My uncle T lived with my cousins, and he would walk over to Granny’s to visit us. Uncle T was one of the old, old folks. He was born with feet that couldn’t sit flat, and so he walked on his toes. He took care of a lot of children, and grandchildren, cooking and cleaning. He chopped wood, sitting down. I remember the light around his beautiful black face. He hobbled with his twisted walking stick, humming, singing, or just making a grunting noise to himself that old people sometimes made. He sat on Granny’s porch and talked to her. I sat playing in the sand. He talked to me. He could really see me. He teased me and laughed. He called me “Denny Flootie Boots” and “Denny Wheatstraw.” I remember his baggy old brown pants and his red Prince Edward tobacco cans. The way he seemed to be dancing slowly, even when he was just standing there talking. I remember his suspenders and swollen knuckles wrapped around the wood of his walking cane. I remember the music of his talk. I remember his pure love.
Not far from our cousins’ house was Grandma Addie’s, our daddy’s grandmother. She was half Mattaponi, a Native American tribe. She was very light skinned with straight white hair. She had hairs growing on her chin and always had an apron on. She’d come out in the yard when she heard us approaching. “Come on in here, chirren,” she would say sometimes and usher us in and give us a little treat. Her house smelled of firewood and cedar and cooking grease.
Then there were all the other cousins on the other side of the road, also going farther and farther back through the woods. When I was little, children and grown-ups would be coming and going all the time. People would just show up and shout out, “Comin’ in!” when arriving at each other’s door, just before entering. People would be yelling out, carrying all sorts of things on the wind, the way Africans had, the way the slaves had. I never really had to talk.
But as we got older, history would drift over us and shower us with yellow pollen, and like that, we would be changed. What had held us all together in slavery days, and in the decades afterward, would drift away from us, would get lost with the memories and the passing of the old people. The horses and the cows would die, and we wouldn’t get new ones. One morning, all of the chickens would have disappeared. One day, we would be eating the last bacon from the smokehouse, and there wouldn’t be any more pigs. The fruit and berry orchards would grow over with stubble and weeds. The fields of corn would no longer turn the light green.
People’s voices would stop ringing out in the woods or across fields. We would start to get modern. News would stop being carried through shouts. The naked shouts of day-to-day feelings would wither like plants pulled from a garden. The bare songs of people walking, or digging, or cutting wood, or feeding pigs, or calling cows, would stop. When I was little, people’s voices were as thick as those of crickets and frogs and owls and whippoorwills and cicadas.
But a deafening silence would come, replaced by the noise of a red radio. I desperately wanted to smash the red radio, to play with shattered pieces of its hardened plastic. But each time I got near it, it would whisper. It would hypnotize me with its perfectly square corners. With its perfect symmetry. Even if it wasn’t turned on. And if it was turned on, I wouldn’t dare approach it. The way its indifferent spirit bent around corners and spilled beneath the crack of the closet door as I hid inside, sprawled in piles of dirty laundry, frightened me and kept me at bay.
People didn’t know it, but the animals and plants had been helping to tell our stories. We would come to a moment when the young people wouldn’t know the little stories, they knew only the big one. The little stories would be lost somewhere in our hearts, somewhere in houses in our bodies. But we couldn’t get to them. The stories were dancing on the tongues of spirits, but most of us couldn’t hear them. In that new age, we would close our doors to each other, unless there were emergencies. We would not want each other to know what things we had gotten, or not gotten, from the white world to put in our houses. We would start collecting white objects. Suddenly, we would be told not to go into anyone else’s houses anymore, and our cousins would no longer be allowed to enter ours.
I was in love with the beauty of my family and my cousins. The forms and the tones of their bodies. From the darkest, blueish-black skin to the lightest. From the nappiest hair to the straightest. With the way they talked. They oozed a sweetness. A distinct flavor that I can still taste if I close my eyes. That flavor was my spirit. That flavor was my body. Growing up, I thought that I would always be surrounded by it. That we would all live there, in the Body, forever. That’s how it had always been, for most of us. In that body, I did not have to explain anything. I could communicate and not have to talk. People just understood what I was feeling.
But when history changed us, that’s when I really started to talk. I was trying to bring the sweetness back. I was trying to hold on to things. Being sweet was a big thing for people where I lived. Sweet was good hearted. Sweet was mannered. Sweet was kind. Sweet was the blood that spilled from you if you were cut open. Sweet held me like a second mama. My daddy would always say to me, from the time I was a baby, until I was fifty, when he died, “Always stay sweet, Red.” I still find myself liking people better if they are sweet. When I talk, I am still chasing sweetness like a butterfly following the color of a blossom.
The Big Yellow Bus
A picture is worth a thousand words.
The first day of school, my mama dropped me off and left. I don’t know how we got there, since we had only one car and Daddy had taken it to work. Daddy and cars went together. He had an old blue DeSoto. Blue like a bird’s egg. When Daddy sat in his DeSoto, he almost disappeared, he was so blue. But he was a darker blue than the DeSoto. I remember him pulling out of the yard one day. Yellow bells blooming. Jonquils. White dogwood blossoms. One puff of white clouds in a still blue sky. A sky that was swallowing up time. And there was dark-blue Daddy in a light-blue DeSoto, the window rolled down, waving as he pulled out of the driveway.
One minute I was standing in the yard, holding rocks and sticks, floating on clouds in a blue sky, and the next minute I was riding in a car, talking to Jeremiah. I think we’re going to Ashland, Jeremiah. Mama seems worried, but I don’t know why. And then I was holding Mama’s hand and we were walking into a building where other children were playing and crying. Mama was talking to some women, and then she was gone. At first I thought she was coming back because she had never left me anywhere, other than at home.
Before we started school, none of my brothers or sisters had ever been beyond the safety of our community for any length of time. In those days there was no such thing as kindergarten; we just went into first grade. We had ridden into Ashland on Saturdays to go shopping for groceries, ice, livestock feed, and salt blocks for the cow. Sometimes we stayed in the car while Mama shopped for groceries in Crosses, the small local market that offered credit to black families. There was still segregation then. I think that Daddy and Mama wanted to shield us from the world, from the demeaning glares of white people, from the bowing and deferential manners that black people masked themselves in when interacting with whites. If we knew anything as children, we knew that the outside world was not safe.
When I realized that Mama had left me, I thought I would never stop crying. Even when I did stop, I soon started again, triggered by the cries of others around me. As terror overcame me, I fell from weeping into quiet despair, into paralysis.
When the teacher picked me up, I was already seeing nothing. She talked to me and she talked to me. She talked to me in a quiet voice. And once I looked at her, when she wasn’t looking at me. I sat close to her and searched for Mama in her voice, in her smell, in the gentleness of her movements.
After that first day, the big yellow bus would barrel down the rutted dirt road every morning, coming to get us. Like sacrificial lambs, we walked blankly into her hungry mouth and sat down in her belly. Strung together by invisible chains, we felt ashamed and defeated. We stoically paraded on board the ship and waved goodbye to our home.
For a
year I rode the bus with just my older brother, Richie. I rode with my eyes closed, gripping the cool, round metal on the side of the seat, next to the wall. I was so nowhere that I remember little of it. The next year my sister, Elaine, started school, and so then there were three of us. But again, I remember little of it. The next year my youngest brother, Levi, started school. I remember the driver’s name was sometimes Mrs. Chaney and sometimes Mrs. Lewis, both heavy-set black women who had children around our ages. They were stern and motherly. The seats were hard and cold. The roar of the bus engine scared me. There were angry people being ground up over and over under the yellow hood. There was a smell of burning oil, almost sweet. By the second year I kept my eyes open and let them go blank in the blur of passing cars and trees. I sank my fingers into the music of the black tires singing. Sometimes I closed my eyes when the bus turned. I liked the turns. They made my body laugh and laugh. Sometimes I closed my eyes and rode my yellow bulldozer, my black train, my red dump truck, all the way to school.
Our school was John M. Gandy, the only black school in the area. But that wasn’t its original name. In the period after slavery, it had been Hanover County Training School. My mama had gone there, after going for years in the little one-room schoolhouse out by our church. I wonder what Mama felt like when she first went to school. How did she get there? She never looks happy in the few black-and-white pictures we have of when she was a little girl. She’s never smiling. She looks sad. She looks like she’s already learned just to do what she has to do.
That one-room schoolhouse my mama went to first was built for the children on the plantation. It still sits there, beside our church. When I was around ten, I would go in there sometimes and play on an old abandoned organ. Most of the floor was covered with stacks of yellowed newspaper. Light spilled in through cracks in the wall, and I could hear the buzzing of dirt daubers and red wasps. If we were city people, and if we weren’t all neurologically challenged. If we had recovered enough from our shell shock to organize. To get signatures and get it in the newspaper. Those kinds of things. I suppose the schoolhouse would be a historic property by now. I suppose we would have petitioned the town and written letters. We would have rallied public support. But we hadn’t. We are still astonished just to be alive. To have the liberty to own houses, drive cars, go shopping in white stores, wear good clothes, watch television. To curl up on a couch or bed, pull the blanket up, and exhale.
At Gandy everybody, all day, every day, was black. Our teachers were educated, but we still recognized them as us. However strange sitting still and saying nothing may have been, someone like us was there to soften the strangeness of it. They talked to us as one of us, even when they spoke “proper.”
Growing up, we had never sat down at a desk; in fact, we didn’t own one. There were no spaces in our house for printed pages, for writing or reading. The shapes that the body gets into when the eyes are feasting on print were foreign and uncomfortable. Just to sit up straight in a chair all day, or to bend over a table for hours, was hard. What to do with the motion in our bodies? It was daytime, but we had to put our bodies half to sleep, to contort them and hold them like little Houdinis.
There were a few books in our house, some that my mama had when she was a girl, with yellowed and brittle pages. Pictures of Mary and her little lamb. Words my mama had written in cursive on delicate paper. My mama’s writing was so pretty. It flowed like waves of music. It led like blue-lit tunnels under oceans, through forests, invisibly through cities. It came off the page and touched me.
The first words I learned to read, I think, were “Consider goat!” (which I pronounced “con cider”). They were printed beneath a picture in one of those books. In the black-and-white picture, a little white boy is yelling at a stubborn goat. He has a string around the goat’s neck and is pulling him in one direction while the goat is trying to go in another. The book was on a shelf in the living room. I crawled from cold linoleum to warm, soft beige carpet to get to the shelf. There was a red piece of knitting across the arm of the couch that I lost my face in, like a diver breaking the surface loses himself in oxygen. I have moments now when I find that same piece of knitting. The way shadows change the colors of material in a store. In the color in someone’s house. At home. “Con cider, goat,” the boy was saying. “Con cider!”
I couldn’t read the rest of the story, but I could fill it in. The boy’s mama had told him to take the goat out to the field and tie him to a stake so that he could graze. But the boy had spent too much time thinking about taking the goat. He had spent too much time standing in the shade with the goat. Him and the goat, standing in the shade, watching the spirits playing. By the time he had remembered he was supposed to be taking the goat, a group of spirits had gathered in the field. They were having a big meeting.
Everything went fine leading the goat halfway across the clearing. But when they got to the field of spirits, it was another story.
“Con cider!” meant I’m sorry. I don’t want to leave you either, but what choice do I have? “Con cider!” meant please, for my sake, do it even if it hurts.
I felt so awkward in school. The classrooms were so open and bright. The bells exploded in my belly and made me want to puke. The long hallways were cool, and quiet, but somehow menacing. There was no space to catch up with my breath. My fire burned out before the day was over. It went dim in the face of all the brightness, motion, and noise. I tried in many ways to hold on to it. I held my breath as if I was sinking under water. I crossed my feet under the desk, as if I had to pee. I walked slowly, as if I was carrying a plate balanced on my head. I was silent. But nothing helped. There was nowhere to go to feel things. There was nowhere to hear the spirits. And how could I survive without my things? How could I stay upright all day without a soft thing to hold, to lean against, a pillow to talk to? I could feel myself disappearing, like sand out of a hole in a crocus bag, as the hands of the big clock over the teacher’s desk tick-tocked relentlessly. At school, whoever I really was, fled so far away even I could never find him.
But I had to go to school. Mama said so. This was what the slaves had fought for.
Things were quieter in the classroom than they were outside, in the cafeteria, or in the halls, but they were never truly quiet. The hum of the florescent lights was like the roar of an engine. I kept waiting for other kids to seem bothered by it, but no one ever was. The ticking of the clock was like knives slicing through my brain. I couldn’t hear the butterflies. I couldn’t find Jeremiah.
At recess, I huddled near the building, touching the wall for security, watching the other children yell and fight and run and throw balls. There was a tall spirit under the sycamore tree outside. Sometimes I talked with him. Sometimes he took me into the tree, which was like a soft room with no clouds. I could walk out of that room into a meadow of singing sparrows. I could hover and glimmer like heat rising from August asphalt. And no one could see me. The spirit’s name was William. I was never as close to William as I was to Jeremiah, but I looked forward to seeing him. He was older and spoke sometimes as if he was talking to himself, even when he was looking at me. And I could only see him sometimes, because he couldn’t go any farther than the shade of the tree’s branches. When it rained, I gazed out of the window as water dripped from the leaves, washing away all shadows, and wondered what William was doing.
The one thing that happened, that made me feel like I was part of everybody else, was when the boxer Muhammad Ali came to our school. He came because we were black. But I don’t know how he knew about us, or how he got there. Excitement and pride swept through the hallways and under the doors of classrooms until everyone had to open their doors. We spilled out into the street, where he joked and played and punched the air and picked a small child up and smiled at him. Before I knew it, we were all a parade, heading down the street, surrounding him. We passed by the black bakery we were forbidden to go to during school hours. The sweet scent made us drunk. We passed the black funeral home w
ith the somber black hearse. Watching Muhammad Ali that day, I learned to joke with a straight face. I became Mr. Laughter, but hardly anybody knew. Hardly anybody got it.
People thought so differently at school. Instead of letting things come to them, sifting through invisible threads, they went out and attacked things and then dragged them back home. There was never time to wait. They shot thoughts and tied them on the rooftops of cars and trucks. People outside our tribe were hunters. People in my tribe were gardeners and carpenters. They grew things. They built things from visions. I had to learn to hunt if I wanted to live in the world, whether I liked it or not. But hunting made me nauseous. I could never kill things. I could never cut their throats and bleed them. And so I tied them up and dragged them home. Or I bribed them with candy or biscuits, or a promise of giving them something that they longed for. Math problems longed for square boxes, to hold them in place. The names of countries longed for vitamin C, and so I promised them oranges. But things I bribed or dragged home were never happy, and they usually didn’t stay for very long. They stayed just long enough for me to pass tests, to say goodbye, and to ask if they would come back sometime if I needed them.
I had an insatiable appetite for learning and for “getting” things, and A’s came easily. But it wasn’t the actual information that usually captured and fascinated me. It was the beauty of how things had been ordered, organized, named. Someone had taken the time to give names to the millions of animals and plants. To the planets and stars. To the clouds. Someone had mapped out how the sky fit together into constellations. The parts of the body, inside and out. The bodies of land and water. Mountains. The shapes of things. The metals and stones and gems. The seasons. Someone had split the world in half and named the hemispheres. Angles. And the names were all so beautiful. So mysterious. Orion. The Himalayas. The Amazon. The Red Sea. Circles. Trapezoids. Stamen. Amoeba. Retina. It made the world less overwhelming, safer. It told me that there were people like me, who had spent most of their time paying close attention to the nature of the world, thinking about and organizing things.
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 6