Easter shot straight up, opened her mouth, screamed, and then passed out.
CHAPTER 10
The men were always on that corner as if they were spawned from the cement. Or maybe they were who the ironworker had dreamed of when he poured the molten metal into the cast and formed the long, dark leg of the streetlamp. When the radical thinkers weren’t on that corner perched atop their stepladders and soapboxes like great ibises, spouting fire, fury, and awareness, the others were there, trampling over the morning sunlight and the three-o’clock shadow. They abandoned the corner only after evening fell and the moon tipped the big dipper, splattering the sky with stars.
Their moods determined how they would approach the women. When the weather was fair and the sky like glass above their heads, they hooted and hollered out, “Lovely, not even a smile? Oooh, you’re breaking my heart!” On crisp days they bowed low and made great sweeping gestures with their hands. For attention one man was fond of jumping high into the air, bringing the heels of his Sunday shoes together in a resounding click, click.
The good girls tried their best to remain good and hid their smiles behind their hands as they hurried off in the opposite direction.
As far as the men were concerned, 135th Street and Lenox Avenue was Eden. Three beauty shops within spitting distance of each other meant droves and droves of beautiful women coming and going from ten in the morning till ten at night, Tuesday through Saturday. Many a match had been made between a wash-and-rinse girl and corner boy. But Easter couldn’t be bothered with any of them. Her mind was set, she said, on something and someone higher.
“Who,” Madeline teased, “God?”
God appeared on that very corner on a cold December night. He stood out not only because he stood tall, nearly six-five, but because in direct sunlight his ebony skin glistened Prussian blue. In the cane fields of Barbados where he’d once labored, the men clamored to work alongside him. Colin Gibbs, they said, provided cool shade.
In 1908, Colin Gibbs packed a canvas bag with the few belongings he owned, along with four salt breads, three roasted pigtails, two cheese cutters, four bananas, two mangos, five limes, and one golden apple. He hoisted his deck chair over his shoulder, planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek, and bade her goodbye as he stepped from the small chattel house and joined the stream of men marching out of Pie Corner, St. Lucy. They were all headed to Carlisle Bay, where they boarded the vessel Thames and sailed for six days and nights to Colón, Panama.
Three hundred heartbeats sounded above the crashing waves of the bay as the Thames moved slowly out into open water. From the beach, his mother stood teary-eyed watching the ship until it disappeared over the horizon.
Back then, Panama had been the land of milk and honey. Thousands of Caribbean men left their island homes in search of work on the Panama Canal. But when the S.S. Thames brought itself to a shuddering stop, Colin cast his eyes over the thick jungle that had been beaten back from the shore with hatchets and machetes and thoughts of neither milk nor honey sprung to mind. Undaunted, he adjusted the shoulder strap of his canvas bag, tightened his grip on the leg of the deck chair, and joined the line of disembarking contract workers.
“Goddamn if you don’t look like Babe the Blue Ox!” the man they called Louisville loudly announced, then tilted his head back and sounded a long, shrill whistle. “You know that story, boy? ‘Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox?’”
Colin remained quiet and brought his eyes level with the big-bellied white man who sat behind a wooden table, shaded by a canvas sail. He’d heard stories of white Americans and how they dealt with their blacks. But Colin was no Yankee nigger; he was a British subject.
“I’m going to call you Ox. How you like that?” Louisville folded his arms across his chest and grinned.
Colin dug into the pocket of his khakis and pulled out a slip of paper, which he presented to Louisville. The man stared at the contract, cleared his throat, and hocked a large glob of saliva over the table. It landed in the grayish sand an inch from Colin’s shoe.
“What you got to say about that, Ox?”
A man in line behind Colin grumbled, “Wat de rass-hole this foolishness gwan here?”
Colin took a mighty breath, placed the paper down on the table, and said, “My name is Colin. Colin Gibbs.”
“Louisville, get to moving, the men are becoming restless,” a higher-up shouted over.
Louisville snatched the paper from the table. “I’d like to take you back to Kentucky with me,” he sneered wickedly. “You know what we do to niggers in Kentucky?”
Colin held his gaze.
“In Kentucky we make big buck niggers like yourself get down on all fours and we fit them with yokes and put them out to plow.”
Colin’s face remained placid.
“I got just the yoke for you, boy,” Louisville continued. “Pretty too, made it myself out of sassafras.” And with that he jerked his thumb toward a wagon that held a group of men sitting shoulder to shoulder, simmering beneath the scorching Panama sun. “Get outta my sight!”
Colin’s first weeks in Panama were spent on a dredge crew shoveling through the Culebra Cut. Months later, his back strapped with a large metal urn filled with crude oil, he walked twelve hours a day scouring acres and acres of land for pools of mosquito larvae—infested water.
He and the other Negroes were paid in silver. The whites were paid in gold. Colin worked extra hard, took no days off, and often sold his meal tickets to the stout men who never seemed to get their fill. He ignored his hunger, his aching muscles, and the names the Panamanians called him: Chumbo!
He ignored the heat, the mosquitoes, the dead bodies that were carried out of the jungle on stretchers, and the names the whites called him: Nigger!
He ignored it all and sent most of his money home to his mother. He did not spend a shilling on liquor or women and when the other men asked him why, he said, “Me going to buy myself a little house with a shop and land. Me going to raise pigs for slaughter and then me going to America.”
“For true?” the men cried facetiously.
“Yeah man, for true.”
Madeline and Easter stood on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue amidst a throng of people who’d gathered to hear Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, speak. The subject that evening was Negro laborers in Caruthersville, Missouri, who over the past month had been threatened and intimidated by whites fearful of losing their jobs to the influx of Negroes pouring into the area.
Marcus Garvey’s dark skin glowed against the gray brick of the building behind him. His jowls trembled and his eyes gleamed like polished onyx. A supreme orator, the man who the people in Harlem had dubbed “Black Moses,” possessed the vigor and vehemence of a Southern Baptist minister.
Easter’s eyes scanned the crowd and she could not spy one skeptic amongst them—except for the pale and ominous faces of the police officers stationed around the perimeter of the crowd.
Marcus’s eyes ranged angrily over his audience as he cried, “Ambrose Young, a Negro, appealed for protection after he had received several warnings. ‘Nigger, get to hell out of here. This is a white man’s country,’ was one notice delivered by five hooded men, Young said. ‘The next night I found another note on my front porch, weighted down with a cartridge box. It said: Nigger, if you can’t read, run. If you can’t run, you’re as good as dead.
“This bit of news is not broadcast; it is copied from one of the papers in New York. It is a significant bit of news. In thirty days, two thousand Negroes were driven out of a certain section of the country.”
The audience grumbled, a few shouted, two women fought their way through the wall of people and went wailing into the autumn night.
“Once upon a time the Negro would have been welcome to do farm work because no white man wanted that job, but now we are gradually reaching the point where even the most menial job the white man finds that he has to do it, and is going to do it with a
vengeance in preference to allowing the Negro to have it. Now if the Negro cannot even get the farm hand’s job, what is he going to get later on?”
Easter nodded in agreement, then together with dozens of others brought her hands together in applause. She turned her attention away from Marcus and scanned the crowd again; this time she spotted a tall man with skin the color of soot. Beside him stood a man of average size whose pallid complexion made him stand out like a lone star in a black sky.
“What has happened in this Missouri town is going to happen all over America, as seen through the vision and through the philosophy and through the teaching of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. I see that as clearly as I see you now. And that is why I have been giving my strength and my little intelligence to the program of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, because it will be a sad day when the Negro has nowhere to lay his head, and that day is coming—coming as sure as night follows day.”
“He too black,” Madeline announced when she caught Easter staring. “And besides,” she added venomously, “he’s a monkey chaser.”
Easter jabbed Madeline in her side. She abhorred the names black Americans had for West Indians. It didn’t matter what Madeline said, not a word had passed between Easter and the stranger and she was already intrigued. She stole another glance and then turned to Madeline. “How do you know that?”
Madeline’s tone was condescending. “They look different from us. Like they just stepped out of the jungle. Can’t you tell?”
“I think he’s handsome.”
“He would be if he wasn’t so black.”
“You ain’t exactly light yourself, Mattie Mae Dawkins,” Easter sneered.
The man saw Easter looking and smiled. Easter smiled back and he dropped his eyes, turned, and shared a few words with the man standing next to him. A few seconds later both men were walking toward her.
Madeline tugged the cuff of Easter’s coat and hissed, “Let’s go.”
Easter deftly yanked her sleeve from Madeline’s grip and turned to greet the tall, polished-looking man.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Colin and this is my friend Jack.”
CHAPTER 11
The “getting to know you” part was easy. Coffee at a luncheonette accompanied by a shared slice of pie. Their forks became interlocked and they grinned sheepishly at each other over the calamity. A stroll through the park presented an opportunity for Colin to pluck a dandelion from its roots and fix it gently into her hair.
He slowly introduced her to his world, which was pinched into the tight corners of Harlem. In his world green bananas sunned on windowsills and cornmeal was turned with okra and dressed with a whole fish, whose dead eye glared accusingly up at Easter as she sunk her fork into the underside of its belly.
In his Harlem people sucked sugar straight from the cane, drank water from coconuts, mixed rice with peas, and doused everything with pepper sauce, even fried eggs. The people in his Harlem did not speak, they sang their way through conversations and disagreements, and it was there where she first heard the words Junkanoo and Jouve, enjoyed the fleshy sweetness of a mango, and became drunk from one too many cups of rum punch.
The people in that part of Harlem preferred dominoes to dice and could not for the life of them understand why football was called football when the feet had virtually no contact with the ball. Men and women in the part of Harlem that Colin claimed as his own greeted each other after six with Good night instead of Good evening and expressed their anger, disgust, and irritation by sucking their teeth.
Their music did not rely on piano or guitar, but instead put its trust in empty oil drums, frying pans, the lids of trash cans, and dried, hollowed-out bamboo reeds. They danced as if possessed. Spineless and sinful, they moved like Mama Rain.
“What kind of dancing do you call that?” Easter asked one night, already excited.
“Wutless,” Colin said, taking her by the hands and leading her onto the dance floor.
He schooled her body in the art of his dance, resting his large palms on her slim hips, guiding them gently into the musical surf. Over time her inhibitions took shelter in the corner of the room and Easter allowed the music to swallow her, and so she did not blush when he pulled her into him and she felt his hardness pressing against her belly.
And oh, joy to the world—he was a book lover! Who had worn and well-read copies of War of the Worlds, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The two of them spent hours trolling through the stacks of books at the Aguilar Free Library on 110th and Third. Colin preferred hair-raising stories, while Easter fancied works that spoke less to the fantastic and more to the familiar—Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Scarlet Letter.
They’d take their books to Central Park, spread a blanket, and read to one another until the light vanished from the sky. Then they would go to his place—a tiny room located over a luncheonette. The air was always stale with the scents of grilled cheese and bitter coffee. It contained just two pieces of furniture—a bed and a stool. He kept his undergarments and socks draped over a hanger in the closet alongside his shirts and trousers.
When they made love the springs squealed loudly beneath the thin, hard mattress and they couldn’t help but laugh. Afterwards they would whisper their pasts into each other’s ears, and Colin cried when she told him about Rlizbeth. His tears touched her deep down in the soft, pink center of her soul.
Over time his name became a lump of sugar on her tongue that rolled off like syrup when she called out to him. When they were apart, he marched all through her mind and she found herself doing childish things like scrawling Colin and Easter 4EVER in the margins of her notebooks. Mattie Mae—now-Madeline almost died from laughter when she walked in on Easter posing in front of the mirror with the bed pillow stuffed beneath her dress.
“What you doing, girl?”
“Nothing,” Easter responded in a huff, quickly tossing the pillow aside. She had woken up that morning a heartbeat away from hungover—she was so drunk with love for Colin. Later that same day she did something she never thought she’d ever do: she asked Colin for his hand in marriage.
“If you say no, I might have to kill myself,” she joked, but there was a grave seriousness beneath the laughter. Colin was surprised and flustered and looked around for someone to tell him what to do or say, but it was just the two of them in his room. The sound of his beating heart filled the tiny space with the ferocity of a hundred drums.
He returned his gaze to Easter’s waiting eyes and said the only thing that had come to mind: “Yes.”
They were married on a Sunday in the parlor of number 17. Easter wore a cream dress with tiny blue silk flowers around the neckline and Colin, a gray sack coat, which he paired with black trousers because the moths had eaten holes in the gray ones.
CHAPTER 12
The store owners spotted spring’s flouncing, flowered skirt way off in the distance and in preparation for her arrival sent their boys out with bucket and brush to scrub the pavement clean. Massive pots of lavender were set to boil and then poured out into the street to wash away the stench of stool and piss left behind by the police horses and stray canines. The fruit and vegetable vendors added a little extra shine to their apples and stacked them pyramid-style. Work rags popped and snapped against leather in a way they hadn’t all winter long, and the shoeblacks sang in that ancient, mysterious way.
On the street those little boys whose first steps were a ball tap or step-heel tap were expert hoofers by the time they reached the age of five and they could roll, cramp, and Broadway shuffle with the best of them. Their jaw-dropping finales were aided by the fatback grease they slathered onto their knees, which allowed them to glide effortlessly across the cobblestone streets, hands thrust high above their heads and fingers fanned out like plumes.
If Easter could have planned it, she wouldn’t have picked that day or that place. She had been on her feet for hours and reeked of pomade and
fried hair. The day had warmed enough to leave the door open, allowing the sounds of the clanging bells of the trolleys that traveled along Lenox Avenue to seep into the shop and entwine with the women’s incessant chatter.
Madeline was out front puffing on a cigarette and lollygagging with that broad-necked piano player called Fats Waller who played Chappo’s monthly rent parties and had taken a liking to Madeline. Now he made it his business to come around a few times a week to slip a five-spot under her bra strap. Easter had asked her how many five-spots she thought he would give her before he demanded something in return. And Mattie Mae—now-Madeline had blinked stupidly at the question as if she didn’t know that men always expected something in return—even if they hadn’t given you a damn thing.
Mattie Mae—now-Madeline was playing with fire; it seemed that everyone except her knew that a season earlier, the boss’s sister, Lumpkin Banks, had dropped her drawers for the musician, who had taken his fill and never returned, but left his specter behind to keep her warm for him, because sleep or wake Lumpkin could still feel him lying on top of her.
On that day that Easter would not have picked, and in that place she would not have chosen, Lumpkin stood in the doorway glaring at Mattie Mae and Fats Waller and so was completely oblivious to the woman waiting for her attention.
Sleek and luminous, the woman had caused a ruckus for three blocks prior to her arrival and two of the men who’d been especially struck by her good looks had followed her all the way to the threshold of the shop. Inside a hush settled over the women who were at various stages of beautification. Her arrival turned their expressions curious, then smug.
Who the hell does she think she is looking like that, dressing like that, with that good hair? Is she here to mock us?
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