by John Lawton
‘Oh he’s rich beyond my dreams or your dreams, and way beyond Lois’s. She married him when he was flat broke. But he’s not rich beyond his own dreams.’
‘I never thought of you as a rich kid.’
‘You knew I had money.’
‘Sure . . . but you know . . . not a rich kid.’
‘I didn’t grow up with money. I wasn’t raised a rich kid. I was almost growed before Sam hit it rich.’
‘You almost growed, white boy?’
‘Nope. I just growed.’
‘Well, tank de lawd for that.’
And she exploded in peals of laughter.
We got through the second day. To my amazement Althea rode, and rode better than I did. We spent a long afternoon on the range. Me and Sam way ahead, because he set the pace and didn’t seem much to care if he jolted me to pieces in the process, Lois, Althea and Huey trailing behind. I listened to his dreams, his new dreams, over here he was going to build a whatsit, over there a thingumajig, both of which would speed up something on the God-knows-what. He didn’t ask me any questions. Not one. Now, he had never been much curious about my life back East but he’d usually rattle through a few of the formalities—he’d always asked about Mel, but could never remember his name, always ‘that little feller’. It was as though he thought any question, anything at all to do with the life I led away from home, was to risk opening a can of worms. So I listened to him instead. And when the five of us met up again it seemed to me he wasn’t looking Althea in the eyes. I say seemed. I mean seemed. I cannot be sure at all.
We almost got through dinner. We were past dessert and but a move away from hard booze.
I wasn’t paying attention. Lois had put Huey to bed and was back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room. I followed. I gave scant notice to whatever it was Sam had decided to chew the fat about with Althea. Body language, like I said not a phrase we knew then, should have told me. He was stabbing the table with the tip of one finger—the ‘fuck-you’ digit rapping down. All I caught was the tail end of whatever. A phrase to stop me in my tracks.
‘What is it with you people?’
‘We people?’ Althea said, big eyes popping.
‘Yes. You people. I don’t get it. What is it with you people?’ I stuck my foot in the door.
‘What people would that be exactly, Dad?’
Sam turned in his chair, clearly unaware that I’d heard any of what had been said.
‘You. You two. The both of you.’
‘Us?’ I said with no real idea what he’d say next but fearing the worst.
‘Dammit, son, you can say I’ve had too much to drink and that my brain’s addled—but the only word I can think of is “pinkos”.’
‘Oh, we be pink alrighty,’ said Althea in her corniest stepinfetchit. Then she slapped the table with the palms of her hands and hooted with laughter.
‘Lawd, Lawdy Mass’Raines, we is pink!’
Sam went from pink to red. The poor bastard was blushing. I could not share the joke nor the laughter. It would have been so unlike my father to have ‘you peopled’ anyone just because they were black. We’d heard too many dumb Texan politicians do that. But I was amazed to hear the phrase on his lips even out of its habitual context. I found myself wondering whether Althea’s was the laughter of relief or a poke in the eye for the old man.
‘What were you talking about?’
‘Cuba,’ Sam said. ‘What else is there to talk about?’
I felt the knot in me unwind a little. We’d stepped back from the brink to argue about brinkmanship. Had to be an improvement.
‘Your Daddy was just reminding me that Cuba is only two hundred miles from Florida.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it’s only ninety.’
Sam just nodded.
I took my seat and decided to pitch in. To argue was better than letting the situation slide.
‘Dad? How close do you think Turkey is to Russia?’
Sam looked perplexed. I realized he didn’t really know where Turkey was at all.
‘What’s Turkey got to do with anything?’
‘It’s closer than ninety miles. It has a common border with Russia.’
‘So?’
‘We have missiles stationed there. Far more than they ever got on to Cuba.’
‘And that makes what Khrushchev did right?’
‘No. It just makes it even.’
‘Even? This is about getting even?’
‘Sure—what else is the balance of power about? It means having as much blow away power as the next guy. Maybe getting equal is a better way of putting it. Equalising the threat. If you blow me away I’ll blow you away before your missiles land. Mutually assured destruction. MAD for short.’
‘You didn’t make that up?’
‘No, Dad. I didn’t. It’s in common use. That’s what the Cold War is. That express certainty.’
Sam looked at Althea. She stopped laughing, got her breath back. I dearly wanted her to say something. She could antagonize the old man all she liked—just please don’t laugh at him.
‘That’s why we can’t win, Mr Raines. It’s what you might call a bum’s game.’
Sam looked from her to me. Still flushed from booze and embarrassment, his eyes shifting slowly between his son and this ball of fire he had brought home.
‘But,’ he said at last, ‘we did win.’
I flipped a mental coin, decided it would be better for me to answer and got in first. Not that Althea was in any hurry.
‘No, Dad. We didn’t.’
Sam got up, muttered a soft ‘Jeezus’, left the table and came back with a bottle of his favorite Four Roses whiskey. I knew the sign. It meant he was hunkering down to get serious at almost the precise moment he would lose the ability to hold onto the serious.
‘Tell it to me one more time, son. JFK went on the teevee and told us we’d won. That Khrushchev feller was moving his missiles out. I saw people dancing in the street down in Lubbock. Those guys that had took to their shelters came out stinking to high heaven and happy as hogs. Old Elmer Mitchell didn’t get out till two days after, ’cause no one thought to tell him it was all over ’cause no one realized that pile of clods and old oil drums in his backyard was his shelter. I saw people on the news in Washington and New York, cheering. And you say we lost.’
I let him pour out three large shots of whiskey. Waited while he downed his, cradled my own and sniffed it and saw out of the corner of my eye that Althea wasn’t touching hers.
‘No one said we lost, Dad. We just didn’t win. That’s what the game is about. No one can win. We just evened up in a new way. All the same pieces are still on the board. We just shuffled them around.’
‘How so?’
‘We’ll be moving some of our missiles out of Turkey too.’
‘Like tit for tat?’
‘Mr Raines, that just about sums up the last fifteen years of history.’
‘Tit for tat? So our prowess, our pride got nothin’ to do with it?’
‘Not a damn thing,’ I said.
‘You don’t have the . . . the . . . feeling that we might just have won this one? Whatever the fancy phrase or the hotshit theory . . . That JFK plain outsmarted that Khrushchev feller . . . That we kicked ass . . . That we kicked the Russians all the way back to Russia . . . That we did what we had to do to stem the . . . the tide of Comm’nism? . . . That it won’t be Florida next after Cuba?’
It cost him a lot to say that. It was articulated slowly and shot full of hesitation, but I could not doubt the sincerity of it. The old man really felt this, and, as ever with Sam, what he felt he meant. He was not one to doubt the validity of his own emotions, be they love or rage. Personally I thought Jack Kennedy had sailed so close to the edge he
had terrified himself, but this was not the moment to say so. Sam’s version of things put me in mind of Ike’s domino theory—the great nonsense idea of the Fifties—but it wasn’t the time to mention that either.
Althea tipped her whiskey into my glass. Kissed me on the ear, smiled, let it be said, sweetly at Sam and bid us both goodnight.
I sat with him for an hour or more. He was working his way towards the fourth rose and he was going to have a stinker of a hangover the next morning, but someone had to hear him out, listen to him ramble through his history of the world since 1945, the view from his own briarpatch, America and the geopolitical crisis by a man whom I had hardly known to set foot outside his own state. I said as little as possible. I had no stomach to kick him when he was down, and too little intellect to sway him. Billy would have done that. Just when the old man is getting ready to say black is white, and there is a poorly chosen metaphor if ever I heard one, Billy could talk him out of it.
In bed that night. Two virgins once more, wrapped in satin sheets and moonlight. I said, ‘You know, I really thought for a moment he was going to throw the race thing at us.’
‘Me too. But he didn’t. I guess it’s bred in me to steel my muscles at the sound of “you people”.’
‘He thinks it though. I can feel it. What am I doing with you? He just isn’t saying it.’
‘What did you expect? And since when could we read minds?’
‘I expected him to behave at home as he does in public. He’d never hire or fire a man on grounds of color. Why should he think twice about us?’
‘For one thing you’re his son, not some ranch hand. And for two things we fuck. Bring sex into any equation, you alter the whole damn shebang. If I were you I’d forget about what he thinks of us till he says it. You should be more worried about his Cold War politics than his race politics. You came late to the debate over Cuba. We’d been at it ten minutes before you noticed. Believe me your old man’s a homespun cold warrior.’
‘He’s not as right-wing as he sounds.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Well OK. He’s right-wing. But . . .’
‘But what? He’s your old man . . . so that makes it OK . . . he’s your old man so he doesn’t count? . . . Turner, didn’t you say to me once that what you and Mel had in common, what we all have in common, was that we ran away from Mom and Pop. That we’re all of us runaways one way or another. Turner, Mom and Pop ain’t some one-horse town in some mythical America. They’re real people.’
‘Sure. But . . .’
I’d no end to the sentence.
‘That word again. But.’
‘I know.’
There was a silence. We both stared out at the night sky. Then she turned to me and said, ‘Turner, can we go now?’
Well, sock it to me one more time.
‘If you like.’
‘I like.’
‘I’m sorry about the old man.’
‘Don’t. Do not apologize for him. Do not apologize for anyone. You do that too often. I am sick of you apologizing for the whole white race. It is not your father’s unarticulated blunders into our relationship that bother me. So he struggles not to be offended and not to give offense. What else would you expect? How prepared do you think you can make a man for you turning up with a black woman?’
‘I shouldn’t have to prepare him . . .’
‘But you do. Let it be. It doesn’t matter. We live in the middle of the beast. I grew up knowing that. I grew up expecting the unintending worst from the well-meaning best. And it matters not a damn.’
‘Then why are we leaving?’
‘Because I have to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘Cuba.’
‘Cuba? Why Cuba for Christ’s sake?’
‘Because it’s what matters. It’s what matters now. I thought we had come here in the wake of a world crisis. Your family wanted to see you one last time before we got blown to dust. Maybe to see you and meet your woman. We left it too late. We should have come when Sam asked or not at all. Because what I’ve seen is not the last hug of the nuclear family—what I’ve seen, and if you haven’t too I’ll be amazed, is the resumption of the norm. A reinforced normality. A triumphant normality. We won. We kicked ass. We showed them Cubans. We showed them Russkis. And the fact that we sailed that close to oblivion is quietly forgotten.’
Her fingers snapped in the air to make her point. That close to oblivion. A skeeter’s wing away.
‘Just do this for me, Johnnie.’
I did not make her ask again.
The next morning I made excuses to Sam and Lois. Told the lies Althea would have me tell, and we left.
As ever Lois drove me to the airport. As ever she said, part self-satire, wholly meant, ‘Y’awl come back now.’
And Althea said, ‘Of course I will.’ But she never did.
§
It took her a month to get an itinerary worked out. But she cracked it. You could not fly directly to Cuba, but you could fly to Austria, cross over at Bratislava into Hungary, with the right paperwork, and, again with the right paperwork, cross into Czechoslovakia and from Prague fly to Havana.
‘So you’ll be away for Christmas?’
‘I guess I will.’
‘You really want to do this?’
‘I really want to do this.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because it’s the big picture, that’s why.’
‘I thought we were in the big picture—what makes you think it’s suddenly out there?’
‘Of course it’s out there. Of course it’s the big picture. What do you think we’ve been doing? We’re going to give a man back his right to sit down at the department store soda fountain. Get served a milk shake. Then stroll on down to the voting booth and cast his vote for whomsoever. Johnnie, I’ve no doubts we’ll win this one . . . and when we do I want that man to have the price of a milk shake in his pocket.’
‘The only equality is economic equality?’
She smiled at me—not sweet, not lovely, hard and shiny like Naughahyde.
‘It’s the first equality. All others stem from it. You see the big picture now?’
I saw it. Only an idiot would deny it.
Her first night back from Cuba, in late, late December of ’62, is seared into my memory. Her room was just as she’d left it, books and notepad open on the desk, her Bible Concordance permanently propped on its little wooden lectern, some project for her Master’s nearing completion, scribbled yellow legal pages spread out and covered in Liberace’s pawprints. She walked in, coat still on, looking at everything as though she’d never seen it before. Pacing around as though undecided whether to stay or go, heels clicking on the floorboards, a stranger in her own home, shooting sharp, inquisitive glances at me. Then she cleared the desk, threw the whole damn lot to the floor with a single sweep of her arm, right down to the last damn paperclip. The crash sent the cat scooting, kept me hanging on. Waiting on her next move.
‘Good,’ she said to me. ‘Good. That felt good. A fresh start.’
We talked about it. About Cuba. Talked about it for weeks. It was, she said, with not a trace of naiveté, a structured totalitarian state. Fidel was in charge, no doubt about that. He had created new freedoms—and stolen old ones. But all this she put in half a dozen articles in half a dozen journals. They’re there for the record, but the remark that sticks in the memory is one she never used in print and I don’t think any journal ever would have printed it—‘They work like niggers over there.’
I did not doubt the truth of what she said. I doubted where it was taking her personally. Professionally it had taken her out of Divinity and into a Master’s in Political Science. God got put back in his box. Marx, Marcuse and Wright Mills took pride of place on Mel
’s old desk. She was and wasn’t the same woman. What could I expect? She was twenty-three, I was only a year older, and at that age expect change. The vehemence she had brought to SNCC and the Movement was simply looking around for a new outlet. She was the same woman in so many ways, sexy, affectionate, funny, always cutting me down to size with a one-liner or a put-down. As long as those things remained the same why should I care? I cared because I could not follow. The tangent she took was not, and I don’t know why, open to me. Maybe I was still committed to all the things I’d believed in when I’d graduated . . . gradualism, the ultimate triumph of a non-violent ideology. Althea wasn’t. And if I’d been less wrapped up in her and in my work I’d have seen that the Movement itself was shifting beneath my feet and I’d’ve asked myself the question I did not pose until it was way too late: How long can non-violence sustain itself under the hard rain of violence? A few weeks after she got back I dragged Althea out of a couple of public meetings because she’d hauled off and socked some guys who thought she was an easy target, and a month or so later I only prevented her arrest at a demonstration by sitting on her. When the cops came out wielding clubs she was all geared up to fight back. And I might have asked myself how long the Movement would have room and tolerance for white guys. How long before we became the enemy within?
But—as long as she was affectionate sexy, whatever . . . love dies slowly. Not with a bang but with a whimper. It drizzles out like a guttering candle. Me, like a besotted and blinded moth, seeing nothing but the fact of light so long as there is light. She left me so slowly. Slipped away from me an inch at a time.
The second time she went to Cuba, there was trouble. She’d polished up her Spanish, she met with Guevara, and she appeared on Cuban television, denouncing the American embargo, and hence she appeared in the logs of those spooks who have little else to do but sit around and watch Cuban TV all day. They arrested her at Dulles when she got back. Half a dozen burly feds to tackle one little black woman. Althea had tipped off the press. It was not an incident they were ever going to write up sympathetically, but the photographs said more than any commentary. It looked like what it was, a metaphor for the overwhelming use of force. Althea was Cuba, six two-hundred-pound Feds hustling her out of Dulles were Uncle Sam. It worked. If she’d done that in ’66 or ’67 it would have worked superbly, she would have found a press and a public at least halfway receptive to her message. As it was she was pioneering the exploitation of the media, way ahead of Rubin and Hoffman. When they stuck a mike in front of her all she had to say was, ‘This is how America conducts itself, abroad as well as at home. It bullies the little people.’