Lindell got hisself a right smart interduction to them his first day on Keesler, after he woke hisself up with the birds to go see the ocean. He’d read about the sea in books, so naturally he wanted to see if it was like they said. The sky over Texas had grown his heart right up, with ever cloud what floated by telling him he needed to go pretty places and do front-page things. And there were the words Son, you could be President bumping around in his head, even if he warn’t paying them much never-mind. Sims’d told him he was right smart to think of making a doctor, but he also promised to send a note up the chain about Lindell trying for Army band. Either way, Lindell would put hisself in a bigger life than any other Colored man in Mt. Sterling’d ever let hisself imagine. Seeing the ocean would be just the first of it.
He stretched on his airman’s first class uniform and saluted as he walked out the gates of the base and down Irish Hill Drive, and when I heard him saying it into the microphone, I could just see him smiling into the air around him, remembering. It was so early in the morning, warn’t even no cars about, he said, and all he could hear was the ocean. He said the breeze blew right through the gathered legs of his new pants, but it warn’t the kind of cold that would upset a body—it was a soft, warm wind like you’d never catch in Mt. Sterling. He’d seen drawings of the sea in his books but he’d never seen it in photographs, and now he still couldn’t see the water for all the houses up and down the boulevard, but he could smell how clean it was in the air, how the ocean done took all the dirt of Mississippi far out to sea and left it. Said he smelt a nothing in the air like he never smelt in Mt. Sterling: everthing the ocean’d washed up to shore, it done already cleaned the night before in its fearsome bowels. When the sun started to make light and Lindell looked at his reflection in the window of a closed thrift shop, he stood up a little straighter and threw his arms out in front of him and imagined hisself leading an orchestra. He could of made his right several times, but the streets was narrow, and anyway he could hear the ocean getting closer, which meant when he finally did make his turn, he’d be right up on it.
He got hisself to St. Francis Street, which was so wide he knew he couldn’t walk all the way cross ’thout seeing the ocean, so he closed his eyes.
“Might oughta watch where you going, boy.”
Lindell said he looked, and found hisself standing not two feet in front of a couple of farmers. He knew they was farmers on account of the sun done burnt their necks so red. Their pants was brown, but you could see how they’d been white in some season previous, and sweat had got their collars stiffer’n any woman’s starch.
“Where you think you going?” asked the short one. He chewed his tobacco like a cud.
“I’m on my way to the beach, if you’ll excuse me.”
They both laughed, and Lindell said he figured by the lack of scratch in their voices that the wrinkles around their eyes wasn’t speaking to their true ages—they was young, maybe even young as he was. The tall one wasn’t chewing, but he spit tobacco juice anyway, in the sand right next to Lindell’s shoe. “Naw you ain’t. You ain’t a bit more going down to that there beach’n the man in the moon.”
“Must be one of them air monkeys from up North,” said the short one. He wasn’t smiling anymore, and now he was chewing so hard his nose moved with the force of it. “He don’t know we don’t let niggers on our beach.”
“You best get your black ass to base,” said the tall one.
The short one winked without smiling and spat again, this time right on Lindell’s shoe. They walked on, but Lindell done forgot right then how to move. He stood in the middle of the street so long that a city bus had to slow down, honk, and drive around him—so still that a man in a cotton truck drove a little bit on the sidewalk so as not to hit him. For long about an hour, Lindell said, he just plain couldn’t remember how to move. He stood in the middle of St. Francis Street with the waves crashing not a hundred feet from where he was standing, and he heard men shouting at each other while they was searching through the waves for oysters. But Lindell wouldn’t look. Matter fact he’d never see the ocean, long as he lived. Turnt out he walked down that street ever weekend on his way to Joe’s Oyster House, and he could of just turnt his head a little to the right and seen all that great deep water, but he knew it would of made him just as mad to look as it made him not to. He’d lie in all his letters home, tell Danaitha the ocean was even bigger’n the sky he’d seen over Texas, but the picture he’d have in his head was from a program he saw on the television.
The Air Force didn’t apologize none for the situation, but they did warn him, after the fact, because he got back to base that first day just in time for a special briefing for Negro airmen. It was seven of them, standing out in the hot sun in a straight line, with the sergeant yelling at them through a megaphone like they was a hunderd. They wasn’t ’llowed to set foot on the beach, Sarge said, and they wasn’t supposed to set down in Whites-only establishments. Sarge yelled out through that megaphone like he was being cut with an ice pick: they was not to be seen riding in a car with a White airman. His voice sounded specially angry right then, and Lindell said he knew it wasn’t your regular Army angriness, but he couldn’t decide whether Sarge hated the Negroes standing in front of him or the rules the White peoples of Biloxi had made to keep them in their place. Lindell looked out the corner of his eye at the six other brothers to see if they was understanding the situation like he was, and sure enough he saw mouths set in “I’ll be damned,” eyebrows crooked in “What’ve I gotten myself into?” Seven hundred fifty miles south of Kentucky, and Lindell was already in enemy territory. There was rules of engagement the Army didn’t even know about. Sarge yelled out that the Negro airmen was to ride on the back of the Biloxi buses, and that’s when Lindell fixed it in his head he warn’t going to be riding on any city buses.
And his voice was different while he told the rest of it. He said he stepped out for fried okra on Saturdays because he could walk right down Columbus Street to Joe’s Restaurant, but outside of that, he didn’t leave base. He stayed in the rec room and played the two pinball games—KnockOut and Skyway—and he read ever crazy story he could get his hands on through the by-mail book club. He started out with all four books by Claude McKay, and then he found hisself getting more and more peculiar in his appetites, ordering books about monks and priests and even nuns. The light in the rec room was none bright, and he missed the Lexington Public Library with its lamp at every desk, but he figured Negroes warn’t ’llowed nowhere near the Biloxi one.
He made hisself quite a few friends, and they never stopped asking him to go see a football game at Our Mother of Sorrows. They just about begged him to get on the bus and go out dancing. “You some kinda queer?” they teased him to his face. “Weird, anyway,” they said when they thought he warn’t hearing them. But he didn’t never go into town with ’em, not even on the Fourth of July. It got to where he done read all the books about Irish priests and moved on to the American ones. Nobody could beat him at pinball anymore, and the other soldiers liked to just stand by and watch him spin those little wood flippers, his hands rolling from the side of the machine to the front about as fast as they churned over each other on his piano back home. It was other times, after their long nights of carousing the Colored part of town, they’d find him setting in the room’s maroon reclining chair rereading The Cardinal, and they’d sit around on the couch and whisper about the thighs of girls they’d met while they watched him speed-read. He was special and unreachable and plenty of fun to watch, Lindell figured—like a dog they could pet when they got back to base.
It was prostitutes what walked theirselves right outside the base at night there on Irish Hill Drive, but apart from Joe’s Restaurant, Lindell said he didn’t even fancy going that far. For love, he took to playing the Lyric’s black baby grand in his dreams, so much so that the wood floor next to his bed began to sink under the dream piano’s weight. At inspection, when he stood next to Lindell’s bed, Sarge ke
pt saying he felt shorter than usual. Said he never did understand why.
DETAIL
Grandmama ain’t give away if she found out about Ralph coming over to the house when she wasn’t in it. But she been looking at me right dirty ever since, like she knows everthing swimming around in my head from the beginning to the end, how I want to screw with Ralph over and over and over again until he falls in love with me; how I see other boys, and grown men even, and wonder if they’d feel any different inside me than Ralph did. Maybe they’d move different while they’re doing it, or make more noise when they’re done. Maybe after, they’d love me. Grandmama never has told if she knows, but she’s been dropping Alka Seltzers ever morning, like something’s bothering her so bad she has to fizz it away.
School’s out for the summer and the kitchen’s all mine this morning on account of Imagene still sleeping, and I’m going to set here and think while the dew melts off the new flowers and the world gets hot. I done collected my mind in the months since Daddy killed Mama. Ain’t like some big thing happened—God did not appear to me in the bottom of my soda pop and tell me to cut it out. It’s just that when I heard Lindell on them tapes, following his dreams off to nowhere, and then I subtracted the difference between what me and Grandmama had for Imagene’s school shoes and what they was actually going to cost, well, when I thought on all that, being crazy just did not seem profitable. I pour orange juice, and an ant floats up with the juice to meet me, but then here Grandmama comes looking for her Alka Seltzer and I know she’d cuss me for pouring good juice down the drain, so I just sip around that ant and watch her. She never has been a big talker in the morning, so it seems natural not to say nothing, but when I don’t, she gives me one of them foul looks. “Well, good morning to you too,” she says.
“Morning, Grandmama.”
“You going to fix that thing today?”
She means the blender she got on layaway from Taylor’s. She ain’t known a thing about blending—she just bought it on account of Siddie Sims got one, and she sure ain’t going to let low-down Siddie Sims with four children by four different men have anything over on her. It’s a manual what goes with the blender but Grandmama don’t read long words, so the blender been setting there with its innards on the counter all week since it came home. We moved the radio to the window to make room while we put it together, but that just means we ain’t reached up there to turn the radio on for all this time, and yet we still ain’t got no chopped-up food out the deal.
“Yes’m. I’ll read the manual and assemble it.”
She drops her tablets in the water, and they sink to the bottom even as their little bubbles float to the top, and when she leaves out the kitchen I bring her glass to my ear to hear the fizz up close. It’s little bubbles hitting the side of my face, and that phony lemon smell is coming so powerful I can just imagine little Speedy singing at me. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz: I hope I never turn into my grandmama. “Here, Grandmama,” I tell her, when she comes back in the kitchen with her thin spring jacket on. “I shook it up a little so the tablets’d break faster.”
“You ain’t supposed to shake that,” she says, taking the glass, and her eyes flash blacker behind her glasses. “They break up when they want to. It’s medicine, girl. Medicine.”
She drinks it down faster’n you’d believe is good for her, and then she packs some Kleenex into her handbag and leaves for Dr. Stone’s house, and when I’m sure she’s a good piece down the street, I reach back into that window and turn on the radio. Jimmy Giuffre’s tooting out “Iowa Stubborn,” and I turn it so loud that it powers out the sound of the screen door slamming against the doorframe, so loud that the hearing it powers out anything else I might feel of the world, and I’m floating down Grandmama’s steps ’stead of walking. I lay out in the grass with that manual and I ain’t been there three minutes when here come Audrey running out Grandpap Martin’s door to lay in the grass with me. “You going to Lexington with Sylvia, too?” she asks me.
“No.”
“Oh.” Back when we was both flat-chested, we used to lay on our bellies and close our eyes into the cool ground under our faces, but now we both have to lay on our sides with our trussed-up bosoms aimed sideways and our arms cocked under our heads, so she’s facing me when she asks why I ain’t going. “Sounds like it’ll be right fun, anyway,” she says.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Sylvia ain’t asked me nowhere.”
“Oh,” she says again, and we listen to the radio a little bit longer, a song what sounds like Paul Evans singing it but I ain’t never heard the music before, and then Audrey gets up and brushes off her dress. “Bye,” she says, and runs back across the street.
I wait and wait for Sylvia to ask me, but she don’t say a thing about it. I even treat her to a milk shake at the drug store in the afternoon, and then on Thursday she asks me over to her house to watch The Danny Thomas Show, but I don’t get one word out of her about fun, or Audrey, or Lexington.
I don’t get one word of it until the next week, when I hear it from Hannah Cosby, that Sylvia took Audrey to one of her Alpha Kappa Alpha Cotillion dances. “Said you wouldn’t even believe how splendid it was,” Hannah tells me, when I see her at the Colored store, and she tells me how Audrey said the AKA ladies decorated the Lyric with fancy streamers and shimmery strings up in the rafters, and how the Colored girls in Lexington know how to pick up the right fork for their beef, and how to set with their ankles crossed for a group photograph, and how to curtsy so low their dresses sweep the floor. I’m thinking a hilltop blackberry like Audrey couldn’t of made out too well up there, but then I hear it from Ruth Simmons, how Audrey’s mama bought her a new pair of Capezios and a purple dress with gossamer over the skirt, and how it all must’ve worked, because old Poindexter took off her glasses like she was some sort of swan and danced with four different boys that night.
Well, I ain’t asking her nor Sylvia not one thing about the whole business. Won’t give them the pleasure. And anyway Tyrone Boyd done invited me to go see Porgy and Bess, and before I know it I’ma be over in his mama and daddy’s bedroom, testing out how he sounds and how he feels when he’s doing it, and won’t neither one of them know a thing about that. And I got something over Audrey, something she won’t even know, because I ain’t never going to let her hear her daddy on them story reels. I been thinking on calling her over to give a listen, get her all excited about the sound of a ghost, but now I figure she can just set over there and dream fancy with Sylvia French. Too bad, ’cause she won’t never know how her daddy’s story really ended.
Lindell told it all to that recorder, the part we all knew already, and I do remember it very clearly, how Grandpap Martin was walking so tall around town at the time on account of his son done stood up to some muckety-muck down in Mississippi and lived to tell about it. Well, the way Lindell told it, it was a senator by the name of John Stennis who came to base, telling them servicemen about how “the United States will put a man on the moon before the God-abiding state of Mississippi integrates Nigras and Whites outside the walls of this base.”
When he wrote home to his daddy, Lindell wouldn’t be able to tell him what made him get up by hisself in the middle of that senator’s speech and march back to the barracks in 115-degree heat, but he told that reel recorder. Said his sergeant trailed his heels the whole ways, wiping his bald head with his cap and hollering for “a damn good explanation,” and Lindell could’ve told him he was tired of watching all them cityboy airmen fall out like fleas in the heat, or that the lack of sex in his life done finally made him crazy, or even something a little like the truth—that his daddy’d always told him it was better to die on your feet than live on your knees. But Lindell told that tape the true nitty-gritty—Senator John C. Stennis’d just plain made him mad.
“My father taught me to play by ear because the notes were no count,” Lindell said, “and without a piano to play, I’d begun to think perhaps my father was wrong, because at
night the notes were all that came back to me. I’d dream up an entire six-part quadrille and see every accidental. Well, just then in that grandstand listening to the senator, the notes left me, and I reckoned my daddy must have been right—the important things in life get played by ear.” He said he ain’t even had to think about marching back to barracks.
It was June 28, and a war’d been going on in Korea for three days, and Lindell’d tell that tape he figured getting sent off to it all had to do with Senator John C. Stennis, and I do remember Grandpap Martin, in the short time between Lindell’s letter and the Army’s sad telegram, walking round a little bigger, a little stronger in his knock-knees, even telling the White druggist downtown to please get his heart pill order right. I remember Audrey telling me later that her daddy never loved her, that he went over there and died on account of he was so in love with his pride that he forgot he had a little girl. And listening to that tape, I get right sad myself, on account of I done spent eight years thinking Lindell was some Negro what flew away from here, and it turns out once he got where he was going, he got his wings clipped just like anybody else. Lindell got them papers to transfer to a deploying unit, and he told the tape that after feeling some afraid he reminded hisself how he walked out on that speech, and he got to feeling like the biggest man at Keesler. And that was the end of Lindell’s voice, but here it turns out that ain’t even half the story.
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