Five Smooth Stones (14 page)

He didn't remember his grandmother too well, the woman Gramp still talked about as though she had just stepped into the next room, but he did remember her bitterness and some of the things she used to say, and the memories of her bitterness and the love she had wrapped around a small boy were somehow intermingled, as though the bitterness grew from the love and the love from the bitterness.

He knew it wasn't just the kids, the little kids like he had been the first time a white boy called him a "nigger bastard" and he'd asked "Why?" The old folks asked it too. Isaiah Watkins—David could hear him now, sitting in the front room, talking to Gramp—said once, "Why in hell we got to get so much hate, Li'l Joe? We ain't got all that hate, at least, most of us ain't. Good Godalmighty, Li'l Joe, I ain't got the stren'th to tote it round. You coming to the ALEC meeting, Li'l Joe?"

"Have to see has I got a gig, 'Saiah."

"Damn it, y'all ought to come, gig or no gig. We needs everyone we can get, Li'l Joe. We got a lot of young folks coming along. We needs the older folks too."

"Let you know, 'Saiah. Man has to make his bread. I pays my dues."

"Takes more'n money, Li'l Joe. And one of these days, and it ain't too far off, it's going to take a hell of a lot more'n money."

"Blood," said Gramp.

"You saying it, Li'l Joe. You the one saying it."

"Seen a lot of it in my time, 'Saiah. Seen plenty. Seen my own cousin when he wasn't more'n eleven year old shot dead on purpose by a white boy. Over back of Mandeville it was, and no one moved a hand against that white boy, nary a hand. Seen the blood that day. Seen it since. Came damned close to killing me a white boy that day, but they helt me back. Red blood on brown skin. It ain't pretty."

"Sure ain't." Isaiah was walking around now: David could hear him, the heavy, limping step. Isaiah was younger than Gramp by a few years, a big man, heavy set, almost fat, with a congenital hip defect. When he walked the defect made him swing his protuberant, oversized buttocks in almost a complete half circle. He spoke again, and David could tell he was talking from behind the cigar that was his trademark all over New Orleans. "Sure ain't. And green grass in a public park can't no brown-skin child set foot on is downright ugly. That blood goes away, and the man it run out of mebbe he dies or gets better and it's all forgot. But there ain't no forgetting li'l black kids being held down, ev'ry day, ev'ry day, ev'ry day. You don't want to get busy for yourself, you better get busy for that boy, Li'l Joe."

The "Why?" was never answered, whether it was asked by the kids or the older folks. Maybe, thought David, the reason the question "Why?" bothered him so much was that "Why?" was one of the Profs big things in teaching him. "Why—why —why!" Knudsen would thunder. "Ask it of everything your mind touches, and let your mind touch everything!"

He couldn't remember when it was Gramp had said, "You a lucky boy. You got any idea how lucky you is?"

"I—well—I guess so—"

"You know what it means, David, colored boy like you learning from a famous Professor? Having him to help you? I ain't saying there ain't other colored jes as smart as you are, mebbe smarter. I'm jes saying you lucky. The brains they got going to rot down here like mine done."

"Gramp!" He always hated it when Gramp ran himself down.

"Shucks, ain't no sense not saying it. Me, I been working ever since I was in the third grade. Never did make it through the next. My ma tried to teach me, but Lawd, you Tant' Irene, she was working seven days a week, sunup to sundown, sometimes half the night, making twelve dollars a month. She tried, tried her best, but she never could get me to even speak good like she done." There was sternness in Gramp's face when he added, "But you been lucky. You take care, y'hear!"

"What you mean?"

"Man pays for his luck, son. Man pays for it, one way or another. Your Tant' Irene say, 'You pays for your pretties.' You be mighty sure you let the good Lord know you thanks Him. Ain't many had it lucky as you.... And don't go to looking at that cast on your leg. That ain't nothing. That ain't nothing compared to having a cast on your mind like us colored has had since we was born down here. And still having. Ain't no gimpy leg gonna hold a man back has he got education and learning." The sternness left Gramp's face. "Ain't no black skin gonna hold him back neither if'n he gets outa here —less'n he lets it." David could remember, even now, the gleam of the moisture in Gramp's eyes. "You gonna go way from here one of these days, son."

"No, I ain't, Gramp. I mean, no, I'm not."

"Yes, you is, baby; yes, you is. I knows that."

Gramp almost never called him "baby," only when love and fear crowded him and it slipped out

"You wrong, Gramp. You sure wrong about that."

After that he didn't take things for granted so much. Gramp's words stayed with him. What was he going to have to pay, and when? He looked around and saw the truth of Gramp's words, realized them, young as he was, and felt a strange, abstract guilt. Remembering it, he knew it was not the solid guilt he'd feel for playing hooky to go swimming, or staying away from a session with the Prof for a toss in the hay with Edna Mae, but guilt for something that just was, and for which he had no responsibility. He mentioned it to Gramp, who said: "You ain't got no call to feel guilty. That's foolishness. Ain't no man guilty for something he can't help. I didn't mean you was to feel bad about it. Reckon if it wasn't right for you to have it, the good God wouldn't have give it to you. Jes you keep it in mind things ain't always gonna be like this. Get yourself ready to pay up. Shucks! Ain't no call to feel guilty."

He did, though, no matter what Gramp said.

CHAPTER 11

Looking back, David could see that the Professor had sneaked up on him in the matter of the scholarship just as he had in the matter of preliminary education and that the scholarship to Pengard had always been the big man's goal for him.

He was ten years old the first time he met the Prof's brother, Dr. Karl Knudsen, head of the Mathematics Department at the Ohio college. The Prof explained that the "doctor" was an academic degree and had been used at first only to avoid confusion when there had been yet another, unrelated, Knudsen at Pengard. "It has stuck," the Prof said. "Now I am afraid he is 'Doc' to them all."

David tried to describe the Prof's brother to Gramp. "He's so
little,"
he said. "I don't believe he's the Profs brother, honest I don't. I never seen—saw—two people so different." He struggled for a comparison, came up with: "You know that li'l piece of a dog the Joneses got? They calls it a wired hair? That's what he's like, Gramp, except his hair stands up straight all over and grows every whichaway." As David grew older and met Karl Knudsen on subsequent visits, he understood better what the Prof meant when he said, "Overgrown pixies, that is what some people call the Danes."

The summer he was eight, David fixed himself a shoeshine kit, working on it secretly so he could surprise Gramp with his first money earned away from home. The first day he took it out, after Gramp had left for work, he went to the corner of Petra and St. Anne streets in Beauregard, instead of to the Timminses. It was close to the ferry slip bus stop, and he knew there would be a lot of people. He made two dollars that day, shining shoes, doing it right, the way Gramp had taught him to shine his own. That night he showed the kit and the money to Gramp, proud. Gramp's face broke in two the way it always did when he smiled, and then, suddenly, the smile was gone and Gramp took the kit away from him and put it on a high shelf in the kitchen.

Surprise and disappointment silenced him for a minute. When he spoke his voice was high and querulous with hurt. "Why'd you take it away, Gramp? Why?"

"We finds you something else—"

"Gramps! You done it! You told me you was shining shoes when you was five. And I'm
eight!"
Newly learned grammar was washed away in the tide of emotion.

"I know, son, I know. I done a lot of things to make a penny."

"But I
likes
it, Gramp! And you said, you said a jillion times about earning money. Gimme back my box, Gramp!"

"You ain't gonna get a right understanding of this, not now, not till you grows up and maybe has a chile of your own. But I never was one to tell a chile 'no' and not tell him 'why.' Ain't no job a man should feel shame for doing if it's honest and he does it good as he knows how—"

"Gramp, lemme do it for a while. Please, Gramp."

"If you'd asked me could you go to shining shoes I'd of said 'sure'—"

"I wanted to
surprise
you, Gramp."

"I knows that, David. I ain't faulting you for not asking. I'd of said 'yes' if you'd asked. But when I seen you with that shoeshine box something ris up in my insides. I ain't going to argue, son."

"It was
fun
—"

"Said I ain't going to argue. How many colored you shine shoes for?"

"A couple. The first was Bucky Harris from 'cross the road. He said he'd start me off. He give me two bits."

"The rest was whites?"

David nodded. "I—I guess so."

"How many of them whites rub your head?"

David ran long, thin fingers over hair cropped close to his scalp. "I—I don't remember. Maybe three—four—"

"Sure, sure," said Gramp. "Figured it'd bring 'em luck, like finding a pin or seeing a white horse. And you smiled real big, and I bet they tipped you good."

Again David nodded. "They was O.K., Gramp—"

"I dunno, David. Seems like the good Lord's waking me up too late for breakfast. But you ain't getting down on your knees and shining whites' shoes, and you ain't gonna do what I done when I was a kid, kissing white asses for a nickel or a dime. I never done it when I got bigger; you ain't gonna do it no time. You got to work for 'em; hell, a man can't be a damned fool and starve to death, but when you works for 'em it'll be because they
needs
what they pays for, not because they want to rub a li'l black boy's head and see him grin. Your gram was what they calls extreme, but she wasn't wrongheaded all the way."

A day or so later David knew that his grandfather was trying to soften the disappointment when he said, "I know one guy you can fix up with a nice shine, son. Your gramp."

"Shine 'em your own self."

Quick anger flared in Gramp's eyes. "You ain't so big you can't still get a good licking, not showing respeck—"

David turned, sulking, and scuffled his way to the back door, not slamming it because Gramp gave a licking the way he played banjo—hard. He sat on the back steps watching

the chickens Gramp was too mush-hearted to kill and eat, scratching Stumpy's head, feeling sorry for himself.

***

As time went on, he found other jobs to do in the summer and on weekends: delivering finished wash for Miz Emma's sister, helping one of Gramp's friends, Slim Sims, in his little grocery store near the house, and, when he was older, working as helper on a laundry truck. If any of the work he found to do threatened to take time from his studying, Gramp raised such a sand he had to quit He gave a large share of the money he made to Gramp, and God only knew what Gramp did with it; that he "put it up" somewhere David was sure. When he could he bought his own clothes, and Gramp taught him to smell out a bargain, and tried to keep
him
from buying flashy, foolish things.

One thing he and Li'l Joe always managed to find time to do was what Li'l Joe called "make music." Lately Li'l Joe had sometimes taken
him
along on playing dates at the clubs, and during the last year or two, when there wasn't anyone from the union around, he had played a little solo piano between sets, fumble-fingered with stage fright at first, then letting the music carry him over his nervousness. Most of the time he played as Gramp and Miz Jones had taught him, but sometimes he worked it over differently, like the music he and Rudy listened to on records and in juke joints, fooling with the chords, making them say something different, until Gramp got on him. "You young uns wants to mess with stuff like that, showing off, all that stuff they calls 'far out,' that's your business. Gawd knows, it sounds like hell to me, all them chords, thirteenths and Gawd knows what—getting so far away from a good tune can't no one tell what it is after the intro. But that ain't what the folks come to this place to listen to."

When Bjarne Knudsen first started mentioning Quimby scholarships with a sort of fierce casualness, David shied away. He didn't know a great deal about scholarships, except that they were something you had to be a near genius, maybe a full genius, to get and he knew for sure he wasn't either of those. It scared him when the Prof said, "Once you are at college, David, you will be glad I have been hard on you in Latin—" Actually, thought David, the Prof hadn't been hard on him in Latin; he had made ancient history of such absorbing interest that an ancient language became easy because the desire to learn it was strong. He didn't say this; might as well let the Prof feel apologetic if he wanted. He told the Prof he wanted to learn Greek, too, and the Prof grinned wolfishly into his beard and said, "Ah! That is good," and added that usually Greek was not permitted in the first year, but because of his grounding in Latin they might make an exception. With his eyes blazing with indignation, the Professor told him that Pengard was one of the few colleges left in the country where ancient Greek was taught and where students were encouraged to study it.

It was during one of Dr. Knudsen's visits to his brother that he got the real information about Quimby scholarships. A "Quimby," he learned, was confined to Pengard college, and was reserved for Negro students of marked intellectual promise.

"Why Negroes, sir?" he asked.

The Professor's roar came before his quieter brother could reply. "Chips!" he said. "My God, chips! How often must I say it, David! Keep the chips from your shoulders. There are those, many of them, who will not take up the challenge to knock them off!"

"Do not shout at the boy, Bjarne. You have chips on your own shoulders about the chips on his shoulders." The doctor turned to David. "Horace Quimby is an old man, a very old man. His father founded Pengard and gave it his mother's family name. In fact, Dr. Quimby is president emeritus, but we still call him president. He is a wealthy man, a very wealthy man, through the death of his wife. It is unfortunate that wealth should be so important. President Quimby is a great man in his own right, and much loved by faculty members. The actual president is a young man, and must think of things like science buildings and a new lab building and modern dormitories. And always, I am sure, the directors and the young president must carry in their minds the picture of an old man living in a big house on the edge of a lake, a very old man who controls millions of dollars. But Quimby believes that a college, even his own, must, like a person, earn what it receives, must receive money from outside sources as well, in recognition of worth. He gives what you call 'cagily.'" The little professor smiled. "It is a fine college, David. I know of no better this side of the Atlantic for freedom of thought, of action, for the questing mind to find its answers for itself, yet be guided by gentle discipline. You will like it. For prelaw work it cannot be equaled."