Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  “Man, ain’t that nigger gorgeous with all that slick hair?” one cooed, nodding at Leon.

  “Yeah, he outasight. I believe he almost as purty as George Wallace.”

  “Later for these dudes,” Leon murmured, looking straight ahead.

  “Who they?” Donny asked.

  “Bunch of thugs off the block. Think they’re badder than anybody else. I gon show them who’s bad.”

  Down at the corner were some good-looking chicks. Leon started talking to one. Said in his line of work you never had no time off, you was always on the lookout for new merchandise. While Leon ran down all his virtues to this one chick, Donny stood around smiling, getting ignored, and feeling guilty toward Rochelle for having had such a good time with Sylvia, for having set up a date with her a couple of nights later.

  The chick said in a loud voice, “Listen here, brother, I don’t give nobody nothing who don’t know the Ten-Point Platform. If you want to get next to me, you got to get hip to the revolutionary ideology.”

  “What you on about, woman?” Leon muttered, glancing uneasily up the street at those dudes, who were watching.

  “What I’m saying, brother, is you don’t get this in your bed, and you don’t use it on the street. You talk about all the nice things you gon do for me. You want to do something nice, you do you some revolutionary work so our people can be free. Fascist pigs is murdering us every day, and you standing here blowing about smack and coke and pussy and Cadillac cars.”

  “Right on time, sister. Run it down,” the woman next to Donny snarled.

  Leon started backing down the street. “Well, you just suit yourself now.”

  “That’s just exactly what I always do!” Her eyes flashed.

  “Honey, I got women waiting in line …”

  “Too bad for them.”

  Leon muttered as they walked away, trying their best to swagger, “Jive bitches. Putting out for them cats with the kinky hair.”

  Donny was starting to really supplement his income taking the Mercedes over to Dog Fur. Seemed like she couldn’t hardly live without that car. She was on the phone asking for it all the time, day and night. Or else showing up at the garage with the fat husband. Donny took a real dislike to Old Chubby. All the time smiling and sucking on these unlit cigars. He’d flip half dollars, and Donny would have to run around catching them or picking them up. At least Dog Fur sometimes blushed when he did this. Donny didn’t mind chasing after money, though. He needed it for taking Sylvia places. He and she, Leon and Flo, were spending a lot of time together at Clyde’s and the Chicken Coop. Every now and then they went out to a fancy restaurant or club, but Leon knew Donny couldn’t afford it and was tactful about not suggesting it often, and picking up the bill when he did. Donny felt guilty not sending his tips home, but he was sending a big chunk of his salary. He figured tips were extra. You earned them by being cheerful and quick, and being with Sylvia kept him that way. So he guessed it was right to spend them on her. Even if it wasn’t right to be with her in the first place.

  One evening Chubby called and asked Donny to bring over the car. As Donny drove on to the street, something evil came over him. He roared downtown a dozen blocks, shot over to Park Avenue, then crawled slowly back up to Fifty-third with the radio blaring. Chubby and Dog Fur were standing outside looking impatient. Donny switched off the radio right quick. As he climbed out, Chubby flipped him a half dollar. “Here, boy. Thanks. We’re in a rush.” Donny pocketed the coin, feeling good. He might drive that mother all over town, and old Chubby wouldn’t never even know it. He chuckled.

  In bed that night he felt ashamed. He’d always done what he was supposed to. And when he hadn’t—like when he sneaked down to Dupree’s, or when he beat up Rochelle, or now with Sylvia—at least he’d had the decency to feel bad about it. But he hadn’t felt bad about driving Chubby’s Mercedes downtown. He felt wonderful. What was happening to him up here in New York City? Was he becoming one of the godless Reverend Stump was always preaching about, who’d arrive in Pine Woods from the cities in big cars and fancy clothes, with no morals or decency left in them? He wondered, horrified at himself, if maybe being among the godless wasn’t worth it.

  Leon and Flo started having bad times. When the four of them went out together, they’d snap and bicker about dumb things. And Leon wasn’t around much otherwise. He didn’t say where he was spending his time, and Donny got the message not to ask. Donny supposed he had him a new woman, that he’d talk about her when he was ready.

  In recent letters and phone calls Rochelle seemed to be warming up a little. She even started talking about missing Donny and wanting to move up there to be with him. Donny decided the thing with Sylvia had to stop. He couldn’t keep track of his feelings for both of them. And if he saved his tips, he and Rochelle could be together that much sooner. He knew this decision was cruel. Sylvia had been good to him and for him. He hated to hurt her. But he had to. What he’d been doing was a sin, and once you knew that through and through, you had no choice but to repent and atone.

  “I got a confession to make,” he told her one night at Flo’s apartment. “I’m a married man, Sylvia. Got me a wife and two children back in Tennessee.”

  She shrugged. “Sugar, we all married. Or have been.”

  “We are?”

  “Shoot yeah, I got me three children.”

  “You do? Where at?”

  “My grandmaw in South Carolina’s raising them.” Donny looked at her, feeling contempt stirring. What kind of a woman gave away her own children to somebody else to raise? His own mother, he realized. Still, this made it easier for him to say that he had to move on. It was Rochelle, struggling to raise their children, who deserved his support and devotion. Sylvia didn’t need it.

  She shrugged. “Well, bye bye, sugar.”

  He’d expected anger, tears, reproaches. “You don’t mind?”

  “Hell, no, honey. I was just doing Flo a favor for Leon. Now that Leon ain’t around, it don’t make no difference to either of us.”

  Donny stood up. What kind of a place was this New York City? These people were monsters.

  “You gon give me one last gallop on that long black hobby horse, sugar?”

  His penis sprang to attention, caressed by her filthy talk, which he delighted in. “I got to go.”

  She laughed. “Suit yourself, farmer.”

  He hobbled toward the door, then turned around, threw off his trousers and leaped on her, ashamed as she laughed and writhed underneath him.

  The next time Leon stopped by Donny’s mother’s apartment, he’d quit conking his hair and was wearing a black leather jacket

  “Leon! What’s happened to you, man?”

  “Let’s go get us some dinner and I’ll tell you.”

  They walked down the steps. Donny looked around. “Where’s your car at?”

  “Sold it.”

  “You sold it?”

  “Most of the brothers and sisters got to hoof it, so why not me?”

  “What you mean? Your brother Jesse, he got him a ’65 Fairlane. Ain’t you seen it the last time you was home?”

  “I don’t mean Jesse, man. Brothers and sisters—that mean like all our people.”

  When someone in Pine Woods said “my people,” he meant his relations. But seemed like Leon meant even people he wasn’t kin to.

  “See, man, all my fancy living, I was playing right into the hands of the man.”

  “Which man?”

  “The white man, farmer.”

  “Which white man?”

  “Whole motherfucking bunch.” Leon looked irritated.

  Donny couldn’t believe his ears. He wondered if Leon knew about that good-looking cat on the TV a while back who called them “white devils” and got himself shot dead.

  “Whitey had me where he wanted me. Course where he wanted me most was in a hole in the ground. But failing that, he had me committing slow suicide with my horse. Had me waging chemical warfare on my own people se
lling them the stuff. Had me hustling all the time for cash for my clothes and cars. But I don’t need nothing he got no more, man. This is one slave that’s set hisself free.”

  Donny couldn’t figure out what he was blowing about. Colored people hadn’t been slaves for a hundred years. This New York City definitely did weird things to people. Suddenly the light dawned. “That chick you was after, you get you a piece?”

  “Brother, that chick laid some righteous facts on me. How pimping the sister on the block wasn’t no different from slavery times, only it was the black brothers collecting the cash instead of Whitey.”

  “You get you a piece?”

  “Shit, that ain’t the point, farmer.”

  Donny wondered how come people was all the time preaching at him?

  When Donny got home, Arthur looked up from his medical journal. “Have you heard yet about that Ford job, Donald?”

  “Naw, I ain’t.”

  “When do you suppose you will?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Perhaps you should phone, or go out there and inquire.”

  “Say they get in touch.”

  “You can’t just sit back and rely on other people’s largess, Donald. You have to make your own way in this world.”

  “I reckon.”

  “I know. Do you think I’d be where I am today if I’d just sat back and waited for someone to send me to medical school? They wanted me to stay an orderly. I had to make things happen.”

  “Yes sir.” Donny just wished the cat could like him like he was. He was doing the best he could.

  Arthur sighed and returned to his journal. Donny turned on “Sanford and Son.”

  Leon had started spending most of his time with the dandelion heads. Donny missed him and was glad one evening when Leon invited him to go along. When they walked into the office, the chicks were all typing and running off this newssheet on the mimeo machine. These three cats and Leon did a complicated Patty Cake routine Leon said later was the solidarity salute. Donny couldn’t get the hang of it.

  The men started putting on these bandoliers full of shotgun shells like the Cisco Kid used to wear on TV.

  “I’m coming too,” announced the chick Leon had been after, name of Lucille.

  “Naw, you ain’t,” said a man named James, who wore horn-rimmed glasses.

  Lucille picked up a rifle and headed for the door.

  “I said stay here and get that motherfucking newspaper out!”

  She stopped in midstep.

  “Goddam, woman, I’m captain here!”

  “You can call yourself captain, James honey. You can call yourself Donald Duck for all I care.”

  “You ain’t going!”

  “Now, be cool, baby,” said a man in a beret, leading James to the door. “Ain’t no need in you yelling at her.”

  A man named Phil with red hair and lots of freckles, who looked white to Donny, was standing around outside looking nervous. He moved over to the old Chrysler with the rest of them. James snarled, “What you all the time hanging round here for, white boy?”

  “I told you, man. My maternal grandfather was black.”

  “Gwan. Get out of here.”

  “I just want to help.”

  “You was raised white. To the world you is white. The biggest help you can give us is to go back where you come from. Work with your own people, man. They our whole problem.”

  “Ah, come on, man. Give me a break.”

  The man in the beret said, “Hey, I’m driving.”

  “No, you ain’t,” insisted James. “I’m captain.”

  “Fuck it, man. It’s my car.”

  They all got in, and the others set their rifles upright between their knees. As they rode around following patrol cars, Leon explained to Donny that they were keeping an eye on the police in case they got into any brutality on the block.

  James was saying, “That Lucille, she just counterrevolutionary, what she is.”

  “You tried to get next to her, man, and she didn’t dig you,” said Beret, “so now you call her counterrevolutionary.”

  “She all the time telling everbody what to do. But shit, I’m the captain, man.”

  “Yeah, but she sharp, that Lucille. She smart.”

  “Hell, I ain’t listening to no woman, don’t care how smart.”

  They pulled up next to a cop car at a light. James muttered out the window, looking straight ahead and scarcely moving his lips, “Rotten fascist swine, low-life scurvy redneck bastards, bigoted racist sons of sharecroppers …”

  The eyes of the cop who was driving narrowed and the muscles in his jaw twitched.

  “Hey, don’t do that, man,” Donny whispered. Leon like to impaled him on his elbow.

  As the car wove in and out of the blocks, they started comparing .357 Magnums and M-1’s and shotguns with double O buckshot and 30.06’s and 9mm pistols. Donny didn’t have no opinions on the subject. The only thing he’d ever shot was mistletoe out of oak trees with The Five. For a minute he wondered what the others were up to. Rochelle heard from Sally that Raymond had gone to Kentucky. Emily was supposed to be up here somewheres. What part of town did she live in? Maybe somewhere near the parking garage.

  James was saying, “Plastic’s best, man. One and one-half inches will stop a 220-grain slug from a .45 submachine gun.”

  Beret, who’d been over at Nam, explained, “Yeah, you take a brother with a flamethrower in an armored van. Another cat with an M-60 machine gun, and one with an antitank rocket launcher …”

  Seemed like they’d gone plumb hysterical. Donny just couldn’t see it. All that brother and sister and our people shit. Seemed like they most of them grew up here and didn’t have the real thing, so they had to go out and fake it. But Donny had just come from Pine Woods, where he really was related to everybody. Or at least knew everything there was to know about them. Didn’t feel no need to play these games. All that hate-whitey shit he didn’t have no use for neither. He couldn’t say he was crazy about most of them, but he couldn’t see wasting his time hating them. Seemed like that these cats used the hate to get up tight with each other. The more they said Them, the easier it got to say Us.

  Besides, a few white people had been pretty good to him. Like Dog Fur, who’d asked him to start calling her Deirdre and stop saying “ma’am.” Like Mr. Prince at the mill. Like The Five in the Castle Tree.

  After that, when Leon invited him to go down to the office, he usually had reasons why he couldn’t. If that was what he had to put up with to be with Leon, he’d rather be alone. Leon started calling him Mr. Junior Church Usher again.

  One night walking back to his mother’s from the subway, he passed an alley. An old blind wino he’d seen stumbling around the streets with his white cane was sprawled in it. When Donny was halfway down the block, he looked back and saw a patrol car pull up. Two cops hopped out and walked into the alley. He heard some grunts and thumps. Crossing the street, Donny walked back toward the alley. Those laws had that wino on his feet and was throwing hands at him like he was a punching bag.

  Donny wondered what that old guy had done. Looked to him like he’d been out cold, but he must not of been to provoke them like that. He felt bad for the old man, but it wasn’t his business. The cops dropped him against the wall, kicked him a few times, and walked out of the alley and down the street, twirling their nightsticks.

  When Donny wasn’t working, he didn’t have a lot to do, what with Leon playing army and Arthur wanting him out of the house. He’d shoot some pool, or go to Clyde’s for a drink, and a few cats Leon had introduced him to might nod and say, “What’s happening, farmer?” But he realized right away they didn’t really want to hear. He had to admit he was lonely. He wasn’t used to passing somebody on the street and not knowing them, not stopping to talk. In Pine Woods he was Donny Tatro, star forward class of ’63, grandson of Ruby Tatro, first colored man on at Benson Mill, youngest deacon at Mount Zion, husband of Rochelle and father of Isaac and Nicole. Up h
ere he wasn’t nobody.

  Seemed like Arthur and his mother took pity on him, for once: One Saturday night they invited him to go with them to a Ray Charles concert at the Apollo. Big shiny cars pulled up out front, and out stepped people dressed like he’d never seen colored people dressed before—except maybe the Supremes on television or something. Furs and jewels and slithery gowns, tuxedos and lacy shirts. Just like Chubby and Dog Fur. His own mother wore a fox stole with tiny shining eyes and paws. When he got on at the Ford plant, him and Rochelle would dress up like this and come in from New Jersey every now and then.

  Ray was led to his piano in his tuxedo. His backup band in their glittering gold tuxes stood up as sections, threw back their heads, and blared out their parts. The Rayettes in long sequined gowns and straight-hair wigs danced complicated but perfectly coordinated routines, while singing the backup in close harmony.

  As Ray began singing “Georgia on My mind,” the huge room became quiet. “… Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind …”

  “Yeah, sing it!” a man called.

  Several people moaned as though in pain;

  Donny started thinking about Pine Woods—the sun in the willows down by the river, bare feet slapping on sticky red clay. Donny felt like moaning himself, but managed not to. For Arthur’s sake. Arthur wouldn’t want no funky nigger of a stepson moaning in public.

  But he hadn’t been able to earn a living down there. A white doctor had stitched his cheek up all wrong. Jed Tatro and his friends drove through Pine Woods throwing bottles. Why was everybody moaning with homesickness, or wanting to? Damned if he could figure out why he felt tonight like a Hebrew in Egypt, driving cars around that pyramid downtown.

  “Shit, how come we left, Mama?” he asked as they drove home.

  “Pine Woods?”

  “Yeah. Big old ugly place up here, full of hateful strangers.”

  “Honey, I know why I left. And I reckon you got your reasons, too. You just a little homesick right now. But you’ll get over it.”

  The next morning he wandered around the streets trying to think what to do with himself. In Pine Woods Sunday had never been a problem—church in the morning, a big dinner, an afternoon of visiting, church in the evening. As he watched his alligator shoes moving along the grey pavement, he thought about how many hundreds of miles of sidewalk he’d covered up here, rarely the same section more than a few times. That sidewalk down the middle of Pine Woods, his feet knew it as well as his hands knew Rochelle’s body—each dip and bump and crack. Every point at which your roller skate wheels switched from a humming ramble to a clatter. The new sections, decade after decade, which contained the initials of almost every child in town—many now middle-aged, like his own mother. You had to tame a sidewalk like a bronco, make it your own. Up here the only spot he really knew was the one in front of his chair at the parking garage, and he didn’t know that very well. But it wasn’t something you could just up and do. Took years of traveling down it and lounging around it, in every season, on every conveyance you could think of.