The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “The women in my family don’t. We have maids,” she muttered, standing up.

  He considered this. “Never mind. Let’s skip it, Sally.”

  Sally bit into Mrs. Tatro’s corn bread. She didn’t care what Jed said: Her mother’s was better. At first he wouldn’t even eat any when she used her mother’s recipe.

  “My Lord, whoever heard of sugar in corn bread?”

  “She makes it that way for Daddy. That’s how his mama made it. Yankees like their corn bread with a little sugar.” He thought it over and decided if it was good enough for Mr. Prince, it was good enough for him.

  But if Prince corn bread was good enough for Jed, Tatro corn bread didn’t seem to be good enough for her own parents. They’d been invited today and had declined. Sally wasn’t sure why, but it upset her. When she told them about her secret marriage and pregnancy, they sat in silence.

  Finally her father sighed. “Well, Sally, what can we say? What’s done is done. Now we all have to figure out how to live with it.”

  Her mother shook her head. “A baby? Sally, you’re only a girl yourself.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” Sally lied. “I’m having your grandchild.”

  “You thought we’d be pleased? My daughter pregnant by a numbskull from the mill village and I’m supposed to be pleased?” her father replied.

  Sally was shocked. She’d never heard her mild father talk like that before.

  Raymond glanced around the table. His family. What a strange notion. By some accident of birth he was tied to these strangers for life. But it was mostly a charade. His real life was in New York City. His real family, a family he’d chosen voluntarily, was there. Justin, Maria, Morris. These were the people he was really kin to, not this bunch of backwoods bigots. Before dinner, sitting in the living room, he’d mentioned the integration of Donley High School—the reports on the evening news and in national news magazines of Negro students being chased by a white mob; having scalding soup dumped on them in the lunchroom; being attacked with hat pins; having eggs broken on their books.

  They looked at him.

  “But Donley’s only thirty miles away. How can you not know about these things?”

  He told them about the dynamiting of the school and the mobilization of schoolchildren across the country, each donating the price of a brick to the rebuilding fund.

  “Goddam Yankee do-gooders,” Jed muttered. “Why don’t they mind their own business?”

  “It is their fucking business,” Raymond snapped. “If we’re not going to see that all the citizens of the South are treated justly, someone’s got to.”

  “Now look here, son: we treat our niggers fair,” Mr. Tatro informed him. “If they don’t want to work, that’s their bidness. But they shouldn’t expect the rest of us to carry them. You just drive through Pine Woods in the middle of the day. You’ll see there in front of Dupree’s Luncheonette a whole gang of perfectly healthy men just standing around.”

  “Where are they going to find work?”

  “Why just look in the want ads! Hundreds of vacant jobs!”

  “Yeah. Yard work at a dollar twenty-five an hour.”

  “Son, when I started in over at the mill, you know what I earned?”

  Raymond stifled a yawn. His father was off and running on his self-made saga.

  “Twelve cents a hour?”

  “That’s right Twelve cents an hour, boy! And I was grateful. Do you hear me? Grateful! Now some people is too proud or too lazy …”

  Emily looked at Raymond with sympathy. But later on even she said, “But Raymond, that Donley stuff, it’s got nothing to do with us. Just some maniac is all.”

  He was trying to figure out how to liberate Emily from Newland. It was like trying to get Aunt Jemima onto the Underground Railroad.

  “So where have you applied to college?” he had asked her in the car on the way to the party the night before.

  “State. I mean, if I already know I want to go there, why bother with other applications?”

  “What’s-his-name who’s been sticking pins in you—he’s over there?”

  “Earl. Yes, Earl goes to State.”

  “He putting it to you, or what?”

  “Raymond! That’s just not any of your business.”

  “I’m trying to figure out why it’s so important to go to some second-rate diploma mill fifteen miles from home, when you could go anywhere in the world.”

  “Well, maybe I’m just not very adventurous. I mean, what’s it to you?”

  “I hate to see potential wasted.”

  “God, Raymond, you’re so arrogant. What makes you assume Sarah Lawrence is better than State?”

  “Better or worse doesn’t matter. The whole point is to get away from where you’ve grown up, so you can see what’s really you and what’s just a product of your upbringing.”

  “Then girls up there should come down to State?”

  “Definitely. Listen, do me a favor, will you? Apply to a couple of other places. You won’t hear if you’re accepted until spring, and you may have changed your mind.”

  “Raymond, I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “Please.”

  “Oh, all right”

  But Jesus Christ, she’d turned into a goddam coed since he’d been away. She said things like, “Why, Raymond Tatro Junior! I never!” Most of her attention was directed to the shine on her Bass Weejuns and the press of her Villager shirtwaist. Yesterday after his arrival she shrugged on this cream-colored blazer with the royal purple crest of that dumb club of hers on the pocket, and ran off to a bake sale with a batch of sea foam divinity, saying, “Gracious me, Raymond honey, I’m late! I just got to fly.”

  As impatient as he felt with her, though, he recalled how scared he’d been to leave Newland last summer. Now his timidity seemed laughable, but at different points during the fall it had seemed justified.

  One morning after his initial elation had receded, the elevator stopped at his floor, and two paramedics in starched white rushed out pushing a stretcher and a large green oxygen tank. They asked Raymond to hold the elevator door. Soon they re-emerged with a woman on the stretcher, his neighbor, whose name he didn’t know, gasping through the oxygen mask. She never returned. He had no idea what happened to her. On the one hand, after eighteen years of knowing everyone’s business—their loves and fears and hemorrhoids and favorite recipes—it was a big relief to have no interest in or responsibility for this woman. On the other hand, he realized his corpse could rot in his room, and no one would know the difference. Or care.

  He became obsessed with the notion of dying alone, among strangers. A man with a Pancho Villa mustache, who was always wearing a dirty trench coat with the collar turned up, often came into the print shop with posters or handbills. He and Raymond chatted, though he had a habit of turning his head sideways as you talked to him so that you had to gaze at his profile instead of into his eyes. One day he tossed a pamphlet down on the counter and asked, “What do you think of this layout?”

  Raymond made a couple of suggestions, which the man adopted, murmuring, “That’s great.”

  “Who is that guy?” Raymond asked Gus after he’d left.

  “His name is Justin Lawson. He’s a prick, but he gives us a lot of business.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Aw, he works for this civil rights group called FORWARD. Thinks he’s Jesus Christ or something.”

  “What’s wrong with working for a civil rights group?”

  “Nothing. It’s just his attitude or something. Hell, I don’t know. The guy really bugs me. Doesn’t give a shit about Negroes, he’s just using them to try to solve his own psychological problems.”

  “That’s a pretty harsh accusation.”

  “Well, he’s all the time trying to talk me into donating press time to his projects. And here he’s got him this trust fund. His family lives in one of those mansions in Newport. Have a penthouse on Central Park West, too.
Sea captains, they were. Made their fortune off the slave trade. So this guilt-plagued son of a bitch comes in here trying to manipulate me into feeling guilty.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about him, to dislike him so much.”

  “Well, it worked. I felt guilty. So before turning my shop over to him, I checked him out. Smooth bastard, isn’t he?”

  Justin asked Raymond for more and more “input” about layouts. And one day he invited him to a meeting of FORWARD, which he explained stood for Friends of Rural Workers Against Racial Discrimination. They’d picketed Woolworth’s in support of the sit-ins in North Carolina. They were raising money for voter registration drives in the South and needed photographs of their activities as documentation, and as evidence if there was trouble. They needed picture research and layout skills for brochures. Justin explained that over the weeks he’d concluded that Raymond had real potential.

  Raymond asked if Justin was president of FORWARD. Justin smiled tolerantly and explained that FORWARD had no president, no officers, no hierarchy of any kind. It was true that FORWARD had been his idea, but he saw himself as a catalyst rather than a leader. He had no wish to be followed, simply wanted to establish an atmosphere in which members would pool their differing skills and equipment with the goal of training each other in their specialties so as to become interchangeable. Where individuality was unimportant, rank also became unimportant.

  It sounded wonderful to Raymond. In any ordinary ranking system, he knew he’d end up almost at the bottom every time. He accepted the invitation, flattered that Justin felt he had potential. And he was lonely.

  His first meeting was in a cluttered loft on the Lower East Side. Eight or ten people sat or lay in a circle on cushions. A Negro man in overalls walked in, and another Negro in a cap made from a knitted stocking jumped up and locked palms with him in arm-wrestling position, saying, “How you making it, baby?”

  A white man in overalls and purple-tinted glasses stood up and shook wrists with the newcomer.

  A white woman in wheat jeans, black jersey, and sandals gave him a kiss.

  Justin said, “Maybe we ought to get started.”

  The man in the stocking cap said, “Yeah, well, first off, I’d like to hear a few words from this new cat in the back there.”

  That meant Raymond.

  “I invited him,” Justin said.

  “Beautiful, Justin. Like we ain’t got enough problems as it is. You got to go dragging strangers in off the street.”

  “He’s got access to a print shop. He owns a camera, lenses, the whole trip.”

  “Yeah, but the point is, you didn’t consult nobody before asking him here.”

  “We consulted last week. We agreed we need photography skills.”

  “We agreed on needing the skills. We didn’t agree on no particular person.”

  “I didn’t notice you consulting anybody, Ralph, when they filmed you for Huntley-Brinkley saying ‘We’ this and ‘We’ that.”

  “Shall ah leave, Justin?” Raymond offered. The room fell silent.

  The man in the tinted glasses said, “Fantastic. Now we’re complete. We’ve got us our own resident cracker.”

  Raymond gave him an injured look and stood up.

  “The cat’s OK,” Justin insisted. “I checked him out.”

  The woman, Maria, said, “This beats all. Using this poor guy as a weapon in your power struggles. Sit down,” she said to Raymond. “I apologize for my rude co-workers.”

  Raymond sat down, staring at her.

  “Well hell, I ain’t got all night,” muttered Ralph. “I’m leaving for Nashville in two hours. Can we get on with this meeting?”

  Raymond was unable to sleep that night he was so excited at the idea of being part of this group. He was now trying to divest himself of all the reactionary racist rubbish Newland had crammed into his head so that he could be worthy of them. He was reading Marx and Engels and Fanon, listening to records by Thelonius Monk, Bessie Smith, and Bob Dylan. Attending lectures and movies recommended by Justin.

  “Honey, you ain’t had you no black-eyed peas,” his mother pointed out.

  “I don’t want any,” Raymond announced, as his mother tried to load his plate.

  “Why, Junior honey, you got to have you some peas. It’s good luck, honey. Lord, you got to eat you some black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day!”

  “Forget it. I don’t have to do anything.”

  Everyone sat still.

  “No, that’s true,” his mother agreed.

  “Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck!” He threw back his head and laughed. “Southern superstition. Hocus-pocus. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “It’s just a custom,” Emily murmured, “not a superstition.”

  “You always et em before and never said nothing,” his father said. “Now you come back from up North with all your goddam Yankee beatnik ways. Scorning the rest of us. But I ain’t having it in my house!” His voice had risen. “Now you eat some of them goddam peas, or you get the hell out of this house!”

  Raymond stood up, looked around, then stalked out.

  Donny had the feeling it was going to take more than a mess of peas to help this bunch. They needed to meet up with someone with a pocketful of cash. Rochelle and him and the kids sat on the floor at his grandmaw’s eating black-eyed peas and chitterlings. His grandmaw and Rochelle’s mother, wrapped in a quilt and looking puny, sat in the armchairs. Donny felt like a failure. For all his big ideas, he hadn’t been able to keep Rochelle in school so she could be a librarian. And now the kids was having to be farmed out, and he couldn’t do nothing about it. Big man.

  He glanced at Rochelle, who was daydreaming. He’d stop by her house in the evenings, and she’d fall asleep at the kitchen table as he tried to talk to her. She refused to listen to anything to do with school. Since that was where he was spending most of his time, they didn’t have a lot to say to each other. He wanted to tell her about his basketball games, about the coach and the guidance counselor telling him he’d almost certainly get some scholarship offers from colleges next year if he kept it up. But she only wanted to talk about their friends who’d left school. Tadpole was doing basic training now at Fort Campbell. He came home some weekends in his uniform with a wallet full of bills. Leon was back in New York City and came to Pine Woods sometimes in a burnt-orange suit and slouch hat, driving a bright yellow Buick. Sidney and Chariene worked in the paper mill. They had them their own apartment and a baby on the way. Everybody was moving on, and here he was racing around the gym in satin shorts. No wonder she looked at him with a mocking grin sometimes and called him “our little Donny.”

  Leon had been at the dance at the Masonic Hall last night, strutting around in his orange suit and shades. He’d brought with him a new dance step that involved collapsing to one side and hopping sideways. Rochelle picked it up right away, but Donny couldn’t seem to get it, so Rochelle danced with Leon. She gazed at him, her lips parted and smiling. The band played a slow song, and he watched Rochelle’s hips move against Leon’s. She’d changed since she’d quit school. Now he was the one who had to hold back. He’d explain about not wanting to mess up his chances for a scholarship. She’d nod, but when they walked down by the river, she’d rub her hips against his the way she was doing right then with Leon, and she’d laugh when he got hard. Sometimes she’d lie down and pull him down on top of her and thrust her hips until he came.

  Leon whispered something in her ear, and she shrieked with laughter.

  When she came back to the table, she said, not looking at Donny, “Woo, honey! That Leon, he bad!”

  From the way she said it, he knew that “bad” here meant “good.”

  Leon came over. “And how’s Mr. Junior Church Usher this evening?”

  After Rochelle and her mother and the kids left, Donny sat watching “Ramar of the Jungle” on television. A white man and woman in shorts and helmets had their hands tied behind their backs,
and anxious frowns on their faces. A row of natives in these grass skirt jobs, with bones and junk through their lips and noses, were chanting and pounding their spears on the ground. The white woman’s eyes was all wide and terrified. This fat black cat in shorts and a helmet was hiding behind a grass hut whispering reassuring things to the man with the tied-up hands. Everybody in shorts was good guys. Everybody in grass skirts was bad guys. But what was in it for that chubby nigger there in his shorts, except getting to be thought of as a good guy by bwana and pussy? Donny shrugged and bit into an apple.

  Chapter Twelve

  Graduation

  After receiving her medal for Most Studious, Emily climbed back up to the stage and stood behind the podium in her rented black gown. Her classmates sat on the gym floor in folding chairs, having processed to “Pomp and Circumstance,” repeated by the band twenty-three tedious times. Families sat in the bleachers looking bored.

  “Percy Bysshe Shelley said in a poem, ‘Nought may endure but mutability.’” began Emily. “We can never be sure how things will change. We can only be sure that change will occur. Five billion years ago our sun was born from a cloud of hydrogen. Ever since, two competing forces have been at work—the tendency toward change and the tendency toward stagnation. Charles Darwin in the 1800s proposed a mechanical process of adaptation: Creatures best adjusted to altered physical conditions survived. Today some scientists prefer the notion that life as a whole reaches out, not just to survive but to develop any new potentiality. Otherwise, they ask, how can we explain snow crystals, or the staggering variety of flowers, or the instinct to make music?”

  Sally sat with her legs spread and her hands holding up her enormous belly, which looked as though it would burst open like a seed pod at any moment. Emily’s mother had a faint smile on her face. Her father, with his legs crossed, seemed to be listening. Earl was gazing at her with a bemused frown. When she had told him last month that she’d sent in her acceptance to a college in New York, he’d stared at her just as he was doing now.

  “But you’re going to State.”

  “I changed my mind.”