Homegoing (25 page)

Joe laughed. “You should hope you sing better than a girl on the street corner, Willie. How else you gon’ make it out the street and into a building?”

Robert was holding Carson, bouncing him a little bit so that the boy wouldn’t fuss. “That ain’t the first thing we gotta do. First thing we gotta do is set me up with a job. I’m the man, remember?”

“Oh, you the man, all right,” Willie said, winking, and Joe rolled his eyes.

“Don’t y’all bring no more babies into this house, now,” he said.

That night, and for many nights after, Willie and Robert and Carson all slept on the same mattress, laid out in the tiny living room on the fourth floor of the tall brick building. On the ceiling above the bed there was a large brown spot, and on that first night they lay there, Willie thought that even that spot looked beautiful.

The building that Lil Joe lived in was full of nothing but black folks, nearly all of them newly arrived from Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas. On the way in, Willie heard the distinct drawl of an Alabamian. The man had been trying to push a wide couch through a slim door. There was a similar-sounding voice on the other side of the door, giving directions: more to the left, a little to the right.

The next morning, Willie and Robert left Carson with Lil Joe so they could walk around Harlem, maybe look to see if any
For Hire
signs were up in their neighborhood. They walked around for hours, people-watching and talking, taking in everything that was different about Harlem, and everything that was the same.

Once they rounded the block past an ice cream parlor, they noticed a hiring sign on a store door, and decided to go in so that Robert could talk to someone. As they walked in, Willie tripped on the lip of the door stoop, and Robert caught her in his arms. He helped her get steady, and smiled at her once she was on her feet, kissing her cheek quickly. Once they were inside, Willie’s eyes met those of the store clerk, and she felt a cold wind travel that sight line, from his eyes to hers, then all the way down to the coalpit of her stomach.

“Excuse me, sir,” Robert said. “I saw the sign outside there.”

“You married to a black woman?” the store clerk said, his eyes never leaving Willie’s.

Robert looked at Willie.

Robert spoke softly. “I worked in a store before. Down south.”

“No job here,” the man said.

“I’m saying I have experience with—”

“No job here,” the man repeated, more gruffly this time.

“Let’s go, Robert,” Willie said. She was already halfway out the door by the time the man had opened his mouth a second time.

They didn’t speak for two blocks. They passed a restaurant with a sign hanging up, but Willie didn’t have to look at Robert to know they would keep walking past it. Before long they were back at Lil Joe’s place.

“Y’all back already?” Joe asked when they entered. Carson was asleep on the mattress, his little body curled up just so.

“Willie just wanted to check on the baby. She wanted to give you a chance to rest. Ain’t that right, Willie?”

Willie could feel Joe looking at her as she answered, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Robert turned on his heel and was out of the door in a flash.

Willie sat down next to the baby. She watched him sleep. She wondered if she could watch him sleep all day, and so she tried. But after a while a strange and helpless panic set in, about what she didn’t know. That he wasn’t really breathing. That he didn’t recognize his own hunger and therefore would not whine for her to feed him. That he wouldn’t know her from any other woman in this new, big city. She woke him up just to hear him cry. And it was only then, when the cry set in, soft at first and then a shrieking, full-bellied sound, that she was finally able to relax.

“They thought he was white, Joe,” Willie said. She could feel him watching her as she watched Carson.

Joe nodded. “I see,” he said soberly, and then he walked away and let her be.

Willie waited anxiously for Robert to return. She wondered, for the first time really, if leaving Pratt City had been a mistake. She thought about Hazel, whom she hadn’t yet heard from since leaving, and a wave of missing hit her, desperate and sad. She had another forward memory. This time of loneliness. She could feel it approaching, a condition she would have to learn to live with.

Robert came back to the apartment. He had been to the barber, his hair cut close. He had bought new clothes, with the last of their savings no doubt, Willie thought, and the clothes he had been wearing when he left were nowhere in sight. He sat down on the bed next to Willie, rubbed Carson’s back. She looked at him. He didn’t look like himself.

“You spent the money?” Willie asked. Robert wasn’t meeting her eyes, and she couldn’t remember the last time Robert had done that. Even on that first day she’d gone to play with him, even as she pushed him, even as he fell, Robert had always kept his eyes steadily, almost ravenously, on hers. His eyes were the first things she’d questioned about him, and the first thing she’d loved.

“I ain’t gon’ be my father, Willie,” Robert said, his eyes still on Carson. “I ain’t gon’ be the kind of man who can only do one thing. I’m gonna make a life for us. I know I can do it.”

He looked at her finally. He brushed her cheek with his hand, then cupped the back of her neck. “We here now, Willie,” he pleaded. “Let’s be here.”

What “being here” meant for Willie: Every morning, she and Robert
would wake up. She would get Carson ready to take downstairs to an old woman named Bess who watched all the building’s babies for a small fee. Robert would shave, comb down his hair, button his shirt. Then the two of them would walk out into Harlem to look for work, Robert in his fancy clothes and Willie in her plain ones.

Being here meant they no longer walked together on the sidewalk. Robert always walked a little ahead of her, and they never touched. She never called his name anymore. Even if she was falling into the street or a man was robbing her or a car was coming at her, she knew not to call his name. She’d done it once, and Robert had turned, and everyone had stared.

At first, they both looked for jobs in Harlem. One store had even hired Robert, but after a week there was a misunderstanding when a white customer had leaned in close to Robert to ask him how he could resist taking any one of the Negro women who frequented the store for himself. And Robert came home that night crying to Willie that it could have been her the man was talking about, and so he’d quit.

The next day, they both went searching again. This time they only walked so far south before splitting off, and Willie lost Robert to the rest of Manhattan. He looked so white now, it only took a few seconds for her to lose him completely, just one white face among the many, all bustling up and down the sidewalks. After two weeks in Manhattan, Robert found a job.

It took Willie three more months to find work, but by December she was a housekeeper for the Morrises, a wealthy black family who lived on the southern edge of Harlem. The family had not yet resigned themselves to their own blackness, so they crept as close to the white folks as the city would allow. They could go no further, their skin too dark to get an apartment just one street down.

During the day, Willie took care of the Morrises’ son. She fed him and bathed him and laid him down for his nap. Then she cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, making sure to wipe under the candelabra because Mrs. Morris always checked. In the early evening she would begin cooking. The Morrises had been in New York since before the Great Migration, but they ate as though the South was a place in their kitchen instead of one that was miles and miles away. Mrs. Morris usually came home first. She worked as a seamstress, and her hands were often pricked and bleeding. Once she got home, Willie would leave for her auditions.

She was too dark to sing at the Jazzing. That’s what they told her the night she’d come in ready to audition. A very slender and tall man held a paper bag up to her cheek.

“Too dark,” he said.

Wille shook her head. “But I can sing, see.” She opened her mouth and took a deep breath, filling up the balloon of her belly, but then the man put two fingers to her, pushed the air out.

“Too dark,” he repeated. “Jazzing’s only for the light girls.”

“I saw a man dark as midnight walk in with a trombone.”

“I said girls, honey. If you were a man, maybe.”

If she were Robert, Willie thought. Robert could have any job he wanted, but she knew he was too scared to try. Scared he’d be found out or scared that he didn’t have enough education. The other night he’d told her that a man had asked him why he spoke “that way,” and he’d become scared to talk. He would not tell her exactly what he did for a living, but he came back home to her smelling like the sea and meat, and he made more money in a month than she had ever seen in her entire life.

Robert was cautious, but she was wild. It had always been that way. The first night he had lain with her, he’d been so nervous that his penis had rested against his left leg, a log on the river of his quivering thigh.

“Your daddy’s gon’ kill me,” he’d said. They were sixteen, their parents at a union meeting.

“I’m not thinkin’ ’bout my daddy right now, Robert,” she’d said, trying to stand the log. She’d put each of his fingers into her mouth one by one and had bitten the tips, watching him all the while. She’d eased him into her and moved on top of him until he was begging her: to stop, to not stop, to quicken, to slow. When he closed his eyes, she’d bidden him to open them, to look at her. She liked to be the star of the show.

It was what she wanted now too, now that she was still thinking about Robert. How she could put his skin to good use, be less cautious if she were him. If she could, she would put her voice in his body, in his skin. She would stand on the stage of the Jazzing and listen to the glowing words of the crowd rush back to her, like the memories of her singing on her parents’ table often would. Boy, can she blow. You ain’t never lied.

“Listen, we got a job cleaning the place at night if you want it,” the slender, tall man said, rousing Willie from her thoughts before they could turn dark. “The pay’s okay. Might get you somewhere a little later.”

She took the job on the spot, and when she got home that night she’d told Robert that the Morrises needed her on night duty. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, but he’d nodded. That night, they’d slept with Carson between them. He was starting to say a few words. The other day, when Willie had picked him up from Bess’s apartment to take him up to Joe’s, she’d heard her son call the old woman Mama, and a terrible, immovable lump formed in her throat as she clutched him to her body and took him up the stairs.

“The pay’s okay,” she said to Robert then, pulling Carson’s thumb from his mouth. He started crying. He shouted at her, “No!”

“Hey now, Sonny,” Robert said. “Don’t speak to Mama that way.” Carson put his thumb back into his mouth and stared at his father. “We don’t need the money,” he said. “We’re doing all right, Willie. We can get our own place soon, even. You don’t need to work.”

“Where would we live?” Willie snapped. She hadn’t meant to sound so mean. The idea was appealing to her: her own apartment, more time to spend with Carson. But she knew that she wasn’t meant for that life. She knew that that life wasn’t meant for them.

“There are places, Willie.”

“What place? What world do you think we live in, Robert? It’s a wonder you make it out these doors and out into
this
world without somebody knocking you down for sleeping with the nigg—”

“Stop!” Robert said. Willie had never heard that much force in his voice before. “Don’t do that.”

He rolled over to face the wall, and Willie stayed on her back, staring at the ceiling above them. The large brown spot on the ceiling was starting to look soft to her, as though the whole thing could come crashing down on them at any moment.

“I haven’t changed, Willie,” Robert said to the wall.

“No, but you ain’t the same neither,” she replied.

They didn’t speak for the rest of the night. Between them, Carson began to snore, louder and louder, like a rumbling from his stomach was escaping through his nose. It sounded like the background music for the falling ceiling, and it started to terrify Willie. If the boy was still a baby, if they were still in Pratt City, she would have wakened him. Here, in Harlem, she could not move. She had to lie there, still, with the rumbling, the falling, the terror.

Cleaning the Jazzing was not too difficult. Willie would drop Car
son off at Bess’s before dinnertime, and then she would head over to 644 Lenox Avenue.

It was the same work that she did for the Morrises, but different too. The Jazzing audience was whites only. The performers who showed up on the stage every night were like the slender man said: tall, tan, and terrific. Meaning, as far as Willie could see, five foot five, light-skinned, and young. Willie would take out the trash, sweep, wipe the floors, and watch the men as they watched the people onstage. It was all so strange to her.

In one of the shows, an actor had pretended to be lost in an African jungle. He was wearing a grass skirt and had marks painted on his head and arms. Instead of speaking, he would grunt. Periodically, he would flex his pecs and pound his chest. He picked up one of the tall, tan, and terrific girls and draped her over his shoulder like she was a rag doll. The audience had laughed and laughed.

Once, Willie saw a show through the shield of her work that was meant to be a portrayal of the South. The three male actors, the darkest Willie had ever seen in the club, picked cotton onstage. Then one of the actors started complaining. He said that the sun was too hot, the cotton too white. He sat on the edge of the stage, lazily swinging his legs back and forth, back and forth.

The other two went forward and stood with their hands on his shoulders. They started singing a song that Willie had never heard before, one about how grateful they should all be to have such kind masters to take care of them. By the time they finished their singing, they were all standing up again, back to picking cotton.