High Cotton: A Novel

by Darryl Pinckney

  I went to him anyway, telling myself that at his age I had to pay the price of just showing up at his door, of sitting for hours noting the feline sounds a fly could make on a wall, of patiently watching as Grandfather rocked gently, kept time with his slippers as an old, abused song crept into him and carried him, nearly asleep, head bowed, in a terry-cloth-covered chair, from his borrowed, musty living room in Cambridge, back to the wide, hot fields where men and women cut and pulled their way through the furrows.

  The sound of a car horn called Grandfather from his reverie. Surprise wrinkled his face, angular and sharp, like a tribal mask. He remembered that he was in retirement in a brown wood frame house on Dana Street, not squinting at the sun that baked the red clay. The passage Grandfather had made through life from Dublin, Georgia, was something—of that he was certain. But he wanted to know more about what he had come to. Where from, that he knew.

  Grandfather was no longer so tall, but he was still ascetically thin. The cap of granite-colored hair had liberated itself into crumpled stalks that shot out over his ears in an alfalfa-like way. He moved in quick, small steps, stopping to support himself against the unsteady gateleg table, pausing to ask for strength to get to the stained stove or the almost empty bookcase. There was something valiant in the way he stumbled about, kept moving and fending for himself, pushing through his daily routine, as if his body were not betraying his will hour by hour.

  Students lived above Grandfather, and also next door, in the left half of the splintered wood house. I was jealous of his interest in them, of his love for Harvard students in particular. In his mind Grandfather followed them down Boylston Street and into Widener Library. It was impossible to know how many lived there at any given time. Grandfather was disappointed that they remained strangers, that the faces of the occupants changed so frequently, that he had not formed a kind of pedagogical rapport with them.

  He longed to advise the students who shared his back yard how to tend their tomatoes and peppers. Once, catching them at work, he stunned them with lyrical remembrances of the plush, full vegetables that grew down home. They stopped their doglike digging and looked up at him, an old black man leaning with his cane against the puckered screen door as he traced images of cabbages on the clouds.

  Grandfather retreated, a little confused and embarrassed. He latched the door and mumbled something about what Paul had written to the Philippians about good works. The students watched him shrink into the dark house, pulled at the red bandannas over their heads, rubbed their hands on faded dungarees, and exchanged smiles. But one of them, the one who had just returned from a hitchhiking tour of the country, defended my grandfather, asserting that every “Pops” he had met was very heavy, close to the earth, wise in the way of herbs. Grandfather had yet to identify the marijuana plants they were trying to grow near the fence.

  His fondness for the ebb and flow around him came from the perplexing contradiction of his somewhat worldly Old Country tolerance. He liked students, partly because he believed that, unlike children or the middle-aged, they were not impatient with old-timers. He carried their remarks away, and examined them, like a shoplifter who doesn’t dare to pull out the booty until well away from the detectives and alarms. Though he was a good man, incorruptible, in his way, he loved sinners and had never experienced a dearth of supply.

  Grandfather really enjoyed his part-time helper, Red, a reliable old sinner who lost vast sums, as he told it, playing the numbers and sending healing dollars in to radio preachers. Red lied about his age, claiming any year between fifty and sixty. Red had told so many whoppers he believed most of them.

  Among Red’s other businesses was a car service. I doubted he had a license, but he taped a livery sign on the windshield when he took Grandfather for a thrilling ride. Usually, a thin green bottle of wine slid around under the seat. Red talked about how quickly a fistful of Jacksons could unstable you, while Grandfather tipped through the revolving doors to pay his bills on time.

  Grandfather didn’t trust Red unsupervised around the house. He complained that Red’s irresponsibility upset his own schedule. Red was sometimes detained elsewhere by the consequences of “flea-collar” crime. He banged around trash cans to announce his arrival and went to the back door, massaging his shoulder, explaining how he’d had to start another job at six that morning and hadn’t finished sanding the floors until noon.

  Red had a long list of projects to see to around Grandfather’s retreat, including putting up storm windows, but there wasn’t much to do really, and mostly they argued back and forth about “the race thing,” the screen door between them like a net. “Let me culminate what you’re saying, Reverend.”

  Content with his solitary chores, Grandfather watered the lemon plant that was placed like an altarpiece on the bright blue TV tray. The one pale yellow lemon was the size of a grapefruit and the whole thing threatened to topple over under its weight. I was made to pay homage to it. Grandfather was a little superstitious about his lemon plant: if it remained healthy, so would he, more or less. I saw him wink at it from the kitchen. It did not, like the beige stepgrandmother, talk back. He wet his cracked lips and whistled melodiously “O How Glorious, Full of Wonder” as the kettle hissed, calling the world to reveille.

  His presentation of himself—setting himself apart from Dorchester, from Roxbury, from the unhappiness of the Rutherford Street projects—still mattered to him. Always the limp dress shirt, somewhat baked around the collar, the cuffed trousers smooth with age, whether he was bouncing to the market, list and pencil in his breast pocket, or clawing his way across the Charles River to try the patience of a teller at his savings bank. He lived in terror of anyone mistaking him for a welfare client and got around the shame of a Medicare card by treating it as a charge plate.

  “Come to the speaking blood,” a lanky boy brayed in the street, his long hair pulled in a ponytail held together with a strand of beads. “Today is the day of your salvation. One drop will melt the mountain of your sins. Would you like to make a contribution to Jesus?”

  “I certainly will. If He shows.”

  “You’re going to be holy one day for sure.”

  “Lord, if you love anybody, love me.”

  His cane a divining rod, Grandfather extended himself down Massachusetts Avenue past the “Soul-Saving Station” toward the Red Line. He was dressed in his brushed brown Borsalino and olive-green overcoat slick from so many seasons of cold rain. He enjoyed the atmosphere of Harvard Square, the youthful chatter in front of the Brattle, the aroma of cider drifting from the doors of the Pewter Pot so early in the autumn term.

  His errands: the bank, the grocer, the cleaner, the newsstand, Keezer’s Men’s Store, a peek at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, and then happily to Goodspeed’s to inhale the sweetness of pipe tobacco and to spend his ration of conversation, if anyone was willing to accept it. “Good books are a man’s best friend,” Grandfather had written inside Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ in 1925, a present to his first wife, my grandmother. “They are companions silent, consoling, understanding. For silence read them and they will give you rest. Will fill you with heavenly peace.” It was one of the few volumes of his library that he had not sold in a much-regretted punitive fit.

  Grandfather’s excursions ended in daydreams in Boston Common, where spots of earth showed through the hard grass like skin. He began each visit with a silent prayer before Martin Milmore’s monument to the men of Boston who died in the Civil War for slavery and the Constitution, “that their example may speak to coming generations.” Crispus Attucks continued his solitary vigil. Grandfather had seen so many statues in his time that history itself seemed to have taken on the greenish color of weathered bronze.

  He did his part on these walks, devoting a few minutes to picking up, with more than a little effort, the litter of cigarette butts, cans, plastic. Around the elms and rodents he went, tapping through the mash of leaves. He sat alone, far from the couples and the old men waiting with f
olded newspapers in their laps, another broken Brahmin brooding in the oil of the pensioned life.

  Under the brag scat and hum of the venerable city the tennis court was silent, the baseball diamond abandoned. He surveyed the new buildings that got lost in the Milk of Magnesia fog. A hunchbacked woman complained to herself in Polish. Rooted in mismatched shoes, she searched the garbage with the skill of habit. The smell of urine blew our way. Grandfather pulled himself up, a little saddened. Predictably, someone had sprayed WAR IS HELL over KOSCIUSZKO.

  You cannot grow up with a city; it grows away from you, a speeding landscape that veers off to present itself to someone new. Grandfather had no feeling for his first home on Mill Street somewhere deep in Boston. He had no urge to see it, as if it belonged to a history as remote as the days of “Nigger Hill” when Irish gangs lay in wait to attack free blacks out walking with their wives. He found being himself a protection of sorts, but he was not a man to rummage as if the optimism of the 1920s were like a memento at the bottom of a forgotten suitcase behind the door.

  A burned-out church that resembled the hull of a sunken ship was a milepost. Grandfather loved to discipline himself, and so rode into town and walked back, counting the steps, impressed by his own moxie. The bridge was near and soon he would cross the expressionless Charles, joggers and gulls flying by; soon he would be on Massachusetts Avenue again, back with the falafel trucks parked in front of M.I.T. Boston was an agreeable refuge for a man who had been an exile all his life.

  “One of the Adams girls lives in the dormitory next to mine.”

  “The Quincy Adamses?”

  The stately Philco radio in its burnished cabinet was a great comfort, though the vintage tubes had long since given out. He had the address of a shop where he could buy them, but he put off calling from day to day. Grandfather thought most radio commentators were idiots anyway and those with a little sense were liars. Mostly, we watched television.

  My aunt had given him a large television set equipped with a battery-operated remote control. He said it reminded him of a motorcycle. Grandfather didn’t like to admit how entertained he was by it. He pretended that he let the television run, as if he were humoring the faces on the screen. But he looked forward to evenings of new situation comedies, as the magazines called them, “recorded live on tape before a studio audience”—a phrase he very much liked because of its jingle quality.

  These shows were quite marvelous to him, especially the ones aimed at the “minority audience.” No more yes, Mr. Benny, no, Mr. Benny. It was the dawn of Sanford and Son, starring Redd Foxx, a clever sinner whose “party records,” Grandfather said, more than one fool had wasted his time preaching against. He also watched The Jeffersons and his wonderful pulpit tenor sang along as the credits rolled up the screen. “We finally got a piece of the pie!”

  He reminded me of students who enrolled in that most notorious of “gut classes,” the History of Television. They’d tell their parents to shut up, they were doing their homework, and turn up the sound of Star Trek, which they were very serious about decoding, in the French tradition. As a student of the “higher biblical scholarship,” Grandfather examined the premises of these popular television shows about blacks as if they were mistranslations from the original Greek.

  “George Jefferson has made more money dry-cleaning skirts and jackets than the Chrysler Corporation has made building sedans. That, as we say, confounds historical truth.”

  Grandfather also liked documentaries—Vietnam, the pollution of Lake Erie, the problems of juvenile offenders, the life cycle of sea horses. He had an insatiable appetite for filmed moments of historical importance and never tired of seeing Haile Selassie address the League of Nations, Jesse Owens cross the finish line, or the motorcade pass on its way to the Texas School Book Depository.

  Some stretching, hazy days must have been spent nodding over interpretations of the Psalms, browsing through Masterpieces of Religious Verse, underlining Homer Smith, or copying out passages from Volume X of Buttrick’s The Interpreter’s Bible. Index cards were covered with his graceful script and neatly arranged across the scratched table according to category. These cards were destined to join stacks of others in boxes under his bed. His research.

  Sometimes Grandfather came upon a forgotten book such as Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze and a geyser of remembered scenes erupted into the quiet evening—Memorial Hall, Holden Chapel, the black All-American halfback Fritz Pollard, the beloved English teacher Benjamin Crocker Clough, the hated campus humor magazine, The Brown Jug. But Cambridge and Providence were more and more confused in his voyages into the past. Thayer Hall was transplanted to the ice above Narragansett Bay. These lapses startled him, made him trust himself less, made me think about what was bearing down on him with the irreversible movement of a glacier. He penned reflective letters to alumni magazines that were never printed.

  “Is your memory infallible?” he used to demand of me.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, mine is.”

  Age, more than anyone or anyplace, had humbled him. He was where I always picture him, not in church, but at the sink, carefully rolling up the blue sleeves of a tattered dressing gown, a birthday present, but from whom or when he couldn’t say anymore, a man who against the tide of things unsaid could only lower his head and notice his hands’ conspiracies. He sang as his trembling fingers reddened in the hot water. Dusk spread over the window, orange and gray.

  “I can’t find your great-granddaddy’s pocket watch. Good one, too. I thought it was in this drawer. I wanted to give it to you.”

  “You keep it, you may need it.”

  “No, I won’t. Where I’m going all I’ll need is a skillet.”

  Grandfather was writing his memoirs. Perhaps that was why he had tried to bring my visit to a close with a meaningful, departing gift. The working title was “Looking for Home.” The stories crawled forth from the marriage of two dark lips. He had written most of these memoirs and yet they scarcely amounted to one hundred pages, even with a generous number of quotes from Browning, Cowper, Ezekiel. His long life was making for a short book.

  He treasured his own life of profound circumspection, dignity, repression, and disappointment, but the chapter he planned to call “Retirement and Reflections” interrupted the work. He could not write it. He meant his chronicle to be instructive, uplifting. It was a sermon, much like any other he had prepared during his half-century as a minister. Those thoughts that would make his gentle audience, his parishioners, himself uncomfortable were suppressed, evaded, and here, the redeeming power of the heavens was unsatisfactory.

  “I am a traveling man, trying to make heaven my home.” So, God’s in His heaven—all’s right with the world? Grandfather had never offered “all’s right.” He knew the real story and loved the imagined one. That was the wilderness in him, which kept the monotone from setting in. He had no intention of “catching misery.”

  He talked about the scalding effort of “writing up life.” Another generation was out there, busily piling up stones. He, too, was preoccupied. “Good things come to those who wait. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Therefore, allow six to eight weeks for delivery.” His pride was like that of a man who, dismissed by friends because of his predictability, his regularity of habit, has a reckless affair, as if to say, “Look at me, I’m up to something.”

  At the table, rolling a pencil in his palms, switching on a lamp, untying the string that held a folder of brown sermons, yellow notes, and a reconciliation of voices—he was, then, most like a man put out to pasture, fighting the wish to travel and be known.

  In the night a battered satchel waited, filled with canceled checks, stamped telephone bills, unused subscription forms, torn receipts, irrelevant bank statements, prescriptions, and old deeds of sale. Grandfather got up from the sheets that had soaked up years of restlessness. Barefoot, he felt his way and took the key to the satchel from its hiding place under an oval rug. He spread the grainy
pieces of paper over the kitchen table, added and added again the columns of acres and dollars, rubbed the stubble on his chin, inspected signatures until dawn entered like a nurse.

  Sometime later, Uncle Ulysses died. One moment he was trying to pump new insulation into his basement walls and the next he had fallen. I hurried up to Boston—not for the funeral, but to be on the scene—with the same coarse expectations of racial spectacle that first drove me down to 125th Street, as if an assembly of old-timers, of elderly relatives at a wake, would stand as a substitute for Harlem, as if their tongues could do what its bad corners had not—lead backward, either into history or into a sense of belonging.

  I looked forward to the wake in Uncle Ulysses’s house, which smelled perpetually of the dry cleaner’s carbon tetrachloride and stood high on a hill with a view of bus stops in one of the satellite towns around Boston. I’d never been to a wake. I imagined men worn out by bluster, women keeping themselves together by concentrating on pulp swimming in the lemonade, youngsters with ears sticking out of new haircuts like sugar-bowl handles. Cousin Aszerine, Cousin Airedale, Cousin Salonia—the weird names were like countries I used to make lists of. “This is Pooky.” And Pooky would turn out to be a huge man in his sixties.

  Upstairs, around the table of condoling hams, I thought the old women, whose authority smoothly canceled that of my mother and father, would gossip, tell another version of that funeral in 1962 in Philadelphia when Uncle Dirt’s brother and sister missed the burial because neither trusted the other not to make off with the nonexistent stash of Confederate gold pieces. They’d torn up the dead sibling’s yard and house in their treasure hunt, and drunken Aunt Bunny had searched everywhere, including the laundry chute, in which she’d got stuck until the fire department came.