New businesses had taken over the old mansions; shopping centers had conquered the cotton fields. In the cafeterias, small families made room for larger parties, who in turn gave up corners to youngsters on dates. Not everyone was either black or white anymore, but people apparently hadn’t caught on yet to the multiracial shoving of “up North.” Even the fundamentalist churches in what had been butcher’s shops appeared to go out of business cheerfully. I was taken to praise the new addition to the medical center. The president of a black college told me he was trying to persuade his daughter to transfer from her predominantly white school to his because he found out she didn’t know who Joe Louis was.
The graveyards were the last remnants of the Old Country. I was shown the way across the park through which Grandfather and his brothers had hurried when they were late to church. The house where he grew up wasn’t there anymore, but beyond the cedar branches was a cemetery. The plots flooded in heavy rain, including one topped by a large pink stone.
Grandfather’s sisters were lined up behind his mother, as they had been in life. One of them, I was told, ended her days in a web of superstitions, which included a time-consuming dislike of blacks darker than herself and putting a bowl of water with a fork in it under her bed in order to trap the hostile spirits that might get her while she slept.
Another sister was reported to have said, “Such a pity about Eustace, getting one of those nasty men’s diseases.”
“How did you work that out?”
“Just like Waldo. When he went bald Mother wouldn’t let him in the house. She said he had one of those nasty men’s diseases.”
The youngest sister, the first to die, had had an almost punishing interest in the cause of convicts. In those days, hangings in the yard of the city jail drew crowds that watched from across the street. Men on chain gangs were starved, put in stocks, hogtied, flogged. It was said that the desperate letters from some prisoners almost tempted her to burn down a warden’s house. In 1932 an eighteen-year-old on the Chatham County chain gang, suffering from tuberculosis, killed himself. He had been laughed at when he asked for medicine. It was a famous story that spread quickly around the state. They said Grandfather’s mother, fearing what revenge his sister had in mind, locked her in the cellar until she cooled down.
Grandfather’s mother hadn’t liked his first wife because she was too light. She didn’t like blacks much either. That was enough, his wife said, she was through trying to please a woman so active in the church. They were buried within yards of one another, in competing family plots, so to speak. Grandfather once told me that long ago he had overheard his mother talking to his first wife.
“How did you get up here?”
“By that road.”
“Don’t be arrogant, child.”
“I walked.”
“I suppose you think you’re sitting pretty now.”
“No, I’m talking to you.”
What frightened him, Grandfather said, was that the conversation had taken place in the cemetery, his mother in her grave and his wife in hers.
The feeling of the Old Country also survived in some of the churches. Visitors to the Thankful Baptist Church were given paper shamrocks to pin to their lapels. Old Esau was remembered as a fine, upstanding churchman in a semicircle of white glass above the main door, mostly, it seemed, because he’d brought central heating to the church.
People who didn’t know me at all opened their doors and hearts, just because I was family. “Root hog or die,” they called hospitality. I was moved by the elderly who spoke of Grandfather as one who had been born in this church, who had grown up in this church. They were very proud and thought of themselves as contemporaries of the church. The immense vault of brown brick they called home was built in 1893, in the “cathedral style,” they said. True, there was a nave, a rose window, a tower, and the big bell rang lustily at eleven o’clock.
The entire church was light green carpet, from the street door, up the first few steps, through more white doors, all the way to the pulpit and the back wall. The old panels had been replaced by a perhaps accidentally primitive painting, a copy of a copy. John had his hand casually on the Lord’s shoulder. They had hippie rather than biblical hair and beards and were half submerged in aquamarine blue, posed for a snapshot taken on a freshwater fishing trip. The halo around Christ waited to turn into a cartoon bubble. People pointed out to me the newness of the windows along the walls and the freshness of the white clapboard ceiling.
The Gospel Choir sang “I feel like going home,” with someone, somewhere, letting out a long, low, dry “Yes,” and the emotion I’d been looking for all those years finally came. Beaten armies learn well, they say.
Perhaps the old-timers were right to insist that we, the Also Chosen, live wholly in the future and, like early Christians, preserve only detached sayings and a wagonful of miracles from the past. The facts were many, too many. If I’d sat where they’d sat, my trousers would still be burning.
As in the game where the word selected at the start of the row changes as it is whispered from ear to ear, it was their faith that being black would not mean what it did twenty years before, or back when the larder always had to be filled, when the woodpile could never go down, when the dairy had to furnish butter and cream, and the pickaninnies had to have molasses and gungers. They could not foresee that anyone would want to revise the story or renegotiate the terms of belonging after them.
Their understanding of what it meant to be colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, their experience of the life because of it and the life in spite of it haunted me much like a religion you are born into and struggle to either reject or accept. I looked to my elderly relatives as revealed texts, guides to a great landslide that would tell me what to feel about this ode in a shell called blackness when the time came. Meanwhile, there was a big hole in the middle of my heart that needed filling up.
I had taken a utilitarian view of Grandfather. What else were old blacks for, except to be repositories of racial lore? Beautiful, maligned, obsolete Negroes, discussing themselves, “this race thing,” and feeling like philosophers—I used to sit back and wonder how they managed to be all-inclusive. It never occurred to me that they might be making it up as they went along and sometimes backing down.
My piety and resentment toward the tales of what I had missed before the thaw, what had been gone through for my sake, turned out to be like a camouflage maneuver, a prolongation of the adolescent lament that I wasn’t real but everyone else was, a comfortable resignation of the self that was also useful as a sort of certificate of exemption. But one thing about the real world, if you aren’t careful it will tell you what you are and just how low you stand.
I had the most dramatic conclusion in mind for my visit to the Old Country. I would walk over the bridge from Augusta into South Carolina, as a kind of humbling of myself before history. My fossilized picture of a rustling, pregnant landscape had me in the sweet myrtle, the dagger-pointed leaves of Spanish bayonet, and then in the great swamp of the Congaree. I’d make noises, the way a child alone in a creaking room adds his own sounds just to scare himself more.
The span over the river was much longer and higher than it had looked from my hotel window. The water below ran with red suds and the way ahead promised only more highway unfriendly to someone on foot. A hydraulic whine blotted out the sounds of my steps. I simply turned back. Even Grandfather’s memories were lost to me, like the Book of Jashar was to the Israelites, as he himself would have said.
Someone bequeathed to me the “fifty miles of elbow room” I took for granted. It was a luxury to believe that better days were being kept in layaway just for me or that the elderly held my consciousness in trust and I could take up the burden of knowing later, after my youth was no longer renewable and my second chances had all been spent.
The future in my early youth was a wide sea of aloneness and my catalogue of adventurers read: children of calamity, offspring of sin, outlaws, isolates
, Negroes, and me. Two slaves ran away from the Dutch trading station during the Tokugawa period when Japan was closed to foreigners. They dressed in geisha clothes, made their way into Nagasaki, and were hacked to bits. I didn’t get to a place that far out.
I never could explain or admit to myself what I was fleeing from and what I was escaping to. I assumed that either time or defeat would fill in the blank spaces. However, escape I did, the accidents of opportunity or sloth I interpreted as divine corroboration, and getting away was easy, like skipping school, avoiding the job, slipping out of the theater—a kind of gigantic, trivial something.
The sociological heat in which I grew up said you could live by yourself, but not for yourself. The community’s pastor shared everything, but he didn’t share the problems unless he came from the community. That was the difference between the war correspondent and the soldier. The former was not under orders. The situation would not change. You would always be pursued by it, and by your being who you were. If you had your ticket out, then you were under an obligation to allow your imagination to tell you what it was like for others.
Then the psychological terrain shifted violently, an entire history lay exposed, right there under our sandals and tennis shoes, as profound as a lost city. Appreciation of it called for initiation, a degree of worthiness, as in the practice of certain mystical sects, and you had to defer to those people who had known the worst, what seemed more true. I didn’t like the togetherness that expressed itself as suspicion; now I miss those whom injury made gracious and also those who simply uglied up and died.
I minded the strict rules of conduct and the tribal code that said that I, as a black, had a responsibility to help my people, to honor the race. Now I am sorry that I went to such lengths not to be of much use to myself just so no one would be able to ask anything of me. To have nothing to offer was not, after all, the best way to have nothing to lose.
It doesn’t always begin with a suitcase. Sometimes it starts with the wrong book. Back in the days when books were deeds and every situation was, I thought, polemical, the language of being black stressed “summers of dreadful speculations and discoveries” and “going behind the white man’s definitions,” as if American reality were an illusionist’s trick that could be exposed by a peek through the correct hole. We, the Also Chosen, a unique creation, meaning more soulful than white people, had to understand history to be released from it.
Those “dreadful speculations” are much like train stations that were once important but are now passed over by commuter lines. The stations disappear in a rush; you whiz by faded arches, fanciful embellishments. Other things have grown up around them, overtaken them, and, in some cases, embarrassed them. To pick up one of these books is to find yourself on a platform in a country of arrested development.
As the day winds down, you begin to panic that there is no way out. No comfortable sleeper has pulled in; the ticket window is closed anyway. The signs are in an alphabet you cannot decipher, the coffee is bitter, the cigarettes stink, the cafeteria has sold its last potato. Everyone else seems to know where he’s going, why he’s waiting, and can’t help you, though clearly he wants to explain the departure schedule to you.
You give in, put on your adventurer’s cap, assure yourself that you will bed down in the sorrel patch if it comes to that. You read on and find that the streetlamps are more subdued than they are in most cities today. The moon enchants the sky and prevents the night from darkening completely. Stars are visible. They throb and shine down on those Freedom Summers of not so long ago. Until death or distance do us part.
You take away phrases as if they were souvenirs to add to your collection of abolitionist ha’pennies, Wedgwood medallions, Aunt Jemima saltshakers, blues records from a Heritage Tour or a cousin’s basement. You want to retain the past, as if through preservation its sufferings will have meaning, but sometimes suffering has no meaning; it’s just suffering.
The past gets longer and longer. Yet it has also gotten closer. It’s sitting in a plastic bag by the front door, awaiting collection. The bag might even be punctured. Bits of stuff are blowing across the yard, spiraling into the lovely, reborn, neutral blossoms.
My parents remind me that my last NAACP convention was a while ago. Miami Beach. Yes, I recall the bar bill I stuck them with. At the Fontainebleau Hotel, which, like the rest of the nation, had seen better days, the smoke from the riot in Liberty City across the bay was visible. “When are you going to run for President?” I asked every famous face. “When I get your check,” every famous face answered. My father has been known to sell NAACP memberships from stall to stall in public toilets; volunteer work has my mother so harried she leaves mailing lists in the freezer; and my sisters know they are losing hope. Occupy till I come again?
When you go back, things look smaller. You almost go back just to see how big you’ve become, how much has been diminished, how much you’ve grown away from the mattress that sags in the middle and the door where the concrete was painted with yogurt and water in a final attempt to grow moss over it. My parents fall asleep over their reading; my television burbles through the night; a raccoon or an opossum sacrifices a rabbit in the attic at dawn; and the department-store box of photographs at the bottom of the linen closet has split under its memorial load of faces that stuck by traditional remedies, preferring feverfew from the back garden to aspirin.
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quinched in leaves the leaping sun,
Are felled, felled, are all felled.
One day—if it comes—I may be someone’s old darky, exercising my fictitious cultural birthright to run off at the mouth, telling someone who may insist on being called a Senufo-American how in my day so many—black, white, and other—were afraid of black teenagers in big sneakers with the laces untied, and three o’clock, when the high schools let out, was considered the most perilous hour for subway riders.
I will be on my feet and the Senufo-American will be suicidal to get away from me, as I sometimes felt in the presence of Grandfather, whose fear of forgetfulness I mistook as a wish to muddy my choices. I may elect myself a witness and undertake to remember when something more important than black, white, and other was lost. Even now I grieve for what has been betrayed. I see the splendor of the mornings and hear how glad the songs were, back in the days when the Supreme Court was my Lourdes, beyond consolation. The spirit didn’t lie down and die, but it’s been here and gone, been here and gone.
In the negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces—or rather masks—that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller calls these “images of God cut in ebony.” But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good nights with them—because they are black.
Charles Lamb
Copyright © 1992 by Darryl Pinckney
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously in Canada
by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd
Illustration on title page:
detail from Dawn in Harlem by Winold Reiss
from the collection of Beth and James DeWoody
eISBN 9781466809970
First eBook Edition : January 2012
First edition, 1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pinckney, Darryl.
High cotton / Darryl Pinckney.
I. Title.
PS3566.1516H5
1992
813’.54—dc20
91-23158
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High Cotton: A Novel Page 29