Tumbling

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  She tried to scream, but no sound would come through. Ethel, with her trained singer’s voice, used to pushing the air through any obstruction to make sound, to make it go high or low, to scat, or shout, or hum, or moan. She couldn’t push the sound through. It was caught right in her throat, strangling her. And then it was Liz’s own hands, strangling her. Shaking her head, trying to shake Ethel’s head from her neck, and hollering, “Bitch, it’s all you fault. Bitch. Why you leave me, you dirty whore, bitch?”

  Ethel grabbed at Liz’s hands. Tried to separate her hands just so she could get a little air through. She wasn’t all that scared of dying, but not by Liz’s hands. Crazed look in Liz’s eye just like the look in her mother’s eye that morning Alfred returned her beaded purse. Her red hair matted, dried plaster caked around her mouth. She knew Liz had already suffered. She couldn’t die in peace with Fannie in the middle of the floor. Blood around her, head wrapped with a bed sheet. She had to separate Liz’s hands. Everyone deserved to die in peace.

  “Why you come back here? Why didn’t you just stay away? Just die, just die, bitch, die,” Liz screamed, out of breath, tired. She was so tired. She could feel her strength leaving her body. She could feel it pulling from her head, draining. On down through her arms, until her hands couldn’t even clasp Ethel’s neck anymore. Her strength was leaving her body. Seeping. Right on through her stomach, the way everything went through her stomach. At least when it was pulling through her stomach, the circles stopped for a little while. Pushing. They were pushing on through her stomach. Running down her legs. All her strength sliding down her legs. She was too weak to feel repulsed. The sliding down her legs was warm and soft like liquid velvet. Even it moved slowly, tired.

  Ethel pulled Liz’s limp hands from around her neck and gasped for air. She coughed and spit and ran to Fannie. “We got to get her help,” she said hoarsely. She put her hand to Fannie’s head and called her urgently. “Fannie, Fannie, can you hear me? Fannie, it’s Ethel.” She listened to her breathe and undid the sheet Liz had wrapped meticulously around her wounded head. “Did you do this? What the hell happened here? What the hell happened to you?” she asked as she propped Fannie’s head in her arms. “We got to get her to the hospital. Who got a car? Don’t just stand there like you outta your fucking mind, you can curse me out and try to kick my ass later, right now we got to get her help.”

  Liz sobbed, “Fannie, Fannie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, Oh, God, please forgive me for hurting Fannie, she cared more about me than anyone.”

  Ethel winced at Liz’s words. But she focused instead on Fannie’s wound. She knew wounds. She had seen stab wounds from butcher knives and ice picks. She had seen straight wounds from razors, and jagged, crooked wounds from broken chunks of glass. As wounds went, this was not that bad: no pus, no swelling, clean, at least it was clean. “Fannie, Fannie,” she called again, slapping her face gently. “How long ago this happen? What you do, hit her in the head with the hammer, what was y’all doing fighting, what was you fighting about? Dial for the red car, we got to get her checked out. Don’t just stand there, what are you doing just standing there, what are you doing? You shitting on yourself, Lord have mercy, Liz, you still shitting on yourself!”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Willie Mann stood on the vacant lot where the church used to be. Three days after it had been demolished and he still couldn’t believe it. That’s not the way it was supposed to happen. He had asked them. Tom Moore and the rest. They had told him the plan was to keep the church standing. Surely some streets would be widened to accommodate garages. Pavements would be extended for more walkway space. But the church wouldn’t be touched. Historical purposes, they’d told him. What had made them do this? After all, his very grandmother went to this church. Damn, the church?

  The dirt swirled around at his feet as he rubbed his hand over his slicked-back hair. What power they had. Immense. That they could take something solid as the church and turn it into the thick air that he now inhaled. He picked up a handful of dirt and let it sift through his fingers. Not over me, he thought as he slapped at his hands to rid them of the dirt. Never did have power over me. No person on this earth got that kind of power over me. Except that he thought now about the one who did. Ethel.

  As soon as he’d heard the church had fallen, and first rushed to the spot and saw the thick dew that hung in the air and looked like teardrops, he’d thought about Ethel. Wondered if her presence back here had made the earth open up and swallow the church. Chided himself. Too cerebral to let his thinking descend so. Except that she’d always had a supernormal effect on him. He hadn’t even been able to get his fullness back since she’d shocked him in the cellar at Royale when he was exploding against Fannie. Two, three women he’d talked into the cellar since then, but he couldn’t summon his throbbing.

  Even that week, twenty years ago, when he’d actually taken care of Ethel. When she’d sneaked back into Philly under the cover of night round with Fannie in her womb. And appeared in the cellar and told him she needed to live down there until the child was born. Told him not to tell a soul, and then she’d unfurled a ball of soft pink yarn and commenced to knitting. And she lived in the cellar at Royale for a week. He fed her soup and gave her chipped ice when her mouth was dry. And then, three days after she appeared there, it was time. He turned the music loud to mask Ethel’s screams. Then he saw the crop of black hair pushing out. He held his hands there and guided the baby out. And she cried and jerked in his arms. Thirteen. He was only thirteen. And his hands and voice were shaking when he said, “It’s a girl. Miss Ethel, it’s a girl.” And for four days after that, while Ethel healed, whenever the baby cried, he’d turn the music up so the cries wouldn’t sift through the walls to the club or the outside world. He’d kept her secret then. Still keeping it. Couldn’t explain it to himself, except to say it was a power she had over him, like those white folks never did.

  A crowd was beginning to form near the lot. A crowd formed on this lot every morning since they’d leveled the church. Someone would pray, someone sing; then Jeanie would give a status report on the lawsuit they had filed and the investigation the NAACP had demanded. And they’d shake their heads all over again as if they were seeing it for the first time and cry or curse and shout for revenge.

  This morning, since it was Saturday morning and they could tarry here awhile, their collective reactions were more emotional, more passion-filled. They even scowled at Willie Mann.

  “What’s that old no-good Judas doing out here?” Bow called more to Willie Mann than to the gathered onlookers.

  “The gates of hell need to open right now and snatch that no-count boy to burn for eternity,” Pat Saunders shouted.

  Sounds of agreement rose and sifted around with the dirt that was blowing toward Willie Mann. He knew what he could do now. What he could always do exceptionally well. Swoon a crowd. Usually for money, special privileges, but today for his own hide.

  “I want you all to know that I was assured, absolutely assured that the church was to be left standing. And I am appalled at this atrocity.” He coughed and smoothed at his hair and scanned the crowd, locking eyes with one person, then the next, until he was sure he had them, salesman extraordinaire, oratorical genius. He loved doing few things better than this: winning over an audience.

  “Well, you been in bed with them the whole time, ain’t you now?” Bow called from the other side of the street. “Now you ready to turn on them; you ain’t true to nothing. Don’t come here now with your empty explanations; if it wasn’t for you and your tactics, things wouldn’t have gotten this far outta hand.”

  “I’m deeply hurt, Bow,” Willie Mann said as he made steeples out of his hands and pushed them to his face as if in prayer. “My very grandmother attended services here each and every Sunday morning.”

  “Well, why’d you try to force her to sell her house then?” Bow shouted as he waved his hand in disgust.

  “Eminent domain, Mr. Bow, sir
. She would have to move regardless. I only had her financial interests at heart.” He paused and went through the crowd again, looking for the grandmothers, short ladies with hair soft and white like cotton, large, sagging chests, and wide ankles, some still in their ruffled over-the-neck aprons with the deep pockets that held everything from safety pins to money for the milkman, from cotton gauze to garlic poultice. He made his eyes go soft when he looked at them and said, “But now it’s not her financial interests I’m so concerned about. It’s her spiritual edification. She would have gotten a pretty penny for her property; she would have had more space than she could ever use had she relocated; I believe she was wisely guided even though she chose not to follow my guidance. But this, this crumbled church, where will she go now on Sunday mornings?” His voice cracked for effect. “Where will be the coming-together point for all the saints when that place you were used to is gone? Where? Where is my grandmother to go now for upliftment of her spirit?”

  “It’s late to be asking those questions,” Bow shouted through the crowd. “You should have thought about all that when you was right in there with them scheming.”

  “Let the boy talk, Bow,” one of the grandmothers shouted.

  “He ain’t got nothing that’s any use to us,” Bow said angrily. “All he care about is covering his own smooth backside.”

  “Actually,” Willie Mann said, folding his hands lightly in front of him, “all I can offer you today is information. Information that has come to me through sources which my integrity will not allow me to reveal.”

  “Go on and spill the beans, boy,” another wide-ankled lady shouted to Willie Mann. “Don’t worry none about who tole it, you just tell it.”

  He breathed in deep. “We have been lied to. Tricked, duped in the most awful way. We have been persecuted, thrown into the lions’ den.”

  And Willie Mann reasoned that he was standing right where the pulpit should be. He was right there where the Word emanated every Sunday morning. He was standing in the sun, dirt swirling from his stomping now. “All they wanted was your space. Not for a road, not a highway, not even a widened two-lane street, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. They wanted your space. Why? Why do they always rise up against us, money, and power, and fear?”

  Sweat was coming together on Willie Mann’s brow as the morning sun beat down against the lot. “This space, this very space where you all have carved out honest, simple lives, this space that you’ve chosen to share with your families, your friends, your church mates, this space that has held your hopes and dreams over the years and created the backdrop for some to even come true, people, this space is worth money to them. That’s why they wanted you to move, not for the road, not for some contrived idea of an expressway. Do you know what I’ve just learned? I’ll share this with you. The most that will be built down here is a ramp. That’s all. One little old ramp.”

  The crowd gasped in unison and drowned Willie Mann out so that he had to shout to be heard.

  “Did a ramp necessitate you all being dislocated? No. Did it mean you all needed to spend hour after hour arguing over whether to go this way or that? Did it mean family member needed to be pitted against family member? No. I say to you on this morning on the once-fertile dirt that held your church, no. In the name of one that I’m not accustomed to call, no! Think of all that you’ve experienced in this space. Why, I can even think of things that have happened during my tenure at Club Royale, after all I’ve been employed there since I was twelve years old, started out bringing the inventory into the cellar. I grew up in the place. I know to some of you that may not seem like the ideal place for a lad to grow, but I did. It was like a second home to me.

  “I ask you,” he continued to the crowd on the lot, “how can we just walk away from this space that’s been a part of our lives? Should we have to? I say to you, should we have to?” He shouted louder, as the scene flashed again, the couch, Ethel with the baby on her breast. Boxed inventory all around. And he had done it. He had helped Miss Ethel birth her baby. He had kept the real meaning forgotten for the past twenty years. New life, he’d helped new life slide into the world. Never bragged about it, never whispered a sigh of it, kept tucked in his heart by Ethel’s power that covered him like a sheath. “Should we have to forget?” he shouted again to the crowd. “No, I submit to you today on this lot, no.” Willie Mann’s arms flew up and down to the rhythm of his singsongy speech. His feet moved in the dirt, stomping, and then dancing. He sang. As he spoke, he sang. His eyes were shining. He was on fire.

  He didn’t feel the first piece of brick that hit him square between his shoulder blades. Nor the second that caught him mid-thigh. It was the one against his forehead that confused him. Made him stop mid-sentence to grunt in pain. Pulled him from his oratorical hysteria to see them converging on him, stampeding, the very ones he thought he was swooning by his accounting of the current situation. “Wait!” he shouted. He backed up, stumbling on patches of bruised earth. “Let me finish, let me explain their treachery.”

  “No, you let us finish,” called one of the wide-ankled women. “Let us finish what your grandmama didn’t.”

  “Always did spare the rod with that one, Maybell did. Always favored him, gave him too much, see what happens when you give a child too much.”

  “Turn on you quicker than day into night.”

  He felt another chunk of brick against his chin, in his chest. He ducked. Pieces of the fallen church were flying like missiles. Now he had lost this too, his finest gift. His ability to persuade. He turned to run. Ethel. He was losing everything since she’d returned. She owed him. She owed him for that week in the cellar at Royale. For his twenty years of silence. He’d tell her too; if he got out of this one, he’d tell her just how he felt. He ran hard to outrun the bricks that were keeping pace. Straight to Royale, his home underground.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Sunday morning Noon woke to an unkempt house. Saturday had come and gone, and she hadn’t done her windows, her kitchen floors, changed the bed linen, dusted down the walls, or the venetian blinds. First time ever Sunday morning had caught her with her housework undone. “It’s gonna stay undone until the Sabbath is over,” she said out loud, and then laughed, and turned on her side and watched Herbie snore. The thought of her crumbled church caught her laugh in her throat, made her moan and gag. “Not now,” she said out loud as she swallowed hard. “Kiss my butt, devil, you ain’t killing my joy right now.”

  She mashed her lips against Herbie’s in a long, juicy kiss, and he put his arms around her and snored again, and she just lay there. She watched the daybreak push in through the half-opened blinds, hardly able to contain herself. Her body still tingled from their maiden voyage.

  They had done it all day Saturday. All over the house. In each room, in the orange and yellow kitchen right on the floor, their feet banged against the oven door and sounded like an explosion getting ready to happen. In the dining room, under the table, cozy and safe between the low turtle-like scalloped legs of the dining room table etched and shaped by Noon’s own brother’s hands. In the living room, in the deep armchair where Herbie liked to read his paper. And then in the bedroom, where they took their time. They napped on and off because Herbie reminded Noon he was not twenty anymore. And Noon with surprising finesse would bring him back to life, and he felt twenty then. They laughed in between, about the silliest of things, Herbie’s foot caught in the tangle of the sheets, Noon’s newly styled bang flopping in her eyes. Until they were depleted. They laughed, and napped, and made love all day Saturday, all night long.

  If her muscles weren’t so tired, so stiff from positions she’d never given thought to, Noon would have jumped out of bed right then and sang and danced and shouted Hallelujah. She almost wanted to go down and open the front door and announce so all of Lombard Street could hear, “I’ve got a feeling, everything’s gonna be all right.” She wanted to put her hands on her hips and rock them on down Lombard Street, ungirdled; she wanted t
o tell the world she’d been set free.

  She slipped from under Herbie’s arms and crawled out of bed and reminded herself that she did have a little housework that had to be done. The mess in the kitchen, the butter she had taken out the day before to soften had melted and run over the floor. And the puddle of cream. Then the clothes, his pants and shirt, her nightgown, who knew where they had landed? She glowed at the thought of getting the house in order just so they could tear it up again.

  Her face was bright as the sunshine after she’d taken her bath and gotten dressed and walked down into the living room. She might as well start straightening up in here, she thought as she leaned over to pick up the hastily kicked-off red high heels that had gotten her home yesterday morning. She glanced out into the sunshine, then dropped the shoes, stunned, and gasped in horror at the figure on her steps.

  She hardly knew who it was at first. The sight of the humped-over figure interrupted the tingle that was still racing through her body. Leaned over, the figure was, head hung as if it were ready to snap from her neck and just fall through the concrete. An unkempt version of Liz, the likes of which she’d never seen, sat on her top steps. She tried to form her mouth to call for Herbie, she could hear him moving around upstairs. But already he was in the tub, singing louder than Noon had ever heard him sing before. And then she snatched open the door. “Liz,” she said. “Can this be you? Can it? Lord have mercy, can this be you?”

  Liz was still in the silky shit-stained pajamas. Plaster dust still sparkled in her matted red hair. When Ethel had run from the house to rush Fannie to the hospital the day before, she’d told Liz to clean herself up and go tell Noon and Herbie. But Liz hadn’t cleaned herself up. She didn’t have the strength. Took her the entire day and night into this morning to get up the strength to walk around the corner. Once she’d gotten there she just sat on the steps. She had wanted to knock on the door. She had just wanted to fall into Noon’s arms. But how could she tell her that she had hurt Fannie? She pulled her knees close to her chest and wrapped her arms tight around her knees. She needed the pressure of her knees in her stomach. Anything to stop the circles.