by Janis Owens
But my hopes were unfounded, and as soon as the bell rang the next day, Gabe turned on the overhead projector and put on a transparency that was, by God, that same little poem, written in his own square handwriting, that word magnified to six inch letters on the cinder blocks above the chalkboard.
At that point, I was thinking suicide might be an option, though, fortunately for all of us, whatever small interest the sight of a new teacher had provoked the day before had clearly passed, the jocks settling into their bored slump, the nappers returning to their book bags, leaving Gabe to ramble around the room, mouthing nonsense words like myth and symbol and empowerment that went mostly unheard.
After a while, I relaxed enough to sneak out a sheet of notebook paper, was covertly sketching a pretty good Transformer when I realized there was a commotion in the front of the room, Gabe holding up a sheet of paper that had everyone on the front row jerking up from their desktops as if they’d seen a snake, their little cries waking the rest of the class.
“Man, thet’s nasty!” was their general reaction, Gabe ignoring it to slowly stroll down the aisle so the rest of us could get a closer look, exclamations of disgust following him.
Even the jocks on the back row came to life when he passed, sitting up straighter, muttering shhhht, the rest of us all rubbernecking and standing till he turned down our aisle and I finally saw what was causing the commotion: a picture of something, I still couldn’t tell exactly what, till he was right in front of me, when I let out a yelp of my own: “Good God.”
Because it was a head-and-shoulders photograph of (maybe) a black guy. It was hard to really tell, because the face was horribly disfigured, like a wax figure that had been left on a dashboard of a car in August, was half-melted, hardly human.
“Whut is thet?” was the general hum of the room, everyone standing and gawking, though Gabe just motioned us back to our seats and returned to his perch on the front of his desk, where he regarded the picture with a grave, solemn face.
“Thet,” he said in deliberate mimic, “is the young man I’ve been trying to introduce to you for the past two days. Thet is Emmett Till.”
For a moment, we were stunned to silence, everyone glancing up at the poem on the overhead, though none of us special-ed kids could read well enough to make much of it. But something in the drama and weirdness of that wasted face had piqued our interest, created enough tension that Bobo (who is kind of hyper when he’s awake) actually ran down the aisle to Gabe’s desk, demanded in this high, curious voice: “Man, whut happened to him?”
In reply, Gabe just shooed him back to his desk, though he answered him levelly: “That, Mr. Crain,” he said, “is a very interesting question.” He felt around on his desktop for a manila folder that was lying there, held it cradled in his good hand while he spoke. “For Emmett Till is an unsung hero of modern American history—a young black man from Chicago, only a year or so older than yourself, who lived a pretty ordinary life—went to school, had a lot of friends, and a very nice, very loving mother, who back in the summer of 1955 decided her son might enjoy a break from city life, sent him down to visit some relatives in Mississippi.”
Such was his emphasis on the word that even us Crackers knew this was an ominous development, like saying a nice Jewish woman had sent her son to Germany to visit Hitler. We were even quieter then, firmly in his spell as he opened the manila folder and produced another picture: this one of a chubby, smiling black kid sitting next to a prosperous-looking black woman; apparently his mother.
Gabe stood and made another slow circuit of the room so we could get a closer look at the picture, his voice that calm and hypnotizing rhythm: “Now, being raised in Chicago, Mr. Till didn’t understand much about race relations in the South, and before he left, his mother warned him to mind his manners, not to get out of line, but he didn’t pay her much mind. He had white friends in the North, just didn’t get what the fuss was all about. A few days into his visit, on a bet with one of his Mississippi cousins—you know—a double-dog-dare—he whistled at a white woman in a country store, the wife of the owner.”
We were really quiet then, even the jocks on the back row, some of whom had begun secretly indulging in a little interracial dating, talking to white girls, calling them at home. I think they were afraid that Gabe was about to out himself, not as homosexual, but as a white supremacist or something; that this story was some kind of nutty cautionary tale.
They even quit chewing their gum as Gabe continued his circuit, his voice very smooth and listenable: “Just a silly little joke, you understand—and I’m sure Mr. Till didn’t think too much of it, just kept on playing, though when his uncle heard of it, he realized this was a serious thing. He made arrangements for him to be sent home immediately, but before he could get him on a bus, some white men showed up at his door, one of them the husband of the woman he’d whistled at, and took Emmett away. It was the last time he was seen alive.”
By then, Gabe had made his way back to his desk, where he assumed that casual, crossed-arm stance as he concluded in a quiet voice: “When they fished his body out of the Tallahatchie River a few days later, he’d been shot, beaten; one eye was gouged out. His own mother couldn’t recognize him when they shipped his body back to Chicago, had to identify him by a ring.”
I think the part about the gouged-out eye was the clincher, the room so silent it wasn’t even breathing as Gabe finished: “And the men who killed him pretty much got off scot-free. Everyone knew who did it, but in those days, no jury would convict a white man for killing a black man, even a child.”
He paused to let this sink in, then took a big breath, said: “And I guess that justice wouldn’t have been served in any sense of the word, except that Emmett’s mother, she wouldn’t go easy. Instead of paying a mortician to do an Academy Award–winning makeup job, or shutting him up in a coffin and slipping him quietly into the ground, she insisted on an open-casket funeral, invited all of Chicago to attend.”
For some reason, I thought about Daddy’s funeral; about his big old expensive coffin and how small and insubstantial he looked in it. I wondered what it would have been like if he’d have been beaten to death; if any of us could have stood to see him.
But it was really just too gross to comprehend. I shook it off with a little chill, returned to Gabe, who met our eyes solemnly, his voice lowered for emphasis: “A thousand people a day filed passed that open coffin. Jet magazine even published pictures of the corpse—one of which I just showed you—that pretty much did to black America what it did to us here today: it horrified them. It awakened the conscience of a nation, did more for the civil rights movement than a decade of legislation, and as Mr. Emmanuel’s poem so powerfully illustrates, transformed Emmett Till into a figure of sacrifice, of myth—”
Just at that moment, the final bell rang, loud and shrill, making everyone jump a foot in their seats, though we didn’t make our usual rush to the door, our eyes still fixed on Gabe, who continued to sit there slumped on the edge of his desk, his voice that hypnotizing rumble.
“The irony of it is that even today, his name doesn’t appear in most American-history textbooks, but is still pretty much oral history—that is, spoken history—the kind that everyone in this room can produce. Maybe not as colorful, or tragic, but certainly as valid. It is the study of us, the history that I’d like to concentrate on these last two months of school, if you’re game. I mean, we can study this history”—he picked up our fat old history book—“or we can study this history.” On that, he held up the manila folder with the Emmett Till photographs. “It really doesn’t matter to me, because as I verified the first hour of class, we are all Americans here, therefore our history is American history. The school board’ll pay me whichever way you choose, we just need to decide today: Which will it be?”
There was no immediate response, all of us amazed that we, the dumbest class in the history of the world, were being asked to pick our destiny for the first time in our life. We all knew
what we wanted, of course. We wanted to study us, it was just that no one wanted to risk a wrong answer, venture a raised hand. The silence drew out for twenty, then thirty seconds, the muffled thunder of the after-school rush echoing through the hallways, though Gabe ignored it to sit there mildly on the edge of his desk, manila folder in hand, waiting for our decision.
Soon, Darius and Travis and some of my closer special-ed buds were casting me these beseeching little looks, calling on me to do my duty as Official Nephew. I avoided their glances and shuffled my feet, held off as long I could, but in the end, I finally rolled my eyes and raised a slow hand.
“Ah, Mr. Catts,” Gabe intoned cheerfully. “D’you have a vote?”
I just took a breath, then offered in a weenie little voice: “I vote for us.”
For a moment, there was silence, then all the gimps and dumbos and jocks who’d been too intimidated to speak up finally thought of a way to voice their opinion. They burst out into spontaneous applause, loud and thunderous, making for one of the few bright memories in my whole academic life: of sitting there, face down, very pleased, with Gabe at his desk, beaming on us like a proud old grandpa.
“Well, good,” he said, finally coming to his feet. “Tomorrow, we begin the study of our twenty-six individual American histories. Your first project is to somehow finagle your oldest living relative into telling you a story. It doesn’t matter how long or how silly; doesn’t have to have a punch line or a moral. If you can’t get anyone to talk, nose around your attic or spare bedroom and bring in something—an old photograph, a quilt—that says something about your history. I’ll give a hundred points for any artifact or story, ten points extra if you can get it on tape. Class is dismissed.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Now, Grannie was the oldest living member of our family, older than Uncle Case by the space of two minutes (they were fraternal twins). And though she had told me many a good story in her day, when I went to her that night with my newly purchased tape recorder and begged for a family story, one that would reveal our history, she closed up tight as an oyster, acted like I was a lawyer in a courtroom trying to catch her in a lie.
It wasn’t until I threatened to bypass her completely and go to Uncle Case or Aunt Candace that she broke down and committed a story to tape, nothing particularly historic or telling, but a hokey little bedtime story about a good little Baptist orphan named Little Gene, who was sent to live with his evil aunt. Among other faults, his aunt was so cheap that she wouldn’t buy him anything at Christmas but a new pair of shoes. Little Gene is very proud of them, though, and wears them to church on Christmas Eve in a hard snow, where he comes upon a ragged, barefoot little boy sitting on the steps. He feels sorry for him, offers one of his new shoes, then has to walk home through the snow with one shoe on, one shoe off. (Grannie always chanted that part: hippity-hop, hippity-hop, one-shoe on and one-shoe off.)
When his cheap aunt finds out he’s given away one of his new shoes, she flies into a rage and sends him to bed in the loft without supper. There, Little Gene cries himself to sleep in the hay, though the next morning, he is awakened by the smell of biscuits and gravy, and sausage and hotcakes (and sometimes a whole lot more, depending on how much time Grannie has). Little Gene can’t believe his nose, and slowly climbs down the ladder to the living room, where he finds a huge Christmas tree surrounded by all kinds of toys. While he’s standing there, looking around in wonder, his aunt comes out, her face shining, and repents of her evil ways, tells him that the little boy he’d given his shoe to on the church steps the night before was an ANGEL, who came to her in the night, led her to the Lord. Now she was living for JESUS, and would buy Little Gene all the clothes and toys and shoes he wanted!
Well, that’s the story, anyway, and such was the power of Grannie’s trembling old voice that when I played it in class the next day, even the jocks on the back row were momentarily transfixed by Little Gene’s sad plight. Gabe himself (who’d been raised on Little Gene) laughed aloud when it was over, mimicked, “Hippity-hop, hippity-hop, one shoe on and one shoe off,” then asked if anyone had ever heard it before.
No one had, and since it really wasn’t a family story, I didn’t think he could shed much light on it, but he did. Leaning on his desk and folding his arms on his chest, he told us that the story of Little Gene really wasn’t original to Grannie, but a Cracker version of an old French folktale, except the little boy in the French story wasn’t named Gene and he didn’t go to church on Christmas Eve (he went to Mass) and he didn’t get saved in the end.
“How did Grannie hear it?” I was impressed enough to ask.
Gabe answered with a cool detachment, as if he wasn’t kin to us at all, but an anthropologist who’d happened in on our American-history class, found us an interesting study, and decided to stay. “Well, your grandmother is from a county in south Alabama that was settled by the French,” he explained, “supporters of Napoleon who had to flee the Continent after Waterloo. That’s probably who passed it along—neighboring French immigrants—or maybe your grannie has a little French blood herself—which, now that I think of it, would explain a lot.”
The idea seemed to momentarily arrest him, making him stand there and rub his chin thoughtfully, then add in a brisker voice: “In any case, the story has been considerably revised. The sausage and biscuits and the salvation are definitely an Alabama twist.”
I was astounded, all of us were, by his amazing ability to trace the most mundane story back to its roots with an accuracy that bordered on the psychic. From the merest wisp of evidence, he was able to tell us all kinds of secret or forgotten things about ourselves: why we lived where we lived, and thought what we thought; why black people sang the blues, and Crackers liked the fiddle. He seemed to take just inexhaustible pleasure in the historical junk people brought in, with no artifact so boring or obscure that he couldn’t wrench some bit of social trivia out of it.
Soon, his desktop was littered every morning with all kinds of stuff: old photographs and letters; turpentine cachepots and lye-stained washboards and even a dusty old mojo hand Bobo stole from a nail in his grannie’s kitchen (which, incidentally, isn’t as nasty as it sounds, nothing but a Ziploc baggie full of dried moss and leaves that none of the kids from Sinclair would come within ten feet of).
“Miz Crain gone put a root on yo ass,” they warned Gabe darkly, though he just laughed at their sincerity, clearly finding the po’ folk at LPM a fascinating study.
I must say the feeling was mutual, my company at the lunchroom table suddenly very much in demand. Every day, there would be this little elbowing fight when I sat down, everyone wanting to sit next to me so they could grill me about Gabe, who they steadfastly believed to be my father. I mean, there was nothing secretive in their suspicions; there at first, at least twice a day, in gym or the hallway, or sometimes openly in class, someone would dip their head toward Gabe and echo Bobo’s high, curious voice that first day of class: “He yo deddy?”
I tried to be patient with them; assure them that though we did indeed have the same blond hair and cowlick and dimple, that we jacked our jaws in an identical way when we were mad, still in all, he wasn’t my father: he was my uncle, my un-cle, my UNCLE. I had to break it down into syllables because it was clear they didn’t believe me, something I privately attributed to their own moral shortcomings, their own blasted families. I figured the poor folk around Sinclair had become so tribal and inbred that they had forgotten the concept of a normal family unit: father, mother, brother, sister.
But other than that ongoing annoyance, I did a pretty neat job of PR, told them about Harvard and New York, and how Daddy asked him to come home and raise us when he was dying, how it was The Right Thing To Do. Even the most jaded kid at LPM could not fail to be moved by so romantic a tale, a lot of the girls falling stone in love with Gabe that very first week, their faces in class transformed by a wistful longing, probably daydreaming that Mama would die of typhoid fever so they could step in and t
ake her place as the Second Mrs. Catts.
This was all to the good as far as I could see, my fear of him outing himself fading as the weeks passed and we settled into a happy routine, Gabe driving me and Kenneth to school every morning, his stereo blasting classic rock: the Beatles, Van Morrison, stuff like that. It became the music of the Revolution: “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Wavelength,” “Penny Lane” and “When I’m Sixty-four,” the backdrop to all our jokes and optimism and laughter that would follow us to school, church, everywhere we went. Gabe was always ready to listen to our many miseries, Kenneth’s usually wrapped up in money woes, and worries for his mother and how much she worked; mine a lot less life-threatening, mostly concerned with Rachel Cole, Sim’s girlfriend’s younger sister, who I’d been in love with since I first laid eyes on her in second grade.
Gabe commiserated, offered advice and (in Kenneth’s case) cash when needed, was such a great and generous support that by May, the whole specter of Daddy’s death and illness had passed almost out of memory in a way that occasionally brought me up short, not during the day, but in strange, unforeseen moments at night, when early-summer storms sometimes blew in from the Gulf, rattling our old house to its cracked foundation and waking me from a sound sleep. While I lay there, drowsy and yawning, listening to the ferocious whip of the old oaks, the thunder of rain on the roof, a strange thought would sometimes come to me: that Daddy was dead, he was gone; I’d never see him again.
Once it hit me, I couldn’t stay still, but would roll off my bunk and go to the window and open it to the fury of the storm, hoping the clean whip of the wind would blow away that first shock, that sudden, awful sink of despair. And it would, too. After a moment of standing there at the screen, being pelted by little drips and tears of rain, I’d close the window and return to bed, lie there with a clearer head, Daddy back in place, way back in 1986 with MTV and Madonna and MiamiVice, back before the Gabe Revolution ever was dreamed of, in my late and unlamented youth.