High Cotton (9 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
I meant to confess about the note, but something again held me back. He thought I had gone back to bed and dialed one of his long numbers. I watched him squeeze the sash of his bathrobe as he murmured wearily into the receiver, “In God we trust. Everyone else trusts in cash.” The person on the other end of the line was hearing, probably not for the first time, how Uncle Castor had been robbed.
Every popular composer was, in his books, an “alligator,” one who stole the melodies and arrangements of others. He had a mental dossier of examples. Hadn’t John Powell plundered the songs of Virginia Tarheel plantations? More than anything, he wanted to frighten some Hollywood types with lawsuits. He said in 1947 one no-talent radio star actually sent an agent to climb his hotel fire escape, pry open his window, and take the music right off his desk. Uncle Castor believed he had been defrauded of fees and royalties, of all sorts of money, including the inadequate, paranoid kind, “black folks’ money.”
As if he had used up his allotment of visits at one throw, Uncle Castor never passed through town again, but the beanstalk he planted in our back yard threatened to grow forever into the region of the clouds. While the widower who lived next door to the filling station cursed and worked to start the Studebaker, Uncle Castor said he was fourteen when he first informed his mother that he was going to Paris. He held out an atlas and she called the doctor.
Buzzy and his mother never got to read about the lindy and tango lessons Uncle Castor would give them if they ever came up to Saratoga. “Hey, face-ache.” A week after Uncle Castor’s departure Buzzy waved a bag of potato chips over my head. “My mama said not to give you none.” He said he had something else for me. He said it as if he were citing an unusual but generally known fact of nature, such as that the Nile flows northward. My
sisters said they didn’t realize how big Indianapolis was until they tried to run away from home.
sisters said they didn’t realize how big Indianapolis was until they tried to run away from home.
The Vienna Choir Boys came to Indianapolis. I badgered my parents, those suckers, until they secured tickets. I slept with mine under the pillow so that it came out looking like one of those unlucky stubs swept from warped planks at the racetracks in Ohio, where betting was legal. Curled up to hide from the garage light outside, I switched from the dream channel on which I appeared as a waif bedding down in the hay far from his dying father, the king, to the channel on which I lifted the pillow high to reveal in place of the ticket an embossed invitation from the Augarten Palace in the way I once found that a grubby lateral incisor had been transformed into a silver dollar.
My fantasy had me in some celestial tabernacle, aglow with such intensity that the conductor begged me, the sad, innocent soprano vulnerable with worthiness, to lead the brotherhood on stage. I assumed that the uniform of the Vienna Choir Boys had rating badges and that after a succession of standing ovations, joined in by my heretofore skeptical sisters, I would be elevated to an officer of the line. In my mind’s eye I saw the sailor uniform with the wide collar fussed over by my godmother and a bevy of classmates who fought back tears of contrition for having persecuted a nightingale.
The disturbing sign was that in my dream the uniform was visible, but I wasn’t. Even when I pictured myself eating European style, with the knife in my right hand, the camera cut from the sailor’s sleeve to the plate to get around the thorny problem of there having been no brown wrists in my prophetic film of the moment,
Almost Angels
. But I wouldn’t be “Four Eyes” or “Chicken Chest” anymore. I’d be beautiful and in front of the Mozart Fountain. I didn’t know the difference between
Schubert’s
Twenty-third Psalm
and “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” but scared money will get you no money, as Grandfather like to say.
Almost Angels
. But I wouldn’t be “Four Eyes” or “Chicken Chest” anymore. I’d be beautiful and in front of the Mozart Fountain. I didn’t know the difference between
Schubert’s
Twenty-third Psalm
and “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” but scared money will get you no money, as Grandfather like to say.
The night of the performance I brushed my teeth until the gums bled, applied coconut goo to my legs and elbows and such a quantity of dressing to straighten my hair that we were late. There was nothing I could do about the Chinese-lantern shape of my face or my father’s decision that he had to work late or my mother’s firmness that even if the choir had come from Tim-buckthree she was not going to wear gloves.
The program’s phrase “world-famous” flitted around in my brain like a captured starling; the choristers, shedding radiance, wafting soft fragrance, looked and sounded alike; and an inner voice said, “Sleep.” My mother declined to nudge me, to win her point about the gravity of my desire to be a part of the Hurok audience. I wanted to meet the “singing ambassadors,” Fritz and Kasper, Master Zink, Peter the young overseer, and his pretty cousin Liese anyway.
I knocked on heaven’s door and approached the nearest halo wearer, who every day was up at 6:15, never ill, never bad, stupid, or ugly in the opinion of his sisters. He received my program and produced a pen with the heavy sigh of one explaining for the last time the theory of relativity to the village idiot. I thought I had nothing more perplexing in my memory bank than the day numbers were added to zip codes, but backstage where, justified by grace, the dimples had been turned in with the sailor suits, I suddenly remembered the untouchable horses of Indianapolis’s Timberview Stables.
It was my sister’s birthday and we had an appointment. A storm had passed through and dark branches on the roads reached up to snag axles. Timberview stood in what I thought of as country. Healthy steeds ate up grass and compliments unknown
to the swaybacks that walked in a circle of flies at the state fair or dropped green mud on the trail at Fox Lake. Timberview’s horses cantered out of the 1957
World Book Encyclopedia
that a salesman had agreed was the steal of 1958. But inside they said the stable wasn’t open and no horses were available. They insisted that the storm, the lightning, thunder, and other acts of God had left their horses in no condition for us to ride. I recognized the fence around the palomino in the glance of the Vienna Choir Boy.
to the swaybacks that walked in a circle of flies at the state fair or dropped green mud on the trail at Fox Lake. Timberview’s horses cantered out of the 1957
World Book Encyclopedia
that a salesman had agreed was the steal of 1958. But inside they said the stable wasn’t open and no horses were available. They insisted that the storm, the lightning, thunder, and other acts of God had left their horses in no condition for us to ride. I recognized the fence around the palomino in the glance of the Vienna Choir Boy.
“They own the fields, but not the horizon,” Grandfather once declaimed in the aisle at 7-Eleven.
T
he
C
olor
L
ine
he
C
olor
L
ine
S
ounds were different in the suburbs. Because there were, to my ear, fewer noises, I imagined that they were bigger, clearer, and more meaningful than the medley of Capitol Avenue and its tributary, the alley. Our new neighbors were remote, hidden by trees, winding fences, ivy, and double doors. Raccoons and boogymen shook the woods; cardinals banged into the picture windows and boomeranged from view; crows kept watch from telephone wires, disappeared behind chimneys, and popped up with kernels of dry dog food in their beaks. Golden retrievers scampered ahead of half-naked boys on bicycles shouting themselves home from a swim. They moved into the weeds when a car went by. I, too, could tell from a long way off if a car was going too fast around the smooth curves.
ounds were different in the suburbs. Because there were, to my ear, fewer noises, I imagined that they were bigger, clearer, and more meaningful than the medley of Capitol Avenue and its tributary, the alley. Our new neighbors were remote, hidden by trees, winding fences, ivy, and double doors. Raccoons and boogymen shook the woods; cardinals banged into the picture windows and boomeranged from view; crows kept watch from telephone wires, disappeared behind chimneys, and popped up with kernels of dry dog food in their beaks. Golden retrievers scampered ahead of half-naked boys on bicycles shouting themselves home from a swim. They moved into the weeds when a car went by. I, too, could tell from a long way off if a car was going too fast around the smooth curves.
In the distance I could hear the rip of a hand-held buzz saw, the smack of a basketball hitting a garage, the swish of sprinklers making lawns soft and shiny, the slap of the evening newspaper landing on driveways the color of the lead in No. 2 pencils and, from the country club across the road, the whine of canopied golf carts, the exclamation of someone watching his ball fly over the barbed wire into the ditch. What we, the new black family,
couldn’t hear our first day in the suburbs were the sounds that went with the slashing of our tires and the decapitation of our mailbox.
couldn’t hear our first day in the suburbs were the sounds that went with the slashing of our tires and the decapitation of our mailbox.
But there was no going back. Freedom had come on in and real life was beginning. I turned a page and started over. Capitol Avenue was wiped out. It had never existed. I forgot to ask to be taken into town to visit the bad corners and my playmates from whom I had parted so tearfully. It was like getting a second childhood, there was so much room for make-believe in the suburbs. Once I determined that the neighbors couldn’t hear what went on in our kitchen, even the arguments between my parents ceased to worry me. I used to lie awake at night on Capitol Avenue, like a civilian in a bomb shelter, hearing against my will whose father had said who was no good, whose aunt had predicted disaster, but suddenly these battles had nothing to do with me, like the peasants who merely looked up when horsemen galloped across the fields described in the mildewy book about the Wars of the Roses that Grandfather Eustace had let me keep.
The undulating stretch of the segregated country club, which doubled as the voting precinct, gave the impression of open scenery, in spite of the barbed wire, but that was something like a conceit. The area had been farmland. German immigrants had perhaps chosen Indiana because parts of it reminded them of home, of Thuringia. In some small southern Indiana towns the street signs still bore High German script. But in our neighborhood nothing remained of those days before the Irish arrived with the railroad and their priests except a narrow black-green canal and a clapboard tollhouse with a plaque.
The old toll road that led into the city was still called the Michigan Road. We called it the highway. Burger King hadn’t been thought of yet. NO SHIRT, NO SHOES—NO SERVICE, signs in the pancake restaurants said. Somewhere along the line
the descendants of the German plowmen had become hicks, and the farms and apple orchards disappeared.
the descendants of the German plowmen had become hicks, and the farms and apple orchards disappeared.
The country club was part of the ruse, the optical illusion. Just as there were dude ranches, there was such a thing as dude country. It looked like my sisters’ summer camp: rustic approaches that twisted toward dwellings with all the conveniences. The roads of the township themselves had summer-camp names: Mohawk Lane, Deer Run Circle. Some neighborhoods in the sprawling township that made a horseshoe around the top of Indianapolis had formed “private communities,” hired private police patrols, and dubbed themselves with village names that faintly recalled the Northwest Territory: Fallen Timbers Park, New Marietta, Harrison’s Creek. Mostly there was an English ring to everything.
We moved into the one house that had too much window for what had been cleared and built up around it. If we weren’t careful we’d strut our Negro ways in a fishbowl. A jazzy woman, my mother called her, a divorcee, sold us the house. Its look, 1950s futuristic, went with the woman’s gold go-go boots: too much redwood, too many acute angles, deep purple in the master bedroom. The jazzed-up divorcee was spoken of as the only person in the world who had had the guts to defy the invisible line, which seemed to strengthen itself with every new law passed against its fortification, and the
I Love Lucy–
era modernism of the house itself was not only a planet away from our wrecked boat on Capitol Avenue, I thought, but also a break with everything old-fashioned, everything on which Grandfather and the Negro Section of the Keep Smiling Union had had to put the best face.
I Love Lucy–
era modernism of the house itself was not only a planet away from our wrecked boat on Capitol Avenue, I thought, but also a break with everything old-fashioned, everything on which Grandfather and the Negro Section of the Keep Smiling Union had had to put the best face.
“We” constituted 10.1 percent of the nation’s population, had six guys in the House of Representatives, one man in the Cabinet, a woman on the federal bench, a posthumous Congressional
Medal of Honor winner, and I didn’t care. In giving myself up to what I thought of as the landscape of freedom, I detached from myself and from those responsible for me, as if a white neighborhood were the end of all struggle. The Lady Leontyne had gone the distance for us all.
Ritorna vincitor!
I was, once again, out of it, until I discovered, a few years later, the social satisfactions of being a Black Power advocate in a suburban high school.
Medal of Honor winner, and I didn’t care. In giving myself up to what I thought of as the landscape of freedom, I detached from myself and from those responsible for me, as if a white neighborhood were the end of all struggle. The Lady Leontyne had gone the distance for us all.
Ritorna vincitor!
I was, once again, out of it, until I discovered, a few years later, the social satisfactions of being a Black Power advocate in a suburban high school.
My isolation was difficult to maintain, not because of the urgency of the news, but because my mother would not act the part of mistress of the robes and my father had no intention of being master of the horse. My parents’ idea of their duty toward me went far beyond the custodial chores to which I tried to confine them. But in what was for me the dramatically uncharted meanwhile, I was alone, in my head at least, and even now I don’t know whether the lie owed its unfolding to the universal derangements of puberty or to my being a new black student in what I described to Grandfather, with furtive pride, as an overwhelmingly white school.
Someone was always trying to interrupt, to get between me and the paradise of integration. Grandfather Eustace took a renewed interest in me because of Westfield Junior High School. An expert on white classrooms, he told me to call if I experienced any difficulty of adjustment or was graded unfairly—and he told me to call collect, to circumvent my father’s complaint that not only would he have to put up with Grandfather’s interference, he would also have to pay for it.
Once my mother stopped dropping me off in the school parking lot and turned me over to the skills of the uncommunicative and unbelievably overweight bus driver, I suffered no traumas of any kind, much to Grandfather’s disappointment. He worried that I did not have the stuff to speak up when mistreated. It
wasn’t like him to hunt for that kind of thing, but then his problems, like those of the rest of the minority of 10.1 percent in 1966—remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them—were not mine.
wasn’t like him to hunt for that kind of thing, but then his problems, like those of the rest of the minority of 10.1 percent in 1966—remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them—were not mine.
The yellow school bus was on time on mornings that got darker and darker, mornings of rain, frost, untrammeled snow; and it was there, mud free, on mornings when the sun’s running yolk caught the moon in the ether. My new school was miles away —these were the days before court-ordered busing, before long rides were considered harmful to white students—and the bus meandered by drained swimming pools, clay tennis courts, collapsed barns, abandoned greenhouses, a colonial-style fire station, an unsuccessful-looking Catholic church with matching grammar school, and a complex called the Jewish Community Center.
Like everywhere else, the suburbs had good, bad, and middling addresses. The school bus picked up cheerleaders with bouncy hair; sulky white trash who smoked in front of hot rods on cinder blocks in scrappy yards; nerds from the chess and visual-aid clubs who howled when the bus passed dogs in the act of doing it in the nettles; and the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto, that strip that had gone fabulously Negro professional in the early 1960s.
With their never-wear-white-after-Labor-Day clothes-consciousness, their coordinated outfits that did homage to the seasons, clothes so new that in some cases the packing cardboard had not been removed from the collars, the black kids made a screaming tribe in the back of the bus. I sat in front with the nerds, directly behind the melting Buddha driver.
I lost the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto at the doors to Westfield. I saw them again during gym period, when their voices reached full fire and the coach applauded the towel-snapping in the showers. But even in gym I was at a safe distance from the
show-offs, having been assigned to the squad for nerds and tubbies, guys who, in a game of “burn ball,” when one team tried to murder the other with a basketball, either immediately ran into the line of fire so that they could sit for the remainder of the class period or hung back by the bleachers until they were picked off like plastic ducks in a shooting gallery.
show-offs, having been assigned to the squad for nerds and tubbies, guys who, in a game of “burn ball,” when one team tried to murder the other with a basketball, either immediately ran into the line of fire so that they could sit for the remainder of the class period or hung back by the bleachers until they were picked off like plastic ducks in a shooting gallery.
I came upon two or three of my fellow black students whom I had known in the banished, forgotten days of Capitol Avenue. One boy had been a playmate and then disappeared. I saw him infrequently, when our parents went to the same picnics. We picked up at these picnics where we had left off in his or my back yard, hammered at badminton birdies, and then he was gone again, waving from the back of a new Buick Electra.
People vanished that way from my Capitol Avenue life. They simply didn’t live nearby anymore and the sledding parties on their hills came to an end. Families moved, mothers became Catholics, fathers went over to the Republicans. I didn’t pick up much in those days, like a radio with a broken antenna that has to be moved from corner to corner before it can adequately receive a signal, but in the hallway at Westfield, unable to remember the combination to my locker, I understood where many of them had been disappearing to.
I scarcely acknowledged my former playmate and soon he failed to notice me in the halls. It was harder to deny two popular girls from my former life. They were older, “cool” in Westfield terms, because they were loud at the black table in the cafeteria about the Tighten Up, the latest dance step, and yet their names appeared on the straight-A list of the honor roll published in the school newspaper. I never saw them on the bus.
In Capitol Avenue terms they were real “upper shadies,” because they had never lived anywhere near Capitol Avenue and were often on their way to Cape Cod or coming back from Hilton
Head. Boarded-up theaters in the “inner city” were named after their grandparents. Their hair almost bounced, their braces flashed in the fluorescent light, and they had my sisters’ permission to make comments about my “high-water” trousers. They said my cuffs fell so high above my shoes I wouldn’t have to roll them up in a flood.
Head. Boarded-up theaters in the “inner city” were named after their grandparents. Their hair almost bounced, their braces flashed in the fluorescent light, and they had my sisters’ permission to make comments about my “high-water” trousers. They said my cuffs fell so high above my shoes I wouldn’t have to roll them up in a flood.
But their laughter couldn’t follow me far: the rules of Capitol Avenue no longer applied. My sisters had stuck by their school in town and that had not been easy. It was an old high school with many sentimental graduates who wept at community meetings and devised through their tears a plan to save the school from the black neighborhood that had grown up around it and was closing in. To preserve its racial harmony, the school had been allowed to go private, to give entrance exams and charge tuition. I was on my own at Westfield. My sisters’ grades didn’t hang over me, the teachers didn’t show up at NAACP meetings. No one knew who I was, and what I was I set aside every morning at 7:45.
My new classmates were ready with batting averages, won-lost records, and the history of shutouts. The names of Queen Victoria’s nine children, nineteen grandchildren, and thirty-seven great-grandchildren did not fall into the category of anything anyone but me wanted to know. Westfield was like a stocked fish pond, brimming with opportunities. I had only to cast down my bucket where I stood. But I was like the tourist who doesn’t want to look as though it is his first trip in business class or his first attempt to buy aspirin in a foreign drugstore. I behaved as though I had been among the Westfielders all the while and was finally shedding the protective coloration that had kept me completely unseen.
I wanted to copy the manner of the coolest boy in my grade —his shiny brown penny loafers with slightly worn-down heels;
the way he spun the calculus ruler of the advanced mathematics student; the noncommittal way he let himself be detained for a moment by admirers, like the terribly rich who must always be on guard against that someone who affects social ease; the way his letter sweater tapped his hips as he made his graceful escape; and the way—never mind that my hair couldn’t “fall,” that my glasses had thickened—he swept his Beatle hair out of his eyes, moiré-gray agates that accepted the devotion of all and gave nothing back.
the way he spun the calculus ruler of the advanced mathematics student; the noncommittal way he let himself be detained for a moment by admirers, like the terribly rich who must always be on guard against that someone who affects social ease; the way his letter sweater tapped his hips as he made his graceful escape; and the way—never mind that my hair couldn’t “fall,” that my glasses had thickened—he swept his Beatle hair out of his eyes, moiré-gray agates that accepted the devotion of all and gave nothing back.
Grandfather mounted a new high horse—the advantages I was about to receive, which raced too near his perfunctory “blessings we are about to receive” over the congealed canned ham and pineapple. It upset him that I was not moved to compare what he conceived of as the elaborate equipment in the chemistry and language labs of Westfield to the inadequate “learning tools” I might have had, had I gone on in the schools that served the world according to Capitol Avenue.
The pleasure of my circumstance depended not only on my perverse wish not to comprehend Grandfather’s point, to show that I was not one of his underprivileged youth group members sweating under an obligation to be thankful, but also on superstition, on a Lot-like contract of deliverance. I couldn’t allow myself to look back, having presented myself to myself as one who had never been anywhere but where I was.
I lived entirely at my surface, passing without reflection from class to class, like someone out for a walk noting when the clouds either darkened or dissipated. The school facilities and high property taxes of which the township was so proud that its citizens voted in referendums against absorption into the city were, for me, so intent on approval, only decoration. My appreciation was like the relief of someone who has crashed a party but isn’t asked
to leave, in gratitude for which, and also from misplaced pride, he doesn’t touch a bite.
to leave, in gratitude for which, and also from misplaced pride, he doesn’t touch a bite.
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