High Cotton (14 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
Grandfather walked with a cane, swung lightly at pebbles, golf balls, and the armor of my revolt. He may have been older, “shipwrecked and dismasted,” but he was still fearless, comfortable with his I-call-you-old-men-because-you-know-the-way posture.
I suspected that a part of him was also delighted that I had not made the grade, that I had been turned down by his alma mater, that I was not, after all, as good as he, in the forefront of Negro Firsterism. “Providence, Rhode Island, is the costume-jewelry capital of the world.”
He had to remind himself to keep his mask of disappointment pulled down, but I simply refused to see myself through his eyes. He had not a clue as to how free and complex I thought I was about to become that leafy June afternoon and how much a prisoner of the predetermined forces in black history I considered him to be.
“We have done our best to train you up in the way you should go, so that when you are a man you’ll not depart from it.” He said that I would be the first in four generations not to earn a college degree and how I was hoping to live with that knowledge he couldn’t say. I said that Uncle Castor had dropped out of the conservatory.
“You take my point. Now we have room for debate.” He said Uncle Castor had ended up dying alone in an infested house with telephone operators his only companions, operators who ran his life for him, told him when to wake up, when to go to bed, told him not to refreeze the fish. I wanted to say that at least Uncle Castor had a home, but the idea of property was offensive to what I then called my system of belief.
Some mechanical form of me kept pace with Grandfather, halted when he paused to make a tip-of-the-hat gesture to the back of a reckless station wagon that pushed wind over the blank pavement, but my real self was elsewhere, already united with the vibrations of the Hungerford Bridge and the screeching of Waterloo Station. “You’ve been hornswoggled,” Grandfather said to the uninhabited manifestation of the far away, bounding me.
It was barbershop wisdom all over again, the cult of the Bible and of education, with a lone razor scraping on a strop in the interval between tall tales as thoughts loped happily back to the way whole stadiums shook under the weight of excited fans, except, in Grandfather’s case, “The Scholar Gypsy” was likely to be appended to the homilies about getting involved in something you wouldn’t ever want to have to explain to yourself.
Grandfather said, “Let me ask you this: did I ever tell you about the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel? Have you ever heard your father speak of Harlem?”
Who hadn’t heard of James Baldwin? I’d even driven down 125th Street once.
“I had to haul him out of there after he got out of the army. Before he was born, his mother almost had to come and snatch me out of there. Marcus Garvey had captured my imagination through his Back to Africa movement.” I’d never heard of Marcus Garvey, and addressing a black man as the Duke of Uganda struck me as lèse-majesté. “That was the cleanest hotel I had ever seen.” But he thought that the President of Africa was, like him, a student of Thomas Nixon Carver’s thesis that workers would own corporations. He said Garvey’s people had fingers smarter than flypaper. “Riches have wings and sober thought soon ruled out that speculative venture.”
Grandfather was speaking off the record, drawing aside the curtain, but he was also suckering me down a trail mined with sympathy. Once he sensed that my real self had been lured back from the Imperial War Museum, once I had slipped back into my body and it began to give off the warmth of human curiosity, he turned on me as he had always done, right there before two evergreen bushes at the edge of a stranger’s driveway.
“You talk so big and so much about needing your own life. I just want you to remember how often your own life has put nothing but heartache and misery into the lives of your mother and father.”
He knew he had scored a direct hit. He didn’t have to spell out which crimes he was referring to. The true bill I returned against myself included grand theft auto, reckless endangerment, and perjury. I went soggy inside at the memory of the tears and the smashed metal and squad-car lights, the tow trucks and the lettering on the lawyer’s door. Luckily, my two joy rides and destruction of three automobiles had not ended in jail or in terrible injury either to myself or to others.
Grandfather studied me, his look uncomfortable, somewhere between the disgust and pity you have for specimens. I told myself that I could fall apart over my career as a car rustler later.
Laying aside guile, he touched my arm. The weather and the road reminded him of the day when he had to have his trusty Oldsmobile put down. It had begun to fail just outside Flint. It was, he said, a sign of how low he’d fallen that when God talked to him that afternoon He said he’d get a flat tire and he thought that if God didn’t have anything more pregnant than that to say he’d go ahead and ignore Him.
We turned a corner, into a shady lane where I had done a great deal of hiding throughout high school. I told Grandfather that the cul-de-sac was private. He said he didn’t see any signs about trespassing. Grandfather, always the first Negro to be respectable, to knock on a door to point out that he alone had, indeed, kept off the grass.
Grandfather said I looked tired and sat. The ledge of the bridge was over a deep creek bed. He even shut his eyes. Steel-colored water splashed on the rocks below; tree limbs, heavy with early summer, bent and straightened. Odors from a septic tank reached us.
I’d waited so often on that bridge, the meeting place between me and the ghost of a future me, had invested the secret spot with such an occult power that it didn’t seem right that it was, in the end, just a lane where people had laid out grandiose gardens, arbors, and goldfish ponds because they had more lawn than they knew what to do with.
Grandfather came to. “Tell me what I was talking about. And don’t tell me you know anything about the railroads.”
No matter what he said, I was only prepared to hear an old darky telling a young buck to be reasonable and practical, which, to me, were code words for envy and frustration that the thaw and the masculine exhibitionism of Black Power had come too late for him.
I was talking to give him a wall to bounce his thoughts against,
in the way we had answered school counselors who advised us not to worry and to have a good time, not because they worried that we worried, but to shut us up. REMAIN CHEERFUL TO THE END, signs in the high-school nurse’s station said of nuclear attack. I said I wanted to join the Peace Corps.
in the way we had answered school counselors who advised us not to worry and to have a good time, not because they worried that we worried, but to shut us up. REMAIN CHEERFUL TO THE END, signs in the high-school nurse’s station said of nuclear attack. I said I wanted to join the Peace Corps.
“You’d look ridiculous sitting in a ditch.”
I was not going to be shaken by Grandfather’s darky pessimism. The sun reached its climax of cadmium yellow, accompanied by the boom of country-club air conditioners as large as trailers. “It is easy to live with the idea of life,” Grandfather said out of the blue, “and when you lose it, you will think of the time when you had it, green and gold.”
I regretted the age of ocean liners and felt the injustice of the
Queen Mary
being ogled at a California amusement park. I was not grateful to the designers of the 747, the size of which was such that to fill the cabin the price of tickets fell within my reach. The jet was so big that for most of the flight I thought the wing out in space was the shore of Greenland.
Queen Mary
being ogled at a California amusement park. I was not grateful to the designers of the 747, the size of which was such that to fill the cabin the price of tickets fell within my reach. The jet was so big that for most of the flight I thought the wing out in space was the shore of Greenland.
As far as I was concerned I was flying home. My bedroom door may have been guarded by posters of radical heroes, but behind that giant silkscreen of the once-fugitive professor of philosophy, the then-captive gap-toothed beauty with an Afro like the lunar corona, I had inscribed my “Stanzas—Written in Dejection near Indianapolis.”
Sometimes my parents came home and, instead of finding me mowing the lawn, saw me loafing in front of the house with a secondhand Edwardian treasure, lolling in a shopping mall and hippie-boutique version of Byronic drag: frilly prom shirt, shoes and belts with big buckles, and a knock-off of an Inverness cape. Jim was ruined as a servant because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil, Huck said.
A young couple on the plane that I played Hearts with was confused by the accent I had worked hard to perfect. It sounded to them like a blend of Katharine Hepburn and Godfrey Cambridge. I told them what tube station they had to look for on the way in from Heathrow. “Have you lived in London before?”
“Sort of.”
Messages in bottles had floated toward me: in England’s green and pleasant land. I had retrained my handwriting so that it resembled the script on the dust jacket of my edition of Lord Hervey’s memoirs. In those rare moments when I thought about the problems of black Britons, I, the born-butler type, made up an argument in my head that began and ended with how much Dr. Johnson had liked his spendthrift servant.
Nothing had prepared me for the desolation of eating furry peaches in the drizzle in St. George’s Park, the soot marks on the carpet in my transients’ hotel, the discomfort of being a catfish blowing in the silt while schools of angelfish glided overhead. To be among the young, I hung around the Round House, then a rock-and-roll venue. So much hippie hair that smelled of avocado shampoo.
Some days the only words I spoke were at the counter of a Wimpy Bar. He who hopes for his reward in heaven because he pledged so much to the church deserves what he gets. I circled Notting Hill and Earl’s Court like a moth. Blacks exchanged greetings of solidarity in the snack bars. I looked away from fists raised in salute. I studied cocktail menus in restaurants and discos I could not afford. Blacking out under theatergoers’ feet during intervals was not the best position from which to strike up conversation. To top it all off, Her Majesty was out of town.
An advertisement for a friendship society took me not to old boys drinking whiskey neat but into a run-down loft of shy Asians in paisley shirts. A clerkly man given to deep blushes controlled
how many cups of watery pink punch I could have and eyed me suspiciously, as if I were competition. I did not need English lessons, but I claimed a place around a beaten-up table and took my turn reading from Agatha Christie’s
Ten Little Niggers
.
how many cups of watery pink punch I could have and eyed me suspiciously, as if I were competition. I did not need English lessons, but I claimed a place around a beaten-up table and took my turn reading from Agatha Christie’s
Ten Little Niggers
.
Mile End was part of the East End of London and the declining Cockney world. One stop beyond Whitechapel was my working-class film set, updated by extras speaking Urdu. Still following up leads in the newspapers, I wandered into a political meeting where, as a black, I generated considerable but suppressed excitement. I’d caused a similar stir at meetings of Unitarians and Young Republicans back home. I saw it as a chance to be catered to, like the black speaker at a Soledad meeting who wanted a cigarette, and inundated with every brand of the international white left—Marlboros, filterless Camels—and asked, “Does anyone have a Kool?”
The unkempt, neglected, upstairs room of the Plasterer’s Arms was spacious, bigger than the pub’s business would justify, and felt cold, though it was summer. Buffalo horns jutted from a wooden plaque on the wall. The Buffalo Club, whatever that was, along with various rotary groups, shared the meeting space with the Revolution. A smattering of believers gathered to discuss “Productivity Deals and How to Fight Them.” My other choice that evening had been a public meeting on “Troops Out of Ireland.”
Strong-willed, bosomy girls and women thin as rakes with equally powerful personalities wrangled over how best to convince the working class that established practices and day rates were being undermined by the promises of piecework. The Trotskyite style had something to do with sneering. “We are under no illusions,” the women repeated.
The few men present looked as if each had one pair of shoes
and trousers to his name. Though they supported the struggle against productivity deals, they seemed in an awful hurry to get downstairs to the bar during the break. Their freedom in debate as they waited for their drinks came from not having to defend a Trotksyite state, because none existed. They could be as rude about Cuba and Vietnam as they wanted.
and trousers to his name. Though they supported the struggle against productivity deals, they seemed in an awful hurry to get downstairs to the bar during the break. Their freedom in debate as they waited for their drinks came from not having to defend a Trotksyite state, because none existed. They could be as rude about Cuba and Vietnam as they wanted.
I gathered that the assholes among them called one another “comrade” all the time, even in private. Behind their backs, their comrades in turn called them Stakhanovites, a term referring to people who thought of themselves as doing more for the Revolution than their colleagues, digging more coal out of the mine in one day than most could in a year.
The introduction to sectarian politics made me think I had penetrated the skin of the tough city. London was about to redeem the faith I had in the books and films about it. I was having a romantic, literary experience, even if it was an Orwellian down-and-out one. I didn’t know whether to think of congenial, self-abnegating Trots as the hobos or the church group that ran the relief house.
A pint of mild was a very proletarian drink. Three of them cleared my head sufficiently for me to see that the man whose assignment it was to draw out newcomers was Ernest Pontifex, a gentleman intellectual who had had hard things happen to him in his escape from his church family but would never concede that he had had a hard life. People matched characters in books, I thought, just as everyone said you could see Old Master portraits in faces in the streets.
The Ernest Pontifex who took me under his wing had nothing to prove and regarded his membership in the group as absurdly difficult work, like the shoveling he had done in the mud of a glove factory in Florence after the flood. He was in his twenties and had already lost his hair. In a matter of months it had gone
into the sinks of Poland, he said. The only thing that stopped his forehead were his eyebrows, which cordoned off his half-ironical, half-in-the-movement expression.
into the sinks of Poland, he said. The only thing that stopped his forehead were his eyebrows, which cordoned off his half-ironical, half-in-the-movement expression.
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