High Cotton (34 page)

BOOK: High Cotton

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I minded the strict rules of conduct and the tribal code that said that I, as a black, had a responsibility to help my people, to honor the race. Now I am sorry that I went to such lengths not to be of much use to myself just so no one would be able to ask anything of me. To have nothing to offer was not, after all, the best way to have nothing to lose.

It doesn’t always begin with a suitcase. Sometimes it starts with the wrong book. Back in the days when books were deeds and every situation was, I thought, polemical, the language of
being black stressed “summers of dreadful speculations and discoveries” and “going behind the white man’s definitions,” as if American reality were an illusionist’s trick that could be exposed by a peek through the correct hole. We, the Also Chosen, a unique creation, meaning more soulful than white people, had to understand history to be released from it.

Those “dreadful speculations” are much like train stations that were once important but are now passed over by commuter lines. The stations disappear in a rush; you whiz by faded arches, fanciful embellishments. Other things have grown up around them, overtaken them, and, in some cases, embarrassed them. To pick up one of these books is to find yourself on a platform in a country of arrested development.

As the day winds down, you begin to panic that there is no way out. No comfortable sleeper has pulled in; the ticket window is closed anyway. The signs are in an alphabet you cannot decipher, the coffee is bitter, the cigarettes stink, the cafeteria has sold its last potato. Everyone else seems to know where he’s going, why he’s waiting, and can’t help you, though clearly he wants to explain the departure schedule to you.

You give in, put on your adventurer’s cap, assure yourself that you will bed down in the sorrel patch if it comes to that. You read on and find that the streetlamps are more subdued than they are in most cities today. The moon enchants the sky and prevents the night from darkening completely. Stars are visible. They throb and shine down on those Freedom Summers of not so long ago. Until death or distance do us part.

You take away phrases as if they were souvenirs to add to your collection of abolitionist ha’pennies, Wedgwood medallions, Aunt Jemima saltshakers, blues records from a Heritage Tour or a cousin’s basement. You want to retain the past, as if through
preservation its sufferings will have meaning, but sometimes suffering has no meaning; it’s just suffering.

The past gets longer and longer. Yet it has also gotten closer. It’s sitting in a plastic bag by the front door, awaiting collection. The bag might even be punctured. Bits of stuff are blowing across the yard, spiraling into the lovely, reborn, neutral blossoms.

My parents remind me that my last NAACP convention was a while ago. Miami Beach. Yes, I recall the bar bill I stuck them with. At the Fontainebleau Hotel, which, like the rest of the nation, had seen better days, the smoke from the riot in Liberty City across the bay was visible. “When are you going to run for President?” I asked every famous face. “When I get your check,” every famous face answered. My father has been known to sell NAACP memberships from stall to stall in public toilets; volunteer work has my mother so harried she leaves mailing lists in the freezer; and my sisters know they are losing hope. Occupy till I come again?

When you go back, things look smaller. You almost go back just to see how big you’ve become, how much has been diminished, how much you’ve grown away from the mattress that sags in the middle and the door where the concrete was painted with yogurt and water in a final attempt to grow moss over it. My parents fall asleep over their reading; my television burbles through the night; a raccoon or an opossum sacrifices a rabbit in the attic at dawn; and the department-store box of photographs at the bottom of the linen closet has split under its memorial load of faces that stuck by traditional remedies, preferring feverfew from the back garden to aspirin.

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quinched in leaves the leaping sun,
Are felled, felled, are all felled.

One day—if it comes—I may be someone’s old darky, exercising my fictitious cultural birthright to run off at the mouth, telling someone who may insist on being called a Senufo-American how in my day so many—black, white, and other—were afraid of black teenagers in big sneakers with the laces untied, and three o’clock, when the high schools let out, was considered the most perilous hour for subway riders.

I will be on my feet and the Senufo-American will be suicidal to get away from me, as I sometimes felt in the presence of Grandfather, whose fear of forgetfulness I mistook as a wish to muddy my choices. I may elect myself a witness and undertake to remember when something more important than black, white, and other was lost. Even now I grieve for what has been betrayed. I see the splendor of the mornings and hear how glad the songs were, back in the days when the Supreme Court was my Lourdes, beyond consolation. The spirit didn’t lie down and die, but it’s been here and gone, been here and gone.

In the negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces—or rather masks—that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller calls these “images of God cut in ebony.” But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good nights with them—because they are black.

C
harles
L
amb

Published simultaneously in Canada
by HarperCollins
CanadaLtd

Illustration on title page:
detail from
Dawn in Harlem
by Winold Reiss
from the collection of Beth and James DeWoody

eISBN 9781466809970

First eBook Edition : January 2012

First edition, 1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pinckney, Darryl.
High cotton / Darryl Pinckney.
I. Title.

PS3566.1516H5

1992

813’.54—dc20

91-23158

BOOK: High Cotton