This Side of Brightness (12 page)

Eleanor laughs. “A boy by tobacco spit.”

“And a good load of it, too!”

“You really think it's a boy?”

“It don't matter to me none,” says Walker. “It can be a kangaroo for all I care.”

“Hopping all over Harlem.”

“Hopping and skipping and dancing.”

“Y'ever get that feeling?” she asks as he rubs her shoulders. “That feeling that when you walk down the street their eyes are ripping you up? You know? When you walk past and you feel like they've just sliced you? Like they've got these razor blades in their eyes.”

“Welcome to the real world, hon.”

“All of us are supposed to be created in the image of God.”

“Maybe so, hon, but even God's gotta take a shit every now and then. Even God's gotta wipe His ass like the rest of us.”

“Nathan! That's sacrilege.”

“No less true, sacrilegious or not.”

“You know what?” she says, after a moment. “That man in the shop wouldn't let me try on a hat.”

“Holy Name! That's only the tip of the iceberg. It gets worse. It gets to be a routine. It gets so's you think it's normal. It gets so you think God is just shittin' on down every minute of the day. Like He's gone and got Himself a bad case of diarrhea. Like it's just raining on down from His ass.”

“Nathan!”

“Well, it's just the truth. Y'all ever heard that song? Bill Broonzy.”

And he sings: Lord, I'm so lowdown, baby, I declare I'm looking up at down.

He stops. “That's us, baby, looking up at down.”

She unwinds a thread from the bottom of her dress, wraps it around her finger, and then snaps it off. “I want my child to be able to buy hats,” she says.

“He can buy all the hats he wants. He can even borrow mine.”

“Come here,” she says.

“What?”

“Kiss me.”

Walker leans to kiss her, and with her forefinger, she smudges some of the cream on his nose. “No son of mine is gonna wear that thing,” she whispers. “No daughter neither. It's horrendous.”

“I believe even God Hisself got one of these hats.”

“Listen to you!”

Two months later Clarence Walker is born at home, greeted by a string of rosary beads. Eleanor allows the Catholic ritual for her mother's sake.

Maura O'Leary is the midwife. Lately she has allowed the gray hair to amass on her head. She is fifty-one years old and has only three months left to live; already her lungs seem to have migrated from her chest, weighted down with so much phlegm. She carries a number of large handkerchiefs and, embarrassed, she drops the phlegm into them, closing the cloth as if sealing a vital letter. Almost blind, her eyeglasses have acrobatic twists of plastic at the edges and thick lenses between them. Yet Maura's sickness has given her a strength and a quiet tolerance—she will die in a fit of coughing in a hospital bed, screaming at the nurses that her son-in-law should be allowed to come to the bedside. The nurses will say no, they cannot fathom a Negro at any white woman's dying bed. She will rant and rave in the immaculate bedsheets, and she will die with a whispered curse on her lips for the nurses.

But, right now, she wipes a washcloth across her daughter's brow and says, “He's a fine strap of a child, girl, a fine young strap.”

Ancestry steps through Clarence in colorful swaths—he has light cinnamon-colored skin and tufts of rude red hair on his head.

The women take turns holding him until Nathan Walker comes into the room. Walker winks at his wife as he places the red hat on the boy's head.

“Don't do that!” says Eleanor, sitting up in bed.

“What?”

“Take that thing off his head!”

Laughing, he removes the hat, wraps the baby in a sweater, and bears him proudly down the street in his arms—past vendors of pig's knuckles and rice, past women eating tania roots on doorsteps, past boys playing stickball in a vacant gray lot, past bored men in caps leaning against light poles. On a corner he waves to some well-dressed men who are signing up soldiers for the struggle in Ethiopia. Nearby, four men look up from their game of dominoes, and Walker grins at them. They smile back. On an outside stoop of a brownstone he nods to a young girl whose voice is in mourning for the fields of Alabama.

“Sing on,” he tells her.

Further along the street a yellow Cadillac overtakes a low-slung Packard. A man leans out the Packard window and stares as Walker goes by. Walker is aware of all the whispers but he swings his body, big and threatening in the sunlight, all the way down to the corner shop, where he browses in the aisles for a long time, buys two bunches of nasturtiums to bring home for the ladies. A five-dollar bill is pulled crinkled from his overalls. The shopowner, Ration Rollins, tugs at a shirtsleeve garter and doesn't even look in Walker's eyes. He lays the change down on the counter and turns away, blowing air from his bottom lip up to his gray hair. With his back turned, Rollins starts arranging cigarettes that need no arrangement.

“And a block of ice,” says Walker. He throws the change on the counter and adds, “To cool yourself down.”

He tucks the flowers under one arm, the baby in the other, and leaves the shop with his head thrown back in laughter. He whispers to the baby, “Clarence Walker, you are so goddamn handsome!”

But behind some conspiratorial windows he is indicted for carrying something that doesn't rightly belong to him: most red-haired nigger child I've ever seen.

*   *   *

Two more children follow in '36 and '37, both girls, Deirdre and Maxine. Eleanor fits the girls in a pram, and the boy walks beside her, holding her hand. They go to the park: soiled swans on a small brown lake; a seller of chestnuts; a man in a bow tie proclaiming the love and scholarship of Marcus Garvey; a row of schoolgirls, amazed, bent over the baby carriage; other mothers smiling at Eleanor, coming over to ruffle the strange texture of the children's hair. But Eleanor sometimes feels uncomfortable. Mostly it is the whites—the cops and the shopowners—who stare at her. At times she finds shade, sits under a tree in the park for hours. Or decides to walk with the kids late in the evening, in the approaching darkness, a head scarf on. She is most fully at ease in these moments of aloneness.

As night falls on Harlem, she closes the curtains and climbs into bed beside Walker while their children sleep. She runs her fingers along his tired shoulder blades.

Two nights a month the fortune-teller looks after the babies and Eleanor joins Walker at Loews Seventh Avenue theater, a cinema for Coloreds. Her husband arrives early—after clocking off from the tunnels—and Eleanor tiptoes down the steps to find him. When she gets to Walker's row of seats, she puts her finger to the lips of an old black man, who stares at her, astonished, as she moves past. The old man touches her hand and smiles. “Go on ahead, ma'am.”

She returns his smile, shoves her way along the row toward her husband.

Darkness hides them, an illicit love affair being made out of their own marriage.

They sit rigidly until the lights are turned off and the music sounds out. Then they drape their jackets over the seats and melt down into the soft red velvet. Walker rubs his wife's wedding ring finger, lifts her hand, tongues along her knuckles. The titles flash away from the screen; it is 1939 and Don Ameche is stepping out in the film
Swanee River.
Walker whispers that one day he will take his four-year-old son down there, to the country of his own youth. He wants the boy to know what it feels like to take a boat through swamp water, to skim under trees of hanging moss, to turn a corner and avoid a sleeping alligator, to come, amazed, upon a flock of dancing cranes. When he speaks of Georgia, Walker sounds as if he has swallowed its rivers and mud in gulps. Eleanor lets the dream seep out of him. She's aware that if the child was taken south, both father and son might just end up like the Spanish moss, swinging from the limb of a tree. In Tennessee recently they lynched a man by hammering nails between the bones in his wrists and feet, nailed him to a bough of a tree, just like Jesus, except Jesus at least had the dignity of a solar eclipse and there probably weren't any buzzards in Jerusalem to eat the swinging carcass.

“You should go,” she says, not meaning it, saying it only for the sake of his brief pleasure.

“Georgia,” he says, as if it's her name.

Eleanor takes the head scarf off and her hair falls and she lets Walker's breath caress her ear, his tongue against her lobe, and she closes her eyes to the images on the screen:
Howilovya, howilovya, my dear ol' Swanee.

They sink down in their seats and, instead of their bodies, they send their minds out to roam.

*   *   *

“We had a canoe, see. And the swamp had all these tall cypress trees what y'all never see in New York. They blocked out most of the light. And I went out looking for Spanish moss. Paddling away. It was nice out there. Quiet. Dark. Lots of water lilies and tree stumps and all. Sometimes I'd be paddling along and I'd turn that paddle and it was like some hand just came out of the water and turned me. Front end swinging and back staying the same. And sometimes you'd be feeling like you was spinning in the center of the world. Flipping the paddle sideways and pushing against the flow.

Anyways, I weren't much beyond ten years of age. I stood in the center of that boat, feet even spaced, and reached up to take the moss from the trees. Filled the back of the canoe. Then the boat'd drift past the tree and I'd kneel down on the wooden slats, take the canoe in a circle. I had good arms for a kid. I coulda stood under the same cypress all day long and grabbed all the moss I wanted, but I liked that game. Return. Collection. Return. Collection. I'd go home at night and lumber that moss up the road in sacks. Y'all's grandmomma, she'd dry the plants for weeks in the sun, hang them from the top of our porch. Then she'd take old shirts and make pillowcases from them, stuff the cases with moss.

When I lied awake at night I could put my nose to the pillow and smell the swamp and, Lord, if it didn't move with me in my dreams.

That summer I found myself the skull of a gator shored up between two fallen logs. It musta died and been washed downriver. In that part of the swamp, there was all these trees been shattered by lightning and wild muscadines and vultures sitting on the branches, flapping they wings and getting rid of lice and insects like they do. Now don't be scared, 'cause it wasn't scary. The boat rocked in the water. The sun was going down. I made a circle and went on back, leaned over the side of the boat, picked up that skull, poked it a few times to see if there be any cottonmouths sleeping in it. Then I grabbed that skull and threw it to the back of the boat, where it landed and looked like it was grinning. Then I paddled like hell. The skitters were out and they was biting. I lit a branch with lots of resin at the top, went through the swamp, holding the branch. Lord, it was beautiful. But when I got home, was your grandmomma ever mad! She was waiting on the porch, a switch in her hand. I tried to go on past her, but she went grabbed me by the back of my shirt, told me to bend over, and then whupped me good. At the dinner table she told me to wipe the grin off my face, that a boy when he's whupped should act like a whupped boy. But ya see, while I was in my boat, I'd gone shoved moss in the back of my pants. So I didn't feel a thing!

That night, she came into my bedroom. The skull of the gator was sat on my bed. She stood looking at it. She smiled her big smile. And then she reached underneath her apron and took out some moss.

Y'all left this in the outhouse, she said to me.

And then she just left me there, with that big load of moss, scratching my head. That was your grandmomma; she was a fine woman.

Now y'all's grandpa, I didn't know him much—he went to heaven when I was a little boy—but, story is, he could go underwater and hypnotize a gator. The gator'd be just lying there in the sun. And he'd swim underneath the water and stroke the belly of the gator, and that gator would get sleepy like the sleepiest little boy. And sometimes he put his hat on the sleepy gator's head, and soon everyone'd go off to sleep together all hush hush hush, right off to sleep like the sleepiest little boy.”

*   *   *

Walker carves his children's initials on his shovel and carries it down to Riverside Park with him. He doesn't dig anymore, just puts the finishing touches on the grouting of the railway tunnel—a high, wide tunnel meant for freight trains—but he keeps the shovel with him as a reminder of the ability of miracles.

Eleanor gets an afternoon shift in a defense plant. Sometimes she brings home a couple of bullets for Walker's favorite trick. He tells the children the history of the trick, and the history of it exaggerates itself. But, when Walker demonstrates, he is too slim and the bullets keep falling out of his navel, delighting the kids.

Three years older than the century—too old to fight—Walker collects rubber tires and scrap steel for the war effort. He goes around the neighborhood and roars, “Victory scrap! Victory scrap!” He hangs a homemade flag for the 369th Regiment out his window and tells stories to his son about the first Colored pilots to wing their way over the beachheads in Anzio. His hands, though bitten by rheumatism, make great sweeping motions in the air as he talks of the airmen and their fabulous planes. When the 369th returns there is a party in Harlem, and bunting flaps with bravado over the streets. Trumpets are blown. Ticker tape whitens the pavements and shouts ring loud. Walker leans out of his window and sees his son dance through the collected tires, feet stepping quickly, pure motion. He remains at the window for much of the evening, watching his son, all love, all pride, all fatherly envy for his youth.

chapter 7

we have all been here before

He thinks about inviting Angela up to his place, but a couple of years ago, in his second summer underground, he brought a girl to his nest and she froze with vertigo. A leg either side of the narrow catwalk, she sat and wept. Runnels through her makeup. He had to wrap his arms around her and then guide her down the catwalk like a stubborn mule. She wore tight black jeans and a pink tank top shorn off at the rib cage showing a silver earring protruding from her belly button. Halfway along the beam she froze again, glanced down at the tracks, and screamed.