And they loved it. Or, as we used to say, they loveded it. All the kids, mine, too—my son, Hiram Junior, standing next to Bryant as his best man, and my daughter and her boyfriend, the so-called Afrocentric intellectual—I swear they acted like we were at the Penn relays instead of a solemn event. They put their hands up in the air and did those doggie hoots like the audience on the old Arsenio Hall show.
“They gonna make this thing into a fuckin' farce,” Audrey said through her teeth. “It'th da bomb!”
I just put my head down and said a prayer.
When I looked up Arneatha was standing in front of the fireplace completely unperturbed. Arneatha can fall over her own shadow, she's so clumsy, but let her stand still somewhere and she exudes calm. I've seen her do it in a classroom: The peacefulness spreads right through the children. Bryant and Junior were so handsome in the tuxes Hiram got them, and Bryant looked so much like Audrey's father, I couldn't help remarking on it.
“Don't even say it.”
Arneatha indicated with a finger that the bridesmaid should step back and give the bride room to squeeze in next to Bryant. The ring bearer started to have a fit because he couldn't see, so Junior scooped him up and held him in one arm for the rest of the service. When the wedding party was still and the guests were finally silent, Arneatha let out that beautiful voice. It is a voice that is rich and smooth, not overpowering, but intense. It's a gift and, when she wants to, Arneatha knows how to use it.
“Dearly beloved,” she began, “we are gathered together here in the sight of God and the ancestors and in the presence of these witnesses to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”
At the point in the ceremony where you can read something, the bridesmaid and Junior stepped forward. The ring bearer, who was spoiled rotten, wouldn't get down, so Junior shifted him to his left arm and read holding his papers in the right:
“‘There is no sweeter name than that of my friend, my love, my soul's companion.' ”
Then the girl read: “For the Bible says: ‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard over the land.' ”
Tamara leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “‘The voice of the turtle?' ”
“And the Bible also says,” he continued, “‘A faithful friend is the medicine of life.' ”
Then the bridesmaid started to sing “You Are So Beautiful to Me.” Her voice was husky and smallish, but right on pitch and from her throat, not all up in her nose like most of the children sing today. Audrey nodded her head. It was just right.
When she finished Arneatha went into her signature wedding prayer: “Father God, we ask your blessings on these two people. They are so very young. We ask that you teach them how to care for and care about each other, knowing that in a marriage nobody gets his or her way all the time, knowing that in many cases, Lord God, you will ask that they rise to the occasion when they swear they cannot, and share when they feel they do not have enough, and give what they never got themselves.”
I commenced to crying right on cue. Like a big baby. I'd been keeping up a good front, but I was exhausted, and Lord knows that like Audrey, I wished he'd held off a few years. And sitting there I had another thought: That of all the people in the room, Arneatha herself was the one who should've had the babies. It wasn't too late yet, but it almost was. We were becoming grandmas already.
Why else was I crying? I don't know.
“Dear God, help them build a life for themselves and their children. We don't fall in love, we receive love from God and we use it in our lives. We know what's in everyone's mind at this wedding, Lord. You've already blessed them with fertility. Teach them how to make love work in the home they will now build together.”
I probably wouldn't have boo-hooed like that had it not been for the cancer. And, as these things go, I had it easy—I contracted one of the good cancers. The girls teased me that I had the rich white women's cancer with the 96 percent cure rate. But something like that rocks your world. It just does. And then there's the other 4 percent.
What I did, the minute I was diagnosed, was I decided to fight this monkey. To my mind, that means not giving in. I like life rich. Like the kids say: phat, large. I made up my mind to that a long time ago. I am going to eat my beef and my pork. Sorry. Pigs' feet is what kept our people alive. I mean it. That's why God gave Adam dominion over the animals. And I am going to put cream in my coffee. I will not let this cancer dictate my every move. I will not live in constant fear. I swear, I think that makes it grow more.
I didn't go to the cancer support groups the hospital sponsored because of the same reasons. I do not want to sit up in a room with a bunch of baldheaded white women talking about how scared we are that the cancer's going to come back. Arneatha told me I was missing an opportunity for spiritual growth, and I told her that I loved her dearly, but that I was growing just about as fast as I could take. I told her, I said: “I got you; what I need the group for?”
So, as Arneatha was saying that marriage is an honorable estate, she looked at me and it felt like the look she gave me in the hospital when I asked if she believed in heaven. “All I know,” she said, “is that life is short, and that this is no dress rehearsal.”
Jesus have mercy.
This is the real thing, I kept thinking, and it's already half over. Half a lifetime ago, I was standing up there myself. I wasn't but nineteen when I got married to a grown man—Hiram was thirty-one—and I knew precisely what I was doing. I'd worked at his bar for eight months. He'd been watching me, but kept his distance. So one day I pulled him aside and told him that I knew his political ambitions. I told him that I knew exactly the kind of wife he needed, and that I could be that wife. I told him that not many women could think as big as I knew he was thinking, and very few could live up to the vision. But I had imagination—and I knew how to stick. Then I stood there waiting for an answer. Thinking that I couldn't possibly be serious, I guess, he told me that he had a thing for blondes. What about that? Could I be a blonde for him? He said it kind of offhand. I was awfully young.
Now, I was not some poor, pathetic child slinking around the world dying to be a wife. I was on a mission—we all were, our set, our little pride, as one of our teachers at Girls' High called us, us four lionesses lying out on our rock in the sun, watching the water hole, just seeing what was going to turn up for us. That makes it sound like we were going to gobble up whoever came along, but too bad how it sounds. If you're a black woman with ambition—or man, for that matter—you better be aggressive and expect that somebody's not going to like you. Because we are supposed to be sub. Subservient. Subsistent. Substandard. Subliterate. Subordinate. Subdued. America doesn't want us off welfare. They want us on welfare, right where they can keep an eye on us.
Far as women are concerned, a lotta men want you to be sub, too. Not Hiram. Hiram expects you to be on equal footing, which is hard sometimes because he is larger than life. It's why people vote for him. Hiram walks into the room and people turn to see who it is. He disturbs the air.
So, there are women, inevitably. I didn't quite figure that in at nineteen, but then, you don't at that age. It hasn't been so bad, really. Nothing I could ever really point to specifically. No disrespect.
He has very strong principles across the board, and where it counts. It wasn't enough for him to own a bar; he wanted to move the drug dealers off his corner so neighborhood people could come in for a beer without being afraid. We had a couple of little light-bright old schoolteachers on the block, lived together in a perfect little house with green shutters—I swear they were lesbians—and he made us make a pitcher of iced tea for them so they could stop in after school on Fridays and have a glass with us. That sort of thing. He brought in a local DJ so people could dance outside the bar on Saturday nights and sold soda and water ice and roast beef sandwiches from a s
idewalk table. You have never seen a bar like Hiram created. It was like the family barbecue that most of us wished we had.
So when he said the blonde thing, I decided not to take offense. I didn't go off about how here's another brother wants white women and all that. What I did, I took it as a challenge. Everything with him is a challenge, a competition. I said—to myself, that is—OK, Negro, you want blond? I'll see you your blond, and I'll raise you.
I went home and bought some Dusky Sahara-something-or-other and dyed my hair. Then I had my girlfriend, Audrey's cousin, give me a new cut and curl. I told her I wanted it bone straight, with just a bang at the bottom for movement so the highlights could catch the light, but short, sophisticated. And I'll tell you a funny thing—see, people think fashion and hair and all is frivolous, but how are we introduced to one another if not through our eyes?—when I picked up the mirror that night, it was as if the woman looking back was exactly who I was meant to be all along, as if that little girl with that rhiney red hair and freckles was the ugly duckling, and, now, I had become the swan. Blond swan. I swear. I decided who I was going to be for Hiram Prettyman, and I can look anybody in the face and tell them: I have lived up to it, too.
When Arneatha got to the part in the service about married people present renewing their commitment, I reached over and squeezed Hiram's hand. Twenty-one years. I remember thinking at that moment maybe that's when marriages, like people, came of age.
Arneatha told Bryant to kiss his bride, and, honest to God, he just went for it. Tamara leaned forward over my shoulder and said to me, “Remember you asked what he saw in her?”
And I have to say, until that moment I never could picture it. You don't, with your own children. Or at least I don't see them as, you know, sexual persons. Tam would. But then, she's the one went down on some little Negro at a house party—and we were only sixteen—so I figured, consider the source.
Audrey saw it, too, which is why she always called the child T&A. Audrey does have a nasty mouth on her sometimes, and that's no more than the truth. In fact, when we had our big falling out fifteen years ago over Bryant—that time she said she was coming to get him to take him to the zoo, but she didn't, and he fell asleep right there by the front door, in his own chair, dressed up in the little blue blazer Hiram bought him—we got into the fight of our lives, and Audrey said some things to me that to this day I will not repeat. But God knows she has paid for it. For every drink she poured down her throat, she has paid a terrible price.
I can't forget, but I surely can forgive, and it's as if I had saved a place for her in my heart all along. Bryant will take longer, though. He gives her her due respect, but he is very, very cool. I can understand that.
Tamara slipped out to get the food and the toast going. I swear, she should've been a caterer. Caterers make good money. College professors do, too, but I have always thought that she was trying to prove something. She said as much herself—that the only thing her Jamaican parents wanted was money and middle-class respectability, even though they couldn't stand respectable, middle-class Americans. So, her compromise was to teach college, drive a thirty-year-old sports car, and stay single.
But if you watched her constructing that wedding cake, putting in straws between the layers to hold the thing together, and then piping the butter cream like they blow insulation into a crawl space under the shed kitchen, you would have seen her whole body come alive. I mean, she twisted and turned and maneuvered. Then she'd put a dab on her finger and come over to me and put her finger to my mouth. The butter and lemon and some drops of raspberry liqueur blended on my tongue like I never could have imagined.
“Tastes like spring, doesn't it?” she asked. “You said you wished we could've had a spring wedding. So, here's the taste of May. And look—”
She opened a mail-order box from out of the fridge and showed me purple and yellow pansies crusted all over with sugar.
“They're crystallized,” she said. “They'll match the ones you put out front.”
They were so beautiful I didn't know what to say. So she tore one, popped half in her mouth, half in mine, and then went back to cementing the top tier of the cake with butter cream.
Tamara may dog Martha Stewart, but I say, if you don't like what she's doing, go out and do it better. I told Tamara that I think, in the nineties, America's ready for a tall, gorgeous, dark-skinned woman with her own TV show on cooking. Oprah has prepared them. Audrey went for the idea so much that she called cable companies and got information about every public access channel in the Delaware Valley.
Tamara wouldn't take us seriously.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “I'd be like a cross between Martha Stewart and Grace Jones. That'll make 'em take notice.”
OK, I told her. We only have but so many schemes to make one another rich and famous, and she already threw away Audrey's idea to do a line of divorce cards back when she was in art school and nobody else was doing them. Now even Hallmark publishes divorce cards. But why listen to us? I'm just the high school graduate who does charity balls and Audrey's the temp nurse. Like what do we know?
FROM What Looks Like Crazy
on an Ordinary Day
BY PEARL CLEAGE
• 1
I'm sitting at the bar in the airport, minding my own business, trying to get psyched up for my flight, and I made the mistake of listening to one of those TV talk shows. They were interviewing some women with what the host kept calling “full-blown AIDS.” As opposed to half-blown AIDS, I guess. There they were, weeping and wailing and wringing their hands, wearing their prissy little Laura Ashley dresses and telling their edited-for-TV life stories.
The audience was eating it up, but it got on my last nerve. The thing is, half these bitches are lying. More than half. They get diagnosed and all of a sudden they're Mother Teresa. “I can't be positive! It's impossible! I'm practically a virgin!” Bullshit. They got it just like I got it: fucking men.
That's not male bashing, either. That's the truth. Most of us got it from the boys. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good argument for cutting men loose, but if I could work up a strong physical reaction to women, I would already be having sex with them. I'm not knocking it. I'm just saying I can't be a witness. Too many titties in one place to suit me.
I try to tune out the “almost-a-virgins,” but they're going on and on and now one is really sobbing and all of a sudden I get it. They're just going through the purification ritual. This is how it goes: First, you have to confess that you did nasty, disgusting sex stuff with multiple partners who may even have been of your same gender. Or you have to confess that you like to shoot illegal drugs into your veins and sometimes you use other people's works when you want to get high and you came unprepared. Then you have to describe the sin you have confessed in as much detail as you can remember. Names, dates, places, faces. Specific sexual acts. Quantity and quality of orgasms. What kind of dope you shot. What park you bought it in. All the down and dirty. Then, once your listeners have been totally freaked out by what you've told them, they get to decide how much sympathy, attention, help, money, and understanding you're entitled to based on how disgusted they are.
I'm not buying into that shit. I don't think anything I did was bad enough for me to earn this as the payback, but it gets rough out here sometimes. If you're not a little kid, or a heterosexual movie star's doomed but devoted wife, or a hemophiliac who got it from a tainted transfusion, or a straight white woman who can prove she's a virgin with a dirty dentist, you're not eligible for any no-strings sympathy.
The truth is, people are usually relieved. It always makes them feel better when they know the specifics of your story. You can see their faces brighten up when your path is one they haven't traveled. That's why people keep asking me if I know who I got it from. Like all they'd have to do to ensure their safety is cross this specific guy's name off their list of acceptable sexual partners the same way you do when somebody starts smoking crack: “No future here
.” But I always tell them the truth: “I have no idea.” That's when they frown and give me one last chance to redeem myself. If I don't know who, do I at least know how many?
By that time I can't decide if I'm supposed to be sorry about having had a lot of sex or sorry I got sick from it. And what difference does it make at this point, anyway? It's like lying about how much you loved the rush of the nicotine just because now you have lung cancer.
I'm babbling. I must be higher than I thought. Good. I hate to fly. I used to dread it so much I'd have to be falling-down drunk to get on a plane. For years I started every vacation with a hangover. That's actually how I started drinking vodka, trying to get up the nerve to go to Jamaica for a reggae festival. Worked like a charm, too, and worth a little headache the first day out and the first day back.
I know I drink too much, but I'm trying to cut back. When I first got diagnosed, I stayed drunk for about three months until I realized it was going to be a lot harder to drink myself to death then it might be to wait it out and see what happens. Some people live a long time with HIV. Maybe I'll be one of those, grinning like a maniac on the front of Parade magazine, talking about how I did it.
I never used to read those survivor testimonials, but now I do, for obvious reasons. The first thing they all say they had to do was learn how to calm the fuck down, which is exactly why I was drinking so much, trying to cool out. The problem was, after a while I couldn't tell if it was the vodka or the HIV making me sick, and I wanted to know the difference.
But I figure a little lightweight backsliding at thirty thousand feet doesn't really count, so by the time we boarded, I had polished off two doubles and was waiting for the flight attendant to smile that first-class-only smile and bring me two more. That's why I pay all that extra money to sit up here, so they'll bring me what I want before I have to ring the bell and ask for it.
Gumbo Page 13