by Daniel Black
“I went to college. Remember?”
“Oh yeah,” he patronized. “You left here right after you finished high school. I didn’t know college took people ten years to finish.”
“It’s a long story, man. I’m sorry. I had to get away. I couldn’t stay here, Willie James.”
“OK, fine, but why didn’t you call or at least write? You always liked to write.”
“Let’s not start this. It’s too hot out here to argue.”
“We ain’t startin’ nothin’. You started this ten years ago.”
“OK! I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. I needed a break from Daddy’s tyranny and—”
“Tyranny? Why can’t you talk plain?”
I breathed heavily to control my frustration. “I had had enough of Daddy’s beatings and working me to death in the fields.”
“So that’s why you left? Daddy?”
“Well, no, not completely. I’d rather not talk about it right now, Willie James. I’m tired, soaking wet, and starving. Are you gonna come down from the tractor and hug your little brother or what?”
Willie James descended the antique and came over to where I was standing.
“You looks good, little brother. Life must treat colored folks pretty good wherever you stayin’.”
We shook hands, but his demeanor clearly rejected the possibility of a hug.
“New York. I’ve been in New York City. Well, I first went to Atlanta and graduated from Clark. Then I went to graduate school in New York.”
“Well, good for you. Did you finish? Graduate school, I mean?”
“Yeah, I did. I graduated last month with my Ph.D.”
“Whaaat? That’s incredible. A doctor in the family,” Willie James said with a tone of causticity. “Dr. Tommy Lee Tyson. I’speck dat’s what folks call you?”
“Only my students. My friends still call me T.L.”
Willie James shook his head up and down and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “A lot done changed around this place, little brother. A whole lot.”
“Really? I bet things are pretty much the same.”
“Well, they ain’t.”
“Talk to me. What’s happening?”
“Momma’ll tell you everything. I gotta get on over to Miss Pearlie Mae’s place. Her chillen comin’ home soon and she wants the field behind her house cleared befo’ dey gets here. You know how she is.”
“Does she still give you a dollar or two for a full day’s work?”
Willie James and I chuckled. Miss Pearlie Mae was good for pleading with us to come do some work and, in the end, giving us two whole dollars. We said we hated her, but really we hated her miserly nature. Yet Daddy kept sending us back, teaching us, I suppose, how a community takes care of its elders.
“I’ll see you later?” I asked.
“You will if you don’t run off befo’ I git back,” Willie James offered. I suppose I deserved the comment. He climbed back onto the tractor and paused. “It’s been ten years since I last seed you, T.L. You was wrong fu’ dat. I b’lieve you had good reason and all, but runnin’ away wasn’t the way to deal with it. I know you thought nobody round here cared about you’cept Sister, and you mighta been right. Yet why didn’t you at least stay in touch with her? When you left, she talked about you night and day. She really loved you, man, and you ran off and left her. Why, T.L.?”
Unable to find the right words, I said, “Man, look. My sorrows were bigger than me. I was about to die. If I hadn’t left, I might have killed myself—or Daddy.”
Willie James didn’t know what to do with such talk. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear from you now. I wish you had stayed in touch with her though.”
“I did,” I blurted without thinking.
“What?” Willie James said angrily.
The letter was supposed to be a secret, but it wasn’t any longer. “I wrote Sister a long letter about three years ago. I told her where I was and why I had to leave. She already knew, but I felt the need to tell her anyway. I knew she was checking the mailbox every day in hopes of hearing from me. I had been contemplating writing her, but I didn’t want Momma or Daddy to know where I was. One day, I got up the nerve and did it, and in the letter I made her promise to destroy it after she read it and not to tell any of you she had heard from me.”
“Well, she sho’ kept dat promise,” Willie James said, very tight-lipped. “We all thought she stopped checking the mailbox’cause she gave up on you. Come to find out, she got exactly what she wanted.”
I had nothing else to say. Neither did Willie James. He put the tractor in gear and drove off with vengeance in his eyes.
The dust, which rose from the earth like a cloud, left a bad taste in my mouth. It was dry Arkansas red dust that covers everything in the summer, including people, giving them a red, Indian-like hue. “Is Sister home now?” I turned and yelled to Willie James, but he was too far gone to hear me or too angry to answer. I continued my march home.
I wondered if Willie James remembered the painting I had given him in sixth grade. The assignment was to paint a picture of a natural object and present it to a loved one. I knew better than to give a painting to Daddy or Momma because they hated sensitive, mushy stuff, and since Sister was too young to appreciate it, I decided to give it to Willie James. At first I doodled around, unsure of what to paint, but then out of a nearby window I saw the most beautiful butterfly suspended in midair. It was bright red and yellow with black around the edges of its wings. I stared at it in awe, for it seemed a bit exotic in Swamp Creek. Suddenly it disappeared as quickly as it had come, and I had to depend solely upon five seconds of memory to create my masterpiece. When it was complete, I felt proud and anxious to present it to Willie James.
“I have something for you, Willie James,” I told him before we went to bed one night.
“What is it?” he asked nonchalantly.
“You can’t laugh at me if you don’t like it, OK? I think you’ll like it, though.”
Willie James smiled and opened his palm to receive the gift. I asked him to close his eyes and not to open them until I told him to.
“OK. You can look now.”
Willie James gasped in amazement. “Oh my God, boy!” he said, taking the painting from my hands. “This is really good.” His approval boosted my self-esteem more than I cared to admit. He hung the painting on the wall over his bed, where it still hangs today, I suppose. Late one night, Daddy came into the room and, noticing the picture, he asked Willie James, “What’s dat bullshit?” and Willie James told him I had painted a picture for him. Daddy grunted something insulting and left. I promised myself that night not to stay in Swamp Creek a day longer than I had to.
I decided to take a shortcut through the Williams place and snagged my pants on the old, rusty barbed wire fence. “Shit!” I said. I knew better than trying to cross those old country fences with two bags in my hands. I suppose I thought I could do things now that used to be impossible. The fence put me in my place.
I was disgusted. Sweaty, hungry, frustrated, and mad my one good pair of khakis was ruined, I walked on in misery. I saw some old-looking cows and recalled the story about when Ms. Henrietta was kicked crazy. At least that’s what everybody said.
“Dat cow kicked de shit outta Henrietta,” I overheard Mr. Blue tell Daddy one Saturday night at the Meetin’ Tree.
“Did?”
“Hell yeah. She was callin’ hu’self milkin’ dey old milk cow in a hurry. Dey say she was rushin’ to git ova and see Billy Ray Henderson, so she was jerkin’ dem titties like she was tryin’ to pull’em off!”
Daddy and the other men spilt beer all over themselves as they laughed. Their mingled voices sounded like a chorus of deep, long, guttural cries. Darrell and I snickered, too, but we remained quiet in order to hear the rest of the tale.
“Bad thang about it, Billy Ray wun’t stuttin’ Henrietta. He wonted Jophelia Mae Walker!”
“Is dat right?” Daddy s
aid, adding fuel to the fire.
“Sho’ he wonted her. He couldn’t stand Henrietta. Every night de Good Lawd send, he was draggin’ his stankin’ ass ova to Jophelia’s, lookin’ like a ol’ bug-eyed possum!”
The laughter sounded like thunder. Mr. Blue was the most incredible storyteller I had ever heard.
“Henrietta still wonted his no-good ass anyway. She thought she could steal him ‘way from Jophelia Mae. So late dat evenin’ she was milkin’ de cow too fast and too hard and’fo’ she knowed anythang ole Bessie hauled off and kicked hu’ right dead in hu’ right jaw.”
“Oh no. Dat’s terrible!” others mumbled sincerely.
“She ain’t neva been right since. Hu’mouth got a little betta, but it ain’t neva been back right. Dat’s how come she talk out de left side o’ hu’ mouth right now.”
“I bet she don’t drink much milk, neither!” somebody joked.
“Oh, dat’s ugly!” Mr. Blue repeated, laughing unashamedly. Darrell and I slipped from the company of the men into the dark and never talked about Ms. Henrietta’s twisted face. The story wasn’t funny to us, maybe because she was lonely and depressed and we felt sorry for her. We offered to do work for her around her house, but she said, “No thank you, boys. I ‘speck I betta do it myself,” as though surrending to a divine punishment. We shrugged our shoulders and moved on. The other reason we never made fun of Ms. Henrietta was because Grandma told us, “Whoever you laugh at, you gon’ get the same thang they got.” We believed her, at least enough not to laugh at most folks.
I chuckled to myself about how strange folks were in Swamp Creek. Some of that craziness I must have inherited, I admitted. Little did I know I was about to find out how much.
3
The sight of the house unnerved me. It seemed smaller for some reason. Daddy or probably Willie James had painted it white, although it was once a dull blue. That’s one of the reasons I hated it. The color simply represented the cloud of depression that hovered over our family. The moments of fun and laughter we shared inside that house were few and never allowed to last long. More than anything, we were a family of people who despised our own blackness and complained incessantly about never having enough. Not until I went to college did I understand how hair relaxers and skin lighteners reinforced a self-perception of ugliness. While I was growing up, everyone teased me about liking the brown-skinned little girls with hair that didn’t require a perm. Of course everyone in my family had bad hair, so we searched elsewhere for models of beauty. When Sister was born, she had straight, silky hair and Momma rejoiced in having given birth to a “good-hair” child. Over the following year, though, her hair coiled until it was too tight to comb. Momma was pissed off. “We black and we can’t get around it,” Daddy told her.
Grandma’s house, across the field from ours, looked the same. It had been my refuge. She was my best friend, and her house was the place I went whenever I felt lonely and dejected. Born in 1910, she died my senior year in high school at age seventy-three. On her deathbed she said, “Sonny”—that’s what she called me—“de Lawd done blessed me to see you grow into a fine young man. You de one dis family been waitin’ on. I ain’t stuttin’ dem ignut-ass folks you livin’ wit’. I’m talkin’bout you, boy. You got to fugive folks and go’head on or dat hatred’ll kill you. I know you tries hard and you dos yo’ best. Keep dat up. But don’t treat yo’ folks lak dey treat you. De Good Lawd’ll handle them. Don’t never thank He won’t. He got His ways and He got His time. You jes’ keep yo’ head in dem books and make somethin’ outta yo’self. Now I ain’t gon’ live to see all this, and don’t chu go to cryin’, neither, but I’m still gon’ be wit’ cha. Ain’t gon’ never be a time when I ain’t wit’ cha. You remember dat, you hear?” I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and burst into tears. Most eighteen-year-old boys would have been embarrassed for crying in front of their grandmother, but I wasn’t. I could express myself any way I wanted in front of Grandma. During my back porch performances of Shakespeare she applauded like I was the best actor she had ever seen. When I started memorizing excerpts from black writers, Grandma said, “Amen! You comin’ on home!” She loved my Dunbar recitations best. His dialect poems made her laugh and cry simultaneously. After she gave me the first Dunbar book, she started getting me black books every Christmas and made me promise to read them and recite parts of them to her. I never failed. When she died, I knew one of my greatest connections to Swamp Creek, Arkansas, was gone forever.
Grandma was a tall, burly woman. She could whip any man’s ass, folks said. I never saw that side of her. What I saw was a woman who loved to hum church hymns and rock in her rocking chair, piecing quilts. She had a slight hump in her back, which reduced her normal six-foot stature to a modest five-nine. She told me once that her dream had been to be a gourmet cook. People came from miles around to taste her desserts, and Grandma always feigned rejection of their compliments with, “Chile, please! I messed this batch up!” Cookies, muffins, pies, cakes, and cobblers were her specialties. I was the sampler. “Taste all right?” she would ask, and I’d offer sarcastically, “I didn’t get a good taste. After I eat some more, I’ll know.” Grandma would smile and say “Uh-huh,” and I knew not to eat another bite.
Someone’s car was parked in front of Grandma’s house, but of course I didn’t know whose. For a moment, I felt a sense of protective jealousy overcome me, and I contemplated walking in there and telling someone to leave my grandmother’s house. Of course I had no right to do so, especially since I hadn’t been home in ten years, but even the idea of someone else in her house troubled my spirit. Grandma and I had created a sacred space there, sharing secrets and crying tears together, and I simply didn’t want anyone else in her house. The truth of my childishness confronted me, however, and I was forced to let it go. “Oh well, whatever,” I mumbled in resignation.
Momma walked out of the front door. She didn’t see me, though, because I was standing behind the large cypress, which stood alone in the field in front of the house. For an instant, I felt the urge to run and yell, “Momma, I’m home!” but I decided against it. “Just take your time, T.L.,” I whispered to my unsettling nerves. I took a deep breath and, for the first time, wondered if, in fact, coming home was a good idea. Of course I couldn’t turn back, so I walked the last few steps slowly, trying to prepare myself for the encounter. She had checked the mail and was about to reenter the house when I approached her and said, “Hi, Momma.”
She turned quickly and froze, statuesque. Her eyes narrowed intensely and she examined me from head to toe with an expression at once painful and refreshing. She knew it was me, for she kept staring and nodding her head, the long-established sign of her unexplainable irritation. I immediately noticed she hadn’t changed much: newly pressed hair, yellow flowered dress, size 9. I was actually startled, for she seemed to have stepped out of time for ten years in order to pick up where we left off if I ever came back home. She was a rather pretty woman, everyone in Swamp Creek agreed. Her baby smooth skin and hourglass shape had been maintained since high school, folks said, and no one—including her children—had ever seen her hair undone. I see why Daddy married her, I thought.
Finally she smiled seethingly and said, “So you came back.”
“Yes, Momma. I came back.”
“Why?”
“Why?” I asked in return, trying to buy time.
“Yes, why? You hadn’t needed to befo’.”
“True”—I was beginning to stammer—“but I needed to now. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life estranged from my own family.” I hated how I sounded, and I wished to God I hadn’t said “estranged.”
“You came to start confusion.”
“No, Momma, I didn’t come to start confusion. I came—”
“Did you take the bus?” Momma cut me off, not wanting me to explain myself clearly. Clarity left no room for conflict.
“Yes, ma’am. I stepped off the Greyhound bus about an hour ago.”
�
��Dat’s good. Come on in de house and set yo’ bags down.” She turned and led the way with an amazing lack of sincerity.
I followed Momma into the house. The tension was so thick it made me restless. I set my bags down in the living room, noticing Momma’s rearrangements over the years. The piano, which she had hoped Sister would play, faced the wall opposite the front door. As far as I know, Sister never touched the thing. I was the one who played it, much to Momma’s chagrin. I was a boy, and boys who played the piano were usually “funny,” she said. I knew what she meant, but I didn’t care. The piano was fun and therapeutic for me. I ended up being the musician for a number of local churches and made some nice spending change playing for weddings and funerals. The piano soothed my troubled soul, although Momma often tired of hearing me practice. Some days, she wouldn’t let me play at all.
I noticed there was carpet on the living room floor. Folks in Swamp Creek didn’t have carpeted floors when I was growing up. I also noticed it was a little—and I mean a little—cooler inside because of the fan Momma had running in the living room window. This didn’t feel like the house I remembered. I felt like a guest who knew his days were numbered.
I went into the kitchen, where Momma was cleaning fish in the sink. The house was totally silent.
“What’s been up, Momma?” I said, leaning on the countertop casually, hoping to initiate a healthy dialogue.
“Nothin’,” she offered coldly.
“Everybody round here doin’ all right?”
“Yeah,” Momma said, expressionless.
“Why aren’t you glad to see me, Momma?”
“I am glad to see you,” Momma lied as she wrapped fish guts in newspaper and placed them into a nearby plastic garbage bag.
“You could have fooled me,” I said sarcastically.
“Well, you fooled me ten years ago,” Momma said, gaining the upper hand.
“Momma, you know why I left. Don’t act like you don’t.”
“Yeah, I know why you left, but I don’t know why you stayed gone so long.”