Song of Solomon (7 page)

“Why? You still haven’t said why.”

“Just listen to what I say. That woman’s no good. She’s a snake, and can charm you like a snake, but still a snake.”

“You talking about your own sister, the one you carried in your arms to the fields every morning.”

“That was a long time ago. You seen her. What she look like to you? Somebody nice? Somebody normal?”

“Well, she…”

“Or somebody cut your throat?”

“She didn’t look like that, Daddy.”

“Well she
is
like that.”

“What’d she do?”

“It ain’t what she did; it’s what she is.”

“What is she?”

“A snake, I told you. Ever hear the story about the snake? The man who saw a little baby snake on the ground? Well, the man saw this baby snake bleeding and hurt. Lying there in the dirt. And the man felt sorry for it and picked it up and put it in his basket and took it home. And he fed it and took care of it till it was big and strong. Fed it the same thing he ate. Then one day, the snake turned on him and bit him. Stuck his poison tongue right in the man’s heart. And while he was laying there dying, he turned to the snake and asked him, ‘What’d you do that for?’ He said, ‘Didn’t I take good care of you? Didn’t I save your life?’ The snake said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Then what’d you do it for? What’d you kill me for?’ Know what the snake said? Said, ‘But you knew I was a snake, didn’t you?’ Now, I mean for you to stay out of that wine house and as far away from Pilate as you can.”

Milkman lowered his head. His father had explained nothing to him.

“Boy, you got better things to do with your time. Besides, it’s time you started learning how to work. You start Monday. After school come to my office; work a couple of hours there and learn what’s real. Pilate can’t teach you a thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one. Let me tell you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too. Starting Monday, I’m going to teach you how.”

Chapter 3

Life improved for Milkman enormously after he began working for Macon. Contrary to what his father hoped, there was more time to visit the wine house. Running errands for Macon’s rent houses gave him leave to be in Southside and get to know the people Guitar knew so well. Milkman was young and he was friendly—just the opposite of his father—and the tenants felt at ease enough with him to tease him, feed him, confide in him. But it was hard to see much of Guitar. Saturdays were the only days he was certain to find him. If Milkman got up early enough on Saturday morning, he could catch his friend before Guitar went roaming the streets and before he himself had to help Macon collect rents. But there were days in the week when they agreed to skip school and hang out, and on one of those days Guitar took him to Feather’s pool hall on Tenth Street, right in the middle of the Blood Bank area.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning when Guitar pushed open the door and shouted, “Hey, Feather! Give us a couple of Red Caps.”

Feather, a short squat man with sparse but curly hair, looked up at Guitar, then at Milkman, and frowned.

“Get him out of here.”

Guitar stopped short and followed the little man’s gaze to Milkman’s face and back again. The half-dozen men there playing pool turned around at the sound of Feather’s voice. Three of them were air force pilots, part of the 332nd Fighter Group. Their beautiful hats and gorgeous leather jackets were carefully arranged on chairs. Their hair was cut close to the skull; their shirt cuffs were turned neatly back on their forearms; their white scarves hung in snowy rectangles from their hip pockets. Silver chains glistened at their necks and they looked faintly amused as they worked chalk into the tips of their cues.

Guitar’s face shone with embarrassment. “He’s with me,” he said.

“I said get him outta here.”

“Come on, Feather, he’s my friend.”

“He’s Macon Dead’s boy, ain’t he?”

“So what”

“So get him outta here.”

“He can’t help who his daddy is.” Guitar had his voice under control.

“Neither can I. Out.”

“What his daddy do to you?”

“Nothing yet. That’s why I want him outta here.”

“He ain’t like his daddy.”

“He ain’t got to be like him—
from
him is enough.”

“I’ll be responsible for—”

“Stop messing with me, Guitar. Get him out. He ain’t old enough to have wet dreams.”

The pilots laughed and a man in a gray straw hat with a white band said, “Aw, let the boy stay, Feather.”

“You shut your mouth. I’m running this.”

“What harm can he do? A twelve-year-old kid.” He smiled at Milkman, who stopped himself from saying, No, thirteen.

“But it ain’t your problem, is it?” asked Feather. “His daddy ain’t your landlord, is he, and you ain’t got no operating license to hang on to either. You ain’t got nothing….”

Feather turned on the man with the white hatband the same acid manner he’d used with the boys. Guitar took the opportunity offered by Feather’s new target to shoot his hand out like a double-edged hatchet slamming into a tree, and shout, “Later for you, man. Come on. Let’s shake this place.” His voice now was loud and deep—loud enough and deep enough for two. Milkman slid his hands into his back pockets and followed his friend to the door. He stretched his neck a little to match the chilly height he hoped the soldiers had seen in his eyes.

Silently they ambled down Tenth Street until they reached a stone bench that jutted from the sidewalk near the curb. They stopped there and sat down, their backs to the eyes of two men in white smocks who were watching them. One of the men leaned in the doorway of a barbershop. The other sat in a chair tilted back to the plate-glass window of the shop. They were the owners of the barbershop, Railroad Tommy and Hospital Tommy. Neither boy spoke, not to the men nor to each other. They sat and watched the traffic go by.

“Have all the halls of academe crumbled, Guitar?” Hospital Tommy spoke from his chair. His eyes were milky, like those of very old people, but the rest of him was firm, lithe, and young-looking. His tone was casual but suggested authority nonetheless.

“No, sir.” Guitar answered him over his shoulder.

“Then what, pray, are you doing out here in the streets at this time of day?”

Guitar shrugged. “We just took a day off, Mr. Tommy.”

“And your companion? Is he on sabbatical too?”

Guitar nodded. Hospital Tommy talked like an encyclopedia and Guitar had to guess at most of his words. Milkman kept looking at the cars going by.

“Neither one of you appears to be having much fun on your holiday. You could have stayed in the halls of academe and looked evil.”

Guitar fished for a cigarette and offered one to Milkman. “Feather made me mad is all.”

“Feather?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t let us in. I go in there all the time. All the time and he don’t say nothing. But today he throws us out. Said my friend here is too young. Can you beat that? Feather? Worrying about somebody’s age?”

“I didn’t know Feather had so much as a brain cell to worry with.”

“He don’t. Just showing off is all. He wouldn’t even let me have a bottle of beer.”

Railroad Tommy laughed softly from the doorway. “Is that all? He wouldn’t let you have a beer?” He rubbed the back of his neck and then crooked a finger at Guitar. “Come over here, boy, and let me tell you about some other stuff you are not going to have. Come on over here.”

Reluctantly they stood up and sidled closer to the laughing man.

“You think that’s something? Not having a beer? Well, let me ask you something. You ever stood stock still in the galley of the Baltimore and Ohio dining car in the middle of the night when the kitchen closed down and everything’s neat and ready for the next day? And the engine’s highballing down the track and three of your buddies is waiting for you with a brand-new deck of cards?”

Guitar shook his head. “No, I never…”

“That’s right, you never. And you never going to. That’s one more thrill you not going to have, let alone a bottle of beer.”

Guitar smiled. “Mr. Tommy,” he began, but Tommy cut him off.

“You ever pull fourteen days straight and come home to a sweet woman, clean sheets, and a fifth of Wild Turkey? Eh?” He looked at Milkman. “Did you?”

Milkman smiled and said, “No, sir.”

“No? Well, don’t look forward to it, cause you not going to have that either.”

Hospital Tommy drew a pinfeather toothpick from under his smock. “Don’t tease the boy, Tommy.”

“Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ’em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ’em to. No. And you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and
every
day. That’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ‘29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.”

A few men passing by stopped to listen to Tommy’s lecture. “What’s going on?” they asked Hospital Tommy.

“Feather refused them a beer,” he said. The men laughed.

“And
no
baked Alaska!” Railroad Tommy went on. “None! You never going to have that.”

“No baked Alaska?” Guitar opened his eyes wide with horror and grabbed his throat. “You breaking my heart!”

“Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.”

“Mr. Tommy, suh,” Guitar sang in mock humility, “we just wanted a bottle of beer is all.”

“Yeah,” said Tommy. “Yeah, well, welcome aboard.”

“What’s a baked Alaska?” They left the Tommys just as they had found them and continued down Tenth Street.

“Something sweet,” answered Guitar. “A dessert.”

“Taste good?”

“I don’t know. I can’t eat sweets.”

“You can’t?” Milkman was amazed. “Why not?”

“Makes me sick.”

“You don’t like nothing sweet?”

“Fruit, but nothing with sugar. Candy, cake, stuff like that. I don’t even like to smell it. Makes me want to throw up.”

Milkman searched for a physical cause. He wasn’t sure he trusted anybody who didn’t like sweets. “You must have sugar diabetes.”

“You don’t get sugar diabetes from not eating sugar. You get it from eating too much sugar.”

“Then what is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It makes me think of dead people. And white people. And I start to puke.”

“Dead people?”

“Yeah. And white people.”

“I don’t get it.”

Guitar said nothing, so Milkman continued, “How long you been like that?”

“Since I was little. Since my father got sliced up in a sawmill and his boss came by and gave us kids some candy. Divinity. A big sack of divinity. His wife made it special for us. It’s sweet, divinity is. Sweeter than syrup. Real sweet. Sweeter than…” He stopped walking and wiped from his forehead the beads of sweat that were collecting there. His eyes paled and wavered. He spit on the sidewalk. “Ho—hold it,” he whispered, and stepped into a space between a fried-fish restaurant and Lilly’s Beauty Parlor.

Milkman waited on the sidewalk, staring at the curtained window of the beauty shop. Beauty shops always had curtains or shades up. Barbershops didn’t. The women didn’t want anybody on the street to be able to see them getting their hair done. They were ashamed.

When Guitar emerged, his eyes were teary from the effort of dry heaving. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get us some weed. That’s one thing I can have.”

By the time Milkman was fourteen he had noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other. When he stood barefoot and straight as a pole, his left foot was about half an inch off the floor. So he never stood straight; he slouched or leaned or stood with a hip thrown out, and he never told anybody about it—ever. When Lena said, “Mama, what is he walking like
that
for?” he said, “I’ll walk any way I want to, including over your ugly face.” Ruth said, “Be quiet, you two. It’s just growing pains, Lena.” Milkman knew better. It wasn’t a limp—not at all—just the suggestion of one, but it looked like an affected walk, the strut of a very young man trying to appear more sophisticated than he was. It bothered him and he acquired movements and habits to disguise what to him was a burning defect. He sat with his left ankle on his right knee, never the other way around. And he danced each new dance with a curious stiff-legged step that the girls loved and other boys eventually copied. The deformity was mostly in his mind. Mostly, but not completely, for he did have shooting pains in that leg after several hours on a basketball court. He favored it, believed it was polio, and felt secretly connected to the late President Roosevelt for that reason. Even when everybody was raving about Truman because he had set up a Committee on Civil Rights, Milkman secretly preferred FDR and felt very very close to him. Closer, in fact, to him than to his own father, for Macon had no imperfection and age seemed to strengthen him. Milkman feared his father, respected him, but knew, because of the leg, that he could never emulate him. So he differed from him as much as he dared. Macon was clean-shaven; Milkman was desperate for a mustache. Macon wore bow ties; Milkman wore four-in-hands. Macon didn’t part his hair; Milkman had a part shaved into his. Macon hated tobacco; Milkman tried to put a cigarette in his mouth every fifteen minutes. Macon hoarded his money; Milkman gave his away. But he couldn’t help sharing with Macon his love of good shoes and fine thin socks. And he did try, as his father’s employee, to do the work the way Macon wanted it done.

Macon was delighted. His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth, and he was relieved at not having to walk all over town like a peddler collecting rents. It made his business more dignified, and he had time to think, to plan, to visit the bank men, to read the public notices, auctions, to find out what plots were going for taxes, unclaimed heirs’ property, where roads were being built, what supermarkets, schools; and who was trying to sell what to the government for the housing projects that were going to be built. The quickie townlets that were springing up around war plants. He knew as a Negro he wasn’t going to get a big slice of the pie. But there were properties nobody wanted yet, or little edges of property somebody didn’t want Jews to have, or Catholics to have, or properties nobody knew were of any value yet. There was quite a bit of pie filling oozing around the edge of the crust in 1945. Filling that could be his. Everything had improved for Macon Dead during the war. Except Ruth. And years later when the war was over and that pie filling had spilled over into his very lap, had stickied his hands and weighed his stomach down into a sagging paunch, he still wished he had strangled her back in 1921. She hadn’t stopped spending occasional nights out of the house, but she was fifty years old now and what lover could she have kept so long? What lover could there be that even Freddie didn’t know about? Macon decided it was of no importance, and less often did he get angry enough to slap her. Particularly after the final time, which became final because his son jumped up and knocked him back into the radiator.