Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  “So why didn’t you just say no?” They were carefully avoiding each other’s eyes.

  “I did.”

  “And then he …”

  “Tried to.”

  Donny gripped the steering wheel. After a minute he announced, “I’m gon cut that man all to pieces.”

  Kathryn laughed. “Sorry, but you missed your chance. He had him a heart attack early this year. That’s why I’m down here now.”

  Donny trembled.

  “I thought you understood this. Grandmaw was supposed to tell you. You must have been hating me all this time.” The significance of this gap in Donny’s information was dawning on her. She slid over and put her arm around his shoulders. “Aw Donny, baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t just up and leave you. Hasn’t a night gone by I didn’t think about you, and wonder how you was doing, and want to send for you. I just couldn’t see any other way to manage things.”

  “Grandmaw said you’d gone to New York City to learn to be a nurse. She made me quit my job over at the brick plant. I couldn’t never figure it out. Said you was gon earn money for us, but here she was making me give up what I was earning.” He beat the steering wheel with a fist. “That white son of a bitch! That pink pig of a bastard!”

  After supper Donny went off in the Galaxy, leaving Kathryn and Ruby facing each other in the armchairs in the living room. Kathryn cleared her throat. “Mama, how come you never told Donny about Blanton like I asked you to?”

  Ruby spat tobacco juice across the room into the coal scuttle. Tightening her head cloth, she crossed her legs at the knees and swung one tennis-shoed foot. “I told that child what I thought he was old enough to hear.”

  “But Mama, I asked you to tell him the whole thing.”

  “Honey, you was out of your head that night. You said a lot of things no one woulda held you to.”

  “Mama,” Kathryn said, struggling to remain calm. “Donny thought until this afternoon that I went up to New York just for fun, or to earn us more money or something.”

  “I told that child how it like to killed you to leave him, but that you’d be writing letters and would be back afore long. I told him how we didn’t have much money, and how things would go easier once you was a nurse.”

  “That may be what you told him, but what he heard was that I’d run out on him.”

  Ruby stretched her neck and munched her tobacco. “You told that child the entire story this afternoon?”

  “He’s not a child and he should have been told four years ago!”

  “Well, honey, I was in charge here, and I felt like that he shouldn’t of been.”

  “Damn it, Mama! You been trying to steal my son! Making him hate me!” She jumped up and pointed an accusing finger.

  “I was trying,” Ruby said with a glint in her eyes, “to keep your precious boy alive, woman. Now shut your mouth and sit down.” Kathryn collapsed in her chair. “Losing his mama was bad enough. Now what you think that child woulda done if I’d of told him the white man who’d been so nice to him tried to rape his mama?”

  Kathryn buried her face in her hands. When she looked up, her face was wet. “Mama, you got to tell them from the day they’re born.”

  “You just plain wrong, Kathryn. You got to raise them up to be strong and unafraid and full of love. Then you tell them. Then they find out for themselves.”

  Kathryn shook her head no, slumped in exhaustion.

  Donny walked across the yard to Rochelle’s house, the last of the wooden cabins that had made up Pine Woods before the development. In the two-room house lived Rochelle, her mother, and six more children.

  Donny and Rochelle sat in the Galaxy at the Wilderness Trail Drive-in playing bingo. They’d been given cards as they entered, and now the attendant was calling numbers over the speaker. “… N-6, N-6 … G-4, G-4 …” Winners brought their cards to the concession stand.

  As the movie began, Donny scooted next to Rochelle and put his arm around her. They sat back to watch That Touch of Mink. After a few minutes Donny leaned over her. They kissed for a long time. He began running his hand up and down her neck.

  “OK. That’s enough,” she announced. “I don’t want no fancy stuff.”

  “All right,” Donny said. After his mother’s story, he wasn’t feeling too great.

  Cary Grant pulled into the driveway of his ranch house in a new Buick Riviera. He stood smiling and waving at Doris Day, who came running down the sidewalk. Donny trembled. He wanted to grab that guy by his polka-dotted necktie and tighten the knot until that ugly white face turned red and then purple, and those eyes bugged out with terror.

  The seizure passed quickly as it arrived, leaving Donny alarmed and exhausted.

  Rochelle glanced at him. She took his hand in both hers. “It’s like this, Donny. I done spent my whole life rocking my mama’s babies. I don’t wanna do nothing that might give me one of my own. Cause I got things to do first.”

  “Like what?”

  “First I want to finish high school. Next I want to get me a scholarship to college. I expect I’ll be a teacher, or a librarian.” She wanted a house like the one Cary Grant and Doris Day had just walked into. Carpeting, appliances. She wanted a husband coming home in a suit and tie. She’d had enough of sharing a bed with her little brothers and sisters and waking up damp from their pee. She was tired of roaches in the cereal boxes and rags stuffed into broken windowpanes.

  “Well, yeah, I can dig that, Rochelle. You told me this before. Don’t worry bout it none.” He returned his eyes to the screen. She studied him.

  “But I am worrying, Donny.” “What about?”

  “About what it means if I don’t let you do nothing but kiss me.

  “I don’t care right now. If I start to care, I’ll let you know.”

  “That’s what I mean. I never went out before with a boy who didn’t care about that stuff.”

  “Well, now you have. You see, right at this particular moment, I don’t feel so hot.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Not with anything you could treat.” “You been fighting with your mama?” “Something like that.”

  “I fought with mine today. She’s having her another baby. I said, ‘This one I ain’t having nothing to do with, Mama. You have them, you take care of them.’ She started crying and said it made her feel like she was accomplishing something when her belly was full. And when she was nursing them. Then they started growing up and getting mean, like I was being. And it hurt her so much that she had to go right out and start another one, hoping she’d do better next time.”

  “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.”

  “That’s what I told her. That’s when I knew that’s what she is—crazy.”

  “I figure we all crazy,” said Donny. “It’s just a question of figuring out how, not whether.”

  Chapter Four

  Hollowed Be Thy Name

  The sun, nearly overhead, was white-hot in a deep blue sky. The cacophony of competing church bells filled the valley as the citizens of Newland, dressed in their best clothes, strolled out of almost every house over to freshly polished cars. The streets filled with snarls of traffic.

  In the pasture bordering the grey river were gathered several dozen members of the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Men and boys wore suits and ties, starched white shirts and suspenders. Women and girls wore dresses and suits, heels and flowered hats with veils and white gloves. Several held umbrellas to fend off the sun. The preacher, Mr. Stump, stood before them on a hillock in a black robe and tam-o’-shanter. Next to him in a midnight-blue robe stood the deacon, Mr. Husk. In front of them were assembled half a dozen frightened adolescents in white robes with knotted white handkerchiefs on their heads.

  “… and I have brothers and sisters come up to me in the street and say, ‘Mr. Stump suh, when is the bottom rail going to be the top rail?’ Now I knows what these people means, friends. You knows, and I knows, bout ever kind of sorriness on the face of this earth. We knows,
friends, what it is to be mocked and scorned and despised ever way in the world!”

  “Yeah, tell it, preacher!” a man moaned.

  “Our people been raised up to believe we’ll never mount to much. We been hongry, friends, and the high and the mighty, sitting at their sagging boards, wouldn’t toss us a bone! We been ridiculed, we been called beggars and crooks and scoundrels. But I’m here to tell you, friends, that they was another who was hated and despised, amen! Another who was born in a stable cause the innkeeper turned his mama away from the door!”

  “Preach good this morning, Reverend!” a woman called.

  “Do you know what happened to this man, brothers and sisters? Do you know what the big shots done to him? They tried him in a court of law, friends, and they found him guilty. Called him a traitor! Called him a blasphemer! Beat our Lord Jesus! Shoved a crown of sharp thorns on his forehead! Nailed him to a cross! They crucified our Lord! Murdered the Son of God!”

  “Oh, yeah, He be my man!” a woman wailed.

  “Some people in this church, they says to me, ‘Mr. Stump, me and my old lady, we thinking bout going up to Washington, D.C. Or to New York City.’ They talk like the streets up there is paved with gold. Like they gon be waved in with palm fronds.”

  “I’m Born to Die and Lay This Body Down” rose and fell softly among the congregation.

  “Then they come back, these people. Yeah, I see them strutting down our streets wearing brand-new silk suits and driving big expensive Cadillac cars. They come up to me and say, ‘Stump, why don’t you go up at that courthouse and get your people what’s due them? Get them the vote. Get them the welfare. Get them hired out at the mill. Get them this. Get them that.’ All the time reproaching me with the Reverend Mr. Hyatt over at Donley, who marched up to the school board last month and demanded that colored children go to the white high school next fall. Huh!” He snorted.

  Ruby snorted, too. The idea of whites and coloreds going to the same school! Just no telling what they’d come up with next. If you was truly smart, you stayed out of the way of white folks. And when you couldn’t, you acted clever and got what you wanted. And if you couldn’t manage that neither, you got by, and you thanked the Lord for the strength to do it.

  Kathryn narrowed her eyes at Mr. Stump, who was referring to her. She’d asked him the other day what plans Pine Woods was making to integrate the Newland schools. She’d about decided, given the chance to go to white schools, Donny was better off here. The school near her in Harlem would be all Negro. Whites had the power and money on this earth—by associating with them you could learn how to cop yourself a piece of that action. But Stump was hopeless. All this reveling in suffering, every nigger a persecuted Jesus who’d be resurrected into Glory. It made her sick. There was no question: She had to get out of this place soon, Donny with her—before he turned into one of these black masochists, consoled by the promise of an afterlife that didn’t exist

  Donny, by shifting his eyes, could encompass his entire world. Everyone important to him—his mama, his grandmaw, his neighbors, his classmates—was all right here. His best friend, Tad, whom he’d known forever. He’d always been a little biddy guy, which was why they called him Tad. But this year he’d shot up to six feet, so everybody’d started calling him Tadpole. School was off to one side, his grandmaw’s apartment off to the other, with the field next to it where revivals were held in big tents. The sounds of preaching and testifying and praying had drifted through his open window, to mix with his dreams on summer nights. The river straight ahead, where he’d floated on homemade rafts. And all around, the mountains. He must have been out of his mind the day he asked about going up to New York City. He liked things fine the way they were. Now that he’d been around his mama some, he realized that New York City hadn’t done her much good. The woman he remembered as warm and smiling was often cool and scowling now—at that very moment, for instance.

  He spotted Rochelle. Usually she sang with the choir, wearing a long white robe. He enjoyed seeing her long legs encased in nylons, and the arches of her feet peeking over the sides of her spike heels. Looked like she was having to work at it not to sink backwards into the dirt. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Her brothers and sisters, scrubbed and dressed in poor-fitting suits and starched white dresses, stood in a row on either side of her. How she managed to keep them so tidy-looking was a mystery. One of the boys grinned and stuck out his tongue at Donny. Donny tried to look stern, but the corners of his mouth twitched. As he looked at the row of little children, he became aware that some were much lighter than others. Their fathers might have been white men. Fury swept through him. His hands clenched into fists.

  The fury drained away quickly, like air out of a bicycle tire. He looked down at his clenched fists.

  “… so the king, he picked this Esther to be his queen. The king’s counselor, he’d arranged for her people the Jews to be murdered. Well now, this Esther was real beautiful, and this old king, he couldn’t deny her nothing. But did she march right in there and demand that he save her people?”

  “Huhun!” people murmured.

  “Well sir, what did she do then, this clever and beautiful woman? She prepared a big old feast. The king, he says, ‘Esther, what is thy petition and it shall be granted thee?’ But did she ask the king to spare her people? No sir, she did not. She asked him to a second banquet. And a second time, the king, he says, ‘Esther, what do you want from me, honey?’ Well, Esther, she was decked out in these flowing robes bordered with gold. Her table was weighted down with food—bowls of fruit, platters of chitterlings, goblets of wine. This time she says, real sweet and quiet-like, ‘If I have found favor in thy sight, O king, let my life be given me at my petition and my people at my request.’ And the king, he says, ‘Now hold on here a minute. What’s this all about, Esther?’ And she told him about his wicked counselor, and the king, he set the Jews free and hanged the counselor.”

  “You preach it, Reverend!”

  Kathryn felt a sneer on her face. She was a lapsed Esther. When she’d been baptized in this river by Reverend Stump twenty-three years earlier, she’d been devoted to the concept that the world was shaped in accordance with the Lord’s wishes—that her assignment was to make white people’s lives more comfortable, that by doing so she’d assure herself of a place in the glorious hereafter. She didn’t go to church in New York City. If this world was what the Lord had in mind, she didn’t want nothing to do with Him. She glanced around. Her friends and neighbors spent their days following white people’s orders and smiling as they did so. They spent their evenings and weekends unleashing on the Lord and on each other the stormy emotions that accumulated. But what if there was no Lord to turn to, and your resentment was allowed to pile up day after day …

  She studied Donny, buttoned up in his dark suit. Serious and polite and obedient and well-meaning, just as she had been at his age. What incident would finally turn him sour? Nothing maybe. Look at his grandmaw. She’d be shuffling to her dying days.

  Stump had paused and the crowd was silent. Suddenly he stabbed the air with an index finger and shouted, “You there with that big diamond ring a-glittering on your finger! You there in your city-bought finery! You there with that blonde wig hat on your head! You is lost! Lost! Cadillac cars rust! Sharkskin suits shred! Diamonds fall out of their settings and into the gutter—and then where is you? You is nowhere, friend—unless you has accepted Christ Jesus your savior.”

  “So glad this morning, bless our God!” called Ruby.

  “We is slaves. Bound by fetters to the prison of our earthly bodies. And I’m here to tell you this morning, brothers and sisters, that the only thing that can set you free is giving your life over to the Lord Jesus Christ. He frees us from our sins just as surely as the masters freed their slaves from bondage. Hallelujah! The new Jerusalem, the Holy City where the streets is paved with gold, where the gates is inlaid with pearls, it ain’t no New York City. Ain’t no Washington, D.C., or Cincinnati,
Ohio. It commences at death for the faithful who in this life accept Christ Jesus as Lord and savior!”

  “That’s right!”

  “Yeah, tell it, brother. Tell it!”

  “That’s why we here this morning, friends, to welcome into the fold these young people who have seen the error of their ways and days and have made the decision to commit their lives to Christ Jesus. Who wish to prepare theirselves for their triumphal entry into the Holy City of God. But even Christ hisself had to get purified, at the hands of John the Baptist in the water of the River Jordan …”

  He waded into the murky foam-flecked river, reciting, “‘And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the lamb.’” His robes floated around his waist. Mr. Husk and the young people in white formed a circle in the water. The crowd wailed in complicated harmony, “I was a backslider once, but praise God I’m on the Glory Road now.”

  Donny watched as the young people were dunked like doughnuts. He recalled his own baptism. He’d been sitting for many years on the mourners’ bench in church, with the women on one side and the men on the other exhorting him to call on the Lord to bring him across. It had become downright embarrassing, both for himself and for his grandmaw, who was the most important lady in the church. Sunday after Sunday, revival after revival, he had waited to be struck between the eyes by a thousand bolts of celestial power, as his playmates seemed to be. Finally Reverend Stump had taken him aside and assured him it was enough just to believe in his heart in the one true God. When his time came to testify, he said just this—no voices in the night, no visions or trances, nothing. But everyone seemed pleased, and sang and wailed. His grandmaw thrust out her arms and shrieked with joy and collapsed into the arms of three ladies, while they fanned her with Sunday School bulletins. Her veiled hat sat askew. Since then he’d gone on to become a junior usher. Straightened up the church after services and swept it once a week.

  Ruby glanced at Kathryn reproachfully for not joining in the singing. Others had sung for her. It was the least she could do. Instead she stood in silence and stared across the river. She’d been behaving peculiar ever since she’d been home. Harsh and shrill now, just like a Yankee. She didn’t do nothing but badmouth Newland and tell everybody how they ought to act. Happened ever time someone from Pine Woods went up North. Came back know-it-alls, in fancy cars with fine clothes and jewelry and all like that, talking about nightclubs. From the looks of it, her own daughter had turned into one of these godless people, concerned only with the tawdry comforts of this wicked world. Ruby was determined not to let this happen to little Donny. She looked at the grim set to Kathryn’s jaw and was afraid for her. Buddy had had that same set to his jaw when he came home from Paris, France, and a few months later he got his throat cut. Ruby agreed with every word Reverend Stump had just said about tact and guile. The Lord meant for people to treat each other good. Just because some folks didn’t always abide by this was no reason for the godly to waver.