“When my mama’s a widow again,” I said, and I got out and slammed his car door hard enough for him to yell Hey! I ran up Grandpap’s porch steps and tried to put my key in the lock but it kept missing. The moon was new, and it was so dark out that I could see the sparks fly off the metal.
“Your daddy’s dead,” Mr. Barbour yelled out his car window. “Better get used to it.” He backed up and turned his headlights onto the porch so I could fit my key. If he’d crashed himself into a tree on the way home, I wouldn’t have been happier.
The radio had lulled Grandpap to sleep, and when I finally got in the door and out of the dark, I found him stretched across the couch, his feet hanging over the armrest, the extra space in his socks pinched up past the toe. Frank Sinatra singing love into his dreams. I threw a quilt over him and tipped across the blue braided rug, down the hall, and into my bed. The night was cool with coming autumn—a perfect night for rest—but when at last I lay down, I found that a ball of Mother’s corn bread had lodged itself at the gate to my stomach. I didn’t want her, but she was with me.
PUFFER
I’d been afraid that night, wondering if I’d live the rest of my life and die in the hills of Mt. Sterling. Watching Grandpap’s complex sorrows ferment into simple bitterness, watching Pookie and Ralph chase each other into the confines of everlasting love, watching Mr. Barbour speed by me in his 210. Not even a month later, I wonder that each New York day isn’t my entire life. I hadn’t known how much I hadn’t known; I hadn’t fathomed not even a quarter of the depth of my ignorance. I’d never realized that Queen Street isn’t a street at all but a cowpath of baked mud, a corridor past the waving pickaninnies, through the west part of town to the shops in Lexington. One turn of the calendar page, and I’m living in a basement apartment in a strong brick building on a street of solid asphalt. A world lives beneath my feet, even—water rushes by just under manhole covers, and passing subway trains throw skirt-lifting breezes from metal grates in the sidewalk. Rats peep out of the corner rain traps, unafraid, the bones of their inner ears absorbing the thrumming march of the city’s pedestrian army.
Every day I’ve lived here, the same man has stood on the corner in his blue bowler collecting the numbers. He’s as regular a part of my days as Hiram Loving once was, ringing his bicycle bell as I waved, but here in Harlem, I’d just as soon wave to a stranger as saw off my own hand. People rush by the numbers man, for the most part, in such great hurries they threaten to topple him, and if a beautiful woman brushes his coat, he’ll sweep himself up in her wake and follow, silently, as though he means to have her. When she steps on a motor bus he’ll stop at the apple seller, realizing, and watch her as she takes her seat and the bus lurches forward. His jolly eyes will follow her bus down its route, but his sad fish lips will draw his mustache down to their corners, because Lenox and 123rd is, after all, his post, and he cannot follow her. I hadn’t known that desire can have such practical limitations, that love can so willingly accept defeat at the hands of money.
I hadn’t known that our stores in Mt. Sterling were general mercantile, that there exist markets solely for the sale of fruit, or seafood, or lamb. On the ground floor of my building, women pay the Lenox Avenue Fish Shop for their lobsters, string them up by their tails, and carry them onto a city bus. During this year’s three days of Indian summer, brine-filled flies gave chase and mated in my window. I hadn’t known they actually mount each other, like cattle. On the third, topmost floor of my building, a Negro woman lives with a White man and their child, a beautiful little cinnamon-colored girl with big brown eyes and dark curls that brush her shoulders. Their mailbox is marked “Mr. and Mrs. Donald Green,” so it seems they are married, and yet when they walk down the street together—their arms linked, their shoulders touching, their little girl tottering in front of them—no one jeers or even stares. Mr. Green’s father, a tall man with stately, metallic gray hair, comes to visit, and twirls his beautiful, smiling, cinnamon granddaughter in the street before they stop in the drug store for soda. Sometimes I hear Mr. and Mrs. Green in the stairwell as they argue; her soprano smacks up against his basso profundo, but he never calls her nigger. After they argue, he’ll bring home the groceries in two big sacks like nothing has happened, and they are still together, this White man with his sandy red hair and this Negro woman dark as molasses. I hadn’t known such a thing was possible.
I know things I cannot stand to know, like how dirtied the floor of a subway platform becomes after a rain, and how that filthy, spit-splattered floor can come back to me in the night and make me count 512 over and over again until sleep comes. A roach on my wall, fiddling its one leg like a bow against another, can seem to stare into my morning tea. Men can wander the streets crazy and drugged with no family to keep them, and even low as they are there are men much lower, men with employment and wives and children, men in full possession of their faculties, who nonetheless abuse themselves on the roofs of neighboring buildings while dewy young girls fresh from the country extinguish their lamps and watch. Waking in New York City, you’ll find the morning rich with possibility; you’ll open your window for fresh air and find, instead, a bustling crowd, and in that crowd all the millions of possibilities that might collide that day with your own. By the time you retire in the evening, you may find that the possibilities weren’t all opportunities, and the collisions weren’t without their damage. Negroes can eat in restaurants with Whites and have nothing come of it, I’ve learned, but I’ve also seen that a fish can be made to eat its own dying body. After sixteen years of innocence, my mind is growing fat.
The morning after I insulted Mr. Barbour’s car, our church went visiting in Versailles. The choir was to sing St. Paul A.M.E.’s Sunday afternoon service, with me playing “Precious Lord” behind Althea Marks, who was such a beautiful singer that Mother said any accompaniment at all was charity to the pianist. Versailles was fourteen miles beyond Lexington proper, and passing through the city’s downtown, all we ladies leaned our satin head scarves against the bus windows and watched the locked doors of the shops. The older ladies closed their eyes, righteous in the knowledge that no good Christian would think of spending money on a Sunday in the first place, but the younger of us sat hotly disappointed, and my second cousin Maylene, up on the fourth seat of the bus, actually folded her legs under herself to get a better look at the mannequins in the window of Snyder’s.
From his place on the first seat, Reverend Graves saw Maylene in the bus driver’s mirror. “Think,” he said, turning just enough that all of us could see his brown ear graze his white starched collar, “how great the fellowship we’re taking to our brothers and sisters in Christ. It is a much greater thing than any yard of fancy cloth.” In profile, silhouetted against the bus windshield and its vista of city streets, he truly did look like Providence, and the whole bus said amen. But when we got to Versailles, we found a funeral. Cars stuck end to end on the street fronting St. Paul’s; cars wedged into the yard at the side of the church; cars covering every square of grass in the empty lot across the street. Three horses, tied to a porch post, drank water from a trough, whinnying and swishing their tails when the flies stung their backsides.
St. Paul’s face wore high stained-glass windows and a spire running up its front, and we’d never seen the Crucifixion baked into glass, and even though we all knew those cars couldn’t possibly be waiting for a visiting church choir, we felt grander getting off the bus than we should have. We pushed through St. Paul’s door and squeezed, single-file, down the side aisle, to the choir stand. Arranged ourselves into two rows and looked over the pulpit into the casket, which was made of gray reflective steel and held a spray of red roses across its closed top. Four of the most beautiful ladies in all of Kentucky’s history sat on the mourner’s bench, leaking tears through their four handkerchiefs and down the necklines of their four identical black dresses. They didn’t look like sisters, exactly, but all four of them were tall and smooth-skinned and had the same style of lo
ng, thick hair—narrow over the ears and full at the shoulders. Nested in misery, they crossed their legs in the same direction—right over left—and even the Mongoloid child sitting between them, with her eyes slanted upward in their lack of full understanding, sat with her thick little legs crossed. The congregation, lost in an old spiritual, tapped their feet. In the corner panel of stained glass, Jesus met His mother.
I sat down at the piano and Althea stood up in the choir stand, and St. Paul’s minister nodded to me, absurdly pronouncing his overbite. He wiped his sweaty forehead and drummed his finger on his knee as I took the congregation to the key of D flat. I’d get seventy-five cents for playing a funeral.
“Precious Lord,” Althea sang, “Take my Hand.” We’d only made the first bar, but already one of the four ladies on the mourner’s bench had popped out of her seat to commence the most terrible kind of moaning, throwing herself down into an unfixable misery. Althea sang, and the woman bent over double, and a nurse in a white uniform came and stood next to her. The retarded child shook with a strange kind of anger, and a tear dripped off the end of her nose. When the bent woman began to thrash and scream and cast wild shadows against the small bit of sun coming through the stained glass, the minister finally spoke. “Give God back what’s His,” he said. “We’ll understand it better by and by.”
I started to wonder what had happened to the man in the casket, whether he’d spent his entire life in Kentucky, and what he’d done to the bent woman to make her love him so. Having caused such love, he now slept. He’d rot to teeth and bone deep beneath the mud of Versailles, his fingernails curling long against his hands, his hair coiling out to super lengths atop the mossening of his velvet casket, his flesh wasting until it lost all human form, and she’d still be loving him. Whatever had killed him would no longer be—a gunshot wound would no longer pucker out of a hole; a tumor would no longer lodge itself as a lump—he would lose all the scars and scratches of his man-life, and become nothing more than a skeleton, even more unfettered by flesh than he’d been on the day he was born, and still, he would cross the woman’s thoughts every morning as long as she lived. Thinking about it, the repetition of her want, my own ribs began to ache in my chest, and the white keys on the piano began to feel as narrow as the black ones, and I saw again how my own life up to then had been a death. Althea was deep in the theater of her own voice, squeezing tears from some place that had nothing to do with the man in the casket or the beautiful screamer now sprawled on the floor, but when she heard me play the final chords a full two verses early, Althea opened her eyes just a slit and frowned. I tinkled out the ending anyway: that screeching widow, the casket, the dead man himself—if I let them, they’d pull me into the grave.
Althea had brought up such a commotion that no one noticed when I stopped playing and ran to the back of the church. I pushed open the front door, letting myself into the country sun. I stared so long at it that I thought I might go blind.
“You all right?”
He was sitting on the steps, right at my feet. The sun had burned itself into my eyes, and when I looked at him, he blazed red.
“What’s a matter?” he asked. “Can’t talk?”
“Just tired, that’s all. Didn’t sleep much last night.”
“And played like that?” He whistled. “Hate to hear you play when you’re wide awake.”
He’d solidified into his normal color, which was still light as any phantom’s. He chewed something not snuff, something that didn’t make him spit.
“You from around here?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. Visiting. I’m an associate of the deceased.”
“Then you know how he died?”
“Poisoned. James Parks could play a fat hand of poker. Should’ve known better. Never lick your fingers in a house where you’re winning every round. When you’re a winner, you ain’t popular.”
“Yeah. Well, he’s got some folks in there all broken up.”
“Widows.”
“Plural?”
“All four of ’em. Concurrently. Never divorced a one—real-life, modern-day harem—your menfolk down here in Kentucky got it made.” The man chewed some more and looked away from me, off into his own daydream. “Tell you something else,” he said, after a time. “Wonder why the funeral had to be on a Sunday?”
“They ain’t got no Black undertaker?”
“Negroes ’round here are doctors and lawyers and such. Sure, they got themselves a Black undertaker. But your specimen James Parks in there, he messed over this woman and he fooled around with that one, and then he messed around with the undertaker’s wife.”
“And when you’re a winner, you ain’t popular.”
The man laughed. His voice was expansive yet brittle, as if something had been sautéed on his throat. “Come time for James to be embalmed, the undertaker wouldn’t even look at him. Body started to rot. Pretty James Parks, ain’t looked shabby a day in his life, started to stink so bad you couldn’t even be in the same room with him. His wives figure they better get him on in that ground.”
The shouting and moaning in the church seeped through the walls, a fever spreading to the outside. The preacher’s noise occasionally cleared the crowd’s. “This nasty life ain’t where it’s at, beloved,” he was saying. “Death! Huh! Death is the party.”
“Better get back in there,” the man said. “Ain’t no party like one with a gal talented as you at the piano.”
“I still got a minute.” I was trying, still, to catch air, trying to make my lungs keep up with my galloping heart. “So what else do you know? That James Parks’s kid up there?”
“According to that tall fine woman of his, a mermaid brought that child. James couldn’t handle it—you know—the girl’s condition. She was his only child.” Whatever sat in the corner of the man’s mouth peeked out at the edge, green like a sprig of jungle. His gold incisor flashed in the sun. “You’re smart,” he said. “You ask all the right questions. You married?”
“You White?”
The man had a nice, even row of teeth, but he was almost as old as Grandpap, and lighter-skinned even than Pookie, with freckles in all the same places—under his eyes, on the tops of his ears. “I’m what some people call White, yes,” he said.
“Some people. Well, since we’re being honest here, I’m not married. Not looking to be, neither.”
“Good, good. Keep yourself out of trouble, not like our friend dead-ass-James in there. How about your kinfolk? You think they’d let you go off to New York City with me?”
My kinfolk almost didn’t.
A White man, Grandpap said, after Mr. Glaser came out to our house, begging. New York hustler, said Mother. But then Mr. Glaser took us all to a ten-dollar-a-plate restaurant in Lexington, a whitefolks’ establishment where the owner let us sit at a back table and order whatever we wanted in peace. Mother asked for soup with a spoon, then went back to rearranging the three different forks that gated her plate. Mr. Barbour ordered prime rib. Grandpap, thinking we weren’t watching, ate three pieces of the soft, white bread the water brought in a basket. He had a hard time managing with his false teeth, and though we all pretended not to notice, Mother did suggest more butter. Mr. Glaser ordered raw fish that he said came from Japan.
“You really gone eat that?” Mother asked when it came. The poor fish was alive still, turning its head and gasping for water, its backside sliced open to expose its bloody spine.
“Blackspotted puffer. You should try some yourself,” Mr. Glaser said. He slid the plate over so that the fish, its gills flapping, was an inch away from her arm.
“I think I just got throwed off my appetite,” she said.
Grandpap, on the other side of Mother, averted his eyes from Mr. Glaser’s plate, and Mr. Barbour frowned at the fish as if it had just cursed him out. While he looked, he sliced his beef, steadying his knife between the tines of his fork. “Audrey’s too young to go running off to New York by herself,” he said. “I believe it’s out
of the question.”
“You ain’t none of my daddy,” I reminded him. He flared his nostrils at me and looked at the door like he wanted to leave, but then he looked at all those White people at the other tables and went back to slicing his beef.
“Your Audrey is an incredible talent,” Mr. Glaser said to the table. “Pianists of her caliber make seventy-five dollars a week in New York.”
“Seventy-five dollars,” said Mother. “Takes me two months to make seventy-five dollars.” She dabbed her napkin at her mouth in a halfhearted way that made me feel sorry for her. She spun a snow pea in the air with her fork. “But she’s only seventeen.”
“I’ll be eighteen come January.”
“Madam,” said Mr. Glaser. “New York is full of eighteen-year-olds.”
“Where will she be eduated?” Grandpap asked.
Mr. Glaser leaned across the table as if he and Grandpap were plotting war strategies. He quieted his voice. “Sir, this child is too talented for school,” he said.
Grandpap’s eyes grew shiny with moisture. His daughter had shipped herself across two states to go to a college he’d never heard of. He’d sent a son away to the Air Force and never gotten him back. The man who had stolen and impregnated his dead son’s wife had also taken the last piece of bread.
“She’s finishing high school, at least,” Mother said. She dabbed her mouth again, with more force than before. “You’ll see to it, Mr. Glaser, or we’ll see to it that she comes on back home. And what about a chaperone?”
“I’ll be her chaperone.” Mr. Glaser’s lips smiled without the help of his eyes, and a piece of flesh fell from his chopsticks right onto the tender gray edge of the fish’s mouth. We all watched as the puffer involuntarily jerked, sucking down its own body. “Goodness,” Mr. Glaser said, but he laughed as he said it. Grandpap, Mother, and Mr. Barbour all stopped chewing and watched the fish eat itself, and to stop what I was feeling, I had to giggle. Such a man as Mr. Glaser no doubt kept the company of murderers.
Saint Monkey Page 14