High Cotton (4 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
“See you in the funny papers,” my mother said. I turned away. I had come down with something that couldn’t be cured by three cheap words and a squeeze.
The next morning Grandfather and I were alone in the kitchen. We both wore “flesh-colored” nylon stocking caps. His was knotted in back. I had on two stocking caps. The feet drooped over my ears. I was in a Cleo the Talking Dog phase. I got up with the earliest light, lapped chocolate milk from a bowl on the floor, lay down by the back door, panted, and tucked my paws up under me.
Grandfather looked at me, a severe expression I was to see again years later when I had to confess in person that I’d flunked a course, which meant my chances of getting into his alma mater were dwindling, and at a time, he said, when blacks were wanted so desperately that any park ape who could manage long division was admitted. Grandfather’s look said he knew my brain was damaged but not in any way he could pin down.
“Come here, and on two feet, if you please,”
Plessy vs. Ferguson
contemplated
Brown vs. Board of Education
. “I want to tell you something and you remember it, you hear? You might not see me again.”
Plessy vs. Ferguson
contemplated
Brown vs. Board of Education
. “I want to tell you something and you remember it, you hear? You might not see me again.”
“Where are you going?”
“Never you mind. I’m not coming back and that’s a fact. Your daddy has no right to make you live here. He has no right to turn you into a dog.”
Grandfather, as ever, was true to his word. He didn’t come to see us again until we invaded the white suburbs.
O
ld
Y
ellow
ld
Y
ellow
M
y friend the television set had begun to send awful pictures from the Old Country. Nice Negroes, in 1962, before mothers and children went to war over “naturals,” looked like disciples of Father Divine—austere hair, correct clothes. “Put it in the bank, not on your back.” But being or looking like someone who came from a decent home wasn’t protecting anyone down there.
y friend the television set had begun to send awful pictures from the Old Country. Nice Negroes, in 1962, before mothers and children went to war over “naturals,” looked like disciples of Father Divine—austere hair, correct clothes. “Put it in the bank, not on your back.” But being or looking like someone who came from a decent home wasn’t protecting anyone down there.
I worried that when the plane landed in Atlanta we’d be put in jail; that when I was stung by a bee in my grandmother’s garden the hospital would not allow my mother to visit. Maybe there were signs over the raised marble water fountains, maybe my mother pretended not to see them, maybe the old woman with Parkinson’s disease who sat two seats in front of me was white, I couldn’t tell, but even if there had been a law against Jim Crow trains, blacks were so scared we would have sat in the colored car. Going to visit Aunt Clara in Opelika, Alabama, demanded, like taking a vow, that a part of the self must die.
I liked my mother’s Aunt Clara because in her photographs she had an organ and looked like Miss Havisham in the film
Great Expectations
. When her driver, G.C., came to fetch us from the dinky colored waiting room in a powder-blue Cadillac, I liked her even more.
Great Expectations
. When her driver, G.C., came to fetch us from the dinky colored waiting room in a powder-blue Cadillac, I liked her even more.
Opelika slept in a liverish tranquillity, and it was clear to my sisters and me that we would have nothing to do with the town proper and had better not ask why. My mother didn’t know the name of the movie house because nice people did not let themselves be foisted upstairs to the buzzards’ roost. That summer of surreptitious feeling even strolls for a Sun Drop soda at the drugstore with the tin FROZEN-RITE signs that Aunt Clara owned were in doubt. G.C. said that cracker youth, “Kluckers,” sometimes rode around in darkened cars, just to frighten people, but everybody knew that Opelika had no facilities worth integrating. “I guess folks go to school.”
Exhausted camellias sagged over lawns. Those were the fine houses of Mr. Charlie and Miss Ann, G.C. said. Yes, my mother said, every house was owned by the same people and she hoped I would never meet them. Then came an intersection, and immediately after it the scent of spearmint from either side of Aunt Clara’s blue drive.
Her house, a respectable structure of glazed brick fronted by four sleek columns, peeked at the road—Avenue A, the battered pink post said—through a regiment of willows and wretched dogwoods. Avenue A continued downhill, unpaved as it entered the Bottom. We didn’t have to be told who lived there.
Aunt Clara waited inside the front door. She had never been a beauty but passed for one because of her light, almost transparent skin—green veins were visible in her face. There was something girlish in her step, in the way she arranged her pleats and hands when she sat, handed around questions, cups, and crystal tumblers of Nehi. Small, with a high forehead and a little colorless hole for a mouth, swabbed by many years of liking
herself, Aunt Clara was accustomed to being, if not admired, at least talked about, and if not for her looks or heart, then for the strand of pearls that lay like a pet against the folds of her neck and the sea pearls that dangled below her unconvincingly dyed black hair.
herself, Aunt Clara was accustomed to being, if not admired, at least talked about, and if not for her looks or heart, then for the strand of pearls that lay like a pet against the folds of her neck and the sea pearls that dangled below her unconvincingly dyed black hair.
Uncle Eugene had been dead for some time, but Aunt Clara did not lack for company. Arnez, Muriel, and Nida Lee busied themselves around her. Childless, Aunt Clara had sort of adopted Nida Lee. She sent her to school and Nida Lee worked at a small college in Holly Springs, Mississippi, when she was not living across the road from Aunt Clara’s drive, ready with talk like a wet mop while “Miss Clara” opened magazines.
Nida Lee came out of her corner gushing, extremely tall, fat and alarming. She got me alone in a window seat and said we were going to get better acquainted. She announced and won a contest to see who could identify what tree in the pampered forest that deluded me was Aunt Clara’s foxwood, her laurel and cherry. I was not to overlook the peach trees, the fledging Cedar of Lebanon, and was clearly old enough to appreciate skyrocket juniper. Her voice rising, she made me approve patches of parsley and thyme, and cluck over what should have been marigolds.
We weren’t used to a nice elderly black lady telling anyone to shut up, but then we also weren’t used to Nida Lee’s maddening tidbits of news—“Negro socialites” had tried to crash the opera at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. She said the next thing you knew they’d be dining in the Magnolia Room at Rich’s Department Store. Aunt Clara said she would not frequent establishments where they stroked the dog with one hand and fed customers with the other.
Nida Lee had a savory item up her sleeve. Marilyn Monroe had committed suicide. I’d never heard the word before. My
mother acted as though Nida Lee carried a dead mouse in her mouth.
mother acted as though Nida Lee carried a dead mouse in her mouth.
“What is it, Nida Lee? We’re not paying you any mind,” Aunt Clara said.
Arnez said after lunch she would show me the little house in the back yard where they once had peacocks and still kept chickens if I promised not to get dirty. “They don’t do nothing but poot all night, but it’s good for the flowers.”
“Cousin Arnez, aren’t you hungry?”
“I ate.”
“She’s not your cousin,” Nida Lee said behind a door.
“Who is she?”
“The maid.”
Arnez lived quietly in one of Aunt Clara’s shotgun cabins across the creek with her old mother and her sister, Muriel, who was paid to fidget with scissors. I was to hear them on the footbridge as they came to and left work, the weight of Arnez’s slow, even tread, the staccato of her sister’s high-strung steps, running ahead, turning back, and catching up. Muriel’s head had destroyed her life. Her hair was shorter than mine. It wouldn’t grow and she’d tried everything.
Most of the elderly people I visited kept their living rooms separate from real life as I knew it. Plants and slipcovers and an undemocratic fastidiousness around the obligatory bowl of stuck-together rock candy I took to be a natural part of getting on in years. Aunt Clara’s house had no hierarchy of dishes, no child-free zones, hostile borders, or speed limits, but the rooms themselves slowed me down. Her house was a zoo of things, dewdrop prism lamps and fire screens, a wild preserve for the pedestal sideboard, the painted sofa with potpourri sewn into the cushions.
I was perfectly free to study the living habits of lyre-backs in the vestibule, rockers, tables, mirrors, walls, secret doors, and gilt settees maybe because Aunt Clara counted on my not daring to. A sign on my mother’s face said, “Don’t feed the rugs.” Around the ancient Steinway was a deep ditch; another moat protected the famous organ in its nook of flocked paper. Even Aunt Clara seemed like an exhibit, part of the uncontrolled decor, a specimen in the menagerie of ceramic dog figurines.
She grew up in a family that thought of itself as inhabiting a middle kingdom. Back in the days when white scholars argued that high yellows were the tares among the wheat, that were it not for frustrated mulattoes blacks would not agitate, it was consoling to think that the majority of whites lived and died under the curse of being “poor white trash.” Her mother believed that the Also Chosen should give to Jim Crow the subversive inflection that the custom of segregation shielded nice Negroes from the contamination of whites. But Aunt Clara was as obsessed as Thomas Jefferson with the “algebraical notation” of blood mixture.
Aunt Clara’s grandfather was a “boss mechanic,” a carpenter, blacksmith, and wheelwright known by his nickname, “Handy.” Family memoirs said what a black family back then would want them to say: that he was “seven-eighths Caucasian and possibly one-eighth Negro,” would never consent to be whipped, and didn’t know who his parents were.
Aunt Clara’s Uncle Sterling claimed that when he worked as a “shaver,” an errand boy, after the Civil War he overheard a Union colonel who considered himself an expert on nigger trading say, “The mother of that boy’s father was a beautiful white girl from one of our best families. It seemed to be a case of real love for a young mulatto, a trusted man, a servant. The child was taken away and sold as a slave and to this day the secret has
been kept.” Maybe Uncle Sterling trusted his memory when his white colleagues were hoodwinked by the story and urged him, a professor of religion, to write it down.
been kept.” Maybe Uncle Sterling trusted his memory when his white colleagues were hoodwinked by the story and urged him, a professor of religion, to write it down.
Aunt Clara’s father, also called Handy, was born around 1856 in Roane County, east Tennessee. His mother had the “personal care” of the food repository, but after slavery, Uncle Sterling, the author of the memoir, was capable of saying, “their best years were behind them.” Three of thirteen children survived. They went the folkloric seventy-five miles on foot for the chance to go to college. Walk, believer, walk.
After Clark University and the Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Handy settled in Opelika, as presiding elder of the Methodist Church and friend of day laborers and sharecroppers who had driven their herds from the border states at night, which meant that the cows were probably stolen. He published inspirational allegories about necromancers, “Mr. Truth” and “Mr. Lie,” and was the bane of many a minister. His reports had the power to deprive them of their churches, to transfer them into oblivion. It was said he made even his bishop nervous.
Aunt Clara was born in Opelika—in 1896 perhaps and at home certainly. She was always “molting her years,” trimming her age, my grandmother said. Her cards were already on the table, one of which foretold clouds of muslin, colored subdebs, and Clark University. “A lot of important people fell through chapel.”
When Uncle Eugene began to court her, he’d walk her home to Avenue A. Finally, her mother sailed from the house and down the lawn: “You may call on her if you wish, young man, but you may not talk to her on the street.” When they married he was a shadow surgeon called in by white hospitals, strictly off the record, and had a lucrative side business in secretive cases: performing abortions on whites.
The newlyweds orbited around her parents, and after the old folks were gone they demolished the house and took their time putting up an expanded version of the original. She and Uncle Eugene used their light skin to get what they wanted, which was mostly to enjoy the theater up North. Then Uncle Eugene died, and as they say, some of her went with him. More of her kept leaving; eventually Aunt Clara stopped going out to places where she’d meet people, even church, and had her hair done at an undisclosed location. She was sensitive about being hard-of-hearing.
The recluse on the hill, she lived, in the Southern phrase, on the inherited capital of family responsibilities, which had dwindled to reading the obituaries and keeping up a strong correspondence with cousins in Philadelphia, Washington, Jersey City, with her sister in Atlanta, and her brother who, after the Great War, sold his Packard, married a French-Canadian girl from Winnipeg, took a job with the railroad at the Manitoba end of nowhere, and never set foot in Opelika again.
She had been educated to be a teacher, like her mother before her, like all her female relations. It was a “holding pattern” profession. “Ariel was your mother’s favorite.” Aunt Clara was disappointed by my response to
Tales from Shakespeare.
Our personalities, insofar as they existed under the detention-center conditions of good behavior, were colors for her to squeeze out, assets or liabilities that somehow reflected on her. “Why, you’re the darkest one in the family.”
Tales from Shakespeare.
Our personalities, insofar as they existed under the detention-center conditions of good behavior, were colors for her to squeeze out, assets or liabilities that somehow reflected on her. “Why, you’re the darkest one in the family.”
Aunt Clara’s activities, dictated by the privacy of her setting, were unchangeable, a routine that absorbed everyone into the perpetual shade of the house. She seemed to know by magic where a light had been left on, as far as the bathroom on the third floor. The telephone never rang, but it was a feminine way
of life, one designed for waiting—waiting for the mail, for the uncomfortable man from the Farmers’ National Bank, for the husband to come in from house calls, the father to return from travels around the state, shaking the outside world from his coat.
of life, one designed for waiting—waiting for the mail, for the uncomfortable man from the Farmers’ National Bank, for the husband to come in from house calls, the father to return from travels around the state, shaking the outside world from his coat.
There was a limit to my enthusiasm for exploration among crocheted covers and bizarre vesper chairs, though Aunt Clara’s things became interesting as they moved up from the first floor. They evolved to higher levels in forgotten rooms until they attained pack-rat nirvana in the attic. Tinted pictures of bayou picnics, of bearded faces that looked past me; men’s hats; thick phonograph records, radios, phonographs; chests I could not unlock; microscopes from Uncle Eugene’s studies at Meharry; camphor ice, oxide of zinc ointment, and quinine pomade for the relief of gathered breasts, nasal catarrh, and pleurisy, medicines that dated back to the scandal of Theodore Roosevelt breaking bread with Booker T. Washington. I couldn’t trace the scents of fir and formaldehyde to their sources.
Aunt Clara preferred that I not ransack the memories of her mother and Uncle Eugene. I was welcome to sit with the grownups, to help her wrap dust jackets that she decorated herself around
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
by Ethel Waters,
The Makers of Venice
and
The Makers of Florence
by Mrs. Oliphant. She read for the same reason that she tolerated Nida Lee’s prayers: both induced sleep.
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
by Ethel Waters,
The Makers of Venice
and
The Makers of Florence
by Mrs. Oliphant. She read for the same reason that she tolerated Nida Lee’s prayers: both induced sleep.
Aunt Clara’s favorite book for the last eight years had been the autobiography of Marian Anderson. It was a great inspiration to her because it read like one long thank-you note to the churches of Philadelphia, as if her career had been the desk tidy she’d always wanted. The great singer traveled with an iron to press her own dresses. Aunt Clara did not, however, approve of Miss Anderson revealing how much she paid for her gowns.
Other books
The Inconvenient Bride by Anne McAllister
Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George
Another Summer by Sue Lilley
Swallow the Air by Tara June Winch
To the Dark Tower by Francis King
Island of the Lost by Joan Druett
A Fashionable Affair by Joan Wolf
This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers
Loving Her by Hutton, CM
Old Lover's Ghost by Joan Smith
