The Book of Harlan

by Bernice L. McFadden

  When the song came to an end, Gwen glanced over to find that Patsy was no longer at her side, replaced now with a pair of hand-holding strangers. Her eyes frantically scanned the shadows, roaming from one unfamiliar face to another.

  No Patsy.

  Uneasy, but trying her best to feign otherwise, Gwen cradled her elbows in her hands, swayed unsteadily to the music, waiting in quiet anticipation for some young man to ask her to dance.

  The front door swung open and closed. As the house swelled with people, it seemed to shrink in size. One record replaced another, shrinking violets of all hues and sizes were pulled from the wall onto the dance floor, yet still no one asked the dancer to dance.

  Rivulets of sweat trickled down the center of Gwen’s back; she tugged uncomfortably at the dainty collar of her white blouse, smoothed her palms over the sharp pleats of her plaid skirt, cast an embarrassed eye down at her size-nine Oxford shoes, and realized with stark embarrassment that she looked either like an overgrown child—or someone’s grandmother.

  No wonder she was ignored. Gwen looked so bland, she was invisible. Teetering on the verge of tears, she spotted a lit room at the end of the hallway and moved toward it like a moth.

  The bright kitchen was jam-packed with people; cigarette smoke hovered above their heads like rain clouds, conversation buzzed at a deafening pitch. Liquor bottles were everywhere—on the table, the windowsills, on top of the stove.

  When Gwen walked in, heads turned and eyes combed over her, but no one said hello. Patsy was standing near the back door, some man pressed into her with his face buried in her neck.

  Gwen moved toward her. “I think I’m going to leave.”

  Patsy shrugged her shoulders. “See you tomorrow, then.”

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “Na-ah.”

  Feelings mangled, Gwen spun around and walked right into Harlan.

  “Hey!”

  A familiar face.

  Gwen’s levies broke, spilling tears down her cheeks.

  Harlan immediately took her hand and guided her outside.

  “Sit down,” he ordered tenderly, passing her his handkerchief. Harlan didn’t know what else to do, so he sat down beside her and waited for her to stop sobbing.

  Behind them, the door opened; foot-stomping music burst from the house like a colorful bird, its wildly flapping wings catching the attention of pedestrians who slowed their gait to look at the house and the young people milling about on the steps.

  Harlan turned around to find the woman he had come there to meet standing in the doorway, arms crossed over her bountiful bosom, eyebrows arched, lips pulled grotesquely to one side of her face. She didn’t utter a word, didn’t have to, her entire being bellowed: Nigger, who is she?

  Harlan raised his index finger. “Gimme a minute.”

  The woman rolled her eyes, yanked the door open, and disappeared inside.

  Gwen dragged the handkerchief over her face. “I-I’m sorry,” she mumbled into the cloth, too embarrassed to look at Harlan.

  “You feel better?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “You wanna tell me about it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you want to go back inside?”

  Another shake of her head, then she stood. “Thanks,” she muttered, folding the handkerchief into a square. “I’ll take this home, wash it, and give it back the next time I see you.”

  “So there’ll be a next time, huh?”

  Even though her eyes still glistened with tears, she managed a warm smile. Harlan grinned back at her.

  “You sure you don’t want to go back inside? We could show them how to really get down.” Harlan pursed his lips and rolled his shoulders in a clownish fashion. Gwen couldn’t help but laugh.

  “No, I better get home.”

  “Brooklyn, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Harlan looked at the door. “I can ride with you if you like.”

  Gwen’s eyes widened. “All the way to Brooklyn?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  Chapter 43

  In the Gill household, fixed on the wall above the refrigerator was a clock with a white face and green arms in the shape of palm fronds. At six o’clock, Ethel glanced at the clock and then at the door of the apartment, expecting Gwen to come bursting in, babbling about her day.

  At six fifteen, Ethel went to the door, opened it, and poked her head into the hallway. By six thirty, she was nervously pacing the floor.

  Irene arrived home from work at seven o’clock; Aubrey followed not too long after.

  “She probably had trouble with the trains,” Irene commented nonchalantly. Aubrey nodded his head in agreement.

  When nine o’clock arrived and Gwen still hadn’t come home, Ethel pulled her winter coat over her nightgown and took her worried pacing out onto the sidewalk.

  It was mid-October, Indian summer had its torrid grip on the city, and within minutes, Ethel was soaked in perspiration. Her concern slowly melted into anger, and even at a distance, Gwen could spot the scowl on her mother’s face as soon as she and Harlan rounded the corner.

  She rushed ahead of him. “I have to go.”

  “Call me!” Harlan hollered after her.

  Gwen’s feet may have been walking, but she was sailing on air.

  Ethel, drenched from two hours of stalking the neighborhood, looked up and saw Gwen racing toward her—grinning no less—and instantly her already foul mood turned rank.

  When Gwen reached striking distance, Ethel’s arm catapulted into the air, her closed fist punched the left side of her daughter’s face and then the right, sending Gwen scrambling into the building.

  Ethel trailed Gwen up the stairs, her coat billowing out behind her like a cape. She raised her fist again, catching Gwen on the crown of her head, the second blow hitting the center of her back.

  They exploded into the apartment and Aubrey, who had been sitting reading the paper, jumped straight out of his chair. A slicing look from his wife warned him that he’d better mind his business—this was mother-daughter stuff, no men allowed or needed. So Aubrey just stood there, quiet.

  Ethel chased Gwen into the bedroom, where she unleashed a barrage of bad words before striking her again, this time across the mouth.

  After Ethel charged from the room, Irene, who had been watching silently from her bed, sucked her teeth and spat, “Chuh, you feel you is a big woman now? Running the streets like some wildcat? You deserve them licks!”

  Gwen said nothing. She stripped out of her clothes, climbed into bed, and gave Irene her back.

  Yes, Gwen’s feelings were bruised, and her lip was split, but none of that could take away from the hour or so she had spent on the train with Harlan. Even as she lay with her face buried in her pillow, still sniffling from her mother’s blows and insults, Gwen was able to smile through her tears. The memory and feel of Harlan’s thigh knocking against her own when the train sped around a bend in the tracks or came to a stuttering stop in the station helped to ease the pain

  And oh, how they had talked! They had talked about near everything: her parents, his parents, music, his grandmother who had recently passed away.

  “In her sleep,” he had said. “Just like my grandfather.”

  A sadness gripped his face and Gwen wouldn’t swear on it, but she thought she saw water in his eyes.

  “We just got back from the funeral a few days ago.”

  “Where did she live?” Gwen asked.

  “Macon, Georgia. You ever been to Georgia?”

  “No.”

  “It’s nice,” he said, bobbing his head.

  How dainty her hand had looked cradled in Harlan’s big one when he scrawled his number in blue ink on her palm.

  She played and replayed the feel of his arm around her waist as they ascended the subway steps and his plea as she hurried toward home: “Call me!”

  Chapter 44

  If Ethel thought she’d knocked some sense into
her daughter, she was wrong. All of those angry cuffs to Gwen’s head and face had done little else but empty her of all the good sense she might have once had.

  The next day, lips still pulsing in pain, Gwen dropped a nickel in one of the pay phones scattered around the campus of the World’s Fair and dialed Harlan’s number. When he answered, she asked if he wouldn’t mind meeting her after work, and he agreed.

  And so it began.

  Gwen, telling lies, sneaking off to be with that mess of a man-child who favored dark liquor, who smoked reefer and Viceroy cigarettes. Who frequented illegal card and dice games in rooms hidden behind false walls and had so many women, he couldn’t bother to remember their names so just called them all baby.

  Three weeks into their courtship, Harlan convinced Gwen to give up that part of herself that Ethel warned she’d better save till marriage or be fated to spend eternity in the underside of heaven.

  Ethel’s threats fell on deaf ears and on a Thursday evening, Gwen found herself in Harlan’s bedroom, sitting on his bed.

  “C’mon,” he coaxed, floating the lit joint near her mouth. “Just take one pull.”

  “I better not.”

  Eyeing her seductively, Harlan slipped the joint between his lips and pulled. After a few seconds, he blew a stream of smoke into her face. Gwen fanned it quickly away.

  “Stop,” she whined girlishly.

  “Just one,” he urged. “You’ll like it, I promise.”

  Gwen’s eyelids fluttered. “Okay.”

  Harlan guided her through it. One puff, two. “Hold it, hold it,” he cautioned, laughing.

  The smoke bit her throat, her eyes watered, and she gagged. Harlan rubbed her back, smiling. “How do you feel?”

  At first Gwen felt as if her chest was on fire. When the flames subsided, she became supremely aware of her heart’s steady drumming. At first the sound only filled her head, then it filled the room. Covering her chest with her hands, she turned wonder-filled eyes on Harlan.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  She fell back onto the mattress and closed her eyes. “It’s so loud.”

  “Is it?” Harlan leaned over and pressed his mouth against hers, using his tongue to pry her lips apart. Somewhere beneath the thump of her heart, Gwen realized she was experiencing her first kiss.

  His fingers slowly, expertly undid the buttons of her blouse. Gwen was barely aware of her undressing, focused as she was on her heartbeat. When his fingers grasped hold of the button closest to her navel, Gwen’s eyes flew open, she caught his hand and sat up. Her eyes swept over the chaos of the room. Molehills of dirty laundry, shoes thrown here and there, an open suitcase spewing clothes.

  “Are you going somewhere?” she asked.

  Harlan’s mouth fell into his lap. “W-what?”

  Gwen nodded at the suitcase.

  Harlan barely glanced at it. “Nah, I haven’t unpacked from Georgia.”

  “Oh,” Gwen moaned, falling back on the bed again. Her blouse spread out around her, providing Harlan with a full view of the white cotton brassiere she wore.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he announced thickly.

  Gwen covered her face in giddy shame.

  Harlan rose from the bed and hurriedly shrugged off his trousers and T-shirt.

  Outside, the evening sun faded from the sky. Inside, on top of freshly washed sheets—that Emma herself had pressed and placed on his bed—Harlan suckled Gwen’s breasts and drowned his fingers in the river of warmth between her legs.

  When she started mewing, he climbed atop her and the sound of his panting drowned out the knocking of her terrified heart. If Gwen had been a seam, she would have burst.

  A few penetrating strokes later, and sweet mercy—that roller-coaster feeling swept through Gwen like a rogue wave. Every cell in her body erupted, setting her limbs to rattling.

  Afterward, when they saw the blood shimmering on Harlan’s penis, Gwen flew into a panic because he seemed as shook by the sight of it as she was.

  Harlan gasped. “You’re a virgin?”

  To which Gwen responded, “Do I need to go to the hospital?”

  An hour-long explanation and nearly a pack of cigarettes later, Harlan was finally able to convince Gwen that no, she didn’t need to go to the hospital, and no, he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “It’s normal to bleed the first time,” he kept assuring her.

  Emma and Sam came through the door, laughing and teasing each other in that way that long-married couples do. Gwen had never met them and wouldn’t meet them that night because Harlan hustled her down the stairs and out the door like an embarrassment. At the subway station, he hesitated at the top of the stairs.

  “You gonna ride to Brooklyn with me, right?”

  “Not tonight, I’m tired.” His lips barely brushed hers. “All right, baby, get home safe.”

  PART VI

  THE Future Has a Past

  Chapter 45

  Well before Harlan had ever laid eyes on Gwendolyn Dorothy Gill, he’d walked into the Powder Room on 138th and Madison Avenue determined to drink himself blind.

  Tuesday evening, only a few people were seated in the brown leather-clad booths. At the bar, three men balanced on low stools, staring silently into their drinks. Cigarette smoke drifted eerily along the embossed copper ceiling, found refuge beneath the metal skirts of the pendant lights, and faded slowly away. A torch song spilled from the radio behind the bar; Oscar Meade, the fat, balding proprietor, polished water glasses and sang along.

  When Harlan walked in, the murmur of conversation collapsed. He raised a hand in greeting and slid onto the stool closest to the door.

  Oscar lumbered over. “Whaddya have?”

  “Whiskey, straight.”

  Oscar set a short glass before Harlan and filled it, then proceeded to make small talk, but his mouth clamped closed when he saw the festering gaze in Harlan’s eyes. He turned to leave, but Harlan wrapped his knuckles noisily against the wooden bar, demanding another.

  After Oscar refilled the glass, he lingered in anticipation, but it seemed Harlan was taking his time with the second drink. He’d started away again when Harlan grumbled incoherently. Oscar cocked his ear. “Say what now?”

  “I said, you think people got your back, but they don’t.”

  Although weeks had come and gone, Harlan was still bitter about being fired from Lucille’s band.

  Oscar shrugged. “It bees like that sometimes,” he chuckled.

  Harlan bobbed his head and raised his glass and bitterly mimicked Oscar’s declaration: “It bees like that sometimes.” He threw a crumpled ten-dollar bill on the bar. “Keep pouring until it’s all used up.”

  Seated two stools left of Harlan was a slim, smartly dressed light-skinned fellow who had been nursing his drink for some time.

  Oscar ambled over to him. “Another?” he asked, even though the man’s glass was still full.

  “Ah, yeah,” the guy said, lifting the glass and draining the contents.

  The man seated between Harlan and the mulatto slipped off his stool. He thumped the bar and said, “See you tomorrow, Oscar.”

  “Sure thing, Joe.”

  Oscar removed the empty glass and dropped it in the sink.

  Harlan glanced over at the light-skinned man. His profile looked familiar, but Harlan couldn’t conjure a name to go along with the soft jawline. He took a sip of his drink and pondered. Within seconds, a name popped into his head. “Percy Lester?” he called out.

  The man turned to face him. “Who?”

  Harlan carefully studied the stranger’s face. His eyes lingered on the prominent callus on his top lip. “Sorry, man. From the side, you looked like someone else.”

  “No problem.”

  Harlan emptied his glass; Oscar quickly refilled it.

  A callus on the top lip usually meant one thing: trumpeter. Harlan leaned back in his chair and spotted the battered burgundy trumpet case resting on the stoo
l next to the man. “That yours?” he asked, pointing.

  The man glanced at the case. “Yep.”

  Harlan grinned. “Music man, huh?”

  The man nodded.

  “Me too.” Harlan picked up his drink and moved to the empty stool between them. “Harlan,” he said, offering his hand.

  “Lizard.”

  Harlan rocked with laughter. “Your mama named you Lizard?”

  “Nah, it’s a nickname. My mama named me Leo, but I prefer Lizard.”

  “Well then, Lizard it is.”

  Bolstered by the whiskey and their shared love of music, the men slipped into easy conversation.

  “Who you like?”

  Lizard offered a sheepish grin. “The king, of course.”

  “Satchmo?”

  “Yeah,” Lizard said. “Yeah, he’s the man for sure.”

  The two clinked glasses.

  “I know him,” Harlan boasted.

  Lizard’s eye twinkled with suspicion.

  “For real, I do,” Harlan said, raising his hand. “May God strike me dead if I’m lying.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Oscar interjected from the corner of the bar.

  Lizard didn’t look convinced.

  “He been to my house and everything. Known him for years. Know him so well, I call him Uncle Satchmo!”

  Lizard didn’t even try to dim the astonishment glowing on his face.

  “Aww, man, he comes by the house sometimes just for my mama’s red beans and rice,” Harlan chuckled.

  Lizard was speechless.

  “Another for me and the Lizard,” Harlan called out jovially.

  Oscar waddled over. “You got any more money? ’Cause you done run through that ten spot.”

  Harlan burped. “Already?”

  “Don’t worry, I got it,” Lizard said, wrenching a wad of bills from his pocket.

  Harlan’s eyes stretched. “Hey, man,” he whispered, “you betta stop flashing that cash ’fore someone relieves you of it.”

  Lizard looked thoughtfully at the money and then at Harlan’s soupy eyes. “You think so?” he said with all of the naïveté of a country boy.