“I stole a handful of cracklin from Mistah and Miz Watkins today, Granma’am,” Luke edward answered, a manly voice from a boy’s shoes. He knows the rhythm of this dance. He only comes in when it’s clearly his turn. Luke edward has been a good dancer since we were little in the bottom-floor flat. He was a long drink of water for a young Negro boy, and the ladies would just rub his head and the men and my daddy would say he’s gone be a killer.
When one song is over, a new one starts.
Granma’am stood up: “Well, you know, Willyum,” to Mistah Watkins, “I am terr’bly sorry bout all this. I’m a come by there tomorrah an pay you an May Belle for whatevah we owe y’all. Lemme jes take care a this young man here. Thank you for stoppin in.” Granma’am talked her city proper talk, she thought, and so we knew—I knew—she had the fury in her. She opened up the screen, an Mistah Watkins turned and tipped his hat and said, “Now, you know, Miz Dambridge, dis ain’t no kinda reference to what you might owe. Miz Watkins and I is jes concernt bout dese chillun. Alla chillun belong to all us, you know.”
“Well, thank you again for stoppin,” Granma’am repeats. “I will come by and see bout things, just the same.” Granma’am can’t hold the door no wider, so Mistah Watkins finally walks through it.
I breathe again cause Watkins was back out on the dirt. Luke continued to stand up like he knew he had better; you don’t sit down in Granma’am’s parlor no way, and you sure don’t sit in it when you wrong.
Granma’am shut the door, and I missed the distraction of old nasty Mistah Watkins right away. Granma’am, she just walk out the parlor, straight down the hall to the back, where the light of all our working was lit.
“Come heah, boy,” she called back behind her. Luke drug his pitiful long self along, and I got up and followed him this time.
I think my head was tipped to one side, that’s how I carried it stoved up with things; I still hadn’t looked my brother Luke full in the face. The shadows had kept me from it, but Luke wouldn’t have looked at me no way, not boxed in all that trouble he was in. He mutters, “Wish I didn’t have to come down this place ever again.”
That was his last summer there down home with me. After Mama heard from Granma’am about Luke’s going to pot, Mama decided that Luke was dog on uncooperative. She stopped sending him down home. Now we had two escaped and often recollected beauties in the family, Margarete and that handsome young devil of hers.
GRANMA’AM CALLED LUKE when she was in the middle of the hall, and he followed her and I followed him. Granma’am still wearing her beetlebug wig. Luke edward seemed gangly and lanky and unrepentant even in this fresh moment. I had my mouth pressed shut, head tipped to the side. Granma’am went straight into the slop closet. As she was closing the door behind her, she said: “Luke, go out in the yard and bring me a wet green switch. Neesey,” she kept barking, “move that tub out the way.”
I could not believe Granma’am was about to switch Luke edward. She hardly never switched us anymore. Besides, Luke was big as sin, bigger then than Granma’am, I recall. I also remember that this is when Luke started to make his famous walled-up face and blank eyes. He was only beautiful when he was not that way. Anybody went ahead and yelled at that boy would only get a look at how dammed up he was.
I lost myself: I don’t know what I was seeing, or what I was tasting rolling off my face. I know there was a sightlessness stealing off the little painful parts. The night was like a punctured black wall. Luke cussed and muttered about dirt religion and I think I heard him calling Granma’am this and that witch. Luke went out the back door as Granma’am hollered from the slop closet that she didn’t hear no movement out there. I started pushing the big tin tub back behind the stove where we kept it when nobody was bathing, or going to bathe soon, or had just finished they bath.
Luke come back with a switch courageous. Hadn’t taken him two minutes to get that thing, long as a rope almost. I wouldn’t never want to be hit with nothing so like a whip as that.
He was standing there with his switch for his trouble and his lips was poked out. I know Luke edward; he was my god, especially then. I know that daring poked-out mouth he gets. Like when somebody at school would mess with me or one of my friends, and maybe he would get a chance to fight. He would walk up in the screaming circle and beat up some fool, protecting me, with his lips poked shut like that. Mama never got on Luke about that because she thought it was manly, told him it was his job, told him he was like his daddy; yes, he should watch out for his little sister. All the time I went to school before I got sent down home, not a body ever put a hand on me, on account of the threat of Luke edward, and how quick he showed up with that half-perturbed half-smile.
I was still looking at the switch courageous—I get stuck in my tracks under duress—when Granma’am come out the slop closet with a newspaper pulled between her hands. She put it down in the middle of the kitchen table, and I liked to fell out. It had a huge mound of movement on it, brown and high-piled for the few minutes Granma’am had took to make it. I ain’t never seen no pile of movement like that before, less it was from a cow or dog or some other such unconscious thing. I like to got sick: how would I have my grits on this table in the morning what with the movement on the table this evening? This was the table of my breakfast, the table of my pumpkin, the table of my entrance to the day. I knew I would always see that mound there, whenever I looked. Was that what Granma’am aimed?
I drug my hanging open mouth and my bucked eyes up, away from that mess so I could see some faces, get some clues about what was fixing to happen here. I wondered where was David, outside and this rain coming.
Luke had the trepidation now. “Gimme that switch, boy,” Granma’am said. “Whachu know bout stealin?” she start right in, not a second worth of wasted breath. Lawd, Granma’am, please don’t start askin Luke no whole buncha questions, you know he ain’t gone half answer you an then you gone be madder an less steady than you are already. I know she knows he ain’t gone answer and besides Luke stared hard at that movement on the table like anybody with sense would. He was wondering too. I know it. We didn’t have no experience with this. “I ast you what you know bout stealin.” The room thundered hell, and Luke’s judgment rocked over him in the person of the old woman whose face sweat and whose legs tripped around the table in a dance of condemnation, some wicked ritual of salvation, her wig slipping ever more to the side.
Four rivers salted my face: eyes and nose both let loose in his honor. Luke started to taste his own salt too, I think. He wasn’t answering Granma’am, she hit him hard cross his long skinny arm with the switch. “Whachu know bout stealin, you no-count little boy?” She was stroke mad. Lawd a mercy. Luke took one hand and put it over the place where the switch had hit. I knewed there’d be a welt there in a second. Right where those fingers were, Granma’am struck Luke again. Her beetle-wig sliding. “I don’t know who taught you so wrongly that you could decide that you only answer when you feel like it, but I’m your elder!” she hollered. “I asked you whachu know bout stealin and I aim tuh git a answer out you shortly.” I think she had hit him enough for all his future by then. “Whachu know bout stealin?” Her screaming belched. She was mad as a bear on fire.
“Nothin. I don’t know nothin bout stealin.” Luke edward finally backed out of his cocky courage and backed into his youth, what with being on the ugly end of a beating and in the face of wild control. He whined and he whimpered and he cried. “Nothin.”
What did he know about stealing? Why was he stealing? Why didn’t he just lie if he had to, and say Granma’am said he could have the cracklin? Was it more than three cents even? Had Luke been stealing before? Why didn’t he ask for what he wanted, didn’t he know that he could have? What was Granma’am gone do with that newspaper on the table? Luke looked at it hard and he simpered, that way we do when we scared.
Granma’am just kept to whacking him—I wondered if Luke was feeling it anymore. “Well, if you know so nothin whachu doin up in
Willyum an May Belle Watkins’ sto’ where I sends you for everything I needs to feed y’all here in this house, stealin some’m an havin him bring you back heah like you a dead body or lost child, cain’t git yo’self honest back where you live? Whachu doin, boy? Whachu doin, boy? Whachu doin, boy . . .?” Granma’am looked broke like the broke record she sound like. Her shiny wig had so slipped that you could see her real braided hair on one side, sweat had beaded in her moustache, her eyes had clouded with her disappointment and her crazy rage. Seem like she kept asking the same nothing. Luke already done answered much as he was going to.
I had moved the tub like she told me, and she moved herself round the table in the space the washtub took. I don’t know if she expected Luke to hop, but he didn’t, and she moved herself around hitting every side of him. Seem like she kept trying to hit his hands, which I guess makes sense cause if you steal, whether you get what you tried to take or not, it’s your hands that’s the problem.
I never learned whether Luke got the cracklin he tried to take. I could just see him stretching his long arm down in that barrel, anticipating the crunch and the brine. Luke always did like salt. Those barrels were high and rubby-brown and many on the Watkinses’ floor; they invited you to reach in and help yourself. He bought pork rinds for five cents from the store in the city. For just a little bag fried somewhere else, in a bag with crimped edges from the factory. Nowhere near the good taste of the cracklin from the Watkinses.
Down home, you could get a ton of cracklin for five cents. Plus, Granma’am had a bill she run; Luke could of just said Granma’am said he could have it, then he would of just been lying, and not stealing, and maybe it would of kept a secret of his fall. The whitepeople and the Negroes in authority seem to make sure all the Negro boys fall in public, somehow. I’m still thinking today about why that is. But here Granma’am was participating in it: about to have a stroke, running round this gangly Negro child of hers, trying to hurt him with that switch got broke off a Virginia tree.
“Turn aroun at the table, boy.” Look. Luke had got hisself twisted in the chair.
Luke and I both looked straight in her face. I don’t think Granma’am knew I was there any more than Luke seemed to know that what all this was about was the wrong turn he seemed to be making at so exactly the wrong age. It was the future taught me that, of course. In this moment, Granma’am just looked straight back at Luke and she was breathing hard, hard. “Turn around at that table, boy. WHY DO I HAFTA REPEAT EVERYTHING I SAY TO YOU? Lawd, have mercy.” Crack crack. Crack crack crack. Switched from the back to the shoulders, right across the side of his head. Look at Luke turn round, hang his head; see his lip hanging down.
“Thieves and murderers have filthy hands so you go right on ahead an get y’hands dirty,” she wheezed. “I want you to remembah dis.”
Granma’am holds her back where it pinches. Luke jerks his neck around and looks straight in Granma’am’s face again. I wished I could see his eyes. She raised the switch, raised her voice: “Lawd Jesus, why I got to repeat myself to dis boy, what happened to dis boy, dis misunderstandin granchile a mine? Show him what little he got is what he got.”
Granma’am wailed, Luke turned, the switch come down again and hit the back of his neck. Luke sat still at the table with his head down. The sound of Granma’am’s awful breathing replaced her wailing on account of she was tired, I guess. Luke edward was quiet too, collecting hisself. When he picked that head up again, I had moved closer to his commotion, and his face was rock.
Granma’am walked around the table a little bit so she could bend down and look Luke edward in his stony face. She didn’t put her finger under his chin and push his head up like she would do sometime. She didn’t rub her hand across his summer red-blond-brown. She put her hand on the table, her wrinkled fingers curved from age and her fingernails opaque like door glass. She stooped low to look under Luke’s bent head, and you could see she was tired, sweat on more of her face, especially her lip where her old-lady moustache sat like a tag. “Put yo’ hands, both of them, right in that dung, boy.”
Granma’am’s plate of false teeth slipped, and she talked real close to Luke’s face. He didn’t move and she sprung up like youth, wailing “Lawwdd.” Did Magdalene and Ruth and the other Martha wail this way? She must of hit him then for all the Negro boys whose lives she feared for in this young and lanky man. She must of hit him for all her fears and all their futures. I wondered what kind of lie this would become. Probably just silence, which is its own kind of lie. Luke’s hands finally shot out and went in the top of the pile of fresh brown shit. Hands in the dung on the newspaper on the kitchen table while I looked on and Luke edward backed more into his secreted self. Granma’am commenced to holler again: “Squeeze it, make a fist back an forth, put yo’ hands in it good. You thievin.”
Look at Luke, he does not move. Me either. I am in a stupor watching the grandmother make this punishment. Create it like a recipe, ingredients from history and the self, invention and the yard. Luke edward tries to follow her orders, but he looks confused: his face goes from rock to babychild and back again. He was fifteen then, sixteen in the fall, and his grandmother, who seemed like she was ninety but I know now she wasn’t, was trying to make him squeeze her excrement at the kitchen table in front of me, and he my darling brother.
Luke jumped up from the table, tormented, his hands covered not like his own. Was I gone hate this woman here? Why didn’t she think she would destroy him? Where was David to help us? And help us do what? Look at Luke, banging out the screen door, the back door. Look at Granma’am drop the switch, heaving breathing heavy.
An old embattled woman sat down in the seat Luke edward had just nearly knocked over. She looked like a slave with a lampshade on her head. And the wisps of my brother’s spirit, left in the chair and in the kitchen behind him, fold her in his bitterness like cellophane I see through.
SEALING IN THE MEAT SCRAPS
SHE TAKES ONE corner of the newspaper and folds it across the pile. She begins to make a roll and folds a second corner in. It could have been chicken bones and the snapped-off ends of string beans scraped off the plates after everybody was full, the meat scraps already fed to the dogs. She pulls the whole bundle toward her, and rolls the paper into a log over the mound, sealing his fingerprints away. Then she folds in the two loose sides over top of the roll, first one side and then the other. Then she rolls the rest of the paper over top of the folded-in sides. The package is closed, kitchen garbage. It looks unspeakably ordinary, everyday. No flies in and no maggots out: Granma’am had taught me how to fix the garbage. Bundling garbage was my job after supper any night.
I am a century old in this evening’s kitchen. Alone now with Granma’am. I don’t know where Luke edward or David hide, but I have seen Luke edward more than naked and less, I think, than a baby. Where was David—why didn’t he come? And where did Luke edward go—what is he doing now? I am convinced he will never be lighthearted again. I’m convinced I will never be light of heart again.
Granma’am picks up the heavy pail from under the sink and half fills it with water, grunting as she lifts the water to the stove to heat. Is she grunting about Luke edward, or is she getting too old to hoist the weight? Tears wet her face like a dunking. I watch her bend over and pick up the switch from the floor there where she dropped it. I watch her bend the green branch into small pieces: it is just too green to break. She puts the switch in the trash on top of the folded newspaper. It springs back alive. When the water in the bucket is hot, she pours a quart off into our old cleaning bowl and drops a rag down in the steam.
“Here, Neesey,” she whispers hoarsely, “clean off the door and the floor there where your brother dropped his memory.” Her words come across the room to where I find myself, sitting on the floor in a corner. My head leans back on both the walls. Immediately, though slowly, I get up, and walk over, and take the hot rag gingerly from the bowl. I add my elbow grease to the wet heat Granma’am has made for me
. Familiar motion and the smell of bleach.
I didn’t mind cleaning it up. What have I learned, if not to clean up behind them and wait for them to come, or to return?
Granma’am makes a cleaning bucket for herself, and then dumps a lot of hot water on top of the table, where we did have fatback and grits the next morning. Luke edward ate only a little, stubborn, silent, and bruised; David ate everything offered to him, looking knowing.
Granma’am scrubs the table a long time, slow, in preparation for this next day’s meal. The ammonia water drips and drops to the floor. Then Granma’am went over the door I had cleaned, dousing with ammonia the trails of bleach I’d left. Granma’am sends me to bed without excitement, early. When she says go, I do. Awake a long time, I listen to the sound of Granma’am’s rag mop washing, washing the floor. This is the sound I finally fall asleep to, and neither of my brothers is inside.
YEARS LIKE RIOTS
LIKE ALWAYS WHEN he settled one thing or another, we had as a group breathed a sigh of relief about Luke edward. He had finally gotten another job after having laid around with Christine and their son Jordan for a year. We relaxed too soon. And with the kind of giddiness that I have learned by now precedes a tragedy. One weekend during break when I was off from school, Luke walked off from the gas station. All the roll of money he’d collected was in his pocket instead of in the cash drawer at the store. That’s what the man who owned the filling station said. He was some transplanted peckerwood who we hadn’t seen before. He was at Margarete’s door Saturday morning before the birds flew.
Luke edward had moved away from Margarete’s, again, so she could tell the truth about him not being there. But hers was the address he had given the station man, so that was Problem Number Two right then. Margarete told the man she was sure there was some explanation. Margarete looked like she would start to plea in a whisper. Big Jim told Margarete don’t ask him nothin. That was after she closed the door.
Good Negress Page 24