Mama cried for a long time. And she almost never cried. But it was Mama’s house now. And she had it a decent while before the onset of her final depression, when she would sit for most of the day in her big reclining chair, talking about death if she talked at all. I’ll never know if we did the right thing by buying her that house, or whether our insistence on vindicating her was somehow misguided.
It was 1987 and I had been at an out-of-town conference, when I got the news. I’ll never forget that slow walk down the corridor to the hotel door. From a distance, I could see the pink message slips taped all over my door. It had to be death or its imminence, I thought. It had to be Mama. Messages from the dean, from the police, from the department, from my wife, my father, from the hotel manager, from the police again, CALL HOME.
She had been in the hospital for a checkup, and she seemed to be doing fine. The white lady sharing the room with her said she was talking one minute and slumped over the next. They kept her alive on a machine.
She’s up, she’s down, she might not make it through the night. She’s a little better? She’s worse? She won’t . . . not even through the night? I flew out to Pittsburgh, the nearest airport, at dawn, then rented a car from there, weeping all the way. Sharon and the kids drove from Ithaca.
At the hospital, Mama kept looking up at me, then at the big blue-gray machine, trying to ask something with her eyes. She’d be fully awake and conscious, then they’d have to jump-start her heart again. She’d come back as if she’d just been asleep, asking that same question again with her eyes. We’d go, we’d come, over the course of the day, till my family finally got there, at about nine that night. She’d waited to say goodbye.
It was about midnight when we agreed not to shock her heart anymore. Rocky, by now an oral surgeon, had assumed charge. I had told her how much I loved her, and she had smiled that deep-down smile, something to take with her on the road.
Nemo and Mama are buried near each other, in the new, highly esteemed, and otherwise white cemetery just outside Keyser, behind the hill overlooking Mr. Bump’s trailer park. It probably bothers Mama to be looking down at Nemo every day, unless she has forgiven him for not calling her to say goodbye when Big Mom was dying.
It’s the kind of cemetery that seems fake to me, with all the headstones bronze and flat, exactly the same size. We got the “deluxe” model and jazzed it up as best we could. It’s got a little poem on it, and a bas-relief flower. Maybe it should have just said “Miss Pauline,” because everybody’d know who that was.
I hate that cemetery. Not because of the lack of aesthetic appeal; not because it’s integrated; but because what Nemo called the Power isn’t there. When you go up on Radical Hill, up past where Sherry Lewis used to live, enter the gate, and take the dusty road to the colored cemetery . . . now, that’s a cemetery. All the markers have different shapes, and the graves are laid out whopper-jawed. Upkeep varies, so some graves look pretty disheveled. Not Daddy Paul’s, of course, and not Big Mom’s, either.
This is where the old souls come to hide, resting till the Day of the Lord. Falling out over graves, like I once saw Mr. Bootsie do when I was a boy, listening to Mama perform her eulogy. Please, please—just one more look, don’t take her yet, just one more look, was all he said, shouting and whooping and hollering and falling out all over his mother’s grave.
You had a chance, in a colored funeral. You had a chance to work out your grief. You didn’t have to be in a hurry with it, either. You could touch it, play with it, and talk to it, letting it work itself up in its own good time. Mama said she didn’t want one of those tearjerkers, with crepe-hangers sitting in the mourners’ pew and then crowding around her grave. She wanted a closed casket, ten minutes at the max, and don’t let Nemo officiate. That was when she was younger. She’d pick out her dress and wig hat, the jewelry and the shoes, when she got old. By the time my mother died, at the worst of her dejection and alienation from herself, her family, the Colemans, seemed to me coolly distant, somewhat embarrassed by her eccentricities and depression. They were tired of her, it almost seemed, and she was tired of life. I think by the end she wanted to die. Nor did she believe in an afterlife. She just wanted release.
Instead of the modern Episcopal Milquetoast service we had for Mama, I passionately wish that her funeral had been like the one for Miss Minnie, or the one for Papa Charlie—or the one for Uncle Boke, which happened back when I was five. That was a nice one.
The sermon was long and loud, demanding that you break down. He’s with the Lord today, walking in grandeur past brooks and fountains, hand in hand with his mother, Miss Lucy Clifford, and his kind old father, Mr. Samuel. I know you want him back, but the Lord had need of him up there. Maybe it was to sing the tenor parts of the spirituals, or maybe to tend the fires. Maybe to polish the silver up nice, or to keep the gold real shiny. I know you’ll miss him; we’ll miss him too. But we’ll meet again soon at the Pearly Gates. On that Great Day of the Judgment, when we cross over, he’ll be waiting there for us, welcoming us into the fold.
Oh, man, did those sermons feel good, sad-good, and hurting. And then they’d sing that killer song, people falling out all along.
When I’m gone the last mile of the way I will rest at the close of the day, And I know there are joys that await me When I’ve gone the last mile of the way.
Then Mama had risen to read her piece, looking all good and sounding all fine.
At Mama’s funeral, I wanted to fall out like that, too. I wanted that blue-black preacher who had substituted that time for Reverend Mon-roe and had blown his tired ass away. I wanted him to get up on that pulpit and preach the Sermon of the Dry Bones, like he’d done for Uncle Boke. People still dated things by that sermon: Hey . . . that was two years, three months, fourteen days, seven hours, and five minutes after Brother Blue Gums preached the Sermon of the Dry Bones.
I wanted the Heavenly Gospel Choir to sing a lot of long, sad songs, and I wanted people to fall out. I wanted the church to be hot, with the windows closed, those paper-colored funeral home fans spreading the steam rather than cooling things down. I wanted starched collars to wilt and straightened hair to kink up and “go back,” I wanted the kitchens crinkling up in that heat, crackling loud and long, before our very eyes. I wanted the whole world to know my mama’s death and her glory while alive. I wanted to cry and cry and cry, so I could tell her how sorry I was for not being a good enough son. I wanted her to know that I could have tried to do more, I could have tried to understand better, I could have come home more. I wanted her to know that I had tried, and that I loved her like life itself, and that I would miss her now that she was gone. I wanted to be sad in that dark, holy place, and I wanted that sadness to last.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
THE LAST MILL PICNIC
SOME COLORED PEOPLE claimed that they welcomed the change, that it was progress, that it was what we had been working for for so very long, our own version of the civil rights movement and Dr. King. But nobody really believed that, I don’t think. For who in their right mind wanted to attend the mill picnic with the white people, when it meant shutting the colored one down?
Just like they did Howard High School, Nemo’s son, Little Jim, had said. I was only surprised that he said it out loud.
Everybody worked so hard to integrate the thing in the mid-sixties, Aunt Marguerite mused, because that was what we were supposed to do then, what with Dr. King and everything. But by the time those crackers made us join them, she added, we didn’t want to go.
I wish I could say that the community rebelled, that everybody refused to budge, that we joined hands in a circle and sang “We Shall Not, We Shall Not Be Moved,” followed by “We Shall Overcome.” But we didn’t. In fact, people preferred not to acknowledge the approaching end, as if a miracle could happen and this whole nightmare would go away.
It was the last colored mill picnic. Like the roll called up yonder, everybody was t
here, even Caldonia and Old Man Mose. But Freddie Taylor had brought his 45s and was playing the best of rhythm and blues like nobody could believe. “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?” was the favorite oldie of the day, because Piedmont was a Jimmy Ruffin town. Mellow, and sad. A coffee-colored feeling, with lots of cream. Jerry Butler’s “Hey, Western Union Man” and Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” were the most requested recent songs.
We had all come back for it, the diaspora reversing itself. There was a gentle hum or rumble that kept the same pitch all through the day, a lazy sort of pace as we walked back and forth along the arc of parked cars and just-mowed grass at Carskadon’s Farm. Timothy grass and raspberry, black-eyed Susans big as saucers, thistle and dandelion, and everywhere sumac. The greensward was an allergist’s nightmare, cow pies were a perpetual threat. Still, we walked.
They had tried to shut down Walden Methodist first, but Big Mom, the matriarch, had simply refused to stop attending her church of eight decades. And “the boys”—her sons, the Colemans—had of course supported her. Other than her doctor, Big Mom almost never saw white people. Nor did she care to be with or worship with them. People huddled together and lobbied her, then huddled together and lobbied her some more, to no avail. Big Mom wasn’t going to stop attending Walden Methodist. And that was that. Since she had a weak heart and high blood pressure, had lost most of her sight because of a degenerating retina, couldn’t hear unless you spoke in her ear—and had, above all else, a steely sense of resolve—nobody messed with Big Mom.
The white minister at the newly integrated United Methodist Church, over in the Orchard, would preach his normal sermon and then traipse over to Back Street and minister to Big Mom, Mr. Ozzie, Mr. Doug Twyman, Mr. Lynn Allen, and a Coleman son or two. Miss Toot and her daughters, Frieda and Eudie, would still sing gospel, including “The Prodigal Son.” White people can’t preach too good, was all that Big Mom would volunteer about her experience with integration. I know she thought that God was white: there were all those pictures hanging on her walls. But that was another matter.
They might have kept Walden Methodist, but there was no hope for the mill pic-a-nic. And what was worse was that nobody had known what to do to reverse it. The mill administration itself made the decision, it said, because the law forbade separate but equal everything, including picnics. So the last wave of the civil rights era finally came to the Potomac Valley, crashing down upon the colored world of Piedmont. When it did, its most beloved, and cementing, ritual was doomed to give way. Nobody wanted segregation, you understand; but nobody thought of this as segregation.
So much was the way I remembered these occasions from my earliest childhood, and yet a new age had plainly dawned, an age that made the institution of a segregated picnic seem an anachronism. All of the people under thirty-five or so sported newly coiffed Afros, neatly rounded and shiny with Afro-Sheen. There were red and black and green dashikis everywhere, blousing over bell-bottomed trousers. Gold peace symbols dangled over leather vests, bare nigger toes poked out of fine leather sandals. Soul handshakes filled the air, as did the curious vocatives “brother” and “sister.” I found myself looking for silk socks and stocking-cap waves, sleeveless see-through T-shirts peeking over the open neck of an unbuttoned silk shirt, Eye-talian style. Like Uncle Joe liked to wear when he dressed up. For bottles of whiskey and cheap wine in brown paper bags, furtively shared behind the open trunks of newly waxed cars, cleaned for the occasion, like Mr. Bootsie and Jingles and Mr. Roebuck Johnson used to do. Even the gamblers didn’t have much to say, as they laid their cards down one by one, rather than slapping them down in the bid whist way, talking shit, talking trash, the way it used to be, the way it always was. The way it was supposed to be.
Miss Sarah Russell was there, carrying that black Bible with the reddish-orange pages—the one that printed the Sacred Name of Jesus and His words in bold red letters—still warning everybody about the end of the world and reminding us that Jesus wasn’t going to be sending us a postcard or a telegram when He returned to judge us for our sins. He’d be coming like a thief in the night. The signs of the times are near, she shouted, the signs of the times. Don’t nobody know the season but for the blooming of the trees. There’s war and then there’s the rumors of wars. My God is a harsh master, and the Holy Ghost has unloosed the fire of the spirit, and we know that fire by the talking in tongues.
Whenever Miss Sarah came around, Mr. Bootsie, Mr. Johnson, and Mr. Jingles would never drink out of whatever it was they kept in those brown paper bags. She appreciated that.
Mr. Bootsie and Mr. Marshall were running their card game at its usual place in the arc of parked automobiles, hoping that Miss Sarah would just keep walking by, as she made the rounds, fulfilling her obligation to remind her friends about Jesus’ imminent return, and sharing a cool glass of lemonade and maybe a crisp fried chicken leg as she paused to catch her breath. Miss Ezelle had on a bright-red dress—she always did look good in red—and she was telling Mr. Buddy Green to lower his voice and not talk about how much money he was losing at poker until Miss Sarah got out of the way.
Greg and I, spying Miss Sarah over by the gamblers’ card table, made a beeline down to the river, figuring that Jeannie and Tanya Hollingsworth had probably decided to go swimming by now. And Miss Sarah Russell, despite all the symbolism of water in the Bible, would never have been caught dead down by the river, where all that bare brown flesh, glistening in the sunshine, could prove too distracting even to the saved.
No one was at the river yet, so we headed back up the bank, passed Nemo’s cast-iron vat, where he boiled the corn, and headed over to watch the last softball game, the game that pitted the alumni of Howard High School against the alumni of Everyplace Else. Roebuck Johnson was there, standing next to Mr. Comby Curl, the latter’s wavy hair shining even more brightly than usual and sliced neatly by the part that he had shaved himself with that same straight-edged razor that made the back of my neck break out in shaving bumps. Involuntarily, I rubbed the back of my neck with my left hand, to see if they had disappeared yet. They were still there from yesterday’s haircut. Roebuck was watching the game because he loved sports and also to escape the prying eye of all of his competing interests and loyalties. But it was exhilarating to watch the Howard team, headed by Earkie and Raymond, beat the hell out of the team from Elsewhere, just like they did every year. Only this time, the beating seemed more relentless, Poochie Taylor—who many people thought was the best natural athlete in a kingdom of natural athletes—tore the leather off the softball. “Couldn’t stand to be away from the Valley,” was what they said when he came home from spring training in the big leagues. Everybody had wanted him to make it to the World Series, just to beat the racist Yankees. Instead, he went to work up at the mill and then got his own church as a pastor. Everybody said he was sincere, unlike some of the other born-agains.
I was surprised that no one made any speeches, that no one commemorated the passing of the era in a formal way. But it did seem that people were walking back and forth through Carskadon’s field a lot more times than they normally did, storing up memories to last until the day when somebody, somehow, would figure out a way to trick the paper mill into sponsoring this thing again. Maybe that’s why Miss Ezelle seemed to take extra care to make her lips as red as Sammy Amoruso’s strawberries in late August, and why Uncle Joe had used an extra dab of Brylcreem that morning, to give his silver DA that extra bit of shine. And why Miss Toot’s high-pitched laughter could be heard all over that field all the day long, as she and Mr. Marshall beat all comers in a “rise and fly” marathon match of bid whist. So everyone could remember. We would miss the crackle of the brown paper bag in which Mr. Terry Conway hid his bottle of whiskey, and the way he’d wet his lips just before he’d tilt his whole body backwards and swig it down. The way he’d make the nastiest face after he drank it, as if he had tasted poison itself. When the bottle ran out, Mr. Terry would sleep himself back to health in th
e cool dawn splendor of a West Virginia morning.
Nor were there any fights at the colored Legion that night, not even after Inez Jones, with George Mason’s white handkerchief dangling between her legs, did the dirty dog to end all dirty dogs.
The colored mill picnic would finish its run peaceably, then, if with an air of wistful resignation. All I know is that Nemo’s corn never tasted saltier, his coffee never smelled fresher, than when these hundreds of Negroes gathered to say goodbye to themselves, their heritage, and their sole link to each other, wiped out of existence by the newly enforced anti–Jim Crow laws. The mill didn’t want a lawsuit like the one brought against the Swordfish.
Yeah, even the Yankees had colored players now, Mr. Ozzie mumbled to Daddy, as they packed up Nemo’s black cast-iron vat, hoping against hope to boil that corn another day.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
IN OUR LIFETIME
FROM TOILING AS White House slaves to President-elect Barack Obama, we have crossed the ultimate color line.
A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African-American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose and to bear witness to the process by which this grand achievement occurs.
The first time was New Year’s Day in 1863, when tens of thousands of black people huddled together all over the North waiting to see if Abraham Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The second was the night of June 22, 1938, the storied rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, when black families and friends crowded around radios to listen and cheer as the Brown Bomber knocked out Schmeling in the first round. The third, of course, was Aug. 28, 1963, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to the world that he had a dream, in the shadow of a brooding Lincoln, peering down on the assembled throng, while those of us who couldn’t be with him in Washington sat around our black-and-white television sets, bound together by King’s melodious voice through our tears and with quickened-flesh.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 5