“Naw, man. You a Indian giver. They mines.”
“Isaac, stop this. Work with me on this one. Give me the pennies.”
Isaac dug into his pocket and retrieved the change.
“See, now I’m in debt for ten pennies. I started with zero. Now I’m minus ten.”
“That ain’t right. Them your ten pennies, and you took ’em back. Indian giver,” Isaac said.
“Maybe this will help,” the teacher said. She put the money in his pocket. “Let’s pretend for a minute. Work with me now. Let’s say you owned the pennies—”
“Then I was robbed,” Isaac said. “Talking ’bout give you the money. That’s robbery where I come from.”
“Isaac, be serious. You have to let me help you.”
Isaac sighed. “All right.”
“Now, you owned the money, and then loaned them to me, and I spent them. Since I started with zero, I would owe you ten less than I have. Let’s say then that my husband gave me twenty pennies, and I paid you back, how many would I have?” the teacher asked.
“Ten,” Isaac said.
“Very good!” the teacher bellowed.
But Isaac would have none of it. In a fit, he tore down the number line over the chalkboard and ripped it up. “Isaac crazy,” the students screamed, and then he got three days’ suspension.
But as long as Isaac was quiet, his teachers didn’t bother him. He asked to be excused almost every period to go to the bathroom, or get a drink, or blow his nose. He roamed the halls.
Down in the bowels of the school Isaac saw enormous furnaces that roared like dragons. In another part of the basement he found cots and cans of food, gigantic silver cans covered with dust. They were big enough to be eaten by monsters, he thought. Why, a monster could eat the cans whole.
Once a year the whole school went to visit the cots and cans. Isaac loved the air-raid drill. In case of a war, everyone would stay down there and eat the canned food and sleep on the cots. But there were only about fifty cots, and three hundred people could fit in the shelter. A yellow and black sign at the entrance to the shelter told you that. Isaac knew there were more than five hundred students in the school, plus teachers. Now that was a test for negative numbers. But he figured he wouldn’t be one of those minuses. He wouldn’t be less than zero. He would be the first one down there, slide right down the wooden banisters all the way from the third floor, and then sprint down the basement stairs. He would eat canned beef and powdered eggs until all the Commies were dead.
When Isaac was in the seventh grade for the second time, a white boy in the eighth grade, a boy no bigger than a ten-year-old, was caught stealing a can of food and was suspended for three days. He was one of fifteen children, and his family lived in a run-down house near the school. “Stupid Polack,” Isaac had said. “Greedy gut. What he want? For us to go hungry in a atomic war?”
Isaac had explored much of the universe by wandering the halls of the school. There were rats in cages, dead newts in jars, sewing machines, maps of other countries and globes that would bounce like balls, charts of the human body full of veins or muscles or bones, strange boxes in the girls’ lavatories that read “Modess.” Isaac knew where the janitors ate lunch and when the oil delivery truck came. He knew if you turned the gas on high in the lab and then threw a lit match at it, you could blast your eyebrows and lashes right off of your face. He also knew that if you closed yourself inside a locker, you couldn’t let yourself out, and that the fat dictionary in the library had nasty words in it. Isaac knew lots of things, all kinds of things. But still he was failing. That was what the principal was telling his father, that he was stupid, a loser.
Isaac was transferred the next week to the Occupational Education Center in Capital Park, despite his protestations. A tour impressed him, though he would not admit it. There were all kinds of shops, a machine shop, a woodworking shop, even an auto shop. He was told that he would spend half the day in shop and half in classes.
Isaac didn’t mind the school that much. It was better than Roosevelt, really. During his first month there he hadn’t been asked to diagram a sentence, to add or subtract negative numbers, to draw one geometric shape. In wood shop he learned how to drive a nail and turn a screw. He was even taught how to use a saw, not just the handsaw but the power saw too. He made his own tool box and a pencil box, and he had been allowed to burn his name into the side of each. Now he was working on a footstool for his father.
Isaac’s English teacher was beginning to spoil things, though, with this Peter Pan thing. What did he want Isaac to say? He wrote what he felt, and now he felt wrong. Why couldn’t you call Peter Pan a faggot? All Isaac knew was that if some boy with those fairy boots came through his window, talking about his shadow wouldn’t stick to him, he would have beat him up. He would have pushed Pete right back out the window, just like he pushed Rick from the roof, and then he would watch him hit the ground. Foop! Pete would grow up then, some stupid white boy with fairy boots and a broken leg, and a shadow all balled up on the ground.
If he had been back at Roosevelt, this would have been the time to roam. During his first few weeks at the new school, Isaac had wandered down to the basement. He had heard sounds coming from one of the rooms there. What he heard sounded like animals, but when he peeked inside, he saw a room full of jellyheads.
They were sitting around some tables with teachers. Their bodies were soft and doll-like. Some were twisted and bent into unnatural positions, some strapped in wheelchairs, some wearing helmets.
One boy knelt in a corner, a helmet strapped to his head, and he was banging, banging, banging his head on the cement floor.
Isaac was staring at this boy when one of the children at a table pointed at him and began making noises. “Ooh ah coa ah coa ah,” Isaac heard him say.
A teacher turned to Isaac and smiled. “He’s asking you to come in. Would you like to come join us?”
Isaac took off running, tripping as he climbed the stairs. He got up and kept running, not looking behind him, and he hadn’t gone back to the basement since.
If a boy could really fly, these were the children he should take, Isaac thought. He should take these retards and dump them in Never Land.
7
November 22, 1963
JUST WHEN there were no more tears, he died. As she lay on the couch with the television playing to no one, he died again. Just when her eyes were closing and her tears were grains of salt in the corners of her eyes, she blinked, and in a splash of whiteness he died.
A pebble thrown into the ocean at noon, cold and white and hard, splashing water on her. Salty water drying, leaving white rings of salt around her swollen ankles.
“Mrs. Taylor, you should not eat salt while you’re expecting. It causes swelling.”
But she was not a salt eater. It was starch she ate, boxes and boxes of Argo. What a country thing to do. She fed it to Mikey and kissed the whiteness from his lips before his father came home.
And she was no dirt eater, like some women in All-Bright Court, sending down south for boxes of earth to eat. She did not eat it when she was back home, even when the women sucked on it to cut their hunger and fed it to children like candy. She never ate it, though they said it was sweet. She ate starch because she was pregnant, sometimes a box a week, and it left her dry.
She had found out she was pregnant a few weeks before Easter when her mouth was searching for starch. It led her and Mikey across the field at the end of All-Bright Court and to the Red Store, a store the people named for its color, the redness of the bricks. Never did they call it Jablonski’s Market. It was there in the Red Store that an old man was telling a story to the man behind the counter, a story of a snake.
The old man’s cousin had been bitten by a cottonmouth. He was bitten on the shank, and he ignored it. But he had gotten sick some days later, boils rose on him, and a fever burned in his chest. Then the boils erupted, and cotton burst forth from them, cotton white and light as air. Black people ran f
rom him, but some white men came from the state college, thinking he was going to die, thinking maybe they could figure out a way to farm cotton out of a nigger. They collected the cotton and measured it. But when the fever broke, the cotton dried up. The white men went away disappointed. The black people came around again. They didn’t know if he had really been bitten by a cottonmouth. He could have ended up that way from picking cotton all those years. Maybe it had gotten into his blood.
Mrs. Taylor did not believe the old man’s story. It seemed every week someone was coming up from down south with all kinds of country tales. But the thought of the snake and the cotton sickened her, and she threw up right there in the store. She wanted to clean up after herself, but she didn’t have a tissue. Mr. Jablonski had to clean up.
The storytelling man looked at her and her son. He looked at the box of starch in her hand. “What you want this time, a girl?”
She did not say anything to the man. She paid for the starch and left. But this storytelling man knew, knew before even she had suspected. Mary Kate understood that the snake story wasn’t true, but that did not stop it from upsetting her. That did not stop it from slithering, wet and cold, back to her.
It came back to her on this day, many months later, after her tears were salt. He was shot again, splash. The snake encircled her ankles. The cottonmouth crawled up her shanks. She could not see it, she was drowning in darkness, but she could feel its heaviness on her legs, pulling her down, back into darkness. And then there was the bite, wet and sharp. She awakened, screaming and beating her legs.
Mikey was lying across her lap, biting her.
“Boy, what you was doing there? Why was you biting Mama?”
“What happened to your stories, Mama? They not on.”
The phone rang. She did not answer it. He would be dying there, on the line, in someone’s mouth.
“That why you was biting me?” she asked.
“Can I go play in the snow?”
“I’ll see,” she said.
“I didn’t have no lunch, Mama . . . The phone ringing.”
“I know,” she said, and got up from the couch. She turned off the television. He was dying in there, in some white man’s mouth. “Mama fenna make you some lunch. Come on.”
“You was crying, Mama . . . The phone ringing,” Mikey said.
“I know,” she said.
He was dying there, and she wiped the salt away. How many times could one man die?
8
Thunderbird
“SO WE GOT a new President,” the butcher at the A & P said to Moses as he wrapped up the smoked turkey Venita had ordered for Thanksgiving.
“Johnson ain’t new. He been in there a year. People voted for him ’cause of JFK. That’s why I voted for him.”
“Get out,” the butcher said. “You’re in the U.S.W. If they thought you voted for Goldwater, they would bounce you. No, first they would collect your dues. Then they would give you the bum’s rush. Hey, what happened to your hand? You get burned or something?”
“Naw,” Moses said. “When that wind was kicking up last week, I slipped on some ice coming out the Welfare Building and broke my wrist.”
“Well, I hope Capital is taking care of you. That company is a damn money tree,” the butcher said. “I used to work for them, you know.”
“Is that right?” Moses said.
“Yeah, but there wasn’t enough money being shaken my way. I hear things are better now. You get that thirteen-week vacation.”
“Right,” Moses said sarcastically. “Ten years from now I should get it.”
The U.S.W. president had negotiated a thirteen-week sabbatical once every five years for workers in the top half of the seniority rank of their plants. Though Moses scoffed at the paid vacation because his would be so far in the future, the sabbatical was a major victory for the workers. An average member of the rank and file would be able to take three or four before he retired.
“Word is, the union president got us this deal so he can look good. There’s a election coming up. But I ain’t voting for him. He the one led that strike back in ’fifty-nine. We ain’t had a raise since then. But he making fifty thousand,” Moses said. “1 don’t see how he expect us to live. I ain’t hardly making it.” He pulled out money to pay for the turkey.
“You pay for it at the front check-out.”
Despite what Moses told the butcher, he was doing very well. He was making $4.00 an hour when the average steelworker’s wage was $3.70. He was still paying on the three rooms of furniture he and Venita had bought, but he managed to put money away. He had even gotten a car, a brand-new 1964 Thunderbird, a beautiful red hardtop with bucket seats. Moses had ordered the optional lights that told him when the fuel was low and a door was ajar.
Venita thought those features were a waste of money. “How you wouldn’t know you didn’t have gas? And there ain’t but two doors on the car. It seem like you would know if one of them was open,” she said to Moses.
This car was for their trip down south. There was no way Moses wanted to arrive in Starkville on a bus. He was going back in style, in a car that moved people “in a special atmosphere.”
But he and Venita never made the trip. When Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were unearthed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Venita refused to go. “I don’t want to be on the road,” she told Moses, “not down there. I can see my people some other time.”
“We ain’t going that far south, and we ain’t going down there to start no trouble,” Moses said.
“You believe they was starting trouble? Them crackers killed them for the fun of it. Don’t be stupid.”
He hid within the shell of his words. They were a way of protecting him from the truth. He did not believe the three men were agitators. They were close to his age. One of them was black, Chaney. Moses knew what could happen to a black man on a lonely road in Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner learned what could happen even to white men.
Moses and Venita took a proletariat vacation to Atlantic City instead.
On his way to pay for his turkey, Moses passed down the dairy aisle. A small boy dressed in a snowsuit was leaning over the case. The boy opened a carton and began dropping eggs, one by one, to the floor. Moses was about to say something to the boy when he saw Samuel Taylor coming up the aisle pulling a red wagon filled with groceries.
“Mikey, what is you doing?” Samuel yelled as Mikey was dropping another egg.
Moses rushed past the pair without looking at them. He paid for his turkey and left the store. His car was parked in the gravel lot in back. As Moses neared his car, he saw a woman and a gaggle of children coming up the street. It was Greene and her brood.
That summer Greene and her six children had come up from Florida. They just showed up at All-Bright Court in a dusty yellow pickup that broke down the day they arrived and had to be towed away. No one knew them, and not a week after they moved in, the bats came.
Out of the twilight they appeared as shadows, first a few, then hundreds. But under the pale light of the full moon they became bats. Isaac led a group of boys on a bat hunt. With brooms and sticks they managed to kill a few bats they chased off from the main group. No one had ever seen anything like it before, and when one of the women mentioned it to Greene, she said, “I want to get my hands on one of them bats. I could use one of them bats.”
And that was all it had taken. The next morning, the question “What she want with a bat?” was being asked by the women from one end of All-Bright Court to the other.
“Where them bats come from out of nowhere and then just disappear?”
“You reckon she called them?”
“And what she was doing with a bat?”
“What you think! She into hoodoo.”
“Mark my words, she going to hoodoo somebody.”
“Hey, girl, you see her teeth? Looking into her mouth make you feel like falling in a pit.”
All of Greene’s teeth were covered in gold, and none of the wom
en knew how she could afford them. Despite the fact she wore a wedding band, no husband came north with her. And Greene had no trouble attracting men.
“Country nigger” is what the women said of Greene. Of the men they said, “Only a country nigger would think her mouth look good.”
Greene was accused of not leaving her country ways behind. Her accusers knew, because they were country niggers too. Over the years they had claimed to be from Birmingham, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, Jackson, New Orleans. But they were really from Plain Dealing, Zenith, Goshen, Acme, Gopher. They had come from specks on the map. They knew the country and its ways well. They had seen spells cast, fields dry up, floods come, moles cast in women’s wombs. And then there were the bats.
The bats had come with Greene’s arrival. This did not stop some of the husbands in All-Bright Court from passing in and out of her back door. They came to explore the riches of her mouth. They left knowing the secrets beneath her tongue.
All of her children wore asafetida bags around their necks. The bags and strings turned black and greasy and smelled of garlic.
In the parking lot Moses rolled down the car window with his good hand and spoke to Greene as she passed with her children. “Cold enough for you?”
“I’m telling you, I done moved to the coldest place there is,” Greene said.
“It ain’t all of that. You get used to it. Your blood get thicker,” Moses said. Even in the thin air, he thought he could smell the rankness of the bags. He did not believe in their power, or hers. His wife, Venita, thought Greene to be a conjure woman, a woman whose power should not be overlooked.
“You must have a hole in your head if you thinking ’bout going to her. How many times I got to tell you you ain’t in the country no more,” Moses had told Venita.
Samuel came around the corner, pulling the Radio Flyer stuffed with so many bags of groceries that Mikey, who was sitting in the wagon, had to hold a bag on his lap. Samuel walked with his head bowed to the wind, the wagon skidding on the newly fallen snow.
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