Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  “Say,” he said.

  I had passed by this store before and nobody ever had actually said anything to me. As a matter of fact, I had passed right by here on my way to Mrs. Washington house. Did I see this same man earlier? I couldn't remember. There'd been some men standing out here, there always were no matter what time of the day, but none of them had noticed me.

  “Psst,” he said again.

  I crossed my arms in front of me so he couldn't see the outline of my training bra and notice what was sprouting underneath. What did Mama say about little girls with pressed hair? “The last thing a little girl need is to give somebody a reason to look at her.”

  “Say,” he said again and I just took off running. He might could smell fear like a dog but he couldn't run as fast as one.

  When I got home, my face was slick with sweat.

  Mama was in the kitchen again, washing dishes. “What you doing running like that? I didn't spend seven dollars for a press and curl for you to sweat it out in the same day!” She shook her finger at me; drops of water and soap made little splatters on the floor. “You got to make up your mind what you want.”

  I was breathing hard, but I was able to say, “It ain't pressed no more?” If it wasn't I wouldn't have been hurt. I only wished that I could have seen it before it went back nappy.

  “No,” Mama said inspecting my head. “It's still straight. But you can't do all that playing if you want to wear curls.”

  “Yes ma'am.”

  She smiled. “You like it?”

  “I don't know. I ain't seen it yet.” I put my hand to my neck, where my nappiest hair grows. Everything back there was smooth as the green strands inside the corn husk. “It feel good, though.”

  I closed my eyes when I walked into the bathroom. I wanted to see myself all at once, like a picture when somebody snatches a red cloth from over it. When my hips knocked up against the sink, I knew I was right in front of the mirror. I opened my eyes.

  My hair was not hanging down my back. It didn't even make it to my ears. Mrs. Washington had turned it into tight curls about as big around as a magic marker. Each curl sat close to my head in five or six rows like I was recharging fifty batteries on the top of my head.

  “It's going to be pretty tomorrow,” Mama said.

  I didn't answer. Mama didn't spend seven dollars to see me cry.

  “We'll comb it out in the morning.”

  “But it's so short.” My voice was shaky.

  “She cut it?”

  “No. But I thought pressing your hair was supposed to make it long.” I couldn't help it now. I let the tears run loose. I stood up against Mama but she didn't hug me.

  “What's your problem?” She held me by my shoulders.

  “A dog chased me on the way home.”

  “Well, ain't no dog in here now and ain't nothing wrong with your hair. Seven dollars can't buy a miracle. What? You think Mrs. Washington supposed to put hair on your head?”

  I moved away since I could see she wasn't going to give me any sympathy. Even worse, she was getting mad.

  “On the one hand, you want to be so grown, then you run in the street like a little kid, turn around, and want to cry like a baby.” She put her hands on her hips, shaking her head.

  What was she talking about? She was the one who said that pressing hair made you grown. I just wanted to have curls. But not these magic marker rolls. All I wanted was to be pretty. Make it where somebody could look at me and actually like what they see.

  “Now, get on out of here. I need to get my bath so I can get ready to go to the wake.” She stood in front of the mirror. “That poor little boy.”

  Mama's hair around the edges and in the back didn't lay down like the straightening comb told it to. It curled up in tight, hard knots that kids call “BB shots.” Especially behind her scabbed ears.

  “Look at me,” Mama said. “My hair is all over my head.” She looked at me with that Sunday school teacher look. I tucked my head and left the room.

  I went in to my bedroom and cried facedown in the pillow, careful not to mash my hair.

  I Don't Know Nothin'

  'Bout Birthin' No Babies

  BY SANDRA JACKSON-OPOKU

  FROM The River Where Blood Is Born

  October 20, 1973

  Dear Allie Mae:

  How is college treating my baby way up there in Providence?

  Don't a day pass when I don't think about you, and miss you, and wonder how you're getting on. I'm counting the days until you home with us for Christmas. Wish we could afford to bring you home Thanksgiving, too. But you know how tight money is. This twenty dollars ain't much, but I hope it helps you some.

  We all been doing fine. Benny fell off the toilet up at Waukegan and had to go in the hospital. He's doing better now, praise the Lord. Otis lost his little bit of disability money last month. Those peoples had the nerve to tell him he well enough to go to work, bad as his back is.

  You remember Miss Nibbs out to Lombard, where I mind her mother Friday nights? She so happy to hear you in college. She give me these books and magazines she was fixing to throw away, thought you might could use them.

  I see one here where they pay peoples to write about My Most Unforgettable Character. You know I don't have much education. I don't know much about story writing and what-all. But Lord knows I could use the money. And I have known me some Unforgettable Characters in my time. Maybe you could write it up for me.

  I know I ain't never told you much about my childhood. I been spending my life trying to forget. It wasn't an easy thing coming up in Cairo. But if I learned one thing at the age of forty-five, it's the truth of that old church song. “I can't get above what made me.” I been thinking a lot about peoples I ain't seen in years.

  Let me tell you about Lula Mae Jaspars. You know Cousin Lola, on my daddy's side? Her mama, my Aunt Truly, was my daddy's half sister. I guess you could call us distant first cousins. They were the kinfolk you never saw much of, come from living too close to the white folks' part of town.

  Old Sheriff Jaspars was one of the ugliest mens you would want to see. Red face, red hair, big old red nose. Now you got to know he had a red neck. That didn't stop him from keeping his two houses. A big rambling one for his white wife and kids. A little white cottage for Aunt Truly and the kids they had.

  I don't know how he done it. Maybe he would switch up days. Say, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with Aunt Truly. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for Mrs. Jaspars, his white wife. Sunday to rest—you know he needed it. Between his two families, Sheriff Jaspars had twenty-something kids. Lula Mae was one of them.

  They say Lula Mae was her daddy's favorite of the bunch. She didn't favor him, except for being kind of on the red side. How ugly Sheriff Jaspars made such a fine gal, I'll never know. Those light, funny-colored eyes of Lula Mae's. I swear they changed with the weather. Rainy days they was gray, sunny days they was green. She got that good hair too, used to wear it all down her back. Never did have the need of no straightening comb.

  Lula Mae Jaspars grew up to be a traveling woman. Her daddy sent her all over. New York City. New Orleans. Texas. I wanted to be a traveling woman, too, but I was too chicken-shit to go off on my own. She was in San Francisco when I got it in my mind to go out and see her. I wasn't but about fourteen years old, but I went up there on the train all by myself. First time I ever set foot out of Cairo, I went halfway across country. Took me the better part of a week.

  Lula Mae, who had been about the sharpest dresser in Alexander County, had took to wearing sandals, long skirts, headrags, and gold hoops in her ears. She had herself a Mexican boyfriend, and was passing herself off as a Gypsy fortune-teller, but she ain't used no crystal ball. She had a little black spider tatooed in the cup of her right hand, with all the lines in her palm stretched out around it like a web. For a price, she would tell them filthy-rich white womens up on Telegraph Hill what the spider saw in their future.

  At first Lola, which is wha
t Lula Mae had started calling herself, wasn't that happy to see her country cousin. But when it came to her that I could be of some help, Lola changed her mind and welcomed me with open arms. She got me on with the MacAvie family doing cleaning. It turned out I was doing her work and mines, too.

  You know, thinking back on it, Dennis MacAvie might make a good story. That child was something else. I called him Dennis the Menace. I'd put him in his high chair while I cleaned up the house. He liked to be up high. And he'd be steady watching me with those big old blue eyes. He would wait for me all morning, just as quiet and patient. By lunchtime I would have that whole house spotless and the rest of the day left to play with Dennis.

  The older he got, the more he swore I was his mama. But I wasn't soft like Mrs. Hightone MacAvie. I wasn't but fifteen years old, but Callie Mae Bullocks did not take no mess. I remember one day they give me some money to take Dennis to a picture show. Dennis wanted a cowboy picture. I wanted to see Gone With the Wind. Guess who won?

  “Lordy, Miz Scarlet. I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies!”

  Me and old buck-eyed Butterfly McQueen about the only black faces in the movie house. Dennis just would have to point at the screen and holler out: “Look! There you go, Callie Mae.”

  Child, I took him out of there and tanned his natural hide. If he had the nerve to show his behind, I had the nerve to whip it for him. Showing me out like that. I might be somebody's housemaid, but I wasn't hardly nobody's slave. If Dennis ain't learned nothing else, I made sure he learned that well.

  “Are you my real mother?” he come asking me another time.

  “Now, Dennis. How I'm going to be your mother? Look at you. I'm colored. You're white.”

  “No.” Dennis shakes his blond head. “I'm colored, too.”

  I went and got his crayon box and a big sheet of white paper.

  “Look at here.” I drew a stick figure with the brown crayon. “This is me. What color is that?”

  Dennis squinched up his eyes. He was just learning to name his colors.

  “Brown.”

  “Alright.” I picked out the white crayon. “Now, this is you.”

  I rubbed and rubbed it on the paper.

  “But Callie Mae. Nothing's coming out.”

  “That's right, child. You see, they call people, like me, “colored,” because we're colored brown or black. They call people like you “white,” because you don't have no color to you.”

  He frowned up his face and snatched the crayon away from me. He commenced to scratching it against the paper, trying to get a picture out of it. Finally it broke.

  “Ain't nothing you can do to make white colored, Dennis MacAvie.”

  When it hit him that he couldn't make a colored picture with that white crayon, he bust out crying and wailed the whole afternoon.

  Well, I've met colored people who wanted to be white so bad they would take a shotgun to their own shadow. And I've met many a colored person who don't have a thing in the world to hold on to but their color. I was one of them. But I ain't never met a white person who wanted to be colored so bad they would cry about it. Not until that day.

  Lola said I was being cruel to the child. But you know as good as I do that Dennis would grow up and learn to love his whiteness. You know he did. But you better believe that he also grew up knowing that darkness can make a mighty mark. And Dennis MacAvie also ain't out there making a mammy out of every colored woman he comes across, or my name ain't Callie Mae Clemmons.

  Of course, I didn't have a way in the world of knowing how he grew up until near on thirty years later. Lola got in trouble with the family about bringing a man in the house to sleep in their bed when they was out of town. Dennis got an eyeful and couldn't wait to run and tell. And we were both sent packing back to Cairo.

  But Lola wasn't a woman who would stay put for too long. Being run out of San Francisco on a rail ain't put a crook in her step. She hadn't sat down in Cairo good before she was off again to be with a man up in Phoenix. A black man this time. He had a little piece of change in his pocket, too. You know Lola had to have a man with some money.

  Back then Clyde Brown owned the only barbershop and funeral parlor in town, right next door to each other. “Clyde's cuts will do you proud,” was one of his slogans. “Browns, for the Funeral of Distinction,” was the other.

  Passing for Creole now (which I guess Creole is just about anything you want to make it), Lola went ahead on and married him. When she had the baby she come back down to Cairo and got me. I guess then she remembered how good I did her all those years in San Francisco when she was supposed to be baby-sitting Dennis. Lola never been too good with kids, anyway. Her temper ain't as long as my toenail.

  Anyway, I went on up to Phoenix to be Clyde and Lola's live-in. And here's where I met another one of My Most Unforgettable Characters. He was so unforgettable, I up and married him. But that's getting ahead of the story.

  I thank Clyde Brown to this day. If it hadn't been for him wanting to stay home and play with his baby girl, I might not have never met your daddy. His name was Benjamin Peeples, but everybody who knew him called him “King.”

  Clyde had set Lola up in a little business. She was queen of Lola's Place, a little juke joint that served watered-down drinks and live music. That night Clyde had come home from the barbershop or funeral parlor, one. He woke up Pat and started playing with her. She opened those big eyes and grinned all up in his face, nothing but curls and dimples. A little Daddy's Girl. If I had woke the hussy out of sleep she would have been screaming to beat the band.

  “Go on out and have a good time, Callie Mae. I'm baby-sitting tonight.”

  “Where I'm going? I don't know nobody around here.”

  “Go on down to Lola's. If you want to meet you somebody, that's where they all at.”

  So down to Lola's I went. And I met me somebody. A big, black, burly somebody. Six and a half feet tall. King was there taking pictures of the colored folks dancing and drinking and flirting with each other's wives. He'd snap awhile, then duck back in that room behind the bar awhile. It was crowded that Saturday night, seemed like everybody wanted their picture took. King stuck his head out the door and hollered over where I was sitting drinking my soda pop, trying to make like it was something else.

  “Come on in here and help me, girl.”

  Turned out to be, King had a darkroom set up in there where he was printing up the pictures as quick as he could shoot them. I got a quick lesson and was left to develop film and print pictures for the rest of the evening. We were a good team from day one. Just like a key and lock when they're well greased and not rusty. One works the other.

  King, he was a natural-born salesman. Loud and friendly, could tell a Shine joke to a church mother and have her laughing at the filthiest lines. People just took a liking to him. He'd jolly them into having their pictures took; sweet-talk the womens, buddy up the mens. We'd sometimes pull in two hundred dollars on a good night. We'd work Chicago, Gary, Milwaukee, Peoria, and every place in between. Lord, wasn't that the good life?

  See, me—I was the quiet type. I was happy to be in the back in the dark, with the noise and the music and the laughter floating back to me. I never missed a thing. Anything I ain't overheard, the pictures told the story the minute they start coming to life in the fix.

  And if they didn't have nothing to say, King sure would. When the night was over we'd go on back home, count up our money, and King would tell me which woman got drunk and danced the hootchie-kootchie on the bar, who beat whose butt in what fight, what songs the band was singing that night.

  King had him a good singing voice. He could croon just as good as that other man they called King who used to work the same juke joints we did before he went and got famous singing:

  “Unforgettable, that's what you are.”

  What went wrong with your daddy and me? The lock ran out of grease. The key wore down. Children started being born.

  Maybe I should never have had
kids. Lord knows I love you both. But when I had taken care of other people's babies it was so easy. When I had my own, it was hard as day-old biscuits. Hard as a pimp's heart. Hard as the sun-baked row you know you got to hoe. That's why I look after old folks now. Seems I'm better helping ease folks out of life than I am raising them up in it.

  Your brother, Benny, wasn't right from the beginning. He wanted to go out of this life the minute he came in it. Maybe they should have let him. They worked on him a good twenty minutes to bring him back. But part of him stayed over on the other side. He always hung back. Slow to crawl, slow to walk, slow to talk. Took him ten years to get up to where most boys would be at two. And he ain't never went no further.

  Big, lively King and his slow son, Benny. It broke his heart every time he looked at the boy. And it broke my heart when I saw him looking. He never laid blame, but I always felt to blame. Like I must have done something wrong to make a child that wasn't right. Maybe it was the smoke in the air of all them juke joints. Maybe it was the chemicals I always had my hands in.

  When I got pregnant again King made me come off the road.

  “You a mother now. Soon to be mother of two. These late nights and smoky taverns ain't the right life for a mother.”

  You was a normal child, even though you came six weeks early. Black as a raisin and smart as a whip. But Lord, I ain't never seen such a colicky baby. Always wanted somebody to be holding you. If not, you cried. Girl, you could lay up there for an hour, flailing those little legs and wailing those little lungs. Once you got started good, Benny would join in. Sometimes I'd have to go out on the porch just to get away from the noise and have a minute to myself.

  King was away working nights, sometimes overnight. And my mind would be working overtime. I'd be seeing him with some woman in the corner of a tavern somewhere. I'd hear his deep laugh mixed in with her soft one, while I sat up and listened to babies screaming.

  Motherhood turned me into somebody I didn't like. A prying, jealous, hateful somebody. The kind of woman who goes through wallets and listens in on phone calls. A woman who boils water and sharpens knives. King was a traveling man. I knew that when I met him. One day he went out on the road and didn't come back.