High Cotton: A Novel

by Darryl Pinckney

  6 /

  Valley of the Shines

  “Ah, masqueraded Harlem,” Lorca cried, “your rumor reaches me.” On an autumn day 125th street offered its “poem of display”—carts of bargain clothes, false gold laid out on squares of fake velvet, “freedom wigs” mounted on poles, and plenty of bad corners with phonograph speakers hoisted above record shops from which funky anthems blared. The crowd flowed, a Niagara of traffic that never ceased, not even at the corners where domestic dramas were acted out. Langston Hughes once gazed with longing on those analeptic streets from his Columbia University dormitory, but since his time Morningside Park had become a DMZ and new students rode the subways in terror of emerging at the wrong 116th Street. Take the A train?

  The Negro Capital of the World, the old-timers’ Seventh Avenue, which boasted “fifty-two Easters a year,” I knew had moved, long before, to the rare-books desk of the Schomburg library. The Hotel Theresa was dead, the Apollo was in a coma, and the lush exchanges between neighbors in the pretty town houses of Stanford White had to wait in a nourishing obscurity, like a piece of music whose neglect makes its revival all the more rapturous. The voyeuristic possibilities of the remains, the bad corners, were more animating to me than that dissertation-giving ardor for the ruins of melanophilia.

  The legends of the high life didn’t tempt me as much as the worn-out ones of danger. I went to Harlem, “Valley of the Shines,” Grandfather called it, for the sake of having been there, as if the adventures I planned to enter into and then embellish at a comfortable remove had entertainment value. If I couldn’t have an encounter of the Harlem kind, perhaps a quick immersion in the scene itself would yield a horror recognizable from the newspapers, an accusatory contrast to the euphoric idleness of life as it was lived in the dormitories, in Central Park West apartments when parents were out of town. Having been on the Harlem scene would enable me to extort from my unsuspecting classmates—the expression “get over yourself” hadn’t caught on yet—something of the awe that attends a chief mourner. My people.

  The Muslim bakery did not stop for me. I submitted the way you pause near a concession stand to listen to the hawker and catch the gaiety of the carnival. I was teased by two young men laden with bales of Muhammad Speaks, drawn into being a part of their performance. They wore white shirts and their hair was conspicuously neat. Their formality said that the Nation of Islam was not so terrifying. They reminded me of the eager scouts who once gratefully and gracefully collected for UNICEF, of the manners that were taken for granted before the thaw, when a stranger was someone not from the neighborhood, but even so not the enemy.

  They were talking about the “Original Man.” The earth, they said, was about to move and Babylon would soon be taken. The planet was in battle array. They wondered if I knew Chapter 30:41 of the Holy Koran. They asked if I knew that I had been kidnapped by the white race. I said I knew that. This tactic sometimes worked with Jehovah’s Witnesses. If one of them asked if I read the Bible, I’d say that I opened it every night. The Witness would stand there with an armload of Watchtowers, confused and temporarily at a loss, long enough for me to make my escape.

  These were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. They said that I did not know the Holy Koran. They said I didn’t sound like I knew what they were talking about. I began to think of bear-baiting but did not move on. They said that if I was one of the Negroes, I was opposed to the truth. Their politeness, I realized, was a kind of parody. They said that if I became a black man I would be the truth. Two girls with rollers in their hair stopped to watch us. A woman asked us not to hog the whole sidewalk, please. The followers of the Messenger of Allah said that I smelled like cigarettes. The two girls moved on. Perhaps they’d seen that show before.

  I remembered the young inmates I once saw on a fifth-grade field trip to a reform school. We were invited to inspect several classrooms, stood at the doors as if stopping before various explanatory signs at a zoo. The cagelings pointed and laughed at us, the outsiders. The halls rang with the shrieks and whistles and curses of hundreds of embittered boys as we shuffled from doorway to doorway. The trusties and counselors kept up a patter about training programs, indifferent to the noise and our fear.

  I was not sure which man, black or white, they said had invented which race in a test tube. They said that white people were devils. I argued with the confidence of being two steps ahead of their next attack. Their primitive weapons and defenses, their slings, stones, and breastplates, were no match, I thought, for the shining mail and Excalibur of my Popular Front mentality.

  They said that I smelled lonely. I hadn’t counted on that. They smiled at each other like gentlemen vaudevillians at the crest of their routine. The audience had been set up for the punch line.

  “We know him,” one said of me.

  “We do.” His partner nodded. “Black on the outside, white on the inside.”

  Con men, ready and agile in broad daylight, added themselves to the path of pretended friends, like the swift nothing of brown paper and tawny leaves hanging and dropping into the sidewalk’s grate. The arithmetic of chance and need put me in the sphere of operations.

  “Please help me.” I first saw a piece of paper with a smeared address and then a long sleeve of stove gray. Attached to that was a face as sable and glossy as the desk organizers marked down 30 percent in the window behind us. “Please help me.” He got out that he had been looking for this address all day, but no one would help him and those who said they would were not very honest. “My daddy said don’t never be scared of nothing. But I don’t know where I am. My mama’s counting on me.” He called me sir.

  I asked him not to call me sir. He said they called him Tunk back home in South Carolina. He’d come up by Greyhound all night long, directly after his father’s funeral, to collect the insurance money. I believed him. Tunk said he had been hunting for his father’s people. I watched him remove a large flowing red handkerchief from his back pocket. He dabbed at his smooth, childish face. “My mama gave me it.” He lovingly wrapped it back into his trousers and looked around, lost, alone.

  “Please help me, sir.” Tunk accosted a wiry man in a hat as wide as a tire. I didn’t move on. Beneath the brim the dandy stroked his goatee and bore down on Tunk’s mauled piece of paper, as if the address had been written in a hieroglyphic the secret of which would be revealed if we only had patience. Tunk raced through his story, loud and desperate. The Samaritan in the plum leather coat said that Tunk was on the right street, but a study of the buildings, their windows like the sockets of skulls, showed that the address did not exist.

  The frightened farm boy said he couldn’t get a bus back to South Carolina until the following day. He had to find his cousins, his father’s people. He had heard bad things about hotels. Besides, his mama needed every cent of the insurance money. I’d seen the film of A Raisin in the Sun. I’d read the play and worried when Tunk pulled out a clump of cash as thick as a biscuit. The Good Samaritan and I agreed that a stranger to the city as naïve and trusting as Tunk had to be careful about whom he showed so much money to.

  “We got to find you a bank,” the Good Samaritan said. He turned about wildly, as if he meant to hail the first emergency vehicle.

  Tunk said he didn’t believe in the white man’s money house. Man is more complicated than his thoughts, they say. The Good Samaritan was appalled. I believed in Tunk’s backwardness as thoroughly as I did his distress, precisely because both were played so broadly, laid on so thick. I believed in the existence of young men like Tunk, up from the tobacco fields, careful not to let their Sunday best make contact with the dirt, slow-witted and abandoned in the coursing streets. We must help him, I thought.

  In the urgency to make Tunk believe in the white man’s money house right then and there, that very afternoon, in the struggle to pierce the country boy’s obstinacy that so aggrieved and astonished the complicitous Good Samaritan, I didn’t reason very far, not to the illogic of why someone leaving town the next morn
ing had to be persuaded that banks did not steal your dollars, at least not in that way. Tunk cried out that we were just like everybody else, that we wished him evil. The Good Samaritan was on the verge of throwing up his hands.

  Tunk said that if I proved to him that the white man’s money house was safe he would regain a little of his faith and courage, enough to go on. I remembered a check from home still in my back pocket. Some mystical force had preserved it there for that purpose. I volunteered to step into the Freedom National Bank, open an account, and make a withdrawal. Tunk said that such a thing could not be done. I hastily produced the check and waved it at Tunk. I didn’t think about the sudden silence in our uproar until later. Tunk had stopped complaining and the Samaritan had left off beseeching. They had looked at each other. It was a brief moment that betrayed a resemblance around the eyes. We are one family, I thought, as I hurried into the bank. Later the rapid look that had passed between them I interpreted as amazement that they had hooked such a stupid fish.

  I wanted Tunk to see that some money houses were black men’s money houses, but he wouldn’t come inside with me. He had a change of heart and pleaded with me not to go in there, as if a bank were a burning house. I saw through the window the Good Samaritan comforting Tunk, who looked up now and then at me from his wet hands to make sure that I was still alive, wriggling on the line.

  The manager was kind. She asked me what I studied. “Smimoff’s,” I said, the good deed I was about to do had enlivened me so. I told her about Tunk. I pointed at the window. I told her that I needed to bring money to Tunk, to show him that I had told the truth, to make him believe.

  “Tell me you’re kidding, honey.” She called to a colleague. “Those flimflams are at the Drop again.” The aim of the scam was to switch their fake bankroll for your real money, or steal your money outright, if they thought you couldn’t run fast enough. Tunk and the Samaritan were gone when I looked back at the window, when I ran out to the street to beg them to come inside and clear up the misunderstanding for the manager.

  By dusk garage doors were pulled down over the shops, revealing murals painted in a sort of local Zhdanovism. The fast-food joints were open and so were the bars where what went on went on softly behind the clarity of pink, blue, green neon. “Positively no guns. Positively no loitering in the restroom. Positively everyone will be searched.” The armada of churches was quiet, the storefront dwellings of the Holy Spirit as well as the flagships guarding the Haussman-like boulevards. Eighth Avenue and the tenements leaning toward St. Nicholas Avenue were nervous bazaars for heroin, with brand names like Circle B, Sure Shot, Three Hearts Ready to Kill, and Blue Magic. Glassine packets were passed through peepholes by children too young to be prosecuted.

  Every stray encounter was decisive. Every evening held magical promises of renewal. I was going to walk out the door and reinvent myself. I was going to turn a corner and there in the configurations would stand the agents of my conversion. I was going to step out of a taxi and the life in which I existed without inward definitions or external categories would finally come.

  Everything was possible because this life continued to be something that stood outside myself, a little way off, in a diner maybe. This life hadn’t recognized me yet, like love or history, both of which always seemed to be walking on the other side of the street from where I was. I never noticed as the days took on a similarity to a neurotic pattern: doing the same thing again and again, and each time thinking the result different, significant. Sometimes I misplaced that dream, which is what dreams are for, found it again, and once more departed from the world of facts.

  Nevertheless, what a miracle it was to climb the twisting monumental stairs of Morningside Park, frightened by the shadow of a falling leaf, to return unscathed, to take the day out of my pocket, to lay it on the desk along with keys, coins, and folded lunatic leaflets from a group more paranoid about the reasons the comet Kohoutek had disappeared than they had been about its collision course with the earth.

  After one of my feeble excursions to test the hypothesis that the sum of Harlem was greater than its parts, I tried to fit my imagined hurt to the balm of being with acquaintances who, having enchanted their brain pans with LSD, talked so much I couldn’t see where I was going. They blocked traffic with their heads and assured me that there were some black people whom they thought of as “just normal people. I forget that you’re black.” It was, as the song goes, nobody’s fault but mine, and I didn’t want to hear myself say that I forgot some white people were white.

  “God has put into my hands a whip to flog your back,” Grandfather said straight off whenever he called. He quizzed me about my reading—“Yes, but can you bend over and tie your shoes without your glasses falling off”—my Columbia classmates—“Their parents don’t mind their children growing up with poor people”—and predicted that I would come to no good among the no-accounts, burrheads, shines, smokes, charcoals, dinges, coons, monkeys, jungle bunnies, jigaboos, spagingy-spagades, moleskins, California rollers, Murphy dogs, and diamond switchers. He liked to be shocking. Perverse opinions were among the few pleasures of his old age.

  The more Grandfather threatened to descend on me with meals, the greater my paralysis became, but when he picked up the telephone in a different mood, asking me to reserve a room for him at the Hotel Olga, long defunct, as it turned out, or offering to send a consignment of Spam, the more insultingly transparent were my excuses. But I had to be careful. A phone call from Grandfather was sometimes followed by an interrogation from my parents, upset that my rudeness had brought them a fierce dressing-down on the subject of what I had not been taught about how to speak to my elders.

  Sometimes Grandfather was in town, but mostly he was not. The complications of his own life had almost simplified mine. His scandalous separation from the beige stepgrandmother—“I’m going to ride until I can’t hear them call her name”—limited his invasions, his surprise visits to the dean that he called keeping an eye on me and which I thought of as spiritual scavenging. As long as the stepgrandmother and her equally hateful sister were in their matching pigeon coops for senior citizens on upper, upper Third Avenue that Grandfather had had “no head chief’s say” in the purchase of, he kept away.

  Perhaps his snobbery made him unable to consider anything less than the sacred groves of the Talented Tenth—massive apartment buildings on Sugar Hill, like the Dunbar Court. Having crusaded throughout his ministry against the wasteland of low-income housing, the projects were to be his destiny. He described the pigeon coop as being near Harlem, above Harlem, on the edge of Harlem, or “sleeping against Harlem’s backside,” anything not to admit that it was in what could be spoken of as Harlem. He had seen Harlem in its glory, but back then he had just been passing through.

  Not to be outdone, Grandfather had established himself, as he liked to say, unmindful of his reduced, improvised circumstances, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within pestering distance of family. “There the wicked will cease from troubling; and the weary will be at rest.” He maintained parity of forces with the stepgrandmother: if she had her sister, he had his brother, Uncle Ulysses, though he had little contact with him, except when he needed something.

  He was strangely, suddenly inhibited toward the rest of us, as if some embarrassment had caught up with him. In his time he had had an exalted social vision, which rested on what could be done for the next generation, a cabalistic idea of one soul born again and again on the tormented journey toward final purity. “I remember Cassius Clay as a boy,” he once said. “The Golden Gloves. Some joker pinched his brother’s bicycle and he wanted to win the money to buy him a new one.” Grandfather, my father and aunts and uncle said without rancor, believed in doing everything for the children—except his own.

  I’d never conceived of my dealings with my grandfather as a relationship: the term implied choice. His having come with the territory precluded thinking about him that way. Family didn’t require the considerations that went with vol
untary association. Then Grandfather one-upped me and gave me what I thought I wanted: he stopped calling, boycotted me altogether.

  For a while I stewed that the possessive old darky who had nearly made a colony of my mind was trying to manipulate me into feeling that I had somehow let him down. Like those people who you think reciprocate your feelings, not understanding that what truly interests them about you is your interest in them, I had come to depend on his pursuit. No one had ever given me the power to reject. Once given, this power is almost impossible to take back. Grandfather had retrieved the advantage, and as much as I told myself that I was well rid of him, I was uncomfortable and not unmoved.

  I heard that Grandfather sent cheerful, solicitous notes to my sisters. I admitted that I sort of needed him, like people who look outside but don’t trust their sense of the weather until they see what other people are wearing. Then I heard that he blamed me for the interregnum of coolness and I was back in the driver’s seat of negatives.

  He wanted to see me, I was told, but was too proud to beg. It wasn’t like him to take a position and not hold to it. I was sure he would begin to tie up the campus phone again and complained to myself about family obligations. I made plans, but was told that Grandfather didn’t want to see me after all. He’d got me, as when a machine that has been silent long enough for you to forget it suddenly starts up again and fills every cavity in your head.