On Sundays Samuel and Mary Kate would go to church with her parents, and then have dinner. He first kissed her on a Sunday. They were hidden in the canopy of a peach tree in her back yard, supposedly picking peaches. Surrounded by the dark greenness, he discovered the insides of her cheeks were like cantaloupe, wet and soft and slick.
Parker knew the time had come for Samuel to leave, and as they were finishing up work one evening he said, “You slowing up.”
“No, sir,” Samuel said. “I’m the fastest dishwasher in Tupelo.”
“Yeah, and if you keep it up, you can say that for a lifetime. I ain’t talking ’bout your work, son. You sweet on my daughter, and she slowing you up.”
“She not slowing me up. I’m not slowing . . . What’s wrong with me liking her?”
“Ain’t a thing wrong with it. Let me tell you something. If I thought something was wrong with it, you wouldn’t be seeing her.”
“You think I ain’t going north,” Samuel said.
“Let me tell you something. There’s another boy that like Mary Kate.”
“Who?” Samuel asked, his voice filled with anger. “She ain’t never said nothing ’bout a boy.”
“Women don’t never tell you they seeing somebody else. What, you crazy, boy? Women smart. But don’t you get riled up. She ain’t stutting him, and he got a college education. This boy went to Southern. You know Southern?”
“No,” Samuel said, disgusted. He wiped white suds from his hands and sat down.
“It’s a Negro college in Baton Rouge. Boy got him a degree. And you know what he do?”
Samuel did not answer.
“I say, you know what he do?”
“No,” Samuel said.
“He a Pullman porter, riding the Crescent from New Orleans to Chicago. Up and down. Back and forth. Come here time to time talking big. He fenna move to Chicago. He fenna get him a job up in a skyscraper. Going to sit on top the world. Only thing, that he stuck on the train. I think the boy scared to get off up there.”
“You don’t think I can make it up north,” Samuel said.
“I ain’t say that.”
“You say this college boy ain’t make it,” Samuel said.
“I say this college boy ain’t make it. Get the potatoes out your ears, boy. I say he too scared to try. Don’t get me wrong now. I ain’t knocking a education. A education a good thing. I wish I had one, a piece of paper saying I was smart. But a piece of paper don’t make you a man. That boy don’t think he a man. You think you a man, I know that. Necking with my daughter.”
Samuel smiled, his eyes cast down.
“You think you a damn grown man. I’m telling you it’s time to go. You letting your dreams slip through your fingers a nickel at a time. You got to go and do what you got to do. Mary Kate ain’t going nowhere. You make good up north, and you can come back for her,” Parker said.
Samuel had made good. He’d gone to New York, upstate, where the steel mills were hiring. He had gotten a job at Capital Steel, saved his money, and two years later he married Mary Kate and brought her back to Lackawanna, a small city just south of Buffalo.
The day she arrived, he paraded her up and down the main street of the town, Ridge Road, as if the three blocks were the Great White Way. There was a five-and-dime, a cleaners, a laundry, churches, an A & P. The grocery store was huge—eight aisles, six check-out counters. The smell of freshly ground coffee filled the store. Sawdust was sprinkled on the polished wooden floor. A red-faced butcher stood behind the meat counter.
They went to the Jubilee Theatre and sat in the front row. They had ice cream sodas at the counter in the drugstore. They even went skating. But Mary Kate didn’t want to go to Dulski’s Diner. “I can cook at home,” Mary Kate would say. Home for them was 18 All-Bright Court.
Samuel sopped up the eggs that had dripped onto his plate with a piece of white bread, quickly finished his coffee, and put some change on the counter. The snow bit at his face as he left the steamy warmth of the diner and hurried back to All-Bright Court, his hand-me-down home.
Capital Steel had thrown the tenement together during World War I in an effort to bury the Germans, two hundred units of nameless temporary housing built in the shadow of the plant for the white workers—the Poles, the Italians, the Slavs, even the Germans—who showed up day after day like migrating birds. Even as the cinder blocks of the buildings were being set in place they were crumbling. It made no difference to the men who moved in with their families. They arrived with their bellies empty and their mouths full of lies. They showed up daily, lying in Polish, in Italian, in Russian, and even in German, saying they knew how to work steel, knew about coke ovens and blast furnaces, rolling mills. What great liars they were; they knew telling the truth was a guarantee of nothing. This was the first chance many of them had had to live on their own. They moved their families out of drafty boarding houses, out of a brother’s, an in-law’s, a cousin’s, a friend’s. It meant a front and back yard, a stone front porch that was shared with a neighbor, a back stoop of their own, an upstairs and downstairs. Thirteen rectangular buildings stood on one side of Hanna, a dead-end street; on the other were twelve. Each building contained eight two-story apartments, all facing west to east, their backs to the sun.
Day and night the men went to work from their temporary housing. The women stayed home and watched clouds of red, gray, and orange smoke scudding across the hazy sky. Their men made these clouds. Night and day. More than five thousand men worked at the plant, worked day and night. They were an army; it was they who buried the Germans.
Twenty-five years later they buried the Germans again. They were an even bigger army now. Ten thousand men descending into the mouth of hell, night and day.
The tenement was still there, falling apart, its cinders turning into ashes. Capital promised to build the men new homes. Some men didn’t wait. They began building houses on the streets surrounding the tenement, staking claim to their futures with thirty-year mortgages.
It was not until 1955 that Capital built new houses for the workers, five hundred houses in Capital Park, a town just to the south of Lackawanna, and five hundred more in a section of Lackawanna across the tracks it named Capital Heights. These prefab houses, trucked in and assembled on half-acre lots, were built for the Poles, the Russians, the Serbs, the Czechs, the Yugoslavs, the Romanians, the English, the Irish, the Scots, the Danes, the Italians, and even the Germans.
No blacks were permitted to buy the houses. Capital was not being unfair, but the past could not be changed.
So the buildings of the tenement were painted to stop them from crumbling, and they were handed down to the black workers. The buildings were painted bright colors, blue, white, yellow, pink, green, and the tenement was given a name, All-Bright Court. That was what it was, a reflection of postwar optimism, bright and shining.
Like Samuel, most of the people in All-Bright Court had recently come from the South, seduced by the indoor plumbing, the gas stoves, the electric refrigerators, dazzled by the splendor, the brightness of it all. Just like the white men, the black workers had mouths full of lies, though some had really worked steel before, in Birmingham, Baltimore, Pittsburgh. What they saw in All-Bright Court was the dream they dreamed down south. They did not see the promise of a dream crumbling under a few layers of paint.
2
Trouble
“THERE SOMETHING wrong with old-man children. They slow or they crazy. Men always blame it on the women. Say old women have ’flicted kids. But old men be having them too. It’s them old sperm.” This was what people said of Isaac’s father. He was an old man, and Isaac looked like an old man’s child.
Isaac’s head was too big for his body. It was too long and thin. His hair was sparse and dry, and Dixie Peach added no sheen. The pomade made his head shine, but his hair stayed dull.
But the boy was not slow. Just as Miss Ophelia had predicted, the boy was crazy. Ten years ago, when Isaac wasn’t quite two, Miss Ophelia hear
d him talking, talking in full sentences to his father, who was an old man even then.
“Daddy,” he said. “Daddy, I’m wet. Take me home and change my diaper.”
Miss Ophelia called Isaac and his father over to her porch. “That boy too little to be talking like that. He got too much sense. He using it all up now, and when he grow up he ain’t going have none. You mark my words. He going to be crazy when he grow up.”
Isaac pulled on his father’s hand as Miss Ophelia spoke. He wanted to move on, but his father stood and listened to the woman’s words. He listened out of respect because, though he was an old man, she was even older than he. When his father didn’t move, Isaac let go of his father’s hand and dropped to the ground. He began spinning around on his back, and when his father did not respond, he got to his knees and began banging his head on the cement. With the first hit, the skin on his forehead cracked, and blood came. His father picked him up and rushed away with Isaac in his arms. Isaac would not let his father touch his wound, so his father rubbed his legs to calm him. He found trouble hiding in the boy’s legs. It was in Isaac’s bones, and his father began working it out of him.
Miss Ophelia died that same year, but her words lived on as an oracle.
Over losing games of marbles or kick the can, Isaac would fall to his knees and turn his head into a hammer. He would bang it on the ground until blood pulsed out of his forehead. He banged out his thimbleful of sense into the earth. When playing red rover, the children would always dare him to come over. As he ran toward the line of intertwined arms, the children would break the chain at the last moment and let him tumble to the ground. They knew it would be a good show. They knew Isaac would bang his head, or beat on his head with his fists, or he might fall and flop around like a fish. They thought he was funny, but they also knew he was crazy. Once when he lost at mumblety-peg, he pulled his penknife from the ground and threw it at the victor.
And every time Isaac blew up, or fell out, or banged his head on the earth, the old man soothed him with cool towels and slices of fresh orange. He pushed Isaac’s mother away and rubbed trouble from his son. He worked it up from his bones. And Isaac moaned and sucked on the slices of orange as his father coaxed the trouble up through his muscles.
“It hurt, Daddy,” he would say.
“I know,” his father would say.
“He need his butt beat,” his mother would say. “He bad.”
But the other mothers on his block, and on the blocks around where he lived, did not think he was bad. They thought he was crazy.
So it was no wonder that on that August afternoon as he was running across the field along the western edge of All-Bright Court no one took notice of him and his father. No one knew this running boy was hot and mad and smelled of jute. He smelled like a bundle of wet twine. As he ran through the field of Queen Anne’s lace and dandelion, he pulled the narrow blue tie from his neck and threw it in the weeds. His father was behind him. He was walking on the narrow path that had been worn through the weeds, but he couldn’t keep up with Isaac. He was too old to keep up, and he had rubbed too much trouble from Isaac. He had taken on too much of his son’s trouble, and it slowed him down.
“It ain’t no big deal, Isaac,” his father yelled. “Wait for me, son.”
Isaac stood in the field wiping tears on his jacket sleeves. The tears were gone when his father caught up with him, and Isaac was making a strange moaning sound, a sound caught in his throat.
“Get up on the path, son,” his father said. “I can’t be walking through all them weeds. Your father is a old man.”
Isaac joined his father on the path, and his father rubbed his shoulders to release the trouble. As they walked toward home, the sound Isaac was making became louder. The moan turned back into a hollering.
“I’ll buy you a bike, son,” his father said. “I’ll get you that English racer.”
Isaac did not answer him. He knew his father couldn’t afford a three-speed bike on social security. He had wanted to win the bike by becoming a paperboy for the Buffalo Star. He wanted to have the chance of becoming Carrier of the Month. His father had taken him on the bus to Buffalo. Isaac had dressed up in a suit and tie and gone downtown to the Star’s office only to be told he could not be a paperboy. He did not want to hear it. He did not want to hear, “I know we had an ad in the paper, but the Star does not use colored paperboys on routes that have white customers. Now if there were an all-colored route in Lackawanna, it wouldn’t be a problem. That’s the way business is done here. We’ve tried it in other neighborhoods, and there has been trouble. It’s nineteen sixty. You would think we would be beyond this point. It’s not my rule. I’m sorry.”
Isaac did not care that the man who told him and his father this really did look sorry, that he really did sound sorry. He did not care that the man could not look at them when he said it. The man looked around his office as he spoke. He looked out his window. He couldn’t look at Isaac and his father because he also had a son. He had two sons, and knew what it was a twelve-year-old boy wanted. Isaac did not care that the man shook his father’s hand before they left the office. He did not know the man’s hand was sweaty, that it was sweaty out of sympathy. Isaac did not know because he refused to shake the man’s hand. All Isaac knew was he would not be getting an English racer.
His father was glad that Isaac had held it in so long. He was glad Isaac was able to hold out until he had come to the field, until they were almost home.
By the time Isaac and his father had reached the end of the field, he still had not quieted. His father rubbed Isaac’s shoulders until his hands hurt. That night his hands would be stiff. That night his fingers would twist into tight buds and he would not be able to open them until well after the sun rose.
As he and Isaac passed by the second row of buildings on their way back to 72, Mary Kate Taylor was in her back yard hanging clothes. Each time she bent to get another handful of pins, or to retrieve a few pieces of steaming clothes from the basket, she felt the weight of the baby she was carrying. It pulled her down, and it seemed that if she let it, it would drop her right to the center of the earth.
She could not complain, though. The baby had not kicked or stirred much. But when the old man and his son passed, the baby quickened. It moved so suddenly that she was thrown off balance. She held on to the line, and when the two had passed, when Isaac’s hollering was drowned out by the roar from a smokestack at Capital, she patted her stomach.
“Don’t you worry none,” she said to the baby. “That ain’t nothing but that old man and his crazy boy.”
3
Rapture
IT WAS JUST before three in the afternoon and the world was ending in All-Bright Court. Venita looked out of her kitchen window, out of her yellow curtains at 92, and fell to her knees. There was a bomb, bright and hard and shining against a blue sky. The bomb was slowly moving toward her. It was stealing blood from Venita’s feet. It was making her feet cold and useless.
They had finally done it. The Russians had finally dropped the bomb. It was only a matter of time. Venita had one consolation in these final few seconds of life on the planet: living in Lackawanna meant her death would be a swift and painless one.
Venita’s husband, Moses, had told her, “They was worried about Florida during that missile crisis last month. But there was a real panic in Buffalo. Them Russians got it high on they list for bombing ’cause there four mills there. But it’s the Capital plant they want. The biggest damn steel plant in the world. Wait till you see it. It’s a monster.”
Moses had told her this in the back of the Greyhound bus as they headed north four months ago. They were riding through Pennsylvania. It was the day after Thanksgiving. They had been married just two days before in Starkville, Mississippi, and were spending their honeymoon on the bus. Moses had only a week off from work, and this was already the sixth day.
“Times changing,” Moses said. “The North is something else. We got whites for neighbors,
got whites living on both sides of us. Polacks, the colored people be calling them. They real nice people. They speaks, and everything.
“You know, times changing all over. When I come up here in ’fifty-eight, I had to ride in the back of the bus all the way to Pennsylvania. It’s just four years later, and you can set anywhere you want.”
“We been riding in the back all the way now. Let’s move up front,” Venita said. “Let’s see how things look from the front.”
So Moses and Venita moved to the front of the bus and looked out the front window as snow began to fall and night began to fall, and after there was nothing left to see, they turned on the light over their seats and watched themselves watching nothing.
The next morning the bus let them off on the pike, on a day that was cold and snowless.
“There it is, baby,” Moses said. “The eighth wonder of the world.”
Venita was not impressed. She covered her face with both hands. “It stink,” she said. “How can you stand that smell? Smell like rotten eggs.”
“You get use to it,” Moses said. “It don’t always smell like that. Sometime it smell worser.”
Moses walked his wife to their new house. He carried her across the threshold into a house that was cold and hollow sounding.
“Welcome to Ninety All-Bright Court. This our home,” he said, and placed Venita on her feet. Then he took the luggage from the porch and went upstairs while Venita looked through the kitchen.
She marveled at the mustard-colored gas stove and refrigerator. She adored the small pantry. It was already stocked with canned fruits and vegetables she had sent up. There was not a stick of furniture in the whole house. Moses wanted Venita to pick it out.
“Three rooms of furniture for two hundred ninety-nine dollars, and on time too,” he had told her. They would get furniture on his first day off. But today he had to work.
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