Tender at the Bone (17 page)

“That man is in love with you,” my mother said the first time she met Mac. He had driven to the airport to pick my parents up when they visited in my junior year.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You just can’t imagine that a Negro man would want to be my friend. He’s never even kissed me!”

That was true. Nevertheless, we were inseparable. Serafina had introduced me to Mac, who was the gentlest man I’d ever met and the easiest to talk to. At first we hung out in groups, but as other people paired off we began to spend a lot of time together just as friends. Even in those days of civil rights marches and antiwar sit-ins we must have seemed a strange couple. I was pale and plump with masses of curly black hair. He was skinny and very black and, as my mother wasted no time in pointing out, seemed to be missing a great number of teeth.

Mac had come to Michigan on a track scholarship, but as far as I could tell he had no interest in sports. By the time I met him he was a graduate student in psychology, working at the state hospital
with disturbed children. It was whispered around that he had the ability to make autistic children talk. I don’t know if this was really true, but I never doubted it; he was a quiet person with a voice so gentle you instinctively answered every question he asked.

“People are a gas,” Mac said, and meant it. He moonlighted as a garbageman while he was in graduate school, and he even managed to love that job. “It’s so interesting what you can find out from what people throw away,” he said. “Besides, the pay’s good and the hours are short.”

Mac opened a whole new world to me. My parents had taken me traveling abroad, but now I discovered another country here at home. We’d drive around town in his comfortable black 1955 Cadillac listening to the Soul Preacher on the radio; the music sounded like everything that I’d been feeling but didn’t know how to say. Mac liked all kinds of music but it was the blues that really made me shiver with happiness. Later, after I knew him better, we’d drive to Detroit, stop at his friend’s house to get a joint, and then eat sweets and greens and fried chicken as if there weren’t enough food in the world to fill us up.

It was Mac who first made me think about the way food brought people together—and kept them apart. When we went to a blues club in Chicago a policeman stopped us as we were walking back to the car and told us to get off the street before we started a race riot. In South Bend, Indiana, we discovered that the coffee shops wouldn’t serve a mixed-race couple. And Mac’s favorite tavern in Ann Arbor was a funky place called Clint’s with a sign over the scarred wooden bar that read
THIS IS ONE OF TWO BARS IN TOWN WHICH BELONGS TO US. PLEASE GIVE IT YOUR RESPECT
.

To reach Clint’s much-mended door you had to pass a pool hall. Men spilled onto the sidewalk with their cue sticks, smoking cigarettes, punching at each other and whistling at the white girls on their way to the bar. Clint’s was notoriously careless about checking identification, which was one reason for its popularity with students.
The other reason was Washboard Willie, who played four nights a week.

When Washboard played, the black women would dance around him as if their bodies had no bones and the white girls, fueled on sweet things with silly names—Black Russians were particularly popular—would try to imitate them.

I was so intrigued by Clint’s that I decided to write a paper about it for my sociology class. “Clint’s, Study of An Integrated Local Bar” gave me a fine excuse to spend all my nights sitting in a bar. And when my parents came to town, they came along.

My mother’s first encounter was with Claritha, a woman who proudly wore a carrot-red wig. She was so large that her breasts shook every time she moved her head, knocking together. It was impossible to keep your eyes off them. Mom watched the breasts moving beneath the tattered beige Orlon sweater as Claritha told her what a fine daughter she had. Without getting up from the table Claritha shimmied to Washboard’s music and the movement beneath her sweater intensified.

Dad seemed to be enjoying it all, but Mom was not reassured. “Wait until you taste Claritha’s chicken!” I cried. Claritha claimed to make the world’s finest fried chicken and it had taken a lot of beer to extract the entire recipe.

“Let me get this straight,” I’d say, buying her another shell of beer. “You pack the chicken in rock salt as soon as you get it home from the store and leave it like that overnight?”

“That’s right, girl.” She nodded.

“Then you take it out of the salt and put it in a pan of buttermilk?”

“You got to cover that bird completely!” she said.

“And then you flour each piece and leave it to dry?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, as if she were in church.

I did all that, hoping it would be as good as she said. Because I was cooking with an agenda: after dinner Serafina and I planned to
ask a favor of my parents. We wanted to borrow their New York apartment for the summer.

They both said yes immediately. If they had known what was coming, they would probably have reconsidered.

CLARITHA’S FRIED CHICKEN

2½- to 3-pound chicken, cut up

Salt

3 cups buttermilk

2 onions, sliced thin

1 cup flour

3 teaspoons kosher salt

½ teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 teaspoon cracked black peppercorns

1 cup vegetable shortening

¼ cup butter

Put chicken pieces in bowl and cover with salt. Let sit for 2 hours
.

Remove chicken from salt, wash well, and put into a bowl with buttermilk and sliced onions. Cover and refrigerate overnight
.

Place flour, salt, cayenne, and black pepper in paper bag and shake to combine. Drain chicken one piece at a time and put in bag. Shake to coat thoroughly. Place on waxed paper. Repeat until all chicken pieces are coated
.

Leave for ½ hour to dry out and come to room temperature
.

Melt shortening and butter in large skillet over high heat, add chicken pieces, and cover pan. Lower heat and cook 10 minutes. Turn and cook, uncovered, 8 minutes for breasts, 12 minutes for dark meat
.

Test for doneness by piercing thigh; juices should run clear
.

Serves 4
.

“I forgot the apartment wasn’t air-conditioned,” I apologized in early July. Serafina and I were sitting by the open window hoping for a breeze. Way down Tenth Street and across the river we could see the Maxwell House Coffee sign blinking on and off. “My parents never stay here in the summer.”

“It’s okay,” she said. She put her face up to catch the last rays of the sun and added, “It’s so cold and dark in that bar I feel like I’m walking into a deep-freeze every time I go to work.”

“Lucky you,” I said. “The whole South Bronx feels like an inferno. It’s so hot that the tar sticks to your shoes when you cross the street and every time I see a fistfight I expect to see flames. What made me think I wanted to be a social worker?”

The Community Service Society on Tremont Avenue was the most depressing place I’d ever been. Every morning I’d hop onto the subway feeling young and optimistic. “This is the Bright D train,” the conductor welcomed me as the doors closed. “Next stop, Thirty-fourth Street.” By the time I came back to the subway station all the good feelings had gone up into the thick Bronx air and I felt grubby and filled with despair. “Brighton D train,” intoned the conductor. How could I help any of these people?

My favorite client, Mrs. Forest, was small, pretty, and just my age. But at nineteen she already had three children. Crystal, the oldest, was six. I tried to feel what it must have been like to be pregnant at twelve, but my imagination failed. While I was learning French and finishing high school she was getting married and having children. “When I tol’ my husband I was going to have her”—she nodded toward baby Charisse—“he disappeared. He didn’t even tell his mama good-bye.”

Mrs. Forest still had dreams; she wanted to be a nurse’s aid.
Smoothing back an errant strand of straightened hair, she said, “But how am I goin’ to get a job till my girls are all in school?” I wondered if her dream would last five years; trudging through the South Bronx with three kids took its toll. So did watching men bleed to death while you waited to see a doctor. I knew.

My job was to be as helpful as I could, to assist clients as they navigated the endless welfare bureaucracy. Like the other students in the summer intern program I was seeing things I had only read about before. There was Ben, a deaf nine-year-old whose parents had not thought to send him to school. We talked about wrestling as I took him through the empty, echoing building so it would be familiar in the fall when he finally started classes. I accompanied a pair of aged sisters with Parkinson’s disease to hospital appointments and a fourteen-year-old girl with no right hand to be fitted for a prosthesis. I liked most of these people and admired their courage.

But Mrs. Williams was the other side of the coin; every time I climbed the five flights to her apartment my most closely-held beliefs were challenged. A large sloppy woman who wore slippers, her stockings rolled just above her ankles, she had eight children by eight different men. They seemed to be struggling to raise themselves with very little help from her. The apartment was so filthy that dirty diapers littered the floor and rats cavorted in the grease in the pans on the stove. I cleared pathways through the debris, made doctor’s appointments for the children, and tried to explain to Mrs. Williams why each pregnancy made her poorer. “But my check gets bigger,” she’d say, shaking her head at my stupidity.

Mrs. Forest, on the other hand, understood the situation perfectly. “No man is every getting in my pants again,” she said. “I don’t want no more children.” She kept her small, bare apartment spotless and her children in line. When she said, “Go get the switch,” they didn’t argue. Sometimes on the subway Crystal and Janisse would talk about whether the belt or the extension cord
hurt more, but after a few stops they’d be overcome by sheer excitement and go completely silent. Until I met them they had never left the Bronx, and each excursion to Manhattan was as exciting as a trek through the Himalayas.

“They certainly did love that buildin’,” said Mrs. Forest when I brought them back from the Empire State Building. Manhattan was as exotic to her as it was to her children; I asked if she wanted to come with us when we went to the Statue of Liberty.

She said she would think about it and never mentioned it again. But a week later when I climbed the four dark flights to their apartment the whole family was waiting on the dreary landing.

Mrs. Forest didn’t say much and on the subway she silently hugged the baby. The children were subdued in her presence and as I struggled to make cheerful small talk I began to wish I hadn’t brought her. Then, as we boarded the ferry, her face changed. She stood in front, leaning into the breeze as the boat left the slip. She looked like an exotic figurehead.

“It doesn’t cost a lot,” she said, looking back at the city and then across to the statue. I knew she was thinking of her small, stifling apartment. “It’s so cool and fresh,” she kept repeating. When it was time to get off the boat she clutched the baby and said shyly, “Is it okay if I just keep ridin’?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll take the girls up to the top of the statue.” I wondered whether it would embarrass her if I gave her a handful of nickels. She didn’t give me a chance. “Janisse,” she said sternly, grabbing the five-year-old’s arm, “you remember what I told you? One drop of mustard on that dress and you’ll get a whippin’ when you get home.” And she waded fiercely into the crowd going back to Manhattan.

The line for the statue snaked around the pedestal and the girls fidgeted while we waited. It was hot. When we got inside they insisted on walking all the way to the crown. We followed the crowd winding its way slowly up the narrow metal stairs and when we
reached the top, finally, Crystal looked down at the ferries crisscrossing the harbor and asked, “Which one do you think Mama and Charisse are on?” She squinted into the light dappling the water and said, “It looks like they’re riding on diamonds.” We watched the water for a while and then turned and walked down the steep steps. Janisse clutched my legs fearfully the whole way.