The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  The bus stops at the L train station. Just before the doors open, the oldest Jah hollers bye to his brothers and sisters, and his mother pulls him down to her to kiss his cheek, smashing the youngest one between them. It is loud and very dramatic. Even the bus driver is looking through his rearview mirror. I get off too. The family does this every morning, as if they don’t live in the same house and see each other on a daily basis. Then the youngest is crying and the mother is holding him up to the window so he can see the brother, who is standing on the sidewalk waving one last good-bye.

  On the subway platform, the conductor speaks on the intercom, asking people to please let go of the doors. He says that another train is pulling up in two minutes, and people causing a delay are endangering themselves, but nobody pays him any mind. One lady holds the doors open for a whole group of people, including me. Now a man is holding the doors open for the last stragglers.

  Every morning the same old lady walks up and down the train car, preaching and giving tracts to anyone who will take them. She always seems to pick the fullest car, the last one, weaving her way through and around people and never bothering to break her sermon to say “Excuse me.” After preaching, she prays for us and then she breaks into a hymn. The woman next to me hisses her teeth and says it is too early for all of this. Two girls, maybe two years younger than me, are leaning against the doors and laughing into each other, probably because the singing is so bad. The old lady tries to give a tract to a couple with dreadlocks, but the man takes one look at the tract and says, “A white Jesus you a gi mi? Mi no bother wid nuh white Jesus.” The woman he is with laughs. Most everyone else is folded into himself or herself, sleep still in their eyes because they are holding on to the last free moments before work or school.

  I touch the letter in my coat pocket. I imagine the tidiness of my mother’s handwriting and the polite way of her words.

  * * *

  —

  When I was little, my grandmother and I lived in the house I was born in. The bed my mother used to sleep in when she was a girl was the same bed she gave birth in, a bed I claimed as my own for the eight years my mother left me with my grandmother. My placenta and umbilical cord were buried under either the ackee tree or the breadfruit tree. My grandfather buried them deep, so no dog could get to them, but he died when I was a baby and my grandmother couldn’t remember which tree it was. She always wanted to say it was the ackee tree but she really wasn’t sure.

  My name was supposed to be Sylvia if I turned out to be a girl or Roy, after my father, if I turned out to be a boy. But when my mother pushed me out, my grandmother said that no one spoke for a moment, and then the midwife, a woman with aging eyes, asked, “A light ’im light so?” No one who had seen how dark my father was would have asked that. “Samson,” my grandmother said. “We a go call ’im Samson.” My grandmother said she looked at my albino skin and knew I would have to be strong. That’s why she named me Samson instead of after my father, whom she called a “cruff” whenever his name came up. Because the labor pains silenced my mother and my grandfather wasn’t interested in what they named me if it wasn’t after him, no one argued with my grandmother. My name is Samson Roy Johnson.

  When I lived with my grandmother, she used to take me with her down to Mermaid River. But I soon became tired of sitting around while she and the other women took care of business—selling the food they prepared, talking people’s business, and whatever else old women did that bored me. I was freed when my grandmother started leaving me at the house of a woman who watched children, and then I started school. After that, I hardly bothered to make it down to Mermaid River, and then, when I went of my own accord, it was because of what Roger Boxx said.

  A man went mad down in Porus and chopped his wife with a machete, which was how Roger Boxx came to be in my class, since his people took him and his little sister to live with them. Everyone had heard about the woman who was chopped. My grandmother and I were eating fried fish and watching the evening news. She paused from picking a fishbone out of her teeth to say, “Jesus,” elongating the word and almost whispering, in the way she did whenever she heard something painful and surprising, or sometimes, miraculous.

  Roger Boxx was the shortest boy in our class. He took over from Clement Richards, who had been the shortest boy in the class but made up for his height with his voice, which sounded like he was copying after his father, who was a Seventh-Day Adventist minister. Nobody paid Clement Richards’s height any mind because they were invested in the way his voice sounded, in the highs and lows, the drama of it. Roger Boxx didn’t seem to have anything about him to level out his height, so nobody paid him any mind. He took up a space next to those of us who were never invited to play cricket. Silently, except when it came time to cheer, we watched the games from the edge of the field.

  After a week or so, Roger Boxx and I were paired up as spelling partners. As soon as he sat down after pushing his desk next to mine, he told me that he had a Game Boy at home. I told him I had a three-legged dog named Delilah who ate the pears that fell from our pear tree. We became inseparable.

  I remember how one time Roger Boxx said that he wanted to see Delilah but when we got to my house, she was nowhere to be found. This was because, as I suspected about the Game Boy, I didn’t have a three-legged pear-eating dog named Delilah. In fact, a man who lived down the road owned a three-legged pear-eating dog he called Trouble. The first time I asked about the dog’s name, the man told me Delilah since he knew my name was Samson. I didn’t confess any of this to Roger Boxx. We walked around the yard calling out Delilah’s name, and I told Roger that sometimes Delilah walked all over the district and then she might come home with somebody’s fowl in her mouth.

  This was how Roger Boxx and I, tired of looking for Delilah, came to be playing marbles in the front yard when he looked up and asked, “Who is dat ole woman?” I looked up quickly to see who was walking into the yard and my mind got stuck on the word “ole” when I saw that he was talking about my grandmother. I never thought of her as old until he said it, maybe because she raised me as if she was my mother since my own mother had been in New York for eight years already, working and making a way so that she could send for me. Or it could have been because she was big and tall, and even with gray hair she never seemed weak. Old meant weak to me then. The word surprised me, offended me, and put a fire under my tail. I decided that since my grandmother was old, I had a responsibility to help her more.

  * * *

  —

  I get off at Broadway Junction. The preaching woman gets off too, hauling two big bags with her. Just before the train stopped, she abruptly ended the hymn, gave everybody a last word about Jesus’s coming again and getting our lives right, and quickly stuffed the tracts and Bible into one of her bags. We go up the stairs and then the morning crowd swallows her. I follow the crowd that gets on the down escalator, then walk a little way to the stairs that lead to the A and C train platform. The A train is pulling off but that’s okay. It’s really the C I need to get on.

  I sit next to a young couple sleeping on each other. It’s the only free seat. The girl’s legs are spread out across the guy’s lap, his arms are wrapped around her, and they look to be completely lost in sleep. Across from me a woman is looking into a mirror and putting on her entire face. My mother’s voice comes into my head, so I smile. She would call the couple sleeping and the woman putting on her makeup “slack.” She would be horrified. She would say that Americans don’t have any shame, and she would warn me, “Please, Samson, I didn’t bring you to this country to tek up dem ways.”

  * * *

  —

  The morning after Roger Boxx called my grandmother “ole,” instead of running off early to watch the cricket games in the schoolyard, I stayed behind. After I had eaten my porridge, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and put on my uniform, I stood behind my grandmother in the kitchen with my hands in
my khaki pants pockets. Standing around was the quickest way to become involved in whatever needed to be done around the house. “Here,” she said, bumping into me as she turned around in our small kitchen. “Yuh look like yuh wan’ someting fi do.” She gave me a pan filled with big pieces of coconut to cut into the little pieces she used to make coconut drops. That morning she had thrown the coconuts against a big rock behind our house because it was the way she busted them open. I’d heard the coconuts being flung while I ate my porridge.

  When I got to school, Roger Boxx and the other boys who nobody wanted on their team were watching the last minutes of the game. Roger held his arms up as if to say, “Where were you?” I only shook my head, because explaining I had willingly stayed behind to help my grandmother cook wouldn’t make any sense to him. I took my place next to him and we watched the rest of the game together.

  After school, I told Roger Boxx that I couldn’t play marbles because I had to help my grandmother. He looked at me as if I wasn’t making any sense to him. After I walked out of the schoolyard, I turned around to see that he was playing football with a marble. I couldn’t see the marble from the distance where I was standing, for all I knew he could have been kicking a small stone, but I knew it was a marble because we played football that way sometimes. I almost went back to play with him. I’d told him a half lie. I didn’t have to help my grandmother and she wasn’t expecting me. My plan was to go down to Mermaid River to help with the selling and, when the sun began to set, the packing up of the leftovers and bringing it all back home.

  In front of a yellow house was a tree and under the tree were three women standing huddled close to each other. I saw my grandmother before she noticed me. A big-boned tall woman, she was hard to miss. She was picking at something wrapped in a piece of foil, and then she, Mrs. Angie, and Mrs. Wright were laughing loudly, the kind of laugh that made their whole bodies dance. For a moment it seemed as though the woman laughing as if she didn’t have one fret in the whole world wasn’t the same woman who quarreled with me. Then she saw me, and I saw myself in her eyes, a twelve-year-old boy prone to trouble since I sometimes didn’t know what to do with myself. She started walking quickly toward me and I could see the questions in her face. She wanted to hear what happened, what trouble I had gotten into, since I never made it down to Mermaid River after school.

  “Wah ’appen, Samson?” my grandmother asked when she was close enough to call out.

  “Nothin’.” I shrugged my shoulders.

  My grandmother stood in front of me wearing a faded church dress and an old purse, the handles of which were tied around her waist. I knew the purse was where she kept the money she made from sales and the mints she sucked on when she felt for something in her mouth. I grew up hearing her say, “Mi feel fah something,” and then she would look for the purse so she could suck on a red-and-white-striped mint. I hadn’t seen the purse in some months, and I missed it, because I used to take money when I wanted to buy a suck-suck at the shop, or a mint when I too felt for something in my mouth. I had been taking money and mints from that purse my entire childhood and I always suspected my grandmother knew, but when she finally caught on she said, “O Lawd, O Jesus, O heaven cum down an fill mi soul, di bwoy a thief fram mi!” and then she started keeping the purse somewhere in her bedroom. Although it occurred to me to look for it, I hadn’t built up the ambition, especially since the last time I went into my grandmother’s bedroom to look for something she hid from me, I hit upon the pail she used in the nights when she couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Usually she emptied it out in the toilet before I even climbed out of bed. She had forgotten, that morning, and as I looked down at it I realized that I was seeing the entire meal she had eaten and drunk the night before. I couldn’t say why I was so annoyed at being greeted with her bowel movements. At first, I thought it was her negligence that upset me, but then I realized, plain and simple, that I was angry she had created the opportunity to disgust me. At the time I didn’t understand why my grandmother was so angry when she came home to meet my annoyance and scorn. It was the complaint I greeted her with when she walked into the house. She wanted to know what I was doing in her bedroom, and if the pail bothered me, why I hadn’t emptied it myself. She asked why I left the pail in her bedroom for the entire day for her to come home and throw it out. She wanted to know how I could scorn the woman who had cleaned my vomit and wiped my behind and changed the sheets when I used to wet the bed. The whole incident bothered and embarrassed me, and my grandmother was so angry that she left me to prepare my own dinner.

  “Wah yuh doin’ down ’ere?” My grandmother wanted to know down at Mermaid River. I remember she was looking over me carefully, and using her hand to shade her eyes, which made the bangs on her wig scrunch up. She braided her hair in little plaits but I only saw them early in the mornings or late at night because she wore a wig everywhere.

  “Oh, I just come down to help you.” This made my grandmother look at me hard, as though I was telling her stories.

  But she looked happy to see me, too. She could show me off to Mrs. Angie and Mrs. Wright, telling them how I always brought home the highest marks in school. She offered me the piece of foil she was eating from. It was a piece of jerk chicken, still warm as I used my fingers to break the flesh apart. Mrs. Angie was roasting jerk chicken in a steel drum and Mrs. Wright was roasting yam, saltfish, and corn in another one. They were across the road from Mermaid River, under a tree where everything they needed was laid out: chairs for sitting, an umbrella, paper fans, and a Bible and church hymnal and other necessities I can’t remember. The tree was in front of the house where Mrs. Angie lived with her husband. On one of the two front walls of the house were painted the words WE SELL HOT GOOD FOOD, big enough for the people in passing vehicles to make out. Every morning my grandmother woke up early to prepare various sweets, like tamarind balls, coconut drops, and plantain tarts. Then she walked down to Mermaid River to sit under that tree with her two friends. On the days it rained, if the rain was very bad, they all stayed home. But if it was only a drizzle, Mrs. Angie would get her husband to tie a piece of tarpaulin under the tree.

  * * *

  —

  There are three black students in my chemistry class, and then there is me. When I told my mother this, she said I shouldn’t worry with those things. The and then there is me part was supposed to be funny, but she didn’t get it. My mother wants to keep me strong to make sure I do something important with my life. My stepfather is a garbage collector, which must have been a disappointment to her. Once, I heard her telling her friend that she never wanted to marry a man who came home with dirt under his fingernails. The irony of my mother’s marrying a garbage collector, the exact kind of man she didn’t want to marry, filled the next moments with laughter. But my mother says my stepfather’s job is very good money in this country, and nothing to be ashamed of, and she says this to convince the both of us, and to meet our surprise, because where we come from, nobody with any shame would willingly collect people’s garbage for a living.

  When class ends, I walk up to the chemistry teacher to show him the letter. He is an old white man with thinning hair, who smells of cigarettes and something else we can’t put our fingers on. He is known to make at least one student a semester, usually a girl, openly cry. He is also the only teacher who cusses in class, saying, for example, “I don’t give a rat’s ass” whenever someone gives him an excuse. Now he says to me, “I’m sorry for your loss.” This is a surprise to hear from him, but how he says it feels appropriate since it’s the uncaring way he always speaks. He must have lived a hard life—that’s what my mother says about people who are miserable. Then he says it’s okay that I’m going to Jamaica, but make sure I get the notes from someone when I get back. I thank him and leave the classroom.

  I show the letter to all my teachers. Mrs. Cunningham, my French teacher, looks very sorry for me because this is the kind of person
she is. She looks like she is about to hug me but she remembers herself, so she only puts her hand on my shoulder. My classmates want to know what’s in the letter because they are nosy. I see them looking at me.

  * * *

  —

  The day I went down to help her, my grandmother and I sat under the tree, waiting for customers. She started telling me about old times—how the river used to be fat, how it used to be unnamed. Eventually a tour bus pulled up across the road, everyone disembarked, and a guide began talking to a group of people. Then the tourists were taking photos and a few crossed the road to our stand. One woman bought a dozen coconut drops from my grandmother, explaining that she was taking them back home with her. As afternoon pushed into evening, cars pulled up alongside the tree. Mrs. Angie and Mrs. Wright would get up to take the orders. I collected one of everything my grandmother prepared and held them out by the top of the plastic bags she tied them in, so customers could see what we had for sale.

  By the time the second tour bus pulled up, I had learned that as little girls my grandmother and her friends from primary school tied up their uniform skirts to wade in the river. One time, they got it into their heads to wade in their drawers, so that’s how they were, all four of them, and then they wrung out their drawers and hid them in their schoolbags and walked home holding down their skirts in case a heavy wind blew.