“You right. Most of the time what they thanks don’t matter, but this is different. Prejudice here is so thick, it’s like one of your aunt Mary’s pie crusts.”
I smiled.
“The wound was opened when the first one of us became a slave and through the Civil War until emancipation. Then, it kinda healed over, just enough to maybe get a scab. Before that scab could heal over, people like Dr. King and Eliza Blizzard come along and ripped it off and left that sore wide open with a whole bunch of sensitive nerves. You might not be but eleven, but that’s plenty old enough for you to be able to pour salt in an open wound. And you know how salt on a cut can hurt.”
“Can I do anything to make this whole mess easier?”
“You just keep on doing like you doing, baby.”
“Then, I got a few white friends and no black friends.”
Mama Jennie looked sad. “Baby, I don’t know what else to tell you. But I think you got to keep on moving on. You done gone too far for folks to be changing they minds as far as I can see. Ain’t no turning back now.”
I got tired of talking all of a sudden. Mama Jennie and I had been down that road over and over again. I lay in that bed feeling like I really wanted to give in. Maybe it wouldn’t work. Maybe they’d still hate or maybe they’d accept me. There was always that chance. So I wouldn’t be somebody; so what? Maybe, though, I might find a little peace. I had to decide which was more important. And if I backed down, how would Mama Jennie and Bojack feel toward me? I hated the thought of disappointing them. After all, when no else cared, they did. But I wondered if I hadn’t been backing down because of them. Was I really following this dream for me, or them?
“What you thanking, baby?” Mama Jennie asked.
“I was just thinking,” I said with a frustrated chuckle, “that I don’t even know what somebody means. Here I am running around studying myself to death, learning how to speak correctly, trying to outsmart everyone and everything, and for what? To be somebody? What is somebody? I almost got myself killed over something I don’t know anything about. I can’t put my mind around it. It’s almost like heaven, the way I’ve built it up. You know what I mean? It’s like someplace everybody’s supposed to want to go, but you don’t really know it’s there. Do you?”
“I guess you really don’t, but you keep living like it’s a heaven out there.”
“But why?”
“Well, look at it this way. If you live a life good enough to get to heaven and there is a heaven, then it’s all gravy, right? If you live a life good enough to get into heaven and there ain’t no heaven, well then you just led a good life, which ain’t hurt no one. You just go wherever it is you going, knowing you done some good in this world. You can rest easy. Same goes for being somebody. I don’t thank many folks that goes on to be somebody actually knowed what kinda somebody they was gone end up being. They just did all the right thangs, so when something come along that pointed ’em this way or that, they got the basics, you know? So many of our folks ain’t even got the basics. Ain’t got the foundation they can build on later. Somebody is out there for you somewhere, if you can just keep hanging on.”
“I just don’t know anymore. I just want some peace. I don’t know who I’m living for.”
“You got to live for yo’self. I know you at a serious fork in that ole road. But as far as I can see it, you ain’t even got a choice now, son. This stuff now is bigger than Evan Walls, bigger than all the racial tension in your life. This is all about Evan Walls having to look hard at hisself for the rest of his natural-born life, considering whether or not he chooses to continue this battle. When it comes to times when people tries to make you lessen yourself and accept something less than what you wants out of yourself, you decide what you gone be in this life: a follower or a leader. This ain’t the kind of thang you can sit on the fence ’bout and just sorta exist without making a decision. Peoples is gone make you make a decision, and you has to live with the consequences. It’s decision-making time, my son. Either you stands for something, or you’ll stand for anything.”
“I understand,” I said. “And I know what I want. I just think I need some rest. Things always seem worse when I’m tired.”
Mama Jennie nodded and helped me with my blankets. I was trying to find the position that caused me the least amount of pain when Bojack walked in, followed closely by Eliza Blizzard. I couldn’t believe it. I tried sitting up again as she walked straight to Mama Jennie and held out her hand. Mama Jennie took it.
“How do you do, sugar?” Mama Jennie asked.
“I’m honored,” Eliza said. “Honored to finally be in the same room with you. You are a legend, you know?”
It did something to me to witness this highly educated, politically astute and socially powerful woman pay her deferential respects to Mama Jennie, who threw back her head and howled.
“Girl, you sho’ do know how to make a old woman feel something good ’bout herself.”
Eliza smiled and let go of her hand. “I hope you don’t mind that we stopped by. I was out of town. I came back early when Bojack called, and we came running over.”
“No, sugar. I don’t mind. Fact is, you might be the perfect medicine,” Mama Jennie replied. “I think this does ole Evan some good. Look here now.” She turned to me. “You got the three of us. The three people who believes in you the most, here together. Just for you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied and smiled genuinely through my pain.
Eliza said hi to me and took a seat on the foot of the bed as Bojack walked around to the other side and knelt next to me.
“How you doing, little man?” he asked.
“I’m in pain and trying to figure out why I can’t be somebody and be liked at the same time.”
I felt Eliza rub my leg, and she smiled at me sadly.
“I think you can,” she said. “And on the way here, I got an idea. When you’re better, I want to take you on a short trip. If your folks will let me.”
“Oh, I’ll see to that now. That I will,” Mama Jennie said.
“Thank you, Mama Jennie,” Eliza said. “If I may call you that.”
Mama Jennie nodded proudly, and we all talked for a while. Eliza told us about some job offers that she was considering, which made me sad. Bojack had us laughing with stories from his daily life. He could be hysterical when he wanted to be. Pretty soon, though, I got tired again, and they all noticed.
“Well now,” Eliza said. “We don’t want to overwhelm you, Evan. But we had to come by to let you know that we love you and stand by you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
They both gave me hugs and waved as they left my room. I lay there quietly, digesting that visit. I wondered about where Eliza Blizzard might take me as I began to fade in and out. Mama Jenny getting out of the chair brought me out of it.
“Baby, I’m gone get up on out of here now. They gone keep you in here for a week or so, they say. Doctor say they want to watch you for a while. So you just close your eyes when you feels like it. Take the time in here to get a good rest. I’ll be coming back and forth until you go home.”
She leaned over and kissed me.
“And you can start now. You go to sleep, you hear, doll baby?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well alright then.”
As she walked to the door, it came to me. The smell was butter.
“Mama Jennie.”
“Yes, baby,” she said by the open door.
“You put a stick of butter in your purse when I woke up, didn’t you?”
“Well,” she laughed. “I cannot tell a lie.”
“Why would you have a stick of butter in the hospital?”
“I reckon I oughta be embarrassed at this mess,” she said. “But what the hell. Back in slavery days, the peoples used to rub butter on they noses when time came around for Christmas and New Year’s Day.”
“Why?”
“Considering all the troubles they been havi
ng, they figured it might help them slide on into the new year just a little bit easier. A little smoother.”
“Thank you, Mama Jennie,” I said, remembering at that moment all she had meant to me. “I love you.”
“I loves you too, honey. God knows you’ll never know how much. Close your eyes now, and tell that ole sandman I be coming at him shortly myself.”
1973
CANAAN, VIRGINIA
ELEVEN
I woke up looking at a bunch of feed sacks and flicking ants off my arm, which had been outside my sleeping bag and stretched across a bed of freshly fallen leaves. The five sacks filled with broken glass I had shattered over the years looked purple in the September moonlight. They were stacked between two of the trees that made up my circular haven in the woods. Nearby was a big seventy-or-so-pound rock that had replaced the much smaller one I first brought here.
Things had gotten worse for me in Canaan, but no matter how much I cried and shook, and no matter how blurry my vision got, I could usually zero in on the big rock and successfully smash up T. Wall, shatter Aunt Mary, or totally disintegrate the likes of Eugenia Pitts.
I rolled over and flipped open the latches on my toolbox. It was a rusty old Craftsman that Bojack had given me. I kept all my essentials in it. I reached in and grabbed a flashlight, flipped it on, and pointed it at my watch. It was one o’clock in the morning. I laughed because I had watched a four o’clock preseason football game that was over at seven; I had come out to the woods to rest just for a little while, but it turned into six hours. It didn’t matter much, though. No one at the house would have cared if I didn’t come home. In fact, I spent many nights outside in the woods because I was uncomfortable at home.
I put the flashlight back into the toolbox and lay down again. I zipped up my sleeping bag, which was actually Bojack’s from the Korean War. I thought about how much things had changed in the four years since the beating I’d taken on the day of “Death to Whitey.”
•••
That mugging had kept me in the hospital for three and a half weeks. For the first half of that time, only Mama Jennie, Bojack, and Eliza Blizzard came to check on me and to keep me company. When I was alone, I read books left for me by candy stripers.
When Mama and Daddy finally came to visit, they were a couple of happy chatterboxes. Mama kissed me. Daddy shook my hand, asked how I was doing and told me that they missed me around the house.
Mama told the nurse, who happened to be checking my vitals, that she and Daddy had been out of town and that my great-grandmother, whom I had been staying with, had a terrible time reaching them. The nurse smiled, looked at me sadly, and left. She had often heard Mama Jennie talk about how terrible it was that parents would sit at home and let a child suffer alone in a hospital.
Deep down, I wanted to forget that it took them a week and a half to come see me. I wanted so much for the care they exhibited to be real. But just the same, I knew better. It turned out that they were pressured to see me because of guilt. Not their own, but that of the black community at large. “He a honky wannabe for sho’, but I don’t reckon he deserved all of that mess they done to him,” is what one old lady had said to Mama Jennie.
With this in mind, they couldn’t continue to act like they had no sympathy for their own son, especially when they were benefitting from his misfortune. Reverend Walker bestowed upon Daddy the title of chairman of the deacon board. He also made Mama president of the missionary circle. And on top of all that came appreciation from some white citizens of Canaan. Daddy received another promotion at the packing plant, and Mama was offered a job selling girdles and bras at a local department store. The owner was a sympathetic white woman who thought it was wonderful that I would protect a white boy.
Together, Mama and Daddy brought home an annual salary of $23,000, which was unheard of for most blacks in Canaan. Daddy even stopped renting out our farmland. “I’d rather let the damn weeds grow tall as them trees out yonder before I let that cracker bring another plow anywhere near my land again.”
Mama and Daddy were now hanging around the Canaan middle class, and they began to act as if they had always been there. They spent a lot of time talking about their many new purchases and how bad they felt for the pitiful folk. One night during the summer after my school beating, I tiptoed into the kitchen, filled a glass with Kool-Aid and peeked through the kitchen curtains at the session conversation. Although several members had threatened to boycott our porch, they didn’t. Maybe it was tradition, or maybe it was the addiction to gossip. Maybe, like before, they wanted to be near those who had something in this world. I’m still not sure.
“Child, you say your paycheck was spent when you got it. Huh! Mine is spent way before I even earns it,” Ethel Brown said.
“And half mine, too,” Jim added. “If both us won’t working, we’d be in some kinda trouble.”
“Yeah, I knows the feeling,” Aunt Mary said.
“It’s a damn shame,” Chauncey Mae added.
“It’s pitiful,” Ethel said.
“Lord knows, I pray every night thanking Jesus for our many blessings and praying for the pitiful,” Daddy said.
Mama delicately kissed him on the cheek, the way a rich wife would kiss her rich husband who showed such sensitivity.
“You ought to pray,” Jim said. “Y’all sure is lucky.”
“Yes we are,” Mama said, acknowledging the luck in such a way as to suggest that only certain people were deserving.
•••
Cozy Pitts had become increasingly irritated with Mama and Daddy because of “they high-minded, nose-in-the-air ways,” as she said to Ethel Brown one night after they passed under my bedroom window on their way home. Another night, she let them have it face-to-face.
“Well, at least some of us got children where we can stands to look at ’em. Not one that’s near about messed up in the head as Lost Boy. And Evan who stay out in the woods all night sleeping with the raccoons and snakes and shit. I guess money and the white devils don’t solve everythang, do they? Tell me, Treeny. What that white-lady boss of yours got to say about this fucked-up family of yours?”
Everyone got very quiet and shifted uncomfortably. Mama’s mouth hung open, hurt that Cozy would speak to her that way in front of people and on her own back porch. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t been prepared for someone to rebel against her good fortune. She was furious at Cozy, but more angry at me. After all, in her mind, I had caused the initial fall from grace. In her mind, my existence left her vulnerable to constant attack. All someone had to do was mention my name or my “eccentricities” and a great pall was cast on her.
But Cozy Pitts needed to be put in her place. Mama stood and walked over to her chair. Cozy rolled her eyes and looked indifferent, which made Mama angrier.
“You look me in the eye, you ungrateful witch!”
Cozy laughed at her. “Ungrateful!” she shouted. “What you done for me that I can be ungrateful. Gimme some Kool-Aid? Huh!”
The next thing I knew, Daddy had run across the porch, grabbed Cozy’s blouse in both fists and dragged her across the floor while she held on to her wig. He deposited her on her butt by the screen door.
“Why don’t you take your nasty mouth on home to your loving husband. See if he can’t knock some of that sense he knocked out of your head back into it.”
Cozy struggled to her feet and went out the door. She looked terribly frightened. She looked at Daddy the same way I had seen her look at her husband. In the tension-filled silence, the screen door swinging shut sounded like someone emptying a double-barreled shotgun. I felt sorry for her as she started quietly across the lawn.
The others scratched their heads, looked down at shuffling feet, or nervously stared off into space. Mama began to cry. Her sobs seemed as loud as the screen door slamming. She yelled at Cozy.
“Cozy Pitts! You a cruel, cruel woman!”
A voice replied from the darkness of our driveway. “Well, I reckon the
truth hurt sometimes, don’t it?”
“Maybe so,” Daddy yelled back. “But from now on, you can do your reckoning on somebody else’s porch and out of our sight.”
“Well, I reckon that be just fine with me,” she yelled.
I was torn. I couldn’t stand the shame I created for my parents, but at the same time, I felt it was about time they did a little of the suffering around the house. I went to my bedroom, got my clothes for the next day, and went to the woods to spend the night. I didn’t want to be in the same house with Daddy, who I knew would need to blow off his anger.
Instead, later that night, I found myself in my woodland sanctuary lying on top of Bojack’s sleeping bag trying to imagine what must be going through my parents’ heads. I imagined them on their bed, silently and angrily staring at the ceiling. And I imagined that they were both thinking the same thing. Wondering what had gone wrong with us. Wondering what I was doing in the woods, and why Mark had turned against them.
In truth, Mark had turned against the whole world. In the four years since my trip to the hospital, his life fell apart. His confusion over how he should live his life eventually got the best of him. It left him with no direction, and when he finally saw that he needed a path to follow, there was no one around that he trusted to help show him the way. So he floundered. He no longer possessed the self-confidence to strike out on his own and become the man he should have been.
He was now nineteen and worked on the loading dock at the meatpacking plant. His immediate supervisor was Daddy. Whenever I pictured Daddy standing over Mark as he sweated, lifting box after monotonous box, I thought of the night that started this whole mess. I thought of Bojack lecturing about parents who didn’t want their children to do better than they themselves had, and I hated Daddy. I thought about how Mark had said that same night in the quiet of our bedroom that he had decided he couldn’t live like many of the black folk in Canaan. Now I mourned his lost dreams.
The Emancipation of Evan Walls Page 17