by Alan Duff
All right, I'd developed a miserly side and should have thought of my mother whose patchy income still came from filling in as a tourist guide and doing the odd shift at hotel reception at the Waiwera Hotel.
Mum, I've been meaning to give you some money. But she waved me away. If it doesn't come naturally then don't be forcing it, son. Makes it a different kind of giving.
So now I felt guilt. Especially when she said they didn't have a lot of time as they had a bus to catch back home. I'll take you. Just relax. Cup of tea? Something stronger?
Nothing, thanks. Wiki, Manu, go and buy yourselves an ice-cream or something from the shop we passed. I have something private to discuss with your brother.
Soon as my siblings went out the door, Mum pulled a brown envelope out of her handbag. Here. I want you to look at these.
Sarcastically I asked, who died?
She shot back, might be you in a minute. Open it.
I shook the contents out on to my lap. Photographs. Black and white. One of my mother in Waiwera guide's uniform with a man whose face was darker than hers, the photo must be old. Negro, but not coal black like in a movie. Maybe half-caste. In civilian clothes. I had never seen one Negro tourist in Waiwera. In fact never set eyes on a Negro, period. Just on the movie screen, playing servant roles and over-acting the buffoon for the white masters' amusement.
The other photograph was of — I think — the same man but a lot clearer and a closer shot. A handsome man, languid smile like he was posing for the camera. In a uniform. Military.
Wasn't until I looked up and saw my mother's face, those eyes saying what the slightly parted lips did not need to, that I knew.
This is your father.
But he's a Negro . . . ?
I look at my arm with quite a different eye. I'm the same brown but now I discern a certain duskiness. I have urge to rush to a mirror and reconsider my face. Get the alarming thought of my contempt for Maori slaves of the old days: Negroes were slaves.
This can't be. My father is white. With uncanny resemblance to Elvis. Or the ruggedly handsome features of John Wayne. When I was younger my dad was a cowboy — and they're all white — with six-shooters blazing, saving my life from Injuns. I've carried this choice of images in my mind for years. This is not him.
I think of coal, boot polish, the Devil, evil, all the bad and negative moods described as black and dark, even the night is black and the day is glorious light. A virgin doesn't get married in black. Nothing black is pure. No food is black. Black is what is worn at funerals.
Mum, Negroes are poor.
Because they're not allowed to be rich.
They're servants, waiting on rich white folk — sucking up, more like.
No choice. They got to eat too. Rich white folk, as you call them, set the rules. How would you be if our own white race set the rules? Well, in a way they do but least brown folk have got opportunity to be whatever they want. Just have to try a bit harder. But not the black folk in America. Jess told me that much. It's called a colour bar, son. Don't be looking down on half your existence.
Mum, we're high-born.
Says who?
Says Merita.
Her head starts to slow shake. I think she was making you feel good.
Merita doesn't lie. She said your great-grandfather was a very high chief and his fathers before him. Said his head was so sacred a specially appointed person had to feed him by hand. He kept slaves by the hundreds, like an Egyptian pharaoh. He was like royalty. Why would Merita lie to me? She loves me.
Now you have your answer, son. Believe me. I am not high-born. If I was then Henry would have had to accept what I did without complaint. The village would have taken my side no matter what. My families on both sides are ordinary. Nothing wrong with that. You are what you are.
Well I'm no child of a descendant of slaves. And I'm sure as hell not a nigger.
Her eyes narrow. You'd call your own father that?
Every concept I have of Negroes is in turmoil. I realise I'm prejudiced too. My father sent a Louis Armstrong long player; I'm sure I'd seen the same man in a movie playing the boggle-eyed fool nigger. Jess wrote the man is a genius, a giant astride not just America but the whole world in his musical influence. Why did such a colossus allow himself to be portrayed that way? I am confused.
Where are you coming from with this slave stuff, Yank?
She walks to the door. Stops.
By the way, that was one beautiful voice you were playing. Who is it?
What sort of question is that after my own mother has hit me with a bombshell?
Mel Carter, I answer. Puzzled. Hasn't she given me enough to deal with?
He's got to be a Negro with a voice like that. Some voice that nigger has. I'll call by same time tomorrow. Bye, my special boy. Remember we're only slaves to ideas and attitudes.
Holy cow, I'm half black.
PART TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHICKENS SCRATCHED FOR FOOD IN our dust, ate the worms and blown seeds under the cluster of raised houses, foraged in the woods but always came home to give us eggs and sometimes faithful heads to chop off and thrill kids with a body pumping blood and running round like crazy — and give the family food a couple hours later.
I remember at least two hogs in a wooden pen we threw scraps into and the hogs bumping hard against the timber enclosure, snorting, gobbling up like they'd never ate in a month; they'd eat anything. Their beady eyes we kids could see warmth in, even intelligence, we'd talk or make noises similar so they understood and dang if they didn't answer back.
In fact there were a good two dozen hogs and every household in the shotgun line-up of shacks gave their scraps, picked up from different rural sources: cabbage cut-offs, rotten lettuce and collard stalks, turnips, corn husks, corn mash, corn liquid, unsold bread bought dirt cheap from town bakers at cents a bin. We stole corn from fields, to feed ourselves and the hogs; to us it was the sea, the unbroken vastness we'd never get to experience in liquid, only pictures and imaginings impossible to re-create middle of Mississippi except as a field that made a great sighing, moaning in the wind and we could plunge into it and lose ourselves forever, swim it in our minds, and when it turned back to land we could take a thousand cobs if we chose, the theft not noticed among the millions of plump yellow sweetnesses within green sheaths.
Not that we pined for the sea: we had a river and ponds, a few little lakes; we pined for near nothing except to experience a whole week of full bellies, to gorge every meal for all seven of the Lord's created days on hog fried, grilled, boiled, roasted, cooked in coal embers, we dreamed of feasting on crackling by the big bowl, trotter gristle, even the toe claws, of feasting on the layers of meat, fat and crisped skin unless it was boiled to just like chewing gum, of dining on the snout we'd talked to and been answered back by, kind of sad but sure tasted good, chewing on hickory-smoked ribs, fat-back, carving thick slices of roasted leg, having it cured as bacon and ham hocks boiled for hours with greens, any greens. Our mother salted strips and chunks of it, stewed pork in a chow mein everyone swore was as good as the Chinese cooked; she had curry recipes to turn old vegetables and going-off meat to biting, sweat-forming feasts; we sopped up the gravy with pone bread, our tongues and throats burned and we came back for more. This is what we pined for if we pined at all. Just a week-long belly full of pork.
We ate boiled hog ears that had heard our every creeping movement their way, picked meat from around empty eye sockets from eyeballs melted in the cooking heat, eyes that had once told of a brain, a mind behind all the enormity of snorting, snuffling bulk and hefty animal presence that looked at kids from the far corners of a curious animal mind. We spat out bristles missed in the scraping, we started one side of the hog's cooked head, on the meat round the teeth rows we said was kissing hog lips and sucking on its face. Munched through the length of tail, boiled bone sections of meat, fat, skin combined. That's what we might have pined for living jammed up side by side in
each other's faces and lives and tempers and, we grew to see, lust appetites and loves, to just once in a while get to gorge a week long on hog, sweet hog.
The adults went to work in town in old trucks and broken cars, some walked to nearby fields, some stayed home. Kids went to our mother's one-room school class, she was a Jeanes teacher, funded by something called a foundation by the name of Anna T Jeanes who wanted Negro children to get an education even though Miss Jeanes was white and rich and had no children herself, or so our mother said. Was Miss Jeanes helped make our family a little different.
Not saying set on another path, for you are who you're surrounded by, mostly. But she gave us another form of language, structured grammarwise, not sing-song spontaneous like ordinary Negroes. And we had the choice of coded nigger talk to hide and disguise meaning from wrong ears, or speak straight and correctly as our mother preferred. But then it's not a mother's life to live: we each belong to our peers, more or less.
We were raised to be grateful to Miss Jeanes; without people like her we Negroes would have worse lives when to kids it doesn't feel any but what it is, and worse not a word that sprang to mind let alone worse again. Since kids hardly ever went to town what did we have to compare to? We only heard the stories and from time to regular time noticed the missing faces gone to jail or heaven via the violent route or they went north, just about all to do with white folk not liking us niggers and to get better paid work and suffer less racial prejudice.
But really, a kid doesn't notice politics or what truly ails a people even when it's notably us. Guess we were luckier than some.
Far as we knew we ate pretty good, mostly. Pig feet and chitterlings, chicken fried and baked and done perleau style, gopher, armadillo sometimes, tortoise, grits, black-eyed peas, boiled and roasted peanuts, pecans we found growing wild near the river, gingerbread and buttermilk, waffles with Georgia syrup, and in lean times meat grease and salty lard on pone bread.
To us youngsters it was mostly sunshine days and all our spots in the woods, the river, the areas of water we could cool in, explore, hide sometimes; we played under the houses up on piles for Old Miss floods making our tributary spill over, underneath there with the clucking chickens, finding their eggs and listening to adults going at each other with words or humping: we listened in disbelief to female moaning that wasn't from a beating but why we had yet to have idea, we heard men declare God in that way and the gasps and groans above us and giggled in imitating what we did not know.
We heard singing, individuals and joined, it meant little, everyone sang even kids did and without really knowing. Like play, we just did it and forgot soon after. Though of everything, it was the singing and music-making that must have burrowed into our young minds and taken up residence there, waiting quietly to be remembered, drawn from like a wellspring when the time came for needing it or just to express.
Mostly we heard nothing but each other and what we could conjure from our imaginations under the dark and cool of floorboards, scare off the rats, get startled by a stirred armadillo, look out for snakes, listen out for a hornet nest, get covered in spider webs, bitten by skeeters and chiggers, just lay there talking to each other or a cast of characters imaginary and real like our oldest friends there under the dwellings.
Guess most the men got drunk on Saturday nights, coon dick they drank, they gambled on Florida Flip, craps, Sissy in the Barn, cooncan; whooped and hollered and sometimes argued and fought with fists, a knife sometimes, gun incidents became lore, like some of the characters did. Most everyone dressed up, they visited other communities, but loved the juke joints best; bought crazy brews from the turpentine stills, got happy and sometimes went mad on it. And everyone danced and sang as if tomorrow was never coming, and for some it never did. We'd see the bodies lugged on to the back of a truck, or hear the stories. Life and death went hand in hand, like they danced together.
We took to the woods to do some real hunting, rabbit, 'dillo, coon, squirrel, turkey, gopher, anything that moved on land or in fresh water, from morning till dark we lost ourselves in there, came home with mammals and birds and fishes, or nothing at all but excuses and cuts and grazes for our mommas and grandmas to tend and lick, say kind things to us failed boy hunters, how we'd do better next time. Or we came home with food for the table, sometimes to spread round a few tables and wallow in adults' praise. Guns we knew early.
And when it rained we messed about in huts and shelters we'd built, made mud pies in puddles, slid down wet clay slopes, or holed up somewhere just listening to it drum on the roofs the millions of leaves and needles, the continuous thrumming on the grateful ground drinking greedily. We stood out in it with mouths opened to let the sky fall in to quench thirst or just the sensation, it didn't matter, nothing matters when you're a child in the endless sequence of growing up.
Our difference was, our mother made us read, made sure we kept up with study tasks set by her pamphlets of teaching rules she kept locked in our little classroom the storage cupboard where the children's books were kept so as drunk or ignorant adults didn't use them for toilet paper, to light a fire.
We Hines kids were told we had extra responsibility on account of our mother being the teacher who in turn owed to the generosity of Anna T Jeanes and her foundation, but we were still what our peers were and couldn't be nothing else, not till later in the years when these things started heading us to what could only be revealed by the written word.
Only a very few families shared our compulsory interest in the written word and not that it made a power of difference in how we lived: our mother got a most modest salary, she taught for the love of it and the debt she felt she owed to the kind white woman to enable her to help lift young Negroes educationally and — she very much hoped — as advantage to her own father-abandoned brood.
Life is an endless dream, no need for remembering as living it every moment is enough. Things happen, sure they happen, and some of it bad even real bad, but you kind of shut it out, does a kid, because childhood is not meant to be painful it's supposed to be joy.
And so it turned out to be. Hell, I don't even remember it actually meaning anything that we lived in the state of Mississippi, let alone have awareness of things peculiar to the South and directly pertaining to us, people of dark skin, colored the whites called us, and niggers and Negroes. We were just kids growing up where we'd been born, learning from our mother that one day a greater, wider world awaited us when it seemed we already had that promised world right in our contented young hands.
Then youth made greater and greater claim on us, we practiced dance steps in the same dust and mud our chickens pecked from, and as we grew all we wanted was to express through dance and song and instrument playing, express our African origins with feet yet three centuries firm in America. Thus we learned our own steps and movements and means of patterned display. Acquired our own unique suffering too.
Miles we walked to venues, hundreds strong of our own young exuberant kind, competed with each other at any of a dozen styles of dance, but tap in particular. We did whatever work was required to purchase shiny patent-leather shoes with the steel toes and heels, the threads to go with them; we practised prancing and preening the required walks and stances and postures, then got lost in the pulsing, sweating, floor-hammering madness of each other's smooth-moving company every Saturday night without fail.
We danced till the sun came up and Sunday bells were commanding our mothers and grandmothers to church and we had to hurry for fear of punishment — not from fathers as men didn't figure like women did in any of our communities: we weren't big town or city boys, we feared our mothers and grandmothers. Naturally though every year we lost more and more regard even respect for our elders, no matter that we loved them. Rather dance than pray. Bed a fine girl than sit in church listening to the congregation doing shouts, hollering to the same unanswering God, singing like angels to His long-deaf ears, beseeching Him for what He plainly had no intention of delivering.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
THE WORDS TO THAT POEM came back to me — to any Negro who knew them — not long after returning home from the war. To find as if we'd never participated, as if we had served on the enemy side.
As if our dead servicemen had died for nothing. As if every lost limb, eyesight, hearing and mind, every disability and constant nagging pain, had all been wasted.
Back to our beloved, hateful South; back to the dominant white populace still the same nigger-haters, and even more hell-bent, most of them, on showing us who was boss.
Came home to strange black fruit still hanging from poplar trees, to white citizens of the country we'd fought for stringing up Negroes, even war veterans, even women. Men who'd not served were lynching good men who had.
How stupid, how naive, how dumb we were to expect things to have changed just because we'd fought alongside our white fellows. Land of the free our national anthem claimed us to be. A lie if you were of Negro extraction, living in a country where any drop of Negro blood was like a tainting.
I should have known, we all should have known, that attitudes of three centuries' making do not change, even given a world war we were engaged in supposedly as equals, defending our country, our beliefs. We Negroes should never have kidded ourselves this war might change things. Not in the South.
We had another war left to fight, against an enemy called racial prejudice.
They gave us the most lowly positions: sanitation, cleaning, dish-washing, lugging heavy ammunition all day, every menial task an army needs but no soldier wants to do. But then we were young Southern Negroes only too glad to be called up for military service so we could get out of Mississippi. To go other countries was an impossibility for any but a rare handful of blacks. Now we were going, even if soon to a war. Felt more like a windfall holiday to exotic overseas lands than fighting another people to the death.