Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  “I give my mom big respect. She takes care of me,” he said. “Even when she's tired.”

  Yes, he sure did love his mama, but he was in love with Ms. Jamieson, the science teacher he met in his senior year. At least until the trouble happened.

  Ms. Jamieson was probably the first white woman who Ray felt had treated him right. He had no behavior problems when he was in her class. He even did all his homework and the extra credit. When she needed someone to stay after class to help her with a classroom project, Ray's hand was the first to go up. All because she'd told him he was smart. No one had ever told him that before. It wasn't like someone had said to him, “You're dumb,” but it was the way too many teachers, for too many years had looked at him through their do-right pity, like surgeons whose eyes peek out between their caps and masks, and say without a word there's no sense in trying. The patient is too far gone. You see, Ray had gotten so used to everyone thinking he was stupid, he'd forgotten he wasn't. He'd given up trying to prove that the color of his skin did nothing to diminish the power of his mind.

  Quiet as it's kept, when you study this child's records (and this is what I told them at the hearing) you'll find his scores are high, always were, all the way up through the third grade. Then something happened. His grades dropped like a downhill skier who had to pee.

  My guess is he stopped feeling that joy of learning and love for himself as a special black boy. He came into the system with a gift, but we didn't have space for it on our paperwork. I always tell my teachers, every child has something, a delicate, little flame, whether it's a pretty smile or his ability to memorize all the words to a song. It's up to us to work that flame. Honey, we got to work it, you hear me, into a bonfire.

  Somebody shoved Ray's flame down his throat. It wasn't shining anymore. Just burning him up. Same intelligence, but locked down in a pit of fire. 'Cause somewhere down there, he knew (even if he didn't know how to say it) that it wasn't supposed to be like this or feel like this as he went through life. Dr. Kunjufu says it's a “conspiracy to destroy Black boys.” (It gets done to the girls too, but in a different way.)

  From fourth grade on, Ray's records showed that there were problems. “Attitude” was what most of the comments were about. But what does that mean? Black folks got to have attitude just to get by in this world. We are characters by necessity. How you think we made it through our first Holocaust? But suddenly Jamieson was a key. Yes, Lord. In his senior year, the flame in Ray began trying to break free. I think he even began to believe he might be halfway smart. I loved visiting his science classroom just to see the process take shape.

  And the other good thing about his excitement about Ms. Jamieson's class was having a domino effect on his other subjects. He had lost interest in being with the kids who meant him no good. Or maybe they'd lost interest in him. Either way, he seemed to finally be swimming with a gang of new ideas in a pond of his own. Graduation was on the horizon and maybe even a small community college.

  It all fell apart at the Science Fair.

  Ray had never thought about entering it before, but his progress in Jamieson's class gave him courage. He outdid himself. Do you hear what I'm saying? Created a project in quantum physics. The child was asking questions like “What is now?” and “How can we prove that time exists?” He did all kinds of research. Even interviewed scientists at the local university. It was brilliant. Okay, granted we all knew he did what he did to please Ms. Jamieson, but so what? Isn't that part of the game? Let them think they're making a big ole boat for you, and when it's all done and pretty and they're standing back and can't wait to see that look on your face, you show them that the boat was really theirs all along and you help them sail away.

  Now what do you think happened? There was a tie between him and Wayne, an Asian boy who was used to winning every year. So I came to work one Tuesday morning and hell had not only broken loose, but it had splattered itself into a pool of folk in front of my office door. There was Wayne, his mother, father, and grandmother, Ms. Jamieson and Mr. Wycoff, the self-declared, most important Negro in the school, and head of the Science Department, all talking at the same time and trying to calm each other down. They were all waiting for me. The breakfast I'd bought was also waiting for me inside my pocketbook.

  After I stepped inside my office to hang my coat up and gulped down a few quick bites of heaven, I called Jamieson in, because I knew all this commotion had something to do with Ray. Wycoff tried to push his long head through the door, too, but I told him I only wanted to speak with Ms. Jamieson at the moment, thank you very much. I closed the door on him mid-sentence and asked her what was going on. She paced and hemmed and hawed and finally said Wycoff thought Ray had cheated on his science project. That's when I felt a vision of a double cheeseburger and super-size fries coming on. Lord help me, I knew I was going to have to wring some necks that day.

  Seems that Wycoff had looked Ray's classwork over and decided that he couldn't possibly have done it. I asked her if Wycoff had any proof Ray had cheated. He didn't. She said he was sort of hoping she would back him up on this. I asked her point blank what she was going to do. I'll never forget the terrified look on her face, her eyes bugging out of her head, but at the same time looking straight ahead, but no voice, no response.

  Course Wayne's people wanted to know what their son had done wrong that he wasn't exclusively in first place. After all, everyone knew how smart he was.

  They all expected me to open my door to their twenty-ring circus. I was not having it. No one, and I mean no one, was going to completely ruin my breakfast. I kept that door closed after Jamieson left. I was eating and thinking, thinking and eating. I decided to speak to each party alone, in a soft voice, with my belly full.

  Of course, I had to call Ray in, too. He was nervous. Real nervous. He couldn't sit down. I told him how proud I was of how hard he'd worked this year. I told him not to worry. His graduation was not in jeopardy. Then I told him what he'd been accused of.

  Slowly, he sat down.

  “Ray,” I said, “if you have anything to tell me, now is the time.”

  “You think I cheated, too?” he asked.

  “No, Ray. I don't. Now that we've spoken, face-to-face, I know you're telling me the truth. But I want you to be man enough to face your accuser and tell him that same truth. I'll be right here with you.”

  “Thanks, Big . . . uh . . . Miss Carter.”

  That seemed to make him feel better. Now it was time for the meeting between him, Jamieson, Wycoff, and myself.

  Ray thought he knew what to expect. He figured Jamieson had to be there because she was his teacher. He was sure she would defend him against Wycoff. He sat through Wycoff's accusations, and all through the speech about why plagiarism is unacceptable and how we have a higher standard at this institution of learning. He kept looking at Jamieson, waiting for her to say something. When he couldn't stand it anymore, fighting tears, he said, “Miss Jamieson? Miss Jamieson? Tell him. Tell him it was my work. You know me. Tell him, Miss Jamieson.”

  She hung her head and never said a word.

  That's when I saw the final embers die in Ray's eyes. This is how they do it, I thought. They kill the children's spirits then sit back and watch them kill themselves.

  Ray ran out. I knew exactly where he was headed. Y'all know I couldn't beat him to it. When I finally did get to the cafeteria, I was dripping sweat in places I didn't know I had, and out of breath. The science projects were still there on exhibit but Ray had knocked his over. By the time I saw him, he was stomping it into nothing but a mess of paper and mud. Then he started destroying everyone else's.

  I tried to stop him before things got too out of hand, but Ray wasn't even there. He had gone to a place where he couldn't hear me anymore. Plates, glasses, windows, he began smashing everything he saw.

  Security called the police, of course. They took him away in handcuffs. His mother showed up in time to see them pushing him into the police car. I held her back s
o they wouldn't lock her up, too. Should I have called her sooner? Maybe. Would it have made a difference? I don't know.

  It was a sad, sad day.

  Ray never did graduate. He was in and out of jail after that. Last I heard, about two years ago, he was doing big time somewhere upstate, learning quantum physics from a whole new perspective.

  Now, I told you I never forgot that look on Jamieson's face when I asked her what she was going to do that day in my office. Well, I saw that same look one winter day after Ray was taken away, but on someone else.

  The snow was thick underfoot and in the sky. It had been coming down pretty heavy for three days. I guess it was about five o'clock or so, because I remember praising myself for getting out of the building, for once, before the sun went down. I was trying to cross the street so I could get into my car when something made me look up. There was a car coming in my direction and it was making a weird kind of sound, like something scraping. As it got closer, I saw that a young white woman was driving. She had that look on her face that I told you about already. Pure terror, but straight ahead. Her hands were gripping the wheel tight, tight. And When I looked down at her front bumper, I saw that a big, black dog was caught underneath it. As she passed by, dragging the dog against the ground, she left a bright red trail on the snow behind her.

  I stood there for a minute, the snow striking my face, not believing what I had seen. You can't tell me she didn't know she had a dog stuck underneath her fender. How could she not know? And then a thought came to me just as clear. She was like so many who worked in my school, pretending they were doing what was right by moving forward, getting from Point A to Point B, talking to themselves, plowing through year after year, no longer looking for any signs of life, just moving forward, not even caring that they were dragging the dog.

  But you know, as Pastor Richards says, “God puts on his pajamas, but he doesn't go to sleep.” Life has a funny way of bringing us back full circle 'til we get it right. Ms. Jamieson was forced to resign last year. Rumor was, someone discovered she didn't really have a degree in Science. In fact, when I did some digging, come to find out she never even graduated from college. Then Wycoff's wife caught him cheating on her one night with some young chippy. She left him the next day and never looked back.

  As for me, I'm still here at Morrison High, searching for a few good pieces of wood, trying to build those bonfires. But all this storytelling's made me hungry. Would you care to join me for a couple of giant burgers with very special sauce?

  Museum Guide

  BY SHAY YOUNGBLOOD

  FROM Black Girl in Paris

  PARIS. SEPTEMBER 1986. Early morning. She is lying on her back in a hard little bed with her eyes closed, dreaming in French. Langston was here. There is a black girl in Paris lying in a bed on the fifth floor of a hotel in the Latin Quarter. Her eyes are closed against the soft pink dawn. Delicate maps of light line her face, tattoo the palms of her hands, the insides of her thighs, the soles of her feet like lace. Jimmy was here. She sleeps while small, feminine hands plant a bomb under the seat of a train headed toward the city of Lyon.

  James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gabriel García Márquez, and Milan Kundera all had lived in Paris as if it had been part of their training for greatness. When artists and writers spoke of Paris in their memoirs and letters home it was with reverence. Those who have been and those who still dream mention the quality of the light, the taste of the wine, the joie de vivre, the pleasures of the senses, a kind of freedom to be anonymous and also new. I wanted that kind of life even though I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.

  I remember the long, narrow room, the low slanted ceiling, the bare whitewashed walls, the spotted, musty brown carpet. To my left a cracked porcelain sink with a spigot that ran only cold water. On its ledge a new bar of soap, a blue ragged-edged washcloth shaped like a pocket, and a green hand towel. A round window at the foot of the bed looked out onto the quai St-Michel, a street that runs along the Seine, a river flowing like strong coffee through the body of Paris. The quai was lined with book stalls and painters with their easels and wooden plates of wet fall colors.

  I am there again. It's as if I have somebody else's eyes. The Paris at the foot of my bed looks as if it were painted leaf by leaf and stone by stone with tiny brushstrokes. People dressed in dark coats hurrying along the narrow sidewalks look like small black birds. Time is still when I look out at the pale, gray sky, down to the silvery river below, which by midmorning will be crowded with double-decker boats filled with tourists. In the river, on an island, I can see the somber face of Notre-Dame cathedral and farther down, an enormous, block-long, turreted, pale stone building that looks like a castle, but which I am told is part of the Palais de Justice, which houses in its basement the Conciergerie, the prison where Queen Marie Antoinette waited to have her head chopped off and the writer James Baldwin spent one night after being accused of stealing a hotel bedsheet. Even the prisons here are beautiful, and everything is so old. Back home you can see the bars on the windows of buildings and houses, so you know that they are prisons. Sometimes bondage is invisible.

  The first time I woke up in Paris I thought I'd been wounded. My body ached that first morning. My eyes, nose, and lips were puffy, as if my face had been soaked in water. My skin was dry and ashy. My joints were tight. When I stretched the full length of my body, bones popped and crunched like loose pebbles in a jar. The dream I woke up with was like a first memory, the most vivid of all the old movies that projected themselves onto the me that was. I woke up with a piece of broken glass clutched in my left hand. There was a small spot of blood on the sheets underneath me.

  Before I left home I cut my hair close to my scalp so I could be a free woman with free thoughts, open to all possibilities. I was making a map of the world. In ancient times maps were made to help people find food, water, and the way back home. I needed a map to help me find love and language, and since one didn't exist, I'd have to invent one, following the trails and signs left by other travelers. I didn't know what I wanted to be, but I knew I wanted to be the kind of woman who was bold, took chances, and had adventures. I wanted to travel around the world. It was my little-girl dream.

  I woke up suddenly one morning, at dawn. As the light began to bleed between the blinds into my room, the blank wall in front of me dissolved into a colorful collage by Romare Bearden of a naked black woman eating a watermelon. Against the iridescent blue background lay the outline of the city of Paris. The woman was me. This was my first sign of the unusual shape of things to come. By the time I came back to myself I was booked on an Air France flight to Paris. Paris would kill me or make me strong.

  In 1924 at the age of twenty-two, Langston Hughes, the Negro Poet Laureate of Harlem, author of The Big Sea, arrived in Paris with seven dollars in his pocket. He worked as a doorman, second cook, and dishwasher at a jazz club on rue Pigalle. He wrote blues poems and stories and lived a poet's life. He wrote about the joys of living as well as the heartache.

  My name is Eden, and I'm not afraid of anything anymore. Like my literary godfathers who came to Paris before me, I intend to live a life in which being black won't hold me back.

  Baldwin's prophetic essays . . . The Fire Next Time . . . No Name in the Street . . . Nobody Knows My Name . . . were like the sound of trumpets in my ears. Baldwin knew things that I hoped someday he would tell me. The issues in my mind were still black versus white, right versus wrong, good versus evil, and me against the world.

  The spring before I arrived in Paris, the city was on alert. I cut out an article from a news magazine that listed the horrible facts: April 2, a bomb aboard a TWA plane exploded over Athens, killing four Americans; April 5, an explosion in a West Berlin disco killed an American soldier and a Turkish woman, 230 people were wounded; April 15, in retaliation, President Ronald Reagan bombed Muammar Qadaffi's headquarters in Tripoli, killing fifteen civilians. Three American hostages were killed i
n Lebanon in response. April 17, a British woman was arrested in London's Heathrow airport, carrying explosives planted in her luggage by her Jordanian fiancé, who had intended to blow up a Tel Aviv–bound El Al flight. Terrorism was so popular that there were full-page ads in the International Herald Tribune offering hijacking insurance to frequent flyers.

  I was no stranger to terrorism . . .

  I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where my parents witnessed the terror of eighteen bombs in six years. During that time the city was nicknamed Bombingham. When the four little girls were killed by a segregationist's bomb at church one Sunday morning in 1963, I had just started to write my name. I still remember writing theirs . . . Cynthia . . . Addie Mae . . . Carole . . . Denise . . . Our church sent letters of condolence to their families. We moved to Georgia, but I did not stop being afraid of being blown to pieces on an ordinary day if God wasn't looking. I slept at the foot of my parents' bed until I was eleven years old, when my mother convinced me that the four little girls were by now colored angels and would watch over me as I slept. But I didn't sleep much, and for most of my childhood I woke up each morning tired from so much running in my dreams—from faceless men in starched white sheets, from policemen with dogs, from firemen with water hoses. I was living in two places, night and day. In the night place I ran but they never caught me, and in the morning brown angels kissed my face. I woke up with tears on my pillow.

  I was no stranger to terror . . .

  When I was thirteen years old and living in Georgia I was in love with a girl in my class named Rosaleen and with her older brother, Anthony. Rosaleen and I played touching games in her bedroom, games she'd learned from her brother. We never spoke when we were naked and lying still on the carpet waiting for a hand to move an arm, bend a knee, for lips to kiss, for fingers to caress like feathers. We created still-life compositions with each other's pliant limbs, we were corpses, and for a few moments, a few hours, death seemed like something beautiful I wanted for the rest of my life. The fear of being caught heightened the sensations she awakened in me. Once when Anthony was home from college he sent Rosaleen downstairs to watch television, and he and I played the touching games. In Anthony's eyes I was a pretty brown-skinned girl. He whispered a continuous stream of compliments about my strange narrow eyes, my soft, still tender new breasts that filled his hands. He called me “Sugar Mama.” His hands were rough, his smell musky and rank. I didn't struggle against the thick fingers that pushed between my legs, but let the hardness search the stillness inside of me. My feelings about Rosaleen and Anthony created a confusion in me, a terror of choosing. Anthony touched my body, but Rosaleen was the one I wanted to touch me inside. I was afraid to lose Rosaleen, but eventually I did. She got pregnant by a boy she met at the county fair. The baby was sickly and soon died. Rosaleen was sent away to live with relatives in Philadelphia. I never saw her again, but I had been touched by her in a way that would make all other touches fade quickly. After Rosaleen and Anthony I was terrified that no one would ever love me again, that desire was a bubble that would burst when I touched it. Years later I met Leo, who loved my body for a while, then left me when I felt I needed him most.