All about Skin (28 page)

“In the hand,” Stanford said without looking up from the cheese.

Daniel paused in the motion of setting the pig foot on the counter where Sam had already placed his dime. White folk and colored did not touch. But Stanford had just declared to everyone—Daniel and customers alike—that the boy was not white. In the eyes of Atlas Bayles and the people who made the staples—corn meal, flour—Sam and Daniel were the same.

Conditioned to obey, Sam scraped up the dime. Gazing at the coin or the counter or the floor, he held it out to Daniel. Hesitantly, he raised his other palm. Dirt moistened by sweat filled the lifelines. Hard years of farm work were banded in Sam's hand, embedded in gray layers of skin, his calluses as permanent as fingerprints.

The problem was not that Sam's hand was unclean or rough. The man Daniel was expected to touch was an unmitigated black. There was nothing about his color or wooly hair or full lips to indicate a hereditary encounter with white blood. Sam was pure black, the kind Daniel had been taught to shun most of all.

But if not Aunt Ida's, at least Uncle Harold's aversion to blacks had been tempered with the understanding that he stood only one or two rungs above them on a shaky, splintered ladder. On the days when suit-clad white men were inclined to pick up their own boots, Uncle Harold stood with their merchandise outstretched—the leather worked soft as infants' skin—free hand twitching at his side as he tried to anticipate: Would the money be handed to him or tossed on the counter to avoid the touch of his hand? Like Sam, Uncle Harold had to divine without reading the face.

Daniel's fingertips brushed Sam's as he took the dime. He placed the vinegar-stained bag on the trembling, upturned palm. He made change, drawer and coins clattering in the cranky old register. He held out the coins and, this time, Sam was quicker to raise his hand.

“Ha' a good day.” Sam rushed the words.

Their gazes connected firmly, like palms meeting in handshake. “You do the same,” Daniel said.

The hum of back and forth began again. Stanford grunted approval.

From the swayback of ol'Amy, Stanford looked down at Daniel. “No work tomorrow,” Stanford said. “Preacher down Willow Branch, so no church neither. I'll take you to her.”

“Wh—where will she be?”

“Sunday? Oughta be home. You can meet all'un'em. Sisters, brothers too.”

Daniel nodded. He began to step away from the horse, but then stopped and stepped closer. He tried to see Stanford's face clearly from the awkward angle, through the dusky light.

“If I'd asked you to take me before?”

“You won't ready before,” Stanford answered. He tapped Amy with the horse whip.

Daniel watched Stanford and Amy until horse and rider flattened into the line between field and trees. When the sky began to darken, Daniel wandered to the back of the store. He opened the door of the storeroom, hoping to cool it enough for a comfortable sleep.

As he waited in the yard, a blue moon, the second full moon of the month, took the horizon, fading as it rose, from amber to pearl. Daniel marveled at the effortless transition, for he knew nothing was more impossible than the slip into another color, the shedding of a skin, the changing of a desire.

Atlas Bayles planted Daniel in Lou Ella's body by force, but he'd had to take the boy in the same manner. Perhaps it was not until she saw the child that she began to want him. But she
had
come to a mother's want. And if the boy returned to her, Lou Ella would throw the front door wide. Lou Ella would kill the fatted calf and set the welcome table.

To associate with blacks is to become one of them
. But a child's yearning crushed Daniel like the weight of that singular, chameleon moon. He went inside to sleep. He wanted to be ready when Stanford returned.

The regular sky had peeled away like old paint. Daniel and Stanford traveled beneath some kind of just-made, original-blue beauty. Stanford walked ol' Amy and mapped the land and past for Daniel.

“Now, through there, you'll find the sweetest stand'a blackberry bushes in the county. An' further on is good fishin' year round if you can stand the mosquitoes or the cold. That stream dangerous, though. One good freshet, it 'come a river. That meadow is where the men an' boys plays baseball every Sunday after church in summer. Pearson an' two'a your brothers plays, Rob and Tom, I think.”

They moved further along the wide clay and rock road; the grass turned to sapling pine. Around a bend the meadow disappeared, but Daniel craned his neck in the direction they had come. He imagined himself barefoot, running the bases, slapping the hands of two boys with his face and eyes, exulting over the day's best plays in the quiet dark of a shared room.

The sharecroppers' dwellings lay just beyond another line of trees. They were the same shack over and over again: zinc roofs, boards weathered gray, black where the paint had peeled and mold had set in. Where a shack rested on cinder blocks, a bedraggled dog or chicken flopped in the dust beneath. The yards revealed the lack inside of the leaning walls. There were privies of various size, in varying states of repair, some white-washed, some with doors hanging by a hinge. Women washed babies and clothes in pans and tubs set near spitting pumps or heaved buckets from wells. The breeze mingled the smell of greens and corn meal boiled outdoors with the stink of penned hogs. Daniel felt the bottom of his stomach weaken. His gaze skated over the vegetable gardens bright with squash, the pink bushes of crepemyrtle. He winced to see a child run barefoot through shimmering chicken shit.

People paused in their washing, tinkering, or idling as the two men passed. At more than one house, a man or boy occupied only with chewing a toothpick stood to watch them pass. A woman who walked down the road with coarse string wound into her hair stopped to stare. Everyone greeted Stanford. They eyed his companion suspiciously. Daniel stared back, equally wary.

In front of Lou Ella's house, a drawn, bearded man looked up from his fence repair. He moved a crooked, wet cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other as the visitors approached. “There Pearson,” Stanford said, “an' here some'a the younguns.”

Caught in a game of hide-and-seek, Lou Ella's children appeared from behind a battered pecan tree, the rain barrel, from beneath the porch and from around the corners of the house.

Stanford drew the horse up to the swaying gate. With the agility of a much younger man, he swung a leg over the pommel and slid easily to the ground. Stanford looped the reins and shoved the whip between the leather straps.

“Daniel?” he said when the young man remained rigidly on Amy's back.

“What's goin' on, Stanford?” Pearson called.

Stanford turned in greeting. “Whatcha know, Pearson?”

“Nothin' good!” Pearson set down the nails and hammer. His gaze stayed on the man on the horse.

“Lou here?” Stanford asked as he stepped inside the gate.

“Yeah,” Pearson answered. “What y'all want wit'er?”

“This here's Daniel. He been working at the store,” Stanford said.

Pearson nodded to Daniel, an uneasy greeting likewise returned.

“What he want wit' Lou?”

Stanford explained again, “This here's
Daniel
.”

Working tobacco-darkened lips, Pearson rolled the cigarette to the opposite corner of his mouth. He looked long at the boy.

“Hadn't heard his name,” he said, shaking his head. “Even if I'da heard it, I never woulda 'magined—he
that
Daniel?”

Stanford nodded. “Come to meet'er.”

“Jus' come?”

“Come when he could.”

Across the yard, the children paused in their running and chasing. They bunched together. Men who looked like Daniel came where they lived only to collect insurance or when there was trouble. Never had one come riding on the back of a colored horse. The older children grasped the hands of the younger. Protective—the way their mother insisted. In all things concerning the children, Lou gave the last word. Pearson understood why it had to be that way.

“She be mighty glad,” he said, his solemn gaze moving from his own children to Daniel. “I'll get'er.”

As Pearson crossed the yard, Stanford beckoned to Daniel. “You heard what he said? Come on.”

But reality overwhelmed Daniel's every sense. The house was not a whit different from any other in the neighborhood. Somehow, he had imagined it would be. But the cinder block steps were cracked. The porch planks gaped. Pieces of a broken chair—spindles, legs, a backless seat—littered the yard. A rusted headboard leaned against the pecan tree like a ladder. The front door stood open to flies and strays and the many children who stared at him like hungry pickaninnies he'd seen on city streets. They were tall and short, slim and stocky; all were barefoot, the boys and youngest ones bare-chested, in too short, tattered dungarees. Daniel's younger brothers and sisters stood with dusty feet, frayed cuffs, gaping mouths, and
to associate
—

Daniel lifted himself from Amy's rump into the saddle. With sweat-damp hands, he grasped the whip and reins.

Stanford shoved open the gate. “Daniel,” he cautioned, just as Lou Ella appeared, frantically wiping her hands on a dishrag. Pearson stood behind her, his hands moving soothingly up and down her arms.

Lou Ella Slade Pearson was black, a color that seemed to well from within her. Her face shone with oil and sweat from cooking beneath a galvanized roof. Bare of straw hat or scarf, her hair was divided neatly into plaits. Her arms were large, the skin dimpling over her elbows. She wore a housedress, its pattern scrubbed down to blurred color and thin cotton that stuck in the folds of her waist and belly. Her stout legs and feet were bare.

Lou Ella's gaze skimmed the familiar faces of her children, dismissed Stanford, and darted past Daniel until Pearson nodded, “That's him, there.”

“My son?”

Pearson nodded.

Lou Ella shoved the rag at him.

From the height of the horse, Daniel watched Lou Ella approach.

With each step, she transformed: A stranger-mother, broad-smiled, marveling at his presence; the kerchiefed, grinning woman on a box of pancake mix; the big-bodied, red-turbaned woman on a box of Fun to Wash; the Fig Bitters woman, like the girl who “happened to be in the yard,” bent over, naked buttocks in the air.

Stanford stepped aside as Lou Ella pushed past and opened the gate, still uttering softly, disbelievingly, “My son? My son?”

She reached up to touch Daniel.

Daniel raised the whip.

Part 3

Borderlands

Toni Margarita Plummer

S
he has wedged herself in the doorway again, her hands gripping the small ledge at the top, her feet planted along one side.

“They told me to be like this for ten minutes,” she says.

“Who did?” I ask from the couch, my highlighter hovering over a used copy of Aristotle's
The Nicomachean Ethics
. I want to get a heads-up on reading before the new semester begins.

“The little one.” She reaches down to indicate a height below her butt, starts slipping, and reaches back for the top of the frame.

She must mean Eddie. She recently returned from my mother's cousin's house. He is the youngest and most rebellious of the kids, so I'm guessing he's the one who gave her this so-called advice on earthquakes.

“It's good to go to the doorway, but you shouldn't climb up in it.”

She leaps down with a great thump and arches her back like a cat. “That is enough for today,” she says, as though I've not spoken.

That's the thing about the Veronica. She has a knack for forgetting I'm around. She'll jump when I come around a corner. “You scared me!” she exclaims, her hand on her chest, as though it's shocking I'd be walking through the house. What am I supposed to do? Announce myself ? Should I be banging pots together like I'm in the wilderness?

I turn back to my book, though it's hard to concentrate with her accented chattering and stomping around all day.

Veronica Sandoval is the daughter of Mom's second cousin Mari in Veracruz. She is fifteen years old, has lightish brown hair dyed ultrared, blue eyes, a tattoo of a shell on her ankle, and a piercing in her navel. She wears baggy pants, thong underwear, and an amulet around her neck that she claims wards off bad spirits.

She is visiting us American relatives for the summer to improve her English, so that she can test well on returning and get into a good school. We've been passing her around like a 120-pound Mexican fruit-cake, from family to family, from Pico Rivera to Sylmar to Santa Ana, essentially to the most Spanish-speaking neighborhoods throughout these various counties of Los Angeles. But Mom and I get the pleasure of her company most of the time.

We spoke Spanish to her the first day she arrived, she and Mom conversing easily, me only getting every third word despite having tested into Intermediate Spanish. But after that it's been only English, so she can learn. This rule doesn't apply to the television or stereo, however, and the Veronica takes this to her full advantage. She's got the Spanish station on now, and I don't ask her to change it. Besides, Mom will not give up her telenovelas for the sake of her immersion, so what's the point?