I Got to Keep Moving

by Bill Harris

  Mr. Amalfi left, whistling.

  “Hear he likes a little dark meat,” Chap said to Vienna and Luck after Pearl and Son had gone inside.

  Vienna’d heard it too, said, “Mr. Amalfi’d be colored if he could.”

  “Would be if it didn’t cost him,” Luck said.

  “Might be even if it did,” Chap said.

  Son started that next Monday morning.

  In the early morning light, in the gateway of the writhe of metal of 560, Son stood at the curb. He was in his zipped jacket and wool cap, listening as Mr. Amalfi, in the seat of his produce-loaded wagon, rambled up Clinton. The sound of the man’s whistling warbled dramatically above the steady pace of the horse’s metal-shod hooves. Horse, man, and rig pulled to a halt.

  “Good morning, Mister Amalfi.”

  “Buongiorno, Senior Luna.”

  Giving the boy a hand up to the wagon seat beside him, and with a light flick of the reins, they began making their way up Clinton Street. The boy’s heart rate much faster than Bellini, the horse’s trod, which he would come to learn was andante. They crossed Dunbar, heading for the Lewis Heights district around North Clinton Avenue. Mister Amalfi, even that first morning, asking questions about phrases and punctuations, laughing when asking what something was called as he pointed to it, before remembering that Son couldn’t see it.

  Stupido.

  Stupid.

  It was the first instance of a lot of their time spent laughing at and about their handicaps with English and sight. Fun. Not like work.

  “Good morning, ladies,

  ready or not . . .”

  Daisy—the domestic, the girl, the help—who worked for Mrs. Jacob, who was the wife of Mr. Russell Jacob, who was the manager of First Chilton Bank, recognized the voice, but it took her a minute to place its owner.

  “Here comes the produce man

  come see what Tony’s got.”

  Then it came to her like sunshine breaking through a cloud. Son. Couldn’t be nobody but that blind who’d won the last, she couldn’t remember how many, amateur contests on Thursday nights at the King picture show.

  “Got sweet onions and salad greens,

  peas and beans,

  got carrots, turnips and beets,

  5 cents a bunch.”

  She heard him sing as she, wiping her hands on her apron, walked down the hall from the kitchen and looked out the parlor window.

  “String beans, spinach, cooking apples,

  5 cents a pound.”

  Him, all right. Sitting beside the Dago Tony on the buckboard of the wagon.

  Daisy saw the front curtains, upstairs and down, in the Boland house across the street pull back; Ruth Ann, old Mrs. Boland’s girl, a fellow petitioner at Zion AME, likely downstairs; and Mrs. Boland, the wife of Mr. John Boland, a high-up, senior manager of something out to the plant, peeking out from the second floor.

  Son’s head held back at the same angle as when he was on stage, same joy in his voice, same smile on his face, singing out.

  “Got sweet onions and got corn,

  tomatoes round and ripe,

  got string beans, pretty and green

  and the price is right, come see what I mean.”

  As she headed back down the hall for the back door, Daisy patted her apron pocket to make sure she had the seventy-five cents produce money she’d been given that morning.

  “Miss Jacob,” Daisy called, hoping the woman was having her after breakfast nap; “it’s the vegetable man!”

  Son was singing now, just like Bessie Smith,

  “There ain’t nothing I can do, or nothing I can say

  That folks don’t criticize me,”

  Just like Bessie Smith for the world,

  “But I’m goin’ to do just as I want to anyway

  And don’t care if they all despise me.”

  Laughing she moved quickly back to the kitchen, pausing only to slip into her shoes, then grab the big woven-string shopping bag from the doorknob and through the back door, across the porch, around the side of the house toward the street.

  In that bright spring to browning fall season along North Clinton Avenue and the wide, quiet, oak-lined streets of the surrounding Lewis Heights neighborhoods, there were occasional minor distractions that broke up the routine of Daisy’s and the other domestic’s monotonous day-work duties. Welcomed were the mailman, the door-to-door salesmen, the regular arrivals of the milkman and egg sellers, and shinny men. But their favorite diversion was the Tuesday and Saturday appearances of Son and the produce man. The sharp, slow clop-clop of the horse’s hooves on the cobblestones, and the boy singing his chants about their produce and his other songs, popular and operatic, were the unquestioned highlights of those days.

  Though they would not understand the opera songs’ words, they marveled at how smooth, as the shimmering colors in the soap bubbles of her Monday morning wash, each note flowed out of and into the next, and how they rose from low to high and back like the call of a whippoorwill. Daisy longed to sing along with him, jealous to know the words the way the blind boy did, and to be able to speak Italian. She tried to imagine Horace and her sitting at a candle-lighted table in an Italian restaurant, with a strolling singer serenading them as they held hands.

  That first morning Daisy was among the girls to gaggle and jockey good-naturedly to get the best of the items in bushels and baskets and boxes in the loaded wagon bed.

  Tony, the not half-bad looking Italian man with the thick mustache, who reminded her of a rough-around-the-edges version of Warren William in Imitation of Life, answering, Questo è il mio colore figliola. His colored son, he translated, as he and the boy laughed, and he gestured for the women to keep it a secret from their employers.

  Tony, as always, gracious to the colored women, young and old, as if they were donna di casa, women of the house, rich and positioned and white, white as the white women peering out at them from the windows of the stately houses they were mistresses of. Calling each by name with a tune whistle-trilled for each and a parting Grazie e bona giornata, signora (Thank you and good day, madam), as he added their coins to his four-barreled coin changer, and Bellini with a short nicker, neigh, or snort, clopped, shoe-hoofed forward, like an 80-stone winding-down windup toy. Windup toys being exactly what Mrs. Jacob thought all of them, their colored help, were, something mechanical to be wound up and ordered around until they finally ran down at the end of the day.

  Even before they arrived, Daisy whisked the feather duster absentmindedly at the menagerie of porcelain lords and ladies, as she imagined Son and Tony making their way among the other, just stirring, merchants at the farmers market, and maybe waving to Horace in the early light as they moved up Chilton Street and across Dunbar on the ride out each morning. Horace maybe saluting them with his nightstick, his badge number 79 shiny on his dark blue uniform in announcement of who he was: Chilton’s first colored patrolman.

  After they had purchased what their white women had instructed their girls to get and the wagon had moved up the street, their white women would come downstairs and sit in the way at the kitchen table, smoking and sipping at a cup of coffee, asking after the odd couple. Who was that colored boy sitting next to that Tony, singing? And was he blind?

  Yes, and he had talent, he was smart and he was theirs, Daisy thought, and guessed all of the other colored maids and cooks, babysitters, and laundresses up and down the length of North Clinton Avenue were as possessive about Son as she, and would go through the same sort of interrogation. They too would know pretty much the same things about Son, but would parcel out bits of it in one-word answers like a miser doling ducats from his stash. Their employers wanting to know not only about Son but also about what went on down below Dunbar. It was as if the employers were striving to close the wide gap in the disparity between what their employees knew about them versus what they knew about those who worked for them.

  Fat chance. It was one of the things the women and girls laughed out loud a
t as they waited at the bus stop or in the back of the public transportation as it rumbled them home in the evening. They swapped stories about how they had deflected inquiries about their business as they had picked up bits of gossip told directly, overheard during phone conversations, or the dozens of other ways the domestic cadre knew what they knew about the households and business lives of white folks in the North Clinton district.

  Tony and Son went on up the street too busy tending to their own to think about them noisy women. Son singing and attracting the housekeepers like the Pied Piper, as if they were intoxicated by the fecund aroma of plump oranges, plums, apples, and melons to heft, sniff, thump, and then purr about in flirty tones, unnecessary to the transaction but fun, like humming birds flitting around impatiens. Thinking the boy too green to understand the game as they teased the produce man in hushed, hussy-coded innuendos, inquiring about the firmness and juiciness of items in the tradesman’s haul. All chirping at him at once as he tried to comprehend it all and answer in kind with rushing flourishes of tongue-stumbling English before having to resort to what, in their imaginations, were rutting yet romantic Italian expressions. Making him even more difficult to understand, and delighting them even more, until either the boy, humming and rocking slightly, secretly pulled the reins, or the horse’s internal clock thought it time to move on, and with a snort took one clop step forward, causing the jingle of the traces, signaling it was time for the boy to sing out again above its adagio gait, in a tone as musky as a rotting onion—

  “Big fat berries been plucked,

  peaches shook from the tree,

  telling you the berries’ve been plucked,

  sweet, juicy peaches

  shook down from the tree.

  Ladies, if you want you some,

  run out here now and talk to me.”

  —and them covering their mouths to keep their screaming laughter at this twelve-year-old soul, sounding for the world like the bassist blues singer, from rippling across the lawn and through the windows for their boss women to hear, until then it was really time for them to scruff back to their dusting, scrubbing, diapering, or cooking.

  Until soon one morning came a sudden summer downpour and they, man and boy, soaked to the skin, were given refuge by Daisy on Mrs. Jacob’s back porch. It was on Daisy’s own initiative to give them towels to dry their heads and she who double spread newspapers for them to stand on just inside by the kitchen door. Mr. Amalfi politely declined, but Son entered. He was given a cookie to nibble (and one wax paper-wrapped to put in his pocket for later), and a cup of milk from a quart delivered fresh that morning, cream on top, and if Mrs. Jacob didn’t like it, then too black bad.

  Daisy was asking about his mama, or Luck, Chap, or String, until Mrs. Jacob came to check on the commotion.

  “He’s dripping on your floor, Daisy,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Well, if you want to mop it again it’s fine with me.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Well worth it, Daisy thought, in a way she didn’t try to analyze or justify. She just knew it felt good to have him standing there, and if it meant mopping “her” floor again she’d do it and hum while she did.

  What happened was Mrs. Jacobs pulled rank and the boy was kidnapped and ushered down the hall into the parlor and stationed by the door of the bright, dustless room while he was questioned about ways and things to do with Tony, or ‘lo’ Dunbar, including was his mama the woman who was the seamstress? Miss Pearl Moon, yes, ma’am she was. Well tell her I might be calling to speak with her about a garment, Mrs. Jacobs said, but it had to be kept a secret between the two of them. Yes, ma’am he would and he would deliver the message. Yes, she said, she could see that he was a young man of his word. And then, that bit of business out of the way, she went seeking verification of juicy bits of gossip gleaned from the tidbits overheard by her and the other mistresses from girls up or down the block, many of which he might have known but almost surely had little knowledge of and even less interest in, but which Daisy—probably eavesdropping from the kitchen—had claimed total ignorance of.

  Until the rain stopped and it was time to go. Thanking them, and assuring them he’d pass the greetings along to Chap and Luck and his mother and Vienna and Branch Ottley, Son returned to his hawking—

  “Come look ladies, we got it all,

  Tony’s best produce for the fall.

  Beets, carrots, cabbage, grapes,

  okra, potatoes, collard greens,

  pumpkins, peppers, pears,

  lettuce, limes, Brussels sprouts,

  come see our wares!—”

  —and the planets and squirrels went through their cycle, and leaves greened and flamed and fell, and the wagon on the last day of the season rolled back down North Clinton Avenue toward Dunbar and below, Tony and Son together on the seat; the boy singing; Daisy, as she had come to do over time, humming, harmonizing her soprano with his tenor until they faded out of hearing.

  They’d assigned each other homework, a radio program to listen to with an articulate speaker or a classical music or opera program, to be discussed the following day, clarifying points, defining, correcting grammar, notions.

  Son had buon orecchio, a good ear, and uccello beffardo, mockingbird skills. He learned as much Italian as his boss learned English. It was still heavily accented, but grammatically correct. He had a steadily increasing English vocabulary. The boy had also learned about Italian opera and composers, and oratorios, da capo arias, trills, and accents that thrilled the listeners along North Clinton Avenue. If he had a voice, Tony said, never mind like Caruso, but like Son’s, he would be happy as a lark. He would sing outside the windows of all the beautiful Negro women, Tutte le belle donne di Negro, while they flung roses down to him.

  Until it was finally time, as Son, holding Bellini’s reins, pulled up in front of 560. Mr. Amalfi helped Son down.

  “Goodbye, Mister Moon. Thank you.”

  “No, grazie, Mister Amalfi.”

  The boy moved through the iron gateway and up the walk as the horse’s hoof beats faded down Clinton.

  20

  Tinhouse

  Chilton, 1939

  Those who knew Tinhouse knew they didn’t really know him. They knew he did not run his mouth, and knew he took his time, but also knew what little they did know was enough to know if he’d wanted them to know more he would already, after all these years, have told them. That much they knew.

  In the shop Tuesdays through Saturdays and after hours during weekend poker, cooncan, and tonk, while others around him were in rambling or heated discussions, Tinhouse was content to do what in his opinion was one of the two things he did best, play cards, and the other was to cut hair. To him neither activity required a whole lot of conversation.

  His opinions on politics, news, sports, or music were not generally offered or sought, but the phrase “Ain’t that right, Tin?” was often asked, as he was called upon to be the final arbiter in tangled matters of dispute. He was the man behind the first chair. It was his place of business. He was acknowledged and appreciated. They just didn’t expect a lot of jawboning from him.

  Tinhouse did not mind words, would listen as long as you wanted to talk, and you could always sense that he was paying attention, with interest, not just giving the unhuh or grunt at the appropriate time. You were never conscious of his having posed a question, but he must have asked you something, you would think later, otherwise why had you opened up to him like that, not that you were sorry you had, having felt good getting whatever it happened to be out. Furthermore, you never had to worry that what he was told was subject to judgment or in danger of being spread. The one thing everybody knew was, Tinhouse did not run his mouth.

  That was part of what made it as hard to read him as a clean blackboard. That, and that he was so deliberate. Steady. Working, eating, walking; what little talking he did was slow. They didn’t mean slug-slow, or stupid slow, not dawdling but measured. He was
always on time. He just took his time and yours too if you let him. No hurry, no worry, he’d’ve said if he had put it into words. But he didn’t.

  In poker, for instance, raking in the big pots wasn’t what made him a frequent overall winner when, in the wee small hours, the game broke up. Chasing Lady Luck’s whims down dark alleys with blind trust was not his way. Studied and steady was his game. So deliberate was he that it was hard to figure if his strategy was focused solely on the hand in play, or if he was thinking ahead four or five games, or five or six sessions. Either way, the general consensus was that Tinhouse was the turtle to bet on in the race with a hare.

  Griff, the second barber, could cut almost two heads to Tinhouse’s one, but being in Tinhouse’s barber chair was a time you could close your eyes and, as he was giving you a hot lather shave, or washing your hair, or massaging your scalp, or hand clipping and scissor snipping and razor edging away, look like Lena Horne was humming some lullaby you first heard from your mama when you were still in her belly. You forgot all about your job and your bills and squabbles and the general jinx that was white folks. So when he tapped you on the shoulder and turned you so you could look at your newly shorn self in the mirror, you were nine times out of ten disappointed that he had finished and you had to be dusted off, powdered, and sent back out into the world.

  Where was he from? Son, in Tinhouse’s chair, asked, as Griff was finishing with Maxwell, and Haworth was getting in the other barber’s chair for his every-two-weeks cut.

  Alabama was Tinhouse’s answer.

  Him too, Son said.

  A couple of them missed it, but a couple of the others turned their sudden attention toward what was really a private conversation between barber and his young customer, their ears perked up like a stream-lapping deer hearing a twig snap.

  “Was Alabama where you came here to Chilton from?”