Persia's handsome, ambitious husband is also contemplating becoming part owner of a Standardbred (harness-racing) horse.
though perhaps it would be better for him to go into partnership with a friendly acquaintance who owns a Hammond supper club where he and Persia might work together... might, in fact, perform: they are superb ballroom dancers, in the mode of the Castles, the legendary dance team of Vernon and Irene Castle who earned, at the peak of their fame decades ago, as much as $30,000 a week. "The Incomparable Courtneys," they call themselves, Duke with his patrician features, Persia with her beautiful face and naturally wavy naturally red-gold hair and tireless ebullient manner. For why not?
This being the United States of America, and the Courtneys so talented, so gifted, so attractive, so eager to please, why not?
Like Fred Astaire, Duke Courtney is clearly the sort of long-legged lean limber man who cannot fail to age gracefully; and Persia, though now a bit past thirty (Persia's birth date is a family secret but after her death Iris, her daughter, will discover it was March 4, 1922; thus on this midsummer day of 1953 she is thirty-one years old): why not?
Persia says uncertainly, "I guess... I guess we're here."
The Garlocks' eyesore of a house on Gowanda Street, which Persia enters that day for the first and only time in her life, is in Lowertown (as the poor section of Hammond is obliquely called); up the block from a storefront church SECOND CALVARY ZION BAPTIST, around the corner from the notorious juice joint POF'PA D's. The house has been built flush with the sidewalk, not an inch of grass, children's toys and household trash spilling out into the gutter.
"Mrs. Garlock? Vesta? What is wrong?"
Mrs. Garlock is babbling of something else now no longer "nigras."
She appears frightened of her own house... but that can't be possible, can it?
Persia helps the whimpering woman up the steps, through the rusty screen door, trying to comfort her but not knowing what to say.
Inside, it's the millennial present tense of poverty. A wash of debris to Persia's ankles, an assault of smells: greasy, syrupy, baby formula, baby vomit, baby excrement, the Garlock odor grimed into wood, wallpaper, the very foundations of the house. Persia is appalled.
Persia tries not to feel melting with pity. "Hello?
Anybody home? Your momma's back!" Her voice is weaker than she'd like.
The front room has been made into a bedroom of sorts. There's a sofa with bedclothes on it, a mattress on the floor, a filthy pillow no pillowcase. Towels, dirty undergarments, children's clothes, children's toys, a baby's playpen into which yet more household debris seems to have drifted... no, Persia squints and discovers an actual baby in there. Napping in all the mess, sprawled on its back like a drunken man. A baby of about nine months.
An eye-watering stink of urine and ammonia lifts from that airless corner of the room.
Persia calls, "Hello? Pleaseis anybody home?"
What Mrs. Garlock is frightened of now clinging to her as she is, Persia can't guess. Not a word of this hillbilly woman's makes sense.
Two towheaded children with the Garlock look in their faces poke their heads through a filmy curtain strung up between the rooms, stare mutely at Persia, back off. A husky boy of about twelve, barefoot, in filthy overalls, with a raw blemished skin and small gleaming-red Garlock eyes, appears... and stares rudely at Persia as if he has never before seen anyone or anything like her.
Then asks, suspiciously, "Whatcha doin' with Momma? Howcome you're here? This here's our house." His stare is long and hard and assessing, a grown man's. Persia says, quickly, "Your mother doesn't feel too well... she asked me to walk home with her. Someone should call a doctor, maybe." The boy snarls at Mrs. Garlock, "Momma, for shit sake whatcha doin'! Actin' like you're crazy or something'!"
Within seconds mother and son are fighting, and Mrs. Garlock, inches shorter than the boy and twenty pounds lighter, manages a windmill assault upon him, cuffing his head and shoulders, cursing like a man, until the boy gives her a violent shove and slams out the front door, and Mrs. Garlock is sitting on the floorboards sobbing angrily, weeping. "Devil, damn devil... don't know who they are...
devils."
Persia wants to leave the Garlock household quick as she can (she hears heavy footsteps upstairs) but something holds her. Her eyes dart quickly about as if she means to memorize details, nuggets of fact, to bring back to Duke for his amusement; if, this evening, he's in a mood to be amused. You won't believe this. Oh, it was.
squalid.
Gently she says, "Mrs. Garlock? Are you all right? Did he hurt you?
Maybe I should help you somewhere, get you calm. Would you like an aspirin?" She's staring down at the woman's head, at the thin frazzled colorless hair, hoping she won't see any signs of lice.
More than once since their move to Curry from the "nice" place on Java poor Iris came home from school infected; it's no laughing matter.
She notes too how extraordinarily thin Mrs. Garlock's legs are in the calf, a sickly dead-white, covered with coarse brown hairs.
Suddenly Mrs. Garlock opens her eyes wide and says meanly, "Don't look! Don't judge! You're too young! You're too pretty!
You can't know!"
Then she shuts her eyes tight. Hugs herself, begins to rock energetically from side to side, lips drawn back to expose truly ghastly teeth. Persia loses all patience. "Oh, you are crazy!"
Vesta Garlock is past hearing.
Persia goes over to check the baby in the playpen; her conscience wouldn't allow her not to. 'Poor sweet innocent thing in all this mess," she murmurs, leaning over the railing. But the baby sleeps on unperturbed, drooling, diaper reeking, face blank and bland and round as a saucer... not, thank God, sickly looking.
Persia contemplates the Garlock baby for some minutes, dangerous minutes maybe, for what if it's Vernon Garlock upstairs and he's about to come down, what if that nasty-eyed boy comes back; she's heard plenty of things about the Garlocks and other hillbilly families and how the men treat the women, including sometimes their own daughters.
.. but the baby sleeping, just lying there sleeping, holds her transfixed.
She's thinking how her little girl Iris is growing up so fast, she'd dearly love to have another baby... oh, God, how she'd love to have another baby. The happiness of feeling it inside her, coming to life slowly, then not so slowly; then, after it's born, the countless hours of hugging, rocking, whispering... giving baths where each movement of her hands is special, privileged... napping together in the afternoons when Duke is gone... a darling little blue-eyed baby looking at Persia, at her, fixing its wondering stare on her, alone of all the world. D'ya love me, honey? Mommy loves you too.
Except: if Persia Courtney has another baby she'll have to feed it formula this time, not nurse. Because Duke Courtney doesn't want his wife's lovely breasts to get all saggy and broken-veined and the nipples ruined, like some women 5... and neither does Persia.
And if she nurses, as she did with little Iris, she wouldn't be able to drink with Duke, wouldn't be able to go out drinking with him, share his good times with him; God, how Persia and Duke need their good times!
Persia wonders, suddenly inspired, would she have time to change that poor baby's diaper, before one or another Garlock came in and discovered her? If she could find a clean diaper, that is, in all this mess.
don't stare, Iris. Haven't I told you that's rude?"
She wonders if their blood too, like their skin, is darker than the blood of Caucasians. Of "whites." She has heard the mysterious words "black blood," "Negro blood."
Aunt Madelyn murmuring with a fierce shake of her head, "That's black blood for you!"
At the racetrack one day, a gentleman friend of Duke's slyly observing of another not immediately within earshot, he wouldn't be surprised if the fellow wasn't trying to "pass... pass for white."
And the scandalized laughter in response.
Persia scolding prettily: "Oh, what a thing to say! Oh what a thing to say."' "Look at his lips: the size of them! And his hair."
Staring after them in the street, on the trolley car, on the city bus, where, as if by a natural tug of gravity others cannot register, they drift to the rear, polite, courteous, silent; choosing to stand hanging from hand straps back there where the ride is bumpier, where exhaust fumes accumulate, rather than take empty seats nearer the front where "whites" are sitting. The dividing line, sharp-eyed little Iris observes, shifts from day to day, from bus ride to bus ride. It's fluid and unpredictable, depending upon the numerical proportion of "whites" to "blacks."
"Why don't they sit with us? there's room," Iris whispers in Persia's ear. The two of them are together in one of those odd open seats flush with the side of the bus and there is plenty of room beside Persia for a young black mother and her two-year-old, but the woman, hanging from a hand strap, gazes sightlessly beyond them and Persia nudges Iris into silence: "Just hush."
As Hammond eases downward toward the river, as Uptown shifts to Lowertown and the buildings and houses and even the trees become shabbier, there is an increase of dark faces, an ebbing of white faces; and Persia sighs, runs a hand through her hair, says, "You can tell we're getting near home, can't you. Uh-huh."
They've moved again. From Java Street to Curry, from Curry to Holland.
Each time the moves are sudden and rapidly expedited "expedited" is Duke's word, one of his favorites.
Now they live on the very edge of Lowertown. (You would not want to say Niggertown; the only people Iris has heard say that have been drunk.) The Courtneys don't go to church, but around them many others go to church. Sunday mornings on East Avenue are amazing: the streams of churchgoing Negroes.... The gorgeous colors of the women, their hats, dresses, like peonies, big luscious plumphearted flowers. Men with their slicked-down pomaded hair. (And how it strikes Iris's eye, the strangeness of Negroes with gray or silver or white hair.) The boys in suits, white shirts, neckties.
Are these the sloe-eyed boys Iris sees in the park the boys she knows she should be wary of and avoid? And the pretty little girls Iris's age in starched cotton dresses, sashes tied in bows and bows in their hair...
like dolls. Walking self-consciously in their dressy shoes. Little white anklet socks.
Iris stares greedily. These skins like cocoa... milk chocolate bittersweet chocolate. A darkish purple sheen like the sheen of fat Concord grapes. And shoe polish: the rich black oily polish Daddy allows her to dab on his good shoes with a rag, then rub, rub, rub until the leather "shines like a mirror... can you see your own face?"
Dark dark eyes flashing slantwise to her.
Strange nappy woolly hair.
"Don't stare, I said," Persia whispers, giving her a poke.
Iris starts to ask, "Why" and Persia says, "Just don't."
But the question Iris wants to ask is too abstruse for the few words in her vocabulary. Why are they... the way they are?
Different from us? The same, but different?
Iris wonders why, if the Negro children stare frankly at her, at her pale drained-looking skin, her pale greenish-gray eyes, her hair that isn't brown or blond or any precise color at all, she can't stare right back?
Persia says, "They don't know any better, some of them. But we do. " Iris has been taught that "Negro" is the proper word, in two equally stressed syllables: "Negro Say it too fast, or carelessly, and you get words you don't want: "nigra," "nigger."
"Colored" is acceptable too, sometimes; it's the word Aunt Madelyn prefers. (Madelyn Daiches, whom Iris loves, isn't Iris's aunt, really, but a cousin-twice-removed of Persia's.) Aunt Madelyn has many "colored" friends, she says, women friends, and fine people they are too, but the race as a whole... "the-race-as-a-whole".
can t be trusted.
And there is Iris's Uncle Leslie (Duke Courtney's older, bachelor brother), who speaks uncomfortably of "minority populations," of 'African-American people," sometimes, even more uncomfortably, of 'African-American peoples"... as if, though he knows what he wants to say, he is at a loss to find the words to express it.
Thus Leslie Courtney hesitates to say even "Negro Will never say "colored." Or "black." (Says Leslie vehemently, "They are no more black than I am white.") When he is robbed of his camera, his wallet, and his wristwatch one summer evening in Cassadaga Park, Leslie is pained to describe his assailants to the police in terms of the pigmentation of their skin. It becomes a family joke, or one of Duke's family jokes: "Did y'all hear about the time my brother was mugged by three African-American' jigs?"
"Jig" is one of the words Iris has been told she must not say, ever.
Like "nigger," "coon," "spade," "spook," "shine." Yet when Duke uses the word everyone laughs, it's so... unexpected.
