Jump into the Sky (7 page)

Then he’d go on with his message about the dangers of dancing the jitterbug or drinking whiskey or not honoring the Sabbath or something like that. Lucky for us, he’d given up his church chain for the war effort—donated it to one of the scrap drives in Chicago to be made into hand grenades. I figure there was probably enough metal in that chain to blow up half of Berlin. But the preacher still made me jumpy whenever he stood up to give the sermon. Who knows what he’d find to drop from the pulpit next. Boulders maybe.

“They teach you about Jim Crow too, up there where you is from?” the old man said, coughing so hard I was afraid his lungs might come out on his hankie. “Or this the first you seen it with your own eyes?”

Now, up until that moment, I still thought the fellow was calling himself Jim Crow. The raggedy suit hanging loose on his narrow shoulders coulda easily passed for the tattered wings of a bird. His skin was a dark ink-black. The man waved his arm through the air again. “Jim Crow. That’s where you setting. Real pretty, ain’t it?”

His words weren’t making a crumb of sense. Aunt Odella probably woulda called him a few cards short of a full house. Again I cast a look around, trying to come up with another place to go, but there was nowhere else in sight. Only the coal cars and the engine rumbled in front of us, and our car didn’t have a back exit. There were just six rows of wooden seats and behind them was a solid wall with a locked door, where I figured the special baggage was being kept.

“The car’s called Jim Crow,” the old man repeated.

“What?”

“You see any white folks around this place?”

“No sir, just us.” I tried real hard to keep my eyes from rolling at his questions.

The man snorted. “Us white?”

“No sir.”

“Well, then welcome to your first ride on Jim Crow.”

I told the old man he was wrong about why we were there. Told him how I’d been sent to guard the baggage and help out with the war effort. He just leaned his head back and howled, his toothless mouth wide open, showing nothing
but pink gums. “Son, you wasn’t sent to this baggage car to be a guard—you was sent here because of your brown skin.” He wiped tears of laughter out of his eyes. “You ain’t guarding nothing you wasn’t born with.”

Heck, that idea was pure absolute nonsense. Heat warmed up my ears as the old wreck of bones kept up his howling. Who ever heard of cars called Jim Crow for colored people? My daddy had never written a single word about riding in them. And nobody on the Chicago train put me in a separate car, did they? Look at Margie with the Margarine Hair—she was a white lady who’d shared her seat with me and she’d given me a cake to keep. Was the old man just trying to make a fool outta me? Razzing me because I was from somewhere else and on my own and all?

Well, it burned me up listening to him go on and on. Standing up, I headed toward the little washroom in the front corner of the car, figuring maybe I’d just slam the door and sit inside there for a while. Get some peace.

But I didn’t even get one big toe through the doorway. The sour smell stopped me first. I pushed open the half-closed door and the odor that came pouring out was straight evil. There was no real toilet inside at all—only a wooden box with a hole in it and tracks flying right below that hole. Scores of flies covered the walls and ceiling. There was no washbasin. No water. No towel. The smell drifted up my nose. I backed out, feeling like I was gonna be sick.

“No use,” the old man hollered when I tried pulling the door closed again. “I done tried all that before. You just gotta grit your teeth and live with what we got right here. No other choice. You gonna learn that lesson soon enough.”

His words made me madder, as if somehow he was to blame for me being covered in coal dust and stuck in the worst car on the screwball train. Maybe he thought it was funny, but heck, nobody I knew would put up with this place. Not Aunt Odella. Not Uncle Otis. I didn’t give a fly’s behind what the car was called. I just wanted to be off it. Smacking into the corner seat again, I turned my face toward the window and let a bunch of curse words ricochet around in my brain for a while. Then I licked my dumb metallic-tasting lips and cussed inside my head some more.

For a long time, the only sound inside the car was the rhythmic clatter of the wheels below us as they rolled along the tracks. Then I heard some music start up in the far corner. Glancing back, I saw the old man sitting there, bent over a banged-up guitar. His eyes were closed, but he swayed back and forth in his seat, plucking the strings and singing a little sideways song I couldn’t make out the words of.

“You like music, son?” He stopped in the middle of his tune, like he knew I was watching, and opened his eyes.

I didn’t answer, but he swung the guitar over his shoulder anyhow and came swaying down the aisle to take the seat behind me. “Here, I’ll play you a little something I
made up,” he said, sitting down and strumming again with his fingernails, which were the yellow color of beeswax.

“It’s a tune about coming and going, living and dying,” he said.

From what I could tell there was only one verse to his tune, so who knows if it counted as a real song or not.

He sang those same words over and over, plucking different strings and tapping on the front of the box with his fingers, making up the accompaniments straight out of his head as he went along, it seemed like.

In no time at all, of course, my mind started drifting to my mother—picturing her sashaying into a spotlight wearing a sparkly kinda dress with her hair done up in a shiny roll like a movie star. Music often afflicted me like that. Whenever somebody started singing, my mind went straight to thinking about Queen Bee Walker. Nobody in the family had a single snapshot of her, so who knows what she looked like in person. Aunt Odella always said the lady didn’t stick around long enough for a flashbulb to pop. I wondered what tunes she sang at the jazz club the night she met my daddy. Must’ve been good if he fell crazy in love after only hearing a couple of them.

*   *  *

The old man brought me back to where I was. “You hear the coming and going in my song, son? How sometimes you gotta move and sometimes you gotta stay where you is?” He stopped strumming and waited on an answer.

Nope, I didn’t hear any of those things, but I nodded politely anyhow.

“See, I sing what I’m feelin’ right inside here.” He tapped two shaky fingers on his chest. Looking at him closer, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was a hundred. His eyes made me think of the old river catfish Uncle Otis sometimes caught and brought home. He had those same muddy catfish eyes that had seen a lot.

“So where you coming from and going to, son?”

I told him I was going from Chicago to North Carolina to see my father in the army. He shook his head slowly as if that was a bad idea and absentmindedly plucked a few strings on the guitar.

“See, you just like that little ol’ rock I been singing about. You been setting on top of the hill in Chicago, living up there in the North where everything is fine and dandy, and now you about to come down from that pretty mountaintop, getting smaller and smaller the farther south you go. Once you step off this train in North Carolina, only one piece of you’ll be left. Know what that is?”

“No sir.” I tried not to sigh, guessing another dried-up kernel of wisdom was about to drop off the cob.

The old man held up his hands. “Your color. That’ll be
the only piece left. You can go ahead and forget your name and your fancy ed-u-cation and everything else you learned up there in the lily-white North, ’cause only one thing will matter once you get off this train … and that’s what color skin you got.” He gestured toward the window. “There’s only two shades outside our train now. White and Colored. Every sign you see and every doorway you go through in the South is put there to remind you which color you are. And you better be sure you choose the right one every time. No tellin’ what kinda trouble you get into if you go and forget who you are. No sir, no tellin’ what big kinda trouble you’d get into …”

Picking up his guitar, the old man started plucking out his strange tune again.

I had no idea whether to believe what the old man was telling me or not. I remembered Uncle Otis worrying how I wouldn’t know the rules in the South. Had he meant the kinds of things the old man was warning me about? Or something else?

I kept my eyes open, but I didn’t spot much in any of the ho-hum towns we passed through as the morning wore on, so maybe it was all made-up nonsense. The South sure had some odd names. One place was called Carmel Church, which Aunt Odella probably woulda called an outright
insult to religion. I almost expected the next town to be called Milky Way Bar. Farther down the tracks was one called Skippers. Good God. It made me feel glad to be born in Chicago.

By the time the train finally arrived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, it was midafternoon and the heat shimmered in waves above the tracks. Only thing I wanted by then was a drink of water and a soft seat. Watching the train slow down, the old man fanned his face with a square of newspaper and said I was real lucky to be getting off. He was going all the way to Georgia. Who knows how much farther it was to Georgia, but seeing how tired the old man looked right then, I worried about him making it there alive. The front of his shirt was soaked with sweat, and his thin shoulders rose and fell with each gasp of air.

As our train pulled up to a low brick building with
FAYETTEVILLE
on the side, the old man reminded me again, “Only thing you gotta remember when you get off this train is your name is Colored down here. Don’t you forget that, son. Always keep your eyes open and look for that word first, you hear?”

He picked up his guitar and started strumming again. “Gonna write me a song about meeting you … ‘One day I met a little rock a-settin’ on a Chicago hill …’ ”

His catfish eyes crinkled into a wistful smile. “You take care now.”

*  *  *

I told the old man goodbye and left him the rest of Margie’s cake to eat along the way. We’d already finished most of it anyhow, along with all the butter cookies Aunt Odella had tucked in the bottom of my paper sack. Never did find out what the man’s real name was, and I don’t think he ever asked mine either. Always thought of him as Jim Crow. Later on, there were times when I wondered if he’d been real or if I’d dreamed up the old man singing his songs and coughing up the color black.

Mostly I wished I’d listened to more of what he’d tried to tell me. Wished I’d asked more questions. As I stepped off the train that day, I had less sense about what I was doing than I coulda ever imagined. Because it turned out my next lesson about the South wouldn’t come from an old colored man trying to keep me outta trouble—it would come from the end of a gun.

S
tepping onto the steamy Fayetteville platform one slow foot at a time, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to hoping maybe—by some chance—my father would already be there waiting on me. Pictured myself coming off the train and spotting him standing by himself in his sharp army uniform and cap, looking around with a worried expression on his face. Then I’d stroll over to him, real nonchalantly, before he even noticed me, and say, “How ya doing, Daddy? It’s your son, Levi, here.” When he turned and saw who it was, he’d wrap me up in one of those strong, man-type hugs and tell me how long it had been since we’d seen each other and how much he’d missed me. Had the whole scene planned out like the end of a satisfying movie picture.

Nobody was waiting, of course.

Guess Aunt Odella was smart enough to figure out if she told my daddy I was coming, he woulda found a good reason why I shouldn’t. Still, part of me had held out hope he
might’ve had some sixth sense about me showing up on his doorstep.

Aunt Odella was big on signs and sixth senses. She used to tell me how she woke up with a real bad feeling on the day Pearl Harbor was bombed and put an extra spoonful of salt in her Coca-Cola that morning because she thought for sure the sick feeling was a bad headache coming on. Then the news about Pearl Harbor being attacked came over the radio. “See, I shoulda known that sick feeling was a sign,” she’d say.

Lately she’d been going on and on about a cactus. She must’ve told the story to everybody we knew, a dozen times at least—how, at the beginning of April, a tiny bud had suddenly appeared on a half-dead cactus she’d had sitting on the windowsill for ages. Then, a week or two later, a big orange bloom the size of a half-dollar burst outta that bud like Lazarus himself coming back to life. My aunt was absolutely convinced it was a plant miracle. “Will you look at this, Levi?” She must’ve showed it to me
fifty
times. “Had this cactus my whole live-long life and never saw it bloom until now. It’s a sign from above. No doubt about it. I’m telling you, Levi, it’s a sign of change coming to this world. That’s what it means. The war is gonna end real soon.”

Now that I had the chance to think back and put two and two together, it wasn’t impossible to see how the blooming cactus coulda been one of the main reasons my aunt sent me packing. It had convinced her the war was ending and
our lives needed changing too.
A new day
, she’d said. Wasn’t my life a crazy mess? I’d been left first on the front seat of a Ford by my mother—and now by an aunt and a cactus. Heck, it was a wonder I’d turned out okay so far.

As the last cinders from the disappearing train drifted around me like burnt snowflakes, I found myself thinking all these sorry thoughts and wishing Jim Crow had gotten off with me. At least he woulda been one person I knew. He coulda walked with me for a while carrying his guitar and singing one of his made-up tunes, and I swear I wouldn’t have minded. Instead, I was standing on a train platform feeling almost more alone than I could stand. Even the air smelled different than Chicago. A humid soup of flowers, frying fish, coal smoke, horse manure, sweat—