Calvin must have been buried in similar thoughts of wanting to be elsewhere, must have come to a conclusion of similar importance, or to some agreeable compromise with his thoughts about education, for he straightened his back, and the vigor and youth of his years came back into his body. His eyes were bright again, and the whiteness in them shone. The dashiki he was wearing made him look noble and like an emperor; stiff and with the pride of knowing where he was.
“This is the very last time I be laying this paranoid shit on you, brother. You are my guest here in this city. I am a Southerner, and we Southerners’re hospitable people. I’m gonna show y’all some real southern shit now, y’all!”
He had lit a Salem before he had spoken. He was the kind of man who could not make a serious statement before he had first lit a Salem. Smoke streamed through his nostrils, and he looked like a walrus again.
“I’m Amerrikan. This is my motherfucking country.”
“You were born here, man.”
“I’m a Southerner. So, let’s have some Ripple . Let’s drink this shit.”
It was a long road. There were no streetlights. Dust swirled round the tires of the VW as it pierced its single weak headlamp through the oncoming darkness. “If the man don’t get me for this Ripple, he’s sure’s shit gonna get me for this light!” The moon was a dark sliver of lead, far off to the right. Calvin was still in his cut-down jeans and dashiki. But I had changed. I was in white. White Levis and a white dashiki, bought from the Soul Brother Store. When I went into the store, dark and musty and smelling of old cigars, the owner greeted me, “Brother, come in, brother!” He charged me twenty dollars more than the price I had seen on the same clothes in two other white stores on the same integrated street. But I did not divulge this to Calvin.
“Lay it on me, brother!” Calvin had said in admiration and in approval when he picked me up.
“Be cool, man,” he had told him, trying hard to be cool.
“Gwen opened your nose!”
“Shee-it!” I said, hoping it came out right, and heavy, and properly Southern.
“Shit!” Calvin said. His speech was like a crisp bullet in my chest.
Now, driving along this road, in the middle, there was no dividing line, and if there was we could not see it; in the swirling flour of this thin road, cramped in the VW, with the smell of smoke, a trace of leather, and the acrid languor from the fumes of Ripple, making less speed than the rattle of the muffler suggested, and hitting stones in the middle of the road, the two of us, rebellious and drinking in our joy, like escaped prisoners; but I, like a man redeemed, Gwen had said when I was at the door like a gentleman, “Shee-it, you ain’t leaving here to walk those dark street at this hour, man. This is the South,” saying it with a pronounced West Indian accent; we were screaming and hollering as if we were both born in the ecstasy of mad Southern Saturday nights, in Birmingham.
Calvin slapped an 8-track tape into the player. “My Favorite Things” came out. The hymn coiled around the jazz solo, reminded me of matins at St. Matthias Anglican Church in Barbados; and especially evensong and service. I could picture myself walking in that peaceful sacred light, one hour after the sun had gone down behind the tall casaurinas, when there was a slice of a moon, like this one in Birmingham, and walking between thick green sugar canes in my black John Whites that kicked up almost as much dust as the tires of this old VW. And each time Coltrane repeated the main statement of the tune, I could hear and recall the monotony of the tolling bells. There, my mother walked beside me, in contented sloth of age, of sickness and of Christianity. Here, I bent my neck to the charmed pull of the music.
Calvin is silent beside me. This music is his. I have heard this music before, probably, all the places and things and colours that the music is showing me I have faced in Toronto. The tape is scratched badly.
In the distance, pointed out to us by the weak left headlamp, is a barn, or a factory; perhaps something that was once used as a portable camp for soldiers. Soldiers are always on mind in Birmingham this summer. The Civil War, which a magazine swears in its cover story, is about to be fought again: white people versus black people. Soldiers with muskets, vertical straps of leather aslant their soldiers, fighting for the other cause. And the flag of their confederation, with its own two vertical blue slashes across its broad, bloodied shoulder, signifying something different. This building in the shortening distance sits in a square stubbornness in the middle of the single headlamp, with no grace of architecture like the white-painted gazebo. From this distance it is black. It soon looks brown. Light from inside the building is being forced through small windows that are covered by blinds made of sacks of sugar, not for Bohemian style but from economy. And as we get nearer still, the truth of its dimension, size and colour, are exposed to us.
The saxophone reminds me of the singing of old women, repeating the verse of the hymn as if their age has crippled their recollection of succeeding verses. So, I begin to think again of my mother, leading the song at the Mother’s Union service, going over it again. “Rock of Ages.” This saxophone is not speaking of such desperation, though.
We are approaching Gwen’s wooden house.
Calvin stops the VW, for no reason. And I realize he’s always doing this, but this time he parks it, and it rocks forward and backward just before the engine dies. We are now bathed in the light from the naked fluorescent bulb on Gwen’s porch. I did not see this light the night of the party. The rain was too heavy that night.
“You’re really into Trane playing ‘Love Supreme!’” he said.
“Not ‘My Favorite Things?’”
“‘Love Supreme,’ brother.”
How many other things in this city of Birmingham, this South in this culture, in this short time here, had I got wrong? I had heard a train, but was there a train rolling through the green fields like a lawn mower? I had seen a moon, but now that we were stopped, there was no moon.
“A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme,” Calvin said. “Nineteen times Trane chants it.” I can see movement in Gwen’s house, at the side; for the bedrooms are at the side.
Calvin got out, leaving me in the car, slammed the door shut and stood beside the car. A splattering of water hits the gravel. I imagine steam rising. I can smell the sting of the water. And then I too get out and shake my legs, each one to straighten the seams of my tight-fitting jeans. Calvin is still peeing and shaking. Some men can pee as long as horses. But it looks more as if he is being shaken by the peeing, in short spasms of delight and relief. Each time I think that Calvin is finished, he shakes again. I was wrong about the name of the tune on the 8-track. I am wrong about my mother. It was not “Rock of Ages.” It was not even the walk through the country lane going to St. Matthias Anglican Church for evensong and service that had pulled those memories from me. It was I myself. As a chorister in the St. Michael’s Cathedral, singing a song of praise. Was it Easter I was thinking about? Easter? Or Christmas? Rogations Day? Quinquagesima Sunday? Could it have been Lent? O, all ye beasts of the sea praise ye, the Lord. O, all you fish of the sea, praise ye, the Lord? Could it have been that? Yes. That was the comparison of the repetition which the beauty of the saxophone ought to have brought back.
“Every time I hear Trane playing ‘Love Supreme’ I gotta have me at least one smoke, and—” He seemed short of breath all of a sudden. His words were cut short. Nevertheless, there was a lingering, a drawing-out of the enunciation of his words. His words would be cut off. In mid-sentence. As if he were struggling. For breath. And trying. To talk at the same time. The middle door on the porch opened and light flowed weakly out, and I could see Calvin’s eyes, now red and fierce, and at the same time peaceful, and filled with water. But he was not in tears. He was happy.
“Want a joint? Can you handle this shit, brother?”
“I’m cool, man.”
“Shit’ll kill you. It’s a motherfucker. It kills the black arts, and the black musician.”
“I’m cool
, man.”
“Know something? Let’s not waste time with these chicks. Forget Gwen.” I was wondering what kind of a man Calvin was. “Let’s talk, brother. You’re going back up to Toronto next week, and when you’re gone, ain’t nobody I can talk to, nobody on this campus, in this city, in this fucking country. Let’s talk. And I gonna cut out all these ‘motherfuckers’ and ‘shits’ in my speech, and just talk.” I was sure he was reading my mind. But I ‘Love Supreme’ brings back memories of something my grandmother used to hum, just after she lit the kerosene lamps every evening. Some white folks calls this shit a canticle. Took me years to stop confusing canticle with cuticle. Heh-Hey! But, anyhow. This canticle thing has a Latin name. Man! I kicked more ass, I was superior to everybody in my class in Latin in high school. Hate the thing now, though. But I know it all by heart. Had to learn it by heart. Been learning it by heart from hearing my grandmother, singing it for years. Listen, O, all ye works of the lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him, and magnify him forever. Want to hear more?”
“Didn’t know you were Anglican.”
“Baptist! To the bone. But I read that shit in a book that had words like works, nights, days, whales, water, etcetera, etcetera, and all were spelled with a capital letter. Isn’t that something? The English be strange motherfuckers. Strange people. In the South, right here in this city of Birmingham, we worship the English, culturally I mean. The English use colons like Coltrane uses the E-flat!
Baptist to the bone! Baptist to the bone. And anti-English, except culturally.” He threw the marijuana cigarette, now smaller than his fingernail, through the window. The VW’s engine started as if the whole car was about to explode. It stuttered, and finally it turned over. “Life is better without chicks around. Sometimes. We’re going to the Stallions Club where there’s the best rib sandwiches and fried chicken in the whole city of Birmingham! If not in the whole South!”
Pandemonium, sweet as pecan pie and ice cream, struck me full in the face the moment the door of the Stallion Club was opened, when Calvin pushed me inside, first. The room was dark. Bodies were moving. The laughter was loud and sweet and black and jocular and exaggerated. Smoke was rising and swirling. And above the lighter darkness of the bodies in the room, the smoke remained there like halos. The music was climbing the walls. Music such as this I had never heard. It was like a baptism, a final submergence into the hidden, secret beauty of the South. Loud and full, enunciating each vowel, each nuance possible of behaviour, each instrument, each riff. I heard a voice pleading, “Didn’t I do it, baby? Didn’t I? Didn’t I do it, baby?” and I looked toward the stage, in the deeper darkness there, through the large, slow-moving dancers, expecting to see Aretha Franklin in the flesh. What a victory it would be, to know her, in this thick-fleshed Southern, warm night! I was overcome by the music. I could feel my entire body relax. I could smell the odours around me. I could feel my blood. I could feel the difference, and the meaning of my presence in the South. The fried chicken. The barbecued ribs. The tingling, sweet nausea of burnt hair. The cosmetics and lotions in the glassy, bushy “pom-padoo,” as Calvin called it, on the fat, healthy jowls of the men and women dancing. I could feel my own body give off a stifled exhaust of smell. I could feel the sweat and the excitement under my armpits. A housefly was in the room. It came and rested on my top lip, and I did not brush it away. I was, for the first time, at home in the noise, the smells, the fragrance, the sounds and the voice of this city of Birmingham. And they all made me nervous, as they made me feel good . “Didn’t I do, it baby? Didn’t I . . .” I was like a man drowning in this foam of a wave that one moment ago had been wafting me in its freshness; I was moving towards the front of the swaying crowd that was coupled in its own sweetness. I looked into their faces. And those faces that were not buried into the necks and shoulders of men and women, wore flat expressions. Masks. No one was smiling. No one was grinning. No one was laughing as he danced. No teeth showed in this relaxed, coagulating, heavy and soft coupling of the music with the voice. It was as if the voice was giving them a message they all knew and desired. I could feel and taste the powerfulness in the large room. It was like a country. A country of men and women, all of the same colour, the same breathing. And this became my baptism: I had never imagined it was possible to be in a room so large with only black people. Never in Toronto. Never even in Barbados. I looked around to see, just in case. And there was none, not one white person. It was a beautiful sensation, and it frightened me. This is why I thought of power-fulness. And now I knew what it meant. I could feel it in my blood. Two large women, heavy in their thighs, heavy in their bosom, heavy in their arms, heavy in their waists, each one about fifty-five years old, were tied together in the slow almost unmoving dance; their breasts pressed against each other, thighs glued together beneath their mini skirts, looking like logs of mahogany polished to a high magnificent sheen, arms lassoed to arms like tentacles, or in a Boston Crab, and with the weight of their waists pressed together, begrudging space and denying any man’s hand from forcing itself between their impenetrable love, close as if they were Siamese; love for the music and for the voice that pumped this love from one into the other, blood through veins, these two women moved in their heaviness like oil on shining glass, oblivious to the fact that there were hundreds dancing along with them. They moved as if they were on ice. They moved only because I had seen them leave one spot small as a dime, and occupy another dime’s area, not that they themselves could ever know that they had moved. They were close to me now, and I stood for a moment and watched them. I watched them grinding out their satisfaction and their ageless joy in this heavy, segregated world, in this black section of this city, safe amongst numbers, and amongst blackness created through the dance. “ Didn’t I do it, baby”? A black world and a black poem which the dance itself had formed and had drawn a circle around. “This is a black world,” Calvin said, having to shout.
I was now only three paces from the stage. I stood. I had to stand, for the bodies were not moving now. They were grinding. I was the only one who moved. I was the only one out of the rhythm. Inching to the stage, I was the only one out of place.
“Didn’t I do it, baby?”
The face of the singer was bathed in black perspiration. It was like the water of baptism and of revival. And it was growing out of the body, like strength. Not dripping like an exertion. The thin, tight body looked as if it was being tormented. I could see this through the slits of space in the crowd as the dancers moved. I could see it as a slice of a fish; a slice of a human being; slithering in the shimmering sequins on the long dress that was like an extra skin. She was bathed in the white material of the dress, like a dolphin . “Didn’t I do it, baby? ”
“This sister can whup Aretha’s ass any . . .” And Calvin’s voice was blocked out for a moment by the passing of the two women between us, “any mother . . . any day!” Here in this room, I needed space even to hear. The song came to a perspiring end. It was a soft end. And it was followed by an explosion of applause. Handkerchiefs, fingers and Kleenexes came out to repair the cheeks, and wipe away the beads that had damaged the neckline and the collar, and the forehead for the duration of that love-making rendition. And before the women and men had completed the renovation of their cosmetics, the mermaid of a woman on the stage began another song. “A midnight train to Georgia…” Without warning, without even a desire to join in this dance and in this circle, for I was out of place, inarticulate, foreign, without speech and gesticulation, one of the fat ladies took me into her arms. It was like a mother knowing before the expression of pain is made taking her child in the safety of her breast and bosom. I sank deep and comfortable in the billow of her love, as her arms wrapped my smaller body in embrace so much like my mother’s, that I felt I could fall off into a sweet slumber and surrender myself to her; except that the song was raging through the magnolia and pine and poplar woods of a land that held such frightening memories. And Calvin was there to witness my surrender, and , perha
ps, in a seminar on black behaviour, live to tell the story. But she held me close. She held me tight. She held her left arm round my waist, and her right hand on the softness of my bottom. I began to travel all those miles between the never-ending rails of steel, going from one place I did not know to a place which was even farther removed from my present; but to a place which was identifiable, as I was able to know where I am now. And so, I buried myself in her flesh, her perfume acting as a mild chloroform, and I found that Gwen and the woman in Toronto climbed into the sweet delirium along with the woman holding me, and I paid no regard to those two encumbrances, and allowed myself to be moved so very slowly by her; by her body that was guiding me, and by her blood which I thought I could taste. But that would have been, in addition to the unseemly unnatural acts, incest. I was dancing with my mother. The smell of her body, and the strength in her legs which were tightened round my left leg, was like the tightness of a thick towel after a bath deep in winter. I could hardly breathe. But I could just as easily have died in her arms.
The housefly I had seen earlier returned and lighted on the woman’s mouth. She pursed her lips, unwilling to release one hand and let got of my body; and the fly fled. It probably had learned, through its ugly leaden antennae, what thunderous violence her anger would give rise to, in the slap the woman would have used.
Her lips were roughed in a deep red. Like the blood inside her body which I felt I could feel and taste. But I was not entirely passive in my enjoyment. My eight fingers were pressed deeply into her soft flesh. With difficulty I tried to move to the music, in my own slow, sweet time. It was like poetry; and I thought of poetry. And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman . . .
In this City Page 15