Venita had rehearsed the scene, had written the entire play, so when the time came she would be ready, believing in the absurd notion that if you rehearsed for tragedy, you were better prepared to face it.
When her father had died back in ’65, when she had received the call from her Aunt Hattie, she thought then she would be ready. The buying of the black dress, the long bus ride home, the knowing her father was dead, did not prepare her for seeing him in a small coffin, his face gray, his stiff hands clenched around a Bible, a book he never read, since he could not read. Though she had thought herself ready, she still expected to see him with a drink in his hand, and when he was buried, she had wailed with the rest of the women.
Sorrow has a finite depth, breadth, width. Venita knew this, for she had woven hers into a cloak and hidden behind it. Sorrow could not touch her as she looked at the child who had come and broken the silence in her life with Moses.
It was not as if Clotel had done anything, said any one thing to change their lives, for she was a quiet child. It was the sight of her combing a doll’s hair, the feel of her hand in theirs, the sound of her walking upstairs over their heads, the sound of her breath while she slept.
The first time Moses and Venita heard her laugh, they were in bed on a cold Saturday morning, deciding if they should make love, if they had time before Clotel woke up. Having to decide added secrecy and intimacy to their lives, which they had not had since they were teens and made love in the far corner of Venita’s parents’ garden the summer before Moses went north. He would wait impatiently for her in the night, calling like an owl from the woods. They would lie with his shirt bunched under her head, their eyes closed, their ears open to any sound rising from the green and soft earth.
On that Saturday morning, as she and Moses lay together, the girl’s laughter rose, eddying and curling around the banister, every bit as shocking as the smell of smoke. They left the bed quietly and walked halfway down the stairs, to see Clotel and her doll sitting less than a foot away from the television, watching cartoons.
Like anyone who retreats into a world of dreams, Clotel would awake in the night, blinded by the blackness of her room, and think she was still sleeping, lying in a dreamless void, waiting to be awakened. Dreams now passed her by on their way to children who needed them more than she.
She slept less, entered more into the world of wakefulness, and began stumbling through the house, breaking things. The first thing she broke was an ashtray Venita had gotten in Atlantic City. She bumped into the cocktail table, and the dish shattered on the floor. Clotel ran and hid in the closet under the stairs, expecting to be beaten. She refused to come out for hours, even when Moses came home from work. Not until after dinner did she emerge, her eyes puffy, her face flushed. She was not beaten. She was given her dinner. Moses and Venita were never angry with her, even when she dropped her fork, spilled a glass of milk, splashed water from the tub. Zena would fly into a rage over offenses smaller than these. Once she had beaten Clotel because she had forgotten to flush the toilet.
Clotel never asked where her mother was, why she had gone, but to Venita it seemed the child’s restless, searching eyes were watching out for Zena. Her mother had told her that her protruding blue eyes made her look ugly, like a fish, and Clotel had come to feel that way, submerged in the blueness of her house, as colorless as a creature on the floor of the deepest of oceans, unexposed to light, living under atmospheres of pressure.
But in this new house life drifted down to her.
Before school started, the Taylor girls Jonetta and Olivia came over to Venita’s to play with her. This was beyond her experience. The knock on the door was for her. Someone had come to see her. She went out with them and watched them play hand-clapping games, singing all those names she had heard ringing through All-Bright Court so many times: Miss Mary Mack, Miss Sue, the pretty little Dutch girl, Punchinello.
When they sang Sally Walker, they gyrated their hips and shook their shoulders, urging on the weeping Sally sitting in the middle of the circle:
Rise, Sally, Rise.
Wipe them tears out eyes.
Put your hands on hips,
And let your backbone slip.
Ah, shake it to the east,
Ah, shake it to the west,
Ah, shake it to the very one you like the best
Sally West.
Clotel liked this game. There was no falling down, not like ring around the rosie, when the girls turned themselves into piles of ashes. Here was only a rising up as the girls danced and shook their troubles away.
It was not until the spring that Clotel entered the game, when Jonetta picked her to come into the center.
And there, in the brief and late spring, Clotel rose from the ground that still held winter. The earth was yet to give way to the softness, the gentle push of warmth, sun, rain. It did not yield when Clotel began shaking as if in a trance, her hands on her hips, her head thrown back, her white face turned up to the sun. She shook to the east and west. When the girls stopped singing, she kept on dancing, shaking to the north, to the south, and all the girls stood around watching.
One finally said, “Stop, girl, and pick somebody.”
Clotel did not stop. She kept on dancing until Jonetta jumped into the center and grabbed her by the shoulders. Clotel stopped and stood squinting at the blueness of the sky, waiting for rain to chase her back into hiding. None fell, and still looking upward, she walked from the center of the circle.
Venita could not put off looking at Clotel any longer. It was time to wake her. She sat on the bed next to the child, who was curled up on her side like a baby.
Below the lids, Clotel’s eyes were moving rapidly. Venita called to her, but she would not respond. She shook the child, and when this did not wake her, she tried to lift her. But she was so heavy in sleep that Venita could not move her.
She went to get Moses to take the child down. But he could not face Clotel to say goodbye.
“That woman waiting now,” Venita pleaded. “Get on up.” Moses would rather have stayed in bed, his face to the wall, but he got up and walked past Venita into Clotel’s room.
Venita followed. Clotel lay more tightly curled than before, and when Moses went to lift her, it seemed as if she had fastened herself to the bed. When he finally got her up, she went limp in his arms. Venita picked up her things, and they descended the stairs. It was as though they were being summarily dismissed, given back their unadorned life. And they were going to go back without a fight, back into an existence that was as white and slick as the inside of an eggshell, into a seamless life that curved around itself, defining its own scope. Even before the rising of the sun, Venita would be up cooking Moses breakfast, packing him a lunch. Moses would go to work, and when he returned Venita would have his dinner ready. Later, when neither could avoid it any longer, they would drift upstairs, and though they would sleep in the same bed, they would be at opposite ends of an open field, he calling to her like an owl, she no longer able to hear him.
Zena was sitting, smoking, flicking ashes into a cut-glass candy dish. She took a few more drags before she put the cigarette out, and she stood up.
“This all her stuff?” Zena asked, taking the things from Venita and moving toward the door.
“I’ll carry her to where ya’ll going,” Moses offered.
“I got a car outside, and you can put her down. She ain’t even sleep,” Zena said. “You ain’t even sleep,” she said to Clotel. “Get up.”
The child stiffened in Moses’s arms, and then her legs arched downward as she made an effort to stand. Moses placed her on her feet.
“Let’s go,” Zena said to her, taking her by the hand. Clotel began walking, her eyes closed. There was no need to open them, for she would still be in bed, still dreaming.
“Wait,” Venita said. “I forgot her doll, and her coat. She shouldn’t go out without a coat. I’m a run up and get them.”
“Don’t trouble yourself. She be all righ
t. She ain’t going to need a coat. We going to California,” Zena said, her smoky breath in Venita’s face.
Zena led Clotel out the door, and Clotel kept her roving eyes shut tight, even as the rain began to fall.
25
Where’s Joe
MIKEY had sulked when he found out his father did not have the money to send him on his class trip. Over the spring break, the class was going to Washington, D.C., to celebrate the bicentennial year. Mikey did not dare tell anyone at school that he could not go because of money. He simply said his family had made other plans. His friend Scott wasn’t going either. He and some of his friends were driving to Florida. Mikey didn’t understand why his father didn’t have the money. He did not know that his father had been a slave for four years now.
“We have been sold into slavery!” the local representative screamed at the rank and file gathered in the union hall. It was two weeks before Christmas. Nixon had been reelected. The men, still dazed by the layoffs that had come earlier that year, sat tired and confused. In the back of the room was a line of men. Samuel stood in the line. The hall was not even full, but there were not enough seats. At a meeting the previous week, half of the wooden folding chairs had been destroyed.
The men had been called in to view a film, Where’s Joe? Joe was an American steelworker without a job. Joe had not worked hard enough. He had wanted too much money, too many benefits. Joe was on the unemployment line.
“Where’s Hans?” the film asked. “Where’s Oda?”
Hans and Oda had Joe’s job. They had worked harder. They had worked longer, for lower wages. They had sacrificed for the good of their nations.
Finally, the film posed the question “Will you be Joe?” The men had grumbled through the movie, but when the final question was asked, a chair winged through the air, its seat flapping shut, and knocked down the pull-up screen. The men began smashing chairs. They tore the reel from the projector and ripped apart the film, as if Oda and Hans were inside it, living in one of the frames, as if their union president, Petrovich, could be strangled by twisting the film.
If only they could get their hands on Petrovich, they would tear his lame-duck wings from his body. After the men had been laid off, without the consent, advice, or even knowledge of the rank and file, Petrovich had met with management and signed their lives away. He had taken away their right to strike.
The agreement he signed was called the ENA, the Experimental Negotiating Agreement. It would be a way of protecting the men, to keep foreign steel from taking advantage of domestic steel. If there was to be a strike, the Germans or Japanese could make inroads by selling their product more cheaply. Strikes were not only obsolete, they were dangerous. Whether or not the men agreed, their amended contract was binding.
Samuel focused his attention on the representative at the podium. “Let me read something to you,” the man said. “This is a quote, now, not my words. ‘I’d like to see democracy exercised to the fullest extent in our union or any other union, but democracy in the labor movement, as in various segments of life, can be carried too far.’
“I probably don’t even have to tell you who said that. It was Petrovich, the lousy son of a bitch, lame duck. Too much democracy! That’s what he’s saying. Where the hell does he think we are, Russia? Petrovich is Russian. You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying. He’s trying to sell us into slavery, the stinking Red.”
Samuel did not know if Petrovich was a Red. He did know he was a redneck.
During the fall of that year Gerald Thompson, a black staff representative, won a nomination as a candidate for international vice president. The then vice president was retiring. Despite the fact Thompson was backed by the black members of the U.A.W., who numbered one third of the union’s membership, Petrovich invalidated the nomination. It came to his attention that in 1965, while Thompson was hospitalized with a work-related injury, he had let his dues lapse.
“We will fight, fight, fight!” the union representative yelled. “We have a contract that doesn’t say we can’t strike. We’re going to court because that agreement Petrovich made isn’t right and it isn’t legal.”
Before the rank and file went to negotiate its new contract, a ruling was handed down on the no-strike policy. The judge hearing the case said, “In any system of self-government, in theory and in practice even the most precious of rights may be waived, assuming that the system established for making such a decision is followed.”
Because the rank and file had voted Petrovich in, what he did might not have been right, but it was legal. The no-strike policy would be in effect until 1977.
Work or leave. Those were the choices the men faced. How could that be considered slavery? No one forced into involuntary servitude had the option of leaving.
When the contract came back, there was a twenty-eight-cent-an-hour raise the first year, and sixteen cents for each of the next two years. In just fourteen years, steelworkers dropped from first to fourteenth on the wage scale of industrial workers.
The men worked while management continued streamlining the industry, combining and eliminating jobs and starting a “speed-up” campaign. There was no featherbedding. And the men’s loyalty to the 1974 contract was rewarded. Each worker was given a flat one-hundred-fifty-dollar bonus. Management had no hard feelings.
In the bicentennial year, when sixty-five thousand domestic specialty-steel jobs were threatened by imports from Germany and Japan, Samuel knew Hans and Oda were working, and he was glad to be working, even with emphysema. He was glad he was not Joe.
Mikey would not be making the trip, but he was leaving anyway. He was going to graduate the next year, a full year early, and he was going east. Every school he was applying to was in New England.
“Why don’t you apply to some college ’round here? They got some good schools in Buffalo,” Mary Kate had said to Mikey one day while he was preparing to go out on his route.
“Mama, there are no good schools around here. I’m not going to go to a state university. I can get into the Ivy League.”
Samuel asked, “What’s that?”
“Dad,” Mikey said, “everyone knows what the Ivy League is.”
“I don’t,” Samuel said. “Your mama don’t know neither.”
“They’re the best colleges in the country, the world!” Mikey said.
“If you want to go away to school, you should think ’bout going to a black college, someplace like Southern,” Mary Kate said.
“Southern?” Samuel asked.
Mary Kate said, “Yeah, it’s a fine school, and then there’s Grambling, Howard—”
“I’m not going to any black college,” Mikey said, folding the last of his papers.
“He right. He ain’t going to one of them,” Samuel said, coughing. “If he want to get what the white man got, he better go where the white man go.”
Mikey left with his papers.
That night, when Mary Kate and Samuel were in bed, she asked, “Why you tell Mikey what you did?”
“What?” he asked. He had been half asleep, his back to her.
“You not wanting him to go to a black college.”
“Kate, could you see him at one?”
“Well, I can’t see where he want to go. He just want to get away from us.” Her voice was thin, brittle.
Samuel turned to face her. In a wheezing voice he said, “That ain’t true. Don’t you think that.”
“It is true. I worry ’bout him more than any of our children. Him graduating early, he doing that so he can get away. He going to be lost to us,” she said, her voice cracking.
“Hush, now,” Samuel said, his words floating into the shadows of the room. “He going to be all right. Let me tell you something,” he said, reaching out for his wife in the darkness. “He going to be a blessing to us in our old age.”
26
Snowbound
FOR JUST a minute Mikey was lost. Only a few blocks from home, he could have been in a desert, swep
t up in a simoom, sand becoming sky, becoming air, blinding him, choking him.
But he was on Ridge Road, caught out in the worst storm of the century, the blizzard of ’77. Mikey wished the storm was something he had dreamed up. If he were dreaming, someone would come and wake him, and he would find himself safely in bed. He would settle for seeing Isaac, welcome his haunting presence. Isaac could scare him out of this nightmare.
As Mikey had gotten off the bus, the driver had said, “I hope you’re close to home. The way it’s coming down, you might never get there.”
Only then did it occur to Mikey that he might be in danger. Though it took him five hours to get to Lackawanna, though the two buses he had to take had been late, had stopped and skidded and lumbered along through snow falling at a rate of two inches an hour, though along the lakefront there had been zero visibility and the driver nearly hit seven abandoned cars, Mikey had not let himself believe the storm could harm him.
The storm was not unexpected. High winds and ten inches to a foot of snow had been predicted. The flurries had begun early that morning, a little snow slipping in unobtrusively over the lake.
The headmaster at Essex had decided at ten in the morning there would be a full day of classes. Then it had been snowing steadily, but not heavily. The previous week he had dismissed classes at noon because a heavy snowfall had been predicted. But less than an inch fell, leaving smokelike spirals of snow dancing across the deserted campus, and the headmaster looked foolish. He was not going to repeat that mistake.
As Mikey had sat in his last class of the day, watching as the world was being obliterated by whiteness, he thought that back in All-Bright Court everyone must surely be thinking that the world was ending, that this storm was a plague being visited upon them by God.
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