The Vain Conversation

by Anthony Grooms

  He heard the man exhale and clear his throat. “What do you mean?” He asked sonorously.

  “It hurts.”

  “Hurts?” The man sighed and spoke slowly, “Somebody fucked you up, brother.”

  The critique stung Lonnie, and he shifted his weight, turning to look more closely at the man.

  “College Boy.”

  “What?” Lonnie asked.

  “That’s what they call me. ‘College Boy.’”

  “What college do you go to? Morehouse?” Lonnie named the only college for coloreds that he knew.

  “Fuck no. Do I look like a punk-ass nigga?”

  The ferocity of the reply startled Lonnie. “I didn’t mean … I never been to college so … I thought it was a good college.”

  “It’s good if you are a high-fallutin’, high yellow nigga. I didn’t go to college, either. I had the grades, but no bread.”

  Lonnie cleared his throat. “I guess you had more than me, then.”

  “You guess, but you wouldn’t know.”

  Lonnie started slowly, and then said assertively, “I guess you wouldn’t know, either. I mean about me being fucked up.”

  “Just you looked like somebody been messing with you. I can dig that. I know where you coming from with that. You ain’t the only one somebody messing with. We cool?”

  Lonnie considered. How could this man know anything about him? The man was half his age, and the thought of that gave Lonnie a chill. He was growing old. Thirty-seven. Decades had been lost in the curlicues of pot smoke. But more than that, he hadn’t known what to do with himself. At least, the Navy had given him purpose, even if the purpose was a monotonous search for an elusive enemy. He hadn’t dared think it in all the time he had been away from Georgia, but he had been running from Talmaedge. But why? His mother was right, what happened in Talmaedge had nothing to do with them. And yet, he felt he had been running from something he must do there. “Cool,” Lonnie said. He sighed, looked toward College Boy in the darkness. “So yeah, I’m fucked up. Somebody fucked me up.” College Boy said nothing. Lonnie wasn’t even sure he was there, except the dark seem to deepen where he thought the man sat. “I was just a boy. Just a kid.” Slowly, he told College Boy about the murders. He told of picking blackberries and seeing the men dragging Luellen’s body through the woods. He had thought it was a bear, until he saw the flower print dress and the bloody thighs. Then the men were shooting the others on the shoal under the bridge and heel of Bertrand’s shoe dug up the ground. When he finished his story, Lonnie looked up at the angel. College Boy said nothing, Lonnie called to him to make sure he hadn’t left.

  “You got some more smoke, man?”

  Lonnie lit another joint and passed it to College Boy. The glow lit up the man’s face, casting the shadow of his narrow nose onto his cheek.

  “Why you tell me all of that shit?” College Boy’s voice, though low, carried an edge. “Don’t you think I know about all of that? Your friend wouldn’t be the only one lynched by a bunch of crackers.”

  Lonnie felt a little scared. Was College Boy calling him a cracker? He started to say that he was innocent, only a witness, just a kid, but it sounded defensive and he stopped. He knew, too, that innocent though he was, he was white. After a moment, he offered, “What about Martin Luther King? He made things right.”

  “He’s dead,” College Boy said without inflection. “Crackers killed him, too. Probably FBI, who knows? Medgar Evers—dead. Malcolm X—dead. Seems to be a pattern.” College Boy chuckled drily, then snorted. He handed the jay to Lonnie. “They say the next mayor is going to be black. One of them light-skinned Morehouse niggas. He be dead next.”

  The man’s matter of fact tone caused Lonnie’s stomach to ache. “But … but you’re free, now, aren’t you? Martin Luther King gave you your freedom. I mean, you’re better off”—

  “Than who? Than you?”

  Lonnie felt he needed to think before he answered. He toked twice on the joint before passing it back to College Boy. He looked up at the angel, who was now just a vulture against the sky. What does it mean to cease fire? People were always having their wars, killing each other, and when they had had enough of killing, they declared ‘cease fire.’ But in a little while, they would be fighting again. People liked to fight. Why had Wayne gone to the war? Was it patriotism? All his father really wanted was to farm his own land, nothing fancy or big, just enough for himself, and to be at peace with his neighbors.

  Suddenly, Lonnie saw a sharp, bright light and he fell back into the leaves from the force of a blow. He tried to sit up and scoot back from where he thought College Boy was standing, but another blow caught him in the front of the nose. For a moment there was blankness, and slowly he became aware of College Boy standing over him, his afro framed by the night sky. Then, there was shouting coming from the athletic field, and College Boy ran away. Someone was threatening to kill the nigger, and then someone else was squatting next to Lonnie, asking him if he were all right and pulling him into a sitting position.

  “That nigger trying to rob you, man?” asked a woman.

  Lonnie couldn’t answer right away and the voices, coming to him from all sides kept asking questions about the nigger. Lonnie wanted to say that College Boy was not a nigger, unless they all were. College Boy was his friend. But all he managed to say was “friend.”

  “Some friend!” the woman said. “You know you can’t have a nigger for a friend.”

  “Wait a minute,” said a man. “Was there some faggot shit going on here? That’s what I—Goddamn it! They’re a bunch of queers. He’s a goddamn queer. Serves him right.”

  The woman stood. “Nigger shouldn’t have beat him.”

  “I’ll beat the fucker,” one of the men said. He kicked leaf litter at Lonnie. The group walked away, complaining.

  Lonnie sat for a moment, awareness coming back. He patted the ground around him for his tin of marijuana and couldn’t find it. Then, for a while, he thought of nothing. He was sure he hadn’t slept; he hadn’t been aware of thinking or dreaming. It was dark in the grove, but the streetlights shown in the lawn of the park. He felt a little cold and drew his stiff limbs together into a ball. Gradually he began to feel warm, and when he opened his eyes again, bright dabbles of light cascaded around him. He was in the forest he loved, in a rivulet of sparkles. Then he rose and saw the great forest from a thousand feet above, the various greens of all the trees and the fields, the jades and olives of the tangles of vines and branches mixing like the currents in a great green ocean. He saw the round tops and half domes of the Appalachians. Oddly, he even heard the clicking and screeching of the insects and squeaks and barks of the squirrels and voles. There were birdsongs and the music of all manner of creatures. He was floating on a river of air, tilting and ruddering in the current and he saw every beautiful and kind thing in the world he knew. Then, Ahhhh, he said to himself. Ahhhh. Just over that hill. The blackberries. Blackberries. Bursting with ripeness in the cool morning and the warm light.

  TWENTY-ONE

  He had met Aza X on Columbus Avenue in front of the Mona Lisa restaurant soon after his discharge from the Navy. He had been wandering, partly exploring, but mostly just walking. She was opening the door to the restaurant as he passed, and when a gust came from San Francisco bay and took her papers out of her hand. Limping, he had helped her chase the papers down, and when handing her a clutch of flapping sheets, he read the lines:

  Stars and moon are shining bright

  But the lynch man comes in dark of night.

  The word “lynch” stopped him, and though he was not reading anymore, he stared at the page.

  “Thank you,” Aza said, a slight impatience in her lyrical voice.

  “You wrote this?” he asked. He looked at her face, round with brown eyes and full lips. He wondered what a young woman—a girl, really—might know about lynching. She nodded aloofly and entered the restaurant. He stood at the entrance for a minute, and then followed her. At the coun
ter, she ordered insalata mista with bean sprouts. He ordered spaghetti with meatballs, and as he stood waiting to pay, she beckoned him to sit with her. It was at their first meeting that he told her about the murders. She did not seem put off or surprised by his confession, and looking into her clear gray eyes, he could not help but to tell her more and more. With each revelation, she nodded, grunted encouragingly, or said, “I didn’t realize that; I didn’t know that.” At the end of his spiel, she asked him if he wrote poetry. Not only had he never considered writing a poem, he had never seriously read one, and he told her so. “But you have so much to tell.” She drew out the word “so” into an elongated note and he noticed the little “o” her lips made when she said it. “You should write a poem about it so people will know what happened. That’s my purpose; that’s why I am a poet. I am called to revolution, and poetry, my brother, can bring the man down.”

  “Bring the man down?” Lonnie chuckled, a little dismissively.

  She sat back in her chair, her fork full of bean sprouts. “What’s so funny?”

  “Bring the man down? After what I just told you? It’s amusing.”

  “Don’t underestimate me.” She hissed slightly. “Poetry has power, because it comes from the ancestral spirits. It can blow up this world.” She leaned forward, a bit coyly. “But what would a white brother know about revolution? You are part of the power structure, my brother, part of the problem.”

  He wasn’t sure she was offending him. “Am not.”

  “Are too,” she said, drawing out the sound.

  It sounded childish to say it, but he felt she was pulling it out of him. “Am not.”

  “Okay,” she said with a nod of her head. “I’ll take you for a righteous brother. Now, you got any weed? We can go and write a poem together.”

  “Oh?” he said.

  Her apartment was a few blocks away, across busy Columbus Avenue on quiet, narrow Castle Street at the foot of Telegraph Hill. The apartment was an efficiency, with a galley kitchen to one side and a Murphy bed on the other side of the large bright room decorated with music and political posters. Not long out of the hospital, he had no marijuana, but she did, so they sat on pillows on the floor by the window and smoked several joints, drank cheap wine and wrote poems. Lonnie found that he liked writing poems, that he liked considering the meaning of words, their sounds. After a while they found themselves in a debate about lynching, Aza saying that a lynching always entailed a hanging. She asserted that was the way Judge Lynch, a real person she believed, dispatched of black people who dared challenge Jim Crow.

  “But what would you call what I saw,” Lonnie countered. “There was no hanging, just beating, and stabbing and shooting.”

  “Well …” Aza put her index finger to her chin. “I guess it was just a murder. Maybe you would call it a mass murder. Anyhow, at least in literature, you have to have a rope with a noose. The noose is the symbol of lynching and lynching is the symbol of three hundred years of the white man’s oppression of his black brothers and sisters.” She dragged on a marijuana joint the way she might have a cigarette, and turned her head and blew the smoke out in a stream. Then they wrote a poem about lynching. Aza started with the lines, reciting as she wrote. “Strange fruit swinging in the buck-eye tree/ Strange fruit swinging, beaten and gutted.”

  Lonnie leaned back on the floor. His head buzzed pleasantly, and Aza’s voice soothed him. Closing his eyes, he imagined the site of the murders, now more than twenty years past. He recalled first the tangle of the blackberry bramble, and the plump shiny fruit that hung on them. And then the smell of the woods. It was late in the spring, and the woods were green and heavy with scents of the leaves and the smell of the leaf-mold where the litter had been dragged up. There was also the rusty smell of the river and the creosote from the timber of the old bridge. “Gutted? I don’t think so. I don’t think they gutted anybody.”

  But he remembered the story told to him a day or two after the murders that if you went to Venable’s feed store, into the office, that sitting on a shelf behind Venable’s big desk was a Mason jar full of nigger ears. Two of his school mates swore they had seen it. Four or five ears—a five-eared nigger, or one with three ears—two were black, two were nearly white and the leftover one was somewhere in between. Lonnie had been too distracted by the packing of the house and the sudden move to Atlanta to think about the trophies at the time, but now, with the talk of gutting, he wondered whose ears they might have been. He told Aza about the ears. She said nothing for a long time, and then she wrote, “I’m a killa. A natural born killa/ Gonna slice and dice, honkies beware/ this nigger is crazy and swinging razor in the air.” She narrowed her eyes and bared her teeth as she chanted the lines and Lonnie thought that perhaps she could kill, and suddenly, in the marijuana-induced lethargy, he felt a pang of paranoia.

  She noticed and touched his hand. “Not you, baby. I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “But could you? Could you actually kill somebody? I mean, kill white people?”

  She sat back as if considering. “Intellectually, yes. Intellectually, it would be the only way to get their attention. If you don’t blow something up or shoot somebody down, then they just assume that you like to be kicked around and they just keep on kicking. Who ever heard of reasoning with an oppressor? Nobody reasoned with Hitler or Hirohito. No, you just drop the A-bomb on their asses. But, could I really?” She leaned toward him, her face coming close to his. “Let me put it this way. I wouldn’t want to.” Her lips glistened and her breath smelled of the fortified wine, and he wanted to kiss her. He ran his tongue across his lips and she leaned in even closer. She put her hand on the back of his head and pulled his mouth close to hers but not touching. “I just wouldn’t want to, but if I had to. I would. Like the brother said, ‘by every means necessary.’”

  He pushed his lips into hers and felt their soft fullness. They kept pressing together, hardly kissing, just pressing, and she pulled at his hair, pulling herself to her knees. Pulling on his hair hurt him, and he wanted to say ‘ouch,’ but the press of her lips sent tingles through his spine and he didn’t want her to stop. She slipped her hand through the front of his collar, stretching the crew of his undershirt, and stroked his nipples, making circles around the areola with her finger. He moaned, his mouth still against hers. Then, without warning she pinched hard and twisted the nipple. He let out a yell, as much in surprise as in pain. He tried to move away, but she held onto the nipple, twisting harder and pinching. “I could kill you if I have to,” she hissed, her voice both threatening and lyrical to him. “How many niggers have you killed?”

  “None,” he managed. “I ain’t killed nobody.”

  “I don’t believe you. Every whitey has killed somebody.”

  “No.” He grabbed her wrist to pull her hand away. He knew he was stronger than she and could easily loosen her grip, and doing so would stop the pain. But it would also stop the pleasure and his penis was pushing tightly against his pants leg. “I was just a boy,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, letting go of both his hair and his nipple. “You were just a boy, you murdering bastard. Just a boy, but already a nigger-killer.” She rubbed her lips against his cheeks and stood up. “You want to write another poem?” She shifted her weight on one hip and smiled coyly. “No? Then what do you want to do?”

  His throat was tight and his voice shaky. “Fuck you.”

  She smiled, shifted her weight to the other hip. “That’s always what the oppressor wants. And what do you get when you do it. You get pleasure, but you get pain, too. Right? That’s the cost of being white. The guilt gets in the way of the pleasure.”

  “I’m not guilty.” He wanted to laugh, but his libido surged and he only breathed hard.

  “Your skin makes you guilty.” She elongated the word “skin” and raked her nails across his arm, scratching but not drawing blood.

  The accusation startled him and he pulled away from her, but she grabbed him by the collar and pulled
his face against her breast. “Nigger-killers deserve to die. Do you want me to kill you?”

  For a moment, he had no breath; his mind went blank and his body pulsated with pleasure. “Yes.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she instructed.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She walked into the small bathroom next to the kitchen and shut the door. Before he could make sense of what had just happened, she came out dressed in a flowered moo-moo and carried a bamboo cane. In the light from the window, he could tell she wore no underclothes. She struck the cane cross her palm. “Now, come here.”

  He had been with many prostitutes in his travels, but he had always been straight forward with them. The image of Aza, feet astride and lashing the cane about, gave him a feeling of eagerness and danger and he thought he might come before she allowed coitus. He started to stand.

  “Did I tell you to stand? I said to come here. On your knees. Crawl like a dog. Crawl.”

  He crawled over to her, the wood floor hard against his knees. When he was in reach of her, she put her bare foot on his neck and pushed his face to the floor. Then she whacked him sharply with on the rump with the cane. When he protested, she told him to shut up.