On one such occasion Aileen had jangled a palm full of coins out of the screen door right in front of his nose. “Now, I can’t have you working here for nothing. People will say I am taking advantage of you, Bertrand. Please, I never want them to say a thing like that.” Bertrand considered, gestured as if to accept the coins—but when she jangled them again, he shook his head.
“Whyn’t you give little Lonnie a treat. Call it my treat, if you will. Like I said, I don’t mind the little chores at all. You know, Mrs. Henson, Wayne was a good man, a unique man, and I feel I owe him just this much.”
“He was good.” Aileen withdrew inside the screen door, fisting the coins and shoving her hand into her apron pocket. “I appreciate it. I do.” She sniffed and withdrew into the house.
Lonnie studied the colored man for a minute. Compared to his father, Bertrand was short and round. He had thick shoulders, a thick waist, and squat legs, yet he exuded a heroic quality, a confidence not unlike the quality Lonnie ascribed to Captain Marvel and Superman. Bertrand had traveled to places beyond Talmaedge County, places like Atlanta and London. He had even been to Africa, in the war, but all he would say of it was that he hadn’t seen any jungles where he had been. It had amazed Lonnie that there were places in Africa without jungle, but Bertrand had patiently described the Sahara desert, the great savannahs, the big cities. When schoolboys challenged Lonnie about it, Bertrand had given him a picture postcard with a map of Africa, and showed him where the deserts and jungles were. He had taken the card to school, and the boys had taken it from him, called him a nigger-lover, and torn it up. They said his father had been a nigger-lover too, and crazy enough to blow off his own head.
Lonnie walked with Bertrand across the yard to the edge of the woods. In spite of his squat body, the man had a graceful gait and the boy found it hard to keep up. “Mightn’t you go on back to your momma?” Bertrand said, as he crossed from the yard into the woods.
Lonnie’s stomach tightened, but he followed on. Bertrand stopped, faced him, and waited.
“I got a question to ask you.”
Bertrand smiled and nodded.
“Them boys I told you about? Ronnie Davis and all. They …” Suddenly the boy’s throat closed and he hated himself for crying. “They said Daddy killed himself.” Saying the words brought on a rush of tears and stomach cramp. The man sighed heavily and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The thick hands steadied him, held him upright, and suddenly the boy couldn’t resist embracing the man and burying his wet face against Bertrand’s shirt. “Why do they say that?” He sobbed. He hadn’t even cried like this at the clinic, when they arrived to find his father gone.
The man patted his back and stroked the back of his head. “You just cry, if you need to. But God knows your daddy slipped. Everybody knows your daddy slipped.”
He slipped, of course, the boy thought. That was what Sheriff Cook had said, and what Doctor Talmaedge had said, too. But the boys, with their faces in ugly sneers, said he had blown off this head. He had turned funny. He was shell shocked. He was a nutcase from the war.
“No,” the colored man was saying, “Your daddy was a good man. A kind man. A man with his eyes on the future. That’s who your daddy was. He was a great man.”
On his next visit, Bertrand asked Aileen if his cousin, Beah Thompson, could buy the baby crib. She could pay five dollars for it and having it would be a big help to her. The cousin was the daughter of the man who had given them a ride when they wrecked the car. Aileen said that the crib had cost fifteen dollars, and that she would think about it. Later she told Lonnie that they needed the money. She had already sold the Ford to Wayne’s cousin. The car had sat on the side of the road, just where she had wrecked it, for two weeks, when the cousin offered her fifty dollars for it. “Why I let him jew me down, I don’t know,” she complained. She was considering selling a couple of acres of land, but worried that they only had four and would get so little for it, might as well keep it. Or maybe, she speculated, they should sell everything, the house included, and move to Atlanta. At least there she could find work. But she couldn’t part with the crib. She wasn’t ready for that.
The next day, Maribelle Crookshank stopped by. Rather than come in, she stood by the front stoop chatting for about ten minutes. She, too, asked that Aileen sell the crib to Beah. Beah cooked at her restaurant and made the best fried chicken in the world, Maribelle said. “She’s a good girl, but has gotten herself in trouble with a lowlife scoundrel named Jimmy Lee.” She clucked her tongue and looked off into the distance when she said the name. “But what can we do? We try to help them. Don’t we, Aileen? As God is my witness, we do try.”
Neither Beah nor Aileen said much when Beah and Jimmy Lee came for the crib. Aileen told Lonnie to lead Jimmy Lee around through the kitchen door and to the back bedroom. She stood on the front stoop, side by side with Beah, both women looking in the distance, commenting on the obvious, the insignificant.
Two things impressed the boy: It was the first time he had ever seen a pregnant woman, other than his mother, up close. Beah’s belly wasn’t very big, he thought, but she had a nice shape, as though a moon was waxing in her. At that moment, he thought it would be fun to be a doctor just to see how that baby would get out.
It was also the first time he saw Jimmy Lee, not that it made much difference at the time. He was just another yellow colored man—but, the boy liked him. Jimmy Lee had a joking way about him. Said he would crawl up in the crib and have a nap. Asked Lonnie if it was his baby crib. And when Lonnie said it had been his baby sister’s and that she was dead, the yellow man was quiet a second, and then turned to him with moist gray eyes, and said, “That’s a very sad story. Poor little baby girl.” Jimmy Lee said it in such a way that the boy couldn’t think of him just as a strange, gray-eyed colored man, but as someone who might be a friend.
“What your name?”
“Jimmy Lee Lee. Don’t say it too fast because it sound funny. I wish I had a good soundin’ name.”
“Jimmy, Okay. Like Jimmy Olsen?”
“Who Jimmy Olsen? He play baseball?”
“Ball? No. He’s Superman’s friend.”
“Oh, he a strong man.”
“No, he’s weak. Superman always have to rescue him.” The boy was walking ahead, holding the doors. When they got outside, Jimmy Lee heaved the crib up onto his shoulder. It rattled and the boy thought the springs might drop out of it, but Jimmy Lee balanced it and carried it over to the truck, the same truck the boy and his mother had ridden in after the car wreck.
“Say Superman got a weak friend? What Superman want with a weak friend?”
The boy shrugged.
Having placed the crib in the truck bed, Jimmy Lee seemed to think a minute, then closed the bed gate. “Maybe that’s what makes him strong. Having a weak friend he can save.”
“He’s strong because he’s from another planet.”
Jimmy Lee winked. “I reckon that’s right.” The wink and the little smile that followed it put a crinkle at the corner of his eye. The boy glimpsed the eye which was deep enough for him to believe that Jimmy Lee was from another planet.
After the truck pulled away, Aileen unfolded and examined the crisp five-dollar bill that Beah had paid her with. “Nice gal,” she said, slowly turning to go into the house. “A little proud, that’s all.”
The next Saturday, Bertrand worked in the garden, forming soil into little pyramids with a shovel. The boy grabbed a paper sack with the seed and poked holes in the hills and pushed in the seeds—“two to a side,” Bertrand told the boy. The garden soil had a clean damp smell and nothing was more fun, the boy thought, than to run his hands through the soft, clay clods, to pluck the worms and grubs to save for a fishing trip.
“Bertrand, I met a friend of yours,” the boy said, searchingly.
“Who would that be?”
“Jimmy Lee Lee.”
“What makes you think he is a friend of mine?”
“He co
lored, ain’t he? Ain’t you a friend to the colored man?”
“That is a manner of speaking.”
“He’s nice, ain’t he?”
“Jimmy Lee is all right. A little foolish is all.”
Bertrand was quiet for a long time and then the boy realized that Bertrand didn’t like Jimmy Lee. Why would one colored man not like another? The boy stood and pictured Jimmy Lee, grinning and glowing golden in the evening sun on the day he had come for the crib. He wanted Jimmy Lee to be his friend, too, and he didn’t know if he could be friends with Jimmy Lee if Bertrand didn’t like him.
They had planted a dozen hills of squash, Bertrand moving quickly and the boy, deep in thought, following. Aileen brought a pitcher of water and Bertrand’s glass, as she called it, the one she kept separate to serve him. Unusual for her, she lingered at the edge of the garden while the boy carried water from her to Bertrand. While Bertrand drank, Aileen asked where she could find tomato slips. Tomatoes were missing from her garden, and she couldn’t find any volunteers on the property. Bertrand informed her that it was probably too late to buy the slips in the store, and any volunteers might be too big to transplant. After Bertrand had drunk and thanked her, and she had gotten the glass back, she said, “Miss Crookshank sent that Thompson girl by here to get my crib. Now, how is she kin to you?”
Bertrand explained the family connection, wiping his brow and leaning with one foot on the heel of the shovel.
“She put me in mind of you, a little.”
Bertrand nodded. “All of us favor.”
“It’s good I could give that crib to her—look like she getting right along.”
“I expect so.” Bertrand lifted the shovel, indicating he was ready to begin work again, but Aileen continued.
“I reckon it was her husband that come with her, a light-skin’ fellow?”
Bertrand shoved the shovel in the ground. “No ma’am. I know whom you talkin’ about. But he ain’t no more her husband than a man in the moon.”
Aileen considered. “Then, they ain’t married.”
“No ma’am, they ain’t married. But he’s married. Now I ain’t one to talk about folks, Mrs. Henson, and it ain’t nothing we in the family are proud of, but that’s just the way it is.”
“Truth always best.”
“Yeah, truth always best.”
“She look like such a nice girl.”
“Well, I ain’t saying she ain’t a nice girl—”
“Proud, though.”
Bertrand straightened suddenly and then slowly pulled the shovel out of the soil. The boy looked at him, then his mother, and then back at Bertrand.
“I reckon she ain’t no prouder than the next one.”
Aileen flicked the remaining water out of the pitcher. It seemed to Lonnie that she hadn’t paid attention to Bertrand’s remark. She asked Lonnie to come to the house. On the way, she seemed distracted, her lips trembling. “Now, Aileen,” she chided herself loud enough for the boy to hear, “it just a little, innocent baby. Baby can’t help how it got here.” Before she got through the door of the screened porch, she wobbled and was short of breath. She cried and sat down on the cinderblock steps. “That was Eliza’s crib. Wayne bought it for me. I had no right to sell it for a measly five dollars.” She looked at the boy. “It’s like stomping on my baby’s grave. I don’t care that that colored baby is a bastard. That’s Eliza’s crib.”
The boy put his hand on his mother’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Momma. That’s fixin’ to be a good little baby and Eliza won’t mind it. Not a’tall.” He tried to imagine how the baby might look, but couldn’t.
“Goddamn Maribelle Crookshank. Always looking out for her niggers. Goddamn that bitch.” It was a minute before she regained her composure. Then she took the boy by the shoulders. “Now, listen to me. Listen good, hear? You stay away from him. Don’t go ’round him unless I’m out there with you. Understand me?”
“Him? Bertrand? Why?”
“Mind me. That’ all.”
“Why?”
She breathed deeply and wrung her hands.
“Bertrand and me are friends.”
“You keep that to yourself,” she whispered sharply and looked around. “Come in.”
Inside and calmer, she asked the boy to sit in the parlor with her. Never before had she asked him into the parlor, not even when his father had died. She asked if his pants were clean, and invited him to sit on the big chair, the one his father preferred. She sat on the sofa, perpendicular to him. Between them were a bible, a picture of Wayne in his army uniform and a baby’s bonnet and booties folded and put in a fancy flat box just under the bible.
“Son, I want you to hear this from me first. Bertrand is a nice man, now. He intends nice. He is nicer than most of them. And I know your daddy liked him. But there is a way that things are done. Well … there’s a natural way about things. The Bible tells about it. We don’t hold nothing against colored. Colored, in their way, are just as good as white.” She thought a moment, seeming to the boy to be reexamining her statement. “Lord knows, there’s some good colored people. Bertrand’s good. But, that doesn’t mean we’re supposed to mix too much. Of course, now, you got to have some contact. You can’t help that. But … well, what I am trying to say is—” She shifted toward him. “—to keep a distance between you and Bertrand. Bertrand means well, and I appreciate him. But everybody around here don’t see it that way.”
The boy couldn’t form whole thoughts for a minute. He watched his mother stand up and walk to the window and look out onto the front stoop.
“Momma, I ain’t got no friends out here—” the boy started to say. He wanted to argue logically.
“You got friends at school.”
“School’s out.”
“You’ll find a friend. Even if you have to go to town. And Bertrand too old to be your friend anyway. He’s a grown man.”
“But since Daddy—”
“He ain’t your daddy. No. He ain’t your daddy,” she said, turning in a sharp movement toward him. “Don’t shame your daddy by saying a thing like that.”
The boy’s face was hot. He hadn’t meant that Bertrand was his father. He knew that Bertrand was no substitute.
The woman softened. “Honey. I know it’s hard, but life is hard. We’re just barely making it and we don’t need no trouble. Besides, Bertrand, he’s proud.”
“Proud? What do you mean, ‘proud’?”
“Proud. Proud. I mean he’s too smart for his own good. He don’t hide it. Don’t act humble. Bible says you should act humble. But it ain’t so much The Bible. Around here, colored are supposed to be humble and he ain’t.”
“So?”
“So I don’t want nobody to see you with him.”
“Who fixin’ to see us here?”
“People see things. People watch. People talk.”
“Who watching?”
“I don’t know—people.”
“Why would somebody watch Bertrand for helping us?”
“They just do. That’s all. Because he’s colored. And he’s too proud. A proud colored man gets watched.”
The boy loved his mother. He knew that she bore many grievances, sometimes walking around with her right arm against her chest as if she were cradling them. It was not just Eliza and Wayne, but also the old woman for whom his mother’s grief was akin to guilt. Aunty was old, yes, and crippled, yes. The boy knew also that his mother was relieved to see her pass. But without a husband, the house was a burden. An outsider, she had always kept to herself, and now the only one to offer help was a colored man, a colored man she deemed “too proud.”
The boy was not satisfied with how his mother explained it and wanted to know what it meant to be “too proud.” He imagined that it meant to be “kingly,” to order people around, but he had never seen such behaviors in Bertrand. That night he wondered more about it and decided that he would spy on Bertrand. The decision delighted him. It would be an adventure, for he would
find out all about Bertrand: What he did at home, the things he liked to eat, what his strange wife was like. In spite of his mother’s admonishment, the next Sunday afternoon, while his mother napped, the boy set out to spy on Bertrand. He knew that Bertrand would be at church, and he knew the church sat on a bank, built up from the marshland of Geechee Creek, a large tributary of the river. He went through the woods to the river, and when he got there, he followed one of the many easy paths along the banks until he reached the creek. Following the creek was difficult, as the main path was on the side opposite him, but soon he came to a shallows and crossed. Then he followed the path, which went away from the forest and its floor of mayapple and wild ginger to run beside a marsh of cattail, cardinal flower, and jewelweed. He was careful not to slip into the mud, reticulated with rivulets and pools of quicksand. Before he emerged from the marsh, he heard music from River of Joy Church.
The church was typical of country churches, colored or white. It was a small, clapboard structure that could have been any farm building except for its vestibule and painted glass windows. Several cars were parked along the road in front of the church and in the churchyard were two wagons and two mules tied along a rail not far away. The music was pounding and rhythmic—piano—and what seemed at first like drums to the boy, but he soon discerned it as stomping and synchronized clapping. It was not like church music he was used to the few times he had gone with his father to the Methodist church. But colored people, he reminded himself, were mostly Baptists, and Baptists were louder, more unruly than the Methodists.
As he approached the side of the church, he saw through the opened windows people sitting inside, singing and fanning. A child, no older than five, looked out at him, and turned back, to report to an adult, Lonnie assumed. But he kept walking, and hoped that it would appear that he were merely passing by. At the front of the church, he saw that the vestibule doors were ajar, but there he saw the shadow of a man, an usher he assumed, so he kept around the church. But when he got to the next corner, he flattened himself against the side of the building. He could feel the building vibrating with the rhythm of the clapping and singing. It made his heart thump. A man’s graveled voice was singing in a quick, heavy melody, “I been beated,” and the people answered in rhythm, “Beated.”
The Vain Conversation Page 7