Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  When she got the creased paper open she found the same leaning, elongated scrawl she had studied on the back of the snapshot she had found. Five words: “I remembered and I paid.”

  Questions erupted in Sunday's chest, and with them a lightning flash of outrage.

  Remembered, remembered and paid? she said to herself. And that's your offering to me who never even knew you never even saw you and I hope you did pay in fact I'm counting on it and what does that mean anyway that you paid and what does it mean that you were brother and never forgot and were sorry yes sorry you surely were and does it mean you married again and had another family you did not feel the need to leave?

  It was too little, and far too much.

  She wanted to know if he had recalled the 704 of Nana's address, and whether he had ever phoned their number and hung up when someone answered, or let his imagination run wild as he let it ring. Whether he had taken anything besides the locket that he had kept all those years, and wondered, wondered, what his fatherless children had grown up into, how they had turned out, if she looked anything like him? Delta, he had a chance at remembering, but what about her? The baby who was not yet born? What about her?

  She heard tearing paper and before she understood what she had done, she had ripped the note in half and Delta was crying, “No!” and snatching it from her, running to the hall closet for Scotch tape. There she was again, Delta thought in panic and rage: Sunday, taking everything for her own.

  “I'm . . . I'm sorry . . . I didn't realize . . .” Sunday stammered as she stood holding the envelope, aware that once again, she had just made Delta the victim, and had given her something else to hold against her.

  Delta leaned over the table, carefully matching up and rejoining the halves of paper, while Sunday tried to find different, more meaningful words than “sorry” to express her regret.

  “Do you want me to fix it?” she ventured, reaching out to touch her sister's hand.

  “I think I'm capable of doing it,” Delta replied as she pulled away.

  “I didn't mean . . .”

  “Oh damn, I almost had it lined up. Why don't you make some coffee or do something useful?”

  Okay, I feel really shitty, Sunday thought as she looked at the paper, bisected with a shiny, Scotch-tape scar, and while I'm at it I'd like to apologize for every wrong I've ever done to you. She knew she had acted impulsively, “before thinking,” as Dolora had always told her was her biggest flaw. And selfishly.

  Delta smoothed the paper and added tape to the back to reinforce the mend, while Sunday, returning to the padded envelope's postmark in the heavy silence, considered whether she might be able to cope with finding Clement Woods.

  They both jumped at the teakettle's shriek. “I figure,” Sunday said, after rushing to turn it off, “Mama must have been puzzled by him taking that one thing. Lord knows she had a whole story about that locket that was very important to her.”

  What had his selection of that one possession meant? they pondered. Had it crushed her and comforted her both, that he had left behind the ring, which had stood for a promise that bound, keeping instead the smooth, gold disk that held a timeless memory of the girl she had been, before the demands of life began. Was it a talisman he had selected for his afterlife, rejecting commitment and choosing love?

  While they considered Dolora's feelings about the locket, Sunday reached into the shoe box and started spreading the contents out on the kitchen table. When she came to a photo of her own art school graduation, she stopped. There they all were: she in her cap and gown, waving her diploma in the air; Delta, matronly at twenty-seven, hands folded and pageboy intact; Nana dressed in a navy suit and hat and gloves, head held high; and five of the bread-making ladies from church surrounding them, dignified and proud. The Bread Ladies had arrived on commencement morning by train and returned that same night, trusting neither the cleanliness nor the hospitality of white, city hotels.

  There was a picture of Dolora's younger brother, Wilborn, who had gone to the East Coast after college and married Anna, from a prominent black family, who loved to say their people were never slaves. At each family death, she and Wilborn had flown in the morning of the funeral and left that night, only visiting once that Sunday could remember for longer than that. “I know he's embarrassed by me,” Delta had overheard Dolora declare tearfully to Nana one night.

  Sunday and Delta remembered enduring holiday phone calls placed by Wilborn and his family to Nana and Grandpa, following the arrival of extravagant checks. Everyone was forced to take a turn on the line, composing pleasant summaries of school and health and prosperity. “We're having a really good quarter,” Wilborn would always begin, and then he would tell about the earnings of his latest sales line and the gifts he had given that year. Dolora was always reduced to icy withdrawal by what she called Wilborn's “all-out bragging” and Anna's “digs.” “Isn't family great?” Sunday and Delta used to say, after hanging up.

  Wilborn and Anna sent a yearly form letter detailing family accomplishments, and an annual Christmas photo taken in front of their hearth, in which they wore matching holiday outfits, and even the dog had on a red and green sweater. Sunday found many of these in the box and arranged them chronologically on the counter to observe the changes the years had wrought. She found that although the children grew taller and their parents' faces and bodies aged, the photos were amazingly uniform. They showed the same poses and expressions, the same dark hair, and only slight variations on the outfit theme. And then for three years in a row, they presented forced smiles and hints of discord. Wilborn and Anna had moved apart, to the sides of the fireplace instead of its middle. Her arms were folded tightly in a posture of defense, and she looked tired, unamused with her part. Aha, Sunday thought, there was trouble in paradise. What was it, Wilborn, an affair, unbearably average children, declining revenue? Yet after those three pictures, they resumed their presentation of triumphant harmony. The pictures stopped the year before Nana's death.

  Beneath those holiday photos, in the shoe box, was a collection of picture postcards that Nana's cousin, Boykin, had sent from all over the country. They remembered how he had come through town as a traveling salesman, bringing the jokes and tall tales he had picked up on the road, jigsaw puzzles and hand mirrors and folding fans with silky red tassels. They had loved it when he showed up, unannounced, spreading mischief and laughter.

  They put Boykin's cards aside and took a brown and white photograph of their grandfather from the box. He had died of a heart attack when she was only four, so that most of what Sunday knew was what she had heard. Delta picked up the photo and noticed right away how it had captured his unyielding, unforgiving gaze, and the resolution and pride in the set of his jaw.

  “He was a reserved kind of man,” Delta said, “and he took everything he did seriously, never missing a Masons' event and revealing nothing, even to Nana, about those sacrosanct meetings or the lodge. He wore a stiff collar and a coat and tie to work at the store, and kept it on even at home while he sat in his easy chair and read the paper as Nana cooked their evening meal. I always wanted to be in the kitchen with her, and I think he scared me. He seemed to need adulthood from me, when I was just a little girl.”

  She went on to say that his most unforgettable habit was directing an inventory of questions to Nana or Dolora, about the way some chore had been performed. And after the inquisition, during which his respondent had grown more and more vexed, he would demand with quiet force, “Since we now understand each other, tell me. Tell me that you love me now.”

  That feeling behind “Tell me that you love me” was what Sunday remembered about him. She felt uncomfortable just thinking about it, and she still responded to compelled affection with flight.

  “He wanted things to be done in a certain manner,” Delta said, “the way he had seen those he called ‘important white folks' do them at various points in his life.” She told how Grandpa had also been religious about “upholding the race.” Al
though he was a man of few words, one topic he went on at great length about was “the betterment of the Negro.” He had worked since he was seven, first farming soybeans and wheat with his family and then, anywhere he could earn something extra. For many years he had had two or three jobs, and he had always taken on something extra, like picking up people's clothes for the white cleaners downtown or delivering groceries. His experience working for a fancy country club, during the one year of college for which he had managed to pay, left him bitter at white folks and determined to emulate them, too.

  He took pride in knowing that he was one of the most hardworking and prosperous men in Salt County, and he had a corner drugstore and several pieces of property to show for it. He always wore a suit to work behind the counter at his store, and he felt his people had to show both white folks, and themselves, that Negroes knew how to do right, that they were capable and responsible. And what disturbed him about Mercury Owens were his inklings that he had neither tenacity nor rectitude.

  Delta remembered him checking with her to see that she had done her homework. “Always follow through, child,” he had told her, stabbing at the air with his forefinger. “Always follow through.”

  Delta remembered being perplexed by the difference between Nana and him. In contrast to his distant formality, she was warm and fluid, but one piece of common ground Delta had been able to discern was the church, where he was an alderman and Nana was forever organizing some activity, baking for benefits, and singing in the choir. The other quality they shared was a kind of dignity, expressed in different ways.

  “Did you ever hear anything about how he and Nana got together?” Delta asked. “Because I don't believe I did. I don't even know what year they married, or exactly how old they were at the time. Well, I have to think about who else would know, about their getting together, I mean. Opus Green knows, if anyone does.”

  There were no pictures of Mercury's family in the shoe box, but Delta knew that according to Nana, after his father had been killed in a sawmill accident, when he was three, his mother had tried for a year to feed and clothe them. She told Sunday what she knew about how they had often gone hungry, and how his mother was sick with consumption. She had been forced to leave him with her sister, Edna, who thought it best to try to raise him as her own and to speak of his mother as little as possible. He had been a handful growing up, restless and inattentive in school, a loner who had trouble making friends, and his mother died soon after his aunt Edna took him in.

  Delta had seen Edna regularly at church. She had brought them birthday and Christmas gifts, but had never stayed long at the house and had never been there for a holiday meal. Delta recalled Nana commenting that Edna and Mercury seemed to make each other so defensive and ill at ease that her visits were dreaded by everyone, and then, after his disappearance, she rarely came. She had brought food for Dolora and sat with the children several times right afterward, and then she had faded from their lives, moving, a year or so later, to another town.

  Sunday made a mental note to see what she could do about contacting Edna, or any of her family who might still be alive.

  They put aside the photo of Grandpa and uncovered the last things in the box: two pictures of Mercury, one a yearbook photo and one a riverside snapshot with Dolora, that they had both memorized. They had retrieved the meager bequest from Dolora's closet often when they were growing up, determined to read his expression and posture, to know him through his dimpled chin and folded hands. “Who are you?” they had both puzzled, inspecting the figure in the yearbook pose and the youth at the riverside. “Who are you and how are you mine?” Sunday remembered looking at the second snapshot and imagining what everyday essentials and treasured possessions he had carried in his bulging pockets.

  Studying the snapshot with a magnifying glass, Delta had speculated on what things had been withheld and professed. She noticed how their shoulders barely touched and the attention her mother's titled head revealed, and imagined the charged aftermath or prospect of touch on their impatient, adolescent skin. Surely they were dreaming, she thought, of the life they would make together, of the home and family they would one day have. Or had he just told her about some aspect of her beauty, “You have the longest lashes I have ever seen,” or “Your waist is perfect for my hand”? Maybe they had laughed a private laugh.

  They both imagined the people their parents had, at that moment, been. And then, as there was nothing else for the shoe box to yield up to them, Sunday went to her coat and took out the mosaic coaster, its tiles set within a brass frame. “Oh, that one I remember,” Delta said. “In fact, I can picture her making it, for the church sale, and then deciding she didn't want to part with it, because she had gotten the colors just right, and almost hidden in the pattern was a scarab she just couldn't bear to let go.”

  As she handed Mercury's monogrammed belt buckle to her sister, Sunday thought she saw Delta's face stiffen with resentment while she smoothed her eyebrows, right then left. “So you had the buckle,” she whispered. “He wore it only on special occasions, not to work, and he always placed it in a dish on his dresser, where I was told never to go. It was off-limits, you see, to my touch. He used to polish it with a piece of flannel, I remember that.”

  Sunday explained hurriedly that she had forgotten packing the coaster and the buckle when she left for college, only to find them before she came home.

  She didn't tell how, halfway through that night when she hadn't been able to sleep or work, she had opened her taped-up box, cutting the packing tape with her matte knife to retrieve the note. Before she got to it, she read every other piece of correspondence she had saved, arranging Nana's letters and Delta's greeting cards by date, combing through her other boxes for the things she had brought with her from Salt County. Unsure of what she was seeking, but driven, she had unearthed her high school yearbook; her drawing contest awards from elementary school; her first set of markers, now shrunken and dried; and the ticket stub from the first train she had taken to Chicago. Amid the other contents of the box, she had found the coaster and the buckle, which as a child, she had liked to use for bouncing moonlight at the window, pretending it was a signal to contact airplanes and helicopters as they passed high above Salt County.

  “Well,” Delta said, before she could stop herself, “I'm surprised you found anything from here worth keeping.” She placed the photo on the table and stood up to clear the plates. It was quieter than ever, and Sunday's bitterness at her sister's long-standing martyrdom flared. Two small mementos seemed little enough to take, when Delta had every other possession that had been left them right there with her. But nothing between them was free of the past, and Sunday guessed that the paucity of things selected, as well as the taking, itself, had provoked her sister.

  She looked at the things on the table, stung silent by Delta's comment, and disappointed, too, that she hadn't been more excited about the items she had found. It made her even more reticent to reveal the bigger yearnings she had in mind, for Delta would surely think her maniacal for deciding to track down the man Mercury Owens had become.

  For her part, Delta couldn't believe how sharp her own tongue sometimes got. This was no way to begin a reunion, she thought, and yet Sunday just seemed to get under her skin like no one else. She didn't understand where it came from, when she hadn't even been aware that all that ugly history was still so alive. She suggested that they put the pictures and the shoe box aside and they made lunch, relieved to have a concrete task.

  To the background of the clock's steady meter, they made and ate their sandwiches, saying little except to comment on the train ride and the condition of the neighborhood. And then, settling back at the table and taking out a cigarette, Delta told the detail, overheard and never shared, which had caused her untold pain: In the laces of one shoe, Mercury Owens had tied his wedding band.

  Once she had added that piece of information, the surviving image of his departure became, for both of them, those side-by-side work sh
oes. Run-down unevenly at the heels and holding a slim ring of gold.

  FROM October Suite

  BY MAXINE CLAIR

  The doctor had already told them that it would be days before he could say one way or the other. To October this meant that he didn't want to tell them. And so she said that they should keep a vigil. Twenty-four hours every day, one of them should be right at Aunt Frances's side. Panic took hold of October every time she pictured Auntie wandering in the Valley of the Shadow. She looked at her—pale against the white sheets, slack and doughy—and prayed. Here it was now, Bible wisdom rolling off her own tongue and none of it went anywhere. “God is love.” If this was true, how could God let things like this happen? “Thy will be done.” Surely suffering wasn't it. “For everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” Didn't October already have her season of grief, or was this just a continuation? But she prayed anyway.

  Vigil it was. For three days they all took turns watching Aunt Frances breathe, talking to her absent eyes when they were open, catnapping when she slept. Visitors couldn't stop coming—from the church, the paper mill, the hospital, the neighborhood. Some of Aunt Frances's bywords being proven. Reaping the kindnesses she had sown. And there were all the women from the Negro Ladies' League, too—a loosely gathered group that collected food and clothing for the poor. October recognized some of their faces.

  The League had always left a sour taste in October's mouth, because her aunties had pushed it so hard. When she and Vergie were girls, the biggest notable event of the year had been the weeklong annual celebration for the Children's Home, and the Negro Ladies' League was always front and center. A season didn't end that hadn't seen those ladies—led by Frances, with Maude Cooper and their nieces—tramping around the Hopewell burial mounds or a Tecumseh site with a ragtag flock of orphans.