by Bill Harris
Naw, not directly, Tinhouse said, he’d traveled all over.
“Me too.”
The blind boy, who before landing in Chilton had spent time traveling throughout the south with his mama leading him, was just asking with the kind of deep curiosity that was his way. And in those two questions he had already gotten more background on Tinhouse than any of them had in all the time they’d known him.
They generally thought the handicap of the boy losing one capacity, eyesight, was balanced off by the gaining of another, insight. Mother Nature’s way of caring for her own. But even more than that the general thinking was he was like the rebirth of somebody who’d been around before, maybe two or three times prior. He was, like his mama Miss Pearl claimed, special. He felt the emotions of the people around him like an animal sensed the weather, like a cat or a chicken getting skittish when a tornado was brewing. It was an instinct to help alert the one-way-or-another disabled to the unseen dangers around them.
In the midst of his clipping Tinhouse was answering yes or no to place names that the boy was asking if he’d been to.
“Got cha!” Hughes shouted from his chair along the wall.
The shop went quiet. Tinhouse even looked up.
“Goddamn, I knew it!” Hughes said. He had stood, his finger pointing at Tinhouse like a redheaded woodpecker at a chestnut tree.
Knew what? Somebody asked, his tone as much as telling Hughes to cool it because they were finally finding out something about Tinhouse, but Hughes, excited as if he had just discovered fire, said, “I knew I’d seen you before!”
“Who?”
“Tinhouse.”
“Where?”
“Fighting.”
“What?” Haworth laughed. “Tinhouse? Fighting?”
A couple of the others added their disbelieving snickers.
Berks told Hughes to sit down.
“That’s right, fighting,” he said as he sat. “I saw you. Him.”
Tinhouse didn’t say anything.
“Fighting what?”
“Who?”
“When?”
“I’m fixing to tell you. About 19 twentysomething–-I don’t remember when right now.” Hughes waited for Tinhouse to confirm it or call him a liar. Tinhouse did neither.
“I been coming in here eight or nine years,” Hughes said, “and I knew I remembered you from somewhere.” He started to rise again but looked at Berks and kept his seat.
Haworth confirmed that he remembered Hughes saying that to him, way back, that Hughes remembered Tinhouse from somewhere, long time ago.
“Yeah,” Hughes said, “’28, ’28, and when you just now said them places you were, I could think of you somewhere other than in this shop, and it come to me, just now. I saw you fight. Deny it.”
“How he going to deny something didn’t happen?” Berks asked.
“It was in Blythe, Tennessee. That boy you beat, the first one—”
“First one?” Berks got in while Hughes was trying to remember the name.
“Axe!”
“How many he fight?”
“Acts?”
“You say first one.”
“Asks?”
“Axe—like a hatchet.”
“Oh, Axe.”
“His name was Axe. Axe. Like a hatchet. That was what they called him. And it was ‘Come one, come all,” Hughes remembered.
“And this was Tinhouse fighting this Axe?” Berks asked.
“Axe was the bad-est nigger in Blythe at that time.”
“Was he?” Berks asked as if he was just humoring Hughes and it was all he could do to keep from laughing at him.
“I lost thirty-five cents on you,” Hughes said to Tinhouse. “This was nineteen, twenty years ago, had to be, maybe longer ago than that.” He shook his head like he didn’t have time to figure it out, “but round in there, had to be,” Hughes said, as Haworth said, “Thirty-five cents was a day or two’s meal-money back then.”
“Two or three, and you mighty well told right it was. And much as I hated that job. Working on the front line in a slaughterhouse, mopping blood and cleaning up cow shit. And they had fights every Saturday night in the stock pen stalls out behind the train depot. And I know you was the most—hardest—you know what I’m trying to say? Most relentless fighter I ever saw,” as he stood, ignoring Berks. “Like a guard dog had snapped its chain.” Showing them: “Come in low. Jab like a jackhammer, crosses, hooks, and uppercuts. All the tricks. It was winner take all. And you did. Had beat down two before Axe. Didn’t a one of them go more than three rounds.” He sat, winded from his demonstration. “Next thing anybody knew you was off in the night. Gone. Had everybody’s money. You a little heavier now, aged of course, but it was you, Negro, nobody but you.”
“What you want?” Berks asked, “your thirty-five cents back?” Everybody laughed. “What you get for betting against Tinhouse in the first place.” Berks looked to Tinhouse for confirmation that it was him, as Hughes turned to Haworth, “You remember I told you way back I knew Tinhouse from somewhere.”
Yeah, Haworth remembered.
“It wasn’t no-body but you! I remember because I hadn’t ever seen no-body fight like that—that hard. And nothing you say going change my mind. It was you,” Hughes concluded, folding his arms and crossing his legs.
“Was it?” Son asked.
“Not likely.”
They were surprised it wasn’t a full denial from Tinhouse.
It got quiet again before Hughes, pleased with himself, said, “Wasn’t no could’ve been. Was. Was you.”
“You talking about a long time ago,” Tinhouse said. “I might not even remember.”
Hughes said he remembered, and told it. “Tinhouse was like a bad boss, was one of them fighters the other guy didn’t have to look for because he was quick and nasty, and always up in the other guy’s face, like it was personal.”
“Where did you say this was?” Tinhouse asked in a monotone that betrayed real interest.
“Blythe. Blythe, Tennessee.”
“Blythe? I think I did come through Blythe once.”
Now they were getting somewhere.
“Blythe. Yeah. I think that’s where I met that boy. Can’t remember his name right now.”
Drawing it out, like he was spoon-feeding a sick child. “Blythe. Train run by a stockyard there.”
“That’s right,” Hughes said.
“I was moving around a bit back around then. Had fights there, right?”
“Bare knuckle. Winner take all.”
“This boy I’m trying to remember—we left about the same time. If I remember correctly he was a fighter,” Tinhouse said, not missing a snip of cutting Son’s hair.
“It was a long time ago,” Hughes said. “It was a long time ago, and it took me a long time to remember, but I didn’t forget. It wasn’t no boy. It was you.”
“Was it?” Son asked.
Griff, who had known Tinhouse the whole twenty or so years he was in Chilton, waited with the others.
Tinhouse was edging around Son’s right ear with the razor, wiping the shaven hairs and foam on a towel over his left wrist.
“Well?” Griff asked, after a long-time silence even for Tinhouse, “You going to tell it or not?”
Tinhouse, satisfied, moved to the left ear. “I cannot remember his name for the life of me. Can’t even remember what he looked like. Remember he said he was on the run. Remember that. I had run away from home not long before then, so we traveled along together for a while. And trying to remember the story he told,” his concentration still on cutting Son’s hair.
Clifford, usually the last one to come in, came in then, smiling and glad to see everybody, wanting, as usual, to talk about something in the news that any other time would have, as usual, already been discussed. Its possibilities thoroughly sifted through and everybody with a position in place on all points of the issue, but by the short hushed greetings and sharp gestures they indicated for him to shut up,
be still, and listen. Not insulted by their dismissive attitude toward his entrance, he did. He leaned, shoulder to the wall near the door, although there was an empty chair at the far end, concentrating, trying to catch on and catch up.
When they had settled again like a flock of birds that had in a sudden flurry swooped, circled, and reroosted, Tinhouse, as if he was unaware of any of it, continued.
“The boy—hell, let’s say Willie—”
Fine with them. They were willing to concede the name; the point was to keep Tinhouse going.
“He said they accused him of thieving. Hadn’t stole a thing,” Tinhouse said.
“Next thing he knew he was under a shotgun. Free labor for the county, chopping weeds side the road, or fieldwork, or picking up dead animals, whatever bent-back slog they needed done.”
“This is this boy Willie you talking about,” Hughes, said, sarcasm dripping off his tone like rain off a rusty roof.
“Working off a seventy-five-dollar fine, he said,” Tinhouse continued, not directly answering Hughes or his accusation, “plus twenty-five for court fees.”
Whew.
“It had started at fifty, the boy said, which was the going vagrancy rate around there at that time, till he called the sheriff a lying motherfucker and the judge took offense.”
Mumph.
“He, this boy, said he knew better, but patience wasn’t one of his virtues then. One hundred dollars at the rate of fifteen cents a day, coming to seventy-five cents a week. Though he was only getting credit for five days, they had him working Saturdays too, off the books, the crew boss, or whatever they called him, pocketing the difference, feeding him wormy stew meat and moldy potatoes, sleeping on a bug-infested pallet on that hot tin house floor.”
Tinhouse leaned away from Son to inspect the backs of both ears. Approved, he lowered his arms to his sides, inhaled and exhaled, then raised them and started on the line at his nape.
“Willie said most of the others were older than him, more tame to the treatment, better suited to put up with that old plantation shit. Anyway, he say he bristled, but so that it didn’t show, and did what he was told, grinning the whole time.” Son’s hairline was level across the bottom as if he had used a straight edge, “Grinned them crackers into relaxing, grinned till that one evening it was just falling dark and they escaped.”
Tinhouse stopped. Was he trying to remember or had he quit telling it?
“Now I don’t even remember if he told me how or what,” he said finally. “Had something to do with hanging from a Loblolly pine limb and stuffing a leafy mud ball in the chimney pipe, and in the smoky confusion he got his hands on a rifle—anyway, he escaped.” He went quiet.
Was that it?
Had he now tapped out?
No wonder he didn’t talk much. He couldn’t tell a story worth nothing.
Somebody had to say something. Something. Somebody.
Son said, “And I guess it wasn’t too long after that you met up with him? Did you and him become partners?”
That was the right thing to ask. The boy’s mama, Miss Pearl, was right. Was something special about him. It was that little bit of a jigger that set the delicate contraption that was Tinhouse back into operation.
“A little while we did. I was fresh to the road and he’d been at it longer. It was him wised me to the ways to maneuver and snake through the twists and tights of being out of the ordinary confines. Ways of thinking about who I was and how I had to be. Ways my daddy would’ve been scared to even dream about.”
“And this boy Willie, looked exactly like you, taught you all this?” Hughes said.
Tinhouse didn’t answer.
“Willie the one,” Hughes continued, “fought like a crazy man?”
“Wasn’t crazy,” Tinhouse said. “Fought the way you had to fight in his situation.”
“Nigger on the run,” Berks said, “in Alabama, them times.”
Tinhouse agreed without acknowledging what Berks had said. “It wasn’t about who you was fighting. Whoever they were, they were just standing between you and getting a meal without stealing. That meant fighting him like he was that white man you’d waited your whole life to whup.”
Okay, then.
It was quiet for a moment, as if they had just heard the opening lines of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, before Griff said, “The white man what had insulted your mama and belittled your daddy with you standing there looking.”
“And always cheated you out of your share on the settling crop count,” Berks added.
Everybody nodding except Son, Tinhouse, and Haworth, who, with his chin on his chest, was getting razor-edged by Griff, but nobody spoke.
How come, Haworth wondered half-mumbling, Willie didn’t just serve out his time?
“And what?” Berks snapped, indignant on Tinhouse’s behalf.
“His debt would’ve been paid—” Haworth said, turning to see why Berks’d asked like he had. “And he’d’ve been free to go back to—” Just that quickly it had turned to sound ridiculous even to him as he heard himself saying it.
“Down there our debt wasn’t never paid,” Berks said, stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray in the arm on his chair.
Their silence was in agreement.
“Ain’t that right, Tin?”
They waited. They had questions, but didn’t want to press for details and miss out on what else he might be willing to tell. They didn’t even turn from him when Reba, the coffee-colored girl with the neck-breaking Coke bottle shape, went switching her way by there from her part-time job at the confectionary. Scared any distraction might irk him and shut off the flow of the story, and they wouldn’t get another drop out of him for another twenty or so years.
By that time almost a half hour had passed since the boy had sat down in the chair.
“All right then,” Tinhouse said as he handed Son his dark glasses. “If you don’t win that talent contest coming up it won’t be because you didn’t get the best haircut can be had in Chilton.”
Griff was not insulted.
“Willie, my ass,” Hughes said as the boy got up and Tinhouse was shaking out the barber cloth with a snap.
“Make up all the stories you want to. It was you.”
Without leaning forward to look at Hughes, Berks, lighting another Lucky, said, “You think whoever it was was the only nigger down there fighting his way out of the south ten, fifteen, twenty years ago?” It got even quieter than it had been before. “Tin said it wasn’t him. What he have to lie to you for?”
Nobody had an additional comment.
“Yeah,” Tinhouse said, as if trying to reestablish good graces in the shop’s congregation. “There was a lot out there like me.”
They looked at Hughes, then away.
Tinhouse asked who was next.
Hughes raised his hand like he was in school.
“Get in the chair,” Tinhouse told him, “while I get me a bottle of pop.”
They knew Nehi Orange was his favorite, but they knew he’d settle for Grape. They knew he needed it because they knew he had run his mouth dry.
21
Frocks
1939
Pearl had asked, “What’s a fancy word for dresses?”
“Frocks.”
“I’m smiling,” his mother said. “You’re so smart. Thank you, that’s good.”
“Pearl’s Custom Frocks,” Son said. “Smart dresses of distinction, tailored to the particular dimensions of her special clientele.”
When Pearl started out the dresses she sewed were still kind of country, but it wasn’t too long, what with seeing women on the street, in moving pictures at the King, and in magazines at the beauty parlor, before she caught on to the way it was done in Chilton and elsewhere. She reckoned who the colored women thought they were, what their place was, and who they wanted to be or appear to be. She made dresses that reflected her vision or what she thought their vision of themselves was. To show they were free to be themselv
es and stylish as white women without copying them, and so their men would see them anew. Her time at Mr. Fong’s was at the base of much of what she was able to bring to her process.
Her range of creations, made with or without a pattern, could be flirty or formal. For dancing or church. Social or business—such business as they had. She had a knack of somehow putting some extra material in the back across the hips so the dress tails of her colored customers did not rise up in the back the way they did when they wore store-bought dresses, and their behinds, when walking or standing, engirdled or not, did not look like a pair of pumpkins rolling around in the rear of Mr. Amalfi’s wagon. Pretty soon, what with Vienna and Potluck getting the girls in the shop to talk Pearl up, and with a couple of her samples hung on display in the shop, as well as down at the dry cleaners, Pearl was doing okay to fair, just fine.
She charged $2.50 to $3.00 a dress, fifty cents to a dollar more to white women. For coloreds they were over the price of store-bought, off-the-rack ones of the same quality, but worth it for the service, the fit, and having a custom-made garment.
Pretty soon women all over ‘lo’ Dunbar were ordering dresses for themselves, at half more than the off-the-rack price, but worth it, and Pearl Moon was in business full time for herself.
Then, slowly, Pearl picked up a client or two from the wealthy matrons above Dunbar, from when the domestics wore one of her garments to work to show off before changing in the bathroom into their work uniforms. For the wealthy Lewis Heights women, Pearl did both copies of her own designs and copies of pictures brought to her.
She went at first dressed as a maid, to do private fittings to camouflage that extra girth through the white women’s middles, or across the hips, to add or subtract through the bosom. Then after she had reached favored seamstress status with a couple of the Lewis Heights white women, to save time, she went to being picked up by the chauffer, or the lady herself, considering it an adventure to drive to ‘lo’ Dunbar and park in front of Pearl’s Custom Frocks, opposite the King Colored Theater, motor running, windows up, to pick Pearl up and drive her to Lewis Heights. The more adventurous were fitted in the rear of the little shop Pearl had set up in a space rented to her by Chap.