Glorious (5 page)
S
eventeen East 133rd Street already had the sounds—creaking floorboards, the rattle of the skylight when the wind blew off the Harlem River. In the winter the house groaned like an arthritic man and the furnace coughed in sympathy.
Chappo had brought the smells—iodoform, asafetida, and turpentine, along with herbs kept in clear jars, all varieties of dried animal feces, fried cow tongue, cured alligator tail, and pickled eel. There was magic in those jars for they held remedies for the hiccups, stomach worms, skin rashes, thinning hair, blurry vision, wanton women, no-account men, and unwanted babies.
Chappo was doing the work her mother and grandmother had done before her, God’s work—at least the work he didn’t have time to do himself.
A month after Easter arrived on Chappo’s doorstep, she fainted dead away at Bibb’s Hair Shop, where Madeline had gotten her a job as a wash girl. Madeline brought her home and put her in bed. After which she went downstairs and inquired if Chappo might have something she could whip up for her friend who wasn’t feeling herself.
Chappo hummed in her throat and instructed Madeline to stay in the kitchen and keep an eye on the pot of hog maws she was cooking.
Upstairs, she didn’t bother to knock, so when Easter opened her eyes Chappo was standing over her.
“Ma’am?” Easter hardly had strength enough to lift her head.
Chappo was not one to mince words, so she got straight to the point. “Your friend know you pregnant?”
Goddamit, Easter thought, she didn’t even know herself until three days ago.
“No ma’am.”
“What are your intentions?”
She hadn’t really thought about it.
“I ain’t judging you. I ain’t gonna call you loose or nothing like that. All I’m going to say is this: the devil’s sneaky and he’s busy.”
Chappo stopped and watched Easter’s face for any change. Someone’s muffled giggles penetrated the wall and Chappo flung an exasperated look in that direction.
“I like you, Easter, you pay your rent on time, you quiet and respectful, but I can’t let you have no baby here. If I ’low that, the rest of these girls up here will feel they could do the same, you hearing me?”
Easter nodded.
Chappo sat down onto the edge of the bed. The coils squealed. “If you decide you don’t want it, I can help you with that,” she whispered.
Easter suspected as much. She’d seen the women coming and going. Some arrived alone, meek as lambs, throwing nervous glances over their shoulders before scurrying through the door. Others came with men who waited outside, pacing the sidewalk, smoking one cigarette after another. Sometimes they rolled their sleeves to their elbows and played stickball with the neighborhood kids until their women emerged, hunched over and weeping. Easter never imagined that she could be one of those women.
Chappo patted her thigh. “You just think about it and let me know. But don’t wait too long.”
She stood to leave, but Easter caught her by the wrist and asked, “When can we do it?”
Two days later she was in the basement of number 17, flat on her back with her knees pointing toward the ceiling.
“Just relax, baby, it’ll be over before you know it,” Chappo said as she brought the bottle of ether to Easter’s nose. Easter inhaled twice before she was overcome with a sense of weightlessness. She giggled when Chappo pulled her legs apart.
“This is going to hurt a little,” Chappo warned before slipping the thin metal rod up into Easter’s vagina and piercing her womb.
Easter cried out and tried to clamp her legs shut, but the ether had made her weak and Chappo’s meaty hand was strong. She pushed the rod deeper and Easter called out for her mother.
“Hold on,” Chappo whispered as she removed the instrument, turned it around, and inserted the hooked end. She gave it a brutal yank, which ripped the gestational sac clean from Easter’s womb.
Easter shot straight up, opened her mouth, screamed, and then passed out.
T
he men were always on that corner as if they were spawned from the cement. Or maybe they were who the ironworker had dreamed of when he poured the molten metal into the cast and formed the long, dark leg of the streetlamp. When the radical thinkers weren’t on that corner perched atop their stepladders and soapboxes like great ibises, spouting fire, fury, and awareness, the others were there, trampling over the morning sunlight and the three-o’clock shadow. They abandoned the corner only after evening fell and the moon tipped the big dipper, splattering the sky with stars.
Their moods determined how they would approach the women. When the weather was fair and the sky like glass above their heads, they hooted and hollered out, “Lovely, not even a smile? Oooh, you’re breaking my heart!” On crisp days they bowed low and made great sweeping gestures with their hands. For attention one man was fond of jumping high into the air, bringing the heels of his Sunday shoes together in a resounding
click, click
.
The good girls tried their best to remain good and hid their smiles behind their hands as they hurried off in the opposite direction.
As far as the men were concerned, 135th Street and Lenox Avenue was Eden. Three beauty shops within spitting distance of each other meant droves and droves of beautiful women coming and going from ten in the morning till ten at night, Tuesday through Saturday. Many a match had been made between a wash-and-rinse girl and corner boy. But Easter couldn’t be bothered with any of them. Her mind was set, she said, on something and someone higher.
“Who,” Madeline teased, “God?”
God appeared on that very corner on a cold December night. He stood out not only because he stood tall, nearly six-five, but because in direct sunlight his ebony skin glistened Prussian blue. In the cane fields of Barbados where he’d once labored, the men clamored to work alongside him. Colin Gibbs, they said, provided cool shade.
In 1908, Colin Gibbs packed a canvas bag with the few belongings he owned, along with four salt breads, three roasted pigtails, two cheese cutters, four bananas, two mangos, five limes, and one golden apple. He hoisted his deck chair over his shoulder, planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek, and bade her goodbye as he stepped from the small chattel house and joined the stream of men marching out of Pie Corner, St. Lucy. They were all headed to Carlisle Bay, where they boarded the vessel
Thames
and sailed for six days and nights to Colón, Panama.
Three hundred heartbeats sounded above the crashing waves of the bay as the
Thames
moved slowly out into open water. From the beach, his mother stood teary-eyed watching the ship until it disappeared over the horizon.
Back then, Panama had been the land of milk and honey. Thousands of Caribbean men left their island homes in search of work on the Panama Canal. But when the
S.S. Thames
brought itself to a shuddering stop, Colin cast his eyes over the thick jungle that had been beaten back from the shore with hatchets and machetes and thoughts of neither milk nor honey sprung to mind. Undaunted, he adjusted the shoulder strap of his canvas bag, tightened his grip on the leg of the deck chair, and joined the line of disembarking contract workers.
“Goddamn if you don’t look like Babe the Blue Ox!” the man they called Louisville loudly announced, then tilted his head back and sounded a long, shrill whistle. “You know that story, boy? ‘Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox?’”
Colin remained quiet and brought his eyes level with the big-bellied white man who sat behind a wooden table, shaded by a canvas sail. He’d heard stories of white Americans and how they dealt with their blacks. But Colin was no Yankee nigger; he was a British subject.
“I’m going to call you Ox. How you like that?” Louisville folded his arms across his chest and grinned.
Colin dug into the pocket of his khakis and pulled out a slip of paper, which he presented to Louisville. The man stared at the contract, cleared his throat, and hocked a large glob of saliva over the table. It landed in the grayish sand an inch from Colin’s shoe.
“What you got to say about that, Ox?”
A man in line behind Colin grumbled, “Wat de rass-hole this foolishness gwan here?”
Colin took a mighty breath, placed the paper down on the table, and said, “My name is Colin. Colin Gibbs.”
“Louisville, get to moving, the men are becoming restless,” a higher-up shouted over.
Louisville snatched the paper from the table. “I’d like to take you back to Kentucky with me,” he sneered wickedly. “You know what we do to niggers in Kentucky?”
Colin held his gaze.
“In Kentucky we make big buck niggers like yourself get down on all fours and we fit them with yokes and put them out to plow.”
Colin’s face remained placid.
“I got just the yoke for you, boy,” Louisville continued. “Pretty too, made it myself out of sassafras.” And with that he jerked his thumb toward a wagon that held a group of men sitting shoulder to shoulder, simmering beneath the scorching Panama sun. “Get outta my sight!”
Colin’s first weeks in Panama were spent on a dredge crew shoveling through the Culebra Cut. Months later, his back strapped with a large metal urn filled with crude oil, he walked twelve hours a day scouring acres and acres of land for pools of mosquito larvae—infested water.
He and the other Negroes were paid in silver. The whites were paid in gold. Colin worked extra hard, took no days off, and often sold his meal tickets to the stout men who never seemed to get their fill. He ignored his hunger, his aching muscles, and the names the Panamanians called him: Chumbo!
He ignored the heat, the mosquitoes, the dead bodies that were carried out of the jungle on stretchers, and the names the whites called him: Nigger!
He ignored it all and sent most of his money home to his mother. He did not spend a shilling on liquor or women and when the other men asked him why, he said, “Me going to buy myself a little house with a shop and land. Me going to raise pigs for slaughter and then me going to America.”
“For true?” the men cried facetiously.
“Yeah man, for true.”
Madeline and Easter stood on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue amidst a throng of people who’d gathered to hear Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, speak. The subject that evening was Negro laborers in Caruthersville, Missouri, who over the past month had been threatened and intimidated by whites fearful of losing their jobs to the influx of Negroes pouring into the area.
Marcus Garvey’s dark skin glowed against the gray brick of the building behind him. His jowls trembled and his eyes gleamed like polished onyx. A supreme orator, the man who the people in Harlem had dubbed “Black Moses,” possessed the vigor and vehemence of a Southern Baptist minister.
Easter’s eyes scanned the crowd and she could not spy one skeptic amongst them—except for the pale and ominous faces of the police officers stationed around the perimeter of the crowd.
Marcus’s eyes ranged angrily over his audience as he cried, “Ambrose Young, a Negro, appealed for protection after he had received several warnings. ‘Nigger, get to hell out of here. This is a white man’s country,’ was one notice delivered by five hooded men, Young said. ‘The next night I found another note on my front porch, weighted down with a cartridge box. It said:
Nigger, if you can’t read, run. If you can’t run, you’re as good as dead.
“This bit of news is not broadcast; it is copied from one of the papers in New York. It is a significant bit of news. In thirty days, two thousand Negroes were driven out of a certain section of the country.”
The audience grumbled, a few shouted, two women fought their way through the wall of people and went wailing into the autumn night.
“Once upon a time the Negro would have been welcome to do farm work because no white man wanted that job, but now we are gradually reaching the point where even the most menial job the white man finds that he has to do it, and is going to do it with a vengeance in preference to allowing the Negro to have it. Now if the Negro cannot even get the farm hand’s job, what is he going to get later on?”
Easter nodded in agreement, then together with dozens of others brought her hands together in applause. She turned her attention away from Marcus and scanned the crowd again; this time she spotted a tall man with skin the color of soot. Beside him stood a man of average size whose pallid complexion made him stand out like a lone star in a black sky.
“What has happened in this Missouri town is going to happen all over America, as seen through the vision and through the philosophy and through the teaching of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. I see that as clearly as I see you now. And that is why I have been giving my strength and my little intelligence to the program of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, because it will be a sad day when the Negro has nowhere to lay his head, and that day is coming—coming as sure as night follows day.”
“He too black,” Madeline announced when she caught Easter staring. “And besides,” she added venomously, “he’s a monkey chaser.”
Easter jabbed Madeline in her side. She abhorred the names black Americans had for West Indians. It didn’t matter what Madeline said, not a word had passed between Easter and the stranger and she was already intrigued. She stole another glance and then turned to Madeline. “How do you know that?”
Madeline’s tone was condescending. “They look different from us. Like they just stepped out of the jungle. Can’t you tell?”
“I think he’s handsome.”
“He would be if he wasn’t so black.”
“You ain’t exactly light yourself, Mattie Mae Dawkins,” Easter sneered.
The man saw Easter looking and smiled. Easter smiled back and he dropped his eyes, turned, and shared a few words with the man standing next to him. A few seconds later both men were walking toward her.
Madeline tugged the cuff of Easter’s coat and hissed, “Let’s go.”
Easter deftly yanked her sleeve from Madeline’s grip and turned to greet the tall, polished-looking man.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Colin and this is my friend Jack.”