Original Sins (35 page)

Emily got off the IRT and walked up Broadway past the junkies in the center island, then down the blocks lined with welfare hotels. A letter from Earl talked about the tobacco harvest, the last cut of hay, the woods turning gold and rust The KT Fall Formal, the UT game, the Hot Nuts concert, serenading the Tri Delts.

Emily peered into windows, watching people embrace or argue, laugh or weep, eat or snore in front of TVs. They sat in their apartments encircled by lamplight, while she wandered dark dirty dangerous streets alone, with no one to talk to and nowhere to go. What was she doing in this weird place among strangers who'd abhor her if she let them really get to know her? Those people surrounding Raymond seemed to include him and care about him like a family almost. Like the Ingenues. To fit in here as he now did, though, meant agreeing that her homeland was inhabited by psychopaths. It seemed like a lot to ask. After all, some among them had washed her cuts, told her stories, hugged her when she was sad, provided her with the love and support that gave her the self-confidence now to be able even to consider rejecting them. If those people were psychopaths, then everyone was …

As she paced, she thought about the valley, how The Five used to sit through a sultry summer afternoon by the river, with the current barely moving. Dark clouds would roll in fast. The tall grasses would bow down under a suddenly black sky, as rushing winds announced the arrival of lightning. Like the wand of a crazed conductor, the stabs of lightning cued kettle-drum rolls of thunder, then the full orchestra tuning up at top volume. Raindrops the size of bird droppings would splatter. Then cascades, a waterfall from heaven. The Five would throw off their clothes, screaming gleefully into the thunder and dodging lightning bolts. Afterward, the setting sun would turn the swollen storm clouds to royal purple, making the sky a giant bruise.

All right, maybe a few of the people there imitated nature. Like lightning rods they picked up violence in the atmosphere and brought it down to earth. Raymond used to keep a file of atrocities from the Newland paper. A woman who knifed her husband for refusing to take out the garbage. A man who shot a hole through his wife's bouffant hairdo as she rode by in a pickup truck with her lover. But this you could understand. You knew who was doing you in and why. Here in Freedom City she could be raped, robbed, murdered at any moment by someone she'd never seen before, whose cousins she didn't even know. A land where people were still involved enough with each other to want to kill their loved ones was almost touching by comparison.

She was on a block of gutted tenements. Several streetlights were out. She was lost. A drunk sprawled in a doorway. She walked fast to a brightly lit avenue and flagged a taxi driven by a large Negro in a felt slouch hat. Her feet began to hurt, and she propped them up on the seat. In front of her dorm she discovered she had only enough money for the fare plus ten percent. She dumped the change into the driver's hand. He counted it, then turned and said, “Shit, lady, I can't make no living on this.”

“I'm really sorry. It's all I've got.”

“Hell, what you doing in a cab then? Should have taken you the subway.”

She stared at him. No Negro had ever spoken to her in this tone. “I didn't know where the subway was. I was lost.”

“Listen, lady, that ain't my problem, is it? Shit, I'm trying to make my goddam living. Just my luck to get stuck hauling some hick halfway across Harlem for twenty-nine cents.”

“It
is
a ten percent tip.”

“Ten percent of nothing is nothing, lady. Now get out.”

He roared away before she could close the door. It flew open. He screeched to a stop and banged it shut. “Goddam cracker!” he yelled, careening off, hitting the pothole beneath Emily's window and almost fishtailing into an oncoming cab.

She staggered into the dorm. A Negro who was not prepared to put her problems before his own? It was a startling concept

In her room as she removed her shoes, she discovered her socks were caked with blood. Her shoes had rubbed; blisters had formed, popped, turned into open sores. All without her being aware of it.

“To the Puritans there was good and there was evil, the elect and the non-elect. As the elect, they considered it their mission to carry the word of God into the wilderness. The Massachusetts Bay Colony regarded the Algonquin as heathen, in dire need of conversion …”

Emily scrawled this in her notebook. She'd gotten up late, wore a nightgown under her London Fog raincoat. Hands shot up. Young women expressed opinions, and disagreed with each other and with the professor, a small man with a dark flat top and an acid sense of humor. Emily observed this, as always, with groggy amazement. Most of her efforts at Newland High had been directed at not having opinions, and certainly not ones that disagreed with those of a man. The Ingenues didn't give bids to girls who raised their hands in class.

“Jamestown, by contrast,” continued the professor, “was founded as an economic venture by broken-down cavaliers and inmates of debtors' prisons. The Pilgrims found a cold climate and rocky soil. Virginia settlers found a warm climate, rich soil, plentiful game. The two settlements attracted and formed different types of people.”

Emily wrote “Earl” in her margin several times. A stab of desire shot through her. She recalled the last time they'd made love—in her roomette on the train that brought her to New York, before it pulled out of the station. “You better not go and fall for some goddam Yankee, you hear?” he called as he jumped down to the platform.

“Don't worry, I won't,” she called through her tears. And she was keeping that promise. Though it required very little effort. She'd been attending fraternity Freshmen Teas. But the brothers were all clods compared to Earl. She pictured him in his Confederate uniform, boots and sabre, recalled the way his erection would strain against his tight jeans. Raymond had fixed her up a couple of times with friends of his, but sharecropper costumes didn't excite her the way they did Corinne and Joan. Real farmers in overalls and rusted pickup trucks were a fixture around Newland, and overalls reminded her of rural poverty rather than heroic toil.

Emily's professor for Introductory Sociology was a tall thin Negro woman who peered out over Ben Franklin glasses. She was lecturing that morning on the characteristics of a cult—its saints and martyrs, totems and shrines, its missionaries and its devil. “Of course a group doesn't have to have a religious basis to qualify. It can have a political or social basis. The essence is that there is an out-group by which the in-group can define itself.”

As she copied this, Emily realized she'd never seen a Negro woman in any job except maid, cook, or babysitter. Joan informed her that her background hadn't prepared her for many of the situations she was having to deal with, and Emily had to admit that this was so. Maybe this explained why she was so tired all the time, always oversleeping and having to race to class in her nightgown. She could never just react, because all her reactions were geared to a different reality; she had to examine each of her responses all the time. But Joan seemed to be treating her with more respect since the showing of Raymond's documentary. “It's really admirable, Emily,” she'd say, “that you were able to drag yourself out of that swamp.” Emily was grateful.

That afternoon on her way to the Hall of Man at the Museum of Natural History for her anthropology course, Emily passed some tableaux in glass cases. One case contained models of two apelike creatures. One with black skin was loping naked across a savannah. The other, with white skin, was dressed in animal furs and was hunched over a fire in a cave. The card read,

By a million years ago homo erectus had spread across Asia, Africa and Europe. He made huts of branches and stone, clothes of animal skin. Seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago he discovered how to make fire. With his movement into cooler regions came physical changes. His skin, originally dark from the pigment necessary to block ultraviolet rays in the tropics, bleached out as he inched northward over many generations; fair skin that allowed synthesis of vitamin D had survival value in regions of sparse sunlight.

Emily found herself reading this card over and over again with irritation.

At dinner Joan walked past Emily's table with a woman named Leslie whom Emily had seen at rallies. She always wore a red bandanna around her head like a pirate, and large hoop earrings. Emily felt a rush of gratitude as they surveyed all the tables and came over to sit at hers.

“This is Emily,” said Joan. “She's from Tennessee.”

Leslie looked her over: a Regenerate Southerner. She nodded firmly, as though approving her. Emily sat back, relieved. “They say the situation is pretty grim down there,” said Leslie with narrowed eyes, like Cotton Mather contemplating Salem.

Out of the blue Emily was swept with anger. For a few moments she was speechless. Then she said, in what was meant to be a blasé voice, “Oh, it's all right. We let our niggers roam the streets until eight o'clock at night now.”

As Emily raced out, not looking back, she noticed Lou at the next table. Emily blushed and her stomach contorted. Lou, fork poised, threw her head back, smiled faintly, and said, “Huh.”

Returning from the library that night, Emily crept toward her room, dreading to meet any hallmates. A Bach cello suite floated out of the transom over Joan's door. Joan pronounced Bach with a growl at the end, as though clearing her throat to spit. “Bach-ch-ch,” Emily mimicked to herself. The full horror of what she'd done was beginning to dawn on her: She'd have no one to eat supper with, to drink coffee with, to bum cigarettes off, to borrow lecture notes from. She'd been lonely before, but now she was a pariah. Panic gripped her. She was used to a big family, a close neighborhood, a tight community, church, classmates. Her future as an electron with no nucleus, no network of fellow electrons, darting through the void alone, was hideous to contemplate.

She heard a thick Southern accent: “Hey, gal, how you making it?” Lou was leaning against her door jamb, observing Emily as she crept down the hall.

Emily froze: Lou had heard her at supper. How could she explain what had come over her, her need to thwart any party line, a need she'd kept under wraps in Newland for long enough to get a bid from Ingenue. Tonight it had been stupid, and pointless, self-indulgent.

“Come on in here a minute. Got something I want to show you.” Lou walked into her closet. She picked up her laundry bag and fished around and pulled out a bottle of Southern Comfort.

Emily stared at it. They sat in the closet on Lou's laundry and shoes, with her dresses hanging in their faces, and passed it back and forth.

“Look, I'm sorry about what I said at supper,” Emily ventured. “I just got fed up.”

“Huh. I was tickled.”

“You were?”

“I get fed up too, child. This New York City is one weird place.”

They reminisced about Charlotte and Newland, their accents getting thicker the more Southern Comfort they consumed. The
way
Lou expressed herself was familiar—stringing together little stories, describing people by where they came from and whom they were kin to. As opposed to the statistics and theories that Joan and Corinne specialized in. But the content of Lou's stories was so different from that of Emily's that they might have been talking about two separate countries: “So I was standing by the door of my daddy's funeral home. They was carting out flowers and putting them in a hearse with a coffin that held an old man from our neighborhood, who always used to carry hard candies in his pocket for us kids. He'd paid burial insurance his entire life preparing for this day. These two little white kids was watching these wreaths and bouquets come out, and one whispered, ‘All them flowers just for that dirty old nigger man?' I beat the shit out of them. Then my daddy beat the shit out of me.”

“How come you to tell me this?” asked Emily. “Looks like you'd stay away from white people.”

Lou exhaled slowly. “I guess I been so goddam churchified I think I got to hate the sin but not the sinner.”

“Is that possible?”

“Maybe not. But if you Negro and you go round hating everybody that does you dirt, you got time for nothing else. You see what I'm saying?”

As Emily stumbled out the door, Lou called, “Don't you be no stranger now, hear?” The familiar phrase, the familiar accent, and the excess of Southern Comfort combined to send a searing stab of homesickness through Emily.

On their way to class Emily and Lou joined a long line for coffee at a takeout shop on Broadway. Judging from their accents, the Negro women behind the counter were fresh off the boat from Louisiana. As they took orders and poured coffee and snapped on lids, they moved as though suspended in a vat of molasses. The shoppers and businessmen and students in the line, which stretched to the door, shifted, twitched, consulted watches, and heaved irritated sighs. The waitresses continued their languid pace.

The woman in front of Emily and Lou was trembling. She muttered under her breath, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.” Her plastic shopping bag rustled steadily in her shaking hands.

Finally she stepped out of line, pointed to the waitresses, and announced in a loud voice, “I marched on Washington for these people, but I'll never make
that
mistake again!” She stomped out, leaving the room in dead silence. The customers looked annoyed or embarrassed. Emily fought to suppress a grin. Finally Lou gave a throaty chuckle. She glanced at Emily. “It's OK. You're allowed to smile.”

By the time they reached the counter, Lou and Emily were giggling sporadically—whenever Lou whispered with piety, “I marched on Washington for these people!” The waitress looked at them and smiled and drawled, “Boy, some folks sure is in a hurry.”

Joan and Corinne were no longer speaking to Emily. They took Lou aside and informed her that Emily was racist. Lou said, “Thank yall so much. I do preciate yall telling me this.”