by Diane Munier
The cymbals had crashed and they stepped back and Debra lowered to her seat her eyes big on Naomi. “Should I go?” she said.
“No,” said Naomi, glad to have something she could speak to besides my question. That I knew.
“Well sit down,” she said to me, reason in her voice like always.
“Answer me,” I said loud.
Debra said, “Hey now,” and Naomi held out her hand like a stop sign.
“Sit down,” she said again.
“If you don’t answer me…I am going to break…apart.”
“I will answer. I will. Just sit down, baby. It’s a long answer.”
So I let her pull the chair for me and I dropped.
She sat quick. She leaned toward me. “Lonnie is your father, Hilly.”
I slapped the table and I couldn’t feel my hand. “No. The truth. The truth that everyone knows, that everyone says in Snyder and at school…. The truth!”
Naomi has pulled back but she keeps her eyes on me. “Lonnie Grunier. He is your father.”
“Eugene Blue is my father.”
She shook her head. “He is not.”
“How do you know that? You’ve lied to me for so long.”
She licked her lips. “It’s the blood. That’s…how they tell. You cannot match Eugene’s blood-type.”
She was trying to explain it, the science, but I talked over her, “You’re lying. Are we blood? You and me? Why wouldn’t you tell me that? You let me think I had no one. Why are you lying to me?” I slapped the table over and over. I couldn’t seem to stop, and I cried and my face was twisted up.
“Listen to me Hilly, listen to me. You have always had me. Always. I am telling you the truth. I am telling you what I know. Lonnie Grunier is your father. I wish I could help you…I wish I could say it’s not so.”
“I am black…inside. I feel it. You can’t not let me know…you can’t. I’m like Danny. We’ve always known…he has. We’re alike…we’re the same…he’s my love. And…he’s my love. He protects me…you protect me…but you’re killing me. Don’t you see it? You’re killing me.”
I had pushed my chair back at an odd angle and I was sobbing now, feeling myself melting down. She grabbed at my hands. “Shh. Shhh. I will tell you. I was going to tell you but I promised your grandmother…I promised.”
“Is Eugene Blue my father?” I asked one more time, gasping and breaking against her.
“No. Not father.”
I shook my head. I looked at Debra. “I did not know,” she said.
“Your Great Grandmother…the day we got word her daughter had died…we went to Memphis just her and me. She couldn’t tell the mister, he had washed his hands of her. But we went there in the worst part of that city in a place so foul…and there was Leonard Shote’s sister, drunk and a broken woman…a junkie…so high and so low…so angry we were not the pusher man but two ‘goddamn mission women,’ as she put it.
“We had not realized Renata’s mother lived with a Negro man. Not a good man though. But had the white grandfather known that…there would be nothing we could do for these children she had left. Leonard’s children is what the sister said.
“And in that one filthy room, Renata, just a toddler, dirty…” Naomi looked off, tears streaming and she wiped at them then looking away she said, “and in the corner there…,” a sob, but she pulled it in and I saw her holding her shoulders straight, “…a cardboard box for bathroom tissue…why I remember…a little baby black and skinny,” she was laughing and crying now. “No diaper…no clothes. And Renata she comes in between us there and points and says, ‘Baby,’ and she is sucking on a bottle and it just has this milky water in it…this water with some Karo syrup, and she puts it in this baby’s mouth and he sucks a few times and she pulls it from him and sucks on it herself. And then back to him. And we realize…she is caring for this baby and she is not yet two years old. And your granny picks her up and….”
“Well…I lift him…I lift him, this sour smelling string bean and there is so much angry life in him he almost wiggles out of my hands and I say, ‘Lord Jesus.’”
Now she looks at me, light in her face, “And that was him. My Eugene.”
Finding My Thunder 32
Naomi and me sat in the living room for the rest of the evening, me curled next to her limp but oddly peaceful. Our sides were touching, sometimes her arm came around me until the arthritis.
Around us were the picture boxes and the album of Eugene growing up. How many times I’d looked at these, but not like now.
He was my uncle. He was my blood. If he had lived…no, I couldn’t think of it. She already did…Naomi. I couldn’t add my grief.
No matter who the father, Leonard Shote, my black no account grandfather, or some other, no matter who, Eugene’s mother Lottie was my grandmother. She never married anyone far as we knew, and not Leonard for sure.
The room I had grown up in in Mama’s house had been Lottie’s room. She had run away young, she had got on drugs sometime and turned to a low-down life.
Naomi said there were only two happy things ever went on in Great Grandma Susan’s big house…Renata when she was a child…and later…me. I didn’t have much confidence that now it had come to Lonnie him and his new family could lift the curse of sadness there.
So, when Lottie died, Susan had conspired with Naomi to rescue Lottie’s children. Without telling her husband Clyde, Susan journeyed to Memphis with Naomi. Susan rescued Renata cause she showed white.
But Renata’s brother Eugene, the baby in the box who lived on random sucks of Karo, that one so dark so long and angry…Naomi took. She brought him home to her husband William.
William knew the truth about the babies, but far as Clyde knew there was no Leonard Shote, no consorting with Negroes no way, and there was just Renata. He could not, could not ever know about Eugene and all that would bring up. Eugene and Renata’s lives depended on their silence.
Together they created a bulwark of secrecy and behind that wall those children grew. And I did, too.
We turned on the fan and it blew on us, and we sat in the dip of that old brown couch and we let ourselves exist and we breathed.
I understood. And a huge part of myself solidified.
Inside my mind the curtain was torn in two, just like in the bible story of the Temple, the curtain that hid the presence of God, ripped away and God got out of that special room, that box where the Jews had held him, God was too big to stay in there and that was like me, the truth, the truth was free in me and there was no telling where it would go.
And what I knew first off…there was more. Oh there was more. Secrecy was the way.
Mama and Eugene were told they were siblings. But Lonnie never knew. He would not have tolerated such…but in himself…it was there. He was so broken apart from his inner voice…as I had been until today.
No, Lonnie did not listen. But Mama…in the end…and maybe most her life…it was all she could hear.
Finding My Thunder 33
That last night, knowing how it would be for Danny…maybe out with friends, I didn’t know but he’d had a life as varied as a wealthy man’s wardrobe and he could put it on, any part of it, any time and it would cover him.
But now it was morning. I needed to pull myself out of this bed, this womb of one-hundred-percent pink cotton.
But I laid there and fought the panic. He was leaving…harsh…a quick jab of despair, my eyes glued shut, my throat dry and sore and this heaviness…. Danny was leaving today.
Can you comfort yourself? I imagined Naomi saying to me as I’d heard her say to others growing up…others in beds hurting. She would say, what do you know that is good and true. Well, at least Danny would still be on this continent for a while. I knew that.
I was near him, had grown up this way, on his street, now living on the alley that ran behind his house too, connected by this brick river. Years in his shadow, never turning my head but knowing he was there, feeling his light and th
e ache it brought me, but still I knew he was alright. And now, stronger than ever…the way I could dwell in his margins.
He had a one thirty flight out of Memphis, hangar B to Los Angeles. I had to get there to Memphis somehow, all sixty five miles away. I had to pony up and be brave.
Hitchhiking was the best way I could think of and I wished I had those free-spirited girls with me that I’d had Danny pick up on the way to the boy’s farm. But I just had me and a heart ready to burst with desperate love. I hoped this trip would use some of it up cause I was so overfilled with no way to let it out. For him.
I put on jeans and a t-shirt and packed my bag, then scribbled a note for Naomi that I was going to go sign up for school and walk around since this was my last day of freedom, and I had some things to do like go to the J. C. Penny’s catalogue store that was stuck in back of the auto body shop and write down the numbers on some new school clothes so she could work on helping me buy those things…and I was never in a million years going to really let her do this. I had all my clothes and Mama’s to make over some, and I didn’t wear but half a dozen things, so no. She had done enough for me. But in the note I did say I would go there right after I registered.
Painting the Temple earned me some freedom. And the events of last night garnered some sympathy. She would want to give me time to take care of my responsibilities and think.
She was pulled…like my Sooner with those pups. Naomi had folks she looked in on every day. She was retired from the hospital but that just led to more time at her Temple work. She would never retire from serving her Lord, not ever. Sick folks in Snyder depended on her to see they hadn’t died in their beds. And there was usually something of a dramatic nature, sometimes life and death, going on with the community. She was gone most days, some evenings too what with prayer meeting and bible study and clothes gathering and food distributing and driving others like a taxi to various appointments at doctors and lawyers and social service agencies and to visit loved ones and even to the jail. There was mission work and sewing and the endless cooking the ladies did for the many meals they gathered round and gave away. She had her tiny pension and she had the stipend they paid her to shepherd and she got more gifts from her flock than you could believe, six ears of corn, a bag of greens, a chicken leg and thigh fried crisp, biscuits. She loved to tell me how rich she was…rich in folks and love, for the Lord had promised houses and lands and Snyder Town was her kingdom.
So hopefully she’d let me drop out of her mind some. I drew a smiley face on the bottom of the note just to let her know I wasn’t going off to kill myself or something.
I headed out. I had some money for the bus home and maybe extra I hoped. Birthday money and Temple painting money.
I kept to the alley to leave town by. I walked along behind his house and it wounded me in the stomach to see it, to know it was his place, it held the hours of his history, it held his people and they hurt too, like I did. They wept some inside like me.
A man and his wife took me as far as Hillsboro. I told them I had a flight to catch in Memphis. I was going off to college, I said. They lectured me some about hitchhiking and the state of young people in general, and I was the age of their granddaughter so that’s why they stopped. I thanked them in Hillsboro and they were upset I would travel on and they could not take me as they lived in Hillsboro, but I assured them I would be alright, and I almost had to run off while they were still talking and worrying and they did not leave but watched me beg for my next ride at the gas station and I did catch a ride with a Mexican family who had been working the vegetable fields in Florida and were visiting family outside of Memphis. They did not speak great English, but my one year of Spanish did help the littlest bit, so I sat in the back with two little kids and some luggage and the wind beat my hair so I braided it and wore my bandana and they took me all the way to the airport. I thanked them so much and tried to give them five dollars for gas and the children or something, but they wouldn’t take it so I said good-bye and hurried into the terminal.
It was big. And I went right to a desk because neither of the drivers I’d picked had gone very fast, so it was close to one, it was twelve forty three. I found the terminal and I felt like I walked the giant leg of that place and I got to B and went almost all the way back to the place where regular people had to stop. I could see a crowd there, but no military in that group. But what I did see was her golden head of hair and Lauren’s dark one. And I went behind a large tiled post and my heart was thumping and my chest was squeezing. I felt exhausted and filthy and ashamed to be there. And I dug quickly in my bag for the letter I’d written to him and I held it in my hand and stared at it. I had pushed myself to get this far and I was just going to give God the credit for getting me here. Maybe he did it to finally pulverize me down to nothing, but I was here. Tahlila was just another barrier. But one that Danny had taken very seriously. I made up my mind. Really…I already had.
I couldn’t say how, but I knew he approached and I moved around the post and looked back from the direction I’d come from. And he was walking in the broad hallway. He wore jeans and a denim button down shirt, untucked. His boots. His hair buzzed off. His brow, his eyes more than ever…his lips red. Shaven clean.
She and Lauren ran to him squealing. He had not come with them. He looked surprised and he smiled but I felt it in my heart he was thrown. But not as thrown as he soon would be. I waited while it settled some, and he talked polite. She went to him and hugged him. His arm came to her back and he hugged her, but not like a lover, not like he hugged me, with his body, with his face, with his legs, with his self.
So I waited, and I heard the announcement. Others were dispersing, going deeper down the corridor where only the passengers were allowed. He was wrapping it up, but they followed, they laughed, but he seemed nervous. They didn’t know how he felt. They didn’t know how they were barging through his final moments to be a civilian. But I knew.
I gripped the letter, gripped it with both hands, and as he moved and they moved with him, closer, I stepped out from behind the post. And his head turned and he saw me first. He stopped then. I saw his lips form my name, but no sound, and they were still talking. He moved toward me, and me toward him, not running, just walking. I dropped my bag, I heard it hit, but I went to him, my arms open until they were around his waist and he grabbed on to me and I pressed my face, my body against him, as hard as I could, he held me so tight, I held him so tight. It grew quiet around us, just the people passing, the announcement again, he needed to board. I looked up, and he was right there, and his eyes now. “Every day…every minute….” I said.
“Hilly,” he said, and such a look…I would see it…ponder it…but for now, the lines in his lips, the beard in his skin like pepper, my hand on his face, and a kiss against my lips, but it’s too much and it ends and we’re just close, and it’s in his breaths and mine, the weight of everything.
“Go,” I say. And I shove the envelope into his hand. And he has grabbed my arms and he rips himself away and our arms are extended as he creates reluctant distance and our fingers are the last thing and he keeps pulling, and I stand…and he looks back…he looks back…he looks back…and I stand, staring, until he looks back once more…and he’s gone.
I am only looking after him, just two eyes looking, no body, no feet, no dropped bag, no airport, no stunned bitches who have huffed off and left the stench of their perfume to my left, nothing but him…nothing but this love.
Finding My Thunder 34
Nothing good was going to come easy. I knew that now. I somehow knew I’d fought to get born, really fought, a baby she had by a man she didn’t love. I’d always been in trouble.
They’d taken my bag. It was gone. I knew it was them, Tahlila and Lauren. I had two choices, go after them, try to find them and get it back, or go to the big plate glass window where others stood waiting to see Danny’s flight take off and see him go into the sky…alive.
I went to the window. I felt his
arms around me, his body against me, his skin, his lips, his eyes, his fear, his excitement. his sorrow. his eagerness. I felt it all and I wasn’t ready to let it go, to let him go, and I stood against the glass, a tree frog girl with a serious look on her face as she watched, and waited, and finally saw the jet taxi turn, and go down the runway, and build speed, and lift, lift, lift, lift, lift…and small, smaller, smallest, all that power soaring, and soaring until it was gone.
Plastered on the glass I couldn’t fall. But there was only this invisible thing holding me, like God would if he was solid.
At some point Danny would open the letter, maybe now, maybe right away and he’d see this, a piece of loose leaf and on both sides in big and small letters, some hollow, some solid all sizes the same thing, both sides same thing, over and over, “I love you.” And then a picture, school picture Naomi made me buy. Bad and stupid and serious, just staring there, just me. All I had to offer, but honest, and if he took that, this plain thing that was me, just there…then he took the love.
A ribbon of highways led from the airport. I couldn’t go out there and get on that. I didn’t know the right way. I needed someone who did, who could take me out of here in the direction of home.
The one I picked was carrying a big orange suitcase. She was around Mama’s age, maybe more. Gray-white hair and a face still younger than that color. She wore black slacks and a man’s shirt, white and rolled on her arms.
“Ma’am…I lost my purse and need a ride home or even part-way. I live in Ludicrous.”
She was struggling with that case and looked at me. “You with those Krishna’s?” she asked and I don’t know why. They were over there chanting but in a minute they’d disperse and start trying to sell their books.
“No ma’am. I’m with…myself. I came up this morning to see my boyfriend off to the army.”