The Favorites of the Sun

by Mac Pope

  Janie was sixteen (to my fourteen years), she was dating and trying to dress to the times but Aunt Mahala regularly gave her opinions on late hours; feminine modesty and boyfriends. In contrast, she had seldom seemed to notice me except at Christmas and my birthdays when she presented me with unusual gifts—seldom suited to my age or interests. Once she gave me a finely wrapped book, “The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling.” Janie called it a worthless, insulting gift but I was proud of it; with its imitation leather cover and rich papers and drawings. True, when I tried to read it, the text was so thick in ‘native’ dialects that I couldn’t. It took a year of off and on deciphering to understand six of the ten stories. But they were fine, they were unforgettable stories…

  A time came when I had to get her attention; I was in trouble and needed her help. In our area of Brooklyn, bright kids my age went to Boys High School, a city school but with private school traditions and an elitist reputation; acceptance there was the gateway to the free city colleges and the fixture. I had been caught up in the English, History, and language classes in Junior High School. I seemed to be blocked and so made minimal progress in the Math and Science work. That had caused a conflict between the teachers who supported me and those who wouldn’t recommend me to BHS. The decision was left to the guidance counselor, a very smug, smiling lady who assured me that my large hands and strong frame spoke of outdoor work. “A good trade,” she said, giving me a choice of two vocational schools—both with poor reputations. I knew my father wouldn’t intervene; he had gone to one of the schools, so I needed Aunt Mahala to help save my academic life.

  She found me waiting by the stairs one day when she came home from her ‘errands.’

  I had fixed my face to reflect doom.

  “Well, a handsome young’un here to greet me, but looking so miserable…” she said.She must have seen through me because she smirked and said:“If you hang your head any lower it may very well fall off.” Then she tugged off her white gloves and told me to sit on a stair step with her and say what I’d been practicing to say.

  I told her the problem and asked her to write to intercede with the guidance counselor on my behalf. When I ended my plea, I was surprised to see the counselor’s smug smile on my aunt’s face… “It sounds as though your counselor knows the whole you better than your other teachers or I,” she said. “She plainly wants to see you through to good manual skills, which are the Lord’s work as well as any other…” Her voice and attention was drifting beyond me as though she were considering more important things.

  I got angry. She was not going to help me; she didn’t think I deserved her help; Janie was right about her—‘the family peacock,’ Janie once called her. I stood there, fuming…

  Aunt Mahala had withdrawn from my sullen stare and was mounting the stairs to her rooms when I fairly shouted at her. “Test me!” I said. She jerked her head back.

  “You don’t think I’m college material; I want you to question me to find out—so then we’ll both know.”

  “Who wrote The Iliad?” She asked in a sad voice. “Who wrote Twelve Lives?” almost in a whisper, facing away from me again. “Homer, and then Plutarch,” I told her. She paused a moment, looking startled, then said, “Which men were honored in?”

  “Plutarch’s Lives?” I said, “Demosthenes, Pericles. Marcus Brutus, and Cicero.”

  She turned to me as though I were a demon: “How do you know this?” she said.

  I was ready for her. I told her that I was under orders to go directly to the public library after school every day for my safety by my parents, since they both worked until late evening. It was one of the Carnegie Endowment libraries; designed to bring the best to the poorer districts. It was built with marble floors, classic statues, mahogany paneling—a book-filled small mansion with hide-a-way alcoves in the balcony tier. For years, I had lost myself among those stacks, almost obsessed with reading. Book stack workers called me ‘Quasimodo’ among themselves, I knew it and was pleased.

  Early on I read books at random, if the subject appealed to me, then I discovered a series of old books marked ‘for discard’: they were novels about life at an upper class English public school written in nineteen sixteen. I started reading the first book to laugh at long dead lifestyles but found myself hooked, virtually included in a closed world of green school lawns, school sports heroes, gray blazers, and scholarly masters.

  Latin, rugby matches, the Angelus bell, and evensong in chapel at dusk became part of my virtual life. Since they were engrossed with Roman and British history and literature, so was I.

  I even entered into imaginary competition with a self-assured character named Desmond Bullock for the school’s ‘classics prize.’ I wrote down his study list for the oral questioning and hunted the library shelves for the same books. Our scores were near equal in the chapter that gave the test results. Another boy won. In a later chapter, Bullock left school to enlist in the Great War. Still later, he was reported in chapel to have been killed in France. I felt I was virtually present in chapel as the school sang ‘Jerusalem’ in his honor.

  Aunt Mahala’s face had taken on a broad smile none of us had ever seen as I told of my book life. “Silly woman…” she said when I was done with my story. She told me that she would meet with the guidance counselor; she was grinning, and her voice made me feel as though I were witnessing her talking to herself: “They, the white people, don’t understand the different ways in which our people are gifted with intelligence,” she said. “They view us the way they view insects in a glass ant farm—so they can’t know that among us high intelligence often develops in a child of illiterates or that the spark can skip generations to reappear in a special child, very often the youngest child in a large family…” She eyed me closely. “You’re going to have to grow your gift into a professional life and marry someone who can equally pass on ability to your children, that is the way we move forward.” Before we parted, she told me she knew two of Nora’s teachers; that Nora was also a bright student, excellent in Math. Then she drew herself up and said something weird and mysterious: “You must both prepare for University. I will see to it that you want for nothing—nothing!”

  I was accepted at Boys High School; (On the first day of school I wore the gray blazer my aunt bought for me) but more than that—I was accepted into her confidence. She took me along on her twice monthly trips to downtown Brooklyn where she visited her bank and the offices of her financial advisor in Brooklyn Heights. We were surely the only non-whites entering those offices other than to clean them. The richness of the place reminded me of the author’s description of the headmaster’s study in my British school, and of our front parlor. I felt as comfortable in the place as did my aunt. She seemed to become more fully alive on those visits. The financial counselor treated her with respect, and she seemed to breathe it during their intense discussions. I noted their sharp eye-play over polite smiles as they kept to the subjects of bonds and balances, rates, and returns. From what I could understand, she had saved and bought securities while with the Dyckman family. She had also been given ‘pats’ of bonds from the wills of at least five Dyckmans. I could see that the stockbroker enjoyed talking with her, having tea brought in on good china for the self-possessed, well-spoken little woman—perhaps he thought her an exception that proved some rule… For her part, behind her look of coolness, I think Mahala’s quick smirks revealed her amusement: she was sitting in the seat Julia Dyckman occupied whenever she had brought Mahala with her on ‘errands’ and visits to her broker.

  However different the sums the two women may have had invested, the brokers attitude indicated that, eyes closed, the women may have been peers. After business, we would lunch at a tablecloth and silver restaurant and then walk homeward along Fulton Street, which changed from office buildings and stores to a stretch of neglected apartment houses and a littered park where black vagrants, prostitutes, and truants gathered in small, noisy groups.

  Mahala usually urged us
quickly past that scene, but one day we were not fast enough.

  “You won’t get no man in that dress, sister!” a tilted woman called out; others joined her in shrieking laughter.

  Aunt Mahala’s gaze was straight ahead and her head upright.

  “Better leave her alone,” someone else commented. “You know them kind don’t truck with y’all country Negros from Down South—Urmh!—Miz Lady even shines them high top shoes!”

  More keening laughter.

  My aunt inclined her head to speak to me while turning a cold eye on the group. In a voice everyone could hear, she said:

  “Worthless people with ugly faces are always seen in public places…”

  The stinging tone of her voice left the group in silence. ‘Colored strivers’ usually took their hoots and catcalls with tight smiles and hurried away. Mahala’s remark sobered them, chilled their self-image as free spirits and players confirmed an apartness they knew existed and left them feeling cut and scammed. I glanced back at them as we went past the park: they still stared after us without expression; like cows in a field.

  I told my aunt that I wouldn’t have disrespected the street people in the way she had.

  “After all,” I said, “wasn’t it up to people like us to communicate with them and teach?”

  She was quiet for a while, considering me and her response. Then she said, without raising her voice, “You should know this, that our kind: educated and progressive coloreds have worked to defend and guide and carry that class since they clogged the roadways down South at Emancipation time. Some of us wanted to declare ourselves a separate people from the freed slaves back then, but when we met in assemblies, our choice was to help. We decided we’d lead the masses, teach schools, protest lynching, improve the image. That was our duty. But they had a duty, too…” she said, “to learn, work, and join us or help us prepare their children to live in this world. Now, a century later, there’s just too many thousands like those people in the park who will have to follow or be left far behind. We’ll not follow them and give our children nothing but silly names and bad examples… give our kind the image of clowns and crooks… Don’t ever forget,” she said, “that our best equal and can surpass the finest people on the Earth.” As she said that, she gazed back towards the park: “Even though we carry some sorry baggage… The thing is, though, some of our best are back there in that crowd, pretending to belong there, so our truer mission is to find them, wake them, carry them with us.”

  I watched her pull at her white gloves.

  One day, my sister Nora was called upstairs to aunt Mahala’s apartment and given an hour of stem criticism over her ‘new-found wildness with boys and careless appearance.’ She met me on the staircase so angry, teardrops popped from her eyes as she jerked her gaze upwards as though to burn a hole in Mahala’s paneled door. “Who is she?” Nora hissed.

  “No one in this house breathes without her permission. She sits on us like Queen Victoria—she hasn’t got a life worth living… She wants to run mine?” Nora slapped the stairway wall, then pressed her back against it. A sly, bemused expression soon said she was thinking of a way to get revenge.

  There followed three days in which I barely saw Nora around the house. Then, one day, she met me in the foyer and, whispering like a spy, led me down into the cellar.

  Wordlessly she pulled me into a far corner to an old steamer trunk and threw open the top. The trunk was filled with dusty slim green books with the word ‘Journal’ gold embossed on the spine of each. Their months and years were documented in ink. My sister showed me the book for the immediate past year, then displayed the earliest book, dated January 1st, 1935. She watched the awe gather on my face as she flipped through yellowed pages: she had found Mahala’s diaries—her whole history was in our hands!

  “You ought to be ashamed,” I told her hotly. “This stuff is private. This is another person’s life.”

  “Then she should have put locks on the trunk.”

  “Maybe she trusted her family!”

  “Maybe she thinks we can’t read…” Nora’s voice trailed off as she read pages of random books. “Somewhere in here I’m going to catch her with her bloomers down; I’m going to find out if she had a wild side, if some man got to her, if she stole something or messed over somebody bad… this is her weak spot, right here!”

  Surprised and repulsed as I was at the intrusion on a person’s life, I couldn’t deny that I was excited at the opportunity to learn things about Mahala and her times that she would never have revealed to us or anyone. I glanced over Nora’s shoulder at the page she was reading; Nora had a look of sly satisfaction on her face. “She trusted them, and they hurt her,” she said, nodding her head. “Nineteen thirty-eight,” she went on, “broke her heart over trivial stuff—considering, but it’s a key, I think, to her sour personality.”

  Nora handed me the book dated February 5, 1938:

  “Feb 5th: I would not have believed that they would go so far to make my life miserable; this family that has always been generous and appreciated the efficient service I’ve rendered these three years, that they could turn me out of the hallway room that’s been my place since I came here. My room with the three windowed bay looking over the sweet garden, taken without reason or apology. Suddenly they think of me as a hag and a maid, I was engaged as a housekeeper, I am equal to the English Butlers and Housekeepers that other good families bring over from Europe. The family wrote to Hampton Institute,”in order to employ a suitable colored graduate," they wanted to improve the status of the race, they claimed, but look what they’ve done to me. Well, I shall go by tramway to downtown Brooklyn on my Thursday free day; I may find work in a commercial building or something else suitable. I won’t stay here without respect."

  Nora said she was sure to find other, harder revelations as she read excerpts from the books, “I’m looking for real dirt,” she said.

  I kept reading the 1938 book and further along Mahala discovered the reasons she was turned out. It seemed the Dyckmans, like many of their kind at the time, had been reading the then new novel, The Forsythe Saga, the grand story of a wealthy, ambitious English family and the way they lived. Descriptions of some of the Forsythe homes and lifestyles were very similar to the Dyckman house, except their servants slept in attic rooms, not along the same hallway as the family.

  It seems that after someone lent her the book to read, Mahala came to accept the changes but also to accept that her Dyckman family, caught up in the fictional Forsythe’s upper middle class pretensions, were nowhere near as smart as she had thought they were. Neither of us uncovered any true dirt as we read through the books, but Nora discovered a mysterious Mr. S, who had come calling twelve times in the 1939 book. Mahala described him: “S is so tall and of such good posture and yet he doesn’t seem to notice he has to bend his neck to speak with me as we walk. He has high cheekbones with a strong jaw; he is reddish brown in color, probably Indian—mixed like my own people. He is twenty years old like me but he’s already a professional man with a teacher’s degree from the Oberlin College. He often compliments me on my intelligence when we enjoy a picnic together on my Thursday free day.”

  Nora tried to pick some passion and high times out of those trips into the woods, but it seemed to be just a nice relationship that didn’t last long. In an entry a month after his last visit, Mahala revealed that S came to her, excited with his plans to immigrate to Liberia. The Black colony settlement in Africa. He insisted she join him on the ‘adventure’ but they argued: she held out that her career in the Dyckman house was important. He described her ‘position’ as that of a fancy servant—that she could do important work in Africa and be mistress of her own house and servants. She responded that she was a professional in her own right equal to European house managers and anyway, too wise to go and die of malaria in Africa. In the end though, she went to Manhattan to wave goodbye to him at the pier. There was no further mention of him in any book.

  I found an entr
y in her March, 1941 diary book that made both of us so angry, we banged the walls in frustration.

  “I am safe now,” she wrote. “I’m closed inside my bed blanket like a tent and I have a cup of chamomile and rose hips tea warming me. Only my hands are still shaking now; and I no longer want to scream…” The perfect penmanship, usual in her writing, was gone and words ran together as she went on:

  “How can evil happen so suddenly? And on a nice day and in a good place? I only walked the roadway to Van Dorn’s market store as I do every week. I carried the basket to fetch potatoes, onions, and some planting seeds for the sweet garden… and there in the store, I was civil as always with the staff and neighborhood people. They know me. But then, those four grown boys noticed my color and began to call out insults and throw sawdust from the floorboards at me. They began to call me names… they called me ‘tar baby’ and ‘black toad,’ one of them ordered me to clean his boots! I waited for the proprietor to take a broom to them and for the other ladies to call to them since they knew their families… but all of them stood silent, watching as the boys pushed me outside, as all my vegetables dropped and rolled about. When I hurried away, the youths came behind me, now they lighted matches and threw them at the hems of my skirts and on to my straw bonnet. A woman was watching from her open doorway as I came near her house. She shut the door, thinking I would seek shelter. And she reappeared at her window curtain to watch. Lord! I am here, home by your grace and by the laziness of those Scum! They gave up the chase when I made the corner. Until this day I had not let my coloring enter my mind—much as a red-haired person would not dwell on her difference… but from this day, I shall never deal with or turn my back on the white low class. Surely, they are more base than the low colored! Thank you Lord; continue to help me until I’m safe with my family someday—with my own…”