by J. J. Murray
And why does a white man want to read African American fiction? He should be reading nonfiction so he’ll know the real deal. I know that the fiction books I review aren’t truly about the real black experience, and that they’re just for entertainment, but I doubt anyone would want to read the real deal about being black in America.
Especially white men. Oh, excuse me, Caucasian men. He’s a member of the world’s youngest named race, “Caucasian” having been coined by some German named Blumenbach in 1807. And how do I know this nugget of information? Another white man came into the reference section to ask, that’s how. And this Blumenbach was a piece of work, let me tell you. He is supposedly the father of physical anthropology, and he based his findings on studies of his own collection of sixty human heads. Sixty…human…heads…in his personal collection.
I will never understand white people.
And the man over there wandering in the fiction section is definitely white—and ashy. White people, as a rule, are the ashiest people on the planet, the reason Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion (for dry skin, of course) and Oil of Olay were invented, the reason SPF-48 exists, the reason alligators are not as self-conscious around vacationers and retirees in Florida. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “A really white man would be a horrible sight.”
And that shaggy man is a horrible sight, indeed. If we had a children’s reading today, they’d all run away from him. Skinny, unshaved, scraggly blond hair, light blue eyes, and more wrinkles on his clothes than straight lines.
Pitiful.
But what is he doing returning a few books on a Thursday morning? Maybe he’s on his holiday break. I’ll bet he gets the whole week off from his cushy job. Well, it can’t be that cushy. He was wearing only a simple wedding band. I’ll bet his no-ironing wife has quite a rock on her finger.
I pick up Thicker Than Blood. Grandpa Joe-Joe, please help me forget about that skinny, ashy, unobservant white man.
2: Grandpa Joe-Joe’s Jungle
“I told you to be careful,” I say. “Just find yourself a stick.”
Chloe looks around in the tall grass in front of Grandpa Joe-Joe’s two-story farmhouse for a stick to scrape off a wedge of shit from her sandal.
Nasty. From Mr. Shaggy White Man to crap on a sandal. I just can’t win today.
“Does your grandfather have a dog?”
“No. The septic is probably backed up again.”
Nastier.
Chloe finds a stick and begins scraping. “Yuck.”
I shrug. “Grandpa Joe-Joe won’t notice.”
And it’s true. He doesn’t notice much of anything anymore. If it’s raining, I have to tell him to come inside. If it’s snowing, I have to tell him to put on a coat. If he’s stank—and he’s right stank most days—I have to tell him to take a bath.
Grandpa Joe-Joe might have some Caucasian in him. Mr. Shaggy White Man had some serious funk on him.
I look behind me. “Damn. He took down his mailbox again, and I’m not about to go looking for it today, as hot as it is.”
Chloe tosses the stick away. “He takes down his mailbox?”
“Yeah. He thinks if he doesn’t have a mailbox he won’t have to pay any taxes.”
If only that would work.
Chloe only blinks.
“Really. I pay his taxes anyway, ever since he got back from the VA hospital.”
She steps up beside me. “Has he been sick?”
“He has post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say, and I can’t help but laugh.
“That’s not funny.” She swats at a swarm of gnats in front of her face. “That’s a serious disorder.”
“I know it is. It’s just that Grandpa Joe-Joe was never in any war. He got in just after Korea and got out just before Vietnam.”
“Oh.”
“He’s got everybody fooled, huh?” I continue through the grass. “Follow directly behind me if you want to.”
She takes my hand, and it is soft. “Where’s the sidewalk?”
“This is the sidewalk. Grandpa Joe-Joe doesn’t believe in trimming anything. He likes everything a little wild.” I part a thick shock of grass, and she steps through. Very nice calves. “See those bushes blocking all the first-floor windows?”
She shades her eyes and looks up at the farmhouse. “Yeah.”
“They were planted by Great-Grandpa Bert in nineteen forty-eight.”
What, no Great-Grandpa Bert-Bert? If you’re going to be throwing funky names at your readers, at least be consistently funky.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I think they’re holding up this side of the house now, and whenever Grandpa Joe-Joe locks himself out of the house, which is almost every other day, he just climbs the bush to the second floor.”
Chloe squeezes my hand, and I stop. “What’s that?” She points to the right at a hulking piece of rust.
“That’s a DeSoto, Grandpa Joe-Joe’s first car. I spent many a summer evening racing that car as a kid.”
“It…ran once?”
I smile. “No. It wasn’t running even then.” I slide my hand out of hers, put it around her shoulders, and point to the back of the farmhouse. “If you look real carefully at the kudzu over there in the backyard, you’ll see all of Grandpa Joe-Joe’s cars and trucks peeking out.”
“I don’t see…oh. Oh.”
“Yeah, there are a lot of them, and when the kudzu’s down in the winter, all kinds of folks stop by to ask Grandpa Joe-Joe for parts. He doesn’t sell any of the parts, though, but he lets them look, mainly so he can mess with them.”
She leans back into my arm, even slides her arm around my waist. Where has this girl been all my life? “How does he mess with them?”
“Oh, say a man asks, ‘How much for that bumper on the Ford?’ Grandpa Joe-Joe will circle the man a couple times, then say, ‘How much you got?’ The man will ask, ‘How much do you want for the bumper?’ and Grandpa Joe-Joe will ask again, ‘How much you got?’ This will go on and on till the man says something like, ‘I got a hundred dollars.’” I stop and slide my hand down to Chloe’s little waist. Nice and soft. Nice little shelf down there, too.
Come on! Not all women readers have “shelves.” Since when has having a big behind translated into sex appeal? I haven’t felt it, and very few men have ever gotten close enough to my “shelf” to feel it. The things men want in a woman that women don’t want on them.
And speaking of shelves, I don’t see Mr. Shaggy White Man. I feel a chill. I mean, it’s just Kim Prim and I here today until two, when Francine gets here, and Kim believes that every patron is harmless. “They’re only here to be enlightened,” she says.
Oh, there he is, and though I feel a little better just knowing where he is, I still feel a chill. I look at the front door and see it rocking back and forth. When is maintenance going to fix that thing? The tiniest bit of wind makes those doors move.
I look down at the page. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah.
“Then, um, Grandpa Joe-Joe will say something like, ‘A hundred dollars? That all you got? Damn, you’re poorer than me. How’s that make you feel, boy?’” I turn Chloe to me, my chin nearly resting on the top of those zigzag cornrows. “He’s always messing with folks, and he’ll probably mess with you, too.”
She looks up at me. “How crazy is he?”
“Pretty crazy.” And Chloe is crazy pretty. I hope Grandpa Joe-Joe doesn’t run her off like…No, I don’t want to think about that day.
“Oh, please do,” I whisper. I look up slowly, darting my eyes side to side. No one heard me. I have to stop thinking out loud while I’m reading.
“Come on” I say, taking her hand, but Chloe doesn’t move. “What’s wrong?”
She points at a long black gopher snake sliding through the grass in front of us.
“Oh, that’s just a gopher snake. Nothing to it. Only eats mice.” I look all around us. “It’s the coiled and brown ones you should really watch out for.”
She jumps up t
o me. “I don’t like snakes.”
“Better not use Grandpa Joe-Joe’s bathroom, then. I had a gopher snake pop out between my legs once while I was, um, doing my business.”
Nastiest. That can’t really happen, can it? If so, I am never moving to the country. Never. I can barely make myself go in the staff bathroom upstairs.
“They can…do that?”
“Sure. They get into the plumbing all the time, looking for mice, I guess. Lots of mice out here.”
“Were you scared?”
“Hell yeah. It scared the shit out of me, all right. No one can be constipated at Grandpa Joe-Joe’s house.”
HAAAAA! But it’s still nasty. Did I just laugh out loud? I look around and only see Mr. Shaggy White Man pulling books from the shelves. What’s he got, five books already? I sigh. He’ll be back here in a few minutes, and then I’ll have to do some work.
I lead her to the porch, a small gap in the bushes letting us hit the first step.
“Will the porch hold the both of us?”
“It ought to,” I say, “but if it doesn’t, you’ll just tour Grandpa Joe-Joe’s root cellar first.”
Chloe drops my hand and steps back through the bush to the ground.
“I’m just kidding, Chloe. It’ll hold us. Just don’t—” Damn. “Just don’t leave the sidewalk.” I have to do something about that septic. “You still have that stick?”
Chloe retreats even farther, fussing and cussing, looking for another stick.
“It’s just fertilizer, Chloe. Why do you think the grass is so green and thick around here?” She isn’t hearing me at all. Now both of her sandals have shit on them. “It’s the best land in Franklin County.
Hey, there’s a Franklin County just south of Roanoke. I wonder if…Nah.
If we could just find it under all this grass, that is. I’ve had so many offers to buy this land from other real estate developers, but Grandpa Joe-Joe won’t have it. This is my home, he says, my…home. I know I could get at least $5,000 an acre for it, and that would give Grandpa Joe-Joe half a million to play with, but he won’t even listen to me when I start talking numbers. ‘This…is…my…home.’”
That’s right, Grandpa Joe-Joe. You keep your family’s land.
Chloe finds a stick and starts scraping, her face one big frown. Damn.
“Of course, we’d have to move Grandma and Great-Grandpa first, though.”
Chloe freezes. “They’re…buried out here?”
“Somewhere.” I look around. “I used to know where they were, but with all this kudzu—”
She turns to leave. “I’m out of here.”
I would have left at the first sign of human excrement. What took Chloe so long? Oh, that’s right. Chloe is a hoochie-ho with zigzag cornrows and a nice “shelf.”
“Where are you going, Chloe? We’re only staying a few minutes. I just want to check up on him, see how he’s doing, and then we’ll leave. Five minutes, I promise.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” she calls out.
“It’s too hot to wait in the car, Chloe. Come on. It’ll be all right—”
Then I see a skinny, yellow, liver-spotted hand reaching through the grass for Chloe’s ankle. Damn, Grandpa Joe-Joe, not today! I start to run to Chloe, but I’m too late. Her screams send a flock of sparrows up out of the grass into the sky.
What would I do if that happened to me? I’d probably scream, and then I’d stomp the living daylights out of that liver-spotted hand, crap on my sandals or not.
Chloe kicks Grandpa Joe-Joe’s hand away and runs to me, which is a good sign. The last girl ran completely away, all the way to Atlanta, or so I hear. I wish Chloe’s whole body wasn’t shivering, though.
“Is that, is that—”
I put my arms around her. “Yeah. That’s Grandpa Joe-Joe.”
“Where…where—”
I don’t see him, which means he isn’t done messing with us. “He’ll pop up eventually. He’s like a big prairie dog.”
“Why…why—”
“Like I said, he likes to mess with folks.”
And then we see his hunched-over form moving through a patch of thinner grass before he disappears into a thick canopy of kudzu behind the house.
“He is crazy,” Chloe says.
And this novel is as ludicrous as Wishful Thinking. Oh, I’m sure there are crazy folks in the Southern hills, but no woman—“cute” hoochie or not—is going to go running to the man who brought her to this place.
I look over to the fiction section. Where’s Mr. Shaggy White Man? Ah, I see a neon-white hand pulling another book from a shelf. Oh, Lord, I hope he’s not leaving books all over the place. That’s what some folks do. They pull a book from the shelf, continue to look, find something better, and then they put the “not-as-good” book down wherever they please. I sometimes see folks do that at the grocery store, and I have to fight the urge to take somebody’s unwanted peanut butter from the bread rack and return it to the condiment aisle.
Oh, he’s coming this way. Dag, he’s skinny. And tall, maybe six feet. Tall people should not be skinny. There’s just so much more “skinny” to see. That red and green shirt he’s wearing is nice and colorful, and the green matches the pants, but those wrinkles, and is that a price tag? Tacky!
He’s stopped at another shelf, a thick stack of books under one arm. Only five of those books are leaving the building, Mr. Shaggy. I guess you didn’t read the sign posted right in front of me on the counter.
He’s moving away. He’s still not done? I look back at my book.
We hear Grandpa Joe-Joe laughing, more cackling than laughing really.
“Hey, Grandpa!” I yell out. “It’s me, Robbie!”
More cackling. “Nice ankles!” he yells, and he cackles some more.
I smile. “He likes your ankles.”
I look at my ankles and see nothing special. J. Johnson has some strange fetishes.
Chloe looks down at her ankles. “Oh.”
More cackling. “They smell like shit, though!”
Ouch. “I’ll, uh, I’ll clean up your sandals for you.”
She looks down again. “They’re ruined.”
“I’ll, uh, buy you some new ones, then.”
More cackling, this time from somewhere over to our left. Grandpa Joe-Joe hasn’t lost a step at all, and he’s pushing sixty-five.
“What’s her name?” Grandpa Joe-Joe yells.
“Chloe!” I shout.
More cackling. “Chloe? What the hell kinda name is that?”
It’s a perfume.
I look at Chloe. “You want to answer him?”
“No.” Chloe looks pissed. “What kind of name is Joe-Joe, anyway?”
No cackling this time. “Name my mama give me,” Grandpa Joe-Joe says, standing just three feet behind us, wearing his usual overalls, red flannel shirt, and shit-kicker boots. I wish he would shave and get a haircut or wear a hat. He’s looking more like Moses every day.
Chloe turns her head slowly. “Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I did,” Grandpa Joe-Joe says, wiping his forehead with a blue bandanna. “What kinda name is Chloe? Sounds like a name you’d give to a cow. Here, Chloe, Chloe, Chloe, here, girl, let’s get you milked, now, Chloe.”
For some strange reason, I like Grandpa Joe-Joe. He is, in his own odd way, calling Chloe a “heifer.”
Chloe’s little back stiffens. “My mama gave me that name.” Nice comeback.
Grandpa Joe-Joe chews on his moustache. “What’s ya mama’s name?”
“Violet,” Chloe says.
“Better name.” He nods at me. “Robbie.”
“Grandpa.”
“Well, you seen me, now get on. I got things to do,” he says.
I can’t imagine what. “You need anything?” I reach into my back pocket for my wallet.
“Did I ask if I needed anything?” He spits out a hair. “Did you hear me say I needed somethin’?”
I take out
two twenties and put them in his hand. He folds them twice and shoves them into his pocket. “Have you called anyone about the septic?”
Grandpa Joe-Joe grins. “Yeah.”
This is a surprise. The last time he waited until the stream of filth backed up to the front porch. “Who do you have working on it this time? It can’t be Roto-Rooter. They refuse to come back out here.”
“Nah. Jes’ me.” He plucks a strand of crinkly gray hair from his chin and stares at it. “An’ Jimmy.”
Not Jimmy! Anyone but Uncle Jimmy! “He’s out?”
“He been out.”
“Oh.”
Damn. Now I’m going to have to weed-whack Grandpa Joe-Joe’s hundred acres looking for Jimmy’s “medicinal” plants. The Franklin County sheriff found Jimmy’s last crop growing in the bed of an old Ford Ranger pickup a couple years back, just under the kudzu. The plants weren’t that big, but those fifteen marijuana plants got Jimmy fifteen months, and all Grandpa Joe-Joe cared about was getting his truck back after the trial.
“He’s a good boy, Jimmy is. He visits an’ stays.”
Until he gets arrested. “Is, uh, is Jimmy here?” I look up at the house.
“He’s around.”
Which means he isn’t here. “Where, uh, where are you pumping the septic to?”
Grandpa Joe-Joe winks at Chloe. “It’s a secret.”
As hot as it is, all I’d have to do is follow my nose…to more of Jimmy’s plants. “Grandpa Joe-Joe, you know what happened last time.”
He spits out another hair. “Won’t happen this time, I guarantee it. We got us a good hidin’ place this time.” He plucks a hair from his moustache and looks at it. “Where’d you find Miss Chloe, Robbie? She’s cute.”
I watch Chloe blush, or at least I think she’s blushing. “We met at Bensons.”