It sure was.
“No sir, I don’t think so. I reckon he got called to go early.”
Pa sighed and started picking at his food.
“Ain’t that just like the military? No concern for family whatsoever.”
The Captain was eating his food fast. Faster than me, and that was something to brag about. We sometimes had eating races during lunchtime at school, and I won almost every time, as long as Eddie, Bob Gorman’s pudgy son, didn’t get involved. That kid was a vacuum cleaner disguised as a twelve-year-old. Maybe he was a robot.
“We running late for church or something?” I said.
“Church?” he said with his mouth full of chorizo. “You two go to church on Sundays?”
“Yeah, don’t everybody?”
Pa caught eye of the Captain’s bewilderment.
“Me and the Captain ain’t going today. We got a lot of work to do. But you ought to go. Why don’t you hitch a ride and go with the Parkinses today?”
I laughed cause I reckoned he was joking. Then I realized he wasn’t, he was dadgum serious. Which meant the person playing the joke was the Almighty Himself. He was one devil of a prankster.
“To the colored church? In the Colony?” I said. “Are you kidding?” I was pretty sure there was laws against white folk going to the Colony for anything, and especially for going to the colored church. It was for our own safety, of course. Kind of like all them hunting laws I never listened to. They was intended to keep us all civil.
“Church is church, ain’t it? And I can’t take you, so you should go with them.”
“Maybe I could stay home. After all, with Tommy leaving and me having an inflamed throat and stuff, I’m sure it’s all right for me to miss.”
He stabbed his biscuit and took a big bite.
“No sir, you got to get going. To the Parkinses’ church today. You’ll be fine.”
I ate my food as slow as I could given how good it was and how hungry the Captain looked, and then I took my time getting ready. I figured if I missed the chance to ride with the Parkinses, I couldn’t be blamed for not going to church. It would have been a lot easier if I was a girl and had makeup to do and stuff. All I had to do was comb my hair and spray cologne on my armpits.
I wasn’t able to go as slow with that as I wanted to, cause Pa came up to my room and was watching me with his leather strap just itching to meet up with my backside. So I got into my clean white shirt and my black pants and started working on getting my dress shoes on, when Pa saw the wad of money me and Tommy’d made the day before sitting on my dresser.
“Is this your earnings from yesterday?” he said.
I reached to grab it, but he took it first and shoved it in his pocket.
“I don’t want you putting this in the offering or nothing. I’ll hold on to it.”
I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his place, cause Tommy’d put me in charge of the money, but I didn’t have the guts to do that. That strap of his was practically humming in anticipation of getting swung at my hindquarters. I hurried out of the house and ran to the other side of the mountain. I caught Mrs. Parkins just as she was loading her kids into their big white station wagon.
“I told your pa I wouldn’t never be available on Sundays,” she said to me while she was helping her little daughter get into the backseat. She was a cute little girl in a white dress, probably only three years old. She stuck her tongue out at me, and I almost returned the gesture but Mrs. Parkins was eyeing me, so I decided I’d save it till later. I made a mental note so I wouldn’t forget.
“I ain’t fetching you to come up. He sent me to go to church with y’all.”
She got as funny a look on her face as I had inside my head.
“Is this a joke?” she said.
“I reckon so, though it ain’t one being played by my pa.”
She understood that, I guess.
“The Lord does have an interesting sense of humor,” she said. “Well, get on in and make room for Willie.”
I wasn’t enjoying the seating arrangements one bit, but I slid in next to the little girl and braced myself for Willie to squeeze in after me. He came out of the front door and I noticed, for the first time ever, that he walked using a crutch like the kids that had had polio did at school. He was carrying a suitcase under his arm and he hurried to get into the car. If we was ever putting on a show of A Christmas Carol with an all-colored cast, he could probably play Tiny Tim. Finding a Scrooge would be hard, though. Maybe Bob Gorman could put on blackface.
“What’s in the suitcase?” I said to him.
“None of your business,” he said. “What are you doing riding in our car?”
“None of your business,” I said, and I reckoned that about covered all the questions.
We drove down the mountain on the opposite side of Cullman and went the ten miles into the Colony. It was small, even compared to Cullman, and it was as run down and poor looking as folks might expect of a colored town. We drove over to where the Parkinses’ church was at. It wasn’t all that different from the church in Cullman, except that it was older and smaller and the outside wasn’t kept up as good. I didn’t reckon that was the fault of any of the folk that lived over there, after all churches was kept up by the money of the people. And everybody knew that the Colony wasn’t where no money was at.
We pulled up and Mrs. Parkins walked in and the kids all followed her, so I did too. The kids ran off to different classrooms for Sunday School except for Willie. He headed through two big doors into the sanctuary, carrying his suitcase with him. I was plumb curious as to what he was up to, so I followed him. Actually, he walked so slow, I just went in ahead of him and waited.
He hurried as much as he could with his bum leg all the way up to the front of the sanctuary and set the suitcase up at the foot of the pulpit. He opened it and pulled out some metal stick thing with a wire coming off of it and set it up on the wooden podium. He plugged the wire into a little hole on the suitcase and then he pulled out a couple of round things, one that had a black ribbon come off of it. I went up to see closer. I didn’t think a preacher’s kid would bomb his own church, but there was a first time for everything. I ate an egg roll once.
“What you doing?” I said.
He stopped and tried to hide his stuff from me.
“What I’m supposed to. Why don’t you go to your classroom?”
Meeting strangers was right up there with getting eaten by a bear on my list of favorite things to do. I didn’t even bother answering him.
“What is that thing?” I said.
He let out a sigh.
“It’s a reel-to-reel tape recorder. I record my pa’s sermons every Sunday.”
I looked at the suitcase more closer. Pa would have loved it. It had a switch on it that said Stop/Play/Record, and there was a speaker set into the top of it. He had the two reels all ready to go, the one on the left was a thick roll of the black ribbon, the one on the right was empty. I really hoped his pa wasn’t going to fill that whole tape with his preaching.
“Is that your pa’s tape recorder?”
“It’s mine. The church folk got it for my birthday last year so I could record the sermons.” He ran the end of the ribbon from the reel on the left to the one on the right and fastened it. “Anyway, I got to get this ready. So go find somebody else to bother.”
I thought about shooting back a comment at him, but since we was in a church and he was the preacher’s kid, God would probably hit me with a lightning bolt the size of Kentucky, so I decided against it. I walked around the building, finding things to look at and kick around until about time for the service to start. I went in and sat as close to the back as I could, figuring I was in for another boring Sunday morning.
Boy was I ever wrong.
The first thing I noticed was different was the singing and the mus
ic that went with it. It wasn’t necessarily that everyone in there was a better singer than the folks back at my usual church, but I’ll be darned if they didn’t sing them songs better than we did. They sang every word like it was a dadgum message from Heaven itself, and the organ that was played was like a singer all its own.
They went through a few songs, some of the women crying and darn near swooning, the menfolk clenching their eyes shut tight like they needed to block tears from popping out. I didn’t sing along with them. Not so much ’cause I was embarrassed by how bad of a singer I was, but because I didn’t know how to get myself worked up like that. Crying wasn’t one of my skills. It was like dancing. I usually just plastered myself to the wall and ate the food.
After a while, they sat down and the preaching was set up to start. Willie went up and started his tape recorder and his pa, the Reverend Parkins, stood in front of the little metal stick on the pulpit and started preaching.
I usually took a nap during the sermons at my church. One time I’d snuck in my radio in my jacket to listen to a football game, but I got caught and whipped for it by every deacon on the board, so I didn’t try that no more. I figured that I might catch some valuable sleep while Reverend Parkins was preaching.
But there wasn’t no sleeping during his sermon.
He started off kind of slow, talking about Daniel and the lion’s den. I thought that was a pretty funny coincidence, and it made me remember the cash Pa’d taken from me, but I tried to put it out of my mind. It got pretty easy, because Reverend Parkins told that story like he’d been in the den with Daniel. He started yelling and shouting, and the folks in the pews would yell and shout right back at him. He’d jump up and down and wiggle his finger in the air, and some of the men would stand and point at him. Occasionally, while he was getting to preaching real hard, somebody would jump, run to the front, and slap some money onto the platform, telling him to “Keep on preaching.” Folks didn’t do that at the white church. They was all trying to figure out how to make the pastor shut up.
Reverend Parkins kept going and going, and the folks kept getting more and more into his sermon, and I wasn’t getting bored with it or nothing. The only problem I was having was that my head done started hurting, and it got worse and worse as he went on. My Sunday School teacher told me once that a guilty conscience would do that, but I was fine with all the sinning I’d been doing, so that couldn’t have been it.
Instead, it felt like my brain was a fishing pole that had gotten grabbed by a big whopper in the water, and it was bending the pole in half fighting from getting reeled in. Now, I wasn’t sure if the fish I’d snagged was a trout called “My Brother Just Left Town,” or if it was a bass called “That Dadgum Captain Had His Fingers Down My Throat This Morning,” or what it was, but I felt for sure that it was only a matter of time before my pole got yanked out of my hands. And I didn’t want to be around when that happened. Too bad I probably had to be, on account of me being stuck with myself.
I was racking my brain to figure out just what exactly was going on in my head, but then Reverend Parkins said something that just about put all the ache out of my head.
“See, we’re all in the lion’s den with Daniel, and we’re surrounded by lions at every side. But we’re also surrounded by someone else. We’re surrounded by angels, angels who will shut the mouths of the lions that threaten us. So you have to ask yourself, are you staring at a lion or at an angel? Are you a lion or an angel?”
Well, that got me to thinking. Maybe the whole point of all this was that, if I was going to protect Pa from the lions, I had to be an angel for him. When Reverend Parkins said the closing prayer, I said my own that the Good Lord would help me be strong like an angel. It wasn’t a long prayer, cause I didn’t do long prayers. Besides, I almost felt like I needed a brain doctor for the machine gun that was firing in my head. I wanted to get back home and have the Captain look at me again.
Folks got up to leave, Willie went and packed up his tape recorder, and I hurried to find Mrs. Parkins. She was standing with a group of women, talking with them about the week’s schedule and such. I’d learned the hard way not to interrupt women when they was talking like that, back when I was just a kid and I’d spied a mouse in the church and the women all took turns twisting my ear for interrupting. Then they all screeched when they saw the mouse and blamed me for not running it off. Since I figured I needed to wait for her to get done, I headed outside for some fresh air. I’d have to settle for that, since I didn’t have no rabbits’ feet to trade for a smoke.
Willie and his friends was talking together and laughing at something, which was usually my clue to stay away. That’s how it was with the kids at school, at least. But I wasn’t sure if them clues was the same with colored folk. Somebody should have written a handbook.
Then I spied Willie’s eyes and I realized that there’s some things that is the same, no matter what sort of fella is doing it. ’Cause I recognized his look from all the times I’d had it myself. It was the look of a fella trying his hardest not to cry while he’s acting like he’s laughing.
In spite of the fact that it was the leading cause of death among cats, I gave in to my curiosity and went over for a better listen.
“Maybe we could find you a job at the front, Willie,” the tallest kid among them was saying. “You could give out tickets or something. Provided we got you a stool. That’d be a long time on one leg, even for a flamingo.”
All the fellas with him laughed, and Willie did too, though his laugh was a little too loud and a little too fast.
“What y’all talking about?” I said.
They all got real quiet. The tall fella eyed me all over.
“Who wants to know?” he said.
“This is Johnny,” Willie said, and I could tell he was hoping time would hurry up and move on past the moment we was in. “My ma brought him.”
I held out my hand, ’cause that’s what manners says to do. They didn’t take it none.
“Figures,” the tall fella said.
“This is Russ,” Willie said. “He’s going to be a boxer when he grows up.”
“And I’m going to give jobs to all my friends,” Russ said. “Even my little crippled friend here. ’Cause that’s what a good man does.”
Willie winced when he said that, then pretended he’d had to sneeze. He probably fooled all them, but I spoke the language of winces real good, so I knew what it meant.
“A boxer?” I said. “Like Sugar Ray?”
“Sugar Ray Robinson, for sure,” Russ said, then he put up his fists and punched at the air in front of me. “Best boxer there’s ever been.”
“Does that mean you’re going to lose to Gene Fullmer, too?”
The whole mess of them groaned, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. A white boxer like Fullmer beating a legend like Sugar Ray was something Cullman folks was real proud of, which meant it was something the folks in the Colony was probably butt hurt about.
Russ stepped forward and his fists was clenched. Yup, they was butt hurt.
“Losing to one boxer don’t take nothing away from Sugar Ray,” he said.
“Except Fullmer beat him three times. Reckon that makes Sugar Ray a three-times loser.”
“If they fought again, Sugar Ray’d knock him out just like he did in ’57,” Russ said.
“I guess there ain’t no way to know, is there?” I said. “Fullmer’s got too much class than to humiliate him like that again.”
Russ kicked at the ground. Willie eyed me and then him, like he wasn’t sure which one of us he wanted to be right.
“Well, Genie, I mean Johnny, maybe there’s one way to know,” Russ said. “What about you and me having the rematch for them? Right here and now?”
My stomach clenched in on me and my head felt ready to pop. I had a feeling it was the only move that was the same no matter where you was, challenging a
fella to a fight. The one who gets challenged ain’t really got no choice in the matter. He’s got to fight or be a chicken. Even if he’s the pope. That’s what them crusades was all about. I think.
“We ain’t Sugar Ray and Fullmer,” I said.
“Of course I ain’t Sugar Ray. That cat is rich and famous. But around here,” he said, pointing around the yard and at them other fellas he was with, “around here I’m Sugar Ray. And there ain’t but one fella that could stand in for Fullmer.” He reached out and patted my chest.
“Come on, Russ,” Willie said, eyeing me like he was worried I might say something I shouldn’t. “He didn’t come here to fight. Just let him alone.”
That worked for me. I turned to get away. I couldn’t help but remember what Eddie Gorman had told me once, about how colored folk was more savage when they fought than civilized white folk, which was why they was such good boxers.
Of course, Eddie was a racist. He rooted against Jim in Huckleberry Finn. But he was funny, so it was okay.
Still, there was no telling if he was right or not. But I didn’t want to test his theory out. I’d rather be a chicken in the Colony than a body in the hospital. I took a couple of quick steps away.
And that set Russ to laughing.
“Probably a good thing,” he said. “I’d have punched him so hard, his mama would have felt it.”
Now, I’ll be honest with you. Folks had made fun of my ma before and it hadn’t really bothered me much. And Russ probably didn’t have no idea about her being dead. Heck, even the couple of times Eddie, who knew my ma was as dead as a doornail, had asked me where my ma was only made me kick his shins. It just didn’t affect me too much, since I couldn’t remember her none.
But when Russ said that, it was like the fishing pole in my brain that had been getting yanked and tugged by I didn’t even know what all of a sudden broke right in half and I got yanked off the boat.
I spun around and I clobbered him right in the eye. I barely even realized I’d done it before my fist had already met his cheekbone and all them other boys had their mouths gaping open. Even Willie.
The Troubles of Johnny Cannon Page 4
