“A lump somewhere,” muttering it, not wanting to interrupt the dialogue between the girls and Lorraine, or miss the points of correspondence in what’s beginning to look like an interesting parallel. Velma holding up one of the plaster bases, chipping a piece off. The girls can watch Jan and Velma and listen to Lorraine and get several lessons in one.
“Sleep white and your rhythm goes right off. Hmph, hmph, hmph.”
A piece of plaster from the base is buried in the clay, throwing the jug off its axis. They all can hear the offbeat.
“That Reilly boy’s on the offbeat track. You watch and see,” Lorraine said to Jan and Velma. And the whole group watched the jug wobble up sideways as if it were Teddy Reilly himself.
“Let’s concentrate on the clay now,” Jan finally said, clearing her throat with a theatrical flourish, just as the sliver of plaster came tearing through the terra cotta walls.
Velma tapped Ruby and then tucked her feet under her on the couch, and tried not to give Robert a target. She didn’t blame him for being warm. Jan had picked a not-so-cool time to do what she was doing. She was tracking him across the carpet, throwing her hands about, trying to explain how difficult it is to pull up straight if you’re a girl and no women are getting their wagons around you, or if you’re a boy and no men are getting their wagons in a circle.
Robert was lining his golf club up with the edge of an old bugle bell. There was a bridge made of wooden hangers tied together with the pants rod removed, several “psych” jars of water, and some pebbles from the fish tank strewn about the carpet for effect.
“Look, that’s his business. Or his father’s,” Robert said. And Jan waiting for him at the bugle bell was pressing the soft V at the base of her throat as if to dislodge a fish bone.
“You could talk to him, Robert.”
They all watched the golf ball roll under the chair and then drag another inch forward on the shag.
“And just what am I supposed to say to him? ‘The sisters don’t like you humping white girls?’ ‘Keep off the Heights fore they lynch ya, boy!’?”
“Oh, Robert.”
And Ruby muttering that what somebody needs to do is get a wad of lamb’s wool and a can of chloroform and bring the brother home. Robert’s look makes the roots of Velma’s hair tighten. He’s swung his club over his shoulder like a back scratcher and is all for abandoning the ball in favor of the cards, which is what the two invited them over for. But Jan is still trying to coax him out of the sandtrap.
“It’s not about sisters being uptight, Robert. Or white folks being uptight. It’s about the boy himself. Old Man Reilly is so old. And that boy’s been to all those white schools, white camps.”
Robert is considering a bank shot off the legs of the chair. Ruby reviews her freshman math. But Robert buries the club head in the carpet, folds his hands, and gives Jan his attention.
“I always took you for your word, Robert. Nation building?” Jan’s whispering, realizing finally that she might have done this in private. But Velma appreciating finally why she didn’t. ‘And don’t forget to build the inner nation, Robert.”
“The nation,” Robert says, checks his watch and takes his shot.
“I don’t believe this,” Ruby snorts and Velma pushes a pillow in her face.
“It’s like trying to build a bowl when you haven’t got the clay properly centered,” Jan was saying after Robert left the house, confident they all agreed on a common reference for ‘it.’ “It’ll rise, it’ll flare, it’ll look good for a minute. But it’ll wobble and tear. It won’t stand up.”
“Who you telling?” Ruby was on her feet wrassling a chunk of air onto a wheel of similar substance. “Yeh, like trying to get this bowl done without doing a scientific analysis of the objective conditions and primary issues.”
“Ruby. Quit.”
“Or taking a serious position on the woman question, the national question, the gay question, the so-forth-and-so-on questions.”
“Just stop, Ruby.”
“It’s a case of Little Red Henism most of the time. Notice how fewer and fewer people are ready to build. Hence my bowl here is jeopardized.”
Velma and Jan laughing and holding each other while Ruby wrassles the bowl in the air, her head wagging no, no, miming with each spin the tear that was growing more critical, the lump that was curling the lip of the bowl over in a sneer.
“Your performance just does not make me feel good, Ruby.”
“She’s perverse, Velma.”
She was on the piano stool with the baby in her lap. They were turning, getting taller, her feet farther and farther away from the pedals, the baby riding, his legs round her waist. And James was at the desk editing the Academy manual. And Mama Mae was sitting in the horsehair Chesterfield, chanting in that way of hers, “Dahlin, when M’Dear told me the news, I fell on my knees and cried, ‘Glory!’ It’s a beautiful thing.” She was misting up, and the fact that she’d passed up the opportunity to emphasize that she’d had to get the news from M’Dear about the adoption made Velma misty too. “Lawd, all them babies; all them babies inside all them places waiting on us to bring’m on home.” And Velma was turning slowly on the stool, smiling at Mama Mae, smiling at the baby there was no name for yet, big as he was. Then James standing, turned toward the window, arms wide to the sun, then turned toward her and the baby. “I orient myself,” he smiled. “I de-occident myself,” she answered. A private joke whose origins they’d forgotten and Mama Mae frowned, leaning over to take her grandson from its funny-talking mama.
“Health is my right,” Velma finally said with some clarity, no longer reeling and rocking on the stool. Her eyes were opening and the healer’s hands were patting her. “My right,” she said again.
Just what so many patients maintained indignantly when the bill came. The original statement had been more than done in bas-relief over the Infirmary archway more than a hundred years ago by carpenters, smiths and other artisans celebrated throughout the district in song, story and recipe and immortalized finally in eight-foot-high figures of eye-stinging colors on the east wall of the Academy of the 7 Arts. Those black men of old who had flat out refused to haul them stones anutha futha no matter what the surveyors and other standing-about-with-pipes experts had to say on the subject of gradients and silt and faults and soil mold. Cause the stars said and the energy belts led and the cards read and the cowries spread and the wise ones reared back in their rockers, spat a juicy brown glob into a can, shaded their eyes and took a reading of the sun and then pointed—that spot and none other.
So the Southwest Community Infirmary, Established 1871 by the Free Coloreds of Claybourne, went up on its spot and none other at the base of Gaylord Hill directly facing the Mason’s Lodge, later the Fellowship Hall where the elders of the district arbitrated affairs and now the Academy where the performing arts, the martial arts, the medical arts, the scientific arts, and the arts and humanities were taught without credit and drew from the ranks of workers, dropouts, students, housewives, ex-cons, vets, church folk, professionals, an alarming number of change agents, as they insisted on calling themselves. The Infirmary at the base of the hill; its north windows looking out toward the post office that had gone up on the first bluff where cars, buses and trucks shifted gear for the second pull up. And the Infirmary’s sun deck overlooking the Regal Theatre marquee which jutted out so close to the curb, bold children on the school buses would lean out on a dare and snatch bulbs or remove letters from the racks leaving baffling announcements, while the driver shifted gears for the final pull up to Gaylord Heights where a fountain ought to have been, or a plaza for couples to promenade about on Sunday afternoons, or a public garden with a pond and some of the statuary on exhibit in the halls of the Academy should have been. But where stood like a sentinel, the gaslight in front of the wrought-iron gate of the Russell estate, eager to annex unto itself the whole of Gaylord Hill, the prime real estate of Black turf that ended somewhere between the lane—where the b
us turned carrying away the chemical plant workers and Heights’ domestics and the schoolchildren—and the mailbox some six hundred feet below the gaslight. The flame in a nervous flicker always. Fire going out. Animals closing in. The tongue of the flame darting, striking at the globe. Each year a new globe to replace the one shattered not by the fanglike flame but by the bus riders just before turning into the lane. Each year a globe more ornate and preposterous than the last, as if the Russells were convinced it was their manifest burden to bear the torch, to bring light to the natives of Gaylord Hill.
It was said though in the stories, songs, jokes and riddles of the district that the lamp was not gas but electric and drew upon the power line that fed the Regal and the rest of the establishments of the Hill, that, of course, had to foot the bill, and wasn’t that just the way? And more than one community sage would look toward the Heights on viewing the dimming halo of the Regal’s marquee on foggy nights or upon hearing the groan as the Infirmary switched to its own generators, power from the main line dwindling, would nudge a kid and point toward the top of the hill and explain, “Their world-wide program, their destiny, youngblood, is to drain the juices and to put out the lights. And don’t you forget it.”
When the scaffolding went up in the spring of 1871, the stone masons mounted the face of the Infirmary to chip free from the chosen stones all manner of messages responsibles might read to their charges. Some messages written out to be read by anybody who’d mastered the alphabet. Others, more finely carved and worked over, to be read by initiates of the order only, those selfsame secrets of alchemy attempted in the carvings of Notre Dame miles away from the seat of knowing, those selfsame instructions of the arcana burned, buried, smothered in the cradle but persistent, those selfsame knowledges and mnemonics sacked, plundered, perverted. But over the Infirmary arch all of it pure, insistent. And when new, had urged the originals to transverse the globe to share the wisdoms with the peoples of the Solomons, the Philippines, the China Seas, the Indian Ocean, Mexico, Europe, Arabia, Mesopotamia—the neighbors who’d been set adrift at the splitting of Pangea.
All of it gazing down in stony insistence on Dr. Julius Meadows standing on the steps, looking over his shoulder at the paint job in the halls of the Infirmary. White, white with a flush of pink, like an udder left too long without milking. That’s my country self talking, Dr. Meadows frowned, coming down the steps. And it was his country self admiring the tabby wall that wrapped around the back of the Infirmary holding the woods off. And it was his country self wanting to set foot on the crushed-oyster-shell walkways that led to the sheds where the generator hummed. Looking up, he saw merely sandstone faces, wheels, five-sided puzzles, basalt, grape clusters, bricks and coils that could be snakes to the fanciful of mind. Figures, glyphs, warnings, bricks, carvings, arches—it was all the same to him, a building. He looked toward the curtains of the treatment room, then turned his back, blushing, for the idea of actually making a journey through the woods in search of two catatonic women branded him a fool in his city mind.
Dr. Meadows moved quickly toward the avenue as if with purpose, trying to make some sense of his behavior earlier, his actions now. Reviewing the Hippocratic oath after all this time, it was peculiar, a compulsion. He had wanted to call them out, dialogue with those beings behind the names, know the gods he’d given allegiance to. To converse with one’s principles seemed both the height of sophistication and the height of ridiculousness at the same time. Seemed primitive. Seemed … He lost his point and then lost himself among the children out of school, adults out of work, shoppers, workers from the chemical plant’s second shift smudged and smelly and in search of a quick bite to eat.
There seemed to be a contest going on between the record shop and the neighboring bar, an ear-splitting electronic version of an old Wild Bill Doggett piece he had once danced to hitting him at his back, and a spastic rock piece he’d never heard assaulted him head-on. “Band of Thieves” he tagged the first group, and it was getting so he had to look hard at the musicians on the bandstand when he went into a club these days, the white boys had it down. “Chinese band,” he labeled the latter, as his father had called the group he’d planned to hook up with. “A bunch of opium heads.” So Meadows had gone to medical school.
“We need to bring scientific thinking to the masses,” a kid in a Levi suit was haranguing his buddies, the youths marching along four abreast. Meadows had to step into the street and walk around a parking meter to avoid getting hit by their book satchels. “The masses are still reacting out of infantile emotionalism.”
“Mostly it’s diet,” maintained the one who had almost broken Meadows’ kneecap. “Diet and stress.”
“Izat right?” an indignant drunk, snatching at the passing satchel, was challenging the four young men to a talk-off. But they continued on and left the man reeling, so once again Meadows moved toward the curb. This time he was stopped by a group of skinny old men in shirt-sleeves leaning up against a Coup de Ville, eying three young girls dancing in the middle of the street, swinging a red plastic tape recorder back and forth as in a relay race.
“I feel so sanc-anc-tee-fie-eyed.”
“Before you can get sanctified, girlie, you gotta be saved.”
“Save your breath, Shakey Bee, can’t tell these young girls a thing.”
The third man was squinting like he was in need of an aspirin. It was Meadows’ guess that he simply wanted his cronies to shut up so he could watch the girls in peace.
“How you get saved?” one of the girls asked in mock seriousness, arms out like the radio was a kid sister she was swinging. The quiet man with the headache appealed to Meadows. Couldn’t he make everybody be quiet and just enjoy the floor show? The girl asking the question had superb tits, Meadows noticed. “How you get saved?” she asked again, her head to the side as if she didn’t know she had magnificient tits, as if that was not why she wore her crushed leather belt like a tourniquet. “I seriously want to know.”
“Surrender.”
“Surrender?” She rolled her eyes and did a snaky move with her hips the headache man fully enjoyed. “What kind of surrender?” She was looking straight at Meadows. Meadows thought it wise to cross the street.
“Surrender? Counterrevolutionary batshit,” said the skinnier of the three girls, imitating someone who evidently wore a cap with a bill, for she mimed the yanking down of a cap as she spoke. “Surrender is antistruggle,” she announced in this other person’s voice, making the third girl giggle, but Meadows doubted she knew why.
“Is that what they’re teaching you at school these days?” The man was shrugging off the headache man’s hand plucking at his sleeve. “To curse your elders?”
“Aww, man, it’s spring and it don’t cost us anything to enjoy all the pretty flowers. Why you want to get overheated?” Headache pleaded.
“Wait up now. I ain’t through talking to you.”
“We through listening, less you got some money,” Tits said.
“I got some money,” Headache spoke right up, both hands digging in his pockets.
“What you got?” The other two had shot past him, but the brazen one was once again looking Meadows square in his mouth. “Gloria, check this out. Ever seen a nigger blushing?”
“He a nigger?”
Meadows crossed back over to the other side, wondering why he was putting himself through all these changes. But it had been so long since he had simply walked in a Black neighborhood, been among so many Black people. He wished he knew someone in Claybourne he could call up and invite for a drink, or call up and be invited for dinner.
“Supper. Suppah.” He mouthed the word, relished it. There was an elderly man at the bus stop greeting the passers-by. He looked like Meadows imagined his grandfather had looked. He laughed and showed his bridgework. He looked like a man who might be interesting to have suppah with. Meadows was tempted to take the bus, strike up a conversation and … But then there was a sidewalk café coming up where two good-loo
king women were eating salad out of one plate with their fingers and talking, enjoying themselves. A nice place with chinaware and amber-colored glasses and silverware that shone. Not at all what he’d have expected to find in this neighborhood. He thought about sitting down and having a glass of white wine. But in front of the entranceway was a group of young men and women so intent upon what a tall man with a bow tie bobbing at his throat had to say, that they wouldn’t make room for him.
“I’m not here to boogie, but to jolt you back into your original right minds.”
“You a dreamer, mistuh.” A woman coming out of the café, stuffing an apron into her handbag, broke through the group and backed Meadows up against the white ironwork fencing. She looked like she knew a thing or two, it seemed to him, at least about how to make an opening for herself. “Dreamer,” she sighed, looking straight at Meadows as though they’d spoken of just this topic at breakfast and she would now take his arm and they would go home together. She was looking at him and then she wasn’t, had moved on. And Meadows changed his mind about the wine.
He continued toward the corner, hearing the voice of the tall man in bow tie clear over the heads of the crowd—“History is calling us to rule again and you lost dead souls are standing around doing the freakie dickie”—and adjusting his pace to each beat in the traffic, people scurrying or dawdling or bumping into each other, dreaming along the pavement—“never recognizing the teachers come among you to prepare you for the transformation, never recognizing the synthesizers come to forge the new alliances, or the guides who throw open the new footpaths, or the messengers come to end all excuses. Dreamer? The dream is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is the unreality.” Meadows was out of earshot, but the words still resonated. His city and his country mind drew together to ponder it all.
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