“It ain’t that bad.”
Samuel tended his pan. “That woman ain’t even want to give me no water. When I saw that, I asked her for a glass. I was testing her.”
“Testing her? You must be crazy. Who you think you is, some kind of a goddamn teacher? These white people the ones got the lessons to teach. They the ones do the testing. All you got to do is smile, play things they way, and make the money. The man I work for like me. He be taking me out to his cabin to do work. It’s nice out there. You can fish, got a little lake ain’t poisoned like Lake Erie.”
“All you got to do is be a Uncle Tom.”
“You think I’m a Uncle Tom?” Moses asked, raising his voice.
“Let me tell you something. I was a man when I left the South, and I ain’t come all this way to be a white-man boy. I’ll go back ’fore I do that.”
“You talking out your hat now,” Moses said. “You know things worser down there. Colored people got a place.”
“What, we ain’t got a place here?”
“It’s a bigger place.”
“That don’t make it better,” Samuel said.
“Yeah it do. You go on back south, then. I’m staying right here, and I’m a tell you something. I live better here than there.”
“I rather starve than go work on the other side of the bridge,” Samuel said, scooping his dinner out of the pan.
“You will,” Moses said. “If this strike keep going the way it is, you will.”
Despite what Samuel had said to Moses, before he would return to the South, he would disappear. He would keep heading north. Head up to Canada, follow the drinking gourd until it tipped in the sky, raining down its promise, freedom.
But on day sixty-five, relief came. Pickup trucks from local farms rolled up in front of the union hall looking for men to work. They came at six A.M., and Samuel was there, his lunch box packed, his thermos filled with water.
When the strikers were ordered back to work under Taft-Hartley, they did not go. A challenge was mounted. But while the union was fighting the back-to-work order, an agreement was reached between the union and management. Vice President Nixon had helped bring the two sides together. Management had not proven its charges of featherbedding.
Under the agreement no jobs were to be lost. A thirty-nine-cent-per-hour wage-and-benefit package was offered, and it was passed unanimously by the rank and file.
The union’s national leader came to a rally in Buffalo to help the men celebrate their victory. Samuel went, not because he felt much like celebrating, but because he wanted to see the man who had so much power, a man who had made Eisenhower back down, a man who held the future of a million men in his mouth.
Samuel was disappointed. The union leader looked like such an ordinary man, an older white man with silver hair and a two-hundred-dollar double-breasted wool suit. He did not look as if he had ever been inside a steel plant, and he did not look tired. It had been one hundred sixteen days, and he did not look as if he had gone hungry.
The men barely let him enter the hall. They surrounded him, hoisted him on their shoulders, and carried him up to the podium. While a band played “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the leader yelled out through a crackling microphone, “Victory is yours!”
That had been four years ago.
A man can spin silences around himself like eggshells, each silence an opaque, perfect, elliptical world. Enclosed in his own white silence, Samuel sat in the middle of the living room floor among the Easter eggs, his knees drawn to his chest. Over an hour had passed since Mary Kate had gone up to bed. It was cold in the living room, and he got up from the floor. Though he tried to step carefully through the mine field of eggs, he stepped on one and crushed it as he weaved his way.
The bedroom was dark. Samuel began undressing. He started when Mary Kate’s voice came to him.
“I ain’t mean what I say,” she said.
Samuel was still undressing. He turned toward her voice, a small and warm flame.
“You right,” he said. “I was sitting downstairs thinking. I’m a get up with you in the morning and make a fool out myself.”
“You ain’t got to get up,” she said.
“I know I don’t got to.”
“Your mind done been busy. There been that hearsay of a strike.”
Samuel stood only a few feet away from her, completely naked.
“You don’t think I heard it?”
Samuel was silent.
“Where you at?” she asked.
“I’m here.” He walked over to the bed and lay down behind her on his side. “I ain’t know you heard ’bout it,” he said, moving close to her.
“I can read. It’s been in the paper, and you know how colored folks talk, anyway. Hear say folks went hungry last time.”
Mary Kate turned toward him. She could feel Samuel’s chest rise and fall. “It’s true. Folks went hungry. It was hard times,” he said. “I ain’t want to worry you with no talk like that.”
“Seeing you starve yourself was what was worrying me, and lying, saying you was eating someplace else. Wasn’t nothing for me to say. It was for you to say.”
The muscles in Samuel’s back were tense. They began twitching, and then there was a soft fluttering, like bird wings. Mary Kate rubbed his back, calming the muscles, trying to free what was trapped inside.
“I was scared,” he whispered, his head resting on her shoulder. His tears soaked into her cotton gown. Her fingers flowed over his back. He was pulled into sleep, and when he awoke the next morning to hear his son calling out from his room, he arose in the blue morning light, still a man.
5
Fire
HENRY’S MOTHER came home from work to find him with his head in the oven and his friend Skip sitting on the kitchen sink.
When Skip saw her coming through the living room, he tried to save himself. He jumped from the sink and dashed out the back door. As he jumped off the porch and into the yard, he let out a yell. “This yard full of shit!”
Two men in hip boots were standing nearby. “All the yards are,” one said. “The sewers are backed up. Get out of the yard, boy. We’re trying to work.”
“You get in here, Skipper,” Henry’s mother yelled. “Get your butt in here right now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Skip said, and sloshed back through the ankle-deep water.
“And you, Henry. Get your head out that oven.”
But Henry did not move. “Just one more minute,” he said. Then he began to scream. His mother grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him out.
“You look like a fool,” she said. “You satisfied now you look like Skipper?”
Skip had just stepped inside the back door. “It look tough, Henry. I think it took.”
“Hold it right there, boy. Take off them shitty pants and shoes in my house,” Henry’s mother said.
“But ma’am.”
“Don’t you ‘but ma’am’ me. You do what I say, boy. You the one talked Henry into this, with your slick head.”
Skip stepped back onto the porch and stripped down to his underwear. The men whistled and laughed, and Skip jumped back inside the house.
“It’s really burning now, man. You think you should wash it out?” Henry asked.
“You go get Skipper some pants. He almost a damn grown man, standing here in his drawers.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Henry said, and flew upstairs. His head was on fire. If Skip did not wash the lye from his head soon, he would start screaming again.
“Burning part of it,” Skip had told him as he raked a comb full of white, lye-based cream through Henry’s hair. “The first time I had my process, shoot, man, I was howling like a dog. But it took real good. Like with you, when I finish with you, I’m a put your head in the oven for a couple minutes. That’s going to send it, man. That’s going to cook it. All the tough conks you see was finished off in the oven.”
To grow his hair long enough for the process, Henry had to get out of going to
the barbershop every Saturday for two months. It had been easy during the summer. He had been working a summer job at the plant. But once school started, his mother wanted his hair cut. She had taken his two younger brothers, and they had come back with their heads shaved. Henry had had to keep coming up with excuses.
“Next week, Mama.”
“I have to get my pants out layaway today.”
“They having football tryouts today.”
“I hurt my knee at tryouts last Saturday. I can’t walk to Ridge Road.”
Every day Skip would pull Henry’s hair up from his scalp. “It’s getting there, man. It’s getting there.”
“Yeah, man. It’s going to have to get there soon. My mama fenna take a razor to my head any day now,” Henry had said.
This was the day it had gotten there. It would be Saturday tomorrow, and Henry didn’t know if he could bluff his way out of the barber’s chair again. He and Skip went right home after school. Henry ran upstairs and got a towel, a comb, and the jar of cream he had hidden in his dresser drawer.
When Skip first applied the cream to Henry’s scalp, it felt cool. Henry could feel it working. He could feel the naps sliding out of his hair. The comb was gliding through, flying through his slick hair.
Then the fire started. Just a flicker at the base of his neck. And then, as if fanned by some unseen wind, it spread all over his scalp.
“It’s burning, man,” Henry said.
Skip stood over him, still raking the hard plastic comb over his scalp. “I’m fenna put you in the oven now,” Skip said.
And two minutes after Skip stuck Henry’s head in the oven, Henry’s mother walked in.
“Here the pants,” Henry said. “Rinse me now, Skip.”
Skip slipped on the pants and went to the sink to put out the fire on Henry’s scalp. He turned on the water, and a few drops fell on top of Henry’s head. They could hear the singing of air in the pipes.
“Ain’t no water, man. They cut the water off,” Skip said.
Henry began screaming again, and his mother opened the back door. “What happened to the water?” she asked the men in the yard.
“It’s off, ma’am. We cut it off at noon to unclog the sewer. It’ll be back on by five,” one of the men said.
But it was barely four, and Henry could not wait until five. “Go put your head in the toilet,” his mother said. “Hurry now, before that stuff burn you.”
Henry and Skip ran upstairs to the bathroom, and Henry dunked his head into the bowl of the tankless toilet.
Skip grabbed the soap dish and tried to dip some of the water from the bowl over Henry’s head. But it did little good.
“I’m a kill you, man,” Henry said.
“How was I supposed to know they turned the water off?”
Henry’s mother entered the bathroom with a six-pack of Pepsi and began pouring the pops over her son’s head. “Go next door on either side of me and see if anyone saved some water,” she told Skip.
Skip took off and left Henry alone with his mother. The Pepsi was putting out the fire and tingling his scalp. His mother was gently wiping the lye from his head.
Skip returned with a pot and a pitcher of water, and Henry’s mother finished rinsing his head in the sink. She managed to get all of the lye out.
“You going to let me keep it? Can I keep it, Mama? I’m almost a man, Mama. I’m a senior. Can’t I wear my hair like I want?” Henry pleaded.
“It’s your head,” his mother said, and walked out of the bathroom.
Henry stood there with tears in his eyes, and Skip ran his fingers through Henry’s hair. “It’s tough,” Skip said. “It’s really tough.”
6
Grounded
“PETER PAN a faggot. He a boy they say can fly, but I don’t think no boy can fly. That’s stupid. Rick, this boy that moved ’round my block, me and him climbed our row roof and jumped off. It was snow on the ground. It looked like a lot of snow. It wasn’t. I didn’t want to jump first. I pushed Rick. He screamed all the way down. The snow didn’t break his fall. He broke his leg. They couldn’t get me off. They had to call the fire trucks, and then I ran from the men when they was on the roof. It was dark then. That’s why I think Peter Pan stupid. Can’t no boy fly. I don’t want to fly nohow. I want to drive me a Cadillac.”
Isaac sat down after he read his report. “That’s interesting,” the teacher said. “You seem to be saying you don’t like the book because you find it unbelievable, and Peter somewhat . . . childlike. But that was the whole point of the book.”
“Naw, I’m saying he a faggot.”
“Don’t use that word,” the teacher said.
“Why? You asked me to write what I feel about the book. Now you telling me I’m wrong,” Isaac said.
“That’s not what I’m saying at all. Let’s move on to the next report,” the teacher said.
“Fuck you,” Isaac said under his breath. He didn’t know why he was thrown into this school with these people. They were stupid, retards, jellyheads.
It was after he mowed down half the fence at Roosevelt Junior High that he was transferred. It wasn’t even his fault. The men had been tearing up a field to expand the parking lot. Isaac and Rick had gone there one night to see if they could get a piece of the equipment to work. They couldn’t get the tractor or the bulldozer to start, but Rick managed to get the steamroller started. Isaac was the one who set it in motion. He was playing with the levers, and the steamroller began moving forward. It took off in a slow and steady line, crunching over gravel. Isaac was excited. He felt powerful atop the machine. It was moving like a tank.
“We at war, Ricky. We killing the Japs.”
“You crazy, Isaac. I’m not playing no stupid war game with you.”
“We killing ’em. We at war with them Commie bastards. We going to show ’em not to be messing with us,” Isaac said.
Rick was the one who saw the fence. It seemed to pop up in front of them right out of the night. He screamed for Isaac to stop.
“I can’t stop it,” Isaac yelled.
Rick jumped off the side and rolled across the gravel. Isaac was too scared to jump. He could see himself tripping and getting his bones crushed to dust under the runaway machine.
“I’m riding it out, Rick. I’m going through this mind field. If I don’t make it out alive, give my Purple Heart to my mama.”
“You crazy, Isaac. You really crazy. Bail out, man. Bail out!”
Isaac stayed on, and they heard sirens. Rick took off, turned himself into a shadow and vanished in the darkness, but Isaac was caught. He was placed in the custody of his father. No charges were pressed against him, but the next morning he had to bring his parents to school.
“You go see ’bout that hard-head boy,” his mother said to his father. “I’m too shame to go, and say what to them white people—the fool didn’t mean to run down the fence? Far as I know, he did it on purpose.”
So his father went. Before his hands had even opened, he was sitting before the principal with his hat on his knees and his head bowed. The fence had to be paid for.
Isaac sat quietly until the principal said, “It would be best to place your son in occupational education.”
“O.E.? No!” Isaac said. “I’m not going to a school for retards. I’m not riding the blue cheese.”
“Isaac, you be quiet when the man is talking,” his father reprimanded.
“I’m not going to no school for jellyheads.”
“Isaac, set there and be good,” his father said.
That was when the principal told Isaac he would have to leave the office. Isaac stood outside the door feeling as if he were going to throw up. He knew his record. He had failed the seventh grade once, and he was on his way to a second trip through the eighth grade.
That wasn’t his fault either. He was bored. They were always trying to teach him things he did not want to know, and there were always tricks. He had to find themes in stories, and write thesis statements
, and make paragraphs.
In seventh grade there had been sentence diagramming. That wrecked two whole years for him. Seeing a sentence all strung out, dangling from a line with parts of it sticking off of it like branches from a tree, made Isaac want to crawl out on one of those branches and hang himself from a particle, or article, or something. His teacher would put a sentence on the board like
When the black cat crept around the corner of the white fence, the brown and tan spotted dog gave chase.
and Isaac would say, “That dog stupid to be chasing a black cat. Don’t he know black cats bad luck?” Then he would be asked to be quiet, to just do his work or leave the room.
And he was always being asked to draw three-dimensional pictures of boxes and rectangles, and to measure lines, and to find the area of a square.
If a man has 77 cords of wood, and his neighbor borrows 10 and burns them, only to discover he had 32 cords of wood in his own barn, how many cords would the man and his neighbor each have if the neighbor returned the wood he borrowed?
Isaac could not bear it. There were too many numbers and words thrown together. He would start wondering what a cord was, and why the neighbor borrowed wood if he already had wood, and why couldn’t the neighbor borrow more wood than the man had? That was a real test for negative numbers. And why didn’t the neighbor just chop down a tree in the first place, and how could the neighbor return wood that he burned, anyway?
He was thrown out of school for three days because of negative numbers.
Isaac knew very well there were negative numbers, but he wasn’t interested in them. The teacher told him to think of them as money.
“They not money. If we going to talk about money, let’s talk about money.”
“Well, O.K.,” the teacher said. She handed Isaac ten pennies, and Isaac put them in his pants pocket.
“Now let me have them back,” the teacher said, and she put out her hand.
All-Bright Court Page 4
