“I didn’t say nothin’—”
“Mr. Jacks told me you talked to Venable! He came again. Again! He and Maribelle Crookshank. Together! And what he told me you said—and what did you say?—dirty, dirty, dirty—” She began to slap him with both hands, striking about his head and shoulders and he bent over and put up his hands and leaned into the sofa to protect himself.
“He’s dead!”
She continued to beat him.
“He’s dead. He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Bertrand,” he cried out. “Bertrand is dead.”
She stopped beating him. “What do you mean, dead?”
“They killed him.”
“Who?”
“They killed Bertrand.”
“Who, goddamnit? Who?”
“Mr. Jacks and Venable and the others.”
“Killed Bertrand?”
“Killed Bertrand,” he said with a satisfactory wheeze. At last, he had been able to make her understand something.
“My God, no. No.” She covered her face with one hand as if blind-folding herself.
They rested a minute, and he lifted his cheek from the sofa, noticing for the first time that it had a sweet, dusty odor. Finally, he began to relate what he had seen, beginning again with picking blackberries.
She interrupted him. “I don’t care about that. We can’t do nothing for Bertrand or any of them. We have to look out for ourselvess, Lonnie. You don’t understand, boy. It’s you. It’s you that’s done it. It’s you—”
“Me? What did I—”
“You talked! I told you not to talk! It’s what you said that killed Bertrand—”
“Momma!” He fell back onto the sofa, feeling faint.
“And it will kill me, too—”
PART TWO
IF I PERISH
NINE
The sunlight filtering through the canopy caught Bertrand’s attention as he walked the path, hoe on shoulder, to the Henson place. It was the spring after Wayne Henson’s death, and he was helping the widow and the boy to put in a garden. As he walked, he noticed that the leaves changed the color of the sunlight. Myrtle green in the shade, suddenly they were emerald, and radiant just like the jewel. He had seen this color in a movie in Atlanta. It was just before he was sent to Camp Claiborne. He and his cousin John Robert Thompson had paid their money in the front and followed the signs around to the side of the building and up a winding concrete staircase to the balcony. He had climbed slowly, he remembered, admiring the building’s striped brickwork and the Arabesque design. John Robert had wanted to see this movie. He explained that he had wanted to see it for years. It was from a classic book. It was magical. Something he wanted his school children to see one day.
It was 1942, and Japan had attacked the country. Both men had decided to join the army. It was their duty, they felt. John Robert was the older at thirty-one. He had a teaching degree from Morris Brown College and had been teaching in Atlanta for nearly six years. At twenty-two, Bertrand had just graduated with a teaching degree from Fort Valley State. Teaching was a good profession for a black man, much less a teaching job in a big city, so Deacon, John Robert’s father and Bertrand’s older cousin, had argued with the younger men about the decision. “It a white man’s war,” Deacon had said. “All wars there’s ever been were for the white man and the rich white man at that.” Being young and game for adventure, he and John Robert saw it differently. Quietly, they said their goodbyes in Bethany and traveled by bus to Atlanta to get inducted. When he had been teaching, John Robert had had a room not far from the university complex, but then, for a few days before the induction, they shared a room at the Butler Street YMCA.
Inside the movie house was decorated like an Arabesque fantasy, reminiscent of pictures he had seen in The Bible, Bertrand remembered. The ceiling was made to look like a starry night. He had marveled aloud at it. The movie was a children’s movie full of witches and midgets and flying monkeys, but it had moved him. He still couldn’t figure out exactly why. The singing was good, and he had always enjoyed good singing, but the story was too fanciful. Nobody could survive a tornado, and there wasn’t any kind of magical land, unless it was heaven. Oz wasn’t heaven, or else the girl wouldn’t have wanted to come home.
He remembered how his nose had stuffed up and his eyes watered when the little girl got home. There is no place like home, she said. This was true, Bertrand thought, no place in the world like Georgia. No place in the world like the crow’s nest of a Jim Crow movie house. Damn it. He had been going to be a soldier in the US army, but that didn’t make a difference to the white man who took the ticket at the Fox Theatre and directed him to the crow’s nest.
The emerald-colored city had glowed so green, and the light coming down through the trees had that same hallowed glow. The light fell in patches on the dried leaves and stands of fern. Lichen-mottled stones lay about as if arranged by angels. When the breeze came, everything danced: the branches, the light, the ferns. The light on the rocks made them seem to undulate, like a belly dancer. The leaves made the music. He took in a deep breath, so deep a pain shot across his sternum. This dancing, green and yellow of oak and elm and sassafras and sumac, was Talmaedge County. This music of breeze and bird song and the distant tinkling of the creek was home.
He took the hoe from his shoulder. He had intended to chop a few weeds for Mrs. Henson. He knew the boy would be there to so-call help him, and to talk him to death—but now, he thought, the garden wasn’t so weedy as all that, a little dead nettle and chickweed, easy to pull—and just then, the breeze cooled the woods, and he wanted to enjoy it.
Ahhh. Bertrand, Bertrand.
He sat and leaned against a tree truck and let the breeze speak to him. Bertrand. He was a little ways up the side of a hill and could look down through a stand of trees and underbrush toward the dry branch at the bottom. There was something else about home, too: Buchenwald. It could never happen here. It could never happen in your own home. Yet, it was happening and it wasn’t happening. What had those Jews been thinking when it happened to them? When the police came and said, come with us. Did they see it coming? Did they know it was about to happen and could do nothing about it? Or, was it like nightfall, like encroaching darkness, so gradual that you had to look hard to see the degrees of ever increasing dark, and then, before they realized it, the sun gone? Luellen said it had already happened. “What about the Japanese in California?” But Luellen reads too much communist trash. She’s going to get in trouble one day. Still, he loved her. He loved the way she had layers of hardness and softness, and you had to be careful how you scratched her. He argued with her that the Japanese were the enemy. “They were as American as you.” She scoffed, meaning that neither were very American. “They had been here longer than most white people. Wake up, Bertrand, you have been sleeping too long.”
“Then what’s the difference?” he had challenged. “What make us want to go and round up a group of people unless they can be infiltrated by the enemy?”
She had rolled her eyes in a condescending way that he hated. “First of all, ain’t no ‘us’ to it, unless you got a suit of white skin hanging in the wardrobe.” She rubbed the back of her hand. “Skin, Bertrand, skin. Don’t you ever forget about skin.”
“How can I with you around?”
She had been quiet a moment, thinking and twisting her lips. “You don’t have to have me around. Somebody else will remind you.”
But skin wasn’t what killed those Jews. They were as white as the Germans. They were Germans, too. Some of them. Germans and Poles. But they were Jews. That was the difference. They lived apart from the other Germans. They had a different religion and different customs. Just like the Japanese in California had different language and different religion—well, maybe some of them spoke English and worshipped God, but at the core they were different. That was why they got picked out. You can’t be too different from the majority, he thought.
Probl
em was that some people want you to be different. They keep on talking about how you are different and they won’t let you prove you are just like them.
He picked up a twig, skinned it, and chewed it like a tooth pick. “That’s just it,” he said to himself aloud and chuckled. If the old wizard in that movie had any wisdom for him, it would have been just that. Not only did he have a brain and a heart, he has always been just like them. Only they couldn’t see it. He had to prove it to them. Anything the whites did, he would do it, too. They had a Cub Scout troop, now he had a colored troop. They drove nice cars, now he drove a nice car. They would understand eventually. Wayne Henson had come to understand. It took being in the war, but Wayne eventually understood. How could he not? Suddenly Bertrand’s heart stuttered and he threw his head back against the tree trunk. Buchenwald. His mouth filled with saliva. Every pore was trying to wash out the smell he imagined. The smell of the Jews of Buchenwald. It rode on the breeze. Buchenwald. The smell of rotting flesh.
He put his head between his knees and spat. The rush was over for now. He was in control once again. He wouldn’t think about it for a while. He watched an ant investigate his spittle, a gloss on the dried leaves. “You don’t want that spit, little ant, little soldier.” It was a red ant. It reminded Bertrand of a dog. He chuckled. It reminded him of a man, too. He thought about how solitary the ant was, one ant—and as far as he knew, the only ant in the woods. What a big woods it was to the ant. What a big world. He had to pray, Bertrand thought. Thinking would drive him crazy or would drive him to drink. He had to pray. He pushed up from sitting and kneeled. What if someone saw him? Well, they would just think he was a man of God. What was wrong with that? He closed his eyes. “Oh mighty God … oh mighty God.…” There was nothing now but the image of the ant, and the sound of the breeze. Then there was a distant feeling, a memory he wouldn’t allow for himself. Oh yes—fear, he thought.
After a while, he rose and walked, observing the light in the canopy. Again the light played elfishly with him, making flitting shapes in the canopy and bush. He was determined to pay it no mind. He didn’t want people to think he was crazy. He didn’t want to go crazy. But the light was like that of a rainbow, or a sunrise, full of subtle and mysterious colors. It made him feel that heaven was right on top of him, not some distant place talked about in The New Testament, but right here, all around him in the dome of the leaves. There was also the trickling of the river, the lovely sound of water flowing over the rocks, and echoing up the ravine. Why is water so soothing? A gentle rain on the roof at night. Or even better, on a tin roof in a barn or shed. As a boy, he loved just to sit in a barn and to listen to a summer shower. Storms were different—too violent. But showers came and went and came again like ocean waves. They gave life a clean rhythm, pleasant, predictable, soothing.
As he listened to the water, memories of the war swam up and the familiar emptiness he sought to fill swelled like a big bubble inside of him. Falling light. Falling light. Fill it now with the falling light.
At Weimar, the light had fallen just the same way, slicing the forest into planes of shattered glass; suddenly, he was again in the forest outside of Weimar, heading toward the camp. He didn’t know what to expect there, though he had been told that it was a site of unbelievable horrors. He had seen horrors enough, the dead and the walking dead in a landscape gone to waste. He had helped lay waste to that landscape. Nothing, he knew, could be worse than what he knew war to be. Nothing could make him more afraid than the fear he had already felt. Luftwaffe? Planes—their whining falling out of the sky, a whine in the mind’s ear and then, the rattle of the far away guns and the sizzle of bullets stitching through the mud. Those sorry Jerrys. You were talking to your buddy when a third eye blossomed in his forehead and his helmet cocked to one side.
The countryside around Weimar was not so different from Talmaedge County, forested hills and meadows—and on this day, full of the dampness that comes with early spring. He had gotten out of the jeep to urinate and walked a few yards off the road into a pine forest, large trees, with stands of understory hardwoods and shrubs, easy to walk through, the needles, damp and soft and full of aromatic rot. Scott and Bass were with him. They had been with him since Fort McCain, where the 183rd took basic training. Scott was from Atlanta, a prominent family. Bass, too, was from a good family, but a Philadelphia man. He was the country boy, but they all got along. They respected each other. They had gotten a command to go the camp, to render assistance to its inhabitants.
Then they came to a clearing under the pines, and suddenly he felt faint. Bass asked if he were all right. He said he was, but he had felt suddenly cold and empty as if he had been vacuumed out. Something haunted the place. He turned quickly, answering the sound of branches creaking in the wind. A voice. Buchenwald. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw men, white faces in a group, in a line. When he turned, there were only the slim trunks of the trees, silvery birches. Now he couldn’t urinate, though the other men did. Something was the matter here. In this spot, where he stood, the needles were blood-soaked; the trees, the birds, the insects had witnessed. He was still standing with his penis in his hands when he saw a man coming toward him through the shade and light. The man was dressed in a tattered coat that once had been stylish. His face was lean and pale. His eyes were sunken, but they had a sparkle about them that seemed to suggest a person of good humor. The man smiled and beckoned to him.
A little embarrassed, Bertrand put away his penis and started toward the man. He said for Scott and Bass to come with him, but he didn’t look to see if they were following. He hadn’t walked more than three steps, and suddenly he didn’t see the man anymore. He shivered. He looked for Scott and Bass. They were heading toward the jeep. Bass yelled for him to come on. He looked again for the man, but saw nothing but the forest, the tree trunks, the underbrush. For a second, he thought he saw bodies crumbled on the ground under the bushes, dozens of bodies. A closer look, he saw only boulders. The breeze picked up. The trees creaked and there was a rustling sound. His skin crawled and he started back toward the jeep.
Falling light. Falling light, the breeze seemed to say.
“What?”
Fill it now with the falling light.
“Look like you just saw a ghost,” Scott joked when Bertrand got back to the car. Bertrand said nothing and they rode to the camp.
It appeared before them as a large gated compound, familiar to Bertrand because the buildings reminded him of many of the barns and stables around Talmaedge County. They got out in front of the gatehouse, two long wooden buildings joined on the second story, by three tiers of smaller compartments, the top one being a stubby clock tower. The iron gates that had filled the space under the tiers had already been knocked aside. They went through.
At first there was nothing to see but a muddy yard and many rows of barracks and barbed wire fences along muddy lanes. Then, as if appearing out of thin air, as if his mind had not registered them on first sight, he saw a group of stick figures, human versions of the walking-stick insects. The sight of them drained him of all curiosity. His mind went blue. As they moved toward him he saw them more as one gangly creature than as individual people, a giant spider whose many legs wore the striped garb he associated with chain gangs. It moved as if it were stunned and crippled. Still, a tendril of fear sprouted in Bertrand’s gut and climbed into his lungs. He made a slight motion toward his holstered pistol. Only when he made himself meet a man, eye to eye, did he know for sure that the thing was men. He focused on a young man, one nearly starved to death. The man’s head was stubbed from a recent shave. His face was gaunt and eyes sunken. Scabs and scars covered his face, and his skeletal hands, webbed by scabs, reached out to Bertrand. The man spoke hoarsely, weakly, in a language that Bertrand did not understand. He did not know what to do, so he stood and stared at the man, who stopped and stared back.
The fear withered and slowly he emptied out. The emptiness had been coming for a long time.
“Johnson. Johnson!”
Bertrand slowly focused. Already Scott had turned him by the shoulders and was shaking him. “Johnson, are you all right?”
Bertrand thought he answered that he was, but he didn’t know for sure if he had heard his own voice. Scott ordered him back to the jeep and gave him a rough shove in the direction of the gate. Outside the gate, his senses came back to him, prickling his face and hands. He realized he had urinated on himself and for a moment felt ashamed. But men in battle were always wetting themselves with sweat or piss or blood, so the shame of the stain soon faded, though soon came a greater shame. He had let down Scott and Bass. He had been afraid and that was all right. Men at war were always afraid. But he had gone somewhere and had become useless to them and to himself. Had he fainted? It was the emptiness. The emptiness that needed to be filled with something but it was something he couldn’t manage. Was it anger? Was it hatred? The Bible teaches that we must love. We must turn the other cheek. We must love our enemy as we love ourselves. Must this emptiness be filled with love?
From time to time, even before he had left Talmaedge County, he had felt this emptiness. He felt it again and again during the basic training at Fort McCain in Mississippi. He had thought that Talmaedge County was the most prejudiced place on Earth, and spending time in Atlanta with John Robert and seeing the colored areas along West Hunter Street and in Sweet Auburn—where a colored man had a little better of a chance—had only reinforced his opinion about Talmaedge County. But then, the army sent him to the deeper South and he learned that the army, too, wasn’t any better than Talmaedge County. Even the German POWs had privileges denied to the colored soldiers. The Nazis played volleyball while the colored soldiers washed their clothes and cleaned up after them. This is how much you matter in America, he had thought. So little, so nothing, that a mortal enemy gets treated better than colored. He wasn’t stupid, he had decided. He had known all along things weren’t equal, but somehow seeing the fascists being treated with dignities that he would never receive made knowing real, more real even than the daily humiliations of Jim Crow. After all, they were bearable, somehow. But if a fascist enemy had more right to decency than a native-born colored man, then he was nothing in the eyes of America, and yet he was fighting for America, risking his life for a nation that hated him. No, I love my momma and I love my daddy. If the Nazis take over America, then they would put Momma and Daddy in camps and … He thought like this for a while, and he felt a little better, though there was still a void in his stomach and his chest. Not even hunger filled it. Nothing filled it.
The Vain Conversation Page 10