Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  “You know, Temmy,” he said, “you'll learn as you get older that there really isn't that much difference between your so-called pretty butterflies and your so-called ugly mosquitoes.”

  I looked at my father and I wondered if the sun hadn't beaten down too hot on his head. Didn't he see how light and free those butterflies were? Didn't he see how the sun fanned rainbow colors into their wings?

  Well, twenty years have passed since my father and I last sat on that porch. And after Valerie died, with each year's passing, I finally began to understand what he meant.

  That mosquito bites you now and it dies. It leaves a little mark, but nothing to really talk about, nothing that doesn't go away after a day or two. But the butterfly, that pretty, pretty little butterfly, bites you in another way: It makes you think life is full of color and light and easy. When you pinch its wings, it even sprinkles some of its magic onto your fingertips, like gold nuggets, making you think all you have to do is reach out for it. And you can buy yourself a forever. That's when it bites you. Unlike the mosquito, it doesn't die. But slowly you do. When you learn the truth.

  CHAPTER 3

  Tempestt:

  “Good morning and welcome to Lakeland.”

  I was only eleven years old but deeply rooted in our South Side bungalow when my father moved my mother and me across town to Lakeland. Our move took place in early September 1975. I remember sitting in the backseat of our well-aged Volvo, which Daddy had spit-shined himself the night before, picking at the tear in the vinyl between my legs. The more I picked and pulled at the wadding, the easier it was to forget about the itchy ankle socks and the pleated skirt my father had forced me to wear.

  “Daughter of mine,” he said, glaring at me over his shoulder. “Daughter of mine” was his new way of referring to me. The words fell clankety on my ears and felt completely inappropriate for two people who had swapped bobbers and minnows and baseball cards, including a 1968 Ernie Banks number that only I could have made him part with. That particular one I kept by itself, wrapped in wax paper in one of Daddy's old tackle boxes under my bed. Though my mother never understood why a little girl would need such things—including several pairs of All Stars that Mama made me lace in pink, explaining only, “Because I said so!”—when cleaning my bedroom, she always, always cleaned around them. She also demanded that my father, from time to time, bring me roses in addition to model airplanes and finely crafted fishing rods with walnut stock handles.

  “Daughter of mine,” Daddy continued. This time, he squinted into the rearview mirror. “I won't ask you again to stop picking at that seat. Sit up straight, dear.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Temmy, and close your legs. You're a young lady. Didn't our talk last night mean anything? Weren't you listening? We're almost there now. Sit up straight, I said.”

  I suppose my father's metamorphosis didn't happen all at once. But it seemed that way to me. In truth, it was probably a gradual thing, like an apple left sitting on a counter. One day it's all red and softly curved and the next you find yourself slicing off sections, trying to find places the mold and sunken-in dark spots haven't yet reached. As we drove closer to Lakeland, I wanted just to shake my father, make him wake up and come back to himself. I wanted him to shave off that silly mustache he'd recently scratched out of his face and toss off that too-tight striped necktie. The house, though sold, was still empty. We could move back in, patch it up, make it pretty again, I thought. But of course my thinking was simplistic. My father would never again see the house at 13500 South Morrison Street as our home.

  For me, our bungalow, our neighborhood, was the only home I'd ever wanted to know. From the day I'd learned our address and our telephone number by heart, it had become as much a part of me as my name. My parents had created a life that was sturdy and robust, existing as so much color: yellow-and-blue-trimmed bungalows that lined perfectly square city blocks; Miss Jane's red compact—the size of Daddy's hand—which Mama said Miss Jane held like a shield while sitting where the sunlight was best on her front porch, warding off the years; and Mr. Jenkins's broad purple boxers that were always line-drying on his back fence across the alley. How the prospect of ivory towers and debutante balls could ever compare to this world was completely beyond my understanding. I also wondered how my father could not only choose Lakeland but yearn for it. It was a lifestyle he'd once believed to be too “one size fits all,” and as loosely woven and thin as tissue paper.

  At stoplights, Daddy busied himself by flicking lint off my mother's sky blue cardigan and attempting to blot her perfectly smudged lipstick. Mama batted his hand away, warning with side glances that he was acting a fool.

  “Thomas, you'll draw back a stub,” she said calmly, refusing a full head turn to her left. So, after Daddy pulled the radio's knob and Mama pushed it back in (saying the static, all that popping and cracking, was trying her nerves), he folded several sheets of Kleenex and wiped his loafers. These, I must say, were the same loafers that just one year before he swore pinched his toes and were fit for nothing more than pulling weeds in our garden.

  It used to be, before night school transformed my father from a cabdriver into a teacher, that Daddy watched me with a sense of ceremony as I played in our backyard. He would watch as I skipped around our partially painted picnic table and climbed the bottom branches of our apple tree. He clapped when I completed a somersault; he cheered when I shattered the Coke bottle with the slingshot he'd seen me eye in the Woolworth two blocks from our house. And with him and often my mother as my audience, that tiny backyard—with its thick rows of collards and cramped tomato vines—grew under endless possibilities. Back then, Daddy admired my socks that rarely matched, and my prickly hair, his shade of red, which he once chuckled with Saville pride was so wild, a comb would break its neck getting through.

  But on that morning, when my father reached a heavy hand back toward me, it was only to brush wayward strands, forcing them, too, into submission.

  The night before our move, Daddy rummaged through the house, deciding what was fitting and proper to take to the kingdom of the drab and what was best left behind. We had packed most of our things and sent them ahead. What remained, the movers would take the following morning. There wasn't much need for furniture because Lakeland's apartments, Daddy said, were “impeccably” furnished. The only redeeming quality about that final night was that Mama allowed my friend Gerald Wayne to sleep over with me. We spent the early-evening hours in the backyard in my tent before going inside. It was one last opportunity to listen to all the crickets and grasshoppers and the pitter-patter of alley rats, whose size often put some cats to shame.

  Gerald Wayne and I had been friends since the second grade. Though I had seen him often in school, we met one Saturday while he was sitting on the curb in front of Wilson's Fix-It shop, playing by himself, as he often had. (I inherited both my parents' penchant for the down-and-out.) I just happened to be walking by, when he looked up at me, smiled, exposing two vacant spaces where front teeth should have been, and said in a most sincere voice, “You dare me eat this worm?” Had he given me ample time, I suppose I would indeed have considered the question. Only he didn't. Before I could utter a word, he dangled the worm over his mouth, let the squirmy little thing stare into his tonsils, then scarfed it down. Oh, he was nasty. He didn't even flinch.

  Children always teased Gerald because of his dietary habits. But he had yet another unbearable affliction: He reeked—smelled just like a goat. None of us truly understood why, especially with his family living on the west side of the el train tracks, near the old soap factory. I suppose we thought proximity alone would have an impact on his condition. Even back then, Gerald was the cutest little boy in the second grade. He had smooth brown skin, dark brown eyes that twinkled, and a smile that sometimes made even me feel faint. But he had this black cloud that formed a capsule around his entire body. It was as if no other part of the atmosphere would allow it to enter, so it clung to Gerald fo
r dear life. It even shimmied in the moonlight. Mama said all the child needed was a bath. Daddy later obliged him with one and threatened that if he didn't make “dipping” himself part of his daily routine, he would be banned from our house. Gerald liked having a friend, so he washed, religiously.

  The night before we moved, Gerald and I sat in my tent with our legs crossed and the flashlight dimming between us as we sighed, grasping for topics that didn't smack of corny recollections or mushy farewells.

  “My dad said you guys are lucky to be moving to Lakeland,” Gerald said, interrupting several seconds of silence. “The construction company he works for helped build it. ‘Yep,' he said, ‘the Savilles are some lucky black people.' ”

  “Oh, shut up, Gerald,” I said, choking back tears. “Nobody's lucky to be going nowhere—I mean, anywhere.” Daddy had begun to drill me on my double negatives.

  Outside the tent, a soft breeze nudged the wind chimes on the back porch, which alone held many of my childhood memories. It was there where Gerald helped me dig a hole to bury the horrendous Cinderella dress our neighbor Miss Jane had bought one Christmas, expecting me to wear it to church with her. Mama knew I had buried it back there. She pretended not to see one of the bells jutting up from the ground. But she never said anything, because she hated it, too. In the knotholes in the pine of the banister I had stuffed so many wads of purple and green bubble gum that after several years, they seemed to hold the old rickety thing together. And once I had even caught Mama and Daddy under that porch, moaning and touching one another in places that made me giggle.

  Feeling sick, I opened the flap of the tent. I told Gerald I had to use the bathroom, then went into the house to find my father. I didn't want Gerald to see one teardrop. I don't know when it happened, but Gerald considered himself my protector, my shadow and shield. No, I'm not sure when it happened, because I was the one who often protected him. Like the day I had rubbed his head when Sandy Roberts shoved him to the ground. Daddy had told him that it was never acceptable for a boy to fight a girl, so Gerald couldn't hit her back. But I could.

  In the house, I saw my father scurrying about and I wondered what was lifting him, when my mother and I felt to leave was one of the most wrenching things that could happen to us. One final box marked Garvey, Du Bois, Merton, and Robeson sat in the hallway. My father had so many books that the movers had to make two trips for them alone. He was about to prop the box against the front door when he noticed me staring at him.

  “Hey, princess,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said, picking at the newly painted lime green wall. I unpigeoned my feet, remembering my mother's warnings about them one day turning completely inward.

  “You, okay? Seems like you got something on your mind. At least I hope you aren't so rude that you'd leave my boy out there by himself for nothing. Come here.” He reached out to me with those huge arms of his and made me sit on his lap.

  “I don't want to leave,” I muttered.

  “Daughter of mine,” he said. “I thought we talked about this. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, dear. There's a waiting list a mile long to get into Lakeland. And our name”—he thumped my chest, then his—“our name was pulled in the lottery. Where we're going is a much better place than this.”

  He brushed his hair back in frustration, revealing a row of reddish gray strands. Then he looked up at the top of the stairs, where Mama was standing, folding towels. She, too, was listening; she, too, needed another dose of convincing. At first, my father looked everywhere except directly at me. I followed his gaze to the empty living room. Without furniture, it was all too apparent the floor sloped too much toward the fake fireplace, and oddly, the room seemed smaller than it had before.

  “Lakeland is a wonderful place,” he said finally. “That apartment will be three times the size of this old place. You'll have your own huge bedroom with your own balcony. . . .” He paused. “Temmy, you're too young to understand this, but soon this neighborhood will have gone to pot. Already young boys are hanging out on the corners. It won't be long before this place won't be worth half of what we paid for it.”

  “I don't care,” I moaned.

  “You haven't heard one word, have you, honey?” Daddy took a long, deep breath. “There was a time, when I first met your mama, that I would never have even considered living among the ‘bourgeoisie.' But there comes a time when you have to mix some ideas. You get older and understand that nothing is all good; nothing is all bad. You know why I decided to go back to school? I wanted to give you somebody who does more than drive a cab, and write letters to newspapers and hand out pamphlets in his spare time. I had to ask myself, What more could I offer my wife, my daughter? In a few months, you'll be twelve years old. Soon, you'll be going off to college. I want you to be proud of where you come from and I want you to be proud of me. I'll be a teacher, honey. Your old man a teacher at a fine, fine school.”

  As I walked back to the tent, I wondered what I had done. I had always been proud of my father, and I wondered when he thought I'd begun to feel otherwise.

  Down the hall from the stairs was a small, pantry-sized room that my father had used as his office. There were no windows, just his cold marble-topped desk and his favorite leather chair, cracked and worn, tired-looking from years and years of our weight. Daddy had found the set in an alley in the downtown legal district one afternoon while picking up a fare. He brought it home and dusted it off, and many nights I would stop in just before bed. Though I rarely understood the depth of Emerson or Tolstoy, I knew it was nearly impossible for me to find slumber without the melody of his baritone rocking me to sleep. Those nights, I believed with all my heart that as the years passed and my legs would begin to dangle far below my father's lap, below the final bar of missing gold tacks, we would always fit into the perfectly molded cushion that we'd created. That was until my father decided to leave the set behind.

  Gerald had fallen asleep. I knew this as soon as I reached the kitchen, which led to the back porch. For such a small child, he had a tremendous snore, thunderous snatches of gasping and wheezing. Mama and I stood on the porch for a second, listening to him, watching his figure, silhouetted by the light, heave up and down.

  “You know everything's going to be okay, don't you, Temmy?” she asked. For years I told myself—I suppose because everybody seemed to agree—I looked just like my father. But that was because of the hair. The red hair tended to blind people to the rest of my features. The truth was that I had a lot of my mother's face, her broad eyes, olive-brown complexion, and heavy, good-for-whistling lips. That night, Mama didn't wait for an answer. I suppose she knew I didn't have one.

  “Stay out fifteen more minutes, Tem,” she said. “Then I'll come get you both ready for bed.” She smiled at me, then kissed me on the lips.

  The next morning, I awoke to the scent of my mother's country bacon. I jumped out of bed and ran to wake Gerald in the guest room. By the time I got there, he was already watching the sun rise over the Jenkinses' tree house across the alley, and the garbagemen, sweaty, their pants sliding down their butts, hurl huge barrels of our un-Lakeland-like belongings into their truck. Too soon afterward, it was time to leave. I gave him my new address and he promised to write and visit as soon as he could. From my backseat in the car, I watched my friend, hands crammed into the pockets of his baggy jeans, turn and head for his side of the tracks. I waved, but he didn't see me. Still, I continued until we turned the corner at Alexander Street, and soon the house, Gerald, the Woolworth, everything, leaned in the distance and eventually was completely out of sight.

  The clock on the gate showed 10:00 A.M. when our car pulled up. My father made certain it was ten exactly. The guard said, “Good morning and welcome to Lakeland.” He checked Daddy's driver's license against a clipboard of notes, then handed him a map and showed us how to maneuver Lakeland's labyrinth of twists and turns to the Five forty-five building, our new home. Finally, he opened a massive iron gate that groaned as it parte
d, and we were allowed in.

  As I looked out the car window, my fingers began to tingle and turn cold. Let my father tell it: This place was straight out of a fairy tale. One square mile of rich black soil carved out of the ghetto. One square mile of ivory towers, emerald green grass, and pruned oaks and willows so stately, they rivaled those in the suburbs and made the newly planted frail trees in the projects beyond the fence blend into the shade. The four high-rise apartment buildings were the tallest structures I'd ever seen, and already janitors were hanging from scaffolds, washing beveled-glass windows, making sure everything shined in tandem.

  Men, women, and children were out in droves, reading under the trees, sitting on hand-carved wooden benches, or walking dogs along winding cobblestone streets—appropriately named Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive, Langston Hughes Parkway, Ida B. Wells Lane. When we passed a field of children taking turns riding a pony, I got on my knees to look out the back window. Then, remembering my father's warnings, I slid back down the vinyl. I was surprised to see him smiling at me in the rearview mirror. We turned onto a path that followed the lake, and a flock of white gulls flew over the car. I scooted from one side of the seat to the other to watch their pearl gray wings stretching across the sky as they squawked like restless, hungry babies, back and forth between the rocks and a lighthouse in the middle of the water.

  In Lakeland, Daddy said, was the world's wealth of top black professionals: surgeons, engineers, politicians. Lakeland had begun in the early 1960s as part of Chicago's Life Incentive Project. As an apology to the rat-infested and blighted tenement houses blacks had to endure during the migration, the mayor garnered support from the state capital to the White House to build this urban utopia. It was an idyllic community, stripped of limitations and bounds. According to the Sentinel's annual obligatory article, Lakeland had every amenity: a twenty-seven-hole golf course, an Olympic-size swimming pool, coffeehouses with the classics lining oak shelves, and an academy whose students were groomed and pointed, some said from the womb, in the direction of either Morehouse, Spelman, Harvard, or Yale. Even Lakeland's section of Lake Michigan was different from that of every other community that bordered the shore. In Lakeland, the water was heavily filtered and chlorinated—sometimes even helped along by food coloring—to look the aqua blue of dreams.