Juneteenth (42 page)

Lord, O Lord, you must have been preparing me all those twenty-six years for that ordeal; giving me this great tub of guts and muscle and deep, windy lungs and this big keg-sized head and all that animal strength I used to have and which I thought was simply meant for holding all the food and drink I loved so well and to contain all the wind necessary to blow my horn and to sing all night long, sure; and for the enjoyment of women and the pleasures of sin.… Ah, but right then and there I learned that you had really given me all that simply so I could contain and survive all I was to feel sitting there through those awful hours.

Just sitting there and hating. Just sitting there looking at the two generations of them in the ease of their sleeping, and thinking back three generations more of my people’s tribulations and trying to solve the puzzle of that long-drawn-out continuation of abuse. That and why the three of us were thrown together in my house of shame and sorrow. It was a brain-breaker and a caustic in the naked eye all right, and the longer I sat there the stranger it seemed. I guess it couldn’t have been stranger than if one of Job’s boils had started addressing him, saying, “Look here now, Job; this here is your head-chief
boil speaking to you. You just tell me my name and I’ll jump off your neck and take all the rest of the boils along with me.” Yes, and ole Job too used to trouble and straitjacketed in misery by then to even be surprised to learn that a boil could talk—even one of
his
boils—only wondering why his kin or hair or toenails or something didn’t speak up and tell the boil to be silent in the presence of the Lord. Because, Master, you must have been there with me at the time, and probably with a sad smile on your face. Even after Mamma and Robert it was like waking up on mornings in some Territory town like Guthrie in the old days and discovering that my trombone mouthpiece had grown to my lips and my good right arm changed into a slide, but with no bell anywhere to let out the sound.… Hickman, you were in a fix. You and those two strangers in the most unlikely place in the world and you the strangest of all.

Yes, with the baby mewling and raising the dickens and me having to put him to that thin, white, blue-veined tit to suck. Yes, having to guide his red little gums to that blighted raspberry of a nipple so I wouldn’t have to listen to him crying for a while. And my having to be gentle, not like a nursemaid who loves a child enough to give it a good hard pinch in the side when it vexes her too much, but just because of the murder in my heart having to be gentlest of the gentle. Just because he was a baby and me a man full of hate; and gentle with her because aside from everything else, she was a mother lying in the bed where my own mother had once lain. It was like the Lord had said, “Hickman, I’m starting you out right here—with the flesh and with Eden and Christmas squeezed together. Never mind the spirit and justice and right and wrong—or time—just now you’re outside all that because this is a beginning. So, starting right here, what will you do about the
flesh?
That’s what you have to wrestle with.” He had called me and I had nothing in the hole and was in too far to pass and still couldn’t take the trick by
using the baby’s life as my ace, no matter whether he were dealt in spades or in hearts.

So now I had to cook for her. Go out and get that little boy, Raymond, to go bring me milk and bread and meat from the store, pretending it was for his mamma, and me picking the vegetables that Robert had planted for Mamma’s needs and then stand over the stove and prepare the meal and then feed it to her spoon by spoon. Yeah, and remembering
 … A little bit of poison helped her along
, that old slave-time line, and coming as close to breaking out of my despair and grinning as I ever did for a long, long time. But still granting nothing to the facts. So all right, I told myself, you’re just fattening her for the time she can understand what she did and pay for it. You just be patient, just count the rest until your solo comes up. This rhythm won’t stop until you take your break; just keep counting the one-two-three-fours, the two-two-three-fours, the three-two-three-fours….

So I didn’t eat, only took water and a few sips of whiskey, never leaving the house, knocking on the windowpane in the afternoons to get little Raymond to go to the store, or to stand out on the back porch in the dark to get some fresh air. And with all that feeding and clumsy, grudging ministering to them I wouldn’t let myself think a second about life and living, only about dying. About how to kill and the way our bodies would look when they found us. And the quickest way to get it over with, how the flames would announce the news in the night. Whether to just let them find us or to have little Raymond take a note to Mamma’s pastor to tell the folks to keep off the streets …

Everything, but never whether I could save myself because that would have meant to run and I didn’t believe I had anything left to run for.

Ah, but Hickman, you were caught deaf and blind. With eyes that
saw not, and ears that heard nothing but the drums of revenge. And there was that baby growing more human every second nudging his way into your awareness and making his claim upon you, and her crying all the time—in fact more than the baby did. You had fallen into the great hole and they’d dropped the shuck in on you. There was simply too much building up inside of you for clear vision. I guess if I could have played I might have found some relief, but I couldn’t play, even if I hadn’t left my horn in Dallas when I got the word. And I couldn’t sing and if I had after all she’d done to me I’d probably sung falsetto. Then came the day …

Poor Bliss, the terrible thing is that even if I told you all this, I still couldn’t tell who your daddy was, or even if you have any of our blood in your veins.… Like when I was a boy and guessed the number of all those beans in that jar they had in that grocery window and they wouldn’t give me the prize because one wasn’t a bean, they said, but a rock! What a bunch of rascals. Ha! Ha! So outrageous that I just grinned and they had to laugh at their own bogusness. Gave me a candy bar … No, I’d still have to tell him as I told myself in the days that were to come: that who the man was was made beside the point by all that happened. Bliss started right there in that pain-filled room—or back when the fish grew lungs and left the sea. You don’t reject Jesus because somebody calls Joseph a confidence man or Mary a whore; the spears and the cross and the crime were real and so was the pain.… So then came the day when I started in from the kitchen to find her sitting on the side of the bed, her bare bony feet on the bare boards of the floor as she sat there all heavy-breasted in Mamma’s flannel nightgown; her hair swinging over her shoulder in one big braid and with eyes all pale in her sallow skin; and all weak-voiced, saying—

Listen, Alonzo Hickman, the time has come for me to leave.

Leave
, I said, who told you you were ever going to leave here?

Yes, I know, but he’s growing to me too fast. So if I’m ever to leave I must do it now….

What makes you think …

No, let me tell you why I came here….

Yes, I said. As though I don’t know already; you tell me. Just why, other than the fact that you had no damn where else to turn?

Don’t you be so sure, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t quarrel with me after helping me. There’s more to it than you think….

So why? I’m listening.

I came to give you back your brother, do you understand?

You
what!

Yes, it’s true. I never knew your brother and I meant him no special harm. It was just that I am what I am and I was in trouble and so desperate that I couldn’t feel beyond my heart. You must understand, because it’s true and it’s a truth that’s cost us both all this.—No, let me finish. So now you must take the baby …

WHO?

 … take him and keep him and bring him up as your own, looking at her feet, that braid swinging across her breast …

WHO? I said. WHO?

It’s the only way, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t just stand there in that doorway saying “Who” like that. Who else can save us both? I mean you. It’s the only way. After what I’ve done you’ll need to have him as much as I need to give him up. Take him, let him share your Negro life and whatever it is that allowed you to help us all these days. Let him learn to share the forgiveness your life has taught you to squeeze from it. No, listen: I’ve learned something; you won’t believe me, but I have. You’ll see. And you’ll need him to help prevent you from destroying yourself with bitterness. With me he’ll only be the cause of more trouble and shame and later it’ll hurt him….

And you expect me …

Yes, and you can. You have the strength and the breadth of spirit. I didn’t know it when I came here, I was just desperate. But I’ve seen you hold him, I’ve caught the look in your eyes. Yes, you can do it. Few could but you can. So I want you to have him—and don’t think I don’t love him already at least as much as I love my own mother, or that I don’t love his father. I do, only his father doesn’t know about him; he’s far away, and unless I do something to undo a little of what I’ve done there’ll never be a chance for us. I could go to him—Oh, Alonzo Hickman, nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down to superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away. Certainly none of the things between us shall. So you must take him. Later there’ll be money and I’ll get it to you. I’ll help you bring him up and pay for his education. Somewhere in the North, maybe. He’ll be intelligent like his father and he deserves a chance … and I’ll see that you’re taken care of….

And I thought, So now I’ve got to be a pimp too. First animal, then nursemaid and now pimp, seeing her shake her head again:

No, please don’t speak yet. I must do this for both of us….

And you think that that child there can do all that?

No, but he’s all I have—unless you still want my life. And if you take that, somebody will still have to take him. You don’t just help a child to be born and then leave it alone. So very well, if you mean to kill me, all right, but could you destroy something as weak as that, as helpless as that?

I have killed snakes.

A snake? Can you even with death in your eyes call him a snake? Can you? Can you, Alonzo Hickman?

Ha! Hickman, and you couldn’t. No, but if your heart had been weak I would have died right there of the sheer, downright nerve of
it. Here I had been pushed even in Alabama. Well, God never fixed the dice against anybody, we have to believe that. His way may be mysterious but he’s got no grudge against the infants, not even the misbegotten. It’s a wonder I didn’t split right down the middle and step out of my old skin right then and there; because even after all these years I don’t see how I stood there in that doorway and took it all without exploding. And yet, there we were, talking calm and low like two folks who arrived late at the services and were waiting in the vestibule of the church. She sitting on the edge of the bed, kinda leaning forward, with arms spread out to the side and gripping the bedclothes to support herself. Still weak but with her crazy woman’s mind all set. And me telling myself that I was waiting to learn just how far she intended to follow the trail of talk she’d blazed before I would set the house afire; saying:

So supposing I say all right—what are you going to call him?

You mean what shall we name him?

Yes.

It’s not for me to do, he’s yours now. But why not Robert Hickman?

No!

Then just Robert, and you give him a last name. But I name him Robert as he should be …

Just like that. She couldn’t face life with him, wanted to give him to me but wanted me to always remember all the circumstances that brought him to me. So there it was. Like a payday, when all the sweating and aching labor that went into a dirty job is reduced to some pieces of dirty paper and silver and coppers, which the hateful bossman handed to you in a little white envelope. As though that was the end of it and Monday would never come to start you out all over again. It was too much for me. I just listened to her and then backed out of the doorway and went and lay down and tried to think
it clear. Ha! Hickman, you had wanted a life for a life and the relief of drowning your humiliation and grief in blood, and now this flawed-hearted woman was offering you two lives—your own, and his young life to train. Here was a chance to prove that there was something in this world stronger than all their ignorant superstition about blood and ghosts—as though half a town was a stud farm and the other half a jungle. Maybe the baby
could
redeem her and me my failure of revenge and my softness of heart, and help us all (was it here, Hickman, that you began to dream?). Either that or lead him along the trail where I had been and watch him grow into the wickedness his folks had mapped out for him. I thought,
I’ll call him Bliss, because they say that’s what ignorance is
. Yes, and little did I realize that it was the name of the old heathen life I had already lost.

So she got her way. She asked the impossible of a bitter man and it worked; I let her walk out of that house and disappear. Let her stay around and nurse the baby until dark, four or five hours more, and still let her leave. Let her come in crying and put him in my arms then walk out of the back door and gone. Oh, thank the Lord, I let her. Ah, but who but those who know life would believe that out of that came this? That out of that bed came this bed; that out of that sitting and a-rocking came this remembering, and this gold cross on my old watch chain?

That was the end of the old life for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. But what does a man ever know about what’s happening to him? She came in there heavy and when she went out I had his weight on
my
hands. What on earth was I going to do with a baby? I wasn’t done with rambling, the boys were waiting for me out in Dallas. I hadn’t ever met a woman I thought I’d want to marry, and later when I did she wouldn’t have me because she insisted I had been laying around with a white gal because she thought I was traveling with a half-white baby. So not only had the woman placed a
child on my hands, she made me a bachelor. And maybe after that night, after seeing what a woman could be, after that revelation of their boundless nerve and infinite will to turn a man’s feelings into mush and rubber, I had lost the true will to join with one forever in matrimony. I was still young and full of strength but after that I could only come so close and no closer. I had been hit but I hadn’t discovered how bad was the damage. Master, did you smile? Did you say, “Where’s your pride now, young man? Did you say,
“How now, Hickman, can you hear my lambs a-crying? You’ve got to do something, son; you can’t stand on the air much longer. How now, Hickman?”