High Cotton (3 page)

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Authors: Darryl Pinckney

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American

BOOK: High Cotton
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The most Grandfather’s second wife dared to say was that he talked like a man who was born knowing. Grandfather sometimes turned on us like a rigged trap, and of course the benevolent gaze of the sage became the glare of the patriarch. He was not an accomplished minister for nothing. If an adversary was innocent of one crime, some other transgression lay hidden in the shrinking heart. Grandfather invoked the Book, sent out the verses on guilt patrol. An avalanche of wisdom from Deuteronomy, Kings, or Wendell Willkie shook the bulbs in the ceiling.
His accusing looks were as coercive as his ability to summon
Scripture. His mahogany skin may have lost its burnish, but his cider-brown eyes were still almost too expressive for his own good—in his day it was often dangerous for a black man to reveal too much intelligence. Grandfather was a consummate actor. Assured of his lines, his script, when my father got him on the ropes Grandfather would leap over him with something like “Grieve not thy father when thou art too full.” His eyes would relax and he seemed on the verge of laughter, as if to ask, How about that? Like the ring of it? We always gave up. Reason was easily stoned by Old Testament wrath.
Grandfather’s performances were seldom concluded without the handkerchief for the sorely tried brow. He had strong, elegant hands and was meticulous about his appearance, his granite-colored hair, custom-made shirts, and pliable, hand-sewn leathers. His communicants demanded their money’s worth, especially the sick and the shut-in, who swooned, he thought, at his neat creases and metaphors, and all those women who waited for the lilt of his prayers.
We endured long pauses before he accepted the flags of truce. He ignored conciliatory conversation, which was a trial for him. Grandfather concentrated on newspaper headlines upside down under plants, on my sisters’ fried braids, on the screams of our playmates in the alley, until he couldn’t bear to see us deprived of his talk. All smiles, he’d rub my stupefied head for luck, signaling that these sparrings were a form of family fun.
 
It was 1960 and Jesus wasn’t waiting at home plate anymore. My parents went to church only when they wanted to be seen. Grandfather had baptized my sisters and me over his very own font, down in Louisville, Kentucky, for the time being, and the New Testaments he’d given us were requisitioned by our Sunday-school staff. My parents pulled us out after they heard some
of the pre-Scopes notions we were fed, including the axiom that children who placed their hands in mailboxes were snatched up by Satan.
My sisters had gone into the Sunday business of selling automobile brochures from car lots that wouldn’t give my father a loan. They also did a fast trade in civil defense pamphlets: get shielded, drop flat, bury your face, don’t rush outside after bombings, don’t drink water from open containers, do not listen to or repeat rumors. They hid the contraband in
Mad
magazines, in
Tom Brown’s School Days
, one of those out-of-place, out-of-time things Grandfather liked to read from, more for his pleasure than ours, and worked nearby out-of-bounds streets, because customers who didn’t know us could be relied on not to make troublesome phone calls. I was paid to stay behind.
The engine of Grandfather’s old shoe surprised us counting up the day’s take of quarters. “Say ‘Howdy’ to your Old Moon.” He swatted his way through the pattern of gnats that danced over our steps and nowhere else on the block. We packed quarters in our socks. He said we looked as if we were facing the dentist’s chair.
Grandfather’s beige second wife brought up the rear, limping, the mark of her childhood trial, polio. He used her, a woman, to express things he could not. He was always saying that she was dying to see us, but we knew better. She was not my grandmother, not like my mother’s mother. Grandfather’s real wife was gone, dead from cancer in 1941. She and her intriguing curls had eternal rest upstairs in the hall closet, in a department-store box of photographs. My aunts said that before they were sentenced to hard time in a shoofly boarding school in South Carolina their stepmother had worked them like chars. We got back at the second wife by not calling her by any name.
Grandfather said it was a good day to duck out on his assistant
pastor, because the National Baptist Convention was meeting in Louisville. The offices of that brotherhood inspired the worst sort of contention among the members. The battles were known to upset Dr. King’s stomach. Factions came to blows in elevators and in hotel lounges. “Please, Lord, hold steady this hand while I cut this man.”
The reader of faces waited in his what-have-we-here pose: hands on his hips. Secrecy is the overprotected child’s dissent, but Grandfather already knew what was up. We didn’t have to throw our parents to the lions that day. Tornado Watch, when my sisters piled blankets and cans in the southeast crevices of the basement, had been overthrown by Freedom Watch. I didn’t know what protest was, but my sisters said that the clothes laid out for us showed that protest was up there on the charts with Easter.
The movement that had not waited for Grandfather’s consent infused everyday life with a longing that made intercessors unnecessary. A multitude discovered that it had immediate, unimpeded access to the burning truth, and maybe for that reason Grandfather didn’t think much of it. He wasn’t quoting “Abou Ben Adhem” anymore. Talk of love as the “ultimate creative weapon” made him cringe. His God was not personal, open; He was formidable and avenging.
Suffering was redemptive, but some things, after so many years, were buried too deep and might lose their spell if brandished in the streets. Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit alone, saith the Lord, which clearly did not include “running locofoco with every who-shot-john.” Parading around and eating at Woolworth’s were, to Grandfather, neither sane nor courteous. “That Bond boy ought to know better,” he once said. “He didn’t come from just any home.” Grandfather thought his sudden appearance would force my father to give up his plans.
We had to hear about the time Grandfather went to a symposium at Talledega College in Alabama. Trains didn’t run from Birmingham to the little black college. The teller at the bus station window wouldn’t let him buy a ticket and sent him to the other side. The same teller appeared at the other window. She sent him back to the first one. Eventually, she tired of his passivity and sold him a ticket. He spent the night outside rather than stand in the crowded Jim Crow waiting room. On returning home, he wrote to the officials of the bus line demanding that they correct the inequities of segregated travel.
Once, he continued, he was en route to a budget meeting of the General Synod. He and another minister stopped at a restaurant where they could buy food but not sit. “It was my personal privilege to get an appointment with the owner of the firm. In the closeness of his private office, the three of us—God, he, and I—had a quiet talk together.”
We went downtown anyway, without the mandate of heaven. My sisters were made to leave their genuine U.S. Army sergeant’s helmets behind. My father had to grip the steering wheel with paper towels, his palms were sweating so much.
 
A buffalo would have been less out of place than a skyscraper in the downtown Indianapolis scenery of faded brick department stores and mock Prussian monuments. The two movie houses were chaste, but Union Station had a reputation for estuaries of piss and men in the terra-cotta archways with aluminum foil wads full of stolen wristwatches.
The vast War Memorial Plaza spread out toward the state legislature. The Depression had tabled indefinitely plans for a brilliant reflecting pool. Instead, asphalt extended five blocks from the national headquarters of the American Legion to the entrance of a colossal chunk of limestone that featured a pyramid
lid. Replicas of gaslights alternated with ailing trees to commemorate the natural resource that, after railroads and slaughterhouses, was responsible for the boom-town designs of the “Crossroads of America.” A stately obelisk pulled the blank pavement together, and tanks along the perimeter were a popular attraction.
I’d never seen so many black people whom my parents didn’t know. Of course I didn’t have that word yet. I’d not even heard “black” used as a term of abuse. The Dozens, as winos called insult rumbles among pre-teens under netless basketball hoops, were still on the list of things to look forward to. Grandfather, the son of a race man, said “Negro” in public, and the way he said it left no doubt that the N was capitalized. But when Grandfather said “Negro” he described an abstraction.
Synaptic delay prevented my making the connection between Grandfather’s parishioners and the offhand “we” of my parents’ front-seat talk, talk that concerned the way “we” were treated at lunch counters on the off-ramps to hell. In my heart I believed my mother’s story that she was the real Shirley Temple. My nerve endings finally passed on the news when I found myself walled in on all sides by Negroes about to define themselves.
We accumulated like pennies near the military mall, between a statue of a grim Abe and a fountain. A sculpture of a wood nymph had been stolen and everyone said that the caravans of police cars were to discourage further theft. Compared to the storms to come, some half-dozen assassinations later, our march around the huge patriotic parking lot was like the haphazard, casual milling around on the lawn after church—patent-leather huddles of busy men canceling dates, aviaries of women in pink hats and white gloves. “Give me some sugar,” they said when they bore down on children to pass out kisses. The most meddlesome among the ladies removed their gloves to straighten bow
ties or smooth down hair. The nastiest moment came when they licked their fingers to rub dry skin from my cheeks.
We walked through a gauntlet of spectators, sunburnt men with toothpicks and milkshake straws rotating like cranks in front of their thin lips and women who looked as if they did their hair with egg beaters. More goblins came to stare from the tops of coupes and from the carved doors of the Scottish Rite Cathedral. My sisters and I, with our acute myopia, our bottle-bottom lenses, kept a fix on my father’s jacket, on my mother’s jacket, vanished with them and bounced back behind the ear-nose-and-throat man and the pediatrician.
Even the judge who had won a grand slam and gone into cardiac arrest at the last bridge tournament rose from his sickbed to fall in step. They came, though this was before the chance of getting on television had begun to be “factored in.” It was strange to see people who would have died rather than be accused of having flowers that “showed off” call undue attention to themselves smack in the middle of town, in front of so many others who were keeping quiet, arms folded, not about to join in.
Up one side of the plaza and down the other grownups were loud in public. How long? Not long. They made noise and the songs were almost like church, only faster. In church the hymns were dragged out. On the street people sneaked through verses, and then bore down hard on the end, as if they were stomping out a fire. I saw something nervous and steely in the excitement, expressions like that on my sister’s face when she made up her mind to go without training wheels even if it meant hitting the telephone pole.
We didn’t know what to do with our hands. One section wanted to lock arms, another wanted to clap. There were no stars at the head of our procession to show us what to do. My parents said the city fathers and the quislings among us had
scared them off by saying outsiders would get what was coming to them. My parents and their friends agreed that they hadn’t needed speeches after all. It didn’t matter how long an audience had been sweating, nobody ever willingly cut short a speech. Leaders, especially, were driven by the code that said, “I’ve written this out and you’re going to hear every word.”
The march had started well enough, but without speeches and banners there was no point to come to. The protest broke up, people left abruptly, rolled away like beads of mercury. My new shoes were covered with dust as fine as powdered ginger and I wanted to hurry home, to sink back into that state where good news for modern Negroes couldn’t find me.
 
Grandfather said he’d never met a rich white lady he didn’t like, which was more than he could say about the Negro movers and doers he’d dealt with in his time. Old Eleanor was worth more than the whole WPA. What the country needed was another aristocrat in the White House, a Puritan to scorch confusion, a man with a name as solid as Thorndike or Augustus.
He thought back to the Depression, when the Rockefellers on holiday in the Sand Hills were moved to donate copies of
Collier’s
to the churches. My father said we didn’t want charity anymore. Grandfather had his theories about good whites and bad whites. My father said some of us needed whites more than others. Grandfather said we would not catch the whites he needed by trying to stretch “Congo” lines from our front porch all the way to Money, Mississippi.
We could never tell what would set Grandfather off. He said my father knew precious little about discrimination in the army, since he’d spent most of the last war trying to dodge the draft. My father said Grandfather hadn’t exactly crossed the Rhine either. Grandfather said He would have mercy on whom He
would have mercy. The beige stepgrandmother switched channels to
National Velvet
. She was annoyed that our old set didn’t pick up ABC.
Grandfather said that if my father had wanted to keep studying and not die peeling potatoes for white second lieutenants he should have gone to a good school like his. My father said that Dr. Mays had been more of a father to him than Grandfather had. Grandfather said my father would not have been at second-rate Morehouse in the first place had he not been expelled from second-rate Fisk for calling the French teacher queer. We were sent to bed.

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