Five Smooth Stones (7 page)

When David outgrew the carton beside the bed and the dresser drawer, they moved. The new rooms were only a block away, and no great improvement on their previous cramped quarters, except for an anteroom that might once have been a trunk closet. Into this they managed to squeeze a bed, a dresser and, first, a borrowed crib, then a borrowed cot that they managed to fit at the foot of their bed. On the days when Li'l Joe and Geneva both worked, they took the boy to Ambrose Jefferson's house, next door to Pop Jefferson, his brother, the Abraham Jefferson of Li'l Joe's childhood.

Joseph Champlin could not remember when there had not been a lot of Jeffersons in his life. They were scattered through the French Quarter in an ever-growing and progressively more intricate pattern of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and small sons and daughters. It was the first Abraham Jefferson who had been with Li'l Joe's father, David, when that doomed man had died on a pile of blazing logs in a nearby state. Abraham had managed to escape somehow, and by blind instinct found his way to New Orleans, but had never been coherent enough again to tell all that had happened on that spring afternoon when his friend had died in flames, with the howling laughter of a mob in his ears. "Abr'am just never did come to hisself," said Gran'Cecile.

It was the sight of a white doctor, sent for by Cecile, that had sent the half-crazed Abraham running from the house, a mad, screaming black man no one dared stop, a man who ran like the wind, with bulging eyes and wide-open mouth, ran through the streets of the French Quarter straight and fast as an arrow to the docks, crying "Jesus! I'm coming, Jesus! Take me Jesus!" until the kind waters of the river filled the screaming mouth, closed over the frenzied eyes, and did not give him up for three days. There were old people still alive in the French Quarter who remembered that day.

When Li'l Joe and Geneva were both working and they took David to Ambrose Jefferson's house, Geneva fretted. "They got a lot of white children coming in, playing in that neighborhood," she said one morning.

"You can't help that, Neva. Chile's got to know there's whites, got to learn what they're like. Can't wrap him up in cotton wool all his life."

"Onlies' white he knows now is the Professor. Suits me if he don't ever have to know no more."

"You talking foolishness, Neva. He's going to think all whites is like the Professor, way it is now."

"He ain't going to think it long."

She nagged her husband to keep after Zeke Jones about their grandson's future.

"Gawd sake, Neva, the chile ain't even walking yet, and already you wants him to start laying out co'pses."

The Professor, admittedly hazy about the mental working of the very young, gave them a set of alphabet blocks when the boy was four. To Geneva, whose scant knowledge of reading and writing had come long after she was grown, some of it with the help of her husband, alphabet blocks were not playthings. They were means to an end, and to Li'l Joe they represented the same opportunity—to start his grandson on the right road. He spent hours on the floor with the child whenever he could, making a game of the alphabet, using pictures of dogs and cats and cows and horses until at five David could spell out simple sentences.

It did not bother the child that the only plumbing in their home was a single cold-water faucet, his only playground the cobbled courtyards and banquettes. He was, in the words of his grandfather, "just as happy as if he had good sense." When he was very small he would stand, jigging up and down with excitement, at the kitchen table, his eyes just over its top, while his grandfather cleaned and repaired the broken, secondhand toys they managed to get for him. Gramp could make them work, he knew that; Gramp could make them shine and gleam, and if an old tap washer had to replace a missing truck wheel it made no difference.

Geneva tried to keep the acrid envy out of her eyes and heart in those days when she saw the train sets and fire engines and shiny toy trucks on the floors of the families she cleaned for now and then; tried to keep the bitterness out of her eyes when she took her employers' children to play on park grass where her grandson would not be allowed to set foot.

There were always plenty of books and pictures in the house. The Professor saw to that. The books the Professor brought were new, with no pages missing or defaced by crayons like the ones Geneva brought home, and David learned that if he marked them up or did not take care of them retribution would be swift. At night after Li'l Joe came home he would hold his grandson on his lap and as far as his own limited education would allow he read aloud, the light of the oil lamp, soft and yellow, mellowing the outlines of the shabby furniture. The Professor never missed a chance to pick up a book or magazine with stories about Africa, or with pictures of wild animals, and sometimes Li'l Joe would become so engrossed in the tales of Africa his voice would trail off and David would have to prod him back to reading aloud. "There's where your people comes from, son," Li'l Joe would say. "Don't you never be like some of these colored, shamed your people comes from there. Can't no white say they comes from the same part of the world as King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Wouldn't be surprised but what Moses and a lot of them couldn't ride in the front of the bus was they down here."

Both Gramp and Gram would bring home toy animals, some of them cloth, some of them china or pottery, all of them damaged but new and exciting to him. They joked about the damage. "See," Gram said once. "It's a three-legged dog. Reckon he got in a bad fight. That's what happens, baby, when you gets in fights."

"Gramp'll fix it."

"Can't fix this. Nope. Reckon that other dog he got messed up with runned off with his leg."

They cleaned and mended and restuffed the cloth animals. One tiger defied them, and at last they re-covered the tattered beast with bits and pieces of calico, adding green glass button eyes and drooping yellow wool whiskers. Tant' Irene was there the Sunday afternoon they finished it, and when her great-grandson shouted aloud with laughter she said, "David," and her stern face grew soft. Li'l Joe, looking at her, knew she was not speaking of her grandson but of her dead husband.

"Mane," said David. "Where's its mane?"

"Shucks, tigers don't have no manes, son."

"This one do, Gramp, this one do."

And so they made a tiger's mane for him of loops of wool of many colors, red, green, yellow, blue, and cut the loops, and Gramp gave one look and said, "Lawd! Set that pore thing down in the middle of Africa he'd be one lonesome tiger. All the other tigers'd run like five hundred minute they seen him."

To David it was the most wonderful tiger in the world, and he slept with it every night.

***

David Champlin was a shy child with those outside his immediate environment, and less aggressive than most of his playmates. The first time he ran afoul of the neighborhood bully he came sobbing to his grandfather, who withheld sympathy.

"You let that boy see you crying?" asked Gramp. "Did you?"

David shook his head, dislodging tears. He was stunned that the usual ready comfort was not there.

"Then you get on back out there. He bullies you again, you stand up to him, y'hear!"

"Jimmy—he said he was going to hit me." David was still sniffling, engulfed in self-pity.

"Ain't no law says you can't hit him first." 

Silence.

"Well, is there?"

"No—no, sir."

As he left the room slowly, reluctantly, he heard his grandmother's voice raised shrilly: "You crazy, Joseph Champlin? That Jimmy's twice as big as him—and bad." And his grandfather's slow, quiet, "Chile's got to learn sometime. Chile's got to learn there's coming a time won't no one stand up for him but his own self." But he heard soft footsteps, and knew that Gramp was following him, then was standing at the door, quiet, alert.

David went to bed that night nursing his first black eye.

Several times, after he had been guided through his prayers by Geneva, he climbed out of his cot and over the foot of his grandparent's bed, looking at his bruises in the mirror, seeing himself as a hero in the dim light that filtered in from the kitchen. He had not followed his grandfather's implied advice to hit first. Instead he had marshaled his strength, and at the first taunt from the bully—a light-skinned boy, overloaded with soft, flabby flesh—had taken a running start and, goatlike, butted the soft belly with his head backed by all the momentum he could muster. The results were even more than Gramp could have hoped for. He was not clear in his mind how he had gotten the black eye, because the sight of the neighborhood scourge lying winded on the banquette had started a free-for-all.

The fight had taught him something, though, and it was his first real secret, a something he could not share with Gramp, something only he would know: He did not like to fight. All that he could tell Gramp and take pride in was that he was not afraid to fight and that he could fight. Gramp had been, according to his own stories, which Tant' Irene acknowledged to be true, "One helluva fighter" when he was young. "Used to go out looking for 'em if they didn't happen natural," he'd say, and usually add, "Ain't but two things makes me want to fight now I'm older and come to my senses—that's seeing somebody hurt a young un or an old person."

The process of teaching David Champlin to live in a divided world was begun when he was still too young to walk down the street without holding the protecting hand of Gram or Gramp. It was the first order of the business of upbringing. That he had white playmates with whom he romped on terms of equality only made it more urgent. He was told to take off his hat to all adults and call them "sir" or "ma'am" whether they were white or colored, but in dealing with white adults he was to keep his eyes to himself and never on them, and he must never look a white woman squarely in the face. Once his business with any white person was over he was to get out of their company, even though at that age the business might be no more than the purchase of an ice-cream cone. He learned early that lying to Gram or Gramp or those entrusted with his care was a bad thing and brought a stinging whipping; lying to a white, except the Professor, was glossed over, and therefore it was not a bad thing as lying to his own was a bad thing. The inevitable "why" of childhood's logic was never adequately answered.

"What's a nigger bastid?" he asked his grandparents at supper one night.

"Lawd!" said Geneva. "Lawd!" There was the sound of keening in her voice.

Joseph Champlin finished flavoring his stew with hot sauce, and carefully replaced the bottle in the cruet stand. "Why you ask, son?"

"Tommy Lucido called me a nigger bastid."

It was not the "bastid" that made the muscles of Li'l Joe's jaws set; it was the lisp of childhood in the epithet. "What you do?" he asked.

"I hit him," said his grandson. "I hit him and he runned away. I didn't want to hit him but I did."

"You should of come home, baby," said Geneva. "You should have come home. Don't play round with him no more, y'hear! How many times I got to tell you—stay in your own courtyard; nev' mind what the white kids do."

David paid no attention. He was looking at his grandfather, the source of all wisdom.

"Is there white bastids?" he asked. "Is there?"

"They's plenty," said Li'l Joe, and David heard an abrupt laugh from his grandmother.

"And we the ones what knows it," she said. Then, "Lawd! his folks going to tell all their friends how their lily-white chile got beat up by colored. Going to use it to show why their kids is too good for us. I wish God would strike 'em dead. I wish they was all dead and rotting in hell."

"They bound to be someday," said Li'l Joe reasonably. 'They bound to be. Ain't no God I ever heerd about going to find no places for 'em too close to Him. The whites is lots of things, but there's one thing they ain't—that's Christian." He frowned at his wife. "Ain't no use getting all upsetted. God don't work in no hurry. He'll catch up with 'em, give Him time. Ain't nothing you can do about it, not if you wants to keep on living." He looked across the table into the dark, round puzzlement of his grandson's eyes, and flinched as from a blow. "Next time some white calls you bad names, don't go to fighting, and—"

"But—but Gramp—you said when Jimmy—"

"That's different. He's colored. Some white lays a hand on you, you fight back, but don't get in no humbug over bad names. You going to be hearing bad names from whites all your life. Ain't nothing but bad comes from fighting 'em. They ignorant."

"What's iggerant?"

"They don't know no better. You getting old enough to learn now how it is. You gets in trouble with the whites, I'll tan your hide so good you can use it for shoe leather. You let 'em alone, y'hear!"

David nodded, his eyes seeming to be all that there was of his face. He had never heard that tone in Gramp's voice before; had always known that threats to "tan his hide" were joking, that the worst he would get was a right smart switching. He had never been afraid of Gramp before, and now, suddenly, he was. It was a shattering thing—to be afraid of Gramp, to see a real and bitter threat in Gramp's eyes, hear a harsh promise in Gramp's voice of fearful punishment for disobedience to an order he could not comprehend. The foundations of his small world rocked, threatening to disintegrate. He sensed something else behind that harshness. Gramp was no longer Gramp, gentle, loving, kindly; Gramp was a being to fear and yet Gramp, too, was afraid.

He was sobbing now, and Gram held him close and rocked him fiercely in her arms. "You got no call to cry, baby. All the love you got, you got no call to cry." Her voice was edged and sharp as she spoke over his head to her husband. "You stir yourself, Joseph Champlin, and get down to Antonelli's and get us some ice cream and some of them frosted cookies they got the baby likes."

Gramp's hands were under his shoulders, setting him on his feet, but Gramp's tone was still strange. "Stop it, son! You going to be crying all your life, you keep on like this. There ain't nothing you can do about it. Reckon me'n' Gram's got to teach you about God some more. Come on, li'l man, right now we gets ourselves some ice cream."