Home In The Morning (5 page)

His attitude improved when Mama at last returned to her family. Full of grits, satisfied she’d made her point, weary perhaps of a life devoted to pots and pans and dishes and cutlery and the things that disappeared too quickly from them, she emerged from the kitchen one day and never returned again except on holidays. At last, she took note of her firstborn, saw immediately his loneliness, and devised remedies. You’re pale as a widow’s cheeks, boy, she told him. You need fresh air. Now, I’d love to go out and play with you, like we used to do, you know I would, but Baby Ray needs me here. So I want you to be a good boy and play every day with Big Bokay’s grandson, Li’l Bokay, instead. For your health, darlin’. His granddaddy’s bringing him by today. He’s going to take you fishing. You’ve never done that before, have you? Well, he’s a big boy, ten years old, and he’ll teach you things, just like Mama. Won’t that be fun?

Jackson wasn’t sure of that, but his mind was excited by the prospect of having a playmate, especially an older boy. The knowledge that his companion was a Negro tinged events with mystery and heightened his anticipation. Everything Jackson knew about race up ‘til then, he knew on a subliminal level from the social cues around him. He saw that blacks and whites were intimately related, dependent on one another, sensed that each was aware of that fact, aware of an economic contract of uneasy peace between them, and after spending all their long workdays together, rejoiced in spending off time free from each others’ race and its burdens at last. Jackson knew the staff of his home and Daddy’s office well. He knew the man who packed their groceries, both the man who swept up the bank and the woman whose job it
was to perpetually polish its abundance of brass knobs, lamps, and the balustrade that graced its marble staircase, knew them well enough to call them by name. He knew instinctively not to use Mr. or Miss before their given names when he addressed them as he was taught to address white people. He knew by sight the black children who popped in and out of their mothers’ skirts at Sassaport Bakery and the older ones who spent most of their days at the banks of the Pearl making mischief. He could not imagine a world without black people. Yet if he knew a name to go with a small round dark face that was not of Eleanor’s, Sukie’s, or Big Bokay’s families, it was rare, a social accident. There were, of course, no black children at his school. The Negro school was on the other side of town, through the woods and past the hollow, where those who did not live in an employer’s home or at the back of a store lived for the most part on heir’s property without electricity or indoor plumbing. When Jackson and Mama took nature walks, during which she taught him the names of trees and what berries he could safely eat, they always stuck to their end of the woods and never ventured onto that opposite side, epicenter of the unknown and undiscussed. That summer everything changed. His adventure that summer was the adventure of Li’l Bokay. In his memory it shone like the golden apples of Diana, a treasure so pure and irresistible even a virgin pursued by a horde of men would stop to marvel at its beauty.

Jackson enjoyed celebrating his youthful friendship with L’il Bokay years later when he entertained the Yankee civil rights crowd at college the year they all got ready to march down to DC. Accustomed to hearing him declaim in class, they accepted his bona fides as a political liberal and expected to get the real deal when they inquired with varying degrees of subtlety what was it really like to grow up Jewish in the deep South, in such a community that would murder him if given an excuse. Had he ever had a cross burned on his front lawn? Had he ever been inside a Negro home down there? Sitting in an espresso café in
New Haven, he told them alright, exaggerating his silken drawl, dropping his final consonants and elongating his vowels more than usual, the better to captivate them.

Missy Fine Sassaport’s efforts had not been in vain. Jackson made quite the picture, despite his wardrobe, which would have appalled her. In those days, he had a preference for worn-out Jimmy Dean-style blue jeans, pegged at the bottom. His shoes were usually black leather boots with motorcycle straps. Mama would agree wholeheartedly that his demeanor was completely charming, he had the gallant’s touch of self-deprecation. The way he sat, the way he gestured, would have been suitable in the parlors of kings. Three seasons a year his Yale colors were knotted around his neck in the form of a wool scarf knit for him by a coed who’d captured his attention for six months in his first year. He wore it ascot-style over dark turtlenecks and often wore a navy blue blazer over all, as his terms at Stonewall Elementary and Stonewall High had given him a fondness for such. In those days, he had a pencil-thin mustache, black as the forest of wild hair on his head. For a time he’d considered sprouting a goatee as well, but in the end considered additional facial hair too theatrical a statement. He didn’t need it. He’d dropped into this sea of ambitious, competitive sharks like an eagle skimming its surface. Women liked him. Men asked his opinion. He had never been so happy. In other words, he took on the mantle of Southern raconteur with the vivid grace Mama had instilled in him, having the good fortune to find the role in vogue.

When he spoke about his first friend, he said in full knowledge of the sophistication and political passions of his audience: I’m sure you all can imagine how it might be for a young, friendless boy raised so close to his mama’s teat suddenly to find himself in the intimate company of a rough-and-tumble country Negro three full years older than him. From the first moment, I was in heaven, chasin’ after him in all his rambunctious pursuits with the fidelity of a Jack Russell puppy. He
took me deep into the woods. We scrambled over rocks and splashed through streams, runnin’ headlong deeper into the woods than I’d ever been before, to way over the Negro side of town. He taught me how to bait a hook and, you know, I do not recall what we used for bait that day except that it was slimy and squished between my fingers so that I was disgusted and thrilled at the same time. We propped up our poles with rocks and lay back in the soft dirt of the riverbank and let the dappled light daze our eyes. Li’l Bokay fell asleep almost immediately, but I was too excited by the day’s events to do likewise and studied him instead.

He did not look at all like Big Bokay, his granddaddy, who, despite his name, had not been big since first the rheumatism then his only son’s death in the war got hold of him and bent him over. Big Bokay was a soft-spoken, genial man—at least he was with me and mine—with a full head of white, wiry hair and large, knobby hands. I never heard a harsh word nor so much as a sigh of resentment from that man. Big Bokay was the color of Mama’s coffee, which she liked sweet with plenty of milk, while Li’l Bokay was as pitch-black, tall, and beefy as he is today. Throughout our ramble in the woods, I felt like beanstalk Jack chasin’ the Giant. On close inspection, I noticed his hands were small, the fingers short, as were his feet. I thought that a wonder, given his size. I puzzled over how he managed to stand upright on those feet. He looked to me as if he should bobble over every time he tried. His hair fascinated me, as it was smacked down close to his head with brilliantine. If I squinted my eyes, it sparkled like a king’s crown in the sun.

When he woke up from his nap, Li’l Bokay declared he was bored with fishin’, nothin’ was bitin’ anyway, and why don’t we go steal horses instead. My eyes near popped from my head. Why? I asked. So’s we can ride ’em, was the response. I gulped down my anticipated guilt and asked: Then what do we do? Why, shoot. Return ’em, he said. What
you think, chile? I’m gonna kidnap you and lead you in a life of crime? And the look on my face as I considered this uncontemplated possibility caused him to burst into loud, rolling laughter so infectious I rolled with laughter too, there on that summer day by the riverbank where the fish weren’t bitin’ and a boy just has to do somethin’ to amuse himself. All that afternoon we ran through the Negro side of town, stealin’ scrawny mules and bony drays, which meant hoppin’ fences and jumpin’ on the backs of grazing animals, the two of us on the same one, kickin’ its sides with our heels until the startled creatures trotted aimlessly through their pastures with us holdin’ on to raggedy mane and each other for dear life. It was the most exhilarating day of my young life. I was returned home dirty and stinking of animal, bursting with all the boyish wisdom Li’l Bokay had taught me that day. Mama, I rattled, do you know that a horse can see out the side of his head but not at all directly in front? And Li’l Bokay says this and Li’l Bokay says that.

Now, this conversation took place in the kitchen, where Big Bokay had deposited me at the end of the day. He and Li’l Bokay were lookin’ through the screen door, regardin’ my excitement with big smiles, and Mama nodded over my head to Big Bokay: Well, I guess today was a big success. Might as well do it again tomorrow, that ok with you, Li’l Bokay? Yessum. Then Mama told me to go wash up for dinner and I ran off to the bathroom, but just before I reached it I realized I’d not said good-bye to Li’l Bokay and that seemed rude, so I raced back to the kitchen in time to see Mama place two quarters into his small, black hand with its pink palm, and I understood Li’l Bokay was my hired companion. Hired. This stung me in a place I’d never been stung before, but I buried the sting right away, piled Mississippi mud right on top of it, buried it deep, because there was nothing I wanted more in the world than to spend the next day with Li’l Bokay, then the next, doin’ whatever he wanted to do. Which we did. Yes, Mombasa Cooper
was my first friend and paid to be so. Only then, as I said, we all called him Li’l Bokay. I’m sure his mama still does today, despite his notoriety.

Jackson told this story often, as often as Mombasa, né Li’l Bokay, Cooper was in the news. Due to Jackson’s popularity, he traveled in a crowd, an entourage if you will, and there were always people fresh to the scene around him who hadn’t yet heard it. One afternoon, directly after “despite his notoriety,” a honeyed voice, husky and sweet, rang out from somewhere in the back of the room: Was he as angry back then as he is now?

A good question, Jackson asserted, leaning forward and craning his neck, looking for the source of that voice, which from its first syllable affected him in a startling way, prickling his skin, making the hair of his head lift. As he looked over the heads of his peers, they parted like the Red Sea to afford him an unobstructed view of the incredible creature to whom that indelible voice belonged. Instantly, his mouth dried and his throat constricted, making speech impossible for the moment. It’s doubtful Jackson understood his reaction as anything more than a spike of lust, if a particularly intense one. In later times, he came to comprehend that that day, in that café, while he was busy foolishly feeding his pride with the transitory adulation of those who could never hope to understand who he was or where he came from no matter how brilliantly Missy Fine Sassaport had educated him in the role of interlocutor, those who were too full of their own assumptions to even try to escape the provincialism which stained their opinions of what the South was and how it got that way, those for whom he wasted his breath, he had met his fate. He had met Stella Godwin.

There are few left who remember, but there was an odd sort of creature who sprang up in the nanosecond that ticked between the seminal movements of young intellectuals of the 1960s, between the beatniks and the hippies, a creature conceived in the smoke-hazed caverns of jazz and beat poetry, those black-clad cradles of generational incomprehension
and rebellion, whose birth took place in the light, on the mountaintop, whose first scream was a howl not out of Ginsburg, not out of that anguish, neither of anger, whose first scream was a howl not out of Summer of Love orgasmic joy, not out of that chaos, neither of psychedelic daydream, but was rather a howl of grief. Grief, prescient and keen, for the good things of the old world that the new world worked so hard to obliterate. These were the creatures who listened to Mahler and not the Beatles, who admired the technique of Tintoretto more than the invention of Warhol, who read Jefferson not Mao, who were, by God, capitalists, whose mantra “change the system from within” was crushed between the nihilism of the worn-out and the exuberance of the self-indulgent. These were the true outsiders of their generation, these justice-hungry anachronisms, whose boundless pure energy was doomed to extinction by the time they could clamorously crawl, and Stella Godwin was their priestess. What’s more, she looked the part.

Stella: glittering ropes of flame red hair, broad, pale forehead, oval eyes of a brown so deep Jackson’s soul fell into them at once as if into a boundless well, plump, purple lips bowed at the center, a nose he knew instantly as the thin, long nose of a Jewish aristocrat, and that neck, ah, that neck impossibly long with its cluster of sweet freckles at the base, a neck made for tender bites. She wore a full-length belted trench coat with a tartan scarf and the neck, the head, that was all he saw at first. He had no knowledge yet of her full breasts and tiny waist, of the pert little rump from which grew thighs so slender they reminded him— once he did know them—of the stalks of irises they were that slim, that long, but the face, the hair, the neck popping up out of a mass of plaid were enough to inspire him to mute desire. He tried to elocute, but his throat remained clogged. He could not speak. He could only stare.

If it’s such a good question, why don’t you try answering it, Stella Godwin stated more than asked.

He coughed so that he could articulate something, anything, lest she write him off as a dumb hick. Twice he coughed then found it necessary to cough again.

Yes. Yes. Alright. No, I wouldn’t call Li’l Bokay angry then, although he did have a temper.

The conversation took a turn to angry black men, to Malcolm X particularly, and Jackson was left running an internal dialogue with this woman he did not know, a dialogue about Li’l Bokay’s fiery spirit and Katherine Marie and Bubba Ray and Daddy, too, about what happened among them all. This was a story he never shared. Katherine Marie had made him swear by his mama’s blood he would never speak of her part in those matters. He’d not been sure even then if making that pact was honorable, but he’d kept her secret for three years anyway, no matter how he’d burned from time to time to let it all loose. For reasons he did not comprehend, he longed to relate all of it to this redheaded woman, this stranger who’d stolen his soul.