Lonnie took a moment to say the name, but in his mind he shouted it several times.
“Who this Bertrand? Somebody you like?”
“Yeah. I liked him. Not at first. But I did like him.”
“I hope you like me, too.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good.” The cook touched his elbow, and ran his fingers down to Lonnie’s hand and gripped it. His hands were strong and softer than Lonnie thought they should be. Lonnie squeezed the hand.
“He was like my daddy.”
“A daddy?” the cook said.
“He was my daddy’s friend. And he was colored and they killed him.”
The cook let go of his hand. “They killed him?” A moment passed and the two stood, breathing quietly. “Was this the lynching you were so worried about?”
“Uh-huh.” Lonnie swallowed and he felt his throat choke and his nose close up. “I didn’t know it was him at first. I was out in the woods picking some blackberries, I saw them dragging something, and I followed. And I …”
“Now, now.” The cook put a hand on the back of Lonnie’s neck and stroked. “You needn’t worry about all that now.” Lonnie sobbed. The cook held his head against his bare shoulder. “Now, now.”
The shoulder became slippery with Lonnie’s tears. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried on someone’s shoulder, and he thought it might have been Bertrand’s. When he had tried to talk to Aileen about the murders, she had cut him off and walked away. He sometimes heard her weeping in the bedroom of the Cabbagetown house, but a closed door always stood between them.
“I should have done something,” he said when he was able to manage his breath.
“You should have done something,” the cook repeated sympathetically.
“I should have stopped them.”
“You should have stopped them.”
“I should have told somebody.”
“You should have told somebody. But, who were you supposed to tell? You were just a boy.”
“I was just a boy.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You ain’t to blame for nothing.”
“I’m not to blame.”
“No. It’s not your fault. You are just as innocent as the day you were born.” The cook took Lonnie’s face in his hands. “So clean up those tears.” The cook wiped tears from Lonnie’s cheeks with his thumbs. “Now give me a smile.” Lonnie smiled. He felt lightheaded and took a deep breath. “You want something to eat?”
“No.”
“You sure? I got some ham.”
“No. I’m not hungry.”
“What about something sweet? Some dessert?”
“No.”
“What do you want? What can daddy get for you?”
Lonnie hesitated. He didn’t know what he wanted.
“You don’t know what you want?” The cook’s voice softened. “I bet I know what you want. You want what I want.” The cook put his hands on Lonnie’s shoulders and pressed down. He did not push hard, but Lonnie knelt so that his face was in front of the cook’s groin. Quickly the cook unbuckled his pants and pushed his groin against Lonnie’s face. Lonnie felt the bristle of the man’s pubic hair on his cheeks. The groin smelled faintly of sweat and urine. I am not a faggot, Lonnie thought. Then he said it. “Oh, yes you are,” the cook said. “You are my little cracker faggot.” The cook brushed his fingers across Lonnie’s hair. His penis was uncircumcised and seemed very black to Lonnie. Its veins were flush and it was beginning to fill. The cook pulled back the foreskin and the glans was blue and glassy. “Oh, you most certainly are,” the cook said. He rubbed the glans along Lonnie’s lips. “You most certainly are my little punk cracker. Now, open up.” Lonnie opened his mouth.
For the ten years following, Lonnie roamed the seas as a commissary man aboard the USS Bennington, an anti-submarine aircraft carrier. The Big Benn, as the crewmen were apt to call her, was commissioned during World War II, and when Lonnie came aboard in Mayport, Florida, she was fresh from repairs after a boiler explosion. The explosion had killed over a hundred sailors and it had taken nearly a year to repair the damage. A part of the Pacific fleet, Lonnie found ports in San Diego, Pearl Harbor, Yokosuka, Sydney, Subic Bay, back and forth across the ocean searching for the Russian submarines.
Though he spent more than his fair share of time in the brig for drinking and brawling, Lonnie proved to be a good seaman, and moved up in rate quickly. He was a favorite among the young officers for his easy accommodation of their cravings for home-cooked meals. For this, he was sometimes called, “Mom”. Lithe and blond, he occasionally accommodated the officer’s sexual urges. For this, he was sometimes called “Lonnie, honey,” “honey,” or “sweet tooth.” He expected nothing for either service, and though, at first the rough trade embarrassed him, performing it also comforted him. There was no cuddling and little tenderness—he got that in port with women—but usually a teasing followed by a command, to which he bent like a willow, and the bending itself, the yielding to a greater, more certain power made him feel confident—transitorily—and gave his life direction. When a young officer’s thighs seized and went slack, and he cried out his wife’s name, Lonnie felt a flush of blood to his face and a shortness of breath. But in the hours following such an affair he berated himself. A queer. A fucking queer. Oh, you most certainly are! He thought of the cook and of Bertrand, and he felt helpless. “I was just a boy,” he said over and over again. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” And yet, a feeling of complicity ached dully in every nerve. But what did I do? What? Drinking helped him forget the past, and so he got through.
He would have stayed on in the Navy, making it a career, except for an accident, in which a crate of canned foods slipped from its pallet on a forklift and crushed his foot. It was a miracle, the doctors told him that the foot could be saved but he would always limp. He was in Long Beach when it happened, and after spending some months in the Navy Hospital at Camp Pendleton, he was mustered out of the Navy, and made his way to San Francisco. There, he met a poet, who having rejected her slave name, called herself Aza X. He went to live with her in her apartment on the second floor of a walk-up, just off of Columbus Avenue in North Beach.
TWENTY
I am a redeemer! he kept telling himself. But what was a redeemer? He was driving on a narrow, asphalt road that curved up and down through the wooded hills. The road was unfamiliar to him and he wasn’t sure any longer that he was on the way to Woodbine. Six months earlier, in the winter of 1973, his mother had sent a telegraph, asking him to come home from California, and against his will he drove back to the South, to Atlanta, to Cabbagetown. Aileen had contracted brown lung disease and had become bedridden. It had been coming on a long time, she admitted, starting with “Monday fevers,” a reaction to the lint-filled air of the mill. She paid it no mind, suffering the tightness of chest, the coughs and the wheezing. She had to work, she said. But over the years the cotton dust scarred her lungs, irreparably.
One evening, as Lonnie tended her, spooning broth to her mouth as she lay propped up by pillows, he ventured to mention news he had read that day. Typically, they talked little because breathing was difficult for Aileen, and when she did speak it was about the church, the mill or the Bible, topics that did not interest him.
“Momma, do you remember Mr. Venable from Talmaedge?” Aileen’s eyes widened; she coughed. He wiped spittle from her chin. “Well, he died.”
Her face tightened and she tried to speak, coughed again before she found her voice. “Where you hear?”
“Read it in the newspaper.” He was new to reading the newspaper. He bought it daily at the grocer on Carroll Street, and paging through it helped to pass the time. It reported heavily on the mayoral race, where a brash, young black man was challenging the sitting mayor, a white man. But what caught his attention that morning was an obituary. Venable. He over-looked the article at first, taking scan
t notice of the portraits of the dead that decorated the pages. Then, in sudden familiarity, he came back to the article. Mr. Venable! His heart thumped excitedly as he read. He hadn’t known Venable’s first name, but now to see it spelled out and to see the name of Talmaedge County brought a rush of recognition. He would have gone in to tell his mother right away, except that she had been sleeping.
Aileen adjusted the oxygen cannula, pushing it deeper into her nostrils. “What killed him?”
“Old age, I guess. Didn’t say.”
She grunted, closed her eyes for a moment. “How old?”
Lonnie left the room to find the article. When he returned, Aileen seemed asleep again and he studied her face. Venable had been seventy-four. Old enough. And his mother had not yet turned sixty, though the disease made her look a decade older. When he got up to go, the wicker chair squeaked and, she opened her eyes. “I remember,” she said quietly. “He owes us a dog.” At first the statement seemed amusing and Lonnie smiled. Then he remembered the tomato slips and a sick feeling came to his stomach. Often he thought about the murders, but for some years, living in the Haight-Ashbury, with its perpetual, psychedelic distractions, they had become more figments than real events. The memory of Venable made them real again, and he saw in his mind, as if it had only been a short time before, the man’s crooked, yet threatening smile. “I forgive him though,” Aileen said with a wheeze.
Lonnie sat again in the chair. He looked at Aileen’s hands, still strong but with bony fingers that had reddened and clubbed from the disease. “For what? I don’t.” He felt a hot rush run from his chest to his face. “Neither Venable or Jacks. I hope they burn in hell.”
Aileen looked at him a long moment. “Forgive and forget. ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses.…” She paused for breath. “Our holy Father will forgive ye also.’”
“But Momma, after what they did. You wouldn’t be … lying up here now.”
“That was my journey,” she said at length. She held out her hand to him, and he took it, feeling the bulbous fingers push gingerly into his. “It was my journey to salvation, Lonnie. God has his ways, we do not comprehend.”
He wanted to crush her fingers, but held still. “They said things about you. Jacks and that Crookshank woman. And they took our house from us and chased us here.”
“Yes. They wronged us.” She patted his palm and took her hand away. “I was bitter many years, but I am grateful now that I found salvation. That He redeems us is truth, but redemption is just the journey. Salvation is what we all want, Lonnie.” She coughed deeply and he waited and cleaned her mouth when the fit had passed. “They wronged us, but God is greater. I know this now, though I didn’t then. I want salvation for you, too, son. It would make me so happy to see you give yourself to Him, before I pass. It would make me so glad to see you become an instrument of the Lord.”
“They took Bertrand. I saw them. They took Bertrand and his wife and they shot them dead. How can I forgive them for that?” She was quiet for a while and he looked out of the window. Ragged children played hop-scotch on the sidewalk. Across the roofline of the houses, the brick chimneys of the mill towered.
“I don’t know about all of that. Besides, that wasn’t our business.”
“Momma, it was.”
Unable to speak, she shook her head vehemently.
“Bertrand was our friend. He helped us. He helped Daddy. He was in the war with Daddy. He was Daddy’s friend.”
She shook her head again, cleared her throat with a huff. “It was never, never, our business. Whatever happened, Bertrand brought it on himself. I pray for him. I do. But my soul is clean of all that, Lonnie. So is yours.” She took a deep, cloudy breath. “No more talk of it. It will rot you. Now, what I am worried about is your eternal soul. Repent of your sins, Lonnie. There is room in His grace for you. You must forgive, repent, and accept our Savior’s grace.”
It was all hogwash to him and he wanted to tell her. Besides, what were his sins—what did he need to repent of? He was no thief, or a liar. He was no killer.
“Repent of your lusts,” she said, as if she had heard his thoughts. “Lusts. Repent so that you may be redeemed. Repent and live a Christian life. Become His instrument. ‘For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.’ All of us are caught up in ‘the vain conversation’—yes, the life of sin, passed on generation after generation, but the blood of Jesus, redeems us and saves us.”
He stood to leave. He wanted a cigarette, and would have to go outside of the house because of the oxygen tank. Quickly, she caught his hand, holding him while she rested.
“It is not easy, Lonnie, to find salvation. But the Bible gives us the way through redemption. He is our redeemer.”
The Bible was nothing he could believe in. Yet, once he has seen Bertrand dancing. Dancing in the spirit.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what you come here for;
I come to praise the Lord.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what you come here for;
I come to praise the Lord.
He had seen Bertrand’s feet stomp, stomp, stomp, then slide and stomp. I don’t know. I don’t know. And go back to stomp, stomp, stomp. Standing on the porch and looking out at the trash strewn street and dilapidated bungalows, Lonnie felt as if his own feet might dance. He lit a Lucky Strike and sucked in deep. The dancing was in his ankles and in his calves. I don’t know. I don’t know. His knees and hips were loose and his arms wanted to swing. Dancing, Bertrand had become more than human. An angel. An instrument. Yes! Bertrand was no longer part of this world. He recalled how Bertrand’s face seemed to swell and transfigure into hundreds of faces. He was a trumpet. A redeemer! Couldn’t every man be a redeemer? Couldn’t he? Lonnie wanted badly to dance, to give in to the movement that quickened and transfigured, to be an instrument of something. No movement came. I don’t know. Maybe it was just nigger dancing, after all.
Not wanting to go back into the house, he drove to Midtown, a shabby business district that seemed in a tug-of-war between dispirited hippies and crusading gentrifiers. The head shops and herbal stores were fast giving away to art studios and fern bars, but still the neighborhoods just off of the main street, between Tenth and Fourteenth Streets belonged to the bedraggled, the drugged, the witches, the homosexuals, and a few of the more experimental students from nearby Georgia Tech.
Twilight was settling in as Lonnie walked down Tenth Street. The shopkeepers pulled steel gates in front of their stores and prostitutes, women and boys, found their territory on The Strip. Lonnie walked briskly, madly swinging his crippled foot, sucking hard on his cigarette and jutting his chin forward as if he had a destination, a purpose. He crossed Peachtree Street without checking for traffic, knowing that the cruising Johns would see him and not hit him. He crossed Piedmont Avenue and cut through a grove at the edge of Piedmont Park, startling a couple of teenage boys who made a fumble of hiding their marijuana. From the street, the park’s lawn sloped steeply and he let his legs swing in ungraceful strides as momentum took him downhill, and around by the stone boathouse and dock, and past the western edge of muddy Lake Clara Meer. At last, just past the playing fields, he stopped. There stood a statue of a green angel holding aloft an olive branch proclaiming peace between the North and the South. Below her a kneeling soldier held a rifle in his lap. The statue commemorated the reconciliation of the Confederate and Union states. “Cease fire,” it commanded, and yet the soldier held tight to his gun, having seen the angel but not yet the olive branch.
The grove surrounding the statue offered a screen from the public and Lonnie took a joint from a stash he kept in a tin and lit it from the butt of his cigarette, tossed the butt at the base of the statue. Cease fire. The angel commanded cease fire and yet she looked dispassionately on the solider. Her arm raised the olive branch like a whip, he thought. Whip the fucker. Whip him! But then he thought the soldier looked like his father. His father didn’t deserve to
be whipped. His father was not a bigot. He knew real bigots, not just the petty redneck with his goose honking whine of “nigger this or that.” He knew the kind who lived in fine houses and who had colored people that they treated “just like family” until they murdered them. He knew that he, white as he was, was a nigger, too. What’s a nigger, anyway? Being colored didn’t make you one. His mother was treated like a nigger all her life, as well as all the poor, dough-colored factory women at Fulton Mills and their sallow-colored men who worked as builders and mechanics and doormen. He knew because he had always known he was no better than a nigger—he was a nigger because being a nigger wasn’t being a color. Venable and Jacks! In the dusk, the angel’s wing resembled a vulture’s. Her head, veiled, was the head of death. Cease fire! He began to shake.
It took him fifteen minutes to compose himself, and during that time, a young man settled down near him and drank from a quart bottle of beer. The man indicated he would share the beer for a hit of the joint, and came over to where Lonnie sat. The man wore a kinky afro, parted on the right, that seemed in the fading light to be as sculpted as topiary. The young man examined Lonnie and smiled. “I wish I had hair like that,” Lonnie said. “You don’t know how lucky you are. You don’t have this tangling shit, constantly falling into your eyes and you can’t do any styles with it. You just cut it or wear it long, but you can’t.…” The young man continued to smile and smoke the joint while Lonnie talked.
“That’s cool, dude,” the man said.
Lonnie looked out at the athletic fields where vestigial sunlight streaked the ground. “I’m glad you think it’s cool.” He wanted to talk, to tell the stranger everything that had happened to him. “I have always thought colored people were cool. I know you hear this a lot, but I have a lot of colored friends. Or maybe I should say, I’ve have had a lot of colored friends over the years. I’m new to Atlanta, you see, or really, I just moved back after a while, so I haven’t made many friends here.” He paused, took a toke on the joint, and passed it to the man. The man toked, drawing in deeply and holding, and turning his angular, firelit face away from Lonnie as he exhaled. “I don’t mean anything by it,” Lonnie continued, realizing he had said “colored” rather than “black.” “I’m just used to saying ‘colored.’ It never made a difference to me whether somebody was colored or white. One of my best friends growing up was a colored man. He was my father’s friend to start with, but he became my friend too.…” His head ached in the temples, and he pulled up his knees and rested his forehead against them. The conversation seemed forced, as if something was pushing it out of him. Just shut up, he thought. He wanted just to listen to the crickets and the cars motoring along the street beyond the grove. He could drink this man’s beer easily enough, and the man could share his pot, and they needn’t say a word to each other. He had nothing to prove to the man and talk gained them nothing. “Friendship. I guess friendship is overrated.”
The Vain Conversation Page 24