“I feel as though I’m wasting my life.”
“Yes, but what life isn’t wasted?”
Already there was a little dessert in the corner of his mouth. I’d expected the old story of his first job, at a ladies’ ready-to-wear store back in Augusta, which I’d heard many times since the day I had refused a paper route. His father didn’t like that sort of independence, but the owners were happy to hire a boy who could “make time,” clean the sidewalks. He was also to deliver COD packages.
One Saturday he delivered a package. The black girl who answered the door said she would take it because the lady of the house was out. He reminded her that it was a COD order and took it back to the store. Shortly thereafter he was picked up in spite of the store owner’s protest and taken to police headquarters, where he was tried for having spirited away both the money and the package. One man served as prosecutor and judge. The bailiff acted as witness. They said they made three dollars a day and didn’t dress as well as he. They said he dressed and spoke too well not to be a thief. He said he didn’t have to steal to get the clothes he wore. They wanted to know if he meant to call a white man a liar. Two years in the county reformatory. He wasn’t allowed to call his mother; his father was out of town. Grandfather was sent away on the supply wagon. When his parents got him out two weeks later, they were told they were lucky.
Grandfather said again that he wanted to visit my office. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want them to find out your grandfather is a Negro?”
I didn’t want to say that while I was collating pages that morning the emanations from the file cabinets had persuaded me to type up my resignation and drop it on my boss’s desk. Grandfather refused to let me pay for lunch. His wallet came from deep within his clothing. I waved, but he, the embarrassment to my act, didn’t look back.
I watched him go, sinking in the architecture of signs, layer upon layer, and even now when I imagine that I have felt his presence among the souls who ponder discount chicken wings, stand apart at bus stops, brood over damp chess boards in the park, or lean on windowsills above deserted uptown streets, the consequence of my self-loathing fills me with the sadness that comes from squandered intimacy.
10 /
The Handbook of Interracial Dating
Bargetta was the only black friend I had in college. Blessed be the tie that binds. The Black Student Union, and even some whites, lamps without lights, denounced us as Uncle Toms, but we knew the truth: we were just messed up. “You can’t borrow your oil from somebody else,” Bargetta said. We were the Also Chosen and loved our people—the dead ones, the many thousands gone. We were rather hard, I must admit, on the living.
Bargetta and I didn’t talk much about that, it was so much a part of the atmosphere of our friendship, of being stranded together, that we didn’t have to. Besides, false guilt would have been too much of an obstruction. She lived for pleasure and to give pleasure to others. Life was one big Lenten sale. “Jesus paid for everything so we shouldn’t have to.” She came to college out of nowhere—Memphis, actually, where her father had run her grandfather’s funeral home into the ground, but we used to say that she had been born in Poise, Tennessee. A financial aid officer inquired about the Sony Trinitron she somehow charged to the school. “How do you expect me to compete with whites?” Bargetta had only to open a door to make her presence felt.
She was striking, tall as Muhammad Ali, with a head that seemed modeled after those on Ptolemaic coins. Each term she would experiment with her thick black hair, as if to announce a new theme. One fall it was shorn, which set off her perfect copper skull. That winter it became a riot of coils. By spring it had been conquered, braided on the right side into a stiff tail that hid one of her watchful eyes. Most often it was wrapped in one of the fantastic scarves that became her trademark.
Her family was religious in that sprawling, devout, Baptist manner. “I came to God before I came to Barnard.” Bargetta laughed about the ashtray and cigar with which her father had started his Martin Luther King, Jr., museum, but a deep worry about what Jesus and her mother would say had kept her walking the narrow way—after a fashion. She represented to many boys a dangerous opportunity, as the Chinese say. Bargetta’s popularity, her caressing trustfulness, brought her to the attention of the Soul Sisters of Barnard, a consciousness-raising group that smeared her name at the least provocation. What the Sisters could not abide was Bargetta’s refusal to be answerable to them.
One spring, word went around that Bargetta was going out with the one Jewish guy at Columbia who was not pre-med. “He’s in the Hasidic wing of Black September,” Bargetta said. He was big, blond, with, she confided, “Sargasso eyes. Thank God for those Cossacks.” From their lounge a cadre of Sisters spotted Bargetta alone and in a fit of offended sisterhood dropped egg bombs. Bargetta glided on and was immediately surrounded by gallants who wiped the yolk from her turban.
That night, a little drunk, she interrupted the Sisters’ session on Obote and Amin with her loud contralto:
There were three niggers of Chiceraboo—
Pacifico, Bang-bang, Popchop—who
Exclaimed one terribly sultry day
“Oh, let’s be kings in a humble way.”
We had to make a run for it, but Bargetta was pleased that she had controlled her vibrato. A high-school choir director once told her to cut it out. “You’re not in church,” she said he’d said.
It did seem that Bargetta took “the black experience,” as it applied to her, as just so much light opera, which struck me at the time as unbelievably brave. She nourished her reputation as the queen of that joke about CPT—Colored People’s Time. If she said nine o‘clock she’d show eleven dash twelve. She was known all over campus as an amazing student who was subject to complicated distractions while en route to exams. Once, she explained her tardiness by saying that she was experimenting with brewing her own perfume. “I’m calling it Aujourd’hui. When you want the morning after to smell like the night before.”
A black counselor told her that she could easily get into graduate school, but for a reason she probably wouldn’t like.
“What’s that?”
“Because you’re black. Someone had to tell you, dear.”
“Why is that a reason I wouldn’t like?”
“From what I’ve seen and heard, you don’t identify much with other blacks.”
The black women’s dean told her that she could easily get into graduate school, but probably for a reason she wouldn’t like.
“What’s that?”
“Because you’re black. Someone had to tell you, dear.”
“I couldn’t do your job. I couldn’t go around telling people what they already know. I’d freak out.”
“You’re from the South, right?”
“Born and raised like a chicken.”
“I know your type. One of those girls with her fingers out. From what I’ve seen and heard, you don’t identify much with other blacks.”
“Are you going to tell me that my being a black woman can only be as valuable to me as my being one is to you?”
Bargetta wouldn’t divulge what more she said to send the dean storming from her own office. She gave the strong impression that she was someone who knew very well who she was, but she wasn’t going to tell you.
She said she knew why she liked men, but she didn’t know why she hated to go out with us. She resented what we could get, just by being men. I wanted to talk about her father, but she said her family life had been too normal. She said it had more to do with what she had learned about boys in her teens, especially in Jack ‘n’ Jill. “To me that was like my mother making me go to Hitler Youth.”
Jack ‘n’ Jill of America was an organization that forced the right sort of black children together with other nice children of the “upper shadies.” It had been founded “with tax forgiveness” in 1938. You didn’t join, your mother did. No city chapter could be larger than seventy-five women, which meant to your classmat
es whose mothers didn’t rate in the opinion of mothers who believed in blackballings that you either had a secret life or were a stuck-up in high-water pants. “I will abstain from whatever is unkind and mischievous, and will not knowingly undermine the policies of the organization.”
Once your mother had signed up, you were drafted into various age groups and faced what seemed like a lifetime subscription to the club magazines, Up the Hill and Scope. There were nightmare weekends of recreation and concerts of spirituals. Your mother learned more about children through “careful study,” contributed to research in rheumatic fever, and held polio drives.
It was a bargain—for your mother. She paid dues and you were out of her hair, hauled off to transportation galleries, to keelboats and copies of Ohio River sidewheelers. Enough lunch was funneled into you to make you drowsy, and then you found yourself packed off to sketch prairie schooners, to wrestle with chiefs’ trumpets, firemen’s hats, and man-drawn engines until your underwear got sticky. A designated mother had you by the elbow and you were on the verge of tears in prehistoric galleries with minerals, dinosaurs, and mounted birds. By the time you were handed back to your own mother like the laundry, you were too dazed to argue about what was on television after bedtime. “If a child misses three consecutive group meetings or activities without the chairman being notified the family is automatically dropped.”
In Indianapolis, at least, it was harmless, like hellish family vacations that are pleasant to recall, maybe even laudable, as old-guard clubwomen liked to say when you opened the door for one of them or stood when they came corsage-first into a room. The worst that ever happened was that my sisters tried to drown me as I bobbed for apples and on my last field trip to Lockerbie Street a spooky caretaker said that when the “Hoosier Poet” was locked in hotel rooms so that he wouldn’t drink before readings, he bribed bellhops and received what he needed through keyholes with straws. But Bargetta wouldn’t grant that Jack ‘n’ Jill, in Memphis, was just a part of growing up Negro. “Who can live with the thought of having been a child?” she said.
Real toads in an imaginary garden, the members of Bargetta’s teen chapter of Jack ‘n’ Jill liked to sit around and say, “Your mama.” If she asked someone to pass the mustard she got “Your mama.” No elaborate “soundings” or insult contests, just “Your mama”—for years, so she said. Her mother didn’t believe her and made her go to the mixers, the dances. It was hard to fit clothes on a miserable girl, Bargetta said, and because of her height, she was snubbed by the boys, even the ones who could convert from Celsius, and, because of her unreliable wave of ideas, by the girls with heated patios and pretty hair.
I understood too well the reticence that overcame her among her black peers, which had an element of shame, the source of most rebellion. But it was also flattering, not fitting in. You were different, not like the others, not one of them. The fix was in and the world arranged things so that you could act black with whites your own age, which had something to do with what it was like as a child to show off in front of strangers, but with blacks you shut down, became, as it were, as uptight as a slumming white, which had something to do with the spanking you were going to get for having shown off.
We usually met in the library, like spies, when Bargetta was between boyfriends and in a philosophical mood. “I didn’t even want to go,” Bargetta said, “our Cadillac was so dirty.” Fashions for Freedom was the main Jack ‘n’ Jill event on the Memphis calendar. The organization had been making efforts to like more than its own, to find underachievers, she said, “in more meaningful areas. I felt so sorry for everybody. I mean, here we were sitting with these stringbeans amandine and mess Bourgignon, shucking about what we were doing for the ghetto, and the hotel wasn’t even in a black neighborhood.”
Some of the mothers had banded together to launch Jack Be Quick, a training program they said was “intended to alleviate the dilemma of young Black Males in a matriarchal society.” The year Fashions for Freedom planned to donate its proceeds to the “Underachieving Black Male Negro” Bargetta was in the banquet room, in a Peter Pan collar from Peck and Peck, resigned, not asked to dance by the street-quick scholarship winners, feeling, as a girl, unimportant to the race.
“Chuckie Beauchamp’s mother made him sit with me. I had to give him my Supreme of Fresh Fruit Fantaisie. He clapped for the strapless stuff and the moderator thought it was such a big deal, kept saying that the models were professionals, like it was a big serious professional deal just because some of them were white.” Bargetta glanced around the room, missed the spidery smile of the senior who worked at the information desk. “Anyway, I was peeling a Hershey’s kiss when this guy with a big Dick Tracy face came down the runway. The escort was supposed to grin when his partner styled. He wasn’t real fine or anything, he just looked like he didn’t dig her personally and would punch out the first biddy who asked him to be more, you know, interracial.”
Bargetta changed her mind about the stack of books she’d checked out. She shoveled them into a campus mailbox. “But he looked at me, I swear. I switched tables three times. I wish I had gone backstage. I was wearing La Mort. When death need no longer be an excuse. It was wild. A look that could break night. Like he wanted me dead first. I gagged. I knew then I just wanted to win. Nobody had ever looked at me like that, you know what I mean?”
After the ritual awkwardness on the library steps of my having reached for Bargetta’s hand, which she withdrew to tie and tie again her bandanna, I asked if she went out only with white boys. She thought a moment. She knew what had happened in the way back when and what the Sisters had to say about what militants said about retribution and the lankier their hair the better. She didn’t pretend that it had anything to do with progress. She just hadn’t gotten over that Dick Tracy jaw. “Does that make me a bad person?”
My Aunt Bollie Lucia took out of storage and wielded at the close of her long incarceration in an old maid’s body the doubtful memory of the Scottsboro trial in 1933, when she nearly fell from grace and ran away with a white man from up North.
She: “You’re a Communist, aren’t you.”
He: “Yes I am. Are you?”
She: “Why no, I’ve never even been out of Georgia.”
Somewhere along the line it turned into a status symbol, going out with a white became like having a foreign car. “This girl’s mother used to carry a fat wedding album to every open house,” Bargetta said. “She almost sat on my head to catch my expression when she showed me the groom. She was so proud her daughter had married a white dude.”
In time, Bargetta’s mother bore her daughter’s romantic misadventures, of which Bargetta spared her not a single, throbbing detail, as part of the higher life into which education had launched her. Bargetta, the misbeliever, discovered that she intimidated her family, those followers of the double-duty dollar. She did a wicked imitation of “the Stevens girl” and enjoyed arriving more or less on time for job interviews and being told that she hadn’t sounded black on the telephone.
But after the Ashkenazi heartthrob, the Finnish news stringer with the telephone in the refrigerator, and a greasy railroad flat with the Irish video maker, Bargetta moved her duffel bag of scarves to Paris, to Pierre- Yves, a lethargic artist with whom she had collided during her junior year abroad. She managed to acquire a vague position with a New York record company’s office in Neuilly—“I’m part of the overhead”—and because its phone bill was not, as they say, itemized, I heard from her often.
My flight to Paris was a flight to Bargetta. I sneaked out of Leiden without leaving a note. I had gone to Holland to find peace in the way I imagined burned-out souls lugged their mad hopes to ashrams. As it turned out, the old university town was anything but soothing. My high-school pen pal had taken to Rudolf Steiner, and his five cats loathed me with the vehemence of stepchildren. Everywhere some kind of construction or renovation was under way and for weeks I had stumbled over the cobblestones in search of soundproof corners.
I made it to the rendezvous on the far side of the outer canal. I saw one of the New Zealand street performers I had met in a pub the night before. He, too, must have had a lot to drink because he didn’t remember me or the promises he had flung like millet. His companions had no recollection of their rowdy offer of a ride to France, but gas was expensive and they found room for one more in the battered Volvo, where I remained hidden until we were well out of Leiden. My parents had drilled into me that to hitch a ride with strangers was to tempt fate and I worried that the New Zealanders weren’t street performers at all. Dikes and low pastures flashed in the sunlight, herons strafed the lakes. I willed the arrival of the lumbering tub that was to ferry us to the border.
Once across it, the New Zealanders frequently pulled over to inspect herbs and mysterious weeds, to buy overpriced fruit from big-boned farmers’ daughters. They complained that my chain-smoking was making them sick, and indeed, two packs lay crumpled between my feet by the time we finished with the stench of Belgian towns of historical interest. Their tales of how they almost got busted at various frontiers hadn’t helped. A quarter-moon monitored our passage across France, through valleys of bundled hay. I was thrilled that I had disproved my parents’ theory of brigands on every highway when the New Zealanders dropped me off in one piece in a confusion of yellow lights.
Bargetta loved to be “contactable.” Therefore, I had several telephone numbers for her in Paris. After I had played roulette with them, the sound of her deep, smoky voice came to me like rescue. I had to walk outside to see where I was, Les Petits Negres, because I just could not speak again to the bad teeth and lopsided toupee that belonged to the man behind the bar. Bargetta told me to chill out and she’d be right over. I settled at a table outside and prepared for a long wait, but she wasn’t on CPT.
High Cotton: A Novel Page 23