by Andrea Lee
Some oaf just stomped on my foot and nearly blew my cover. Not the guy I’m dancing with, who is surprisingly nimble, a bit like a boogying Santa. No, it was a local kid crushed up next to us—actually not an oaf but a teenager with a shaved head, a child’s face, and steel muscles under a sweaty Ziggy Marley T-shirt. The kind of partner I should be dancing with—would love to be in bed with, in all honesty, though out of respect for my dear husband, Rory, standing five yards across the crowd, I’ll suppress the thought. Rory will howl when he hears the tale of Josefina and the American. And at the same time—how well I know the covert twists of his white-boy preppy mind—he’ll find it exciting, a confirmation of his fantasies about the brown girl he married. But that’s another story. Another dance.
The thing is, what happens to Josefina if she stays away from tourist men? I’ve seen a wedding here on the island: a cascade of nylon lace framing the scared face of a fifteen-year-old bride seated with her boy-husband on a pair of straight chairs in the shade of a thatched house on stilts. The fundamentalist preacher thundering about obedience for wives and hellfire for adulterers, while in the background, the wise women of the village flick flies off the macaroni and the iguana stew. After the ceremony come the babies and the work, and the swift shriveling of youth and beauty like sea grapes in the sun.
“Y abajo… Y abajo…”
This song is endless. My partner looks as if he’s about to have a coronary. Certainly it must take special skills to deal with a guy like this—nursing skills, perhaps. I’ve never had an old one, though I’ve been hit on by plenty. “Ils sont tellement gentils,” said the Senegalese massage girl at the hotel in Dakar, telling me about her sixty-year-old French lover, and the other elderly tourists who helped her buy a moped and a condominium. “Quand ils font l’amour, il n y’a pas de problème. C’est vite, vite! Et après il y’a toujours le cadeau.” Practical words from an eminently pragmatic mademoiselle. Mitch, our friend who left the States to become a vacation realtor and beach bum, says that a few girls have escaped from the island to become hostesses in a high-end nightclub and brothel in Antigua. Where they earn a fortune. And when they come home to visit, he reports in an aggrieved tone, they go out dancing dressed up like princesses. And if the wrong man tries to cozy up to them, they look him in the eye and say: I choose my partners.
The music is winding down now, and so is this pointless joke. I’m sweatier than ever and feel not mischievous but strangely melancholy. Weighted, as if I’d swallowed a piece of pig iron. Any minute now, my partner will ask Josefina if she wants a Coke or a beer. And I need to get away, to remember that I’m on vacation. To go drink rum with Rory, to make him jealous by dancing outrageously with some beautiful island boy. Or better yet, to steal off by myself. I’ll shove through the roistering throng on the stairs to reach the upper deck, where stars and planets look down blandly through the tropical night.
“Quieres una Coca-Cola? Una Cerveza?”
Valiant Josefina. Before answering she lifts her eyes—eyes with all the subtle fascination of jungle and reef and incorrigible poverty—and for the first time looks directly at her partner. And—most amazing of all—the face of this American is quite ordinary. The face of a professor, an accountant—or a father-in-law like mine. Someone who pays his taxes and worries about dry rot. A little drunk, a little stupid, a little horny and confused, like all the rest of us. Gray hair, a sunburnt nose with a few broken veins, and a blue gaze as limpid as a child’s. Impossible to hate.
“No, gracias.” Said gently. For a fraction of a second, as the next song begins, I link eyes with him. You know me, I say silently. I’m not an exotic dream, not a victim; and with me you can’t hide behind a foreign mask. My name isn’t Josefina, it’s Rachel Moore, and I may have gone to school with your daughter. I married someone who could be your son. I know who you are. Recognize me: it’s the only hope you have.
“No, thank you,” I repeat in calm, clearly enunciated English, as the music gets louder. “It was fun, but I have to go now.”
And since I’m suddenly not interested in observing his confusion, I turn and push my way deep into the surging crowd. There, in the press of overheated bodies, my feet at last grab the rhythm, and for a few delirious minutes Josefina and I dance all on our own.
The Golden Chariot
A musical comedy, or traveling minstrel show, starring a middle-class American Negro family and their brand-new 1962 metallicized Rambler Classic. All of them headed on an epic summer vacation trip across America, from Philadelphia to the Seattle World’s Fair.
Time: August 3–24, 1962
Cast:
EARL B. HARMON, Ed.D., a high school principal
GRACE HARMON, his wife, elementary school teacher
WALKER HARMON, their son, a college freshman
RICHARD HARMON, their second son, age fourteen
MAUD HARMON, their daughter, age ten
The gold Rambler Classic
Music:
No gospel, Dixieland, bebop, doo-wop, ragtime, Delta blues, rhythm and blues, Memphis sound, Philly Soul, or Motown. Just 1962 summer AM middle-of-the-dial radio. Especially three songs: “Portrait of My Love,” by Steve Lawrence; “Things (We Used to Do),” by Bobby Darin; and “Sealed with a Kiss,” by Brian Hyland. These songs play over and over again, fading in and out of the pebbly roar of static that joins cities and towns, ranchland and mountains. The static is the real music.
SCENE I
(Sunrise. Somewhere heading away from Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. DR. EARL HARMON is driving the Rambler while the rest of the family sleeps around him. The roadsides in the burgeoning light are dense with Virginia creeper, and the speeding car shines like molten gold. The peaceful hills are dotted with black-and-white Mennonite cows.)
DR. HARMON: Oh, it’s the AAA that gives us the bedrock of security, the courage to take this leap. American Automobile Association. The name inspires confidence. All those A’s, like the NAACP. The opposite of the KKK. The AAA guidebook tells us that it includes only hotels, motels, inns, TraveLodges, campsites, and guesthouses where, and I quote, no discrimination is made according to race, color, or creed. And there you are, there’s the whole country open to us, like one big guesthouse. They can’t slam the door in your face if they’re in the guide.
Avoiding humiliation, that’s been the thing. I’m roughly the color of Gandhi, but I would never go around in sandals and a diaper or flop down and let some Mississippi cracker spit on me. Oh, I went down to Birmingham because it was the right thing to do, but I kept well in the middle of the ranks as we marched along down streets lined with what looked like zoo animals to me. It was really just Southern white folks, offering their famous hospitality. They were howling for nigger blood, but it wasn’t going to be mine. I made sure I was protected by a solid wall of share-croppers, and then later I headed up a first aid station where we treated the minor wounds of confrontation, my smooth brown hands on my simpler brothers’ work-roughened skin. Ebony published a photo of me wearing a Red Cross armband, my brilliantined hair rippling back like Desi Arnaz’s, an old black Alabama church deacon staring at me like I was the savior of the world.
Not everyone has to confront. I swallowed enough humiliation for a lifetime in Philadelphia when Mordecai Jackson and I were the first colored students at Central High, and they used to take fresh shit, I suppose it was their own, and put it in our lockers, in our desks, in our lunch bags, in our gym suits. Months of shit. There were some white boys with prolific intestines in that school, or maybe they bought it by the pound.
Now I live in a suburb where I don’t have to smell shit unless they’re spreading it on a lawn, in a five-bedroom fieldstone Colonial that the slick Irish realtor who was busy changing the neighborhood gave away to me for eighteen thousand the way he gave houses away to Hobell Butler and Melvin Durant and all the other Negro dentists and judges and preachers and doctors who left the old Philadelphia row house neighborhoods to the poor niggers fro
m the South. We’re in a greener ghetto, and we like the walls. My oldest boy is in a good Quaker college, and the other two are on scholarship in private school, and my wife doesn’t have to work if she doesn’t want to. Education and integration are the keys to the future, as I tell the seniors at my school; and my kids have the future unlocked, with ushers handing them in.
It’s time to give them the biggest present: the country. Not the South, where the air stinks of barbecued black flesh, but the West, the direction the covered wagons rolled. And in a gold car that’s not one of those niggerish Cadillacs or Lincolns, but a Rambler, begotten by American Motors. Discreet luxury, one of the new metallic paint jobs, and a padded dash. Praise the Lord, as my mother would say, we are rolling towards the Pacific in a sort of temple, elect, protected under the signs of American Motors and AAA. Safe, as usual. Safe.
SCENE II
(Along the southern edge of Lake Superior, between Sault Sainte Marie and Ironwood, Michigan. About three in the afternoon of the third day. Beyond fields and woods come occasional glimpses of the lake in dry brilliant sunshine. MAUD HARMON in the backseat opens her mouth into the air rushing in from the front, and lets the wind dry her tongue.)
MAUD: A good thing about this trip is the bottle caps. Coca-Cola is having a contest in honor of the World’s Fair and what they do is print a picture of a different city of the world in each bottle cap, you just peel up the cork, and there it is: Bangkok, Paris, Amsterdam. Whenever we stop at a gas station, I dash over to the Coke machine and worm my hand into the hole where the caps drop down after people open their Cokes. I’m lucky I have skinny hands. I have dozens of bottle caps now, my pockets rattle. I have all the countries now except Brazil and Denmark; they didn’t print any of Russia because they’re Communists. It’s for a contest, but I don’t think about that, I just like having all those cities. I like things that make you think about anything far away, whether it’s other countries or millions of years ago. Among the books I brought with me is one about Marco Polo and another about digging up fossil men in Africa. Another is Ivanhoe. Sometimes I dream that I’m flying over the heads of my mother and father and brothers, gone somewhere else. They’re sad but I’m not.
There was a big storm last night, which was our second night away from home. We were in a town called Mackinaw, which is a name that reminds me of old fish and worn-out raincoats, in a white little house that was part of a sort of motel near Lake Huron where the floor, if the three of us kids stood in one place, caved in about five inches, and where we had to wash the plates in the kitchen part before we ate dinner. Mom fixed minute steaks and corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes and the wind howled like a ghost story and the house shook like a giant was slapping it back and forth and I was disappointed that the roof didn’t blow off.
In the morning I went outside before anybody else and met a white boy on the shore of the lake, where the waves were slamming down like ocean waves. This boy came out of the bushes and he had a long green man’s jacket that came down over his spindly legs like toothpicks, and hair cut so short it looked like a smudge on his head. He said his name was Spencer and that his dad owned land beside the lake and then asked like a retard was I a Negro. I said no I was a Polish Chink from Bessarabia, which was a joke I got from my oldest brother, Michael, and then I told him we were going to the World’s Fair, and that’s our car I said, that new gold one. It was funny to be talking to a white boy in the summer, I’m used to them at school, but we don’t see each other after school or in vacations. This Spencer was quiet for a minute and said he’d show me something, and then he showed me that almost all the rocks on the shore had fossils in them, shells and sponges and trilobites. I picked up about fifteen fossils until my mother called me to come in and get my hair braided, and then it was time to eat breakfast and drive off in our golden chariot and leave old Spencer there waving like a little white doll in the middle of all of his million-year-old shells. See you later, alligator, I said. I felt sorry for him, stuck there while we set off to see the world.
SCENE III
(Bemidji, Minnesota. RICHARD HARMON stands at the foot of the giant statue of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. Sixth day, about eleven in the morning. In the distance, paddleboats on Lake Bemidji.)
RICHIE: Well, eighth grade history was good for something. The Mississippi starts here. At least I think it does. This would be a great home movie, but this cheap family doesn’t even own a movie camera. Our friends do, but not us. Our mother says it’s more educational to look than to take pictures, so we’re traveling with the oldest Kodak in the USA, and we get to take a few crummy slides. On the Wonderful World of Color, people in the commercials are always filming each other in front of Pikes Peak or the Golden Gate Bridge. And what are we doing? We’re not even modern. In exactly eight years, when I’m finished with high school and college, I’m going to be a famous photographer and I’ll have the best equipment there is.
I buy photo magazines to check up on the new cameras, and because they’re good for nudes. Every issue you get has two or three good ones. All the girls in the photo pix are white, the way all the girls in Playboy are, the way everybody is, everywhere in the movies, on TV, in everything we watch or read. I know five or six really cute Negro girls from school or those pathetic Jack and Jill parties, girls so fine I’m half scared to ask them to dance or to say anything to them, but somehow they don’t seem as real as the white girls in the pictures that make you touch yourself. It’s like they exist less. It’s like our family exists less than Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver. We’re going across the continental United States of America in this fabulous car, but it’s like no one can see us. It’s too bad that we didn’t bring a movie camera. We could make a television show of ourselves.
SCENE IV
(Eighth day. Devils Lake, North Dakota. Sunset in a motel parking lot with arid hills beyond. GRACE HARMON stands in front of stacked wooden boxes of empty soda bottles.)
GRACE: These wide spaces scare me. The light is too strong. I don’t know what to do with it. I feel unwelcome, caught like a cockroach out in the open. I like small places inside, places like my shiny kitchen when I have pots on all the burners and everything under control, the smell of greens cooking with ham bones, of chicken roasting, of yeast rolls and tapioca pudding. Or church, when the service has just finished, and we ladies are all standing in our gloves and hats à la Jackie Kennedy, and greeting each other and chatting so close that you can smell everyone’s Arpège perfume and Alberto VO5 hair cream. There is a sense of salvation, and relief, because the Holy Word is still floating around us in the air, and yet we’re all going home to eat soon.
Once when I was still a student at Philadelphia Normal School, I sat next to Eleanor Roosevelt at a tea to benefit the work camps, and she said to me that I must try to see as much as I could of this great country of ours. She was kind, but like an elephant in pearls, and it made me angry that she didn’t stop to think that most of our great country didn’t want to see me.
And I had traveled. The year before that I went with my cousin Minerva down to Palm Beach to work the winter season as a butter-water girl at the Fontainebleau Hotel. That was an experience: the dining room long as a football field, with all those dried-out white faces bent over their food, with Minerva and I and all the other pretty colored girls in our ruffled caps, skimming round tables where never in our lives could we have sat down. The manager’s son, who was our age, used to walk around in jodhpurs and riding boots, not saying anything, just looking us over with hard blue eyes. We felt naked. That’s the way I feel now, standing here under this big sky.
SCENE V
(Glacier National Park, looking over the Canadian border toward Waterton Lakes National Park and Calgary. A curving highway through a swarm of snowcapped peaks, resonance of early afternoon light over heights and distant forests. WALKER HARMON is behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette.)
WALKER: One Winston and they’re on my ass. They haven’t been unco
ol enough to say anything yet, but Mom is muttering to herself and staring out at the Rockies as if she’d like to bite them off, and Pop looks like I just punched him in the stomach. Well, it had to be done, it’s ridiculous that I’m eighteen and in college and doing half the driving and can’t act like the hell I want. This trip is a mistake. It shows up what’s wrong with this pitiful family. The fight for civil rights is in the South, so we go west on a sightseeing expedition. My roommates at Oberlin, Joel Kagan and Marty Hubbard, are both down in Greenville, Mississippi, registering voters. Joel’s sister from Bryn Mawr is with them, she wears dancers’ leotards and skirts from Mexico, and twists her hair up in a style called the Marienbad. White students are lining up to risk their lives, and what did I do? I came home from college in June like a good son, worked a summer job in the mail room at the Philadelphia Bulletin, and dated my high school flame, Ramona Jenkins, who has tits like dirigibles and allows a lot of heavy action with bra and panties firmly in place and is already talking about how she wants to marry a doctor. Instead of acting like a man and volunteering for SNCC, I came on this trip, with Pop sweating over his AAA guide, and practically shitting in his pants every night when he has to go to ask for a room in one of these little cow-town motels. Terrified that he’s going to hear that word—nigger—that would sweep us right off the map of the USA. Sweep his precious family right off to Oz, like a black tornado.
SCENE VI
(Seattle World’s Fair. High noon. The whole HARMON FAMILY stands together in the crowd.)