There’d be no washcloth in the freezer for his face, no tub run, no jug of tea with chipped ice and sliced lemon to drink, sloshing in the sudsy water. There’d be no decent meal to get down to make up for the chili that had his bowels in a knot. And no intelligent conversation. Just the hot still air of the dirty movie-trailer house smelling like spoiled chops burning in an unclean oven. And her blubbering on about the dead coon on the highway till she was too swollen and bleary and ugly to do anything but hit. But he might not even get the chance. The tin can of a bus stuffed and overheated any minute might explode. Snakes popping in the air like the frogs he slung from the mound back of the house, watching them pop and his mother damning his murdering soul to hell, hymnals fluttering out of them beatup suitcases, music cases snapping open and guitar strings popping, cartridge tapes spiraling across the highway a tangle. And the cameras catching it all somehow in time for the six o’clock news. Rage, sorrow, sour kidney beans and rice rose up in his throat with shredded cow spilling its terror of the slaughterhouse hammer into his mouth. He dug out the damp handkerchief, hands like claws, and vomited.
“Driver, you okay?”
“I wanna tell you people that my husband here beats up on me—”
“Give us a break and drop dead, lady, willya?”
“Nilda, pass up the napkins.”
“What’s the trouble up there? Hey, you’re supposed to stand behind the white line for crissake.”
“Don’t never lose your mind on holidays or have big trouble, cause all them hospital beds are full up and the doctors are on vacation.”
“Have a drink, lady, and forget it.”
“What’s going on up there? A summit goddamn conference for crissake?”
“Driver, pull over and let these rummies off. They’re stinking up the bus. Hey! Driver! You! Boy!”
“Watch that shit.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“I’m talking to you. Watch that ‘boy’ shit.”
“Another napkin, somebody. He’ll be okay.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“The ‘boy’ who might get around to arranging your bridgework, honky.”
“Let’s all be peaceful.”
“Awww stuffit.”
“Claybourne in five minutes. Last stop.” Fred was finally able to speak.
All conversation stopped. Mouths agape, gestures frozen, eyes locked on the driver’s cap, or back, or Adam’s apple, arrested, as if the announcement were extraordinary, of great import. They might have been in the playground playing “red light, green light, one, two, three.” Or in a mime studio mastering “statues.” Or in white jackets at a healing session watching the sutures on a woman’s wrists turn from black to maroon to pink to flesh, and staring at the healer, forced to acknowledge something more powerful than skepticism, and be stunned still. They might have been leaning against a stack of bedsheets while Doc Serge, holding forth in the linen closet, explained the symbols on a dollar bill, translating carefully Novus Ordo Seclorum to them and the boy Buster standing mute and immobile. They might’ve been in the corner poolroom instead of whizzing past it, bars, a church, a funeral parlor at fifty-five miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile zone. Might’ve been in Shorty’s pool hall in the exact moment when Shorty rushed to the back, skidded into the corner of the gambling table and warned through clenched teeth “the man” and had been caught in the frozen tableau till some magical bit of stage business registered in the brain as the thing to be doing to render the self invisible to the law.
They might have been sitting on a white stool as the patient or on a wooden bench in a locker room as the patient’s husband, or in the driver’s seat clamping down hard, throat and stomach hot and moist and like a rock, holding still the rage and regret threatening to be thrown up from the depths of the self all covered with slime.
They might’ve been twenty-seven miles back in the moment of another time when Fred Holt did ram the bus through the railing and rode it into the marshes, stirring bacteria and blue-green algae to remember they were the earliest forms of life and new life was beginning again. In the sinking bus trying to understand what had happened, was happening, would happen and stock still but for the straining for high thoughts to buoy them all up. But sinking into the marshes thick with debris and intrusion. Faces frozen at the glass seeing with two eyes merely the onlookers on the embankment holding their breath, or seeing closer by with two eyes the bullfrogs holding theirs in the shallows, the dragonflies suspended over the deeps and the wind waiting, the waters still and waveless till the shock of the plunge registered and the marshes sucked things under.
Silence on the bus as at a momentous event. But an event more massive and gripping than the spoken word or an accident. A sonic boom, a gross tampering of the weights, a shift off the axis, triggered perhaps by the diabolics at the controls, or by asteroids powerfully colliding. Earth spun off its pin, the quadrants slipping the leash, the rock plates sliding, the magnetic fields altered, and all, previously pinned to the crosses of the zodiac and lashed to the earth by the fixing laws, released. A change in the charge of the field so extreme that all things stop and are silent until the shift’s complete and new radiations open the third eye:
J.D., his fingers splayed out on the horn case, trying to connect with the music. A tune had caught him and held him in a moment when speech, movement, thought were not possible. Something in an idiom that had to be attended to from the total interior, captured, defended. The humming sonorous from his center now was making him eager to get to the Regal Theatre in Claybourne to echo it all after six long years of dumbness behind the walls.
Mai, Sister of the Rice, coming unstuck from the web of time and place, was in the fish canneries of Alaska, the sugar plants of Hawaii, farm valley California, Manilatown, Chinatown, Japantown, all over at once calling together in a single moment the Sisters of the Rice to caucus.
Iris, Sister of the Plantain, loosening, was back in Barnwell handing out no-nuke flyers and turning in time to have an angry woman with a baby slung over her back rush up to her and spit “Sun lover!” in her face, an echo of what others like her, misrecognizing who and what she was, had spat out years ago—“Nigger lover!”
Fred and Wanda in the bedroom, oblivious to the noise of the elevator on the other side of the wall. The two of them smack up against each other like two halves of ancient fruit succulent and sweet and no cleaving on the horizon.
Nilda was in the hills readying for the medicine dance. Having dreamed the dream that could release her anytime from the earth’s bands, she was waking again to the thundering of white buffalo and the call of coyote to join the peyote gatherers to dance the dance not danced in thirty years.
Palma was walking into the Infirmary’s treatment room as Buster and Nadeen were walking closer, then passing right through their bodies of rushing atoms and currents. The dark aureoles of Nadeen’s breasts spreading her nipples wider, the dream of wings inside the girl her own swelling, the squeeze of his hands on the girl’s belly pushing her closer to her destination. Then leaning over Velma, she was saying, “She carries their baby in his hands and they carry our future in their guts,” before knocking her sister off the stool.
It might’ve been a fingernail scraping across the window, was Chezia’s thought, remembering her first encounter with panes not made of the waxed paper or the greased sheep membranes of home. Or a goat screaming, was Cecile’s, her ears at home on the island where her appetite readied her for rooti and ginger beer. It might have been the shriek of mandragora root uprooted from a bruja’s garden, Inez was thinking, wondering if the old hag of her village still lived. But the sound that released them from the moment of freeze was the screech from the birds returning. And after the sudden change in pitch came a change in light that could mean rain. And then a change in texture, the air granular with grit that turned the blues to pink-silver and drew eyes toward the windows for signs of a storm.
No one remarked on an
y of this or on any of the other remarkable things each sensed but had no habit of language for, though felt often and deeply, privately. That moment of correspondence—phenomena, noumena—when the glimpse of the life script is called dream, déjà vu, clairvoyance, intuition, hysteria, hunger, or called nothing at all. Released now, lungs sucked air and feet scraped against the grit of the bus floor. But before the passengers could get back to what they’d been doing, they found themselves leaning toward the windshield as the tall woman with the feather pointing up at the ceiling lifted from her seat and shouted “Look” as though it were a bubble-top bus.
Tendon, feather, bone and flesh were riding against a backdrop of eight-minute-ago blue, of fifty-years-ago blue, rode the curvature to the seam, flying through to what the sages of old had known about gravity and the outer edge, gazing up. Birds riding the air, riding the sun’s beams and back, gliding in light in and out, hollow-boned and tiny-brained but sufficient when living in the law.
“Birds,” shrugged the driver.
“Birds,” said the farm boy in the rear, twisting round in his seat to check the sky, his eyebrows up, his shoulders too and the wire basket aslant in his lap. The other passengers shrugging back in answer, satisfied it was just birds, and that they flew their own way, but baffled by the outburst of the woman standing up. Fred eyed her in the mirror, his stomach settled for a moment. Nilda, still lifting from her seat, continued to stare at the ceiling agape as though it were a membrane, a veil to look through at the fabulous apparition flying back from the concealed world in the far side of the mind.
four
Obie dumped his clothes in the locker and dropped down on the bench by his daybook. It was starting up again, the factions, the intrigue. A replay of all the old ideological splits: the street youth as vanguard, the workers as vanguard; self-determination in the Black Belt, Black rule of U.S.A.; strategic coalitions, independent political action. Camps were forming threatening to tear the Academy apart. He held his gym shoe open but had no mind to lift his foot. He should make the rounds. Somewhere in the building, an on-the-sly gathering was afoot, no doubt. And tomorrow the polarities would have sharpened, the splits widened. He sat staring at the cement floor as if for cracks. He wanted wholeness in his life again.
Several hotheads, angry they had been asleep in the Sixties, or too young to participate, had been galvanized by the arrival in their midst of the legless vet who used to careen around Claybourne fast and loose on a hot garage dolly. The tutorial staff were urging the group to pull up the welcome mat, close the doors and concentrate on building up the bookstore and tape library. The office staff were charging the executive committee with elitism. The study group leaders said the new crop of recruits were apathetic or stupid. The masseuse, karate master, the language teachers and the resident reggae band feeling more than estranged were asking, Whatever happened to Third World solidarity?
And too, there was the group who came by the house late at night to argue that the Academy, too visible and above ground, had performed its function, pulling folks together for a moment. And now that key people had been identified, it should be abandoned and a select group move off to the back district and organize a self-sufficient community. Velma had rejected it as too aloof a way to make a contribution.
After several tries, they modified the plan: a select few should nab some devalued real estate near the woods and move off for a year and start a brain-trust farm. And finally do what the folks in the nineteenth century had talked about at the Colored People’s Conventions, finally do what the African Brotherhood had formed to do in the twenties, finally do what had been a priority item in the early sixties, then got pushed aside when the movement was redefined from the outside, but was tried anyway by the Lowndes County Freedom Party, by folks within the Peace and Freedom Party, later by the All African People’s Party, what had been discussed in Philly, Little Rock, Gary, and Dayton, Ohio, but yet to be done—to blueprint a sure-fire strategy for mobilizing the people to form and support an independent Black political party before it was too late. There was the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to hook up with, the La Raza Unida groups still functioning to connect with, the American Indian Movement to ally, and a loose, informal network of medicine people throughout the communities of color to be lifted up and formalized. That had captured his and Velma’s attention. But when was there a moment, much less the material resources, to move off for a year? And so the Spring Festival had been designed as a holding action, way to reconcile the camps, to encourage everyone to work together until the plan could be put to them. But then the hotheads had brought the guns into the place and the splits widened and Obie had not moved quickly enough, been forceful enough, was overcome with ambivalence. Obie felt the image of himself coming apart in Ahiro’s hands.
“Have to be whole to see whole,” Mrs. Heywood had counseled them. He’d tried to stay on top on all diverse plans and keep the groups with the Academy. A deep rift had been developing for centuries, the woman taught, beginning with the move toward the material world and away from nature. Now there was a Babel of paths, of plans. “There is a world to be redeemed,” she warned. “And it’ll take the cooperation of all righteous folks.”
Obie dropped his shoe and rubbed his chest. He was probably exaggerating, but things had seemed more pulled together when Velma had been there, in the house and at the Academy. Not that her talents ran in the peace-making vein. But there’d been fewer opportunities for splinterings with her around, popping up anywhere at any time to raise a question, audit a class, monitor a meeting, confront or cooperate. It was all of a piece with Velma around.
He’d thought he was relieving her of distraction, suggesting she pare her schedule down. But most often she was either huddled in the Chesterfield, her head dropped to her chest, preoccupied, or out of town keeping company with consoles and terminals with cutesy names like Big Blue. And the two major camps, the ones she’d held together, urging each to teach the other its language, had sprung apart. The one argued relentlessly now for the Academy to change its name from 7 Arts to Spirithood Arts and to revamp the program, strip it of material and mundane concerns like race, class and struggle. The other wanted “the flowing ones” thrown out and more posters of Lenin, Malcom, Bessie Smith and Coltrane put up.
Obie bent down and worked his foot into the shoe. He felt the strain in his midriff and wondered if he shouldn’t once again invite Women for Action to join them, to move from his sister-in-law’s studio to the Academy. There was more resistance to this idea within the Academy than he’d anticipated. It made no sense. The work was the same: to develop, to de-mystify, to build, to consolidate and escalate. And they shared key people: Jan, who ran the ceramics and sculpture division; Ruby, who coordinated the newsletter staff; Bertha, who ran the nutrition program. Velma had run the office, done the books, handled payroll, supervised the office staff and saw to it that they were not overlooked as resource people for seminars, conferences and trips, wrote the major proposals and did most of the fund raising. It took him, Jan, Marcus (when he was in town), Daisy Moultrie and her mother (when they could afford to pay them), the treasurer of the board, and two student interns to replace Velma at the Academy.
Obie lingered over the laces, the pull in his midsection masking the pain in his chest. Maybe she had come home, cut the job short, quit. She would have come home to an empty house. He should have left a note—“We’re staying a few days with Cleotus,” or “The Hermit,” as Velma had tagged him. But he hadn’t. She rarely did anymore either. She just hopped a plane to Wisconsin or wherever the computer job was. Or took off to Palma’s saying nothing. Although no one over there had summoned her or was sick. Obie was pulling the laces too tight and wagging his head. What simple-ass shit was that, not leaving her a note because she hadn’t left him a note. “Fuck a note anyhow.”
He swung up, stretched and then slumped, a sack of stones swaying in his chest. And what did he call himself doing now? Hiding out. Stalling. His whole
johnson was getting raggedy—his home, his work. And he was sitting on a bench in a basement talking to a locker. The fissures at home had yawned wide and something fine had dropped through. He was not taking care of business. And the one thing in the world he had always been about was taking care of business, he turned to explain to the staircase, a more organic, therefore more reasonable listener, he figured, measuring quickly wood versus metal. And then he saw the envelope sticking out of his appointment book. He did not want to read the letter again, or check over his schedule for the day again, or go into the gym either. But he’d held out the reward of the sauna and a massage to get him through it all. He couldn’t just sit there. Things coming apart and he was sitting it out on the bench. The major parade to begin at midnight and he was having difficulty getting his shoes on. He didn’t recognize himself.
He didn’t recognize her either. Restless, lips swollen, circles under her eyes, spellbound. And didn’t recognize the versions of her whispered in the halls by people who’d worked with her, knew her—“crackpot.” Ever since he’d demanded more of a home life, she’d been in a stew, threatening to boil over and crack the pot all right. Or maybe the cracking had begun years earlier when the womb had bled, when the walls had dropped away and the baby was flushed out. How long would it take to know the woman, his woman? Two years living with her before he learned to identify the particular spasm as her coming? He would enter her throbbing, and she would close around him. And somewhere, as their hips swung, the bottoms of her feet stroking the fat of his calves, her thunderous buns rocking in the seat of his palms, a muscle would clutch at him, and he’d feel the tremor begin at the tip of his joint. Two years it took to distinguish her tremor from his pleasure, her orgasm from the vibration in his hands, in his calves, the quivering in his tightened balls. Two years before her calling out his name in that way would not catch him by surprise. How much longer would it take to learn all of Velma?
The Salt Eaters Page 9