Cheap Diamonds

by Norris Church Mailer

  I was sitting in my usual booth at Joe Jr.’s, second one from the door, when he passed by on the street. I caught his eye; he stopped and stood there looking at me through the window. He had a funny look on his face, like he was angry. Then he came into the restaurant and stood by my table.

  “Are you okay? Aurelius? What’s the matter?”

  “Hendrix is dead.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Jimi Hendrix. He’s dead.”

  “You’re kidding. What happened?”

  “OD’d. I don’t know. They say he choked on his own vomit. Stupid fool. Stupid, stupid, stupid!” His hands clenched and a vein popped out in his neck. It was a little scary.

  “Wow. That’s awful.” I didn’t know much about Jimi Hendrix. I had heard his music, of course—who hadn’t?—and pretended to like it more than I really did because it was considered cool. In reality, it was too loud and jarring for me, and too repetitious. I liked songs I could sing along and dance to, music that stroked all the hairs in the same direction, like stuff by Marvin Gaye or the Beatles or the Band. It was cool and wild and crazy that Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire and all, but I think it was a little out of my league.

  “Do you want to sit down? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. He was in London, on some kind of dope, too out of it to know what he was doing. Something like that.” He slid down in the seat until his head rested on the back. “Seems like we just can’t keep from killing ourselves. It’s not enough that we’ve been enslaved and whipped and lynched and shot, shut out of hotels and cafés and sent to the back of the bus, but every time somebody black makes it big, we find a way to do our ownselves in. Look at Bird. Billie. Whole string of jazzmen. Booze. Drugs. Black man—woman, too—get a little famous and rich and first thing they do is buy a fur coat and a big car and then start shoving their bodies full of junk, like they can’t deal with success with their own God-given brains, they got to jack them up on dope. We might as well all take a running jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.” He sat up and leaned toward me, his eyes flaming. “What’s the point of working and sweating for something, against all odds, making it, and then just killing yourself for no good reason? You tell me that.”

  “No point, I guess.”

  “You don’t take drugs, do you?”

  “No. Well…I smoked pot a few times.”

  “Pot. Hmph. That’s nothing. It’s the heavy drugs you have to stay away from. Uppers. Downers. Heroin. Speed. Cocaine. LSD. Like that. Those things mess up your mind, and your mind is all you got to get you anywhere in this life. That and your ambition. Not to mention looks. You got that, all right, and you’ll have plenty of people trying to give you all those drugs, you, a big model and all. You stay away from that mess, you hear?” He leaned even closer, glaring at me. I leaned back a little farther.

  “Sure. Of course I will.” This was getting a little weird. I half expected him to reach across the table and grab my arm and shake it. Instead he sat back and took a long look at me.

  “Cherry Marshall, right?”

  “You’re pretty good on the saxophone.”

  “You hear me?”

  “Late at night.”

  “Didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “You don’t bother me. I like it. Do you play with a band?”

  “I got a little group. We get gigs here and there, downtown in somebody’s loft, mainly. I’m trying to be an actor, too, but there’s a lot of us black men out there and few roles. Sidney Poitier gets to be all the doctors and lawyers and Nobel Prize winners or something, and everybody else gets to be a pimp or a mugger or somebody’s black-ass Step’n Fetchit, and not many of those.”

  “There’s parts other than those, surely.”

  “You try to find them.”

  “I’m just trying to get somebody to take my picture. That’s hard enough.”

  “Don’t give me that. Pretty white girl like you? You got it made.”

  “I don’t think I have it made. I’m running out of money, and if I don’t get a job soon, I’ll have to waitress or something.”

  “Now, Lordy mercy, wouldn’t that be awful? Why don’t you just ask Daddy for more money until you make it?”

  “What do you mean by that? You don’t know my daddy.”

  “I mean you don’t know what it’s like to really be without money. Oh, I figure you’re trying to make it on your own, but I’m betting you have a backup daddy who wouldn’t want to see his baby starve. Isn’t that true?”

  “Well, of course my daddy wouldn’t want me to starve, but you don’t have to be so hateful about it. What’s your problem?”

  “My problem? You don’t know nothing about problems. You sound like you’re from the South. Arkansas or Tennessee. Maybe Texas?”

  “Arkansas.”

  “Well, then you ought to know that to be black in the South is to be treated like something on the bottom of somebody’s shoe.”

  “What do you know about the South?”

  “All I need to know. I come from Alabama. I got out of there as soon as I was tall enough to turn in my cotton sack and hitchhike out. That would be something else you don’t know nothing about, working in the fields.”

  “That just goes to show what you know. My grandparents were sharecroppers. My mama worked in the cotton patch when she was a girl, so I think I know a little bit about it.”

  “Your mama. Your grandmama. But you never had to do it yourself. I can tell. You had it easy. You never had that pearly-white skin burned by the sun until it blistered and peeled, those soft hands picked so rough you couldn’t touch anything fine without tearing it to shreds.”

  “Okay, so I never personally picked cotton. I admit it.” He was beginning to tick me off. “But I worked. I worked in a pickle plant and peeled onions all summer!”

  “A pickle plant? A pickle plant? Huh. I spent a summer castrating pigs!” He looked at me, smug, like he was asking me to top that one. I think he had me.

  “Well, I…I give up. You win the worst-job contest! And I’m really truly sorry Jimi Hendrix is dead, but you don’t have to be black to do yourself in. White singers die all the time, too, in little planes crashing trying to fly in bad weather, like Patsy Cline and Buddy Holly and them. Hank Williams overdosed. Everybody’s got to die, one way or the other, whether they’re famous or not. I expect to do it myself one of these days. I bet you do, too.”

  He looked at me hard for a minute, then laughed.

  “You’re not the worst chick I ever met. Peeling onions in the pickle plant, huh? That makes me hungry. Tony! I need a cheeseburger bad, man. Extra pickles and onions.”

  Tony came over to the table, put down a glass of water and another place setting in front of Aurelius.

  “These together?”

  “Yeah, we’re together. Put the girl’s meal on my tab.”

  I looked up at him, my spoon stopped on the way to my mouth.

  “I mean, since you’re so bad off and might have to waitress and all, I’ll buy your bowl of soup,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll let you pay. With all your savings from picking cotton.”

  Something was starting—you could feel it in the air between us. I was a little scared. It had never once crossed my mind to think of any of the few black guys back home as possible boyfriends. We didn’t even integrate until 1962, when I was in the ninth grade, and then it was just fifteen kids in the whole school. When they first came, we were all kind of suspicious of each other, but after a while it was no big deal. They joined the football team, the choir, the honor society, and everything else; we discovered they were good athletes and singers and students, and they realized we weren’t going to beat them up or make fun of them; for the most part it seemed to be okay. Our choir won a number one at the state competition for the first time ever, and the football team got into the district finals. The only thing is, I don’t think we ever did totally relax around one another; we were always too aware that we might
accidentally say something that might be taken the wrong way. We joked around and laughed a lot, sure, but seldom did we sit and have serious talks about anything important. I had a friend named Queen Esther McVay, who I sat with in art class, and we had fun doing art projects together, but we didn’t double-date or spend the night at each other’s house like I did with Baby. The black kids didn’t hang out at the Freezer Fresh, where we all went. I don’t remember any of them even driving up and ordering from the window. There was a barbecue place and juke joint out at Turkey Bend called Moe’s that they all went to, and once in a while late at night some of us would drive by there, on our way out to the river to park, and it smelled so good that my mouth watered for barbecue, but it didn’t occur to us to actually try to go in, or that it was weird that we felt like we couldn’t. That’s just the way it was and none of us ever thought about it.

  Since I’d been in New York, I hadn’t exactly had a nightlife, so I’d gotten a library card and spent most of my evenings reading. I guess partly because of meeting Aurelius, I checked out a biography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, who was from Arkansas, down in the Delta, and that showed me a whole different side of the situation. As I got into the book, I found out that Maya and I had a lot more in common than I would have thought. Maya’s grandmother ran a store that sold to black sharecroppers, and I wasn’t kidding about my grandma and grandpa being sharecroppers. At one time they’d had a nice farm and took out a mortgage to buy more land to raise cotton, but shortly after they did, the Depression came and the bottom fell out of the cotton market. They struggled for a few years, but got to the point where they couldn’t make the mortgage payments and there was nobody left to borrow from, so the bank foreclosed on them, like it did on so many others. A man from town who had been a professional baseball player decided he wanted to retire back home and go into farming, so he bought their mortgage and got the whole farm for the amount of the mortgage—less than two thousand dollars—which even in the Depression was way less than it was worth. He obviously thought that price included not only the house and land, but also every single machine they had on the place, every stick of furniture, every horse and cow and dog and cat—and the sheriff did nothing to stop him. He signed the papers the day Grandma and Grandpa took their cotton crop to the gin, and as the bales came out of the baler, the new owner was waiting with a truck and took those, too. They had the clothes on their backs, and that was about all. The only thing they had left to do was pull up their socks and go to work on shares for a larger farm, leaving behind the neat white house where Grandpa had grown up and their girls had been born, to move into a four-room croppers’ shack in the field they worked. They never got over it, especially Grandpa. If the man who bought their farm’s name ever came into the conversation, Grandpa would spit, even though he was a Christian man and tried to see the best in everyone.

  Nobody, black or white, ever got out from under picking cotton for somebody else—the landowners saw to that by always keeping the croppers in debt to them, charging them high prices for the seed and their supplies, which you could be sure always totaled out to more than their share of the profits.

  Grandma and Grandpa raised two good-looking girls, though, my mother, Ivanell, and my aunt Rubynell, both of whom married young and, like Aurelius, got themselves out of the cotton patch. It’s a fact that, fair or not, good looks are always a ticket to someplace better.

  Aunt Rubynell’s husband, Uncle Jake, owned the Esso station, and Daddy was the postmaster at the post office. Although nobody could call us wealthy, we lived in town in a two-story house and Mama had all the pretty clothes she never had when she was growing up. Even when she lived in the cotton patch she loved clothes. She was tall with a slim figure and could sew and make a hand-me-down look like an expensive store-bought dress. No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy style—it’s something you’re born with—and Mama had it. It could be that growing up with her is why I am a little fixated on clothes myself.

  The patch my grandparents had moved to was down in the river bottom, near Turkey Bend, where most of the black pickers lived, and they shared it with several other families, both black and white. Like the folks in Maya’s book, they called each other Miz or Mister this or that, or Brother or Sister if they went to the same church. My grandparents called each other Mr. Shelton and Miz Shelton, even when they were alone, or so Grandma told me once when I asked her. He was quite a bit older than she was, and it never occurred to her to use his given name. That wouldn’t have been respectful.

  I never heard my grandparents say anything hateful about any of their black neighbors, but they didn’t visit or talk much, even if they were picking right next to one another in the same field. Or unless one of them was in trouble, like the time my grandma was throwing the dirty dishwater out the back door and slipped and fell, landing on the jagged edge of the rocks they had piled up to use for door steps. She gashed her leg open, ankle to knee, and when Grandpa couldn’t get the gaping wound closed or stop the bleeding and she turned gray and began to shake, he ran and got Miz Berry, who lived down the road, to come and help him bind it up. They got her in the truck and both of them took her to the hospital, where Miz Berry sat outside and waited for hours until they came back out with Grandma’s leg sewed up and bandaged. Then Miz Berry went back to her house and cooked them a big pot of chicken and dumplings, turnip greens, and biscuits enough to last for a few days until Grandma could get up and around.

  Grandma would have done as much for her, and she did when Miz Berry had a baby who couldn’t thrive because her milk dried up. Grandma carried milk to her from their cow every day for months until the baby got big enough to eat. But they didn’t go to see each other and drink tea and exchange recipes or whatever. Life was too hard. That was just the way it was.

  That baby was a girl my same age named Reenie, and every Sunday afternoon while Mama and Daddy visited with Grandma and Grandpa we’d dig in the sand down by the river or play out in the old barn, climbing up to the loft and jumping into piles of hay. One time Reenie found a sack of pink pellets out in the barn and ate some, thinking it might be candy, but it turned out to be rat poison. She didn’t swallow much, but it burned her mouth and we got scared. My mother picked Reenie up and ran down the road to her home, and then Mama and Miz Berry scrubbed out her mouth and made her throw up and then drink a big glass of fresh milk. She was all right, but it scared us so bad we stopped playing in the barn, afraid of rats, and neither of us ever again tasted anything if we didn’t know what it was.

  It was about this time that we were six and big enough to go to school, and when I said something to her about how much fun we would have, going to first grade together, she put her hands on her hips and told me in no uncertain terms that she had her own school to go to, that it was better than mine, and she would get to ride a big yellow bus to get to it. Her family quit the patch and moved away not too long after that, maybe to be nearer the school, which I later found out was more than an hour away on the bus. I never saw Reenie again.

  I didn’t know then why we couldn’t go to the same school, but in the excitement of first grade I forgot about Reenie. When Little Rock High School integrated in 1957 with all the hateful mess that went with it, I was too young to really understand what was happening. It was just normal that there were no black kids at school. If I’d ever thought about it, and I didn’t, I guess I would have thought, as Reenie had said, that they were happy being bused to their school and felt like it was better than ours.

  A few years later, of course, I got older and the civil rights marches brought out all the ugliness of segregation onto the six o’clock news, but even then, aside from Little Rock, which seemed far away from Sweet Valley, most of the trouble was always somewhere else, in the Deep South, Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia, and didn’t appear to affect us much. We didn’t have protesters sitting in at the Freezer Fresh or fat sheriffs beating up people, whooshing them down with fire hoses, siccin
g German shepherds on them. Nobody had ever gotten lynched in Sweet Valley. We felt like we were somehow apart from it all. After I read Maya Angelou’s book, I doubted the black kids felt the same way. That book made me think in ways I never had before, and made me ashamed of those white people, ashamed of being so ignorant. If you think about it, white people have done a real number on everybody, starting with Columbus and the explorers—first on the Indians, then on the black people they forced over here from Africa as slaves, and even right up to now on the Vietnamese, whose country we have no business being in at all and which we are destroying as hard and fast as we can.

  Well, frankly, let’s face it, down through history we’ve done a pretty good job on each other, too. Nobody knows if Cain and Abel were white or not, but I’d bet money they were.

  So, sitting across from Aurelius, I was a confusion of feelings, to put it mildly. I had only had that feeling, that attraction, whatever you want to call it, like this twice in my life, and it was something I couldn’t ignore. I know he felt it, too.

  But what would people say if we started going out? How would my mother and daddy act when I told them I was seeing a black man? I know it was jumping the gun a little since he hadn’t really asked me out at all, but would I have the courage to tell them if he did? What if they came to visit me? Well, so what if they did? I was grown, wasn’t I? It wasn’t any of their business who I saw! Oh, my gosh. Here I was getting mad at them already, before anything had even happened. Maybe they wouldn’t care at all. They had never been prejudiced like a lot of people I knew. Daddy worked with a black man at the post office. They might like Aurelius.

  Finally, though, what did it really matter what anybody else said or thought? This was New York, not the South. Nobody in Joe Jr.’s blinked an eye at us eating our lunch together in the same booth. There was nobody at all watching to frown on anything I did, no preacher telling me I would go to hell for every little thing I did or thought or said that wasn’t like what the Holiness church believed, no whispering old ladies to run and tell my parents what they had seen me do. There were no Turkey Bend and Negro-only juke joints, white-only Freezer Freshes. Aurelius and I lived in the same house, right across the hall from each other.