He took out the journals and charts that were locked in the ancient rolltop desk in his den. Weeks were spent tracing the dates and times of penetrations, conceptions, and births for every Nedeed in Linden Hills. He then matched all of this with the position of the stars and the earth’s axis at those moments and it all verified what had been passed down to him about the facts of life: “There must be five days of penetration at the appearance of Aries, and the son is born when the sun has died.”
Luther slammed the journals shut. He had done that—it was followed to the word. Like every Nedeed before him, his seed was only released at the vernal equinox so the child would come during the Sign of the Goat when the winter’s light was the weakest. It had been infallible for generations, so what was wrong now? He then bore the humiliation of seeing a doctor to be sure that there was nothing abnormal with his reproductive organs. When the medical reports returned positive and healthy, Luther held the written evidence for what he had felt all along in his heart: there was no way that this child could be his son.
And as the child faded to him against the clapboards of Tupelo Drive, Luther’s eyes rested on the shadow floating through the carpeted rooms. It began to take form in front of his face. He noticed when it bent over and walked and sat down. He heard the lilt in the voice when it spoke. He distinguished between the colors that hung from the short frame and smelled the perfumed talc as it passed him. He could see the amber flecks in the heavily lashed eyes, the tiny scar on the right side of the lips. The long neck, small breasts, thick waist. Woman. She became a constant irritant to Luther, who now turned her presence over in his mind several times a day. Somewhere inside of her must be a deep flaw or she wouldn’t have been capable of such treachery. Everything she owned he had given her—even her name—and she had thanked him with this? The irritation began to fester in his mind and he knew he had to remove it or go insane. He could throw her out tomorrow; there wasn’t a court in this country that would deny him that right, but no one in his family had ever gotten divorced. And she had to learn why she was brought to Tupelo Drive. Obviously, he had allowed a whore into his home but he would turn her into a wife.
It was then that Luther reopened the old morgue in his basement. He worked alone and in a methodical fury, connecting plumbing and lighting, stacking trunks and boxes against the damp walls. A grimy sweat stung his eyes as he erected metal shelving and wired an intercom. He brought down clumsy cartons of powdered milk and dry cereal, and finally, trembling from exhaustion, he dragged two small cots down the twelve concrete steps. He stood in the middle of the basement and surveyed his work.
Now, let her stay down here with her bastard and think about what she’d done. Think about who she was playing with. He climbed the steps and checked the iron bolt on the door. Did she really think she could pass her lie off as his son? His fathers slaved to build Linden Hills and the very home she had tried to destroy. It took over a hundred and fifty years to build what he now had and it would be a cold day in hell before he saw some woman tear it down.
It was cold. In fact, it was the coldest week of the year when White Willie and Shit slapped five on Wayne Avenue and began their journey down Linden Hills.
December 19th
The business district of Wayne Avenue was contained within five blocks on the northern side of the street. It had one library, one dry cleaner, one supermarket, and two delicatessens (one of which sold a better grade of marijuana than of olive loaf and took numbers when the taxi stand was closed). There were three liquor stores and three storefront churches—the Tabernacle of the Saints and Harry’s Cut Rate Winery standing side by side. A host of small real estate offices were sprinkled amid all this, and their dusty windows held crayoned placards advertising garden apartments in Linden Hills. But the apartments they actually leased sat directly across Wayne Avenue—minus the gardens and the careful maintenance that existed when white families had lived there. These apartment buildings were the enclave of the hopeful who had fled from the crowded sections of Putney Wayne and the alleys of Brewster Place. They now felt terribly suburban because they had two scarred trees at each end of the block and could actually look down into Linden Hills from their back windows. Wayne Junior High School with its large asphalt yard, handball courts, and basketball rings took up one whole block on this side of the avenue.
Willie and Lester approached each other on the side of the school yard. Willie had just crossed the avenue from one of the liquor stores, his small brown package tucked into the pocket of his light pea jacket.
“Hey, Shit.”
“Hey, White.”
Willie held out his left hand, palm up, and grinned at Lester. “Take it to the left.”
Lester grinned back, smacked a gloved hand down on Willie’s, and held out his right palm. “Take it to the right.”
The ritual was finished with Willie’s right hand. Then arms up—“Take it all if it’s good and tight”—four hands making two fists. And the boys laughed.
They had greeted each other like that since the time they had attended the school they now stood in front of. Both had graduated—Lester to Spring Vale High and Willie to the streets. But they had been inseparable in junior high school, and it was there they had picked up their nicknames and their desires to be poets. Willie K. Mason was so black that the kids said if he turned just a shade darker, there was nothing he could do but start going the other way. Didn’t ice get so cold it turned hot? And when you burned coal, it turned to ash; so if Willie got any darker, he’d just have to turn white. Willie believed this for a while and went around in the summer wearing long-sleeved shirts and a huge panama hat. He dreaded the thought of waking up white one day because then his mother would kick him out of the house and none of the really fine sisters would let him kiss them. So the darkest boy in Wayne Junior High was tagged White Willie. He became friends with Lester Tilson in the seventh grade after helping him fight a ninth grader who had called Lester “Baby Shit” because of the milky-yellow tone in his skin. The boy was twice their size and welcomed Willie’s intrusion because he was able to save his knuckles and use Willie’s head against Lester’s jaw. When Lester and Willie got up from the ground with their bloody noses soaking their shirtfronts, Willie told the boy, “There’s more where that came from if you call him Baby Shit again. He ain’t no baby.”
“Well, he look like baby shit. Tell him to put a diaper on his face.”
Lester was ready to fight again, but Willie felt it was time for a compromise. “Look, I don’t want my man to kill you now. Just call him Shit, and we’ll leave it at that.”
He convinced Lester that was a cool name. Imagine—Shit. A real cuss word and nobody could get into trouble from the principal or anything for saying it: if it’s his name, it’s his name, so what could the teachers do about it? Lester wasn’t too sure about Willie’s logic, but he knew he’d be in for it if he kept bringing a torn and dirty shirt home every day. And since his mama was known to have a right hook worse than any boy at Wayne—even the ninth graders—he let matters lie.
They went through the eighth and ninth grades together, swapping baseball cards, Smokey Robinson 45’s, and lies about their conquests over the tight-hipped girls at Wayne who were notorious at the time for not giving it up until they were married—or at least in college, because if they got pregnant, then it was by a man with a degree. Willie had shown Lester his first condom. He hoped that if only half of the stories Lester told him were just halfway true, Lester would be able to teach him how to manage the secret of that small disc of rubber so expertly that Willie could then convince the other guys that maybe some of his own stories weren’t lies.
“Come on, Shit, put it on.”
Lester stared at the limp, elastic nipple as mystified as his friend. “Naw, man.”
“Aw, please. Just show me once. See, I’ve got this girl really ready. But she’s scared of getting banged up. And all the other times I did it, I just went natural, ya know. But this particular one
won’t do it unless I use this.”
Lester took the condom with his heart pounding and tried to keep his hands from shaking. He examined it slowly while Willie waited, his eyes intent on each of his movements. Lester finally shook his head with disgust and flipped it back at Willie.
“Man, that’s too small. It’ll never fit me.”
“Yeah?” Willie looked at his friend with new respect. “But it stretches.”
“I don’t care—you got the wrong size for me. No point in breaking a good rubber.”
“God,” Willie said as he slowly uncurled the elastic tube to its full nine inches, “you must be really something.”
And Lester had shown Willie his first poems. They were studying for a geometry exam at Lester’s home on First Crescent Drive. Lester looked up several times at Willie’s dark, knotty head bent over a smudged looseleaf of triangles and lines. He nervously fingered the loose papers crammed in the back of his textbook, hoping that today would be the time he could summon up enough courage to pull them out.
“White?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing.” Lester sighed and put his head back down into his book. Writing poems was sissy stuff in the crowd he and Willie hung with—unless it was something about Miss Thatcher’s umbrella-shaped behind, or just maybe on Valentine’s Day you could get away with it if the sister who was receiving them was fine enough. But crap like this about sunsets and flowers, and how sometimes he still got a little afraid in the dark, or how he wanted to grow up and be like Malcolm X, his favorite person in all history. Or the way it felt looking at the strong, muscular body of Hank Aaron twist around when he swung a bat—damn. He didn’t want Willie to think he was a fruit or something.
“White?”
“Shit, don’t keep bothering me if it isn’t important. I think I got old Thatcher licked on this one. I can take that test tomorrow and prove that the shortest distance between two points ain’t no straight line.”
“Here.” Lester stuck the papers in his face. “Read this.” His suspended breath burned him while Willie smoothed out the crumpled sheets and began to read. Then he saw the edges of his friend’s mouth turn up just a flicker.
“If you laugh, so help me God, I’ll jump up from here and kick you right in the butt. And if you tell anybody at school, I’ll call you a liar, White Willie—and, and, I’ll kick you in the butt again. I can beat you and practically every other guy there except Spoon and that’s ’cause he fights dirty. Give me my stuff!”
Willie held the poems out of Lester’s reach. “Hey, lay light, man. You know, these are really good.”
Lester flushed with pleasure but it would be unthinkable to show it. Then he’d really be a fruit. He sucked his teeth. “Aw, they’re nothing.”
“No joke, Shit. You must have put a lot of time into these.”
“Two seconds—that’s all. Less time than you need to take a leak.”
“Well, it sure takes me a lot longer than that to do mine, and they ain’t this good.”
“Yeah?” Lester felt the muscles in his face relax but he checked himself. “Come off it. I never saw you writing no poems, not even about Miss Thatcher.”
“I never saw you neither, but you got ’em right here.”
Lester wasn’t going to be trapped that easily. “Okay, where are they? Come on, let’s go to your place right now and let me read them.”
“You can’t read them, Shit.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“No, they’re not on paper. They’re all up here.” Willie pointed to his head. “You know how my house is; I don’t have a room all to myself like you. If my brothers saw me writing poems, they’d call me a queer and then it’d be all over school and I’d have to fight my way home every day. You know, most guys think you’re a sissy if you like this stuff.”
“Yeah.” Lester nodded. “I know. But you can’t worry about those losers. What are yours about?”
So Willie began to recite to Lester. Crude, choppy verses about a place called Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, which Lester guessed must be a lot like Putney Wayne. Garbage can hide-and-go-seek. Winos who spoke wisdom. And Willie went on—about how it felt to hear your father beating your mother and what the tears looked like on your face. Willie hadn’t grown up around too many sunsets and flowers, but he too was still afraid in the dark sometimes. And once he had gotten the same crazy feelings from staring at the thighs of a Knicks center that he got from touching pretty Janie Benson.
Lester then went under his mattress and dug out more crumpled papers that he said he had to hide from his older sister, who was lower than a snake and once had read his diary, which was mostly lies anyway but it got him a whipping from his mother. Geometry forgotten, they sat in Lester’s room for hours, reciting to each other the lines that helped to harness the chaos and confusions in their fourteen-year-old worlds. Bloody noses had made them friends, but giving sound to the bruised places in their hearts made them brothers.
Willie had left school after the ninth grade. He said there was really nothing more they could teach him. He knew how to read and write and reason. And from here on in, it was all propaganda. He was now free to read the books that were important to him, not to some rusty-minded teacher. And if you wanted to write about life, you had to go where life was, among the people.
Lester went on to high school and graduated because his mother swore she’d see him dead before she saw him a dropout since, in the end, it would amount to the same thing. But he came to the conclusion that Willie had been right, although Lester could put his poetry in the school literary magazine. So all of his mother’s tears, threats, and stony silences couldn’t convince him to enroll at the university. Didn’t he want to be more than a bum like his dead father? He’d be the only kid in Linden Hills not going to college. Lester told her that Kiswana Browne hadn’t finished college and her father was hardly a bum—they had the best house on First Crescent Drive, didn’t they? That Browne girl was mentally disturbed—everybody knew that—putting holes in her nose, taking some heathen name, and going to live in the slums of Brewster Place. But Lester had all of his faculties. Didn’t he want to go to the university and come out a great poet? Lester had his mother there. Exactly—he was going to be a poet, and to write great poetry you had to be out among the people, not locked away behind a twenty-foot stone wall. Mrs. Tilson threw up her hands. He was his father’s son and she might as well accept it. His grandmother—that scheming Mamie Tilson—should have died a lot sooner before she’d corrupted his brain like she corrupted his father’s. And Mrs. Tilson would never forgive herself for letting that scum, Willie Mason, come into her home and influence her son while she was probably the only one in Linden Hills who treated him like a person. Lester hardly remembered her treatment of Willie in the same light as she did, but it seemed that she had decided to stop nagging him about school and that was good enough for the present.
So Lester then joined Willie in giving poetry readings in coffeehouses, bookstores, and the city park. They supported themselves with odd jobs because they couldn’t make a living from their work. And Willie couldn’t even pick up the occasional five dollars that Lester got from getting a poem into a local newspaper because he never wrote them down. Willie continued the habit of creating stanzas in his mind and eventually had a repertoire in the hundreds. He said his aim was to be like the great slave poet, Jupiter Hammon, who memorized thousands of verses because he couldn’t read. Willie considered it a terrible drawback that he had even gone as far as junior high and so could read very well. The written word dulls the mind, and since most of what’s written is by white men, it’s positively poisonous.
Willie sought out fewer and fewer jobs over the years. He became a regular on Wayne Avenue, where he’d rented a room, and could be seen sipping wine and smoking pot with other young black men who were either tired of looking for work or tired of finding it. When he got drunk enough he dropped his street language and totally bewildered them with lo
ng recitations in perfect iambic pentameter about the state of American society. So Willie gained the respect of Wayne Avenue because he was a “deep” dude. But it was getting toward the end of the year and the icy winds had driven Willie’s audience into their separate homes. He was now forced to talk to himself, and his reflections disturbed him. He was twenty years old and the last job he had he worked side by side with a twelve year old who came in after school. Would that be his fate at thirty and forty? What difference did it make that he could arrange the ingredients on a cereal box into heroic couplets while he shoved it into a bag and carried it out to someone’s car? With jobs like that, he saw himself frozen in time, never becoming a man, just a very gray-haired boy. He’d think about Linden Hills and all that it offered, and wonder if perhaps there might have been another way.
Willie thought about this now, looking at Lester, who had at least finished high school and would inherit a home on First Crescent Drive.
“Hey, man, what you know good?” Willie said.
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