Original Sins (37 page)

“Yeah, I'm fine, thank you.”

On the train back to New York Emily felt relief: At least she'd had the sense to get away from that terrible place. Was the setup she'd been born into her fault? No, of course not. But it became her fault if, seeing what she now saw, she did nothing.

Her parents had been perplexed by her decision to return to New York several days early. She didn't see any point in telling them how much they disgusted her. They must have seen all along the things she was now seeing. They weren't stupid. And yet they hadn't raised her to be aware of the injustice, hadn't encouraged her to fight against it, had lived with it and profited from it all their lives. She wanted as little to do with them in the future as possible.

The porter knocked, bowed, grinned, and asked her to sit across the corridor while he fixed her bed.

“I can do it myself, thank you.”

He looked startled, then grinned and drawled, “Yes, ma'am, I reckon you can. But it be my job.”

“Well, it shouldn't be.”

He looked puzzled. “I feel real lucky to have it.”

“You shouldn't have to.”

He grinned and backed down the aisle. “Yes, ma'am. You just suit yourself now.”

As he helped her down at Grand Central the next morning, she handed him a huge tip. He stared at it, then at her, then grinned the Grin. “Why, I surely does thank you, miss.”

“Don't,” Emily rasped. “Please.”

When she got to the dorm, Lou leaned out her door and called, “Hey girl, how you making it?”

Emily was unable to reply or look her in the eye, as Lou held her face in both hands and kissed her on both cheeks. “Hey, baby, what's happening?”

“I'm so sorry, Lou,” she whispered, squinting and at last understanding the origin of Corrine's cringe.

“Sony for what, child?”

“I didn't understand.”

“Understand what?”

“What my people have done to yours.”

“Shit. You starting to sound like some kinda Yankee. I ain't no ‘people.' It's me—Lou.”

Emily began avoiding her. She wouldn't accept Emily's apologies. “Now listen here,” she'd insist. “What you say is true, but it ain't got nothing to do with me and you. I don't need none of this Lady Bountiful action from you. Anyone lets you crawl, I
know
you gon take it out on them later. You see what I'm saying?”

Emily began thinking of Lou as a house nigger. More middle class than the white middle class. And when Joan said privately that Lou was an Oreo, black outside but white inside, Emily agreed.

In American History class they were reading the slave narratives—about Negroes being beaten and tormented, worked like mules, bred like cattle. Emily began saving her allowance and sending checks to NAACP and SNCC, CORE and SCLC and the Urban League. To Save the Children and the Sharecropper Relief Fund. She was promptly put on every mailing list in the nation and was swamped with appeals. Every few days she'd lie on her bed and look through them—droughts in Africa, starvation in Pakistan, slums in Manila. Epidemics here, floods there, little children with hollow eyes and swollen bellies. She studied the mailings and suffered and parceled out her allowance: $7.50 for illiteracy in Alabama, $4 for pellagra in Mississippi, $8 for Negro men on death row in Georgia. She bought by mail boxes of notepaper, decorated with a sketch of flower blossoms and bees. A Negro woman in Florida, with no arms from a birth injury in a backwoods cabin, had done the sketch by holding the pencil in her teeth. As penance, Emily held a pencil in her teeth and tried for hours to sketch bees. She couldn't. All these brave resourceful people facing insurmountable odds imposed by
her
forebears.

One night she spent several hours staring at her arm. This pinkish, yellowish skin, pocked with hair follicles, designed merely to allow synthesis of vitamin D—this was the sign of her privilege. It was hideous. She wanted to peel the ugly stuff off, strip by strip, like a plum skin. She got a knife from the kitchen. It didn't hurt. She felt nothing. But it just wouldn't peel. She turned her forearm into a pulpy red mess.

Chapter Two
Raymond

The members of FORWARD sprawled on cushions in a corner of the huge loft, which was otherwise crammed with stacks of printed matter, a mimeo machine, a couple of projectors, film tins, cartons from carry-out food. As Raymond walked in, he saw Emily, her left arm wrapped in gauze to the elbow.

“Jesus, Em,” he said, squatting. “What have you done?”

“I cut myself shaving my legs.”

“How can you cut your arm while shaving your legs?”

“With difficulty.”

She'd phoned as soon as she got back from Newland to see if she could join FORWARD. He was taken aback because he knew she'd been faking it all fall—wearing the right clothes and attending functions, but not really understanding what it was all about. The rallies and concerts must have been the exposure, but the fixative was apparently applied in Newland. She couldn't talk about it. But one night at a coffee house in the Village she began crying when the guitar-player sang,
“Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?”

She had no skills FORWARD needed, but they agreed to let her sit in on meetings because she could clearly profit from the exposure. With a humility Raymond had never before witnessed in her, she was busy finding and absorbing the books and films and records they all recommended. He had to admit to some satisfaction at having her value his opinions again, after what she'd put him through over that fraternity creep last year. He hadn't even grasped that it was all over between them until he went home to Newland at New Year's and found her decked out in some dumb blazer with that guy's pins all over her boobs. Back in New York he'd felt pretty betrayed. He'd picture her in that long Plantation Fall gown, though, and feel glad to be rid of her. But the relief never lasted long because he knew her so well, knew that there was more to her than that. Over the months the hurt had healed. Still, it was nice now having her phone him to ask what “power elite” or “psychic guerrilla warfare” meant. Even when he gave answers that Justin and Maria would have laughed at, she seemed impressed and grateful.

Last week, walking to supper, they came upon a derelict lying across the sidewalk, newspapers lining his overcoat. Everyone else, rushing home from work, was stepping over him. Emily insisted they prop him up on some garbage cans. She also insisted he stuff a ten-dollar bill in the man's pocket. The old man raised his mangy head, looked at Raymond through bloodshot eyes, and snarled, “Fuck you, buddy.”

Emily turned away with tears streaming down her cheeks. He wished he knew what was going on with her.

Justin was talking to her, so Raymond turned to Maria, who lay on her side on a pillow, wearing a flared skirt, black tights, a black turtleneck, and African trading beads. Her long dark hair concealed half her face. “For God's sake, sit down, Raymond,” she ordered. “You look as though you're about to run the mile.”

He looked down at himself—one knee raised, forearms resting on thighs. His father and uncles and cousins squatted this way on the porches and in the yards of Tatro Cove. The men in the mill village squatted like this at ball games and picnics. Blushing, he sat down. He'd worked on his drawl, his rayon shirts and reindeer sweater vests, his bigoted attitudes, but reminders of his origins were always taking him by surprise. Fortunately, no one here but Emily and himself would have recognized the Country Store Squat

And Emily was too wrapped up in what Justin was saying, “Justice … crackers … brotherhood of man … struggle … equality… rednecks …”

Raymond wondered if he should shave off his beard, leaving a Pancho Villa mustache like Justin's. It made him look fierce. Raymond felt he could use some fierceness. Combing his beard with his fingers, he watched Justin turn his profile to Emily and gaze with steely eyes into the farthest reaches of the loft, as though at the future he was pledged to usher in. A cigarette hung from his lips. Emily craned her neck trying to meet Justin's eyes. Maria had once told Justin that he had a heroic profile. And he did—with his narrowed eyes, hollow cheeks, and straight nose. Now he took every opportunity to display it.

Emily was murmuring, “Oh-really-you-don't-say-how-very-interesting-aren't-you-wonderful.” Raymond caught her eye and received a faint wry smile that gave him the creeps. She'd done this with him for years—nursed his ego, a skill from her mother and from his own sister-in-law, the lovely Lady Sally of the cotton-candy hair. Like bicycle pumps, they'd inflate their men to weather-balloon size and then roll them out the door to face the world. But Emily would have to eradicate this slavish Southern Belle in herself if she was going to make it with FORWARD. Straightforwardness and utter equality were the qualities FORWARD valued and nurtured. He frowned at Emily, hoping to convey this.

Maria yelled, “Aw, bullshit, Justin! You're full of crap!” Now there was a woman for you—a woman who said what she meant and meant what she said. An intelligent woman, a politicized woman, a strong, courageous, independent woman. He hadn't known such women existed, after a lifetime of watching his mother stand behind his father's chair at meals. Maria terrified him, but she also excited him as no woman ever had. He hoped Emily would get to know her, spend some time with her, shed some of the attitudes Newland had burdened her with—just as being around Justin had helped him shed his own crippling attitudes.

Justin and Maria were arguing about Democratic Centralism. Raymond wasn't exactly sure what that meant. He read the books everyone had recommended. Last night he'd stared interminably at the sentence, “Each thing is a combination of contraries because it is made up of elements which, although linked together, at the same time eliminate one another.” And he'd come close to going crazy trying to understand it. Yet the others could argue for hours about its ramifications. Either something was wrong with his brain, or the others were on a higher mental plane because of having been to college.

On the other hand, he did understand some things. For instance, he knew that Maria and Justin had been lovers and were splitting up. He knew the former by the glances they used to exchange, the latter by the ferocity of their current ideological disputes. Raymond reflected that if you grew up among hypocrites, you learned to ignore the stated content of a conversation, and instead to study facial expressions and gestures and the feeling tone of words.

Morris sauntered in wearing overalls and a wool undershirt and drawled to the group at large, “Hey, baby how you making it?” He had bushy black hair and glasses with tinted lenses. Raymond was surprised to realize how little he knew about Morris—only that he was a graduate assistant in political science at NYU. Presumably every member of FORWARD had a complicated life beyond the confines of this room, but Raymond knew only what they all looked like here and what they said during meetings and project work. He liked this situation just fine. In his experience, the more he knew about a person, the less he wished to know. The closer he got to people, the more they resembled the people he'd grown up among in Newland.

Morris slapped Ralph's palm. “Ralph! My man!” Then he squatted behind Maria, blew in her ear, and kissed her cheek. Gazing at Justin defiantly, he put his arm around her, his hand molding a breast. Justin glared back, then focused resolutely on Emily.

Maria, jabbing Morris in the stomach with her elbow, snarled, “Get stuffed, creep.”

Morris, laughing, sat down next to Bud, a short squat man in army fatigues and an olive Eisenhower jacket. He had no neck and a red face, looked like an olive stuffed with a pimento. He kept passing around an agenda which no one would read. Some nights meetings never happened because anyone who tried to call them to order was accused of perpetrating a “cult of personality.” Raymond really admired FORWARD'S determination to do away with hierarchy.

Morris yelled to Maria and Justin, “OK, you two, shut up. Now what about this fund-raising statement?”

Justin looked up. “Do you mind, Morris? I was in the middle of a sentence.”

“Mind? Hell no, Justin. I should mind if we're here all night while you finish your sentence?” He folded his arms.

Five minutes later Justin concluded his sentence and asked, “All right. What is it we need, guys?”

The room fell silent Morris's face colored. Raymond wasn't sure why.

“We need a statement of purpose,” explained Bud, “for a grant application that's due tomorrow.”

Raymond studied the breast that Morris had fondled. Maria raised her eyes and caught him. Rather than look away, he forced himself to let his eyes linger, then slowly raised them to hers. A faint smile played around the corners of her mouth.

Raymond realized he was letting personal preoccupations interfere with his politics. He tried to concentrate on Morris: “… our role should be primarily that of a channel of support and communication among groups that have arisen from the direct action of the people themselves, working to alter the status quo in the South, that could serve to solidify evolving societal patterns, and simultaneously …”

“I'm not following you, Morris,” Raymond muttered.

“That's because you weren't listening,” Maria announced. “You were staring at my tit”

Everyone laughed. Raymond blushed. Justin looked at him, then turned his profile to Maria. Raymond hadn't suspected until that moment that Justin could feel threatened by him. What a bizarre thought. Justin was everything Raymond hoped to be, once he'd re-educated himself.

“Shit, Southerners can't grasp anything that isn't couched in a Br'er Rabbit tale. They got cornmeal mush for brains,” snarled Morris.

Raymond realized this was probably true. You asked Justin or Morris a question, and you got back statistics, or a quote. You asked Emily or him a question, and you got an interminable anecdote involving several generations, like an Old Testament chapter. He only hoped his condition was curable. He vowed to memorize some of the statistics he'd been reading.