Makeda (19 page)
“Those were terrible times, terrible times. I encouraged my David to stand up to them for what was right. Your mother Alma and I did. Although he didn’t need us to tell him what was right. He was strong then. Young and strong and ready to stand up for somethin’. God, did they make him pay for it. Mashed him like an ant.”
She was no longer reporting events, but reliving them in razor-sharp images replete with the racking emotions that the images roiled.
“If I remember it right, the summer of ’43 was when it started. There were race riots in Detroit and Texas. Negroes in Harlem smashed near to every store that white folk owned on 125th Street after a Negro soldier was shot by a white policeman. In ’46, after our boys came home from fighting for America, forty-five Negroes were lynched in the South. Paul Robeson, you know, was our hero then. The man spoke all kinda languages. He was a smart lawyer from a big school up North. He could sing. He could act. A giant of a man who could run like the blazes. And boy was he good lookin’. But mainly he stood up for his people. And that’s when they come after him. Called him a communist. He was never a communist. Took his passport anyhow. Ole Truman, callin’ himself a friend of the ‘Negro.’ But it was Truman who told the border police to shoot Paul Robeson on sight if they caught him tryin’ to sneak into Canada to sing in order to make a livin’. And the Negroes ran away from Robeson like they did your father. Even the NAACP that gave Robeson that medal of theirs. No sooner than the white folk come after him, did the NAACP try to hide from ever givin’ Robeson that medal.”
She opened her eyes, including me again. “Black soldiers and white soldiers were fightin’ each other on the troop ships goin’ over there. Your father said he didn’t mind dyin’, but not in Italy, not in Germany, not for them, not for America. And they made my David and all the rest of them pay. And when they finally let him out of prison, they made it so he would continue to pay. Well, that was bad, but the black men who refused to fight the Germans and Italians could handle that, you know. What they couldn’t handle was how they were treated by their own people who treated the men who shoulda been our heroes like traitors. Your father was never the same after that. He became bitter and suspicious. Lookin’ out only for his own. He wanted you and Gordon to be safe. He wanted you to have a livin’ they couldn’t so easily take away from you.”
A large dog growled a hoarse angry threat beneath the window my grandmother sat near. Her body convulsed in a sudden violent tremor. I rested my hand on her shoulder and looked through the glass.
“It’s okay, Grandma. It ran down the hill by the Fountains’ house. It’s gone.”
She trembled in lengthening waves. A line of tiny perspiration beads arced out across her brow. She breathed rapidly in short nervous grabs of air. I tried to calm her by gently rubbing her shoulders. She fought visibly to regain her balance. The episode then eased away and seemed not to have happened.
“Your father is a smart man who is disappointed with himself and with life because he did what he thought was right and paid with the future he thought he was gonna have. He doesn’t trust people, not even Alma. That’s why she’s never worked and used her college education. He’s all weighed down by duty and lonely under it. Lonely in a place that no one can reach, not even me. But he is cryin’ in that deep dark place, cryin’ like a little boy who is lost and can’t find his way back to who he used to be. Do you understand what I’m tryin’ to tell you, Gray?”
“Yes, I think so, Grandma.” I was very much in a stunned state. I knew nothing of the man she was describing.
She smiled inside a reverie. “I wish you could have known him then; smart, full of fire, and ready to take on the world, he was. He would frighten me, even then, because he was ready to fight back. The chances didn’t matter. I think it was me that led him wrong. I raised him up all by myself. I taught him right from wrong. I told him to stand up for right, even while I was washin’ the rich white people’s clothes. He did what I wouldn’t a done, but it was me that told him to do it, you see, not directly, but told him just the same.” Her eyes were full and near to spilling.
“He use to say to me,
Mama, the system
—black folk say that; like the system was some big giant thing that jumped on our backs and stayed there—
has destroyed our men, used
our women, and made us all empty strangers to each other
. Then he would say that Negroes have been made into empty glass vials that white people filled with the flavors that suited
them
. I bet you find it hard to believe that your father used to talk like that, don’t you?”
I wasn’t certain that I
did
believe her, so different was her picture of my father from the methodical unrevealing man I had known all of my life. When I did not answer her, she said, “Soona or later, you’ll have to talk to him and you’ll have to talk about Gordon.” I said nothing. The silence stretched out in the gray dimness of the small parlor.
Thinking back on what my grandmother had said to me about how my father was penalized for the stands he took on racial matters as a young man, it occurred to me later how painfully important what happened to him during those years had been to my grandmother.
I think that I knew this because my grandmother hardly ever spoke directly of racial matters. Later, in the same sitting after we’d sat silent for a length, she asked me with a light, almost offhanded curiosity, “Gray, what do white people look like?”
While my grandmother spoke often and proudly about her own people, and understood well enough the
event
of racial antagonism as evidenced by my father’s harsh wartime experience, she all but never spoke of the way that she herself had experienced race, the emotional dynamics of which she seemed less tethered by than the rest of us were. If race seemed a battlement divide to all the other Negroes I knew, it never seemed such to her. Like the rest of us, she had been exposed to the ravaging social contagion, but she, unlike everyone else, Negro and white alike, had not contracted the disease. Thus, she bore none of its debilitating symptoms. For instance, I’d once told her that I felt
different
, unsure or sort of
un-myself
around white people, and she’d seemed not to have instinctively known what I was talking about. In some ancient neighborhood of her emotional space, race, or at least the angry implacable energy of its sundering power, seemed to her something of an abstraction.
Her social exposures had been very different from mine. I think that I knew this because when she asked me simply, “Gray, what do white people look like?”—race had seemed briefly like an abstraction even for me, as I hadn’t known how to answer this question from a woman who’d been blind all of her life.
“I don’t know how to make a picture for you, Grandma. Did you see a white person in any of the dreams?”
“No, there were only our people in the dreams—the only people I’ve ever actually seen.”
I thought for a while and then asked, “Were there flowers in your Dogon dream?”
She answered almost immediately. “Yes, I remember that there were frangipani flowers. I loved them when I was a little girl. I had one in my hair in the dream.”
“Did the flowers bloom?”
“Yes.”
“What colors?”
“Pink and white—you don’t mean to tell me that white people are the color of white frangipani, do you?”
“No.”
“Then why are they called white people?”
“Well, actually, Grandma, none of the races, Negro, white, or yellow, are at all close in appearance to the colors they are called by.”
“Why are they known by these colors then?”
“W-well, I’m not so sure, Grandma.”
She shook her head in wonderment while I felt oddly silly—quite possibly as silly as my mother once told me she’d felt while trying to explain to me the difference between Negroes and whites when I was three or four years old.
T
he refreshments that Mrs. Grier brought into the parlor on a breeze of perky conviviality reprieved my grandmother and me from the inconstant shadow of a recurrent sorrow and installed in its space the welcome, though temporary, relief of small talk facilitated by the sweet, voluble, oblivious Mrs. Grier.
“So, Graylon, your grandmother tells me you’re getting ya master’s degree in a few weeks. That’s wonderful, Gray, really, really wonderful. I know your mother and father are proud. Has your grandmother told you about the mess over at the church and Reverend Boynton quitting right in the middle of it. It’s awful, isn’t it, Gray? Just awful. Not like the old days, I tell you. No siree, not like the old days …”
Mrs. Grier went on chattering like this without need of reply for what seemed to me an age. My grandmother smiled at her good-hearted neighbor. I did as well—as much out of appreciation for her kindness to my grandmother as out of amusement at the sheer sight of a rare dear soul born with no trace of a sixth sense.
Mrs. Grier passed narrowly with the seesawing tray through the door leading toward my grandmother’s kitchen, all the while talking, with the last of her words thrown jocularly over a retreating shoulder: “Gray, they tell me you got a girlfriend who’s really something special. Hot dog!”
My grandmother laughed aloud, covering her mouth after I joined her, laughing louder than she had. She composed herself and said, “I can tell from your letters that this time is different. So she’s the one, is she?”
“It’s a little early to tell, but yes, Grandma, I think this time’s different, real different, that’s if …” I paused.
“Go on, go on.”
“Well, that’s if I don’t mess it up.”
“You mean by shuttin’ her out?” She must have sensed the astonishment written on my face. She said, “You think your grandmother’s a wizard, don’t you?”
“Well, I …”
“You are a man, Graylon, a young man.” She spoke lightly, “It’s always a good guess that you wouldn’t show yourself, especially in your case. Tell me, son: is she worth it?”
Bestirred, I answered, “Yes, Grandma, she is worth it. I’m pretty sure of that. I’ve never met anyone like her. I think that may be what …”
“What frightens you, Gray?” she asked softly.
“Yes, Grandma, what frightens me.”
“Seeing what’s at stake, son, you’ll just have to risk it, won’t you? So tell her who you are when the time is right. Tell her everything. It’ll make things better for you. It’ll make things better for the both of you.”
I hesitated. Again she seemed to understand me. “She must be somethin’, son. I never seen you so confused about a girl. Is it that what attracts you to her is also some of what scares you?”
I laughed. “You’re not a witch, are you, Grandma?”
She chuckled and said, “Well, maybe I am and maybe I’m not. What is it? You ’fraid she’s as smart as you, or maybe even smarter?”
“The other night we were talking about my work on the Harlem Renaissance poets. I told her that one great black writer had been harshly critical of them, saying they catered more to their white supporters than to regular black people. Jeanne said that my great black writer was only against white folk’s rejection of
him
, that otherwise he was himself an
unconditional assimilationist
, to use her term for him.”
“What is an assimilationist?”
“Well, what she meant by it was that the great black writer most wanted to be
like
white people.”
“Who is this great black writer?”
“Richard Wright.”
“Oh, him.”
“You’ve heard of him, Grandma?”
“Of course, Gray. I’ve listened to him on the radio. Washing clothes was the work I did, not who I am. There’s a difference, you know. Could your Jeanne be right?”
“Well, I suppose so.”
“Then maybe you should think about marryin’ her. You want smart children, marry a smart woman.”
We talked on in this way for an hour or more with Mrs. Grier humming run-on hymns mournfully off-key from the kitchen.
I wanted to be out of the house before my father arrived. At eleven o’clock I asked her about the new dreams, the Lalibela dream we had briefly discussed awhile back on the telephone and another more recent one she hadn’t described to me.
“You’ve been givin’ all this some thought then?” she asked.
“Yes, I want to write about it eventually. I’ve been approved for a grant to go to Mali this summer to do some research on ancient African writers, but the Dogon dream is the real reason I’m going. Jeanne’s going with me. I’ve also talked to a professor in the psychology department at the University of Southern California about this. She thinks maybe there’s something to this.” I saw her expression change. “Don’t worry, Grandma. She’s not going to do anything. She doesn’t even know your name.”
“Well I
know
there is somethin’ to this.”
“How do you mean that?”
“Well, the first three dreams and the one I had a few weeks ago are so different from any dreams I’ve ever had.”
“Different how?”
“First, I can’t remember ordinary dreams five minutes after I wake up. They feel like what they are, dreams— mixed up so you don’t even know whether they’re in color or black-and-white. The Dogon dream, the Lalibela dream, and this last one were different. They were so real to me that I couldn’t tell them from real life, as real to me as sittin’ here talkin’ to you now. So real that when you woke me when you were seven from the Lalibela dream, I couldn’t right away understand English. So real that wakin’ up frightens me because I’m switchin’ from one life to another, except the dream is better because in the dreams I can see. I know it sounds crazy but it has happened to me four times now. What does your professor person think of all this?”
“She believes there are people who have had past lives, people who, either under hypnosis or after a dream, describe events—names, dates, places—that occurred sometimes a thousand years ago with such accuracy that the people couldn’t possibly have made them up.”
I took from my briefcase Dr. Harris-Fulbright’s book and put it in her hands. “This is her book. Have Mrs. Grier read to you the case of Laurel Dilmen on page 257.”
