much growing a baby does in the first few years of its life—crawling, walking, talking, laughing. The brain just changing and changing. You can’t tell me all of it’s not becoming a part of their blood. Their memory.
Those white folks came with their torches and their rages. They circled in their cars, hollered out, called them niggers like they were calling them by their names. Turned my people’s lives and dreams to ash. So my mama taught me all I know about holding on to what’s yours. I know you hold on to your dreams and you hold on to your money. And I know that paper money burns, so you put it into rolls of quarters and nickels and dimes. And when those grow to be too many, you find the men who sell you the blocks of gold. And you take those blocks of gold and stack them beneath your floorboards and way up high in your cabinets. You let them turn white with cold inside your freezer. And every day you’re living you tell your child, Don’t let me die without you knowing that throughout this house is something for you. Something you’re going to need.
From the time I could call her Mama she was saying, Sabe, you hold on to what’s yours. Even with all these years on me I remember being a child and asking her about my teeth. Every time one of them fell out, I said, Mama, this is mine. I’m supposed to hold on to it. Makes me chuckle now. My mama—bless her heart—said, You don’t worry about those teeth. I got them. I’ll hold on to them for you. And somewhere in the world, I guess, there’s a jelly jar full of my baby teeth.
I held on to my mama’s Spelman College sweater. Wore it the first day I got there myself and still have it now. Held on to my own daddy’s stethoscope until I pulled it out of its black leather case one winter and saw the rubber had melted into sticky pieces of nothing and the silver disk was flaked with rust. Seems all I had from them was the memories of fire and smoke. That and the gold all of them just kept putting aside for me. That gold, the way all of them—my grandpeople and mama and daddy and even my granddaddy’s brother and wife—the way they all held deep to the belief that it couldn’t be destroyed. That if you have gold, you’re good for the rest of your life so long as you hide it.
All over this country people talk about a silver spoon, but truth be told, the spoon is gold. And solid. And stacked high and across. That’s how you have to do if you’re colored, black, Negro, brown . .
. Whatever you’re calling yourself that isn’t white.
Lord.
But when your child shows up with a belly and she’s not even full grown yet, you think for a minute that all those blocks of gold don’t mean a damn thing out in the world if you haven’t even taught your own child how to stay pure. How to hold on. How to grow into womanhood right. You cry into the night until your throat is raw and there’s not another heave left inside of you. Not another drop of water left for your body to squeeze out. Not enough ways left to curse God and yourself. So even though you feel like you’re never gonna get out of bed again, you rise. You decide you’ve had enough of the neighbors with their looks and their whispers and you rise. You keep your eyes on the priest when your own church people give you their backs on a Sunday and you rise. You rise in your Lord & Taylor cashmere coat and refuse to let shame stand beside you. And when the priest calls your only child into his chambers, rests his hand too high up on her thigh, and tells her about the place in hell that is waiting for her, you return only once more—to damn him. To damn them all. And rise.
And you keep on rising. Cash some of the gold back into money. Put the money into a house someplace far away from everything your child and you and your husband have always known about Brooklyn. You pack and you rise. You sing the songs you remember from your own childhood. Mama may have. Papa may have . . . You remember your parents living, wrap the ancient photos of Lucille’s Hair Heaven and Papa Joe’s Supper Club pulled from the flames . . . and you rise. You rise. You rise.
* * *
—
Every day since she was a baby, I’ve told Iris the story. How they came with intention. How the only thing they wanted was to see us gone. Our money gone. Our shops and schools and libraries—everything—just good and gone. And even though it happened twenty years before I was even a thought, I carry it. I carry the goneness. Iris carries the goneness. And watching her walk down those stairs, I know now that my grandbaby carries the goneness too.
But both of them need to know that inside the goneness you gotta carry so many other things. The running. The saving.
The surviving.
So after the tears were all cried out, it was time to move on and figure out what to do with all that was coming at me. I could do like I threatened—throw Iris out of my house and make believe she was never born. But who would that make me in the eyes of God? And in the eyes of my own blessed soul? Someone lower than every single one of those white men who torched my grandparents’ lifework to the ground. And even lower than the white folks who laughed at the smoke and praised the flames.
So I rose.
Now my grandbaby is coming down the stairs we own. Wearing the dress I paid off more than sixteen years ago. Me and Po’Boy, we’ve bought our life back. We’ve scrimped and saved and spent to get what should have been ours outright and always. What should’ve been everything my own grandma paid for. Lucille’s Hair Heaven. Sounds like a place you can walk out of feeling like somebody’s dream for you. Papa Joe’s Supper Club. Can’t help but imagine plates piled high with ribs and greens. Buttermilk biscuits and powdaddy, probably. Hot peach cobblers in cast-iron pans.
Listen. Pry that wood up from the bottom stair where her foot just landed. That’s where the bars are. Even as a little girl she’d say, When I jump on that stair, it doesn’t sound like the others, Grandma. Already four years old, knowing the dip and rise of sound so well that I picked up on her piano lessons where Iris had left off all those many years before. Listen, my grandbaby would say to her teacher, jumping off the piano bench and running over to the stairs, her braids swinging along her back and shoulders. Listen to how different this step sounds from the rest.
Then one night as I lay down beside her to read a good-night book, she looked at me wide-eyed and whispered, The sound is because the other stairs are hollow, Grandma! But there’s something inside that one. Then she rose up, put her mouth close to my ear, and whispered, Something hiding. Maybe she was about five then. It was summer and Iris had decided to stay and work in Ohio, so it was still the four of us alone in the house. Most of the time, it was just me and Melody, with both Aubrey and Po’Boy working. And Lord, how me and her would walk. We’d walk and walk and walk, just the two of us. Every day we’d find something new to love in Brooklyn. I’d spent most of my life here, but it wasn’t until Melody was born did I finally get to see it through her new smart eyes. Cardinals and flowers and bright-colored cars. Little girls with purple ribbons and old women with swollen ankles. She saw it all and showed me every bit of it. Look at that, Grandma. And that and that and that.
* * *
—
Then one day as we were sitting at the botanic garden eating some sandwiches I’d packed for us, the child turned to me and said, Well, you’re my grandmother and Iris is my mother, but you’re like my mother and she’s like . . . Then she stopped and her little face got all frowned up like she was trying to figure it out. I don’t know what she’s like, Grandma. She’s like somebody who is never here with us.
Then out of the blue, she said, Does she have enough where she is?
Does who, baby?
Iris!
God creates us warts and all and I look back on that beautiful day in the garden and my grandchild with her daddy’s dark skin, her great-grandma’s long, thick hair, and her own pretty, curious eyes. She’d been calling her own mama Iris for a long time by that point. Every time I heard her say it, it stopped me, made me think I should say to her, That’s your mama. Don’t call her by her given name like that. But I never did.
I didn’t say it because she was a child who already knew what Mama meant. How and where mamas were supposed to be.
Iris has enough, Melody. All of us, we all have enough.
The stair, she said that night as I opened up the picture book she had picked for me to read. There’s something beneath it, Grandma.
I didn’t tell her then that what was there was the gold. The bars and bars of it. The money that would survive flames and water. And time.
Some of those white men were part-time friends of people. Separate as Tulsa was, people found ways to live their lives with each other in it. Until it got to be too much and black folks got to have more than white folks felt was right.
Now as she slowly makes her way down the stairs, I see the beauty and grace that is the child I tried to beat out of Iris and have to choke back a whole new kind of tears. Po’Boy puts his arm around my shoulder and I reach up for his hand. Feel the arthritis bending the bones in his fingers. Feel the thinness of his body that is cancer eating its way from inside to out and know I’ll be growing old without him. No green drinks or raw diet or holistic doctor over on Flatbush Avenue seems to be helping him. Po’Boy wasting away. Pants half hanging off him even with the tailor on Fulton taking tuck after tuck. Now he’s sitting here in his dark linen suit with his pretty blue shirt underneath and all of it hanging on him like it’s being held up by air. I give his hand another squeeze and he pulls away to look over at me with that smile that says, Don’t even think what you thinking. Smile he passed down to Iris and she handed on to Melody. Lord, I will love that man’s smile till I die.
You feel like dancing? he asks me, and I nod. Because I know I don’t have a whole lot more dances with him. I know the dance card God gave us is almost punched through.
And so me and Po’Boy rise.
8
I figure I got room in my heart for Sabe and Iris and my grandbaby, Melody. I even got room in my heart for Aubrey—more room after what came about with him and Iris. Maybe more room than I ever thought I’d have for him, but look at it. He’s a child of God too. And we’re supposed to be made in God’s image but flawed. If I step back. If I look at Iris and Aubrey from the distance of common sense, I know they were just regular teenagers with hormones running through them that they didn’t even understand. Animal instinct. Desire. Need. At this age, I coul
d just as easily forget how close I was with my own johnson when I was young. Every chance I could get, I’d be closing the door to my room, telling my mother I was studying or reading or just needing a quiet moment.
When I got to Morehouse back in ’62, I was a nineteen-year-old sprinter who had never been with a single woman. Wasn’t like I didn’t want to neither. I knew there were girls who would let you do things to them, but I didn’t know them. My friends would get a little liquor in them and talk talk talk about those girls, but I didn’t know how much was truth and how much was plain fiction. I did my work, ran my quarter miles, collected a few medals, and graduated with that accounting degree. I didn’t have Olympic dreams or none of that. Just ran to run. Ran to feel myself breathing and the wind in my ears. Nothing is like a quarter-mile sprint. All muscle and breath and power. And then it’s over and you got a thing behind you—another race you can clock among your races. Another medal sometimes. Another second or two off your time. Another year of the college paying your way. After graduating, I wrapped my running spikes in an old pillowcase and packed them away. Through Morehouse, I heard about a Negro firm that was hiring, so I took the bus over to it, got the job, and on the first day, the most beautiful woman you ever laid eyes on walked through the door asking after a cousin she was sent there to meet.
Shoot—I wanted to jump out of my chair and say, Please, girl, let me be your make-believe cousin!
I tell you, if I didn’t think about finding that cousin and making him my best friend in the world, my name surely isn’t Sammy Po’Boy Simmons.
Sabe wasn’t studying me. Or sure made a good play at making believe she wasn’t. She had a year more at Spelman and had to make up some courses that summer. I near about moved back onto the Morehouse campus and spent most evenings trying to walk where I thought she’d be.
Red at the Bone Page 5