High Cotton: A Novel

by Darryl Pinckney

  My parents thought I was at the movies. Hans Hansen waited around the corner in his MG with a glove compartment full of eclairs and the motor running. He had permission to take off and come back later in case he, an ofay parked in what we solemnly referred to as the ghetto, got scared or was cruised by “the Man” as a kid up to no good, downtown to buy weed.

  I half feared a burst of gunfire when I rapped on the side of the door of a two-family dwelling as tense-seeming as if it had been blacked out for a siege. A child unlocked the door. I heard Sister Egba’s voice surge from a long, dim corridor. “What did I tell you about seeing who it is before you open that damn door. What did I tell you about the pigs.” The child’s thumb went into his mouth. My first thought was that he should have been in bed. I identified myself and made my way toward Sister Egba’s voice. She was cooking—hot dogs and baked beans. Around the red kitchen table crowded with grocery bags sat three women, each with a child in her lap or at her knee. They had a special way of snapping chewing gum. It sounded like fingernail clippers.

  Sister Egba said that the first sign of a good worker was the ability to remember and follow instructions. I thought she was talking to the child. She said I had failed to knock twice on the window first, then the door, which was a serious risk in the “triangle of death” that was America. I said she hadn’t told me about a code. She said she had and that she would appreciate my adhering to the security policies of the Heirs of Malcolm in the future. She did not invite me to sit down.

  One of the women said something about the need to clarify and advance the struggle. I pressed myself between the wall and a refrigerator that was painted black. My knees responded to two sharp bangs on the window. Sister Egba nodded to the child. I heard men’s voices. “What it am.” Two of Malcolm’s legatees scowled in my direction and seemed very big in their black sweaters and brown suede jackets. Sister Egba pushed them into another room and announced that the evening’s meeting was closed, but she had an assignment for me if I thought I could stomach it.

  The MG shadowed me and made me less afraid as I ran from porch to porch, folding leaflets into mailboxes as quietly and quickly as I could, like a prankster soaping windows on Halloween night. Sometimes a guard dog threw itself against the other side of a door, lights went on, and I ducked into the MG until the noise died down. Sister Egba had instructed me not to come back that night after I had distributed my stack, but she would have another assignment for me at exactly the same time the following week. I was so nervous that I neglected to read what was printed on the coarse blue paper.

  The next week three men in variations on the black turtleneck sweater loitered about Sister Egba’s kitchen table. I could hear a child crying in a back room. “Man, he was not only rookie of the year, but that was as close a play as you’ll ever see in your life. As far as anybody in Brooklyn in 1955 was concerned, he was safe.”

  The conversation took me back to the Saturdays when the handyman acted as bodyguard for me on my way to the barbershop on the bad corner, in case I saw something I liked. The handyman hitched up his trousers to join the old-timers, those still loyal witnesses of Satchel Paige, the pitching machine in orange, those connoisseurs of big behinds and disciples of Mad Dog 20-20, seated under the mirror along the wall. They thumbed through back issues of Jet and winked every time they thought of another sin we uncomprehending young woolly heads ensconced in sheets ought never to avail ourselves of.

  But when Sister Egba planted her black boots on the buckled linoleum, the Heirs of Malcolm “switched up,” pretended they were in the middle of a heavy discussion about Jamming Jennys, Armalite M-15s, M-16s that stuck because of deposits in the barrels, and the memorable M-1s of the Korean War. The last bullet out of the clip made a bell sound to let the soldier know he was out of ammunition. “It did. And the Commies, too.”

  Sister Egba interrupted and said that what we needed to realize was that the dog power structure sent black men with shoddy weapons to fight imperialist wars against their Third World brothers and that the use of the term “Commie” was politically incorrect. The Heirs of Malcolm leaned back, as if to get out of the way of her “scientific” approach.

  I could type. A heavy Underwood was produced from a grocery bag. Sister Egba and the others watched over me. She corrected my mistakes. If the notepad before me said ten had attended the rally to demand a stoplight for an inner-city playground, she inserted an extra zero; if the notes said fifty had attended the march against police brutality, she commanded the creation of another optimistic zero. There was some unpleasantness between me and another revolutionary about what sort of grammar and spelling the sleeping masses could relate to.

  The strategy meeting that night was off-limits, but there were several things she needed to talk to me about. She thought I would do okay as a minister of information because I had not thrown away the previous week’s leaflets and pretended that the job was done. I wondered how she knew. She shrugged and said that to integrate theory with practice she’d had me followed.

  She walked with me around the corner, a “go on Shaft,” all-weather trench coat wrapped tightly about her tigress thighs. She ticked on in a low, urgent voice about the necessity to begin aboveground in order to provoke the oppressor into driving the Heirs of Malcolm underground. I stalled, but she said that if I ever hoped to evolve to a higher level and one day drop my slave master’s name for a “righteous handle” she would have to check out my conspicuous running buddy parked in the fast car.

  Sister Egba held her beret through the driver’s window. She said that the treasury needed donations. Hans Hansen swallowed and said he didn’t want to do that. “I’m not asking you to, I’m allowing you to.”

  “Who are you again?”

  “I am none of your damn business.”

  He fished out five dollars and gave the MG the gas.

  I dressed up in my costume of revolutionary devotion and passively received the latest of Sister Egba’s “executive mandates.” My mother threatened to burn my new black turtleneck and flared trousers while I slept, she didn’t care if they were my “movie clothes.” I was careful to wear the same thing every week because Sister Egba did, ostentatiously so. She lectured the women cracking chewing gum around the kitchen table about throwing their money away in the street. One of the women suggested that they organize a clothes drive for the children. Sister Egba shouted, “Where do you see a sign in here that says GOOD WILL?”

  Sister Egba said she would not take castoffs from no-butt honkies or pork-chop nationalists, because she did not want to itch for the rest of her life. If they learned to make their own clothes, she said, their minds would be free for more important matters. I thought of the hours Muriel had spent, hunched over like a diamond cutter, piecing together dresses for Aunt Clara.

  One woman said that at least Afros had ended the agony of the hair question. Another woman said that fixing hair relaxed her. The youngest woman around the table rested her chewing gum on a saucer to light a cigarette and said that Afros hadn’t saved her any time because her hair was naturally fine and she had to sweat with a comb until her arms hurt to make it kinky. Sister Egba’s look was eloquent, as if to say that the journey to a higher level of consciousness was a lonely one.

  Their talk reminded me of the humiliation of having to wait inside the ladies’ room when I went shopping with my mother as a child. I was never allowed to hang much with the men who slid in and out of Sister Egba’s kitchen. They left, usually after a muffled conference with Sister Egba, who returned to the kitchen slamming cupboards and snorting about “foul traducers” and “avaricious individualism,” ominous phrases that she deployed in a less than discriminating manner in the organization’s single-sheet newspaper.

  I couldn’t find out from Sister Egba how many revolutionaries were moving ever onward to victory in the Heirs of Malcolm or what its long-range plans were. She repeated more than once that she would ask the questions. The little I knew about her came from ashtray
s stacked next to the sink: souvenirs of restaurants, motor inns, and a large factory where telephones were made. I decided that she’d been a waitress, a hotel maid, and a telephone assembly-line worker.

  Whatever her past, the future was great. It was, however, far off. Sister Egba lived, as far as I could tell, solely in her present, spoke only in the language of the moment, and did nothing but direct the servants of the Revolution. Time off did not exist for freedom fighters: even television was “the aggressor.” You heard nothing on the news, she said, except propaganda and the distortions of some “flunky running off at the mouth.” She said her son watched television at his grandmother’s, but there was nothing she could do about that. I didn’t know how old Sister Egba was. When I asked about her life, she turned from the stove and said without emotion, “Tight we ain’t.”

  She disliked initiative. My preparation for the momentous task of harassing the oppressor to his doom was confined to unsticking the blunt keys of the Underwood and assaulting mailboxes. I was introduced at the one basement meeting of twelve I was allowed to attend, but was told not to participate, not to raise my hand. If I took notes, they had to be turned over to Sister Egba. I thought that with a pen and paper I would look busy and wouldn’t have to jump up and scream “Right on” with the others. Hans Hansen was proclaimed a potential white ally and granted a seat in the back because the heater in his MG was on the blink.

  What Sister Egba clearly enjoyed was the awesome responsibility of purifying the organization, delivering final warnings, and then expelling offenders from the Heirs of Malcolm for life. It thrilled me, too, to take dictation of an order that began, in imitation of the Panthers’ style, “So let this be heard.” Use of drugs was the most serious offense against party discipline. A comrade on drugs could not be trusted with party funds and was not a positive example in the community, because he had made himself a slave.

  It was therefore essential that she know what her comrades were up to. She tolerated a sluice of gossip, “cleaning up the walls,” around the kitchen table while steam rose from the soapy water in the sink and clouded the window. There was no telephone; the authorities had put too many bugs on her, so she said. It offended my vanity that she wasn’t interested in the rigor of my conduct. I was only a high-school student.

  One night Sister Egba informed Hans Hansen that he had to drive her to an important engagement. He said he wasn’t going anywhere downtown without me. We were, I thought, moving up in the revolutionary hierarchy and there would be some liberator’s equivalent of a hazing.

  She had received a report about a trusted comrade that called for immediate, firm action. She arranged herself around the gear shift of the MG and managed to dominate its two seats. We were packed together so closely that my ribs could feel what I took to be a nozzle in her trench coat. She said we could talk or play music if we wanted, but she had to think. I tried to sing falsetto through my teeth, in terrified German, that she had a gun—Hans Hansen sat in front of me in German class—but he thought I was making up another crazy blues tune and joined in.

  We pulled into the parking lot behind Bobo’s, a bar “on the avenue” that looked more shady than it really was. No lady, no one’s mother, went there, and for that reason it was a favorite of the big Negroes, chiefs of staff, judges, black radio station shareholders, members of Odd Fellows, of the Boulee Club, who liked to get nostalgic about Big Ma Bell, Jimmy Coe, the Pink Poodle, and their many byways of “trying to make it” before they “got over.” I felt safe, knowing they did not let customers who weren’t regulars get out of hand in there.

  “Move,” she said. I looked around to see if I recognized any cars from my father’s bridge club. She almost tore Bobo’s door off its hinges.

  It never crossed our minds to run. Perhaps we were afraid of Sister Egba, though she did not know where we lived; perhaps we wanted to stick around to see what would happen. She forced her way back into the MG and yelled out an address. She breathed heavily, like someone who had climbed stairs. Hans Hansen asked her twice not to smoke. “Drive, blanco.”

  She directed us to a social club in a converted house down the block from the pitted gothic entrance to the old cemetery. The white steeple of a new Baptist church rose over the alley. Cars lined the narrow street; some were parked on the grass, as if the owners didn’t want them too far out of their sight. Blinds in the windows of the second floor opened and shut, emitting flashes of light, as if someone were signaling ship to shore. Sister Egba didn’t move.

  I didn’t know how to tell her that some revolutionaries had curfews. “It’s late.”

  “I’m hip.” Sister Egba didn’t look in the direction of the house. She waited. We also looked straight ahead at the cemetery gates. Then we heard above the party murmur someone singing bits of a Marvin Gaye hit to himself, privately, disconnectedly, in the way, years later, people on subways would sing along with Walkmans, unable to hear how spacy or off-key they sounded because of the earphones on their heads. I turned and saw a slim man in a black beret grope toward the edge of the porch, lose his balance on the first step, and roll slowly and happily downward. “Yes, Willy my silly, your ass is surely grass.”

  Sister Egba shoved me out of the car, stepped over me, and advanced toward the porch in a boneless, fluid motion. I looked through the rear window as Hans Hansen swerved the MG around the corner. She was standing with one foot on the giggling pile of clothes at the bottom of the porch and her right hand was deep inside her trench coat.

  We studied murder stories in the newspaper for days and skipped two Fridays after Hans Hansen confessed that he preferred going to Laura Nyro concerts to parking on spooky streets and watching his hair turn gray.

  We cleansed ourselves at football games, and at meetings of New Life, a group popular with jocks led by a middle-aged man in gym shoes and sweat pants who would not act his age. Women with stiff permanents and rhinestone butterfly glasses gave away suspect editions of the New Testament and glowing cheerleaders flew to greet us with the question “Do you know Our Lord Savior, Jesus Christ?” A screen was set up in front of the lodge fireplace. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water” swelled as each slide projected more oozing red, the blood of the Son of Man. The women in butterfly glasses hugged us and sobbed.

  When I finally showed up, Sister Egba barred the door with a harpoon look. She said she was in the process of writing out the executive mandate that expelled me from the Heirs of Malcolm for life. She had proclaimed that the “correct approach” would be to buy a bus for the relatives of prisoners held at the state penitentiary. I was in charge of the fund-raiser; she didn’t care where it was held so long as it was deep in the suburbs among my honky darlings and their checkbooks. I’d hoped she’d forgotten.

  “You been wrong for too long.” Sister Egba was in my face. I smelled hot sauce. I’d been purged, tried in absentia for bourgeois thought, infantile Marxism, revolutionary decadence, and flunkyism. “Let me break it down for you: this shit is too serious for your shit.” I couldn’t argue, I was so relieved to have been “included out.”

  Hans Hansen said that if I was an enemy of the people he’d be an enemy of the people, too. We drove around, searched up and down the barren avenues for the place funky enough for Baby Huey. A cool English teacher—it’s always an English teacher—once played us a warbly tape of Baby Huey singing, “There are three kinds of people in this world: white people, black people, and my people.”

  We’d asked the English teacher questions about Baby Huey. He didn’t say much and we figured someone had given him the tape or he had stolen it, that he had never seen Baby Huey in person or made a pirate recording at all. It didn’t matter. The English teacher tired of the school board sending people around to listen to what he was saying and the winters made him cranky, so he moved to Tampa without saying goodbye. But we were desperate to hear that song again. If we could only hear that song again everything would be all right. Then Hans Hansen said he didn’t want to
feel guilty for being white anymore. He just wanted to save himself.

  “Europe,” Grandfather said, “is disastrous to the patriotism of colored Americans.” We were taking a turn around the barbed-wire fence of the golf course. The sky walked along with us, or just a little ahead. Maples closed ranks behind us. I knew this was to be a duel between large and small minds because Grandfather had removed his olive-green jacket.

  He was outside in his shirtsleeves, in spite of what the neighbors might think, the better to “relate” to me—an expression he could not use without an involuntary pinch around the nostrils. Grandfather was going to save me from myself. High-school commencement exercises were over, and I knew that I’d be across the state line before the farmers again mounted their collateral tractors.

  In a moment of weakness, I, then at the peak of my Ernest Pontifex phase, slipped and admitted to my parents that I had no intention of returning to the U.S. from my vacation, because student deferments for the draft no longer existed. I was not planning to go to college. I was going to make a name for myself, either as a revolutionary in exile or as a star of the West End stage, I didn’t care which, and the college admissions committee that had attempted to destroy me with a thin envelope would be sorry.

  Back then, you couldn’t easily distinguish an irritatingly persistent adolescent breakfast theme from premature self-obliteration. Flower children renounced the world and joined communes where the babies were stillborn or suffered from malnutrition. Alarmed, my parents called in Grandfather, the big gun, because it was thought that we had a special relationship, that he understood me and had influence over me, one of those family fictions that grow up unbidden, like debris in a back lot, and which are sometimes useful to accept. I’d never been to a funeral because it was said I could not stand death.