As well-dressed church people milled about us, I winked at the beautiful lady like I had that day at the airport and said, “So you’re his lover, huh?”
She said, “Don’t play with me, little boy,” and brushed past me angrily.
I immediately regretted my joke. It was out of place. I worried how she would react to me when we met again later.
But when Elwyn and I got to her house, the atmosphere was, to my surprise and relief, relaxed. She greeted us at the door—I got a friendly handshake and a hug, he got a big shameless kiss on the lips—and she took us on a tour of the house, for my benefit. It was a nice house, though I cannot say that I remember much about it. I remember that it was big and that it was in Coral Gables and that it was less interesting than watching the interplay of those two frisky … teens. What made me happy was that they were accepting me into their little secret. After the brief tour, she went into the kitchen to bring us back drinks and pastries.
While she was away, Elwyn said to me, “What do you think of her?”
“She’s beautiful.”
He nodded, accepting the compliment. “Where do you know her from?”
It caught me off guard. I stammered. “I just met her.”
“Please don’t lie to me. I saw you talking to her at the tent.”
I put a fist over my mouth and chewed on it. “Jesus, man, don’t put me on the spot like that.”
“You are my brother. We need to start acting like brothers.”
“I don’t want to get all mixed up in the middle of something like this, man. Don’t do this to me. I just met you.” My fist was still in my mouth. “Maybe you should ask her.”
“You can rest assured that I will,” he said without smiling. “Jesus, man, I’m sorry. Don’t do this to me.”
He was still nodding his head as she walked back into the living room with our pastries and fruit punch. We had a pleasant conversation after that, though I cannot recall what about. My stomach was jumping from apprehension.
I must say, though, that he seemed happy in her presence and she seemed happy in his. Furthermore, I was struck dumb by the fact that the whole time we were there having this supposed conversation of introduction, she sat upon his lap.
The whole time.
She practically clung to his neck. A few times I swear to God I saw her caress his obvious erection and I was forced by modesty to look away. I focused my attention on the vase of long-stemmed red roses instead. It occurred to me that the rose in Elwyn’s lapel had come from this very same bouquet. He had come here this evening, before the service at the tent meeting, and brought her the roses, and she had cut one and pinned it to his lapel and then pinned one to her hat so that they would appear in public in matching roses. How sweet. I was touched.
Before long, my stomach stopped jumping. I think that was right after they excused themselves and left me alone in the living room to head into her bedroom, lock the door, and make scandalously loud love.
Now we were in my car, headed north to something and somewhere else he wanted to show me. My brother Elwyn, piano player, Christian, man of mystery.
It was well after midnight, and we were on I-95 approaching the city of Pompano. We had been driving about an hour after leaving Sister Morrisohn’s home. It had been a tearful goodbye for them. As it always was, he informed.
The surprise trip into their bedroom had lasted about fifteen minutes. My ears told me that they had been trying to be quiet about their lovemaking in there but had been horribly unsuccessful. Amazing. This after bringing tears to my heathen eyes with his heartfelt piano playing at the revival meeting. My church boy brother and his much older lover, it was all so very weird to me.
As we approached this other mysterious thing he had dragged me all the way up to Pompano to see, I was yakking my head off in the car from nervousness.
“It’s like, my God, I have a brother! I’m actually ashamed of myself, really. I don’t know what held me back all these years—maybe because I didn’t want to get Roscoe in trouble. I don’t usually let other people’s foolishness keep me from making the right choices in my life. If I had done that, I never would have gone to college in Boston, believing that I was too poor to afford it. Even worse, the love of my life and I would never have gotten engaged, believing that my mother’s flaky relationship with her father somehow made us kin and therefore our relationship incestuous and therefore off-limits.”
At that, he turned his face toward me. For most of the drive, he had let me talk and talk, with grunts and nods and the occasional street direction being his only contribution to our conversation. But now he said, “So, you’re saying that she’s your sister.”
“No,” I explained. “She’s the daughter of a man my mother used to live with.”
His voice was flat, though his words indicated that he was genuinely interested. He said, “So, you’re saying you used to have sex with her while your mom and this man lived together.”
“No. We never had sex while they lived together. In fact, we still haven’t had sex.”
For a moment, his eyes grew wide as though he were going to exclaim something, but then he said in that same deflated voice, “That’s good. Good for you. One should remain a virgin until the wedding night. You’re a good Christian for that, or whatever. If people would live according to the principles in the Bible, Christian or not, they’d be better off. They’re sound principles. I wish that I had been more … but she’s a good girl and everything, right? You sound like you really love her. You must really love her to overcome … incest.”
I squared my shoulders. “It’s not incest. Marie isn’t my sister. She isn’t related to me. She’s my future wife.”
“She’s your mother’s husband’s daughter. That makes her your sister.”
“My mother never married her father.”
“If your mother had married her father—make a left here, then go down to the next light—would you still be marrying her?”
“My mother and her father have gotten over it. They support us now. They’re going to be at the wedding. You’ll meet them. You’ll see.” From his throat came an indignant sound, and then he retorted, “I must point out that you are avoiding the question, Benny. I don’t mean to be argumentative. It is a meaningless point because you are going to do whatever it is you are going to do, and I am still going to play at your wedding because that is an agreement I made before I was made aware of your situation, but you must understand that from now on when I look at you two, I will see a man who married his sister. The biblical principle is simple, Benny. My mother’s husband is my father—”
“But he was never my mother’s hus—”
He raised his voice then and spoke sternly to me: “—and my mother’s live-in lover of many years is my mother’s husband in the eyes of the common law, right?”
“He is not her common-law husband.”
“But if he had continued to date your mother, never marrying her, but simply continued to date her and live with her and she with him, you would have had some reluctance to marrying his daughter, no?”
“That is beside the point.”
“Imagine the wonderful family dinners at which a man and his lover are parents of children who are also lovers.”
“That’s not how it was. We never had sex, I told you.”
“You never had sex because you knew that it would be wrong to do so. Why else would you not have sex? You’re not saved and sanctified. You’re not born again. Turn left here.” He pointed to a dark, narrow street. I made the turn. I noticed that the neighborhoods had begun to decline. There were young men hanging out on street corners in groups of three and four, smoking, talking boastfully loud, playing loud music.
It reminded me of Opa-Locka where I had grown up. I would not say that my brother was smiling, exactly, but there was a certain smug triumph in the air around him as he spoke. He was lecturing me. Preaching to me. His arrogance was as tangible as the summer heat and just as oppressive.
“Look at it another way,” he said. “Your mother and this man get married, and then divorce, would you not feel some reluctance in marrying his daughter?”
I was tired of this conversation and I’m sure it showed on my face because his voice became suddenly light and cheerful.
“You don’t have to answer. I don’t know why I keep doing this to people. It’s not my place to judge people, especially when they’re better than me. You got your act together. Nobody needs to tell you what to do. You with your college degrees. Stop at the next house. The green one with the truck in the drive. That’s her house.”
I pulled up and parked alongside the sagging chain-link fence. “Whose house?”
“My wife’s. She lives here with her mom and dad. We got married last month. We still haven’t found a place.”
Like Unto Ishmael, Like Unto Moses
We’ve still been carrying on,” he said about Sister Morrisohn, “because old habits die hard, but really it ended for us like three years ago. We almost did it. We almost got married. This was back during my first year in college. We should have done it, Benny. We should have. I loved her. I proposed to her and everything. But then I went and told my grandmother. We were in a motel room in Micanopy when I asked her and she said yes, and I had to go and get my grandmother involved. I was so young. So naïve. So stupid. I wanted her blessings because she was the only one who knew what was going on, and she had kept it a secret for me, you know? Oh, what she revealed to me that day—it ruined my life.
“You see, what I didn’t understand, what I didn’t know, was that people who have lived before you, they may not be as educated as you, they may not be as accomplished as you, but you can never push past them because they were here before you. They know stuff. They have lived. They know stuff about you that you don’t even know. This is their world, not yours. You just got here. You haven’t earned the right to call it yours yet. You think you’re hot stuff, but you’re not—not with them. They were living and breathing and loving and leaving before you were even born. I mean, you take the book of Exodus and look at the story of Moses. You know the story of Moses? The Ten Commandments and all that. He was born a slave in Egypt, but only stayed a slave for three months. They were killing Hebrew boys in those days, and his mother, fearing for his life, floated him down the Nile, where he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Now Pharaoh’s daughter adopted the child as her son, but needed a midwife for him, so she sent a nearby slave (actually the babe’s big sister) to fetch her a midwife, and the girl went and got for the job her own mother (the babe’s own mother too). So now Moses grows up a prince in Egypt and soon he is next in line for the throne. Moses is a prince and his mother and his sister are his slaves, and the woman he thinks is his mother, Pharaoh’s daughter, is actually his enemy, an Egyptian, but she does not tell him this because she loves him since she has raised him as her son. I used to think all that was fine. I used to think, Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways. It’s God’s will, I used to say. But now I see it a different way. What about Moses? What about him?
“Moses wakes up one morning and suddenly his mother is not his mother and his slaves are not his slaves. He’s like walking around in his noble robes in a daze. He’s saying, So if my mother’s not who I think she is and I’m not who I think I am, then who are my people? Someone points out the slaves building the pyramids under the oppressive heat of the sun and the stinging lash of the Egyptian taskmasters. Them over there, this pointing someone says, them over there are your people. So now he finds himself face-to-face with this fact, I am not who I thought I was. No one is who I thought he was. I have to rethink everything. My friends are my enemies. My enemies are my friends. I have been lied to my whole life. My whole world is upside down. And I am new to this knowledge, but these others—they have known of this since forever. They have been lying to me about who I am. I did not know who I was, but they knew and they kept it from me. One minute I am a prince, grandson to the king, the next I am a Hebrew slave.
“It’s not fair to Moses. It’s not fair to have your whole world suddenly shift like that—from slave to mother. Some slave who is not related to you at all ends up being someone whose existence explains all that you are. Someone who knows more about you than you know about yourself. But that is what happens when you are dealing with people who were here before you were. You are not their equals. There is no way to have any kind of real relationship with them. You will always feel that there are things they aren’t telling you—important things, lifeand-death things. This is why the Bible says honor thy mother and thy father—honor them because you certainly can’t befriend them. How can you befriend them when they know more about you than you know about yourself? It’s too easy for them to manipulate you. You have no choice but to honor them. Even if you hate them, you have to honor them.
“My grandmother tells me that Brother Morrisohn is my grandfather. That’s not fair. I lived all my life with him as some really nice guy, a great and honorable church elder, whom I admired. Not to mention now Sister Morrisohn is like my … step-grandmother. It’s just not fair. What is she going to tell me next—that I am adopted? That my real name is Moses and she found me floating down the River Nile? This is why in the Bible there is all of that who begat whom. Chapter after chapter of begats. This way people can’t lie to you, or keep things from you. This way it’s written down for all to see, no matter who you are or what year you were born. Abraham begat Isaac who begat Jacob; therefore, Abraham is Jacob’s grandfather and not just some old shepherd he might bump into at the watering hole.
“I mean like this thing with you and Elaine. Okay, so she met you before tonight. Years before. You won’t tell me about it. She won’t tell me about it. That’s fine because it’s only a few years ago. So I give it to her straight. I tell her, this is the kind of thing that drives a wedge between us, honey bun. You keep things from me. You treat me like a child—that’s what it means to be a child, to not know things that everybody else knows. This is my brother, but you met him before tonight and you’re lying to me. So we’re making love and I’m shouting at her as I’m laying it on her hard and she’s telling me this story about you and her and my father, our father, at the airport. How she mistook you for me. How she kissed you on the back of the neck. That story. Yeah, that one. So now I understand that she knew about you for like five years and did not tell me. She did not want to hurt my relationship with my father—our father, I should say. So she withheld knowledge about my own brother from me. She made that choice because she wanted to save my relationship with a weak and ineffectual parent. She made the choice to keep me in the dark about … me. She had the knowledge and manipulated it. But five years is only a few years ago. I was alive five years ago. I was of sound mind and body five years ago. I could just as easily have discovered you five years ago and not told her about it, so as far as this thing at the airport is concerned, she and I are on equal terms, sort of. But what if we go further back?
“What if while I was loving her tonight, while I was laying it on her good and she was trying not to scream because you were just beyond the door, I demanded that she go further back? Way back. Back to when you and I weren’t even born yet, but to when we were in the womb. She is about our father’s age. She is the age of our mothers. She was there. She was present while we were being conceived. She knew everybody because she was a member of the church back then. I asked, What do you know about Benny? What do you know of Patsy, Benny’s mother? Well, says she, I don’t want to tell you this. It is too hard to tell you this. Poor Benny, says she. I don’t want to hurt him. Tell it, I demand of her. Tell it! And I gave her a few hard thrusts from the hip, just the way she likes it.
“And she says, Well, Benny’s mother Patsy and Roscoe and I were not saved back then. We were doing things that were not very Christian. We were all part of a group of young people who were wild and careless. Patsy was with Roscoe, they were a couple, and I was with another guy in the group—a white guy. We used to s
hoplift and whatnot. Patsy and Roscoe would go into the Woolworth’s first. Because they were black, they would draw heat. Then my white boyfriend and I would go in. We were white—well, he was white, I only looked white if you didn’t look too closely, but that was good enough—so nobody paid us much attention. While Roscoe and Patsy were drawing heat, my boyfriend and I would take things from the shelves and hide them in our clothes.
“This was a good plan that worked for many months. Eventually, however, we were caught. Buford and his dear wife Glovine bailed us all out and brought us to the church—all because of his daughter Beverly, who was part of our group from time to time, though we really didn’t like her all that much. Patsy wasn’t much on churching, so she played the game for a while and then stopped going as soon as she no longer needed Buford Morrisohn’s legal help cleaning up her record. I broke up with my white boyfriend because I had my eyes on Buford, the rich old guy with the plump sickly wife. Roscoe, who was handsome as hell, settled down and started playing the dashing gentleman with some of the nice little girls at the church, including one Isadore Cooper—though he and Patsy were still an item. In fact, Isadore and Patsy found themselves with child at about the same time. This was a problem. Pastor Buford Morrisohn, at the request of Mamie Cooper, visited with and counseled young Roscoe, after which Roscoe married Isadore and the marriage, as we all know, prospered.
“I am one who believes, she continued, that Patsy lost her longtime boyfriend Roscoe Parker because Roscoe loved Isadore more. The man simply made a choice, and a sound one. There are those who believe that Patsy lost her man because she turned her back on the Faithful, who had done so much to help her with her legal problems. Her record is spotless now thanks to the church, but so is mine. So is Roscoe’s. Again, she insisted, I do not hold with these people who believe the church had anything to do with Roscoe’s choice. In fact, she said, the truth is that many of us were still behaving kindly toward Patsy when the child Benjamin Franklin Willett was born.
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