Makeda (7 page)
Reverend Boynton was not an unkind man. He was simply one of those people who’d been born uncomfortably without a talent for gauging their effect on the people they encountered.
As the group moved through the vestibule en route to the dining room, Reverend Boynton rested his hand on my shoulder and said disinterestedly, “Graylon, you’re looking more like your mother every day.”
Years later, my mother would confess to me that she had worried a great deal days before that Sunday that the dinner conversation would founder in controversy and tension. In the weeks after she had extended the invitation to Reverend Boynton, the country had been roiled by an incipient, but startlingly fast-growing civil disobedience movement ignited by the bold act of the four young men in Greensboro.
I was ten years old when our new seventeen-inch Dumont television set had arrived in the back of our neighbor Mr. Yelverton’s panel truck. Before then, I had not yet gotten the full sharp point of segregation. I knew of course that, pretty much, all Southern white people did not like Negroes, and because of that kept us from going to various places they went to. But this did not affect me at the time in any conscious way. In fact, I would go for weeks, and often months, without seeing a white person, and even then it would happen only when my mother took Gordon and me along when she went shopping downtown. Later, of course, I would see white people on the television. But before this, when I was small, I never doubted that all the Negro grown-ups who wore suits and dresses with big elaborate hats to our church on Sundays were estimable people, and not just to me who addressed them deferentially as Mister This and Mrs. That, but to the wider world as well. It was not until later that I learned full on the heart how white folks really saw us—Grandma, Mama, Daddy, Reverend Boynton, the lot of us—and that was as a faceless gob of menial service providers.
My mother and father contorted all reason to shield Gordon and me from the truth, but in the end they failed as they had to. What really frightened us, however, was seeing them have no choice but to accept their complete inability to protect us.
Reverend Boynton, for many years, had been a member of the National Baptist Convention, a powerful black church organization whose president, Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, had supported Reverend King’s Montgomery bus boycott, but strongly opposed the burgeoning nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that was igniting the country’s black youth.
Through most of the Saturday before Reverend Boynton’s visit, my mother had washed, stripped, and boiled the collards, grated the cheese, and baked the macaroni. By nine o’clock Sunday morning, she had roasted the meat, made and rolled the dough, remembered to add the yeast, shaped the dollops, and spaced them on a pan to grow as we all went off to church to hear Reverend Boynton hold sumptuously forth on the jailing of Saint Paul in Ephesus.
Incongruously, like his spiritual leader Reverend Jackson, Reverend Boynton strongly opposed the students who were offering themselves for arrest at lunch counters across America. For all of Saturday and most of Sunday, my mother seasoned and sautéed and kneaded and baked, all the while worrying that Reverend Boynton’s first visit to our home would collapse in a ruin of sharply differing opinions.
Mama and Daddy knew that Gordon and I supported the new civil rights movement. It was pretty plain that they did as well, although they did not want their sons to get themselves arrested. We had not told them about the episode at G.C. Murphy.
No one in the family could predict what my grandmother would say should the dinner discussion drift into politics. Although they knew nothing of my grandmother’s strange dream experience, they did know well by then that Makeda Gee Florida Harris March was possessed of a spirit that was different from that of anybody they had ever known.
Mama and Daddy sat at the ends of the table while Gordon and I sat side-by-side across from my grandmother and Reverend Boynton. I suspect it may have been Reverend Boynton’s bottom choice of a place to sit, with him pinioned between Daddy, the doubter, and my grandmother, the mystic, while looking across the table at two strapping young men who were on the other side of six feet and taller than he.
The only time that I had been this close to Reverend Boynton for anything more than a handshake was three years ago on the Sunday I was baptized by him in the new baptismal pool beneath the floor of the old church’s pulpit. He was a strong man with thick spatulate fingers that he placed behind my neck and waist to take me down into and up from the water in less time than it took to wake the nerves the cold water had shocked numb.
Mama and Daddy had not reared Gordon and me to speak to adults as equals, thus it would have upset them had we joined in the dinner discussion as such. We were taught a
manner
, befitting our years, of polite observation, and the importance of responding intelligently to adults’ questions with complete grammatical, well-enunciated sentences ending with the word
sir
or
ma’am
. The attitude of our speech, however, had been cultivated to bear no color of shyness or fear or servility. My grandmother and my parents had been of one mind on this point, although my grandmother seemed to have thought the purpose of this through rather more tactically.
“These are your best years for learnin’,” she had said to me once, “and you can’t learn when you’re talkin’.” She had chuckled before going on, “You’ll learn when you grow up that most everybody is a stranger, even folks you know well, or think you know well, and when strangers talk too much, it’s because somethin’ is wrong inside them. The more they talk, the more you learn about them, the less they learn about you. It’s a good thing to learn to talk only when somethin’ needs to be said, when you’re addin’, not subtractin’.” On another occasion she had said to me, “Never rate people by the jobs they hold or the money they have. That stuff comes and goes like a suit of clothes. Look deeper. Find the soul of a person. See how decent it is. Then make a judgment.”
I looked across at Reverend Boynton through the lens of my grandmother’s advice.
“… We’re planning a glorious twenty-fifth revival week for next summer, Sister Alma. We’ve got preachers coming from as far away as Atlanta, Georgia. Pastor B. David Riddick told me that he’s gonna try to make it in from Chicago if he can get a break in his schedule. You know, everybody’s trying to get the man. Lord, can he preach. It’s gonna be a great time …”
I looked at Daddy looking at Mama looking at him, and knew well the measure of his love for Mama which could be calculated in the units of his sufferance of Reverend Boynton who bore on. Oblivious.
“… We should be able to complete the air-conditioning project before next summer hits … Sister Mattie, we got to put a stop to Sister Ann and Deacon Short’s campaign to pull away from the church and buy Big Bethel’s building in Northside … This morning, the youth ushers turned the wrong way with the offering … So what do you young men think about all of this civil disobedience?”
Mama gave Daddy a covert look of dread. Then Daddy, in a single cleanly said word, interposed a choice: “Gordon.”
I glanced at Grandma and saw her handsome features form into a betrayal of sympathy and understanding that fought the old hurt which raked over me once again.
M
y feelings had been crushed when my father called upon Gordon, and not me, to speak at Sunday dinner in the pontifical Reverend Boynton’s presence. The blood had rushed into my defenseless fifteen-year-old face for all except, of course, my grandmother to see. Yet only she seemed to register my adolescent humiliation.
Monday, the next day, was unseasonably warm for April. Wanting my grandmother’s company, perspiring heavily, I reached the walk-up on Duvall Street after school shortly before four.
I could see when she opened the door that she was tired. Turning to leave, “You get some rest, Grandma. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
“I’ll not hear of it, son. Get yourself in here.” Revivified.
We sat in the magical little parlor and were silent for a time. As always, I waited for her to speak first. As always, she would somehow
know.
Suddenly and without preface, she said, “He didn’t mean anything, Gray. He doesn’t mean to hurt you. His soul is not the giver of yours. Your spirit knows not from seeing, but from feeling. He is not like that. We won’t be. He can’t be.”
“Why am I always getting my feelings hurt?”
“See it as the price of your gift.”
“What gift?”
“To understand with the heart what cannot be seen with the eyes. To know what pictures to show and value in your head, and what pictures not to keep there.”
She sensed that I did not understand her. Then, out of the blue, she said, “You know that fellow Einstein, he never learned how to drive a car. Said a car was too complicated. What do you think that means?”
I was surprised by what she said, and did not know how to answer her.
“Most people live enclosed in small yards behind tall fences, son. They don’t look out. They don’t
try
to look out … They spend their lives looking at—even worshipping— the fence.”
“Is that why you won’t let Daddy get you a telephone?”
“Could be. I have lived across the ages. Why would I choose to stare at the fence? Hear that Boynton going on and on about buildings and air conditioners? Sittin’ on the ground. Playin’ with toys. Starin’ at the fence. Not so good in a man of God, eh?”
I was beginning to feel better. She was for me, I guess you’d say, affirming. It may have been then that I first began to understand the distinction between education and wisdom. I smiled and asked in jest, “How did you get so smart, Grandma?”
Smiling back at me, “It helps that I’m blind, I think.”
We were quiet for a while again, both looking, I imagined, at pictures in our heads—pictures on the other side of the fence.
“Grandma?”
“Yes, son.”
“You know what I’ve been wondering since you told me about the dream?”
“Tell me, son.”
“There have been other dreams—haven’t there?”
“Yes.”
“When did they start?”
“When I was just a little girl. I didn’t understand them at first, but I knew they were about things that had happened to me long, long ago. I never told anyone before you. I told you because I somehow always knew that you would understand and believe me.”
“You believe, Grandma, that the soul does not die?”
“I don’t know. I’ve had these dreams. They are real and not like dreams.” She sensed a puzzlement in me. “What, son?”
“One of my teachers said that half the people who’ve ever lived on Earth are alive today. That means that if old souls don’t die, there must still be a lot of new ones.”
My grandmother just smiled.
D
uring my high school years, I visited my grandmother less frequently than I had before. In 1960, just before I turned fifteen, my family moved to Church Hill which was halfway across the city from Grandma’s house on Duvall Street. For a time following the move, I visited with her several times a week just as I had when we were living close by in Jackson Ward. It had been during one of these visits that Grandma told me about the dream of her life as a Dogon girl. Shortly after this, she suggested that we adjust our schedule a bit.
“Gray, you mustn’t worry so much about me. I’m fine. Better than ever.”
“I know, Grandma, but—”
“No. I won’t hear of you coming all this way on the bus to see me after school two, three times a week. You got to study, boy. You still want to be a writer, don’t ya?”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Then you got to work. You got to put the time in.”
She suggested that I come just once a week—on Thursdays—her “day of rest,” since my Saturdays and Sundays by then were being taken up with Kensington Hospital, a segregated white hospital up on Kensington Avenue in the West End, where I washed dishes in a big, deafening industrial machine on weekends with three older black guys who’d worked there for years.
From 1960 until I finished Armstrong in June 1963, I would arrive at my grandmother’s door virtually every Thursday just a little before four, and punch the dimpled brass button that activated the rusty old clapper in the tarnished round bell that encompassed it.
During my three years of high school, my grandmother made a studied effort to settle my spirits. Though my parents were obsessively decent people and reasonably solicitous of my contentment, they only on rare occasions—one being a disturbing and peculiar unburdening to me by my father—talked at length to Gordon and me about anything requiring a significant emotional investment. They hadn’t, I think, the expendable resources to allocate to such. They were tired, I believe, dog-tired, and their psychic stores had scarcely enough fuel to cover the day-to-day logistics of living under segregation while managing the imminently realistic prospect of sudden family poverty.
My father, deciding, I suspect unilaterally, had taken it upon himself to be the family’s sole breadwinner. He had done this, no doubt, for what he believed were noble reasons. Nonetheless, everything the five of us required (including a monthly subsidy to my grandmother’s meager pension package)—food, shelter, electricity, heat, transportation, school fees, alms to those poorer than we— everything, every big and little thing, including the scratch fee of nine cents to enter the Hippodrome movie theater at 2nd and Leigh on Saturdays, depended upon him and him alone. He bore the strain of this burden much, I suppose, as Sisyphus had borne his under the crushing weight of his rock.
My father’s face was a veritable map of exhaustion. Although I knew next to nothing about the details of the family’s finances, it was clear enough that a subpar month of policy sales and/or premium receipts was virtually all there was standing between us and disaster.
I couldn’t bear to load my troubles onto his troubles. Thus, it should surprise no one that I am unable to recall, before leaving home forever at eighteen, ever talking to my father about who I really was or the life matters that concerned me most. Not once, neither before nor after the tragedy.