by Jabari Asim
On more than one occasion, Pristine had come down in the middle of the night and found him asleep, snoring, with the book still clasped tightly in his hands.
“Look at you, Reuben Jones,” she’d say while shaking him awake. “I do believe you’re drunk on history.”
It was true. He couldn’t get enough of the book. He couldn’t believe how much stuff in Notable Negroes had never come up in school, and he’d gone to a historically black college. The thick volume had been shiny and leather-bound when he first unwrapped it, but over time it had been reduced to a barely-held-together, paint-splattered mess. Reuben consulted it the same way some folks turned to the Bible. He’d even named his kids from it. The last two, that is. Ed, whose formal name was Reuben Edward Jones Jr., had been born before the book entered his father’s life.
Ed said he considered himself lucky. His brothers said he was just jealous.
“I would never have let Feather give that to you if I had known it would keep you up nights.” Pristine was only pretending to be angry, and Reuben knew it.
“I wasn’t up,” Reuben would say, rubbing his eyes. “I was sleeping good until you shook me so hard. Next time, try a kiss.”
Reuben had memorized large chunks of Notable Negroes, a handy trick for settling arguments over checkerboards and in barbershops. He grew fond of boring his buddies at the sign shop with long, heartfelt recitations about such “accomplished historical figures” as Dred Scott, Benjamin Banneker, and Ida B. Wells, and boasting about his kids’ famous namesakes. The men of the Black Swan groaned each time an unwitting newcomer asked Reuben how that good-looking, ball-playing kid of his got saddled with a name like Schomburg. “He’s named after an important someone,” Reuben would reply. His buddies knew the rest by heart.
“As in
SCHOMBURG, ARTURO ALFONSO. Bibliographic genius born in 1874 in Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands. Raised in Puerto Rico. In 1891 he moved to New York, where he became deeply involved in American Negro culture. Eventually built a collection of more than ten thousand books, manuscripts, prints, and pieces of memorabilia that document the history and achievements of colored people. Sold his private collection to the Carnegie Corporation, which gave it to the New York Public Library in 1926.
“His poor, poor wife” was all Pristine said whenever Reuben read aloud from that passage, which he did every January 24, when he forced his whole family to celebrate Arturo Schomburg’s birthday.
Pristine would sigh while slicing the cake. “I can’t imagine how she put up with so much stuff,” she’d say. “There couldn’t have been any room for furniture, much less children.”
“Wives, not wife” was Reuben’s regular reply. “The man was married three times and fathered seven children. Too much genius for one woman, I guess.”
“Rest assured, Reuben,” Pristine would say. “That’s a problem you’ll never have to deal with.”
And if anyone who walked into the Black Swan was foolish enough to wonder out loud about the origins of Crispus Jones’s name, the entire sign shop responded in a chorus of righteous indignation:
ATTUCKS, CRISPUS. Born 1723, runaway slave and seaman. First American killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770.
Reuben’s youngest son was probably the only Crispus in America, maybe even the only one so burdened since that Notable Negro went to his glory nearly two centuries ago. It was an unusual name, Reuben was always quick to acknowledge, but not so much different from Limoka, Kozetta, and Tres Bien, to name just a few of his son’s classmates.
Reuben tears his eyes from the table, resisting the book’s pull. The photos of the Grimes girl have to be in here somewhere. He turns slowly, taking it all in. Opposite the drafting table, bookcases spill over with cheap pulps, secondhand hard-covers, and stacks of magazines: Popular Mechanics. Up from Slavery. National Geographic. The Souls of Black Folk. David Walker’s Appeal. Editions of Gateway’s ambitious black papers, the Citizen, the Argus, and the Sentinel. And a local scandal rag called The Evening Whirl. More things he hadn’t read in school.
In a distant corner sits a rickety record player in an equally unsteady console, its legs weathered, ragged, and bearing signs of water damage. Against one leg, a stack of albums: Billy Eckstine, Jesse Belvin, Erroll Garner. Beside it, a sketch pad belonging to Crispus and stumps of his crayons crammed in an old Dutch Master box. Where were the pictures when he’d last seen them?
Reuben couldn’t remember where he knew Grimes from when he first showed up at the Swan earlier that autumn, but he knew he’d seen him before. A tall, brown-skinned man around Reuben’s age, he looked kind of nervous when he entered, as if a little surprised to find himself there. Reuben and Ed were alone in the shop, a fact he guessed Grimes had already determined. He instinctively knew that Grimes was the kind of man who quickly figured out all the angles as soon as he entered a situation: the points of exit and entry, the shadows where danger could hide, the corners where prey could be mercilessly pinned down.
Grimes had hard, unblinking eyes. He looked at you as if he hated you, even if he was saying something as simple as “Hey” or “Good morning.” He said both when Reuben greeted him.
“My wife and I—”
Reuben waited while the man struggled with himself.
“My wife and I … lost our daughter. Cheryl.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Reuben said.
“Leukemia,” said Grimes, with such force and venom that it took Reuben a moment to realize that he wasn’t shouting, had never raised his voice. “Twelve years old.”
The man went on to say that he’d heard about Reuben’s portraits and wanted one of his daughter. Reuben agreed to take on the assignment and told Grimes his price. “I’ll take care of you,” Grimes said.
He carefully pulled a business-size envelope out of his pocket and spread the contents on Reuben’s counter. Four snapshots of a girl. Cute, grinning, tragic. Just four shots, and not very good ones at that.
Reuben studied them. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “Are these all you can share?”
“They’re all I have in this world,” Grimes replied. “We weren’t much on picture taking. Not then.”
Reuben realized he’d never gotten the man’s name. Nor had the man ever asked for his.
“I’m Reuben Jones, by the way, and that’s my son over there.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
The man looked at Reuben a long moment, as if to determine if he was being teased. “It’s Grimes,” he said.
How could they have just a handful of photos of their only child? He and Pristine had at least a hundred photos for every year of every child’s life. Instamatic and Polaroid, black-and-white and, frequently now, color. If they should ever lose a child—God forbid—you’d best believe they would have more than memories to go by.
He’d lost two siblings growing up and didn’t have a picture of either. Pristine vowed that would never happen in her family, and when she wasn’t snapping candids herself with her trusty Instamatic, she was lugging her scrubbed and Vaselined sons to Sears, where a professional photographer froze them on film at every stage of their young lives.
Pristine was fond of saying that she collected memories. She’d pestered Reuben’s mom for photos of him as a boy, but his family had been far too poor to have many of those. She’d done better by their college days, keeping dozens that Reuben had barely been aware of. Pristine had shots of him in his crimson and crème tracksuit, clearing hurdles at the Jefferson Invitational, dressed up in tux and turban, holding his lantern aloft as he crossed the burning sands with his frat brothers.
At her urging, Reuben had also drawn large pastel portraits of each of their boys. They hung above the couch in the living room, a trio of smiling faces done in a style that no department-store shutterbug could ever dream of matching.
Shom and Crisp were still young and innocent enough to grin broadly for the camera
. As for Ed, “going through changes” was Pristine’s nice way of describing his behavior, although Reuben tended to view his son’s growing rebelliousness in far harsher terms. The boy—sorry, young man—had made a scene at the last Sears session, refusing to so much as smile even slightly. Pristine grew tired of arguing and gave in, with the result being a large scowling portrait that now sat glowering on top of the piano.
“If I say Manet, he says Matisse,” Reuben had complained to Pristine. “I say Harvard, he says Howard. Think I talked to my old man like that? Obviously not, since I’m still breathing. Sometimes I’m sure he’s being contrary for contrary’s sake and I want to get a strap and wear him out. He has no idea how many times his mama has come between me and his hide.”
Ed is a hardworking fellow, I can’t dispute that, Reuben thinks while sifting through the contents of a Horack’s Dairy sack stuffed with papers. He still pulls down excellent grades while working long hours at SuperMart. The rest of his time, however, which used to be spent helping his mom in her garden, playing with his little brothers, or down here painting with me, now goes to talking to that girl, either in person or on my phone. I tell him to be careful with her—Charlotte’s her name, I think—and he rolls his eyes and looks at me like I’m insane.
Reuben gives up on the dairy sack. He slips his shoe off and rubs his foot. He replaces the shoe and turns to a battered briefcase he occasionally carries when meeting new customers. He has offered to buy Ed a new briefcase to carry on his interviews with Ivy League alumni, but so far his eldest son has failed to muster any enthusiasm. He actually had the gumption to tell Reuben that carrying a briefcase was “jive.”
Reuben thinks he knows what Pristine means when she wishes they could stay small forever. Then he recalls the look in Detective Grimes’s eyes. His Cheryl would stay young. She’d never sass her mama again, never grow up to regret it. She’d never pose with her giddy girlfriends after graduation, their mortarboards cockily askew and their eyes brimming with excitement. She’d never produce grandchildren to give her parents comfort in their old age. Her last expression, her final words, would be those of a small girl.
Reuben pictures her like Curly, asleep in her coffin. He imagines her parents bargaining with God, offering to relinquish everything to give their daughter a chance to grow old.
The briefcase yields paint sticks, swatches, an ancient painter’s cap, and assorted folders, but no photos.
One day Shom and Crisp will get a little dirt above their lips and a disrespectful attitude to go with it. Crisp is just a wisp of a thing, afraid of his shadow. But too soon his voice will grow husky and he’ll get to smelling himself just like Ed.
Little Crisp is the only child they’d ever come close to losing—twice. First he didn’t want to come out of the womb, or so it seemed until they discovered his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Four years after that adventure, he nearly drowned in the lake in Fairgrounds Park.
Reuben and his two youngest had gone fishing. He and Shom had rested their poles and were tossing a ball back and forth in the grassy area a few yards from the dock. They’d brought gloves along to warm up Shom’s arm for his game that evening. Crisp, ever the daydreamer, wandered right into the lake with his pole.
Reuben dived in and tugged him to shore. “Funny thing is,” he later told Pristine, “as scared as Crisp is, he never even yelled. If not for the splash, I’d never have known he’d gone under. Afraid to go down the basement by himself but not afraid of the deep. That boy’s a mystery.”
Reuben reached Crisp in a couple of agonizing strokes, long enough for him to imagine going home without his youngest son, telling his mother he’d left him at the bottom of a lake, anticipating how it would feel to have a hole in his heart that could never be mended.
I don’t really know what Grimes felt when his daughter passed away, but I have an idea, Reuben thinks, and I want to give him the opposite of that. What I felt when I held my boy in my arms, my living, breathing boy—that’s the feeling I need to convey in Cheryl’s portrait. Maybe I can depict some of the joy she must have brought to her father when she smiled, when he held her. I have to do that much for him.
He goes to his window and stares out at the cold street, sees the blades of grass on his lawn appear to shiver in the night wind. His mind wanders to imminent winter, which he’ll spend doing inside work, touching up the lobby of the North Side Y, repainting the ceiling of the Riviera Club, and dedicating himself to portraits of Cheryl and, if he’s lucky, Ananias Goode. The men of the Black Swan will be glad to get away from the Hawk, but Reuben has never minded its presence. He’s not really aware of the cold once he gets in the thick of things. Even during times when he can see his breath, he starts out with just a jacket and often has to peel it off.
A jacket!
Reuben leaves his office and tiptoes up the stairs. Quietly, he enters his bedroom. Pristine has fallen asleep. On the black-and-white TV, Ed McMahon guffaws while Johnny Carson smirks. Reuben reaches in his closet and retrieves the suit jacket he was wearing when he met Grimes. Normally he wears a windbreaker, but that day he’d gone to city hall to see about a permit. The jacket’s inside pocket holds what he’s been looking for all night. He grabs the photos and gestures in silent jubilation. Great Kooga Mooga! He wants to click his heels, but there’s not enough room and he doesn’t want to wake his wife. Adrenaline fills him as he skips back down to his studio. He lays the photos on the drafting table, grabs his private stash of black crayons. He removes the canvas from his easel and replaces it with a large sheet of paper. He feels a sketching spree coming on. Later the sketches will provide the basis of Cheryl’s full-scale portrait. This calls for some music, he thinks, with the volume turned down quite low, of course. He drops the needle on the vinyl, and Erroll Garner’s genius warms the cluttered space. The sun will be up soon, and cool, brittle air will greet him when he warms up the Rambler and prepares to pick up Lucius. He should get some rest before all that, but it will have to wait. A Surge is coming on.
The Boy on the Couch
as soon as I decided to have a crush on Polly she had to go and change my mind. Shom said it’s just as well because fat girls ain’t worth a pretty boy’s time. Of course he was talking about himself, not me. He said he wouldn’t give the time of day to her even if she had been as fine as Diahann Carroll because he could never trust a black girl named Polly. This from a black boy named Schomburg.
Ed was keeping company with a cutie named Charlotte. Shom practically had his own fan club and was using the summer to take a break from all the adoration. He said he could barely perform his duties as line monitor during the school year because he was so busy beating off girls with a stick. Otherwise, he said, they’d rip his clothes off.
I figured it was my turn. I’d had a couple of crushes during the school year. I worshipped Linda McCulley every time she went to the blackboard and wrote a sentence in her flawless hand, her pigtails neatly braided and elegantly wrapped in ribbons. I also liked Linda Bowie, a demure beauty with long lashes and huge liquid eyes. The two Lindas were the kind of girls all the losers loved. They were the kind of girls who giggled and waved at Shom, blowing kisses to him while he stood on the corner and pretended to be a patrol boy. They were the type of girls who didn’t even see boys like me. I knew I had to set my sights on a kinder, gentler target.
That’s how Polly Garnett entered the picture. Our moms knew each other from the downtown department store where they both worked part-time. Mrs. Garnett had suffered a “personal crisis,” and my mother was helping her get back on her feet by training her to be an Avon lady. For several afternoons they met over coffee and discussed the wonders of Skin So Soft moisturizing bath oil and the staying power of Sweet Honesty perfume. My job, enthusiastically accepted, was to entertain Polly.
The first day I took her down to the basement playroom, where we kept most of our toys. A lot of my playthings looked broken-in and worn-out—played with, that is. Shom’s toys and g
ames still had all their pieces and were arrayed as neatly as a shop-window display. Maybe that’s why Polly kept reaching for things that belonged to him.
I had to tell her that the Hands Down game was, unfortunately, hands off. Same with the Johnny Speed remote-control Jaguar, the Creepy Crawlers set, and the Secret Sam attaché. I told her not to even think about putting her hands on Shom’s Johnny Seven One Man Army. Its seven deadly weapons included a grenade, an antitank rocket, and an armor-piercing shell, all of which had been field-tested on yours truly. I could tell that Polly was getting frustrated.
“How about this Whee-lo?”
“Yeah, that’s mine, but the wheel’s missing.”
We finally settled on the Avalanche game I’d received last Christmas. We set up to play in the front hallway, where our moms could keep an eye on us from the kitchen.
I knew right away that the arrangement wouldn’t last long because Polly’s marbles kept rolling into the living room. I could see Mom trying to ignore her while nibbling at the lemon pie Mrs. Garnett had brought with her and listening politely to her complaints. Polly’s mother dabbed her eyes and asked if Avon made a shampoo that would make a high-yellow heifer’s hair fall out.
“That’s all he wants with her, you know,” Mrs. Garnett said, “that hair.”
While her mother wept softly, Polly kept chasing marbles across Mom’s just-buffed living room floor. She stayed in there a little longer each time. After the third or fourth time, I peeped in to see what was keeping her. She had the marbles in her hand and was staring at the couch. Finally she returned.
“Careful,” I warned her. “My mom normally doesn’t allow kids in the living room. She’s got a thing about that floor in there.”
After the fifth time, my mom had taken all she could stand. She made us a couple cups of Bosco, handed us a big bowl of dry cereal, and shoved us out the door.
