by Daniel Black
“What is nine times eight?” she turned and asked Sol suddenly.
“Seventy-two,” he blurted loudly, much to Emma Jean’s chagrin.
“Seven times seven.”
“Forty-nine.”
“Eleven times eleven.”
“One hundred twenty-one.”
Emma Jean acted as if she wasn’t listening.
“Who were the first five presidents of the United States?”
“George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson . . .”
“My God,” Miss Erma murmured. “And have you ever heard of any colored writers?”
Sol’s brows danced. “Yes, ma’am! I have Frederick Douglass’s book right here.” He reached behind the sofa and retrieved Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. “You ever read this one?”
Miss Erma smiled. “It’s one of my favorites.”
They chatted briefly about its contents, then Miss Erma tried one last time. “You must let this child come back to school, Emma Jean. You simply must!”
“I wanna go,” Sol said, “but—”
“That’s enough, boy,” Emma Jean snapped. “You stay in a child’s place. Ain’t I done told you ’bout showin’ out in front o’ grown folks?”
“Please,” Miss Erma pleaded, “let him come back. He’s behind, but he’ll catch up in no time. I’ve never met a more astute child in all my life.”
“I don’t need you tellin’ me ’bout my children, ma’am,” Emma Jean said, smiling nastily. “I know all of ’em. I raised ’em.” What the hell does “astute” mean? she wondered.
“Then you must know what education would do for this young man!”
Emma Jean spoke louder. “We can’t send but one, and it’s gon’ be my baby. Ma’am.”
Miss Erma looked at Paul, who hoped desperately that she would win the argument.
“Momma, Sol can go! I don’t mind at all! I really don’t. He’d do way better’n me anyway ’cause—”
“Shut up, boy! You don’t know what you talkin’ ’bout! You need you some education. You different from yo’ brothers. Sol can always work. He’s good in the field.”
“Emma Jean, we can’t let a youngster with his erudition—”
“Ma’am! We ain’t gon’ talk ’bout this no mo’. Yo’ big words ain’t gon’ convince me of nothin’ I ain’t already thought about. I done made up my mind, and I’d be mighty ‘bliged if you’d respect my decision.”
Obviously offended, Miss Erma sighed. “I see. Very well.”
“Paul, get yo’ homework done befo’ supper. Sol, you go milk de cow.” Emma Jean resumed cooking. “And Miss Erma, you still welcome to stay fu dinner if you’d like.”
“I thank you all the same, Emma Jean, but I think I’d better be going. I have to get to the Redfields’ before dark. Plus, I have papers to mark.”
“I understand.” Emma Jean nodded without facing her. “I thank you for all you doin’ for my baby.”
Miss Erma left, unable to understand why any mother wouldn’t send such a naturally gifted child to school. She wanted to plead further, to ask if maybe she could tutor King Solomon in the evenings free of charge, yet, afraid of Emma Jean’s wrath, she simply shook her head in dismay.
The day Emma Jean broke the news to Sol, he had wailed like Gus at the Jordan and remained inconsolable for weeks. Then, one day at supper, he wiped his last tear and said, “I’m goin’ to school one day. Somewhere, somehow, I’m goin’.” Paul asked Emma Jean to please let King Solomon go, but she wouldn’t hear of it. The hatred in Sol’s eyes was what scared Paul the most, and his subsequent guilt made him dislike school even more than he already did. Whenever he could, he rose early and escaped through the back door in order to avoid the longing in Sol’s eyes.
At the beginning of his second year, Paul whispered to Sol, “I’ll sneak you some books home if I can.”
Sol smiled derisively. Everyone knew, although no one ever announced, that he—not Paul—read Paul’s schoolbooks. Even the unassigned chapters. Whether fact or fiction, Emerson or Hughes, Sol fell asleep most nights with Paul’s books upon his chest. He completed the homework assignments, too, eager to maintain his tradition of academic excellence. Paul wasn’t the least bit ashamed to submit Sol’s work as his own, believing, in fact, that to do so was his way of supporting Sol’s vicarious education. Emma Jean loved it. Sol’s meticulous penmanship and extraordinary analytical abilities kept Paul’s As rolling in.
Sol resented it. His only life’s passion, the thing he craved most, was knowledge, and having to fight to attain it seemed unfair. Actually, it infuriated him. Others didn’t even want it, he rationalized, so why couldn’t he have it? At twelve, he had been caught extracting a worn copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the garbage dump behind Morrison’s General Store. Old Man Morrison drawled, “Ain’t nothin’ free, boy. You want that book, you gotta sweep de floor for it.” Sol swept so well that Morrison hired him part time. He was there every day anyway, collecting pamphlets, discarded books, flyers, and whatever else he could gather to read, so Old Man Morrison said playfully, “Might as well hire you, huh?”
Sol was thrilled. “How much you gon’ pay me, sir?”
“Pay you?” Morrison screamed. “You niggers expect white folks to give y’all de whole world? Dem books you take is yo’ pay, boy, and I think that’s mighty generous of me.”
“I only take the ones in the trash, sir!”
“Well I’ll be damned! Who you think own de trash?”
Occasionally, Sol would take new books off the shelf and mar them in some way to justify taking them home. Nobody in Swamp Creek bought brand-new books anyway, he noted. Most sat on the shelf in Morrison’s the entire forty-three years it existed, having never been touched by black or white hands, so Sol felt justified in taking a few here and there, especially since he didn’t get a paycheck. On the days he was required in the field, he took a few “old friends” with him, never able to simply read one at a time. When Gus let them break for lunch, he’d read as his brothers ate, telling them that reading was a kind of nourishment for the soul. Authorly always asked, “Then can I have yo’ lunch?” Sol’s extra-lean form worried Gus until, at thirteen, the boy lifted a railroad crosstie and carried it fifty yards. Gus stopped worrying after that.
Each year when school commenced, Sol’s anger was assuaged only by the new books Paul brought home. Like an impatient fisherman awaiting the first bite of the day, he’d sit after supper and wait for Paul to pass along his satchel, anxious to encounter an unknown author or scientific concept. Paul would feign interest first, thumbing pages and nodding for Emma Jean’s sake, then he’d extend the satchel to Sol, saying simply, “Here,” and until bedtime, Sol would sit statuesque on the sofa, devouring worksheets, spelling books, and math lessons until he had learned far more than Paul ever would. Once he began excavating texts from Morrison’s garbage, he eventually amassed his own makeshift library of discarded books, brochures, and newspapers and told Paul one evening, “You’re on your own now. I don’t need your books anymore.” He hadn’t meant to seem smug, although Paul took it that way, mumbling, “You think you’re so smart.” Paul’s real frustration was that, now, he’d have to do his own homework and he knew his efforts would never equal his brother’s. But, then again, having ridden the wings of King Solomon all those years, how could Paul complain?
A few wealthy whites, shopping at Morrison’s, noticed Sol’s insatiable thirst for knowledge and began giving him used books from their own personal libraries. Sol thanked them so enthusiastically that some dumped entire bags of books—like one slinging garbage into a Dumpster—onto Gus’s immaculate lawn. Occasionally the Peaces would return home to find books (mostly old paperback romance novels) scattered across the yard or even dangling from the limbs of the peach tree. Emma Jean would marvel, “Look, y’all! Manna from heaven! Paul, you and Sol gon’ be real smart after y’all read
all dem books!” Everyone knew who read those books. Why did Momma need to say that? Sol wondered.
The boys would gather the books and wait for Sol’s instructions. The one three-tier bookshelf Gus built for Sol’s fourteenth birthday was filled to capacity in three months, and building another didn’t make sense to a father who failed to understand why anyone needed to read more than two or three books in a lifetime. Sol asked Emma Jean if he could store books in the kitchen cabinets, and she teased, “Sure. Why not. Much as you Negroes eat, I cain’t keep no food in ’em!” When the three cabinets filled, he began stacking books against the living room walls. Gus complained initially, then discovered, one frigid February morning, that books burn quickly and easily. When Sol caught Gus ripping pages from his only copy of Native Son, the boy fell to his knees and wept like the women at Jesus’ tomb. He asked Gus why in the world he was burning his books, and Gus’s innocuous response—“I was only burnin’ de ones I thought you had done already read”—made Sol chuckle in disbelief. He began delineating the books he loved from the ones he could do without, and, that way, he avoided murdering the Peace family patriarch.
After dinner, the family migrated to the living room and listened to the radio. Emma Jean never mentioned the Redfield boys or the note and, for that, Paul was grateful. Within minutes, he tuned out the family’s reverie as his mind wandered back to the days of pigtails and pocketbooks. He missed feeling beautiful, feeling special, as though his very existence was a divine gift to the world. Now, he felt ugly and unimportant. Lost in a sea of sameness among his brothers, his significance dwindled, he thought, once he became a boy, and all the manhood training in the world couldn’t erase his memory of having once been the center of everyone’s attention. He longed for those days. Why couldn’t he be a boy and be beautiful? Some boys were beautiful, weren’t they? Like Johnny Ray Youngblood. He was beautiful. Everyone thought so. Girls gawked whenever he approached, and boys looked away quickly as though afraid to admit what they beheld. Emma Jean had mentioned his name so many times that, now, Paul couldn’t get Johnny Ray out of his mind. As much as Gus and his brothers teased him about liking girls—and he did like girls—he didn’t like them the way they meant. His love for women was strictly platonic. That’s why he couldn’t understand when Gus beat him for playing with Eva Mae. What had he done wrong? Paul soon learned that men didn’t mean for him to enjoy the company of women; they meant for him to use them for his personal pleasure. He had never thought of women that way. Emma Jean had planted in his consciousness dreams of marriage and intimacy with men while women were understood as confidantes and gossip buddies. Now he felt confused. Eva Mae was still his best friend—he sneaked and played with her in the field of clovers whenever he could—but he couldn’t imagine marrying her. Certainly he loved her, but that tingling sensation Emma Jean said would come when he fell in love hadn’t come. Not for her. He felt it, though, whenever Johnny Ray was around. The first time it happened, he leapt excitedly, declaring, “There’s Johnny Ray, Mister! There’s Johnny Ray!” Mister grabbed his arm and spun him around forcefully. “You don’t do that, man! Is you crazy? Johnny Ray’s a boy!” Of course he is, Paul thought. He didn’t know then that boys couldn’t celebrate other boys. Or love them. Or welcome that tingling sensation in their presence. Had it been Gus, Paul assumed, he might’ve been beaten yet again, and this time even more severely. So Paul learned, finally, why men keep their mouths shut about everything they think and feel. That way, they never have to explain themselves.
His feelings for Johnny Ray didn’t matter anyway, Paul thought. Johnny Ray barely waved at him, so what difference did it make? Nobody would ever marry someone like him. Every day Woody or Gus reminded him to “Unfold yo’ arms, boy! You ain’t no girl.” Or “Stop all dat damn drama! Men don’t do that.” Or “Put yo’ hands down! Men don’t swing their hands in the air like that!” There was simply too much about him that needed altering, he was made to believe, and Paul couldn’t foresee a refined, polished, masculine product. He’d probably be alone the rest of his life, he told himself, but at least he’d have Eva Mae.
Chapter 23
Paul’s girlhood faded into memory as the years passed. People still looked at him funny—and talked about him like a dog—but he’d learned to ignore them, for the most part. The day after his twelfth birthday, he met Eva Mae in the field of clovers.
“I can’t stay long,” Paul said. “Daddy’d kill me if he knew I was here.”
“You mean if he knew you was here with me.”
Paul didn’t lie. “Yeah.”
“Then I guess you better go,” Eva Mae said.
“I don’t wanna go. I like being here with you.”
“I like being here with you, too.”
They sat on the stump.
“Can I tell you something?” Eva Mae asked.
“Sure.”
“Sometimes I still think of you as Perfect. I mean, I know you a boy and all. Everybody know it now, but you still Perfect. To me. At first I thought the name was kinda strange, but after we became friends, I started likin’ it. And you just as perfect to me now as you always been.”
“Thanks.”
“Can I call you Perfect sometimes?”
Paul grimaced. “I don’t think so. Perfect’s a girl’s name.”
“Not really. I don’t know nobody named Perfect, girl or boy. Do you?”
“No.”
“So do you mind?”
Paul shrugged. “I don’t care. But you can’t call me that anywhere but here. If somebody else hear us, we gon’ be in trouble.”
“Okay. I won’t forget.” Eva Mae rubbed Paul’s hand. Then she stood. “I got a idea!”
“What?”
“Let’s look for four-leaf clovers!”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause Momma said whoever finds a four-leaf clover is gonna find somebody to love them forever.” Eva Mae pulled Paul from the stump.
He thought of Johnny Ray. “Okay.”
“You gotta look real close. They’re rare and hard to find, but I bet it’s one out here somewhere.”
She bent to her knees and Paul followed. Together, they split the grass with their hands, tickling each blade until it shivered between their maneuvering forefingers. Abandoning clover after useless clover, they began to uproot them for being despicably ordinary. It became a ritual, this malicious displacement, until dead sprouts lay all about them. “I don’t want you!” Eva Mae declared, jerking a fragile seedling from the earth. “Or you!” She jerked another. “Or you, you, or you!”
Paul wasn’t as demonstrative—he had learned not to be—but he was certainly as disappointed. “Come on,” he growled. “There’s gotta be one.”
Eva Mae became incensed. “There”—she yanked a plant with each word—“must . . . be . . . love . . . somewhere . . . in . . . this . . . field!” Like a demolition team, the two moved upon their hands and knees, destroying the ordinary in search of the extraordinary. They wanted difference, originality, uniqueness, and they were determined to find it. Each three-leafed reject heightened their disdain for normalcy as the playmates searched for what seemed nonexistent.
Eva Mae’s declarations deteriorated into vulgarity. “Where the fuck are you, four-leaf clover!” she bellowed. “You cain’t hide forever!”
Paul looked at her and scowled. How would she ever get a man, he thought, talking like that?
“Oh come on! There’s gotta be a four-leaf clover somewhere in this whole entire field! Shit!”
“Girls ain’t s’pose to say that, Eva Mae. It ain’t ladylike.”
“Why not? It’s just me and you here, and you’re my friend.”
“I know, but you a girl.”
You used to be one, too! Eva Mae almost said, but didn’t. “Momma didn’t say it’d take a whole day just to find one!”
They paused and huffed in harmony. “I guess love is like that,” Paul said. “Sometimes, you look for it a long time before you find i
t.”
“Or you never find it at all.”
Paul didn’t like that possibility. He wasn’t sure he believed in the myth, but he knew he wanted someone to love, so he looked again. Emma Jean had spoken of romance too many times for him to relinquish the hope. He recalled the story she’d told about the girl who, with six brothers, was so beautiful every young boy around sought her attention. He’d loved that story. Emma Jean’s theatrical delivery had been priceless. Twirling and dancing across the floor, she had declared Perfect the most beautiful girl in all the land, and Perfect laughed as her self-esteem blossomed. She knew she was the story’s protagonist and often closed her eyes and swayed as Emma Jean dramatized the fairy tale. In her mind’s eye, she could see the chifforobe of colorful dresses but could only vaguely imagine what a canopy bed looked like. Her mother tried to explain, having seen one in a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, but Perfect couldn’t understand why anyone would have a huge piece of cloth suspended in midair above their bed. Was it to block the sun or catch mosquitoes? But that wouldn’t make sense, she reasoned, since beds aren’t outside.
She’d also imagined quite clearly the tall, handsome suitor in the story. Emma Jean had said, “Just look at your father—then imagine the opposite!” The story led to Emma Jean and Perfect whispering about every young boy they encountered. “Is he one of them?” Perfect would murmur. Usually, Emma Jean rolled her eyes and frowned. “Ugh! Hell naw!” Only occasionally did she affirm, “Now that one’s got potential,” until Perfect sculpted an image of what the perfect man might look like.
Paul hadn’t heard the story in years. He’d never hear it again now. No one had composed any narrative for him as a boy, and he decided that, if he was going to survive, he’d have to create his own story, complete with a fairytale ending even he couldn’t imagine. So that day in the field of clovers, he began to mentally construct a self-conceived, self-affirming tale that would take him a lifetime to complete.