Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  That was the year I passed the eleven-plus exam for secondary school with a scholarship to go to Wilberforce.

  The day the letter came my old man went straight down by the rumshop after work. He got to brag with he friends, Mamuh said. But she could not hide the faint smile on her face. Earlier in the day she couldn't keep the news to herself either, telling Miss Clarke next door, The government paying for everything—school fees, books, uniform, everything.

  Pa didn't come in till late that night, drunk and happy, singing and waking up me and my mother. But that night she didn't quarrel, just said, Keep quiet and go to sleep.

  Two weeks later another letter came from the Ministry of Education.

  To this day I've never seen the letter but I remember my mother opening it with the sound of the postman's bicycle tickticking away in the stillness of noonday, and my mother standing next to the morris chair by the front window staring at the letter with her mouth slightly open, then saying after a while, Error? What they mean error? and sitting down in the chair clutching the letter in her lap and staring through the window.

  What happen? I asked her.

  She stared at me, and it was a long moment before she said, You pass, but not with a scholarship.

  Which didn't make sense. The letter from the Ministry of Education saying that I had a scholarship for Wilberforce was right there in the shoe box under the bed with all the other important papers like birth certificates and so forth.

  But her eyes were still locked on and mine as she waved this new letter and said, They say they make a mistake.

  And right then, at the age of eleven, I learned that folks like us who didn't have connections to influential people would suffer disappointments and face obstacles in life, or as Ma said as she sat staring through the window with the letter in her lap, Boy, if you don't have a godfather in this country, you suck salt. Or as Pa said later that night to Ma, If you stand up under a coconut tree a coconut bound to drop down and bust open your head.

  Ma gave him a long, hard stare and then burst out, Harold, what stupidness you talking, eh? This is the boy future we talking about. Why you always got to be talking gibberish? What wrong with you?

  But nothing was wrong with Pa. He couldn't help himself. He was a man thrust by circumstance into a role he wasn't prepared to maintain.

  I still remember the night, one of many nights when rum made his head light and his tongue heavy, when Pa made a statement so heavy, so profound, that his rum friends opened their eyes wide and their mouths fell open in astonishment. At least that's the way the story was told when it started to spread the next day.

  To this day everybody has a different version of what Pa said that night, which means that no one really remembers. But Miss Clarke, our next-door neighbor, came to the house bright and early the next day and told my mother, Sonny-Boy is a prophet.

  And Ma stared at her. A prophet? she said.

  Yes, Miss Clarke said. Like in the Bible.

  In the Bible?

  Which caused Miss Clarke to ask Ma, “What happen to you? You's a echo?” Then she began to tell the story of what happened at the rumshop the night before.

  That evening before Pa could get in the door Ma asked him, “What this about people saying you's a prophet?”

  So now it is Pa's turn to look puzzled and say, “Prophet? What you mean ‘prophet'?”

  It wasn't long before people began to come knocking at the front door, sometimes as soon as he got home from work, before he even had a chance to eat, asking for all kinds of advice. It is like all of a sudden Pa had turned into an obeah man with people saying things like:

  —“Yvonne acting funny, like she got another man. What I should do?” and;

  —“I like this fella that does work for the waterworks company, but all I try to catch his attention, he en paying me no mind. What you think?”

  People coming from far and near, and Ma grumbling and asking Pa why he don't charge them. He's the only body she know does give away free advice. And Pa saying how God give him a gift to help people and how she expect him to charge them? If people want to give donations that is one thing, but he can't charge. And Ma saying low so that only I can hear, “Is one thing to be kind, is another thing to be stupid.” But that comment doesn't reach Pa's ears, otherwise wise man or no wise man her ass would've been in trouble.

  And the whole thing reaching national proportions when Dear Suzy who used to give advice to people every day in the newspaper began ending her columns with a warning to her “Dear readers” not to seek the advice of barefoot charlatans who only want to take their money. And the woman who does housework for her, who happen to live in the Village, coming to Pa and saying how Dear Suzy going to obeah man for him because Pa taking away her business. And Pa's only response is to shake his head and say, “Poor woman,” which really impressed the woman who brought the news and she's telling people that Pa really is a holy man who, in her words, “have no fear of man nor beast.” Which is a big joke to Ma who knows better.

  It is around that time that I came to learn another lesson: when people say they want advice, what they really mean is they want you to confirm whatever it is that they already decided. Or at the very least they want you to tilt them in the direction they already were intending to go.

  And it seems that Pa learned the same lesson after Gladys came to him with this question: Sammy en doing so good in school. You think you can help him?

  To which Pa replied, I can't work miracles, adding that he knew Sammy since the boy was a baby in diapers and to the best of his knowledge her son always had a hard head and in his opinion she should try to get the boy apprenticed to somebody to learn some kind of trade because Sammy never going to be a scholar. The boy just not academically inclined, Pa saying.

  You see, Pa had got into the habit of telling people whatever was on his mind, like he thought that whatever gave him the gift of wisdom would also shield him from the wrath of people when he told them what they didn't want to hear.

  Gladys started raising her voice. “Wanting to know what kind of prophet you is, eh? Telling me to send my boy to learn a trade? Why you don't send that little, bony boy of yours to learn a trade, eh? Why you don't do that?” And she's looking me up and down with scorn while she's saying this.

  That hurt my feelings.

  But Pa was calm, replying how he never tell nobody he is no prophet. That is something they put on him. And if she not satisfied with his advice, then she should do like Dear Suzy and go see Papa Sam the obeah man who going tell her some mumbo jumbo and take her money.

  Gladys flounced out of the house. Next thing you know, she is spreading a rumor that every night when Pa got drunk he would always come knocking at the side of her house whispering and begging her to let him in. But she is a Christian-minded woman, so she always tell him to go home to Miss Esther and stop bothering her. He should be ashamed of himself. Prophet? He en no prophet. If people stupid enough to believe that, well that is their business but she know better.

  As soon as Ma heard this, she stopped speaking to Pa, sulking around the house and talking to him through me, saying things like “Tell your father his food ready,” or “Tell your father to pick up some fish when he coming in from work this evening.”

  And Gladys's next-door neighbor, Mildred, is telling people what a lying hypocrite Gladys is, calling herself a Christian, when some nights she can stay over in her house and hear Gladys moaning and carrying on. And it en Sammy's father that causing her to carry on so, because everybody know Sammy father left her and living with another woman. Mildred figuring she doing Pa a favor by calling Gladys a hypocrite, but she's only making things worse.

  After that, Pa stopped giving blunt advice and instead began answering people in baffling, head-scratching parables. So, grown people would come up to me after they talked to my father, asking me questions like, “What your father mean by so-and-so,” or “What he mean by this-and-that?”

  But if they couldn't u
nderstand my father, how could they expect me to? I was only a boy; they were grown. But of course I couldn't say any of this because in those days children couldn't talk back to adults (not like nowadays), so I would just stare at them or shrug, which would only get them vexed and cause them to suck their teeth and fling off their arms and walk away muttering about how I just as stupidy as my jackass father.

  Well, needless to say, the flow of people coming for advice began to trickle, although it never really stopped. Once in a while somebody would come to see him as a last resort.

  But the parables never stopped. Sometimes he would be sitting quietly and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he would let loose a parable.

  So the night when Ma told him about the letter that said I didn't have a scholarship, his proverb about a coconut busting your head was the last straw.

  That was the first time I could remember Ma raising her voice in the house. But I suppose the frustration that had been building up from having to listen to Pa's stupid parables, plus the shock of shattered expectations were too much to bear, so she let loose.

  “These stupid sayings of yours got people looking at me funny! You know that?! People laughing behind my back when they see me, or else they feeling sorry for me and Gladstone—you can see it in their face. You en know you is a big joke?!” she asked him. “You en care you making your whole family a laughing stock?!”

  All the while I'm sitting at the dining table expecting Pa to defend his sayings either with another of his parables (as he had a habit of doing) or by telling Ma shut up, woman, what you know. But instead he stared at the tablecloth as if there was something there that only he could see.

  Finally a long sigh whooshed out of him and his shoulders slumped even more. “What they expect we to do, uh?” he said.

  A beetle pinging against the lampshade gave the silence in the house the heaviness of molasses. Crickets chirped in the bushes outside. Frogs croaked.

  Pa gazed at the letter in his hand. “First they tell we the boy got a scholarship. Now look at this. Eh? Look at this. What they expect we to do?”

  And that night for the first time I saw what defeat looks like on the face of an adult.

  Ma gazed at Pa for a long time then sighed. “God will find a way,” she said.

  To which my father replied, “Well he better hurry up. The school term soon begin.”

  “Hush,” Ma said right away. “Don't talk like that.” And she's glancing over her shoulder like she expects God to strike Pa dead.

  But the slump of her shoulders says she doesn't really have much more faith than Pa does.

  I never found out where Pa got the money to pay my school fees and buy textbooks, nor where he got the money to take me into town and buy a cricket bat for me after I came second in class that school year.

  Even now the smell of linseed oil always triggers the memory of Pa and me walking out of the store with the midday hot sun beating down, me holding the cricket bat, and Pa looking down at me and saying, You got to cure it with linseed oil.

  If my life can be told in chapters, that day marked the beginning of the end of one chapter, the one that ended with Pa shaking my hand man-to-man in the airport building and walking toward a plane that took him to Away, a place I couldn't even imagine and only later got an idea about through reading books I borrowed from the public library.

  For weeks after Pa left I would find myself listening for him to come home from work, and several times I heard his bicycle bang against the side of the house. But those are the kinds of illusions that loneliness can create.

  Many nights I would lie in bed listening for him to come singing and stumbling home, waking up Ma when he came in the back door saying, “Esther! I home! The Boss has arrived!” and then coming over to where I was sleeping on the floor and saying, “Sleeping, Brute?” and Ma stirring in bed and mumbling, “How many times I tell you don't call the boy no Brute. And keep quiet, for God's sake. People trying to sleep.”

  And sometimes Pa would take his food from the larder and warm it up (Rum drinking made him ravenous. I know. The same thing happens to me), and we would eat at the table with the kerosene lamp flickering before us.

  Once when our cricket team was playing down in Australia Pa and I sat every single night next to the radio up to three, four o'clock in the dead of night listening to cricket commentary and eating salt herring and biscuits.

  But all of that stopped the day Mr. Gaskins's old Morris Minor came bumping down the road to take the three of us to the airport.

  When we reached the airport, Pa and Mr. Gaskins each carried a suitcase into the terminal building, with the weight of each suitcase behding their bodies sideways.

  Ma and I watched from afar as Pa showed the woman at the counter his papers. It was as if Ma was already putting distance between herself and Pa so that when he really left the shock wouldn't be so great.

  After Pa checked in we stood in the middle of the terminal—Ma in her good beige dress with white lace trim around the neck, broad-brim straw hat and shining black pocketbook, Pa in his only dark-gray suit with the two-button jacket and dark-brown felt hat cocked at an angle. It looked to me like he was outgrowing his suit, which didn't make sense because grown-ups don't grow. Mr. Gaskins wore a long-sleeved white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbow.

  With all the talking that was going on and the aroma of food, the only difference between the airport and the market was the voice coming over a loudspeaker every now and then.

  “. . . flight number 461 now boarding . . .”

  That is my plane, Pa said.

  And the noise in the airport almost drowned out Ma's voice reminding Pa of the two dozen flying fish she fried that morning and wrapped in plastic and newspaper and packed in the suitcase. “Those will hold you for a little while,” she said. “What you don't want right away you can freeze.”

  Pa said, “All right, all right.” He didn't say it, but you could tell he was thinking he was a big man who didn't need nobody telling him how to take care of two dozen fish.

  Then Ma said, Write as soon as you get there.

  “Soon's I get pay I going send something,” Pa said.

  “Get yourself settle first,” Ma said. Don't worry about we.

  Pa pulled on his cigarette and at that moment he looked like a movie star with his hat cocked at an angle and his shirt opened at the neck under his jacket.

  He stamped the cigarette butt under his foot and hugged Ma. She stared over his shoulder with water brimming in her eyes.

  Then he stuck out his hand and looked me full in my eyes. “You in charge now, Brute,” he said.

  We shook hands, man to man, with me looking him full in his face and with my lips pressed together knowing that if I opened my mouth to speak I would cry, which I couldn't do because men don't cry.

  We watched Pa walk toward the door with his travel agency bag over one shoulder and a carton of rum like a valise in one hand.

  “Come,” Ma said.

  So I didn't learn until years later that he stopped at the top of the airplane steps and searched for us among the crowd behind the guard rail on the roof of the airport building, and even though he didn't see us he waved, not knowing that we were already in Mr. Gaskins's car headed back home with Mr. Gaskins making conversation to lighten up Ma's spirits.

  “He soon come back,” Mr. Gaskins said. “Soon as he make enough money he going come right back to you and Gabby here. Look at me,” he said. “I work like a slave in the London Transport. But you think I was going stay over there? No sir. That en no place for human beings to live, far more die. But if I didn't do that, if I didn't go away, you think I woulda had this little motorcar to help me make a few little extra cents? Things going work out,” he said.

  That night I lay on the floor and heard Ma crying softly. And it brought to mind another night when Ma and I were sleeping and Pa came in, drunk as usual. For some reason he and Ma started shouting and next thing I know, PAKS! He delivered a sl
ap to Ma's face. Ma held her face. The house was silent. Then she uncoiled and began windmilling her hands, hitting him every which way and yelling, “You come in here with your drunk self and hit me? Eh? In front your son? That the kind of example you setting?” And Pa hitting her back, but not with any force. After a while he walked back out of the house and Ma lay in bed sniffling into her pillow the same way she was crying that night after we came back from the airport.

  It was the first of many such nights.

  FROM Water Marked

  BY HELEN ELAINE LEE

  Delta moved aside as Sunday came through the doorway, and in an instant, they felt their manifold heritage of silence and remorse, and the pull of common history and blood.

  Sunday called her sister's name, and Delta's hands began to reach for her, before pausing and returning to her sides. She offered a determined smile, and then, seeing Sunday seeing her, she smoothed down her hair, oiled and halved by a careful part.

  As Sunday looked at her, Delta nodded, reminded of her sister's aptitude for sight, and wondered if she could sense the toll of misbegotten love. She felt a sudden kinship with a tree she had once known, lightning-struck and fired from the inside out, a few singed spots the only clues, but changed, unmistakably changed. Her roomy, flowered shirtwaist offered no cover at all as she seemed to thicken, further, under Sunday's gaze, and she crossed her arms over the fullness of her waist and breasts and fumbled toward speech.

  “Well . . .” she said, damning herself as she spoke for her ineptitude in launching their reunion with that word that was all-purpose and meant nothing, asking herself why she could never find the right way to begin, the right thing to say, even to her own sister, and there she was groping, idiotically groping as she heard her own voice trail off, her alarm at the impending silence and her own impotence spreading, and again, “Well,” this time as if it were a statement, the completion of what she had started.