The Salt Eaters (30 page)

“Taste, Iris. It’s billed as a piña colada. Tell me I’m not crazy.”

Iris waved Cecile’s glass away. She was saving herself for the black-bean coffee, drowsing in her chair thinking of how Paco made it with the nasty sock thing and wondering if he’d started packing yet, sent out any feelers, found a lead on a job yet. They were both going to try to get through law school together. It was loco, but.

“This is the kind of rum we use back home for cooking.” Cecile was pouting, flirting with Campbell. “You don’t drink it, brudder, you light it up.” He took her glass away, very noticeably not flirting back. Cecile and Iris exchanged eyebrow lifts and slumped in their seats a bit, trying to second-guess where the wind would spring up next, under Cecile’s hat which was Nilda’s, under the tablecloth edge, under Mai’s dress.

“I hope it doesn’t rain,” Cecile said, motioning toward Nilda, who sat beyond the shadow of the awning. “How would we get her to move?”

“Self-centered? But that’s a good thing, Ruby. Velma’s never been the center of her own life before, not really.”

“You mean that Obie and the kid is the sun the dear sister revolves around or what-have-you?”

“No.” Jan sucked at her sticky fingers. “Neither of them, but especially Velma,” she emphasized, “ever set things up so they could opt for a purely personal solution.”

“Quotes around ‘personal,’ if you please.”

“I hear you. It’s like what you were saying earlier about wanting to retreat from confusion to your shop, just you and the jewelry making. Confined space, everything under your sure control. Not that you mean it. But that’s what I mean by
‘personal.’ Velma has worked hard not to hollow out a safe corner—yeh, quotes around the safe—of home, family, marriage and then be less responsive, less engaged. Dodgy business trying to maintain the right balance there, the personal and the public, the club/heart cluster versus spades/diamonds, and a sun
and
Venus in Aquarius … Ahh, I knew I’d get a rise out of you, Ruby. But it’s good she has put herself at center at last. If that’s what you meant by ‘self-centered.’ ”

“Jan, I’m sick of the subject.”

Ruby sighed and clasped her hands behind the chair and cracked her elbows. “I think my ass is falling asleep and my legs too. I also think this has been the first conversation we have ever had out of doors that didn’t get interrupted thoroughly by some joker sidling up with the ‘hey mama’ or ‘hey foxes’ like what we could possibly be talking about is nothing compared to some off-the-wall nonsense a brother could lay down. Don’t cloud up. I’m just stalling, that’s all. Trying not to be an alarmist. Last time I pronounced somebody crazy, you were ready to line up the psychiatrists. Remember? You went tearing after Tina Mason’s mother to get her to tackle Tina to the mat?”

“You really had me going.”

“Now, that bitch is really crazy, that Tina. Do you know what her latest thing is? She’s got the studio over the Regal now. And she plans to revive the ancient Earth Mother cult. Got posters, buttons, flyers, costumes, the works. And guess who she plans to cast in the role of ancient primavera, support stockings and all? The boardinghouse lady who’s great-grand-somebody got Harpers Ferry rolling. What’s her name? The one whose son got messed over in the antidraft rally the year we met.”

“Sophie Heywood.”

“Now, can you imagine that old bird traipsing down the
street with Tina’s crew in their X-rated all in all, a daisy chain around her head, flinging yams and golden delicious apples to the multitudes?”

“As a matter of fact, I can. Mrs. Heywood will be riding the Parade float this festival.”

“And half her mixed-bag crew of witches are doing this dance on the Heights Saturday night called Freedom in Romany for the Gypsies. That’s a dance. You should see the flyer. And check this—she calls me to ask if Nate would be interested in joining her band of merrymakers—”

“And would he?”

“Nigguh pul-leeze.
Who?
That bitch crazier’n hell. But I’m not talking about that brand of lunacy. Velma … I wish she’d get here. I’d like to hear more about the computer caper.”

“Well, I’m glad Velma wasn’t here in time for dessert, Ruby. The mere mention of plutonium and she goes off with dire predictions about a police state coming to insure or at least minimize against unauthorized access to nuclear materials. She has so little faith.”

“In what?”

“The people.”

“All this doomsday mushroom-cloud end-of-planet numbah is past my brain. Just give me the good ole-fashioned honky-nigger shit. I think all this ecology stuff is a diversion.”

“They’re connected. Whose community do you think they ship radioactive waste through, or dig up waste burial grounds near? Who do you think they hire for the dangerous dirty work at those plants? What parts of the world do they test-blast in? And all them illegal uranium mines dug up on Navajo turf—the crops dying, the sheep dying, the horses, water, cancer, Ruby, cancer. And the plant on the Harlem River and—Ruby, don’t get stupid on me.”

“You’re sounding like Velma.”

“Hell, it’s an emergency situation, has been for years. All those thrown-together plants they built in the forties and fifties are falling apart now. War is not the threat. It’s all the ‘peacetime’ construction that’s wiping us out. And remember that summer we met, all those TB mobile units in the neighborhoods? Giving out lollipops and donuts and the kids going back two, three, four times for an x-ray. Oh, Ruby.”

“Yeh, I know there’s a connection,” Ruby sighed, releasing her hands and dropping forward. “Pass the carafe.”

“Has the executive committee decided to take on the nuclear issue?”

“I voted it down. Wait! Hear me out. Now, we formed the group mainly to insure ‘input’ in local politics, right? An interim tactical something or other until the people quit fooling around and decide on united Black political action, right? There’s no sense taking on everything.”

“But Ruby, sistuh, heart of my heart, will you just tip your chin slightly northwest and swing your eyes in the direction of Gaylord and tell me what do you see? You think there’s no connection between the power plant and Transchemical and the power configurations in this city and the quality of life in this city, region, country, world?”

“Sold. But can’t I specialize just a wee bit longer in the local primitive stuff—labor with the ordinary home-grown variety crackers and your everyday macho pain in the ass from the block? Yawl take on this other thing. It’s too big for me. I’m just your friendly neighborhood earring maker.”

“I hope you’re kidding. Here, have some more wine, the tea’s cold.”

“What I need is a real drink. Let’s go hang out, unless you’re deliberately hanging out to get something going with our literate friend, albeit a waiter?”

“What?”

“Janice, please. He’s done everything but bite your neck and ravish you on the table.”

“Oh, I don’t think he … just a friendly type brother … I mean …”

“That is bullshit of a non-biodegradable sort. The man’s got eyes. Deal with that at least.”

“Ruby, do me a favor.”

“Okay. I will shut up and drink my wine like a good girl and then I will pay the check with this bogus credit card I traded a bogus Benin gold weight for.”

“You will pay cash money in the hand. It’s the least you can do having saddled me with this questionnaire and a major decision to make about my life.”

“Right. Fine. Now, is it my imagination or are we at a rerun of
Singin’ in the Rain?”

Several young people who’d been boogie-ing in front of the record shack and others who’d hung drape-style around the café railing had rushed into the café’s table area and were broken-field running among the tables, some walking wolf-style as if puddles already threatened Romeo Ballad loafers, Yo Yos, Candies and Converse All Stars. Others were ducking in anticipation of clearing the awning that could in no way be dripping yet, but it was. A sudden downpour with no warning, the light only now shifting from metallic lemon to a purple-gray. Customers by the railing had already begun dragging their tables across the prized quarry tile, knee-bent walking and carrying their chairs on their behinds, these odd-shaped creatures colliding with equally strange bent-over runners darting in and out between waiters, the runaway dessert cart, and one or two stunned customers returning from the rest rooms caught up in a turbulent not-sure-what-something-hey-watch-it happening.

Campbell got hemmed in the corner by the service counter, his order pad pressed against his throat, his elbow in a bowl of
fruit salad not picked up. And he’d been about to make a connection; he’d been clutching at an idea and it was trying to come together, congeal, get structured into something speakable. But now, with the ball-point leaking against his shirt, the stain leaching ever closer to his skin as the contaminated soil in Barnwell reached the water table—it was slipping past him. But in the months ahead he would remember—the height of divinely egocentric association—that lightning had flashed lighting up the purple, smeared sky just as it came to him. Damballah. A grumbling, growling boiling up as if from the core of the earthworks drew a groan from the crowd huddled together under the awning, in the doorway, as if to absorb the shock of it, of whatever cataclysmic event it might turn out to be, for it couldn’t be simply a storm with such frightening thunder as was cracking the air as if the very world were splitting apart.

And whatever it was, it was no mere feet-thrumming intrusion of kids on ball bearings careening down the pavement, nor the drum talk of the dance studio tete tete bak a ra answered by the kabate dada rada from the park. Nor the rumbling of railroad cars. It could be the thunder of cannons. It could mean war. Or angry gods demanding someone be flung into the crater, volcanoes boiling up, vomiting up flames and lava, death running in the streets soon to overtake the café. Or an explosion at the plant.

Folks were crowding together, sharing edges of chairs with strangers, offering bits of scalloped shadow from the oilskin roofing, spreading tents of newspapers on companions’ heads, holding their breath, trying not to hear the dire prophecies or damn-fool hunches of professional talkers accustomed to being asked their two cents worth and used to people listening.

Many years hence, when “rad” and “rem” would riddle everyday speech and the suffix “-curies” would radically alter
all assumptions on which “security” had once been built, many would mark the beginning of it all as this moment. This moment, this light, this place, these strangers. All would be fixed more indelibly on the brain and have more lasting potency than circumstances remembered of that November day in ’63. This moment, heart jarred and lungs starved, would supply the answers to the latter-day version of “What were you into when they wiped Lumumba out?” Or, “Did you ever go past the Audobon Ballroom after they gunned Malcolm down?” Or, “Where were you when the news came of King? Of Ho? Of Mao? Of Che? Of Fannie Lou? Were you wearing a fro the time they were hounding Angela across country? Did you raise funds for Mozambique, Angola? Were you part of the Movement? In D.C. in ’63? Did you help pull the U.S. out of Vietnam, Eritrea, South Africa? Did you wear a Fair Play for Cuba button? Did you send defense funds for Joanne Little, for Inez Garcia, for Dennis Banks, for Russell Means, for the Wilmington Ten?” One would ask and be asked, “When did it begin for you?”

One would make the journey to the café as if to market to trade news, hunches, interpretations of news, gossips, dreams, flashes picked up from official and nonofficial sources regarding what was happening in other districts, other countries, other continents. And no one would say “across the border,” for that entailed tiring explanations, obliged the speaker to be precise about what border was meant—Where Legba stood at the gate? Where Isis lifted the veil? The probable realms of impossibility beyond the limits of scientific certainty? The uncharted territory beyond the danger zone of “safe” dosage? The brain-blood or placenta barrier that couldn’t screen plutonium out?

“I could do without the sound track and the special effects.” Ruby shivered, grabbing hold of the table and urging Jan out of a freeze. “Sounded like the set for an MGM musical. Now
I’m thinking this must be
Poseidon Two
or
Son of Inferno.”

And Jan had lifted her end of the table, muttering into the teapot, “I hope it’s not …”

One would venture out into the streets to the café or some other familiar place from the old days where gatherings looked trustworthy and there huddle to trade stories, sifting and sorting among the tales as if at a rummage sale, taking on those pieces still wearable to get them through the passage, rejecting those pieces too threadbare, too contaminated, too cumbersome.

One would run the back roads to the woods, not jogging in unpaid outfits, trampling shoots, not moving in with tents, dope and bombed-out playmates mouthing off about “We’re into nature,” not hiding out in Wordsworth or Kerouac, excusing the self from social action, but running to the woods in hopes of an audience with the spirits long withdrawn from farms and gardens all withered and wasted, bringing eagle-bone whistles or gourd rattles or plaster saints or rakes and seeds or gifts of soap or sacks of cornmeal or sticks of licorice or cones of incense, anything one had to place on a tree-stump altar or a turned-rock shrine to lure the saving spirits out to talk and be heeded finally. Stumbling through the thorns and briars, following the rada rada big booming of the drums or the weh weh wedo riff of reed flutes, running toward a clearing, toward a likely sanctuary of the saints, the loa, the dinns, the devas. And found, would open up and welcome one in before the end, welcome one in in time to wrench time from its track so another script could play itself out. One would tap the brain for any knowledge of initiation rites lying dormant there, recognizing that life depended on it, that initiation was the beginning of transformation and that the ecology of the self, the tribe, the species, the earth depended on just that. In the dark of the woods, the ground shaking underfoot, the ancient covenants
remembered in fragments, one would stand there, fists pummeling the temples, trying to remember the whole in time and make things whole again. And remembering too that thunderclap heard in the café years ago that was Ogun’s shouting answer to the African workers who labored for life’s renewal, was Thor at the anvil beating swords into spades, was Wagner’s Siegfried striking a blow, was living archetypes sounding the knell of the authoritarian age, the thunderous beginning of the new humanism, the new spiritism if only attention could be riveted on the simplicity of the karmic law—cause and effect. There were choices to be noted. Decisions to be made.