New Boy (8 page)

"Who was Garvey?" I said, peeling the red skin from an apple. Cousin Gwen had rolled out the pie crust and folded it carefully, and was unfolding it in the pie pan. I remembered Garvey's picture on the sign in front of Michaux's bookstore.

Cousin Gwen began to crimp the edges of the pastry in the pie pan. "I guess you don't hear that much about Garvey in the South. Garvey was a West Indian, a black nationalist. Heavyset, dapper, and black as coal. He believed we should all go back to Africa and he started his own organization, with a steamship line to take us back. He called it the Universal Negro Improvement Association. It had a newspaper and it would hold parades with people marching up and down the street in uniforms, and Garvey himself would ride in the back of a big convertible like the biggest politicians—FDR and La Guardia—used to ride in, and he would be all dressed up in a military uniform like Napoleon, with gold braids and medals on his chest and a plumed hat. It was all for show, but he could give quite a speech and, of course, the West Indians loved it. Everybody loved it. Oh, he was something, chastising the white man, spinning out his dream of taking everybody back to Africa to a packed hall with that singsong voice of his. He knew how to draw a crowd." Cousin Gwen began to core and peel the last apple and then she sliced it into the big bowl with the others. "But when Dr. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and the leaders of the NAACP saw how big Garvey's audiences were, they had a fit. They publicly attacked him for leading the race down the path of destruction. Of course, they were advocates of integration, and Garvey didn't want to have anything to do with integration. Unfortunately. Garvey wasn't much of a businessman. The steamship failed and the prosecutors got involved and Garvey ended up
going to prison for fraud." Cousin Gwen stopped slicing the apple for a moment and looked at me. "Why is it our people always fall for these charlatans?" she said, and she shook her head and resumed slicing. "Anyway, that was the end of him, although there are still a lot of people in Harlem who admire Garvey and what he stood for."

Cousin Gwen mixed the sliced apples with sugar and spices and then poured them into the pastry shell. She dotted the apples with butter and carefully placed a covering of pastry on top, fitting the edges into the grooves of the crimped pastry already in the pan. There," she said, admiring her handiwork. "I'll just put this in the oven. It'll be ready in about an hour." She opened the oven door and a gust of warm air enveloped us as she put the pie in the oven. "I'm going to stay up and wait for this pie to finish. The collards won't be done by then, but they'll have a good start." The heavy odor of the collards hung in the air.

"You must be tired," said Cousin Gwen, walking into the living room. I followed her and walked over to the front window. The immense darkness was spread before me, studded with lights, as though all of Harlem was awake. I wanted to linger at the window even though Cousin Gwen had suggested that I turn in. "There's a clean towel and a washcloth on the day bed in the study," she said. "That's where you will sleep. You know where the bathroom is. Now don't stay up too late. We've got a full day tomorrow." To my surprise, she gave me an affectionate pat on the arm and smiled. Cousin Gwen rarely displayed physical affection, and her manner was often so sharp that I sometimes wondered whether she liked me at all or merely tolerated me to preserve her relationship with my parents. But this gesture was so spontaneous, so natural that it caught me by surprise, and I was forced to reconsider how I felt about her and what she had to say.

I said good night, washed up in Cousin Gwen's spotless white tile bathroom, and retreated to the study. It had indeed been a long day, and my mind was spinning as I thought again about the day's events. At last I had seen Harlem with my own eyes, but I wondered what more there was to the place, beyond the huge buildings and the wide streets and the sidewalks flooded with Negroes. There was danger here, I knew from talking to Willie Maurice and reading the newspaper, but I had yet to encounter it. I thought about Garvey, and I wondered if he had been flawed like Joe Louis, losing his way perhaps as only a colored man can. Both were tragic figures, but it seemed odd that Harlem, for all its grandeur and presumed sympathy, could not save them. I was exhausted. In Cousin Gwen's study, I was surrounded by bookcases stuffed with books I was too tired to examine, so I put on my pajamas, switched off the light, and slipped between the covers of the day bed, where I instantly fell asleep in the darkness.

On Thanksgiving, my parents arrived at Cousin Gwen's early in the afternoon. They had left Virginia in the Roadmaster the day before and stopped to visit friends in Delaware, where they spent the night, arising early the next morning to begin the last leg of the trip. By the time they arrived, dinner was almost ready. Cousin Gwen had made candied sweet potatoes, assigning me the responsibility of placing marshmallows on top of the dish and running it into the oven just before serving. Basted, browned, and swollen with stuffing, the glistening turkey rested on top of the stove as Cousin Gwen was busy making the gravy. I had already set the dining room table with Cousin Gwen's finest tableware, long-stem crystal water glasses, Copeland china, and silver flatware she had inherited from her mother, everything arranged according to her precise instructions on a lace tablecloth of white Irish linen. Outside there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and sunlight was pouring in through the dining room windows.

"Well, well, well," said my father with a grin as he shook my
hand and threw his arm around my shoulder. "You're looking pretty good, I'd say."

"I'm doing okay," I replied. I didn't want to say any more. I wasn't prepared, at that time, to discuss the details of my experience at Draper with Vinnie or the events of the day before, even though I knew they wanted very much to hear about them. As far as I was concerned, these were private matters, like my decision to go to a nightclub with Burns, and the less my parents knew about them, the better.

"You mean you're not ready to come home?" said my mother in mock surprise, wrapping her arms around me. I knew she was kidding, but I wondered if there was something more to her question. Since I had arrived at Draper, the thought of returning home had occurred to me more than once, but I had clung to my resolve to remain. Despite moments of great uncertainty, I was determined to finish what I had begun, to prove that I had the will to survive and find my way through the wilderness.

Cousin Gwen's Thanksgiving dinner was predictably sumptuous. The turkey was moist and perfectly done, and she had stuffed it with cornbread, grated orange peel, and country sausage, which gave it a wonderful aroma. The giblet gravy she had put together made the turkey even more succulent. The collards were tender and smoky from the ham hocks. I had put the sweet potatoes in the oven at the last minute and they were now on the table with the marshmallows, crispy brown and puffed. There were slices of baked ham, and homemade cranberry sauce, and, of
course, Cousin Gwen's incomparable hot rolls. It was a feast, and as the deep blue sky began to take on a rosy hue, we ate ourselves silly, helping ourselves to seconds, and in my father's case, to thirds. And to top it off, when dinner was finished, Cousin Gwen brought out the apple pie, which she had warmed in the oven.

"My goodness, Cousin Gwen," said my father when he finished dessert. "If you keep feeding us like this, the boy won't want to go back to school."

"Oh, he's going back, all right. Nothing would stop that." She looked at me with a knowing smile. Even though I hadn't discussed my reservations about Draper with her, I had the feeling that somehow she knew my initiation had not been without incident.

"Well, there's a lot going on back home," said my father. "After that big Supreme Court case the NAACP won in 1954, all the schools were supposed to open right up for us, but the whites have been resisting it bitterly. They say they will fight it to the last man, just like the Civil War. People are starting to wonder if we'll ever get integration." My father leaned back in his chair. "I guess it just proves that we made the right decision in sending you to school up here."

I let my father's words hover over the dining room table, and I thought about old man Michaux and his distaste for integration. I wondered if what was happening at home was simply a confirmation of his view of the world.

"Some of the young people at home are starting to get organized to protest the situation," said my mother. "They've put a little group together, but I'm not sure just what they intend to do. They are still in the talking stages, but several of your friends are involved. Roosevelt Tinsley, Sylvia Newsome, and Russell. Russell Woolfolk." For the first time since I had arrived at Draper, I felt something more than a twinge of longing for home. If this activity of my friends actually came to something, I thought, they could have a role in bringing segregation to its knees. And meanwhile, I would be safely tucked away in a boarding school in Connecticut, where I could read about it in the papers. "It's mostly college students," said my mother, "but there are also quite a few high school students participating. It will be interesting to see if they can get something done. People are tired of waiting."

After dinner, we cleared the table and my mother helped Cousin Gwen wash the dishes. I sat with my father in the living room while he read the newspaper and probed the spaces between his teeth with a toothpick. I could hear conversation coming from the kitchen. My mother and Cousin Gwen were talking about me and, at one point, my mother confided to Cousin Gwen that she was concerned about me being under "pressure." "He's the only one of us up there, you know," she said.

"I know, Clarissa, but that pressure is no different from what he'll face if he gets out into the world and becomes a doctor or a lawyer. The boy's got to learn how to stand on his own two feet," said Cousin Gwen. "Look at these youngsters in Harlem spending all of their time with each other, and most of them aren't going anywhere. When they're around the whites, they clam right up. The colored kids only talk to each other, and half the time you can't even understand what they're saying. And if they eventually do talk to a white person, it's usually a policeman or somebody who is telling them what to do. They don't have any idea what it's like to talk to a white person as an equal, much less a white person sitting next to you at the dining room table. I know it's worse in the South, but this is
not
paradise. If you want to amount to something today, you have to broaden your reach. You have to look beyond what's familiar to you, beyond what's comfortable to you, no matter what color you are."

I was emboldened by Cousin Gwen's words. I had no idea she thought that way. From what she said, it sounded as though she wouldn't disapprove of me going out one night with Burns to hear jazz in a nightclub. Once again, she had surprised me by revealing something about herself that I had never suspected. Across the room, my father rustled the newspaper. I was certain he was also listening to the conversation in the kitchen.

"He wasn't sent up there to be a guinea pig, you know," said Mother. "We sent him there to get the best education we could provide, to get him ready for college. But if he's going to have problems because he's the only one there, well, I don't have to put my child through an ordeal just to give him an education. It isn't worth it. I'll bring him home."

"Honey, he's going to have problems with white folks anywhere he goes," said Cousin Gwen. "Even in a school like that where they claim to want him so bad, he's bound to have problems. And he's going to have problems with white folks for a long time to come. They sure don't seem to be in any hurry to treat us as true equals. But that doesn't mean we have to accept it. That boy can handle anything they throw at him. He's already proved it, but he needs you to stand by him."

As the words drifted from the kitchen into the living room, I thought about how I had been taught to give whites a wide berth whenever I was in their presence, to be suspicious of anything they said or did. Those feelings hadn't vanished at Draper. My experience with Vinnie had confirmed what I had been taught. My conversation with Michaux in Harlem had evoked it as well. But then there was my encounter with Burns, and the thrill of making secret plans to go out to a nightclub together, of gaining each other's confidence. It seemed, at least between the two of us, that it didn't matter what color we were, and I wondered if this was the way it was supposed to be when integration finally arrived.

My father rustled the newspaper again. "Have you thought about what you'd like to do while you're here?" he said. "Is there anything you need? We could do a little shopping if you need something." This was as good a time as any to make a move, I thought.

"I don't have any plans for tomorrow," I said. "But a friend from school has invited me to his house for dinner on Saturday evening." I held my breath, waiting for Dad's response.

"That's nice, son," he said, without taking his eyes away from the newspaper. "Where does he live?"

"Park Avenue," I said. Dad put the papers down abruptly and looked across the living room at me.

"Park Avenue!" he exclaimed. "You traveling in some mighty fancy circles for a colored boy, ain't you? Who is this fellow?" I could tell he was suppressing a smile.

"Gordie Burns," I said. "He's in the class ahead of me."

"Burns, huh?" said my father. "His people must be from Scotland. 'Man's inhumanity to man. Makes countless thousands mourn.'" I gave him a puzzled look. "That's Robert Burns, Scotland's greatest poet," he said with a wink. "All right. Your mother and I were going to take everybody out to dinner on Saturday, but if you have a social engagement, I guess we'll just have to make other plans."

At breakfast the next morning, my mother brought up my plans for Saturday. "I understand you have a dinner invitation for tomorrow night," she said, excavating a wedge from her grapefruit. I did my best to appear nonchalant.