Joyce Carol Oates - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Because It Is Bitter

  There are scattered fishermen on the far side of the river, most of them Negroes, sitting on their customary rocks, girders, slabs of concrete. But none on this side, within the range of all that's visible from the foot of Pitt Street.

  The wide-winged gulls have returned, circling in the gusty air, dipping, dropping, picking in the debris, emitting their highpitched bugle cries. Out in the ship channel a barge with the smudged white letters UNION PACIFIC ORE moves slowly from east to west. The morning shifts to midday, and the ridge-rippled sky turns opaque, the color of lard. Against the pilings and the crumbling abutment and the ravaged shore the waves slap, slap, slap...

  like the pulse of a dream that belongs to no one, no consciousness, thus can never yield its secrets.

  Please, miss? Ma'am, help me."

  Persia Courtney hasn't seen the woman cowering in the drugstore doorway at the corner of East Avenue and Holland until with no warning the woman steps out blindly into her path and there's the shock of a collision. And Persia is the one to cry, "Oh-I'm sorry!" and the one to feel, in her confusion, a moment's teethjarring pain.

  But the woman hardly notices. She has her fingers closed tight around Persia's wrist. A hand like a chicken claw, or that's the way it feels; Persia stares and sees it's a normal hand, or nearly: a thin film of dirt, a scattering of scabs and sores, but a worn-smooth gold wedding band on the proper finger and bright crimson nail polish just beginning to chip. The woman's hair is stiff broom sage and she is wearing a soiled cotton housedress. "Please, miss, don't scorn me please help me," she begs. Her voice is a low hoarse scraping sound like steel wool scouring a pan, but Persia can recognize the accent: hillbilly.

  It is Vernon Garlock's wife. Persia can't think of her name for a moment, then remembers: Vesta. "Vesta Garlock?"

  "There's one of them following me, miss. I can't get home."

  "What?"

  'A nigra. Following me. I can't get home."

  'A what?"

  "Nigra."

  The word is an exasperated half scream in Persia's ear.

  Vesta Garlock is in her mid or late thirties so far as Persia knows, but the poor woman looks twenty years older. Her skin is tallow-colored, bruised and blotched. There's a fang-sized gap where one of her front teeth is missing from a blow as neighborhood rumor has it, of her hot-tempered husband's. And her eyes.

  Those eyes. Wild as a horse's eyes that's snorting and pawing in his stall so that the groom is obliged to bring out the blindfold. I was scared to look into those eyes! Persia will say.

  The woman is pleading, whining. "You're so beautiful, miss you go first. Please. You walk with me, huh? Then they won't pay no attention to me. Won't go after me, then."

  "I don't see any 'nigra' that's following you," Persia says, looking up and down the street. "Maybe you're imagining things."

  "Ma'am, just don't leave me!"

  "I see some Negroes... who are not looking at us. I see that brown-skinned lady up ahead, with the baby stroller... she surely isn't looking at us." Persia speaks sharply, impatiently; she isn't the kind of person to suffer fools gladly. Nor is she the kind of person who feels much sympathy for crazy folk like Vernon Garlock's wife, whose people shouldn't let her wander around loose; Persia thinks maybe these crazy folk bring it all on themselves, their hard luck, even the way they look, blotched skin and missing teeth.

  She'd walk oif, polite but stiif, but the woman's damp wild eyes are showing a rim of white above the iris, and she's gripping Persia's arm.

  "Please, ma'am, for Jesus' sake, then don't leave me to the nigras."

  Wouldn't it be comical if it wasn't so sad: this beat-up hag imagining any man in his right mind, black or white or whatever, would look with lust upon her.

  Persia says with a sigh, "Oh, all right! Where do you want to go? Oh, I guess I know where you live: a ways down Gowanda Street? By the Loblaw's?"

  Mrs. Garlock grunts an eager assent. She doesn't seem to know the name of her street; like the neighborhood dogs she makes her way around by unerring instinct. But Loblaw's Groceries is a landmark.

  So they set off in that direction, no more than three blocks out of Persia's way, Persia conscious of people on the street staring at them.

  Staring at Vesta Garlock, and staring at her Persia Courtney with her gorgeous red-blond hair, "strawberry" blond as it's called, her black and white polka-dot silk dress, her spike-heeled black patent leather pumps... the pretty outfit she wears in her position (Persia does not refer to it as a "job") as hostess at Lambert's Tea Room downtown.

  Persia Courtney, wife of Duke Courtney, and the hillbilly Garlock woman, who is ranting in her ear about nigras: their animal ways, the "mark of Satan" on their foreheads. Why the other day, Mrs. Garlock says, this big black buck poked her toes in the park where she'd fallen asleep on the grass... another time, right upstairs in her bedroom, changing Dolly's baby's diaper, she looks up and sees in the mirror a wicked black face like the devil himself. And the way they send their thoughts to you... so its impossible you can't know what they're thinking. And what they'd like to do to you.

  "Down home we don't hardly have them at all," Mrs. Garlock says excitedly, "or if we do, they keep to themselves. You can go for miles and miles, I swear, all the way across the state...

  never see a nigra face. Not a one.

  Persia says, "Me, I'm crazy for Billy Eckstine. I'd drive across the state, to hear him sing."

  Mrs. Garlock isn't listening. She's hanging on to Persia like a child both scared and willful.

  Persia sniffs and sighs. She is good-hearted enough to see the humor in all this. Such episodes can be transformed into one of her stories, to be told to Duke and their little girl that evening.

  You won't believe what happened to me, on the way home! You won't believe, you two, how come I'm late!

  And Duke Courtney will gaze at her with that look of... that melting prideful this-beautiful-girl-is-my-wife look of his.

  Summer 1953. Persia hasn't yet asked Duke Courtney to move out of their Holland Street flat ("Just so I can think, not always just feel, like some sixteen-year-old girl doesn't know which end is up"); she has just begun her brief tenure at Lambert's Tea Room, that elegant place with its black marble floor like a glimmering pool and its Irish-crystal chandeliers aglow at all times in its churchly interior and its beautifully dressed and impeccably polite lady customers who smile so sweetly and pay Persia such compliments and leave behind such meager tips.

  This summer, Duke Courtney is "in sales" (in the home appliances department at Montgomery Ward, that store's top department) and doing very well, though his work is several notches downward from his connection with Jacky Barrow, now ex-mayor of Hammond... who kept Duke Courtney on his payroll as speechwriter, political and budgetary consultant, friend and aide, jack-of all-trades... until it all came to an end. (The less said of that end, the better. As Persia observed, at least Duke's name appeared only a few times in the newspaper, in the most lengthy fact-filled articles.) And now Duke complements his income with speculation, as he calls it: shrewd bets at the racetrack, carefully plotted poker games.

  "Speculation" is not the same as "gambling"; gambling is for fools.

  Over the years, Duke has developed a complex theory of luck based upon laws (of averages) and factors (specific and concrete): for instance, a simple harness race can be broken down into a set of mathematical figures, arranged in columns, having to do with the horse's former performances of course but also with the quality of the driver, the condition of the track, the weather, and other miscellaneous factors, which in themselves are constantly being altered.

  On the most basic level, if one always bets on the favorite, doubling the size of the bet with each subsequent race (regardless of whether any, all, or no bets have been won), the possibility of walking away with a sizable purse is considerable. One day in Cleveland, arriving with $40 in his pocket, he'd walked away with $6,000; another time, when Persia first visited a track with Duke, at Batavia
Downs, he began with $50 and walked away with $8,300. It's the point at which laws and material factors come together, Duke says, that the human will can seize control of its destiny.

  Persia's handsome, ambitious husband is also contemplating becoming part owner of a Standardbred (harness-racing) horse.

  though perhaps it would be better for him to go into partnership with a friendly acquaintance who owns a Hammond supper club where he and Persia might work together... might, in fact, perform: they are superb ballroom dancers, in the mode of the Castles, the legendary dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle who earned, at the peak of their fame decades ago, as much as $30,000 a week. "The Incomparable Courtneys," they call themselves, Duke with his patrician features, Persia with her beautiful face and naturally wavy naturally red-gold hair and tireless ebullient manner. For why not?

  This being the United States of America, and the Courtneys so talented, so gifted, so attractive, so eager to please, why not?

  Like Fred Astaire, Duke Courtney is clearly the sort of long-legged lean limber man who cannot fail to age gracefully; and Persia, though now a bit past thirty (Persia's birth date is a family secret but after her death Iris, her daughter, will discover it was March 4, 1922; thus on this midsummer day of 1953 she is thirty-one years old): why not?

  Persia says uncertainly, "I guess... I guess we're here."

  The Garlocks' eyesore of a house on Gowanda Street, which Persia enters that day for the first and only time in her life, is in Lowertown (as the poor section of Hammond is obliquely called); up the block from a storefront church SECOND CALVARY ZION BAPTIST, around the corner from the notorious juice joint POF'PA D's. The house has been built flush with the sidewalk, not an inch of grass, children's toys and household trash spilling out into the gutter.

  "Mrs. Garlock? Vesta? What is wrong?"

  Mrs. Garlock is babbling of something else now no longer "nigras."

  She appears frightened of her own house... but that can't be possible, can it?

  Persia helps the whimpering woman up the steps, through the rusty screen door, trying to comfort her but not knowing what to say.

  Inside, it's the millennial present tense of poverty. A wash of debris to Persia's ankles, an assault of smells: greasy, syrupy, baby formula, baby vomit, baby excrement, the Garlock odor grimed into wood, wallpaper, the very foundations of the house. Persia is appalled.

  Persia tries not to feel melting with pity. "Hello?

  Anybody home? Your momma's back!" Her voice is weaker than she'd like.

  The front room has been made into a bedroom of sorts. There's a sofa with bedclothes on it, a mattress on the floor, a filthy pillow no pillowcase. Towels, dirty undergarments, children's clothes, children's toys, a baby's playpen into which yet more household debris seems to have drifted... no, Persia squints and discovers an actual baby in there. Napping in all the mess, sprawled on its back like a drunken man. A baby of about nine months.

  An eye-watering stink of urine and ammonia lifts from that airless corner of the room.

  Persia calls, "Hello? Pleaseis anybody home?"

  What Mrs. Garlock is frightened of now clinging to her as she is, Persia can't guess. Not a word of this hillbilly woman's makes sense.

  Two towheaded children with the Garlock look in their faces poke their heads through a filmy curtain strung up between the rooms, stare mutely at Persia, back off. A husky boy of about twelve, barefoot, in filthy overalls, with a raw blemished skin and small gleaming-red Garlock eyes, appears... and stares rudely at Persia as if he has never before seen anyone or anything like her.

  Then asks, suspiciously, "Whatcha doin' with Momma? Howcome you're here? This here's our house." His stare is long and hard and assessing, a grown man's. Persia says, quickly, "Your mother doesn't feel too well... she asked me to walk home with her. Someone should call a doctor, maybe." The boy snarls at Mrs. Garlock, "Momma, for shit sake whatcha doin'! Actin' like you're crazy or something'!"

  Within seconds mother and son are fighting, and Mrs. Garlock, inches shorter than the boy and twenty pounds lighter, manages a windmill assault upon him, cuffing his head and shoulders, cursing like a man, until the boy gives her a violent shove and slams out the front door, and Mrs. Garlock is sitting on the floorboards sobbing angrily, weeping. "Devil, damn devil... don't know who they are...

  devils."

  Persia wants to leave the Garlock household quick as she can (she hears heavy footsteps upstairs) but something holds her. Her eyes dart quickly about as if she means to memorize details, nuggets of fact, to bring back to Duke for his amusement; if, this evening, he's in a mood to be amused. You won't believe this. Oh, it was.

  squalid.

  Gently she says, "Mrs. Garlock? Are you all right? Did he hurt you?

  Maybe I should help you somewhere, get you calm. Would you like an aspirin?" She's staring down at the woman's head, at the thin frazzled colorless hair, hoping she won't see any signs of lice.

  More than once since their move to Curry from the "nice" place on Java poor Iris came home from school infected; it's no laughing matter.

  She notes too how extraordinarily thin Mrs. Garlock's legs are in the calf, a sickly dead-white, covered with coarse brown hairs.

  Suddenly Mrs. Garlock opens her eyes wide and says meanly, "Don't look! Don't judge! You're too young! You're too pretty!

  You can't know!"

  Then she shuts her eyes tight. Hugs herself, begins to rock energetically from side to side, lips drawn back to expose truly ghastly teeth. Persia loses all patience. "Oh, you are crazy!"

  Vesta Garlock is past hearing.

  Persia goes over to check the baby in the playpen; her conscience wouldn't allow her not to. 'Poor sweet innocent thing in all this mess," she murmurs, leaning over the railing. But the baby sleeps on unperturbed, drooling, diaper reeking, face blank and bland and round as a saucer... not, thank God, sickly looking.

  Persia contemplates the Garlock baby for some minutes, dangerous minutes maybe, for what if it's Vernon Garlock upstairs and he's about to come down, what if that nasty-eyed boy comes back; she's heard plenty of things about the Garlocks and other hillbilly families and how the men treat the women, including sometimes their own daughters.

  .. but the baby sleeping, just lying there sleeping, holds her transfixed.

  She's thinking how her little girl Iris is growing up so fast, she'd dearly love to have another baby... oh, God, how she'd love to have another baby. The happiness of feeling it inside her, coming to life slowly, then not so slowly; then, after it's born, the countless hours of hugging, rocking, whispering... giving baths where each movement of her hands is special, privileged... napping together in the afternoons when Duke is gone... a darling little blue-eyed baby looking at Persia, at her, fixing its wondering stare on her, alone of all the world. D'ya love me, honey? Mommy loves you too.

  Except: if Persia Courtney has another baby she'll have to feed it formula this time, not nurse. Because Duke Courtney doesn't want his wife's lovely breasts to get all saggy and broken-veined and the nipples ruined, like some women 5... and neither does Persia.

  And if she nurses, as she did with little Iris, she wouldn't be able to drink with Duke, wouldn't be able to go out drinking with him, share his good times with him; God, how Persia and Duke need their good times!

  Persia wonders, suddenly inspired, would she have time to change that poor baby's diaper, before one or another Garlock came in and discovered her? If she could find a clean diaper, that is, in all this mess.

  don't stare, Iris. Haven't I told you that's rude?"

  She wonders if their blood too, like their skin, is darker than the blood of Caucasians. Of "whites." She has heard the mysterious words "black blood," "Negro blood."

  Aunt Madelyn murmuring with a fierce shake of her head, "That's black blood for you!"

  At the racetrack one day, a gentleman friend of Duke's slyly observing of another not immediately within earshot, he wouldn't be surprised if the fell
ow wasn't trying to "pass... pass for white."

  And the scandalized laughter in response.

  Persia scolding prettily: "Oh, what a thing to say! Oh what a thing to say."' "Look at his lips: the size of them! And his hair."

  Staring after them in the street, on the trolley car, on the city bus, where, as if by a natural tug of gravity others cannot register, they drift to the rear, polite, courteous, silent; choosing to stand hanging from hand straps back there where the ride is bumpier, where exhaust fumes accumulate, rather than take empty seats nearer the front where "whites" are sitting. The dividing line, sharp-eyed little Iris observes, shifts from day to day, from bus ride to bus ride. It's fluid and unpredictable, depending upon the numerical proportion of "whites" to "blacks."

  "Why don't they sit with us? there's room," Iris whispers in Persia's ear. The two of them are together in one of those odd open seats flush with the side of the bus and there is plenty of room beside Persia for a young black mother and her two-year-old, but the woman, hanging from a hand strap, gazes sightlessly beyond them and Persia nudges Iris into silence: "Just hush."