by Alice Walker
With all the space, which, because it was so quiet and empty of life, seemed really very large, Suwelo was amused to discover Uncle Rafe had chosen as his own bedroom the smallest room in the house. It was something between a bedroom and a closet, across the hall from the master bedroom, which was four times its size, and it was filled almost entirely by his uncle’s single bed. This room, too, had been straightened up and mercilessly cleaned. Though it appeared poor and bare, there was an almost clinical neatness. The cheap wooden bed was polished until it shone. The windows sparkled and the shades were adjusted precisely. The rubber mattress pad had been washed and folded at the foot of the bed the way a nurse—or a private in the army—might have done.
He supposed it was the nurse who had cleaned things up. He wondered. Next to his uncle’s bed there were several neat stacks of National Geographic. There were newspapers, a Life magazine, an Ebony, several copies of Jet, which, Suwelo recalled, his uncle had particularly loved. There was also—he stopped, picked it up, and flipped it open—a worn book, Of Human Bondage. This he took with him as he wandered about the rest of the house.
At last he settled in the master bedroom. As he stood at a side window looking down into the yard, he saw a black woman—youngish, trim, in her thirties, perhaps, weeding her garden. While he watched, an Asian man, very handsome and smiling, came out to embrace her. Seconds later two school-age children ran up. Something funny was apparently said, for they all laughed, and the boy, six or seven, began stacking and disposing of the debris his mother pointed out.
On the other side, a white couple was having a party, and must be somewhere in the group he saw, he supposed. There were about a dozen people, and they were talking, listening to music, and drinking heartily. They were very noisy, but there was nothing frightening about it.
On both sides of his uncle’s house—he did not yet think of it as his own—the yards had a carefully restructured look, raised beds for vegetables and flowers, for instance, that went with the newly modified houses. His uncle’s yard was different. There was just the yard, very plain, flat, with a thin layer of grass, neatly trimmed, and an oak tree that spread across the back of all three yards. Under this tree there was an ugly metal fake “barn” that his uncle must have used as a toolshed.
The room he was in had a high ceiling, three large windows facing the street, a fireplace, massive oak furniture that actually had presence (it was as if several massive dark people inhabited the room), and a giant bed that was the most inviting thing he’d seen on his trip. Wearily he sat down on it, marveling at its woodiness, the elegant old-fashioned carving, how high it was from the floor. A queen’s or king’s bed. The linens, light blanket, and comforter were spotless, ivory colored, and the spread was an extremely ancient, lacy, handmade throw that was so delicate he hesitated a moment before flinging it back. The pillow shams were edged with lace.
He had planned to stay a week, just long enough to put the house on the market, settle his uncle’s affairs, and collect the money coming to him. Before he knew it, two weeks had passed. Every night he called Fanny. Every night her voice was the same: cool, distant, beyond any concern for him. He asked how she was sleeping, because he knew that for a long time she was plagued by nightmares. Something about Prince Charles grinning at her, but with Africa’s teeth. He asked whether she was eating enough. To every query she merely murmured, “Fine, fine,” in that absent voice of hers that so irritated him. On the nights he couldn’t sleep he threw himself into a further cleanup of his uncle’s house. For starters he went through all the boxes of junk in the basement. There were many boxes of old clothing; in one he found pearl buttons and a woman’s wedding gown—old, mildewed, moth-eaten. There were boxes and crates of magazines and books. Hundreds of novels, but also books on learning English, on botany, on learning to sail. By the third week he’d rented a truck and made his way to the dump.
Slowly he worked his way up. In the kitchen he found little to throw out. This did not surprise him; from his first day in the house he’d been fed, as his uncle must have been before him, by the little old ladies who’d been at the postcremation ceremony. Old and slow-moving though they were, they’d lost none of their considerable culinary skills. Suwelo had never eaten so well in his life: three huge meals a day, brought to the door as punctually as sunrise. They did not pause to chatter. The doorbell would ring, he’d go to answer it, two old women leaning on and leading each other would be heading toward a car or back up the street. Sometimes they’d turn and wave. Occasionally he reached the porch fast enough to be able to say hi.
At night he sat in front of the aged television set eating his succulent dinner of smothered chicken or braised fish, and his life, for the first time since he was a child, seemed angel-protected, materially solid, spiritually secure. He was almost happy.
In Uncle Rafe’s house Suwelo always seemed to himself to be in a rather idle state of mind. His life had stopped, at least the life he’d thought he was building with Fanny, and he was suspended. He sometimes felt literally as if his feet did not touch the ground. It was a relief. And at times, too, he simply thought, something that money, enough to keep you going for a while without worrying, permitted you to do. Another of the many advantages of the rich, but only if they were clever enough not to ruin this idle time by thinking about their money.
By now Suwelo had secured his. He took out his bankbook frequently, to prove its existence: $26,867.03. That’s what he had to work with. Plus an old, newly valuable town house in pristine condition. A house that was slowly seducing him. It wasn’t just the ceilings, so high that birds flew in through the open windows and stayed several minutes before flying out again, or the comfortable old furniture into which he sank almost out of sight. It wasn’t the platters of delicious food endlessly appearing. It was actually—he’d considered it—the master bedroom. The bed.
Sprawled on its downy softness, the frilly throw about his shoulders, his back against the lacy, crunchy-sounding pillows, his eyes drowsy from the coal fire in the fireplace and the glass of Dry Sack he permitted himself in the evening, Suwelo experienced a sense of well-being that stunned him. In fact, if anyone could have seen him, his owlish eyes fixed on the fire, his mouth relaxed, his body limp, they would have said he looked stunned, as if someone had hit him once, sharply, over the head and he’d laid himself out to recover.
It was in his idleness that he began to notice how much his uncle Rafe had scribbled. On book jackets and in margins, on notepads and even on some of his medicine-bottle labels. Suwelo imagined him—he hadn’t seen him since he himself was in college, nearly twenty years ago—a doddering, muttering old coot, a bachelor, reading about the world but slowly losing a place in it, conversing by writing his little notes.
“No good. Strained. Trite. Could do better myself.” A scribbled blurb on a book by Ernest Hemingway. “Big bluster. He-Man,” followed on the back flap.
“President nuts. Can’t they see anything? Elect a madman. What do you get? Madness.” On an old newspaper, with a front-page picture of Eisenhower, yellowed, ripped in two.
“Between rock and hard place. Colored voter. Two parties but one race running both. White one.” On the cover of Life.
At first these little messages of his uncle’s simply amused Suwelo. Though he was himself approaching middle age, he held the view common among relatively young people that old people get no closer to being real than caricature.
“Lissie called me up today. Crying. Some crackers hurt her feelings. Bus was crowded with white people coming home from a game. They made her get off and walk. She was all dressed up in her white lace. Was muddied.” This was scrawled, oddly enough, on a shoe box in the master-bedroom closet. A shoe box that contained, indeed, a pair of white, out-of-fashion women’s pumps. Size six. Very soiled.
“Lissie will be the death of me. Must be strong. Damn.” Written, incredibly, on a used linen table napkin and stuffed in the pocket of an old black dressy pair of pants.
“Must tell Lissie not to worry about ...” Here there was no completion, as if his uncle had been interrupted as he scrawled his note on the back of an envelope.
But who was Lissie?
He began, almost unconsciously, to scrutinize the pictures on the walls again. There were pictures of Uncle Rafe as a very young man, just after he’d come up from the Island. It must have been the very first day of his employment as a sleeping-car porter on the Baltimore Limited, the train that “tore up” the tracks between Baltimore and New York City, which Uncle Rafe had talked about as if it were a relative. He was smiling broadly and jauntily sporting his blue-and-red porter’s cap. He’d loved to talk about the amount “she” was fed, what she was like when her “dander was up.” How she “chased the rails.” How none of the other trains could “hold a candle to her.” (What did it mean, he’d wondered, to “hold a candle” to something, especially to a train. How had the expression first come into the language?) Suwelo’s mind used to wander, even as Uncle Rafe grew more excited by the vividness of his memories. His rather somber dark brown eyes glowed, and once he’d said something about a minuscule tip a white millionaire miser had given him, and laughed uproariously, his temples bulging, his head thrown back, mouth open wide, revealing crooked but very white and strong teeth.
Fifty years he’d been a porter. Carrying, mainly, white people’s bags. Sometimes, for his “vacation” on the job, he’d snuck up behind some pretty “brownskin” with “a shape on her hittin’ ninety-nine,” on her way to the sooty Jim Crow car, and insisted on carrying her bag. These were the moments that made his work bearable, and he learned to create such brief encounters, small moments of delight for himself, as the train barreled down the tracks. He got on well with small children (they almost immediately referred to him as “uncle”) and their pets. Young mothers traveling alone doted on him. He was helpful, modest, quick, and definitely knew his place—they could read this easily in his demeanor—because he, like so many colored men, had perfected the art of doing the most intimate things to and for white people without once appearing to look at them. It was an invaluable skill.
At the end of his run his new “friends” pressed nickels, dimes, and sometimes quarters into his palm. There was the occasional half-dollar. He’d laughed, talking to Suwelo and the other relatives gathered around him (and around the mountains of good food always to be found in Uncle Rafe’s house) about how the train’s fancy food, which he had little taste for, was handed out the window to hoboes and how for one stretch during the Depression he’d developed a “paunch,” in which he carried enough prosciutto and roast beef to feed the fatherless family down the street.
“Niggers steal. Yes, indeed!” he’d said, and laughed like a madman.
Suwelo imagined his uncle from his white charges’ point of view. A tall, roundish, though never fat, somewhat somber presence; a being whose eyes were as expressionless as the glass eyes of a toy. (Suwelo thought his own bold but oddly unrevealing eyes resembled his uncle’s. A big brown bear of a man, bending over white people, serving them, for fifty years. The scent of their hair always in his face, their little needs and wants on the ride from Baltimore to New York the impetus for most of his activity, the words “Porter!” or “Oh, boy,” his signal to spring into genuinely delighted or, at the least, concerned action. What a nightmare, thought Suwelo, a hellish nightmare. And how oddly moving it was that Uncle Rafe loved food and wine and dancing (he danced beautifully into old age) in his house—the spacious, uncluttered digs of a stone bachelor, or so Suwelo had thought—with family and friends, and could sit and tell of his days on the railroad and not only laugh himself, but have everybody else laughing too.
And the depth of the laughter! The way it seemed to go so far down inside it scraped the inside bottoms of the feet. No one laughed like that anymore. Nothing seemed funny enough. When his uncle and his guests finished laughing, they’d seemed lighter, clearer; even their activities appeared to be done more gracefully. It was as if the laughing emptied them, and sharing it placed whatever was laughable and unbearable in its proper perspective.
How he wished he could laugh like that now over the mess he’d made of his life with Fanny. And the cowardice he’d shown in his relationship to Carlotta. Fanny loved to laugh, flaunting the irresistible gap between her front teeth, as if she still lived in Africa, where it was distinctly a sign of beauty; a gap that sometimes pinched his tongue. But he could not imagine being included in the laughter, now. His would be the place of the white miser, the one who exploited; or of the children and their grateful mothers, who nonetheless never saw. He imagined Fanny and Carlotta laughing together—at him.
One morning an ancient gentleman, whom Suwelo recognized as one of the two who had attended his uncle Rafe’s postcremation ceremony, rang the bell. He stood there in workshirt, old pants and boots, appearing to dodder. After a minimum of pleasantries—“Nice day. Warm up after a while. How you?”—he announced he’d come to “cut the yard.”
Without a word Suwelo led him through the house and out the back door. Once in the yard he watched as the old fellow unlocked the shed and took out a lawn mower as old as everything else about the house. This he proceeded to push back and forth over the tiny lawn, snipping off the heads of the tender blades of grass in great stateliness and serenity. Suwelo was impressed.
“My name’s Suwelo,” he said when the old man had finished, put away the mower, raked up the grass, and returned the tools to the shed. Suwelo stood beside him as he ran his hands under the water from the outside faucet and used a large yellowing handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from his face.
“I know who you are,” said the old man. “I knew your father and mother. I knew you as a boy, before you changed your name. ‘Louis, Jr.,’ we used to call you. Or ‘Little Louis.’” He sighed. “You wouldn’t remember me. My name’s Jenkins. Harold D., for Davenport. Hal, for short.” He smiled. “The children always called me ‘Mr. Hal.’ Pleased to meet you.” He stuck out a moist hand, which Suwelo took, marveling at its smoothness and fragility—the hand of someone who worked two or three hours a month now, at most.
Suwelo offered Mr. Hal a cup of coffee, which was accepted. Mr. Hal sat comfortably at the kitchen table, as if he were used to sitting there. Indeed, when he shifted in his chair and felt the slight unevenness of its legs, he gave the kind of exasperated grunt one gives when a piece of furniture has aggravated one unceasingly for a number of years.
“Mind if I switch?” he asked, already rising from the annoying chair. “That one ...”
“Did you know my uncle long?” asked Suwelo.
“All his life, just about. We was boys together down on the Island. Both of us come from furniture-making peoples. Went off to World War I together, the Great War. Married ...” There he stopped. Looked at his shoe.
He was a rather small man. His head was longish; his hair, that strange shade of gray that seems to be white hair turning black again, and cut short. His mustache was a neat brush across his lips. His skin was tan and of a smoothness common to old people and babies. He had unusually large and, Suwelo thought, fine eyes. By fine, he meant there was in them a quality of patience, of having learned when and when not to speak. Like many old people’s eyes, they had a bluish cast, and the dark pupils were open wide.
“I’ve been going through my uncle’s things,” said Suwelo.
“A lot of stuff to go through,” said Mr. Hal. “He never could let go of nothing. The least little thing he ever got hold of he kept.”
This was said matter-of-factly and in a tone of “I don’t envy you.”
“Oh, I’m enjoying it,” said Suwelo. “I feel I’m getting to know him for the first time. I wish there were names on the pictures around here though. The faces are so expressive. They all look like they’re trying to speak, but without their names I can’t seem to hear them.”
“Most of the women are Lissie,” said Mr. Hal. “The men are different ones. Your daddy. Cousins. U
ncles. Granddaddy. Maybe a aunt or somebody else female, but I don’t recall anybody else.”
“But there’re a lot of women,” said Suwelo.
“Lissie is a lot of women.”
“Actually, I’m glad you brought her up,” said Suwelo. “I’ve seen her name around here a lot.”
Mr. Hal studied Suwelo. His large eyes seemed to click over him from head to foot. Suwelo felt washed by the look, rigorously assessed.
“You’ve met her, haven’t you?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Suwelo said.
“She one of the ones sometime bring your food.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed. He thought of the old women leaning on each other, or turning to wave as they got into their automobile. He loved having them cook for him, and was really quite astonished that they did, but he thought they were too old to be driving a car.
“She wasn’t always old,” said Mr. Hal. “None of us was.”
Suwelo realized with a start that in his real life, the life in California away from his uncle’s cozy Baltimore row house, he was never around old people. He didn’t know that one of the skills they acquired with age was the ability to read minds. For as he sat there, embarrassed, he knew Mr. Hal was reading him. Easily, casually, as he himself might read a book.
“You married?” asked Mr. Hal.
“I was,” said Suwelo.
Mr. Hal waited.
“I blew it. Right now I don’t know what’s happening with us. I’m drifting.”
“I bet she real pretty,” said Mr. Hal.
This sounded false to Suwelo. And unworthy. Mr. Hal was too old to care about mere prettiness. Even he was. Anyhow, was Fanny pretty? “Prettiness ain’t what it used to be,” said Suwelo. “Probably never was.”
“Don’t take it so hard,” said Mr. Hal, laughing.
Suwelo laughed too.
“Women,” said Mr. Hal, with good humor.
“You can’t live with ’em and you can’t ... you know the rest, I just know.” They looked at each other and laughed again.