We were in a boat together, sailing toward “cool.” Burton was furiously paddling, and Malcolm was reading the map and giving directions. I was looking at the ripples in the water that the oars made and wondering if it was going to get chilly and if I should have brought my jacket and how fast you would have to scoop water out of the boat if it got a leak, to keep it from sinking.
The other kids were always doing something new. Clothes and hairstyles. Ways of talking or walking. Before around eleven years old, I was pretty oblivious to it all. The things I kept up with were people’s colors and smells, with how they moved and how they tasted. They made fun of me sometimes, but not all of the time. I was one of them, but not really, which was all right. The teachers loved me, and that was more important.
Cool slowly crept up on us. It followed us like shadows. At first, the shadows were so far in the distance that we mistook them for somebody else’s. They started to haunt us in seventh grade, and by eighth grade our shadows began to touch us, ever so gently. Our voices deepened. Burton’s the most. Malcolm’s a little less. Mine the least of all. We started trying out cooler ways to say things, mostly intonations we had heard from older boys and men. We started trying out and playing with phrases. Seeing how they fit us. I was tasting phrases and seeing which parts tasted good. Of the three of us, Burton knew the most and cared the most about it. He cared the most about what others thought. Now and then I looked at how I looked in the mirror, partly because I thought mirrors were fun and looking in them made me laugh. But Burton looked at himself a lot more, without laughing. And Malcolm was still a little shy of mirrors, of looking back at himself.
I found my cool in spaces around me that others pushed aside, like finding something I loved in a dumpster. Cool was a way of decorating the distance between me and other people. I learned young that most black people would never think I was cool. I didn’t know how to put it on right. To style out of someone else’s style. There was a stone inside me, in the place where you follow other people and do what they do, in the place where you understand them. It blocked the paths. If people were going right, the stone turned me left. If others were singing, it made me quiet. If people were wearing blue, it made me put on purple. And anyway, I loved flowers more than clothes. I wrote poetry. A few times I gave poems to girls, because once I was outside the friend box, in the “liking” box, I didn’t know how to talk to them. Sometimes the girls looked at me like I was from some distant planet. Sometimes they didn’t look at me at all. Sometimes they laughed at me with their friends. Malcolm explained it to me like this: Black life is so hard and so precarious. People are thinking about food and clothes. And here you are with your poems.
My cool came to me sometimes through tricking. I loved tricking because it made me laugh. It broke the neurologically typical world apart and made it stop and look confused. They cared so much for things being according to their words and their rules. Everything was this or that. I got good at practical jokes and tried to see if I could make certain expressions appear on people’s faces. Just like a painter. I didn’t think about their feelings. I moved things, so when someone came back, they looked confused. So they would see for a minute how I felt all the time. Other times, I would startle people by telling them truths they couldn’t see, like a spirit was standing beside them.
My cool came in Daddy showing me how to tilt my hat to the side, to never give away my feelings. To walk like I didn’t care. That wasn’t so hard, because a lot of times I didn’t. Cool came in the air that surrounded Uncle Charles when he occasionally came to visit. He was a ladies’ man, in a Cadillac, who never let dirt touch his shoes. Every stitch of his shirts and pants was immaculate. Bright. Every color was testifying and taking a stand. But those were nothing compared to his smile and his smooth, silky voice. When he smiled the world laughed like a jazz horn. So much playfulness and lightness. So much pure pleasure. When he spoke, the wind that had passed turned sweet and came back and passed again.
Cool came mainly in the shape of music. In the surreal bubbles of radio and television. In the snail-paced awareness of girls. Cool came as the world became smaller, more littered, like a room filling up with more and more furniture. There was less space to walk around in. Less space to think in. Less space. Less space.
By now, along with the radio, we had a telephone and a television. So, our house wasn’t as quiet.
We didn’t used to have a telephone. The only one for the whole community was at Granny’s house. If somebody called on the phone, Granny would come out on her porch and ring a big bell and yell out the name of whomever the phone call was for in a high-pitched voice, like she was singing: “Jeeeaaan!” “Douuggglasss!” But Granny’s phone didn’t ring much until we started having friends in school. Then, it started ringing a lot, and that’s when we finally had to get our own.
Before the television and telephone, I heard only the voices of my sisters and brothers, of Granny and Mama and sometimes Daddy filling spaces in the house. And then there were long gaps when nobody was talking or when I could hear just one faint voice somewhere outside or inside, and quiet rushed in like tides. The more things we got, the less I could hear the tides. Our house became “nicer,” with better pressure from the pump for running water, with magazines, our own telephone, a bathroom with a tub. Before then, we used to take baths in a galvanized cow’s tub filled with warm water in the middle of the kitchen. As the house changed and there was more noise, I got more headaches and nausea. I wandered outside more often to get away from the sounds, in search of cool air to make my headaches disappear, and to hear nothing.
I liked floating in the bubble of the radio, as long as it was turned down low. I was excited by the spirit of popular music, by its newness, its rebellion. I loved its sense of not belonging, its hunger for a new world. I knew I didn’t belong in the old world. There was no place for a black boy who loved spirits more than soul, who didn’t love Jesus, who was the ambassador of the plants. I was feeling Booker T’s organ and Junior Walker’s saxophone like the light of gold in my body. I was feeling the haunting of Bob Dylan and the engine of Jimi Hendrix’s spaceship. I was feeling the wind through Joni Mitchell’s flute, where seven blue moons shone full over blue waters. “It’s your turn to wash the dishes,” Mama’s voice interjected, disrupting my rapture, or “You need to take that trash outside,” or “I need you to go down to Granny’s and get me a jar of tomatoes.” But I was attached to the music by threads from my body. I was already tasting and dreaming of other worlds. I now knew that I had friends I hadn’t met yet. I would meet them after a while.
I wanted to meet hippie friends, playing in strawberry fields with others like me, in patched jeans and bandanas. I wanted to meet friends in other tribes, like the pictures I saw and the people I read about in the National Geographic magazines that Mama brought home. I loved National Geographic magazines! I read about groups in places like China, Australia, Argentina, Tibet, Thailand, New Zealand, Kenya, Nigeria, Spain, Samoa, and Polynesia. I felt connected to them, and they all felt strangely familiar, as if I had once been one of them. I let their spirits rise from the pages and touch me and tell me things. I spent hours laughing with them.
A professor at Randolph-Macon College, in Ashland, gave the magazines to Mama. He was one of the white people she was cleaning houses for. But it caused a lot of problems in our house, because one day the professor gave Mama a ride home after work. Even though the professor was old, Daddy got the maddest I ever saw him. We could hear him yelling outside their bedroom door. “No white man is going to give a wife of mine a ride. I don’t care who he is,” Daddy yelled.
The story goes that when Daddy was a boy, his mama was with a white man on the plantation, and then when his daddy found out he went crazy. His daddy was working in the dairy, and his mama was working in the big house. On a day when the sky was blue with white clouds, some white men came and got Daddy’s daddy and took him to a sanitarium. People from the field and the house stopped worki
ng to watch, and after that day, Daddy never saw his daddy again.
Even now, when I see a National Geographic, I think about Daddy’s mama and his daddy, my grandma and grandpa. I think about big metal containers in the old dairy, filled with fresh milk and cream. There was something wrong with the television. It was a gray, hungry space. It ate and ate and never got full. It stared at me like a hungry wild dog. So we fed things into it. We gave it pieces of our hearts and livers. We gave it pieces of our brains, and we fed it the most sacred thing of all—our attentions.
And the television didn’t fit anywhere, with any other things. The shape of its corners and the textures of the glass screen were wrong next to anything. Next to wooden chairs or a table. Next to the couch. It pretended to be a mirror when it was turned off, but it wasn’t. Mirrors are still and lively, but the television was never still.
The things I liked most about the television were the pretty wires and tubes I could see inside of it, looking through the holes in the back. The tubes lit up like lights on a Christmas tree, except they hummed, and there was an odor like something burning. I looked forward to when our televisions or radios broke, so I could take out the wires and play with them. If there were any spirits in a television, this must be where they lived. There was always a thick piece of heavy, silver metal, like a magnet, with copper wires wrapped around it. I knew this was the heart.
I knew it was the heart because it pulsed in my hand. And because I saw Daddy operating on engines all the time. When Daddy opened an engine up, he talked to all of the parts. Sometimes he talked to them gently, but other times he scolded them. Daddy never cursed, but he would say “Daggone it!” I didn’t hear anyone curse until I got to college. Daddy could take any engine apart or build engines from scraps. He made table saws and engines with whetstones to file tools and engines for other things. Daddy was trained as an engineer in the army and they taught him a lot about engines, although he had already taught himself a lot before he went in. But Daddy was mad at the army because, although they trained him, they wouldn’t give him the title or the engineer job. They didn’t give black men much of anything when Daddy was in the army. When I took an old television apart, I could follow the trails of coiled copper and colored wires into a land of spirits who were always on edge. I could see some of where Daddy lived.
We saw a lot of people being cool on television, especially on the music shows, like Soul Train or American Bandstand. When I saw James Brown’s hair on television it reminded me of my sisters. Once, when Mama was straightening Sister’s hair, a scent found me that I had been hiding from. It was a foreign scent, from another world. It had tried to get me when I went to feed the chickens. It got in the corn. But I ran and washed my hands and didn’t go back into the yard. I sat in the kitchen when Mama made dinner so it couldn’t get past the onions and greens, or the nutmeg and cinnamon in the corn pudding. Past the biscuits, or the damson jam. Past the chicken and gravy.
I loved the kitchen more than any other room. I was always there when Mama was cooking. When I was a little boy, she couldn’t take a step in the kitchen, she says, without me holding on. Mooing like a cow and holding on. The kitchen was like the church of my mama’s love. Sometimes she sang gospels while she clattered pans. I walked in my mama’s sighs. I feasted on her longings. In the corn bread and greens. In the apple jelly. The plum jam and ham hocks. In the biscuits and the waffles and the bacon. In fried berries and fried chicken and fried corn and fried pork chops and gravy. Her hopes were a tear soaked into a biscuit. Her dreams were a sweetness at the same time in the molasses and sorghum, in the maple syrup on top of melted butter on the other half of the same biscuit. There was always something pushing and always something pushing back. The tension between these was a cool pool of water on a sticky hot day I dove into and floated, and sank slowly down, then rose, then sank again and could not get enough. The in-between of candied yams and Virginia salt-smoked ham, of salty grits and sugar, of fried chicken and watermelon, was where my mama threw her arms open and ran ecstatically into her own rapture.
Staying in the kitchen that night worked, until after dinner. Until all the food was eaten and put away, the crumbs swept up, and the scents of dinner gone. The foreign scent that was after me couldn’t break through. But later, Sister sat in a chair in the kitchen while Mama ran the hot iron along a handful of her hair, dabbing grease on her scalp. I thought the smell of hair grease and hair on fire would be thick enough to keep the other scent at bay. That, and the faint odor of leftover chicken lard. Sister screamed every so often, when the hot iron brushed against the soft back of her neck. The alien scent snuck in and settled on me like fog over the creek in the bottom. It came through the floorboards, from under the house, through the worn, yellowed linoleum.
There was a moment as long as a day when I felt it coming. And then I was down, thrashing on the floor like a hog with its throat cut, eyes rolled back in my head. I was trapped inside while the flesh was ripping away from the bones. I was splitting into a million pieces. I was drenched, underwater. There was a terrible taste of metal in my mouth, as a spoon was shoved in to keep me from swallowing my tongue. There was a long time of nothing, and then finally Mama’s voice, “Red, Red, Red . . .” And I was coming back, drifting back. The light bulb in the ceiling was dimmed by Mama’s head. Oh no, I thought, when I could think, it happened again. Even when I could get up, I didn’t want to. But Lightnin’ Hopkins’s spirit came to the rescue. He played a blue note, and I followed the note with my ears as it drifted across the room, like a full moon across a midnight sky. “Get on up from there, boy!” he said in his playful, deep voice. And his gold tooth shone on me until I finally forgot my embarrassment and smiled.
James Brown’s hair reminded me of my convulsions. We saw him on American Bandstand, sandwiched between Petula Clark and a teenager rating a new song. She gave it a ten because it had a good beat. I liked watching James Brown. After seeing him, I listened more closely to his music when it came on the radio. Something about his hair helped to heal the shame of my convulsions. It was women’s hair, which seemed strange, since his songs and his performances were a lot about being a man. I wondered the same thing about him that I did about a lot of the bands and singers we saw on television and heard on the radio. I wondered if they really took themselves seriously, or if they were having fun joking. The Monkees were having fun. They were like grown kids on their television show. A playfulness also infused the music of a lot of other bands, like the Beatles. But James Brown. He just might shoot somebody as dead as Stagolee shot Billy, if they touched his hair.
The White Castle
Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Inside the white castle, I was blue, blue, blue. I was blue about every day. But I was free at last, free at last, too. I was chasing rabbits and sitting on the dock of the bay. I was chain-chain-chained, and I was looking for strawberry fields and grazing in the grass and trying to catch the wind.
Just before going to the white castle, I was in another kind of blue. Light blue like the sky. I was in blue watching television and seeing bad white people shooting the good people who stood up for our rights. They were battering peaceful black people with sticks and throwing rocks at them. They were beating them with fists and pinning them against walls and sidewalks with water hoses. They were spitting on them and yelling at them and turning dogs loose on them. I was in blue and getting bruises and aches from watching black people with their heads cracked open and their faces bloody.
I was in blue as we sat almost motionless, huddled on the couch as a black hearse passed slowly with President Kennedy’s casket inside. We saw a lot of caskets on television. We saw Malcolm X’s casket. And Robert Kennedy’s. We saw hundreds of caskets of boys coming home from Vietnam, and caskets of student protesters shot by soldiers, and caskets of murdered civil rights workers. I wondered what it felt like to be in a casket.
I was watching Mama and Daddy’s faces on the verge of tears. Black peop
le were rioting in a lot of cities. Civil rights workers were marching all over. I heard the word “freedom” a lot, and I fell in love with it. But black people weren’t the only ones who wanted freedom. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! “Freedom,” Richie Havens sang on a stage at Woodstock. There was free love in San Francisco. White women were taking their bras off and burning them in barn fires. White students were getting shot protesting the Vietnam War. Monks in orange robes wanted freedom, as planes were dropping napalm on women and children and they were burning like torches in the fields. They set their beautiful robes on fire in protest and burned like lynched slaves. I was crying as we watched, as if we were on a boat, watching a city burn, and our boat was about to pull into that city’s harbor.
I had been in blue all of my life, listening to people on Canaan’s Hill talk about white people. For me and my siblings, white people had been a presence without faces. We knew them as the slave owners and their descendants. We knew them as the rulers and definers whose world our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents entered to work in but fled as quickly as possible at the close of day. We had heard that they could be so nice when it was daytime, when it was just them, alone, talking to a black person. But they could turn mean after five o’clock, when their families came home. After dark, they could be predatory. We only saw them from a distance, the women who paid our mamas and grandmamas for housecleaning, ironing, laundry, and taking care of children. The storeowners and people who worked in stores. The policemen. The farmers. The mechanics. The insurance men. The families sitting in their nicely shaved yards.
The Secret Life of a Black Aspie Page 9