Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  “Man, if you don’t want it, I do,” Mitch said. Robert held out his car keys, but Mitch shook his head. “I’ll come back later. Maybe tonight. The night time is the right time.”

  The wind rattled their coats and stung their eyes.

  “When do you leave?” Mitch asked.

  “Next week. We’ll stay at Arthur and Ann’s for Christmas, find our own place in the new year.”

  Awkwardly, Mitch tried to draw him into a hug. Robert, startled, submitted with the best grace he could. He patted Mitch on the back with gloved hands.

  “This isn’t how it was supposed to be,” Mitch said.

  After a long second Robert stepped away, and Mitch folded his arms across his chest. “We’re young, right?” Mitch said. “Our best work is still ahead of us.”

  “Sure,” Robert said. He turned his back on Hayti, on St. Joseph’s, on Pettigrew Street and Beamon Street and Lincoln Hospital and looked west, toward the unfinished cut of the freeway, toward Dallas. “Why not?”

  MICHAEL

  2004

  Wednesday, October 27

  At nine o’clock on Tuesday night, Michael’s father began to describe finding Mercy’s body. After a few minutes, Michael saw that he would not be able to take any more. He got up in mid-sentence and walked out of the hospital and stood for a long time watching the cars roar by on Erwin Road. He imagined he was a common enough sight; one more shattered person stumbling out of that house of pain, barely knowing where he was.

  He located Beamon Street on the map in his car and negotiated a maze of one-way streets to get there. He was not surprised to see everything changed, the single-family homes long since cleared for public housing. He sat in the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, thinking about his father’s weakness, Mercy’s selfishness, himself as an infant, crying in the dark.

  He could not bear to think about Ruth.

  The next morning he was back at the hospital, asking questions that his father answered to the best of his ability. By 11:30 they were, more or less, finished.

  “It took eight or nine months,” his father said, “before I was able to feel anything at all. We had the house on Wildflower Drive then. All the boxes were unpacked, and we had new furniture that Ruth’s father paid for. I had a straight shot up Webb’s Chapel Road to work every morning.

  “I don’t know if you remember Bill Morris or not. I was working at his offices there on the square in Carrolton. We were starting to fool around with some design ideas for the airport, and I was doing the road through the middle of the thing, and all the clover-leaf intersections for the terminals.

  “There was an A&P across the street from our office, and I would generally get a sandwich there for lunch. One day I saw a woman ahead of me in line who looked like Mercy.

  “It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought of her. There hadn’t been a day where I didn’t think of her. I had to keep the lights on in my head all the time, you know what I mean? So nothing could surprise me. But that woman came out of a dark corner.

  “After that I had a bad couple of years. I’d be thinking about anything, about, I don’t know, going swimming in the neighborhood pool. And I would think, Mercy should be the one going swimming with me. And that would start everything again.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in the bed. “When it wasn’t Mercy, it was Barrett Howard. I would see him, too, walking on the side of the road, maybe wandering around one of my building sites. It caught me out every time, every time it was bad.

  “The both of them believed in voodoo, they both believed it could raise the dead. They were wrong. This is what raises the dead.” He pointed at his own temple. “This is what keeps them walking around among us.”

  Michael was not yet ready to feel sorry for his father. “What about Barrett Howard?” he asked. “Who killed him?”

  “You know that as well as I do. It was Randy Fogg or one of his henchmen.”

  “Then why didn’t you call the police? Take him down?”

  “For all I knew Randy Fogg owned the police, too. Maybe he still does. If I started making noise, I could have ended up in an underpass myself. And how could I explain being in the passenger seat of that cement mixer?”

  His father began to cough. It was a terrible, violent sound, a sound of flesh tearing, a sound that a human body could not make and continue to live for long. He put a tissue to his mouth and it came away bright with blood. It took a minute or more for him to get the coughing under control. He drank a glass of water, his chest still twitching with aftershocks.

  “If I could do one thing before I die,” he said, “I would like to make him pay for that. I would like to go to my grave with the belief that there was some kind of justice in this world.”

  “Maybe there’s somebody who can help you do that. Did you know Donald Harriman is still here? He’s teaching at UNC. I talked to him a few days ago.”

  His father’s face lost what little color it had. I’m taking hours off his life with this, Michael thought. And he doesn’t have many left.

  “He claimed to have heard of me because of my work,” Michael said. “He knows a lot more than that, doesn’t he? He knows all about you and Mercy.”

  His father nodded.

  “I think you meant for me to learn all this,” Michael said. “It really was you who put the idea into my…into Ruth’s head to recruit me for this trip, wasn’t it? I didn’t believe her when she told me.”

  Pain clearly made it hard for his father to keep talking. “If I had…some agenda…it was not conscious. I’m past playing games.”

  “Maybe Barrett Howard was your agenda. Maybe you wanted me to get Randy Fogg for you.”

  “Listen to you. You sound like some TV tough guy. ‘Get’ Randy Fogg? Who are you to ‘get’ anybody?”

  As long as Michael could remember, his father had used words like those to hurt him and push him away. “Just once,” Michael said, stinging, “I wish you would ask something of me. Ask me to do something for you.”

  His father closed his eyes, and for a second Michael thought he was going to die then and there. “Dad?”

  His father’s eyes opened, then winced shut again. “Tell your mother she can come back now. I’ve kept her out long enough.”

  Michael stood up. His father would die before he would stop referring to Ruth as Michael’s mother. If there were such a thing as magic, if symbols were real, the cancer would have gone away once the festering secrets came out. Except in this world cancer trumped magic, and his father had waited too long. Thirty-five years too long.

  *

  Michael stuck his head in the lounge on the way out of the hospital. “He wants you to come back now,” he said.

  Ruth nodded glumly without meeting his eyes.

  He could not yet connect this frail, somewhat pathetic figure with the woman who had stood beside his real mother’s corpse, with the seductress and schemer who had destroyed his father’s dreams. She didn’t seem like a plausible target for the rage and bitterness and sadness and loss swirling inside him.

  Just as well, he thought, for surely she would not be able to withstand it.

  He drove to UNC, feeling urgency without a clear purpose. A student waited outside Harriman’s office, and Michael smiled at her and said, “I need a second with Dr. Harriman. It’s urgent.”

  “I have an appointment?” she said. She looked and dressed like an African and sounded like the San Fernando Valley.

  “I understand,” Michael reassured her.

  The door was slightly ajar. Five minutes later it opened to reveal a boy in flipflops, shorts, and an oversized T-shirt. Michael quickly slipped into the office and closed the door on the young woman’s exasperated sigh.

  “I don’t believe you’re Jennifer Brown,” Harriman said, looking over the tops of his glasses.

  “I think you’d better send Jennifer home,” Michael said.

  “You’re that graphic novel artist, correct?”

  “Let’s skip the games.
You know exactly who I am. You know my mother, Mercy Richárd. Intimately. She initiated you into the cult of Erzulie. And I’d bet a substantial chunk of money that you’ve got that tattoo I asked you about, that Four Moments of the Sun, on your left wrist, above that high-dollar watch.”

  “I see.” Harriman got up and went to the door. “Ms. Brown, I’m going to have to reschedule your appointment. I’ll see you in class tomorrow and we’ll make arrangements then.”

  He closed the door and sat down again. “I’m a tenured full professor, and the University is aware that I have firsthand experience with vodou. If your intent is to blackmail me, I would advise against it.”

  “What do you know about my mother’s death?”

  “She had what we recognize today as postpartum depression. It’s not unusual. Unfortunately, for a working-class black mother, especially an unmarried one, psychological counseling was simply unheard of at the time.”

  “So she killed herself.”

  “She cut her wrists in the bathtub with a kitchen knife.”

  “You were in love with her. And that’s all you can say?”

  “I’ve had a long time to recuperate. Thirty-five years.”

  “Do you have a picture of her?” Harriman shook his head. “Can you, can you at least tell me something about her? What was she like?”

  Harriman finally softened. He thought for a few seconds and then said, “I only saw her dance once. There was a period of about six months where I was obsessed with her, in…I guess it was the spring and summer of 1967. I would loiter near her house, watching from my car. Sometimes I followed her and your father when they went out. I don’t think they ever knew I was there.

  “One night they went to a dance at the Durham Armory. It was the Tommy Dorsey band—in name only, of course. Mostly white kids fresh out of college, led by some old guy on trombone playing the Dorsey arrangements. That night Mercy wore a short black pleated skirt that flew up every time she spun around, and a black flowered blouse with one too many buttons undone. Her skin looked pale by comparison.

  “I remember watching her and your father walk over to the chairs along the wall to change their shoes. Watching her was like watching a major league hitter in the on-deck circle. She was so focused and eager and yet so calm and confident, all at the same time.

  “You know what a hovercraft is? They never got the technology down to a graceful size. If they had, it would have looked like Mercy dancing. Her feet were flying while her body floated above them like it was weightless. And the joy surrounded her, like the mist around a waterfall.”

  Harriman stopped, and then he said, “I hated your father for many years. First because he had Mercy and I knew I never would. Then, when she died, I blamed him for her death. How could he not have left his wife for her? How could he have let her kill herself?”

  “I’ve been asking myself those same questions.”

  “He was human, is the answer. Those were different times. Divorce was not that common then, they didn’t have no-fault divorce laws in North Carolina, and indeed, Mercy’s father was not someone to take lightly.”

  “No, I…wait. Did you say Mercy’s father? I thought she didn’t know who her father was.”

  “Ruth’s father. Robert’s father-in-law. Wilmer Bynum. I misspoke myself.” Harriman looked terribly uncomfortable, more so than a simple verbal misstep could justify.

  “No, I think you just slipped up. Wilmer Bynum was Mercy’s father, wasn’t he? So she and Ruth were what, half-sisters? Holy shit.”

  Harriman didn’t answer.

  “Tell me,” Michael said. “Tell me, for God’s sake. Was Wilmer her father?”

  “Yes,” Harriman said.

  “And she never told my father?”

  “She didn’t know it herself. Perhaps she suspected as much. Her mother refused to tell her, and I only got it out of her after Mercy’s death.”

  “Why did she tell you?”

  “With Mercy dead, she had no reason to keep the secret any longer. She wanted to hurt your grandfather, and hurt anyone who had any part in Mercy’s death.”

  Dazed, Michael realized that Wilmer Bynum was back to being his grandfather. “Is Mercy’s mother still alive?”

  “No. She died in 1989.”

  “So my father still doesn’t know that Mercy was Bynum’s daughter.”

  “I don’t see how he could. Ironic, though, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not exactly in the mood for irony. This is not academic to me.”

  “I apologize.”

  He seemed sincere. “What other secrets are you keeping? Do you know who killed Barrett Howard?”

  “Know? I don’t know for a certainty. Randy Fogg is certainly the obvious suspect.”

  “Was he—is he—head of the NRC?”

  “Today the grand dragon is a man named Herbert Strong. He lives in the mountains near Asheville and is tied in with the militias out there. As for the sixties, I don’t know. We assumed it was Fogg. It was much more of a secret society then.”

  “We?”

  “The group that Barrett started.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “It’s past tense. Everything fell apart after Barrett disappeared.”

  “Did you have a name, then?”

  “No. To be able to put a name to something gives you power over it, places limits on it. We believed we would be stronger without it.”

  “Can I see the tattoo?”

  Harriman hesitated, then slowly removed the cufflink from his shirt and folded the cuff over twice.

  His skin was lighter than Barrett Howard’s, and he had the advantage of not having been dead for 35 years. Other than being more clearly visible, the tattoo was identical to Howard’s.

  “What was he planning?” Michael asked.

  “Nothing less than the Revolution. With a capital ‘R.’ That, we did have a name for.”

  “You had guns in the old Biltmore Hotel?”

  He seemed surprised at the extent of Michael’s knowledge. He nodded and said, “M-16s with grenade launchers. Browning Automatic Rifles. We had dynamite. Handguns, shotguns, .22 target rifles.”

  “How many of you were there?”

  “Close to two hundred.”

  “Doesn’t seem like enough to start a Revolution.”

  “Two hundred angry black men with guns? It surely would have started something.” Michael had not seen this fire before. As quickly as it flared, it cooled again. “No. Evidently it was not enough.”

  “What happened to the weapons?”

  “I don’t know. I suspect they were sold off for drugs. That’s pretty much what happened to all the revolutionary movements of the sixties. Everyone was jailed, killed, run out of the country, or ground down and disillusioned to the point of giving up. As a generation, we beat our swords into hypodermic needles.”

  “Do you know where any of the others are?”

  “A few. One of them is a salesman for a Toyota dealership in Durham. Another works at the Herald-Sun. Another is a master sergeant at Fort Bragg. A good number of them have been killed or incarcerated, which is what this country does to black men whenever possible.”

  “Do you know where my mother is?”

  “I don’t understand. Your mother is dead.”

  “Is she buried? Does she have a grave?”

  “The grave is in Beechwood Cemetery. There’s an office there. They can show you how to find it.” He shifted forward, clearly ready to stand and usher Michael out.

  “Are you trying to get rid of me?” Michael asked.

  “Yes. In all honesty. This has not been a pleasant conversation for me, as you might imagine. And you are disrupting my office hours.”

  Michael held back a sarcastic reply. “Do you have a cell phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me the number, and I’ll leave you alone. For now.”

  Harriman wrote the number on a sticky pad and handed Michael the top sheet. “Can I trust you?”
Michael asked.

  Harriman took a cell phone out of his pocket and pointed to the land line on his desk. “Call it,” he said.

  “No,” Michael said. “That’s good enough.” He was suddenly ready to be somewhere else. “I’m sorry to have put you through this.”

  Harriman offered his hand. “I’m sorry too. More than you will ever know.”

  *

  Michael called Denise as soon as he hit the street.

  He’d talked to her every night after the conversations with his father, and she’d done her best to help him keep perspective. “So if your mama was black, that makes you black, right?” she’d said. “That is going to be a relief to my own mother, who’s been ragging me about dating a cracker.”

  She listened to the latest revelations and said, “I know the supervisor over at Beechwood from my research. Let me call him up now, because he’s about to go home for the day. I’ll find out where your mom is, and we can go over there together.”

  It was strange to feel all the urgency of a new relationship and yet have it be so overshadowed by the rest of his life. She was on his mind constantly, an anxious question that he couldn’t answer. What was she feeling? Did he know what he was feeling himself? Even the powerful memory of their first kiss was subject to interruption by an image from his father’s narrative.

  She was waiting for him on the steps of the Heritage Center. It was all he could do not to grab her as she slid in next to him. “I missed you,” he said. The three days had crawled by like weeks.

  “Me too,” she said. She stared at him intently.

  “Do you see him?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “That black man lurking inside me.”

  “I’m sorry. You’d think I’d know better.”

  “It’s okay,” Michael said. “I’ve been doing the same thing.”

  He’d stared in the mirror until his vision blurred. The conundrums of race were no longer academic. Why did a single drop of African blood make you black, but a single drop of European blood not make you white? Did that heritage make him different than he would have been if Ruth had been his mother? Was his penis bigger, were his hands better able to catch a football, did he have more natural rhythm? If that was the fantasy, the reality included the possibility of sickle-cell disease and increased risk of prostate cancer and diabetes.