High Cotton (18 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
Once, when they were both in Indianapolis, Grandfather, in one of his moods, said that we all knew that “Ulyss” had spent most of World War I sitting on his duff in Hoboken and that he bought his pike helmets off someone later. Calling someone dishonest
was Grandfather’s method of deep fishing. Usually the person fell into the trap and, to prove that he wasn’t a liar, said more than he meant to.
was Grandfather’s method of deep fishing. Usually the person fell into the trap and, to prove that he wasn’t a liar, said more than he meant to.
Uncle Ulysses had his defensive details about the transport and the convoy from Sandy Hook, how the men sang “Rock of Ages” to calm themselves, how the ropes tore gloves and the cold at sea burned hands. He went on at Grandfather about the officers who kept the regiment uninformed about its movements, partly from disrespect and partly because of their uncertain relations with their French superiors.
I couldn’t believe that Grandfather hadn’t heard Uncle Ulysses’s stories before; they were over fifty years old by that time. Uncle Ulysses recalled Senegalese drivers at Maffrecourt and women atop the rubble of buildings. He said they would have made anyone think of the refugees down South after they were burned out of their homes.
The rats of Fortin and Ravin des Pins—it wasn’t as though Grandfather hadn’t known his own brother back then, where he had or had not been. But I wasn’t sure. They were a feuding bunch. It was puzzling to me how people lost sight of one another, how siblings fell out of touch. I thought perhaps it was a function of age, or a regrettable outcome of an era when people didn’t have the means or the time to visit. I couldn’t imagine life without my parents or my sisters.
Grandfather smiled at Uncle Ulysses’s standard information about whizbangs and silent 88s, how they sailed in at a very low ordinate and a soldier in their way became a very sorry fellow. Shells dug craters, blood dyed pools red. Wooded ravines and high hills afforded the best protection, Uncle Ulysses said. Then he noticed something in Grandfather’s face. His own puffy cheeks flushed with fury and embarrassment, as if his younger brother had tricked him again into saying something personal or showing emotion.
Not every busybody is a moral primitive. I was both, and alone in Grandfather’s house. There was no wake. No ancient relatives had come from deep pockets of the Old Country and Uncle Ulysses had not had much of a knack for cronyism. Crowded, exciting, singing wakes only happened in the movies, in the folklore of continuity where people were allotted one town from cradle to coffin. The family, when I thought about its gatherings over the years, had been more territorial and less adhesive than customers in a self-service laundry.
They were either ailing or dead themselves anyway, those weird names from my childhood when I couldn’t understand why my mother’s relatives didn’t know my father’s. Grandfather struck me as being one of the last of his period. He was “collectible.” I sat at his desk, eased out his drawer à la
I Spy,
co-starring Bill Cosby, and put my paws on his manuscript. He didn’t belong to himself; he had no right to privacy. The old darky was mine.
I Spy,
co-starring Bill Cosby, and put my paws on his manuscript. He didn’t belong to himself; he had no right to privacy. The old darky was mine.
Convention led me to expect an attempt to evoke the sweet milk, the raw turnips, the thunder, sandflies, and linguistic isolation of the Old Country. Talk de ole African talk? Grandfather had some understanding of irony. From the memoirs: “To our astonishment, as we discovered much later, the little church which our father pastored consisted for the most part of the lineal descendants of the once prosperous slave owners.” It was 1905 in that sentence. Madison, Georgia. Grandfather was the third of five boys and had three sisters whom he neglected to mention, which was perhaps what he meant when he used to talk about the strength not to languish where there were no constraints. “There were white churches also, but no one said that a person could not worship there if he wanted to.”
The starched jackets, straight-legged knee pants, scrubbed brick church, the Christmas barrels and separate but adequate school of the happy colored childhood. However: “Life’s romance
is never a high road of complete sweetness. There were months of tenseness that touched the nerve center of our being.” This was an incident in Madison. A lynch mob had formed in town. The mayor was quickly ushered into the study of the parsonage. “A horse and carriage stood waiting at my father’s disposal, in which he might ride hastily around the town and advise all the colored people to get off the streets immediately and stay indoors until morning,” Esau, the leader, riding off into the night.
is never a high road of complete sweetness. There were months of tenseness that touched the nerve center of our being.” This was an incident in Madison. A lynch mob had formed in town. The mayor was quickly ushered into the study of the parsonage. “A horse and carriage stood waiting at my father’s disposal, in which he might ride hastily around the town and advise all the colored people to get off the streets immediately and stay indoors until morning,” Esau, the leader, riding off into the night.
Another happening from Grandfather’s record: Madison’s liberal white superintendent of education found himself in danger with some “underprivileged Nordics.” He was escorted out of town under heavy guard, having agreed that if the party was overtaken he would be left on his own. “Here again my father was brought to the table to share and give advice. Oh, how he understood: he that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and faith of the saints.”
All Grandfather had left that had been his father’s were a few books.
A Catechism of Scripture and Doctrine Practice for the Familial and Sabbath Schools, Designed Also for the Oral Instruction of Colored Persons
, Benjamin Tucker Tanner’s Theological Lectures, an almanac entitled
Progress of a Race
, and Booker T. Washington’s
The Story of My Life—
worn volumes upright like Pilgrims, wedged between a rose-colored lamp and a pot of coins and buttons. There was also an old edition of Milton’s poems. Esau’s initials were inscribed on the title page, along with the price. There were serpents in relief on the cover, the pages flaked at every turn. Included were texts in Latin and Greek which, in Grandfather’s jealousy, he did not believe his father could read.
A Catechism of Scripture and Doctrine Practice for the Familial and Sabbath Schools, Designed Also for the Oral Instruction of Colored Persons
, Benjamin Tucker Tanner’s Theological Lectures, an almanac entitled
Progress of a Race
, and Booker T. Washington’s
The Story of My Life—
worn volumes upright like Pilgrims, wedged between a rose-colored lamp and a pot of coins and buttons. There was also an old edition of Milton’s poems. Esau’s initials were inscribed on the title page, along with the price. There were serpents in relief on the cover, the pages flaked at every turn. Included were texts in Latin and Greek which, in Grandfather’s jealousy, he did not believe his father could read.
Not surprisingly Old Esau, in Grandfather’s version, never got out of the wagon, returned from church business. The chapter on Madison was brief. Grandfather blessed the boys Grady and
Paul, who’d brought him milk when he was ill as a child. He recalled the Stovalls, the Atkinses, the Shaws. “There was neither bitterness nor fear in the little blue-eyed lassies who showed me how to ‘play store’ with chests of Confederate currency.” Then it was over, his seven years in Madison giving way to boisterous Augusta, Georgia.
Paul, who’d brought him milk when he was ill as a child. He recalled the Stovalls, the Atkinses, the Shaws. “There was neither bitterness nor fear in the little blue-eyed lassies who showed me how to ‘play store’ with chests of Confederate currency.” Then it was over, his seven years in Madison giving way to boisterous Augusta, Georgia.
Grandfather lived without photographs. His house was bare, like a bunker. No shoebox, no leather album with which to beguile the hours, none of his first wife. He was more than a bit vain, but he didn’t even have pictures of himself on the job, signing a wedding certificate or standing among the well-met at the conclusion of some interdenominational conference. Perhaps the beige stepgrandmother was holding hostage the images from his past.
A light rain began. Through the dirty curtains clouds trapped the city’s illumination and threw it back to earth in silver strands. The air grew cooler and cooler in the way friends write to one another less and less and finally vanish. Modern life roared over the rooftops a few blocks away, but Dana Street was so quiet it seemed to belong to a backwater where you couldn’t tell if the population was aware of what it lacked.
The telephone rang. I froze like a burglar caught with a sack of silverware on his back. I rearranged Grandfather’s manuscript, shut the drawer, wiped away my fingerprints. The phone rang and rang, like a recrimination. I’d heard a man in the club car of a train brag that he had hopped up in the middle of the night and lied to the receiver that he was sleeping, alone. I watched a woman eavesdrop. Her expression into her plastic cup said that the telephone always sides with the injured party; but it’s the victim who throws out the verdict.
The telephone wanted to know if Grandfather had turned up.
Evidently he had run away from the funeral. He was last seen moving ahead of his brother’s body. He was down the steps and around the corner before anyone spoke. The hearse waited, gave up, and went to the cemetery. My instructions were to call Uncle Ulysses’s house the moment Grandfather showed.
Evidently he had run away from the funeral. He was last seen moving ahead of his brother’s body. He was down the steps and around the corner before anyone spoke. The hearse waited, gave up, and went to the cemetery. My instructions were to call Uncle Ulysses’s house the moment Grandfather showed.
The rain increased, the wind moved the spray like particles in a dust storm. Under the streetlamps the rain took on the character of smoke. It came through the window that I had opened to let air into the overheated room and to let out my sneakiness. Drops as fine as salt mingled with the punctuation marks of Grandfather’s church bulletins. “Nothing like a good storm to scour the sky,” he used to say. Those wise sayings he was forever coming up with—some satire in them after all, some laughing at himself, at old darkies everywhere, and at all of us who only wanted them to talk in the language of buildings that done gone to leaking.
Several telephone consultations later it was clear that Grandfather was off, maybe boarding a Greyhound in the rain without a stitch of luggage. He had moved on, severed himself from pleasant and unpleasant situations in that way more than once. Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. I thought of him on the road, like Uncle Castor in the weakest days of the big band era: at the Municipal Auditorium in Cleveland, at South Parkway in Chicago, trying to get hot in Omaha.
Before I thought about the worry his disappearance had caused my parents, aunts, uncles, sisters, about the calls to hospitals and the missing persons bureau, before we found out that he had gone to the last place we thought to look for him—to the beige stepgrandmother’s table overlooking Harlem—I admired him for still gambling, after so many years, on the fresh start.
S
oul
oul
I
t was over. Firecrackers and sparklers went off all over campus, from South Field to the law school terrace. Around the Sundial, the setting of many historic harangues, up and down College Walk, on the steps in front of the notorious administration building known as Low Library, the twang of guitars, the crackle of radios, the putter of three-wheeled security vans, the eruptions of voices, and the flags of the NLF said it again and again. Even the jocks were out drinking, throwing footballs in the twilight, crashing into hedges, showing off for the Ophelias of the peace movement, who straddled the windowsills of the Student Mobilization Committee.
t was over. Firecrackers and sparklers went off all over campus, from South Field to the law school terrace. Around the Sundial, the setting of many historic harangues, up and down College Walk, on the steps in front of the notorious administration building known as Low Library, the twang of guitars, the crackle of radios, the putter of three-wheeled security vans, the eruptions of voices, and the flags of the NLF said it again and again. Even the jocks were out drinking, throwing footballs in the twilight, crashing into hedges, showing off for the Ophelias of the peace movement, who straddled the windowsills of the Student Mobilization Committee.
I squinted from my dormitory’s entrance across the nappy lawn to the Quad, the courtyard on the other side of campus, where student-leader types were trying to hook a pair of Harpo Marx glasses on the statue of the young Alexander Hamilton, so available to militant decoration after his shoes were painted red in the golden days of’68. No matter that since then demonstrations and sit-ins degenerated into farce; “living theater” we called it. I remained in the doorway for some time, afraid to take a step. It was the end of spring according to our psychological calendars,
study period, the week before final exams, after which you would have either blown it or not blown it, but in the joyous and idle meantime Saigon had fallen.
study period, the week before final exams, after which you would have either blown it or not blown it, but in the joyous and idle meantime Saigon had fallen.
I backed up the steps into Furnald Hall. The lobby was busy and unexpectedly cool, like a church on a travel itinerary. The guard, Jesse, union member, moonlighter, and taker of beer bribes, already snored at his post. His head rolled against the back of the chair. His bald spot matched the leather, like expensive luggage. “You ain’t holdin’ no air,” he said, if he was awake, when I flashed my ID card in the small hours of the night. “Mess with me, boy, and I’ll have to jump down your throat and swing on your liver.” He was conspiratorial with black students who flouted the rules, such as they were, and distanced the white ones with a grunt, hardly condescending to hear them out. White students who knew how to give a driver the Black Power salute, or who had raised their consciousness, as the expression went, to the point where they said more than thank you to the doorman back home were intimidated by the political correctness in Jesse’s glance. He was nicer to the jocks who didn’t care to know even his name.
“Boy, does your daddy know you’re up here running the streets?” That was the night I passed out on the subway, bolted at the 116th Street stop so as not to end up in Harlem, and turned to see the graffiti of the doors close on my glasses left rattling in the seat. But Jesse had got it right. It was as necessary to self-conscious living as the Fourteenth Amendment: your parents sent you out into the world; that is, they sadly waved you off with a cashier’s check and had no idea what you were up to, apart from the information that could be extrapolated from computer printouts at the bottom of the semester or from how often you called home to beg.
My mother called every Sunday. If I had to, I would have
taken a plane or an all-night train from the scene of the crime, experience, to be in my room in time to get my script together. Once she called in the middle of the week. “Are you still in school? The FBI was here to question you about Patty Hearst.” Two of the heiress snatchers were from my home state, Indiana, and had lurked about the local Committee to Free Angela Davis. I rushed all over the place with the news that the FBI was looking for me, careful to wipe the smile off my face before I knocked.
taken a plane or an all-night train from the scene of the crime, experience, to be in my room in time to get my script together. Once she called in the middle of the week. “Are you still in school? The FBI was here to question you about Patty Hearst.” Two of the heiress snatchers were from my home state, Indiana, and had lurked about the local Committee to Free Angela Davis. I rushed all over the place with the news that the FBI was looking for me, careful to wipe the smile off my face before I knocked.
My parents were not reconciled to my being in New York, so far away. One learned things in Indiana, too, they argued. From time to time I received clippings about the harm marijuana and LSD could do to chromosomes. But jurisdiction was precisely the point. What I wanted was the veil of miles, the freedom to stay up all night, to waste my time, their money, you name it. In those days, when months were like years, when students thought of themselves as bravely parasitic and “I miss you” wasn’t just another lie—in those days when we had more appetite than good sense, the punishment for mistaking white clouds for distant mountains was not loss of life.
I saw a Frisbee bang through a chandelier. I saw Jesse straighten up. “You look like you about to throw up a Buick again,” he said, and closed his filmy right eye, one of his many disconcerting tricks. “Don’t cry Hughie ’round me.” The left eye shut like a ticket window.
Upstairs was the ragged, dicey atmosphere of an inner-city bus station. People I had never seen before, many elites of one, came out of the plaster to mass in the lounge in front of the television, which was a 26-inch color job, as a result of a Cox Commission recommendation, so the rumor went, that the quality of everyday life be improved to appease some of the discontent that had helped to make all-male Columbia the most unattractive, volatile, and abandoned member of the Ivy League.
Girls—students at Barnard across the street—descended on armrests. They made O’s with their mouths around bottles of Tab or Miller Lite. Coed floors were also a post-’68 improvement, but my floor, Furnald 6, was not officially one of them. “Holy shit” was the general comment as we watched, with the sound turned off, replays of film that showed people in a melee twelve time zones away. They scrambled over rooftops, clung to helicopters, accomplished gravity-defying feats of locomotion.
Was it possible, was it so? A young girl, an escapee from small-town New Hampshire, a sort of mascot to the hippies on the floor, started to hum “Kumbaya.” She rocked on her haunches, a beer between her sandals, and fixed her watery, puppy stare on the Jim Morrison cultists, who snickered, and then on the bra-less Barnard women, who declined to acknowledge her. Someone handed her a joint to shut her up. She turned it over, threaded it through her grubby fingers. “Are you going to worship it or smoke it?” her old-man-of-the-week barked. The lounge was thick with the aroma of Acapulco Gold, Thai sticks, patchouli oil, leftover anchovies, squashed Marlboros, Budweiser breath, and slept-in Grateful Dead T-shirts. Through our 26-inch color window on the world we saw a Marine ball his fist. It went up and down on the mob. His brow was knitted but calm, like St. George having his vision.
Boredom is not out of the question even when worlds collapse. The party broke apart. Each to his quarters, his ardent nonchalance. I had no more connection with my fellow cellmates on Furnald 6 than spectators do after the ambulance has turned the corner. They took me for a black separatist. I knew no one on that floor, an isolation which, at that moment, was no longer as hip as I had thought. All day I had been calling people without success. I worried that my friends were hiding from me. However, loneliness was swept aside by another big emotion, one
maybe common to seniors who have not begun their term papers and who have no marketable skills: some awful mix of love and pity for mankind.
maybe common to seniors who have not begun their term papers and who have no marketable skills: some awful mix of love and pity for mankind.
I stood in the dim corridor dumb and, so I believed, invisible in a seizure of oneness. An overweight girl, so important in radical circles that she always wore a shroud-of-Leningrad expression, pounded on the wall near the elevator to affix a leaflet crammed with fine print that announced a demonstration against—she was never not in the vanguard—the Shah. Her faded corduroy trousers dragged on the carpet, drooped so that they revealed to the comprador-bourgeois onlookers the crack of her rear end. I was with her and with the onlookers. I was at one with the floor’s would-be dealer on his water bed, a longhair from Arizona whom no one trusted, whose door stood wide open hour after futile hour, and who seemed forever stuck on the same brown page of an old paperback edition of Kerouac.
I was also with the congressman’s son in whom philosophy had gotten the upper hand, with the pompous slogans on his door like “Relinquish no part of me to the state” or “Hell is badly done.” I was at one with the stoop-shouldered souls on what was called Grind Row, where no posters or stickers of any kind distinguished their cheders, where there was only the sickening smell of a can of Chef Boyardee heating up on a hot plate. In my mind’s eye I was at one with the stupidities scrawled above the urinals and with the Magic Marker that was made to write yet again “Eat the Rich.” I was there. The lichen on the ledge, Jesse in his dream of Jones Beach, the shadows on the Ho Chi Minh Trail—I was with it all, at every festival, until someone passed by and handed me a look like a traffic violation. “Man, everybody’s stoned out of their gourds today.” Down as a result of contact, as they say in football.
My room was one of the coveted singles, which meant that I
was spared a stranger’s socks and nightmares. The sink, the chest of drawers, the cot with the plastic hospital mattress, and the desk that was unusable because of the number of black candles I had melted on it left a bit of floor space the size of an aisle in tourist class. I heard a blast of music—Suicidio!—from a monster stereo system, the property of my neighbors, two guys who had grown up drinking from the same glass but who had lately come to the fork that led one downstairs to sleep in study hall, the Grub Room, and the other to lavish on the walls of their room his masterpiece in oil, an endeavor encouraged by the speed and peyote he swallowed in lieu of macaroni in the cafeteria. At any hour he shouted to himself of his inspiration: “Well, all right now.” In everyone’s face except your own a map was visible.
was spared a stranger’s socks and nightmares. The sink, the chest of drawers, the cot with the plastic hospital mattress, and the desk that was unusable because of the number of black candles I had melted on it left a bit of floor space the size of an aisle in tourist class. I heard a blast of music—Suicidio!—from a monster stereo system, the property of my neighbors, two guys who had grown up drinking from the same glass but who had lately come to the fork that led one downstairs to sleep in study hall, the Grub Room, and the other to lavish on the walls of their room his masterpiece in oil, an endeavor encouraged by the speed and peyote he swallowed in lieu of macaroni in the cafeteria. At any hour he shouted to himself of his inspiration: “Well, all right now.” In everyone’s face except your own a map was visible.
My inner composure depended on the lone window in my room. It looked out on Broadway, on Chock Full o’Nuts, trucks, taxis, delis, abused chestnut trees, panhandlers with fringed cowboy jackets slung over their shoulders, tables of textbooks and SWAPO pamphlets at the college gates. I saw two dedicated teachers, one huge, one thin, both in the throes of tenure battles, scrape gum or shit from their soles. “Don’t they know I’m the greatest poet since Dante?” Mr. Huge once demanded of a seminar. “Trotsky, who was in love with my grandmother,” Mr. Thin had begun a lecture. Furious student petitions were circulated in their behalf. The pair headed toward the West End Cafe, the hangout of the unappreciated, the persecuted, and the fired.
Broadway was so crowded with vegetable buyers and buildings streaked with weather that I hadn’t noticed the dark. Of all the things to witness in the street—flyers and newspapers that tumbled waist-high above the pavement in warm gusts; blue, lemon, red, and green lights in a diaphanous blur of gases; grit that miraculously retained the day’s heat as it flew to my teeth—
nothing was more consoling than the sight of people caught by nightfall in their shorts, their muscular tank tops and bobbing stripes.
nothing was more consoling than the sight of people caught by nightfall in their shorts, their muscular tank tops and bobbing stripes.
Summer was coming in as fast as what we thought was the liberation of the people of Indochina. Summer, that season of disappointed travel plans and joke reading lists, that slowing down into which your classmates disappeared and from which they returned russet and altered, made the hairs of my Afro stand on end, as if life itself had been invented by my generation the day before yesterday.
The time had come. Summer had always meant no school, but it had not meant, until then, with the tanks rolling down Tu Do Street, with the Chekhovian solution imminent—either hand in those term papers or shoot yourself—no school ever again. I saw summer whistling in over the water towers of Broadway as a great postponement of the Next Move, a beautiful ellipsis limited only by my cowardice, by insufficient wantonness of mind.
My parents had never allowed me to spend the summer in New York. Their policy against dancing in the street began the August before my freshman career, when I zoomed back from my first solo moon flight with one dime. I used it to call collect, to wonder how I was going to get from JFK to the Hoosier-bound plane at LaGuardia, and then I plugged the coin into a pay toilet. After that my parents enforced between semesters the uplift principle, which I interpreted as surveillance, wing clipping, Indiana arrest.
How I’d spent my summer vacations: the uplift principle put me to work as a counselor at a “student leadership” camp where the teenagers believed down to their tan lines in nonsmoking, Our Lord Jesus Christ, “role-playing,” Karen Carpenter, and the war on apathy. The uplift principle also permitted me to haunt my room back home or, sulker that I was, to teach my
wounded parents that nine-dollar scoops of chicken salad and debates about busing at NAACP conventions were not fun. But all of that was over. Go ahead, the lights in the wild air said, throw your heart over the fence.
wounded parents that nine-dollar scoops of chicken salad and debates about busing at NAACP conventions were not fun. But all of that was over. Go ahead, the lights in the wild air said, throw your heart over the fence.
New York City was going bankrupt that summer, unraveling toward its high noon. I found what back then could be described with sarcasm as a studio near the cathedral alumni called St. John the Unnnished. My belongings smelled funny when they dried, having been transported down Broadway in a stolen cart during a BB-gun rain. I coated every surface of the room with a glue that sort of killed roaches. The guy who rented me the place—I was the subletee of an illegal subletee—generously showed me how to construct an exploding trap that involved a 12-volt transformer, pieces of magnesium, and peanut butter.
The walls vibrated with hypnotic anthems like “Negrito Bi-bón” by Ismael Rivera, the Spanish Elvis. Children screamed, bananas fried; something scooted about in the walls themselves. The window faced an airshaft down which came boxes, bottles, plates, arguments, and that was difficult because I needed the nearness of a street to be at rest. I was usually on the stoop among the old men studying dominoes, the young men haggling over stripped cars, the mothers braiding daughters’ hair.
I discovered that Morningside Heights, when cleared of students, was a black and Hispanic neighborhood. Just when I was learning to act normal in the barrio, trusting that exchanges in the bodega late at night were not about how to mug me, my father decided that I would sail away with myself unless he intervened. He gave me the last thing I wanted as a housewarming present: a job.
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