The Bay at Midnight (12 page)

Julie
1962

G
randpop and I were in competition. We stood a few yards from each other behind the fence in our backyard, the morning sun in our eyes and our fishing poles in our hands as we waited to see which of us could catch the biggest edible fish. I was wearing my purple one-piece bathing suit and after spending a few weeks in the summer sun, my skin was as dark as my grandmother’s. Grandpop was still pretty pale. He never seemed to tan. He wore his usual brown pants—he must have had six pairs of them—and a white short-sleeved shirt and sandals. I’d never seen him go barefoot.

By the time we’d been out there for half an hour, I’d caught absolutely nothing, while Grandpop had reeled in two blowfish, which we considered less than nothing because they were too
dangerous to eat. Their organs contained a deadly toxin, and after Grandpop tossed the second blowfish back into the canal, I came up with a plot for an intriguing mystery: The colored fishermen on the other side of the canal would begin dying, collapsing right there in the reeds, and it would turn out they’d been poisoned by the Rooster Man, who had fed them fried blowfish livers. I loved the idea and nursed the story along in my mind as we fished.

After what seemed like a very long time, I felt something good and strong tug at my line. I reeled it in, only to discover a hideous sea robin on my hook. Grandpop couldn’t stop himself from laughing. There was nothing uglier in the universe than a sea robin, with its long bony fins poking out all over its body. I grimaced, watching the fish sway back and forth on my line. I was not squeamish, but the thought of holding on to that spiny creature while taking it off the hook was not pleasant.

“I bet Ethan would like that sea robin,” Grandpop said, nodding toward the Chapmans’ yard.

I looked over to see Ethan sitting in the sand, a huge pile of mussels in front of him. I had not even realized he was outside.

“Hey, Ethan,” I called.

He looked up, the sun reflecting off his glasses so that I couldn’t see his eyes.

“You want this sea robin?” I held my pole in the air, the fish flapping its tail and winglike fins.

“Keen!” Ethan said. He picked up a blue bucket from the sand and walked over to where Grandpop and I were standing.

“You have to take it off the hook,” I said.

“Okay.” Ethan seemed undeterred. He took the rag I’d stuck
in the chain-link fence, grasped the fish with it, and extracted the hook with an ease I couldn’t help but admire. He looked at me, grinning as though I’d given him a chocolate bar. “Thanks,” he said. He dropped the fish in his bucket and walked back to his yard.

Grandpop and I began fishing again. We were tired of standing, though, so we pulled two of the Adirondack chairs close to the fence and sat down. I put my bare feet against the fence and slumped down into the chair, feeling very comfortable and at peace with the world.

“Looks like we’re on the wrong side of the canal,” Grandpop said after a while.

“What do you mean?” I followed his focus across the canal to where the colored people were fishing.

“I’ve seen them reel in a few keepers over there,” he said.

“Oh, they’re probably just catching blowfish, too,” I said. “Daddy said colored people eat them ’cause they don’t know any better.”

My grandfather stared straight ahead, not speaking for a minute. “Charles said that, huh?” he asked finally.

I nodded. “He said they’re not as smart as us. And they’re poor, so they have to eat whatever they can.”

There was a long silence that I didn’t recognize as anything out of the ordinary until Grandpop spoke again.

“Did it ever occur to you that, if they
do
eat blowfish, which I doubt, it might be because they’re actually
smarter
than we are? Maybe they know how to avoid the poisonous part. Maybe we’re the stupid, wasteful ones.”

There was a serious tone in his voice that was rare for my grandfather. “I don’t think Daddy would agree with that,” I said.

“Did you know that I lived in Mississippi until I was your age?” Grandpop asked me.

“I thought you grew up in Westfield,” I said.

“I didn’t move to New Jersey until I was fourteen,” he said. “When I was a boy, we lived with my mother’s family in Mississippi. We had a housekeeper and she had a son my age. He was my best friend. Willie was his name, and he was colored.”

“Your best friend?” I said, amazed. I couldn’t imagine it. I had never even spoken to a colored person.

Grandpop nodded, smiling. “Willie and I had some good times together,” he said. “We lived near a lake and we’d fish and swim and explore. But he couldn’t go to my school because of segregation.”

I nodded. I knew what segregation was, even though it was easy not to think about it in Westfield, since every single person I knew there was white.

“His school was far inferior to mine,” Grandpop said. “Willie was just as smart as me—smarter in some things—but he didn’t have a chance. And here’s the worst thing.” He shook his head and I leaned closer to his chair, wanting to catch every word of the “worst thing.”

“One time he and I went into the town near our houses. We were only eight or nine and we decided we wanted to buy some candy. But coloreds weren’t allowed in the store.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said.

“Of course it’s not fair,” Grandpop agreed. “So I went in the store—it was a general store, I guess you’d call it. And I bought a bag of candy for a few cents and took it outside and Willie and I sat on the curb and ate it. Then he had to go to the bathroom really bad. The store had a privy behind it. An outhouse.
But there was a sign on it that said No Coloreds, so Willie couldn’t use it. So, I went into the store and asked the lady at the counter if she would make an exception, since he was just a kid and had to go real bad, but she wouldn’t allow it. We went to another store, and they wouldn’t let him use their privy either. He ended up wetting his pants.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling sorry for Grandpop’s little friend.

“And then a man came and started smacking Willie around, calling him names, saying that’s why…” Grandpop hesitated a moment and I had the feeling he was going to clean up the man’s language for my ears. “He said that’s why Negroes weren’t allowed in nice places, because they soiled themselves and such.You can just imagine how humiliating that experience was for Willie.”

It was an awful tale. I thought about how it would feel to be prohibited from entering the little corner store where I rode my bike to buy penny candy. I imagined a sign on the door that read No White Children Allowed. I imagined feeling desperate to pee and not being allowed in.

But I felt uncomfortable about the conversation, because Grandpop was telling me—not straight out, but he was telling me just the same—that my father was wrong. That he was prejudiced. My father was such a good and admirable person. It was hard for me to reconcile the man I loved and respected with a bigot.

“Dad wouldn’t ever…you know, tell a little boy who needed to use the bathroom that he couldn’t,” I said, desperately wanting my grandfather to agree with me.

Grandpop smiled at me. “You’re right about that,” he said. “Your daddy’s a fair man. But he’s really had no experience with colored people, so he just doesn’t know any better than to say
what he said. People are prejudiced mostly because they don’t know any better.”

I felt relieved. For a minute, I’d been afraid that Grandpop didn’t like my father.

“Do you know that a lot of people thought your grandmother wasn’t as good as they were when she was growing up here in New Jersey?” he asked. “They thought she was stupid.”

“Why?” I asked, perplexed. “She’s not colored.”

“She’s Italian. She didn’t speak perfect English. To some people, that’s considered even worse than being colored.”

I thought I was lucky to have an Italian grandmother. She was sweet to my friends and she cooked fantastic lasagna and made cookies at Christmastime with almond flavoring or rose water. It was hard to imagine anyone not loving her.

I suddenly got another tug on my line, this one nearly pulling the pole out of my hands. Grandpop tucked his pole beneath his chair to hold it in place and came over to help me.

“You’ve got a good one this time, Julie,” he said.

He held the pole as steady as he could while I reeled in the biggest fluke I had ever seen come out of the canal. I was whooping and hollering, jumping up and down as the fish sprang out of the water and we pulled it over the fence and onto the sand. It flopped from its flat, brown, two-eyed side to its white side and back again, and Grandma and Mom came out of the house to see what the fuss was all about. Lucy came out, too, but hung back near the porch door, afraid of the fish or the hook or the water. It was anyone’s guess.

Mom and Grandma watched as Grandpop held the fluke and I carefully extracted the hook.

“He’s a beaut,” my mother said.

“You win, Julie,” Grandpop said, as I dropped the fish into our bucket. It was nearly too big to fit. “I’m going to go clean it right this minute.” That was the loser’s task, to clean the catch.

I felt satisfied with myself as I watched my grandparents and mother walk back toward the house, but all of a sudden, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned and there stood Ethan, just a few feet away from me.

“That’s the most gargantuan fluke I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Can I have its guts?”

The next morning, I was sitting on the bulkhead, using binoculars to watch the boats bobbing and weaving in the rough water beneath the Lovelandtown Bridge. Grandpop had not only cleaned what he continually referred to as the “biggest fluke ever caught in the Intercoastal Waterway,” but he gave me a pair of binoculars, as well.

“I’ve been saving them to give you for a special occasion,” he said. “But I think catching that fish was pretty special.”

I guessed it was my conversation with Grandpop that made me turn the binoculars on the colored fishermen across the canal. That’s when I saw the girl. She was standing close to the dock that separated the fishing area from the Rooster Man’s shack, and she was bending over, doing something with her pole, baiting the hook, perhaps. How old was she? I studied her hard, turning the little dial on the binoculars to try to bring her into better focus. I couldn’t see what she looked like very well, but she was my age, I felt sure of it.

I went into the garage and grabbed my fishing pole and bait knife, took one of the boxes of squid out of the refrigerator, hopped in the runabout and motored across the canal before I
had a chance to think about what I was doing. I pulled into the dock near the girl. I felt nervous, but a little excited, too. Maybe she would have a sense of adventure. Maybe she could become my friend, the way Willie had been my grandfather’s friend. I was so tired of being by myself.

I tied the runabout to the ladder at the side of the dock, then climbed up to the bulkhead with my pole and my bucket, the binoculars still around my neck. There were six people all together. Near me were my hoped-for future friend, an older boy, a woman—probably their mother—and a distance away, three men. Every one of them turned to stare at me. All those black faces. I felt like I’d gotten out of my boat in Africa. I had never felt so white and out of place in all my life.

I had to force my legs to take the few steps to where the girl was standing.

“Hi!” I said to her, my voice far too loud and cheery. “What’s biting?”

The girl stared at me blankly as though she didn’t understand English. Her skin was very dark and she had large eyes in the same deep shade of brown. Her hair had a bunch of plastic barrettes in it, all of them shaped like little bows in different colors. She was shorter than me and maybe a little younger than I’d guessed. I thought she was cute, but she sure didn’t seem to have much to say and my greeting just hung there in the hot July air.

The older boy standing next to the girl narrowed his eyes at me.

“What
you
doin’ over here?” he asked.

“I just wanted to fish on this side of canal for a change,” I said with a nervous smile.

“We got enough trouble catchin’ fish for ourselves without you taking up space,” the boy said.

“Hush, George,” the woman said, moving closer and resting her hand on the boy’s muscular forearm. “I’m Salena,” she said. “What’s your name, sugar?”

“Nancy,” I lied. I looked at the girl who was close to my age. “What’s your name?”

“Wanda,” the girl said. Her voice was high and it rose up a little on the second syllable of her name.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eleven,” she said. I could barely
remember
being eleven, but I guessed it was close enough.

“I’m twelve,” I said. “Could I fish here next to you for a while?”

“’Spose,” she said.

“What you using for bait, Nancy?” Salena asked.

“Squid,” I said, reaching into my bucket. I cut off a bit of bait with my knife and ran my hook through it, my hands shaking the whole time. “What do you use?” I directed my question to Wanda.

“Bloodworms,” she said.

“I use them sometimes, too.” I baited my hook and cast carefully, not wanting to catch the hook in any of their heads and have them madder at me than they already seemed to be. Their hair was really different from mine. Salena and Wanda had stiff-looking hair even blacker than Isabel’s. Wanda’s stuck out from her barrettes in little pigtails all over her head. I couldn’t see the men very well because they were quite a distance from me, but George’s hair was extremely wiry and tight to his head. He was wearing a white T-shirt and baggy tan pants and he looked
like he played a lot of sports, every bit of him thick and shiny with perspiration.

“Can you read?” I asked Wanda.

“’Course she can read.” George scowled. “You think we pick cotton all day or something?”

“Shut up,” Wanda said to George. Then to me, she said, “Sure I can read.”

“Have you read any Nancy Drew books?” I asked.

“Some,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I believed her. “Do you have a favorite?” I was testing her, unable to picture a colored girl reading Nancy Drew. I wondered what it was like to be colored and read a book entirely filled with white people. For that matter, what was it like for Wanda to read just about any book or watch any TV show? The only one I could think of with a colored person in it was Jack Benny’s show with Rochester, the butler, or whatever he was.