Five Smooth Stones (6 page)

For the first time since they had started talking, Geneva's

voice was heard. She had moved into the kitchen alcove and sat in one of the straight chairs, cradling the baby in her arms, rocking it gently. Now she spoke. "You saying the truth," she said. "You saying it
right."

Knudsen went on. "As for your people"—again the finger shook menacingly and again Li'l Joe smiled—"I tell you there is more hope for your people than for those who oppress them. Believe me, it is so. There will be changes. That baby your wife is holding, he will see them, and his children will see them. But the changes will not come because your people have sat still and waited for them, Li'l Joe, sat and waited and hoped and accepted their lot. But oppression does not remain static. It carries the seed of its own destruction." He sighed gustily, then said, like a child: "I am hungry. Li'l Joe, may we use some of our precious cash for the things that are needed for a meal? And would Mrs. Champlin—"

Geneva stood quickly, the baby in her arms. "Lawd!" she said. "I been mighty rude. Professor, I'd be happy if you'd have a bite with us. We ain't got a lot but we got beans and rice, and if I had me some chicken and some shrimp and a little crab, I've got filet and other things for a gumbo. You like gumbo, Professor?"

While Li'l Joe was at the store, Knudsen said: "Mrs. Champlin, I talk too much. I talk too much because I am an angry man, and an impatient one. You understand? Anger can be good, very good, but it must be coupled with patience."

"Yes, sir," said Geneva. It was not the "sir" of subservience. "I think I knows what you mean."

"And for that patience, Mrs. Champlin, I turn to your people. And perhaps to God, if there is such a being, such a force. I do not know. Your people have never failed me when I have turned to them for patience. God—" he shrugged. "God baffles me. I have said that I am afraid of babies and that children baffle me. God does not frighten me, but He baffles me, as children do. Why is it, Mrs. Champlin, that God does not baffle you and your people, who have known a dark crucifixion all your lives? For He does not."

Geneva was bringing things from cupboards, setting them on the table. She spoke slowly. "We're ignorant people," she said. "And most of us poor. Dirt poor. We got nothing to come between us and God. No book learning, no things like a pile of money brings. Maybe we sees Him plainer. We been kept ignorant. You knows that. Ain't no colored person I knows of what ain't praying his children get an education he never was let to have. I mean,
praying
for it. I knows.

She was silent for a long time, coaxing the fire in the stove to a hotter blaze. Then she said: "What they going to do with that education when they gets it? They going to let it come between them and God?"

Knudsen drew a deep breath. "I had not thought of that." His voice, low, rumbled like a train. "I had not thought of that," he repeated. "When your people come into the light of learning, Mrs. Champlin, they must drive their learning and their God abreast, yoked together? That is what you mean?"

"Yes," said Geneva. "I reckon that's what I means. We got God here now, with us; we got Him close because we needs Him so bad. He ain't never far from us. Just so long as we keeps Him and keeps His son, Jesus, near us, we ain't plumb lost."

Knudsen watched her without speaking, without answering her. He must not, he thought, speak what was in his mind, for this above all things she would not have understood. Behind her, he told himself, there were generations that had been taught the belief of "no cross, no crown," generations inculcated with the doctrine that through suffering they would find happiness in some vague hereafter. That doctrine had come from the whites, their masters and their owners, who had known the way, diabolically had known the way, to keep an oppressed and enslaved people from revolt, perhaps without even realizing that they knew the way. Yet if that faith had brought them thus far, who was he to say that, with learning, it would not bring them entirely out of the darkness and into the light?

When at last, in midafternoon, they finished dinner and he stood at the door just before leaving, there were two ten-dollar bills on the table and a five-dollar bill on David's blanket. "With your permission, Mrs. Champlin?" he had said when he laid it there, and she had nodded, smiling but not speaking.

To Li'l Joe he said, "You will come with your banjo tomorrow, my friend?"

"Sure will. You knows that. And don't go forgetting, Professor, these next lessons are on me. You done paid for 'em today."

As he strode across the cobbles of the courtyard, the Pro-

fessor was muttering, addressing himself, as he often did, in Danish, bad though it might be for his English.

"In a dresser drawer. Kind God in Heaven, in a dresser drawer. And You in there with him. That is what they believe, what they
know
with every atom of their being. What they
know.
Bjarne Knudsen, you are an ignorant man. There is a dull knife in your kitchen. Go home and cut your throat with it."

CHAPTER 5

A child's mind drifted in the midst between waking and dreaming. In the dream part of the mist, behind sleep-heavy eyelids, there was a shimmer of silver light on wide, dark water, and sleep-dulled ears heard the voices of many people singing beside the water. Although it was night and his eyes were closed, the child could see the people, all black, all singing, all somehow known to him. There were no words to the song, only the great sound of the voices mingling with the sound of flowing water and a nearer song, that of the woman who held him. His head rested on her shoulder. The softness of her breast and thighs cradled his small body, and the dark sweetness of her voice was in his head: " 'Oh, Mary, don' you weep, don' you moan.... Pharaoh's army got drownded.... Oh, Mary, don' you weep...."' Then the voices on the banks of the dark, shimmering river were singing the same song, and the sound swelled inside his head and became one with her voice.

He stirred, and the lids weighted with sleep fluttered as he felt strong, thin arms lifting him, heard gentle words: "I'll carry the chile home, Neva." Then he no longer heard the woman's song, only the warm soft sound of all the many black people that were the dream part of the mist, all singing on the banks of the dark, shimmering river; then there was the nothingness of the sleep of a tired child.

***

David Champlin murmured sleepily, opened, then squeezed his eyes closed against light, tried to, but could not, follow his grandmother's words as she knelt beside his cot: " 'Our Father, who art in Heaven...' " He sighed tremulously and slipped again into nothingness at," 'Give us this day.' "

There had never been a day like it before; it had been the most exciting, the most satisfying, the happiest day of his short life. For the first time bare feet had run through grass with no one to call out, "No!" For the first time bare brown toes had curled into country dust and dirt; small, long-fingered hands had picked flowers that grew wild and undisciplined, and a small body just outgrowing chubbiness had rolled in rough undergrowth. There had been a fat brown dog that came and rolled with him, a dog that came from nowhere just to play with him and then returned to nowhere. There had been a solemn, skinny black boy who crossed a bumpy, ill-paved road and watched, then shared a licorice whip with him. Then there had been a time of racing through the empty rooms of a half-finished house, crowing, laughing, shouting.

His happiness had been marred only once that day, when his grandfather, smiling, had said, "You reckon you'd like to live here, son? Reckon you'd like to move over the river and stay in this house? Have your own room and all?"

He stood motionless, looking up first at Gramp, then at Gram. The dark eyes widened as he rolled them, looking around at walls whose unplastered lath framework gave a vista of every room from where they stood. Tears spilled over, the round face crumpled. Gram picked him up quickly. "Baby!"

He fought back sobs. "Where'm I going to sleep? Where's David going to sleep?"

"With us, baby," said Gram. "Just like it is now. Don't you fret. We fixes your cot like it is now, at the foot of our bed."

His grandfather said, "Shucks, you knows we ain't going to turn you loose to sleep by yourself, son. Least, not till you learns to stay in the bed and not keep falling out. Gets mighty cold some nights for an old man like your Gramp to go traipsing around into another room to pick you up every time you falls out of bed."

That had made it all right, and happiness came rushing back. Gramp and Gram had never lied to him. If, in this new place, Gramp would be as near as he had always been to pick him up from the floor to which he fell so often with a soft,"Plop!" in the night, there was no need for fear. Some day he would be older and wouldn't fall out of bed and waken with

a wail of fright. Gramp had told him that. But until then he could go to sleep without fear, knowing that should that startled wakening come in the dark there would be, almost at the same moment, the quiet slap of Gramp's feet on the floor, the sleepy murmur, exasperated but without reproof, "Jesus have moicy! There he goes again!" and the feel of Gramp's arms, and Gramp's voice very close. "So-so, little man, so-so." And then the safety of his cot again with the covers tightening over him as Gramp tucked them in firmly.

***

Geneva Champlin gave full credit to the Almighty for her husband's good fortune when disaster and tragedy were common fare for almost everyone. She was also sure she knew the reason for His kindness: that she and her husband would be able to take care of the child He had placed in their care. Tant' Irene said only, in her high, quick voice, "I told you, Joseph. God never made the mouth He wouldn't feed. See you thank Him, hear?"

Sometimes, in Jones's Funeral Home, working over an eviscerated, post-mortemed cadaver from Charity Hospital or the city morgue, Li'l Joe found it hard to make his thanksgiving without reservations. He had done a kind and thoughtful thing one morning and stopped in to see Zeke Jones, who had broken his collarbone a few days before. He didn't suppose God had too many rewards to pass out in those bad times, and tried to be duly grateful when Zeke offered him the job of helper, working under Zeke's own expert guidance. "You do a good job, Li'l Joe," Zeke said, "maybe you can stay on permanent. That man I got ain't a bit of good no more. Shucks, he's taken to drinking so bad I even watches the embalming fluid. You dependable, Li'l Joe; you always been dependable." With an unspoken prayer to the Almighty not to hold it against him if he didn't stay permanent, what with the various unpleasantnesses of the job, Li'l Joe agreed. "Times is bad," said Zeke. "Still, folks keeps on dying. Seems like there's more dying now than ever. Most folks got a little piece of insurance to bury theirselves with. I'll be fair with you, Li'l Joe. You knows that."

"Lawd!" he said to Geneva, a few nights after he started the job. "Anyone told me a while back I'd be helping an undertaker lay out co'pses, I'd have said they was crazy. It's going to take a heap of getting used to."

"You got a lot to be thankful for," said Geneva sternly.

"You think Zeke's any prize to work for, you got another think coming, woman."

"He ain't white," said Geneva. "He ain't white. That's the main thing."

Her husband did not answer. Didn't do any good with Geneva to point out that their own people could cheat and chisel and underpay and overwork their help as bad as any white. Didn't matter to Neva. She'd rather get a bad deal from one of her own people any day than say "thank you" to a white. He understood and sympathized and, in principle, agreed. It just wasn't practical, that was all.

Didn't do any good either to try and make Neva admit that there were a lot of colored wouldn't stack up so good come Judgment Day. She knew as well as he did that there was a whole different world of Negro life from the one they lived in, a world of violence and drinking and bad things happening all the time, but she would push the knowledge to the back of her mind. When word came to them of bad things happening in the Quarter or over on the other side of town, her lips would set tight and she'd shake her head, but she never got self-righteous about it the way most did. Once when a friend of his had been knifed by a jealous woman in a barroom fight, he'd said, "Scum—" and she'd jumped him.

"Ain't no one born bad," she'd said. "Man or woman. But they's some as goes bad under trouble. It's the way they's made, but it don't mean they was born plumb bad clear through."

Li'l Joe didn't agree with her, but he always kept his arguments to himself on a point like this there wasn't any proving of. Instead he had teased her.

"Whites, too?" he said.

"Don't ask me nothing 'bout no whites. I ain't studying 'bout no whites. I ain't even trying to figure out if they bad or what. Don't matter, do it?"

Almost immediately after he went to work for Zeke, Geneva decided their grandson would do well to go to embalming college. "That way he ain't ever going to have to work for whites," she said. "He gets his education and he goes to embalming college, and he ain't never going to be broke. Right now everyone's out of work, everyone's broke, and Zeke Jones, he's doing so well he can hire hisself a helper when he gets hurt."

"Time enough to worry about that when the chile gets his education. That's the first thing, that's the very first thing," said Li'l Joe, but he had to admit there was merit in her idea. There sure as the devil was security in the funeral business. There wasn't any worry about supply and demand. Competition was the only menace.

When the WPA began putting people to work as laborers, Li'l Joe augmented what he made at Zeke's with pick-and-shovel work when things were slow at the funeral home, and occasionally with a "little piece of change" from a music gig or parade when there was one to be played. Everything that he and Geneva made, over and above what they needed for themselves and their grandson, was carefully saved. Never overly trustful of banks, and with the memory of the bank holiday still vivid, they put paper money under the rug, while coins were hoarded in all manner of unlikely places. Only for their grandson were these hoards ever broached for anything but necessities. They disciplined the child, but with more gentleness than they themselves had been disciplined by parents of another generation. "Mebbe he's spoilt," said Geneva. "But he ain't spoilt rotten."