Leaving: A Novel (13 page)

“Rah!” he barked.

The class broke out in laughter. Li’l Pit barked again. “Rah, rah.”

“We don’t allow barking in the class,” Mrs. Terry said.

Li’l Pit stood up and barked right at her: “Rah, rah, rah.” He moved around his desk toward the front of the room, and as he looked at the other kids, they pulled back, the expressions on their faces caught between a scream and a laugh. Before Mrs. Terry could reach the intercom, he turned and ran out the door.

He ran out of the gate, down Peralta, and caught up to Love on the sidewalk. Love stopped and pushed him back toward Prescott. “What’s up? Get back to school.”

“They kicked me out.”

“Damn, dog, what’d you do already?”

“Nothin. Nothin. They say I can’t come back. I ain’t allowed ’cause I got to prove I’m a citizen.”

“What you talking about?”

“That lady in the office say my mama got to come down and prove I’m a citizen.”

“You don’t know what you’re sayin.”

“Well, I didn’t do nothin.”

“Damn, dog. Whatever.” Love turned and walked away from him. Li’l Pit followed, always a few steps behind, picking up pebbles and tossing them at the tall iron bars of the projects.

SANTA RITA JAIL

TODAY I READ
to you from the narrative of James W. C. Pennington’s
The Fugitive Blacksmith:

About this time, I began to feel another evil of slavery—I mean the want of parental care and attention. Many parents were not able to give any attention to their children during the day. I often suffered much from
hunger
and other similar causes. To estimate the sad state of a slave child, you must look at it as a helpless human being thrown upon the world without the benefit of its natural guardians. It is thrown into the world without a social circle to flee to for hope, shelter, comfort, or instruction. The social circle, with all its heaven-ordained blessings, is of the utmost importance to the
tender child;
but of this, the slave child, however tender and delicate, is robbed.…

Three or four of our farmhands had their wives and families on other plantations. In such cases, it is the custom in Maryland … under the mildest of slavery … to allow the men to go on Saturday evening to see their families, stay over the Sabbath, and return on Monday morning, not later than “half-an-hour by sun.” To overstay their time is a grave fault, for which, especially at busy seasons, they are punished.

One Monday morning, two of these men had not been so fortunate as to get home at the required time; one of them was an uncle of mine. Besides these, two young men who had no families, and for whom no such provision of time was made, having gone somewhere to spend the Sabbath, were absent. My master was greatly irritated, and had resolved to have, as he said, “a general whipping-match among them.”

Preparatory to this, he had a rope in his pocket, and a cowhide in his hand, walking about the premises, and speaking to everyone he met in a very insolent manner, and finding fault with some without just cause. My father, among other numerous and responsible duties, discharged that of shepherd to a large and valuable flock of Merino sheep. This morning he was engaged in the tenderest of a shepherd’s duties: a little lamb, not able to go alone, lost its mother; he was feeding it by hand. He had been keeping it in the house for several days. As he stooped over it in the yard, with a vessel of new milk he had obtained, with which to feed it, my master came along, and without the least provocation, began by asking, “Bazil, have you fed the flock?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you away yesterday?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know why these boys have not got home this morning yet?”

“No, sir, I have not seen any of them since Saturday night.”

“By the Eternal, I’ll make them know their hour. The fact is, I have too many of you; my people are getting to be the most careless, lazy, and worthless in the country.”

“Master,” said my father, “I am always at my post; Monday morning never finds me off the plantation.”

“Hush Bazil! I shall have to sell some of you; and then keep you all tightly employed; I have too many of you.”

All this was said in an angry, threatening, and exceedingly insulting tone. My father was a high-spirited man, and feeling deeply the insult, replied to the last expression, “If I am one too many, sir, give me a chance to get a purchaser, and I am willing to be sold when it may suit you.”

“Bazil, I told you to hush!” and suiting the action to the word, he drew forth the cowhide from under his arm, fell upon him with most savage cruelty, and inflicted fifteen or twenty severe stripes with all his strength, over his shoulders and the small of his back. As he raised himself upon his toes, and gave the last stripe, he said, “By the * * * I will make you know that I am master of your tongue as well as of your time!”

Being a tradesman, and just at that time getting my breakfast, I was near enough to hear the insolent words that were spoken to my father, and to hear, see, and even count the savage stripes inflicted upon him.

Let me ask any one of the Anglo-Saxon blood and spirit, how would you expect a
son
to feel at such a sight?

CHAPTER 7A

JULY 1963   •   EASTON 17, SANDRA 18

EASTON AND SANDRA
walked by the stream on campus, past the eucalyptus grove to a bridge made of redwood planks where they could see the water running beneath them. It was the kind of summer day particular to northern California that felt warm but in a light way, dry and slightly breezy, thin leaves fluttering every few minutes like paper chimes. Because it was a summer weekend, there were very few students on campus, and they were left to themselves to listen to the water and be aware of the space and silence between them.

Easton picked at a pimple by his chin where his thin beard was growing in. He stopped himself before she could notice.

“See,” she said to him, pointing through the boards to the stream. “I’m not making it up. Look at the stones. The big one is the eye. See?”

He shook his head. He didn’t speak because he didn’t have the breath. His chest seemed to push against his lungs. He’d hardly spoken the whole time they were alone that day. He shook his head so that she would keep pointing, so that he could stare at her face as she peered between the wooden boards. She had let him kiss her once, at night by a car around the corner from her dorm. It had been a long kiss, and it had been dark, and he felt so unsure now whether she would ever let him kiss her again, whether she even remembered kissing him at all. He had made a mistake that night, and he worried that perhaps she hated him for it, that she was going to tell him in a few moments that they should only be friends.

They had stopped by a car on the night of the kiss because she didn’t want to be seen in front of the dorm, and she couldn’t bring him in. There was a wall, a cement wall mixed with pebbles that formed the foundation of the dorm, which was built on raised ground like an unbreachable castle above him. They had stopped to look at the car, a silver Spider with a black leather interior.

“Nice,” he had said. She nodded and squeezed his hand.

They had come to hold hands in a very peculiar way. That night was their second date. He had taken her to Blake’s to see Dave Brubeck. She was very excited the whole time, watching him explain what he heard and how music was the only way people could be truly free. On the walk back from Telegraph, they had been followed by three young men, all White, one of whom said loudly, “It disgusts me,” and spat on the sidewalk beside them. That was when Sandra took Easton’s hand. The young men stopped following them at Channing Way; and, though nothing violent had happened, Easton felt he and Sandra had experienced their first intimate moment.

Still holding hands, they turned from the car and faced each other. Everything he knew told him he shouldn’t be there and that he should keep still, though he knew what she wanted. He was grateful when she stretched out to him and kissed his lips. They backed away from the car, out of the streetlight, and stood against the wall in the shadows.

Then he touched her breast with his hand. That was not the mistake that worried him as he stood on the bridge. She let him hold her gently as they kissed. It was after they pulled away from each other but were still close enough to hear the mingling of their breath that he said what still echoed in his own mind, as if some stranger had yelled it at him: “How does it feel to kiss a Negro?”

She closed her mouth and frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

He didn’t know what he’d meant, only that some part of him urged it on by whispering in him that he must strike first.

“Nothing,” Easton said. “I didn’t mean anything. I’ve always wanted to kiss a White girl.”

“That’s not why I kissed you.”

“That’s okay with me if it was. I liked it.”

“For your information, you are not the first Negro boy I’ve kissed by a long shot.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her arm.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.

But that was it for the night, and soon she was in her dorm and he was walking alone back to Shattuck.

On this bright day on the bridge; Easton was glad for the sound of the rushing water, which kept him from talking and saying something stupid again.

Sandra plucked a green leaf from the overhanging tree and traced it against her palm as if she were painting. Then she took Easton’s hand and traced the leaf over his palm and wrist, up his arm, along his neck and onto his cheek. He closed his eyes and she brushed it across his face slowly, over his lips and onto his nose, up to and across his forehead.

“You’re beautiful,” she whispered. “You’re beautiful.”

He smiled, and she brushed the leaf over the corners of his smile.

“Am I really the first White girl you ever kissed?”

He kept his eyes closed and nodded. He felt her warm lips touch his, and he opened his mouth. The breeze rustled the leaves above them and raised the hair on their arms. Small pebbles turned on the riverbed below, little black and brown stones rolling over each other in the current of the stream. As they kissed, both of them, at different times, opened their eyes and looked at the face kissing them back: looked, and then closed their eyes again, as though leaving and reentering a dream.

THEY DATED ALL
summer, and by September, Easton was ready to introduce Sandra to his family. He knew he wouldn’t get a word in edgewise, so he took the opportunity to draw her while she sat in the living room. Ruby stayed unusually quiet that afternoon, but Corbet was full of stories.

“See,” said Corbet, who sat in his chair drinking, his crutches leaning against the record shelves. “They still didn’t trust us to be officers in our own unit. They put us under White folks.”

Easton studied Sandra at the other end of the couch. He felt the thick piece of sketch paper between his fingers, the fibrous texture like sacred parchment. He turned to a blank page in the tablet and held the stick of charcoal poised in the air above the center of the paper.

“Jews,” said Saul. “They figured that we were the only White people that didn’t mind, so all the officers of the Negro companies were Jewish at first.”

“That’s why Jews pissed me off so much.” Corbet laughed. “I thought they ran the army and the school and the government, for that matter. Everywhere I looked, some Jew was telling me what to do.” Sandra nodded earnestly, like she was interviewing the president.

Easton began to sketch, brushing the black stick lightly across the top of the paper, his eyes on Sandra, then flicking down every once in a while for a glance at his work. Little Lida walked over and stood across the table from him, staring at his hand and the strokes on the page.

“One day,” Saul said, “Corbet, he came up to me and he said, ‘We’re not going to fight unless we get paid the same as the White infantry.’ See, Easton, this is where you get your fire.”

“That boy and I aren’t blood kin, Saul,” Corbet said, and shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter. Fire, it leaps around like that. In any case, the whole company sent him up to tell me. And I took him to be telling the truth.”

“He just nodded his head and called General Lehey,” Corbet said. “That’s when I knew he was all right. Then they integrated us, but that was only in the army. Came home and I still couldn’t stay in a hotel for my own victory parade. I couldn’t take that kind of foolishness anymore. That’s why I come out here.”

“That’s why you disappeared and left Mama,” Easton said. He looked up at Ruby, who shook her head at him.

Corbet took a sip of his bourbon, “
C’est la vie.
I know it’s tempting to judge me, but life’s too messy to simplify like that. You wouldn’t even be born if I hadn’t.”

“Are you going to let us look at your sketch?” Saul asked.

“You’re the first person he’s done that isn’t from a photograph,” Corbet said to Sandra. “You ought to be honored.”

She smiled.

“She’s quiet,” Corbet continued. “Watch out for the quiet ones, son. They’ll use your own mind to make you crazy.”

“She’s not so quiet when she knows you,” Easton said.

“Is that right? What are you studying in school, young lady?”

“I don’t have a major yet. But I’m thinking about anthropology. I also love art history. I brought Easton a book on Picasso.”

“Is that right? Let me see that here.” She picked the book off the table and handed it to him. “We know Picasso very well. Don’t we, Saul?”

“Sure, yes.” He looked over Corbet’s shoulder while he slowly turned the pages, as if they were precious old pictures of themselves.

“This lady will take you places, son,” Corbet said softly. Sandra bowed her head and Corbet spoke up: “Now, do you do that just to look pretty or are you really that shy?”

“Please, Papa,” Easton complained.

“Let the boy do his own work,” Saul said.

“Sorry. Sorry.” Corbet leaned back into his chair and put the bourbon to his lips.

“Just to look pretty,” Sandra said.