by Randy Alcorn
Ty sat in the front seat fingering GC’s special brass knuckles with their built-in switchblade. The power and deadliness of it enticed him. GC drove down a wide section of MLK on the inside southbound lane. In the outside lane two boys, maybe eighteen year olds, drove up beside them.
“Watch this, cuzzin,” GC said to Ty. “I give ’em my crazy nigger face.”
GC looked across Tyrone to stare them down, narrowing his eyes in a way that transformed his face from the pleasant Denzel Washington demeanor to that of a serial killer. Tyrone trembled at the monstrous hatred in his eyes and wished GC was watching the road. Ty looked to the side at the boys in the other car, preparing himself to hit the floor if lead started flying. But their eyes went down, and they turned right, away from GC. They knew if they returned his stare for more than a moment, they had to be prepared to kill or die. Today they weren’t prepared to do either. Maybe next time.
GC looked at Ty and said, “Yo, got to teach you that stare!”
“Yeeeah,” Ty replied, stretching it out like he’d heard some of the homeboys do.
“Takes heart to kill fo’ yo’ set. Makes you tall. You know? They kill our homies, we kill them. What go around come around. And some that comes around comes around quick, so you got to be ready, you know.”
“Yeeeah.”
They drove up to the next light and GC tried his stare again, moving to the right lane and looking to his left. This time the teenager in the passenger seat of the car stared back. GC rolled down his window with his left hand and with his right reached down to the piece lying beside him on the front seat. He lifted the gun and pointed it at the boy. Ty watched in horror as the red beam appeared on the boy’s forehead. The kid’s eyes almost popped out of his head. He ducked low, and the terrified driver stepped on it, running the red light. Cross traffic dodged and honked as the car screeched through. A police car popped out of a side street a block away and pursued the driver.
GC laughed and laughed. “Hey, Li’l GC. I like it! I got to get me one of these!” He tossed the Glock 17 into Ty’s lap. Ty picked up the gun, handling it gingerly, afraid it might go off on its own. He’d make sure he got it back in his uncle’s dresser before he got home from work.
Clarence drove up to the Westside Racquet Club. It was an exclusive club, much more elitist than the one he belonged to in Gresham. It looked like something Norcoast would be part of.
They hit strokes back and forth for the warm-up. After the third hit, Clarence knew he was in trouble. Norcoast was a 5.0 player, strong and consistent, heavy top-spin, hitting every ball deep. Clarence studied his opponent’s practice serves—hard, deep, with a variety of spin. Norcoast’s service routine was the same. He’d rub his left sweatshirt cuff across his open mouth, perhaps to wipe off sweat or excess saliva. Then he’d bounce the ball twice, go into his high toss, and bring down a commanding serve.
Norcoast took the net and volleyed powerfully, putting away balls with sharp angles and solid overheads, beating Clarence 6-3 the first set. Clarence adjusted his strategy, trying more passing shots low over the net. He’d underestimated his opponent coming into this match. He wouldn’t do it again.
The second set was a dogfight, neither player losing his serve. At 6-6, it came down to a twelve-point tiebreaker. Clarence lost it 5-7, ending the match, which had gone eighty minutes, the most demanding eighty minutes he’d played in years.
They shook hands at the net, Clarence pretending he wasn’t tired.
“Nice effort, Clarence,” Norcoast said. “I’m impressed. We had some great rallies, terrific points. I’m ready for a shower and dinner. How about you?”
“Yeah. Sounds good.” Clarence acted as if it didn’t bother him to get beat by Norcoast. “Let me ask you something, Reg.”
“Yes?”
“Do you play chess?”
“Used to play quite a bit, in fact. My father was a champion. I’ve got a handcrafted chess table in my office at home. Do you play?”
“Yeah, occasionally Maybe we could pull out a board sometime.”
“I’d like that. You know, my father always told me what I learned in chess would pay off in politics.”
“I’ll bet it has.”
Clarence and his family, including Dani’s kids, arrived at his brother Harley and Sophie’s house at 4:00 P.M. It was their annual fall family-wide gathering. Harley’s family didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, so this late October get-together was the last before December.
Harley opened the door, greeting them with, “Here they are, black by popular demand!” His face was framed by Malcolm X style glasses. He often wore his suit and Black Muslim bow tie, but tonight had on a striking brown and yellow kente cloth. Clarence couldn’t help but admire it, even though he sometimes made fun of his brother’s Africa fixation. Black triangular designs fanned out across the kente cloth, each with one line thicker than the other two. It struck Clarence as familiar. Where had he seen that design?
“Hey, Harley. What’s happenin’ bro?” Clarence reached for his brother’s hand and each tested the other’s strong grip. Though Clarence was two inches taller, Harley—at 6′2,″ 250 pounds—was an imposing figure himself. Clarence hugged Sophie and the rest of the family. He listened to the music. Harley had put more money in his stereo system than almost anything he owned. It played black music, the kind that turned every holiday into a soul holiday. It was a refreshing change from dentist office music. Clarence didn’t know how people could stand that stuff. This was the music he was nursed on. He’d never been weaned from it.
Soul music was flowing, swinging, the rhythm enveloping and hypnotic. Lots of bass, pulsing, antiphonal. Spontaneous and innovative. The syncopation and pulsating beat made you want to clap and keep time, as he found himself doing with his right hand as he sat on the couch. The vocalists responded to each other, someone calling, someone answering. It wasn’t monologue, it was dialogue, it wasn’t just performance, it was experience. It wasn’t a commentary on life as much as it was life itself. A jazzy, emotionally intense song, where the women bordered on screaming and the men on shouting, would be followed by something soft, drifting up out of the room like a child’s prayer to heaven. It wasn’t all nice and neat, processed and packaged, timed to the second. You didn’t know when most songs would end. And when they did end, often abruptly, the song continued inside you. That was black music, so central to black culture—full of depth, permeated by sorrow and joy.
“Hey, Marny. How’s my big sister?” Clarence asked.
“Don’t you ever call me big sister, Antsy Abernathy! If I ever get to be half your weight, I’m takin’ out a lifetime membership with Jenny Craig!”
Clarence smiled at her. She was two years older than he. He’d never had as close a relationship with her as with Dani. Marny still hadn’t gotten over losing her son Bobby to leukemia two years ago. He listened as Marny drifted back into the kitchen and resumed an argument with the women that this was the way Mama used to cook that turkey. Dani wasn’t there to end the arguments now. Clarence peeked into the spacious kitchen as they put ham hocks in the pot and Geneva poured in some bacon grease. She’d threatened to stop this to keep the men from dying of heart attacks, but Clarence had said if she did, she just might as well kill them outright. She warned him about the problems with hypertension among black men. Maybe, Harley had suggested, it was another white plot to exterminate blacks.
Aunt Ida washed the greens, a ritual designed to get out every stubborn worm that might be clinging to the leaves. While Ida cut up the greens, Cousin Flora mixed up the cornmeal. Then Ida added the greens to the pot of ham hocks and bacon grease. Water drops sizzled, the grease started soaking up, and the scent was heavenly, taking Clarence back to Mississippi. Just about everything he loved, short of breakfast grits, would be served up tonight. Obadiah poked his head in beside Clarence, eyes closed, nostrils flaring, breathing in the aroma with conspicuous delight. Harley stood behind both of them, trying to lean in too.
&nb
sp; “I swear, brother,” Harley said, “you stand in a doorway and it’s a total eclipse.” The women turned and gave mocking looks at the men.
“Now you manfolks jus’ get away from this kitchen, you hear me now?” Aunt Ida shooed them off as though they were stray cats. “Go on in and discuss yo’ politics and solve the problems of the world so we can do what’s important—fix up dinner!”
After forty minutes of small talk and lots of laughter, the family sat down for the meal. Mama’s dressing, loaded with onions and peppers and celery, positioned itself for the center of attention. Big plates of greens filled the table—collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens. There was a big side of macaroni and cheese, candied yams, a mixture of butter beans and peas, and the crowder peas along with the ham hocks. Though Harley’s family didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, most of the family treated the fall gathering as an early Thanksgiving, so turkey was served, and as Daddy always said, “You don’t want that bird gettin’ lonely.” A heaping plate of catfish, fresh from Marny’s husband’s recent trip to Mississippi, raised eyebrows, while a huge bowl of succotash and servings of okra and corn and peas, and a few spices the menfolk couldn’t identify vied for attention. All the dishes laid out next to each other reminded Clarence of a favorite soul food smorgasbord in Jackson, where the sign said, “When You Can’t Go to Mama’s, Come See Us.” Mama. How he missed her. Nothing would bring her back for an evening quite like the smells and tastes on this table.
There was fried chicken, fried okra, fried potatoes, deep fried pork chops, and Clarence’s favorite, fried green tomatoes. “Just fry it up and you can’t go too wrong,” Mama always used to say Clarence wasn’t a seafood fan, especially not oysters, but Aunt Ida would deep fry ’em up every year along with the gizzards, and every year he’d eat ’em. Clarence still couldn’t abide the smell of chitlins, but it brought back a flood of memories, as did each of the dozens of competing aromas. He took just one slick rubbery bite of chitlins, for nostalgia’s sake. The eye-watering Cajun pepper and hot sauce served as a recourse in case something objected to being eaten. It was always easier to ingest anything than to have to explain to the aunts why you didn’t. This family was southern, and when a southern woman, black or white, goes to the trouble of fixin’ up a meal, you eat it till it’s comin’ out your ears and you enjoy every moment of it and when she asks if you want more you say, “Yes, ma’m,” and that’s all there is to it.
Clarence looked at the plate in front of him, mostly fry brown with generous green and a spattering of yellow. You could look at the old black-and-white family photos of the little Mississippi house and fields, hear a sound that reminded you of a mockingbird, but nothin’ took you back home like the smells of fried channel catfish and Biloxi shrimp and the tastes of ham hocks and collard greens and about everything else on that table. It was enough to get the Mudcat goin’, to drudge up the deepest memories, sweet and sour, of Yazoo Basin, Black Prairie, the Bluff Hills, and the Flatwoods.
Clarence’s mind drifted to the magnificent antebellum mansions of which most whites were so proud and which generated such sadness, distance, and anger in blacks. In his mind’s eye he could see the palace of Jeff Davis at Biloxi and see the old Mississippi flag that still ushered up calls for the Confederacy and all it represented. He thought of the Bible study discussion about the Confederate flag.
Mississippi. Dusty towns with overdressed old men sitting on the town porches, plucking their suspenders and pronouncing judgment on all that didn’t suit them. Corn-whisky stills. Backwater towns where the women spent their school years looking for a man to marry, then the rest of their lives wondering why they’d married such a fool. He remembered a big banner someone hung up in town with the acronym NAACP: Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums.
No matter how he remembered the simple beauty of Mississippi, even longed for it, these somber memories always colored his appraisal. No matter what he heard of how much progress had been made there, to him Mississippi would always be that backwoods state where coloreds were hounded and beaten and lynched. It was his home, yet could never be his home.
Clarence picked up cornbread and mixed it with his fingers into the collard greens. The salty, grease-soaked greens attracted stray crumbs like a magnet did iron filings. He licked his lips. This was eatin’. He looked up instinctively to catch Dani’s eye and maybe kick her gently under the table. The moment he looked up, reality slapped him in the face.
The laughter was loud, and as the talk branched off in different directions around the table it got louder and louder, each conversation competing with the others. Clarence stopped a moment just to listen. White gatherings he’d been at always struck him as so self-aware, the tones hushed and reserved. This high decibel, high energy family gathering was what he’d always known and loved.
Clarence savored the pungent taste of fried green tomatoes. “These are serious vittles, ladies.” He winked at Geneva, who smiled back at him flirtatiously.
“This is livin’, that’s sure,” Obadiah said.
“Just keep that pig meat on the other end of the table,” Harley added, and for the first time the air filled with tension.
“You always have to get that in somewhere, don’t you brother?” Clarence said. “This family isn’t Muslim, and ‘pig meat’ is as black as coal at midnight. So if you have all that black pride, just join us or be quiet about it. Truth is, you know that deep-fried dish there you been eatin’ from? Bet you thought it was chicken, didn’t you? Truth is we bought it just for you, at Bits o’ Pig!”
Most of the family laughed, but not Harley. “I take my religion seriously,” he said. “Guess you wouldn’t know about that, brother.”
Harley’s voice grated on Clarence. It sounded like an out-of-tune guitar. It didn’t help that his brother was brilliant and one of the few people who could keep up with Clarence in an argument. The dinner continued in more hushed tones before regaining its carefree exuberance.
“Let’s retire to the family room,” Marny said after everyone was done. “Time for the menfolk to work off their dinner tellin’ stories.”
“Powerful good dinner, ladies, powerful good,” Obadiah said, voice weak but energized by having his family together. “Menfolk gotsta come up with some pretty big whoppers to match this!”
Soon the stories flowed like melting butter on steaming okra. As usual, Obadiah was right in the thick of them. “We was crossing through Kentucky on horse and buggy, round about 1915 or somethin’, my daddy, Freeman Abernathy, a drivin’ proud as you can imagine. We comes to a car—nicest Model T you ever seen—but this white man had run it off the road. He was standin’ there with his three chillens and one in the pantry, wife pregnant as you ever seen. It was gettin’ dark, five miles at least to the next town.
“My daddy stopped, of course, like any Christian would. He offered to pull it out with our wagon. We had two strong horses, could’ve done it sure. This fellow looks at Daddy and says, ‘I don’t need no help from the likes of you, nigger.’
“Daddy just climbed up in the wagon and shooed off them horses. We looked back and the man’s wife started cryin’ and the chillens looked so bewildered. Mama said she felt sorriest for the chillens ’cause of the way they was gonna grow up. She said, ‘You raised up in the garbage and you can’t help but stink.’”
They laughed, but the laughter was restrained, held in check by pain. As usual, Obadiah’s stories were a string of pearls without the string. There seemed no logical connection between them.
“Your mama’s daddy, he went from being a Kentucky slave to a Lincoln Republican livin’ in N’awlins. When he heard people say, ‘Lincoln freed the slaves,’ and such hullabaloo, he’d always say to us, ‘No man gives freedom, not even Honest Abe. God gives freedom. He’s the one who delivered us out of bondage like he did his people Israel. Ol’ Abe just had the good sense to agree with God.’”
Obadiah looked at the children, most of them huddled on and around three big bea
nbag chairs.
“Did you know,” Obadiah said, “Mr. Lincoln was good friends with ol’ Frederick Douglass, the former slave? After the president gave a speech once, they wouldn’t let Frederick in to see him, so Abe sent word to let that black man in. And ol’ Abe says to him right in front of everybody, ‘Mr. Douglass, there’s no man whose opinion I respect more than yours.’ That’s the kind of man Mr. Lincoln was. And that’s the kind of man Mr. Douglass was. Don’t let nobody tell you different.”
“Tell us more about Frederick Douglass, Daddy,” Marny said. “For the children.”
“Frederick, well he born a slave in the early 1800s. He taught himself to read at age twelve. He got his freedom by runnin’ away, always feared maybe they’d lock him up and haul him off yet. You know how many books he had when he died?”
“A hundred?” Keisha asked, wide eyed.
“A hundred would have been a lot those days. Books hard to come by then. But Mr. Frederick Douglass, he had more than ten thousand books.”
“Funny you should mention Frederick Douglass,” Harley said. “I was just quoting from him this week in my African American literature class. He was talking about hypocrisy in the Christian churches. See, Douglass rejected this Christianity of yours.”
“Just ’cause there’s counterfeit money,” Obadiah said, “don’t mean real money’s no good. You ain’t paintin’ the whole picture, Son. Frederick Douglass was an ordained AME deacon, a church man. I may not have your degrees, boy, but I’ve read his autobiography a half-dozen times. You get me a copy, and I’ll read you somethin’.”
Sophie went to the bookcase and took a book off the shelf, bringing it to Obadiah, who opened it eagerly and started searching.
“Here it is,” Obadiah announced. “This is what Mr. Frederick Douglass said.” He cleared his throat, with the look of pride that came over him whenever he read aloud. ‘“Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.’ See, Son, he rejected the perversion of Christianity, but he embraced true Christianity. You need to see that difference— don’t throws out the baby with the bathwater.”