Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  Aunt Vic loved to be read to. She had grown up in Chicago and still had a subscription to the Chicago Defender so she could keep up with the community even though she had left under duress. The circumstances of her leaving the North many years before remained a mystery to me even though I asked her every time she started talking about the old days. Once I got her to admit her leaving had something to do with a man she didn't care to dance with, a gangster who owned the club she worked in. Aunt Vic loved Langston Hughes's Simple stories, which were published in the Chicago Defender from 1943 to 1966, Aunt Vic said. His main character, Jesse B. Simple, was everyman, every black man, and she loved him.

  “Jesse B. Simple is real, I think that's a real person. I knew somebody just like that back in Chicago. Munro Fish, a sweet-talking jailbird who truly believed that someday he would run for a government office. He had it all figured out just like Simple. Always talking about race.”

  She had collected all the stories. She cut them out of the newspaper, and every once in a while she would pull them out and I'd read to her. The language was a little salty, but Mama wasn't around to get holy. Simple would talk about having Indian blood, and Aunt Vic would add her commentary.

  “Like what Southern Negro don't claim that?” she would laugh. We would start packing our bags when he talked about all the colored people in Harlem. She would start singing about speakeasies and going up to Harlem like we were hearing the story for the first time.

  The stories made us laugh and feel like we knew what was going on in the world, and we had a lot of our own opinions about that.

  Aunt Vic showed me pictures of her old life as a dancer, the girls who went to France, and Josephine Baker, who was to her a symbol of complete freedom. I made up stories and acted out little dramas for my parents, playing all the parts myself. I wrote sad poems about orphans, and I moved through my life taking pictures with a toy camera, recording things in my mind, writing them down between the lines of other books. One day I made up my mind that I would go to Paris to be free.

  When I was thirteen my parents gave me a typewriter, for which they had made many sacrifices. I typed my first novel in fourteen days. I wrote all the stories I knew and made up new ones. I typed them and put them in my library, a small bookshelf next to my bed that my father had made and my mother had painted yellow. By then I was reading in the adult section of the library and was certain after reading Langston Hughes's autobiography, The Big Sea, that I wanted to be a writer and feast at the banquet of life. Going to Paris would be an hors d'oeuvre. I kept my thoughts pressed between the lines of biology texts and biographies of dead presidents that no one else ever checked out anyway.

  The color rust tastes like dirt, and my bones ache. The first blood on my fingers tastes like new nickels. Help me. I stumble on new legs into rooms so full of static sparks fly from my fingertips. As I reach for a vowel with my lips, an “O” softly escapes into the dry air. I need someone to introduce me to the woman who woke up in my skin. Mother, may I? Maman, puis-je?

  “My body is breaking,” says the me who is not my mother's child.

  “It will bend,” the mother whispers.

  When I got my first blood, my mother told me I was a woman. There was something false about her happiness. Her joy came with conditions that must be followed.

  “Don't let boys touch you.” Anthony was a man.

  “Be a sweet girl.” I was hard candy.

  My father pushed me off his lap and my mother seemed blind to me. Aunt Vic was my salvation.

  “Being a woman is a cross we women must bear,” she said.

  “When I go to Paris I will leave behind the little orphan girl and all I will take with me is her body and some of her clothes. I'll make maps so other people can get there too, adventurers like me.”

  This was my little-girl dream.

  Before Paris, at university, I studied English literature, and all it was good for in the end was a job as a librarian.

  I wanted to hold on to old things, but I wanted new things to make me forget. When I was twenty-five I found a job in the house of dead things. Villa Luisa, known locally as the Dimple Mansion, built by the richest black man born into slavery. The house recalled an Italian villa and had become a museum and a memorial to a family of successful African American entrepreneurs. I was hired by the museum's director to assist him in giving tours and cataloging the collection. The director, Dr. Edgar Bernard, was a serious, scholarly gentleman and looked the part. He was tall, gray-haired, and elegant. His old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses accented wide eyes that popped from his head like lightbulbs. He wore the same dark gray suit and a crisp white shirt every day. His silk ties looked like pieces of stained-glass windows. The director was a lonely man. He spoke quietly and quickly as if afraid I would lose interest or he would forget to tell me something important as he veered into heated dissertations on obscure areas of Greek and African civilization. I was fascinated and listened to him with my whole body as if to memorize his knowledge.

  When Dr. Bernard spoke there were secrets in his voice. I knew because I had secrets of my own. Dead things locked in a box I kept out of sight. I listened to his lonely, his hurt, and his misunderstood. He had dedicated his life to preserving a dignified memory of his mentor.

  Dr. Bernard was a young man when he met Mason Dimple and became his secretary. Dimple sent him to Yale. They traveled the world together.

  “Mr. Dimple gave me my first job. I worked in his garden every summer from the time I was fourteen years old. He sent me to school. I studied anthropology, receiving my doctorate just a few months before Mr. Dimple died.

  “‘Edgar,' he said, ‘You have worked very hard and I've had to work hardly at all. I hope that you will make of your life something beautiful.' Mason was very good to me.” Dr. Bernard's eyes got misty and his voice softened even more when he talked about Mr. Dimple, whom he sometimes, slipping, called Mason.

  Now Dr. Bernard was married to a large woman who wore too much makeup and laughed too loudly. They were childless. The few times I saw her at holiday parties Mrs. Bernard's sadness and disappointment were clear as the champagne glasses she kept filled to the top.

  Everything in the Villa was dead or old except me. The offices were in the basement of Mason Dimple's yellow brick mansion. The house was surrounded by a meticulously manicured landscape of pink and white dogwoods, red and orange azalea bushes, and wine-colored Japanese maples. Inside, the furnishings were opulent, each of the twenty-six rooms decorated in a different period. On the ceiling of each room were painted re-creations of religious scenes by Michelangelo from the Sistine Chapel. Angels floated above our heads all day. The Dimples were not religious, but they had wanted to impress their guests with their culture acquired from trips abroad. The house had marble bathrooms with gold fixtures and bronze-and-crystal chandeliers. The floors were inlaid with rare wood or covered in rare Oriental carpets. English antiques in the living room, French baroque velvet sofas in the sitting room.

  A white marble statue of a naked muscled Greek god stood in the foyer, a replica of a famous sculpture in the Louvre. The director had placed a discreet bronze ivy leaf over its private parts after several church groups complained that the statue disturbed the children on tours.

  Mason Dimple's bedroom was not included on the tour. Dr. Bernard said that Mason Dimple was so consumed with grief when his parents died in a train wreck when he was almost twenty-one that he stayed in his room for seven days staring into the flame of a candle, trying to pray them back to life. Then he painted his bedroom walls black. When I opened the door to his bedroom I could feel his suffering like cold fingers on the back of my neck. It was like standing in an opulent prison cell.

  The Villa held a large collection of European art, English silver, and Greek sculpture. Most museum patrons expected to see a collection of African art because of Mason Dimple's race. But there was nothing African here except a wooden mask from Nigeria half eaten by termites and a few Moroccan tap
estries. Mason Dimple hated anything too black or too African. At one time he had wanted to be a part of local white society. He thought his money and barely brown skin would allow him access, but he soon realized that he was not welcome. He made do with occasional contact with the black bourgeoisie that mirrored white society with its balls and charity events.

  Dr. Bernard took me on a tour of the house and gave me facts I memorized. The questions from our guests were always the same.

  When was the house built? Who was the architect?

  How did the family make its fortune?

  How did they die?

  Why did Mason Dimple never marry or have children?

  What are the naked wrestlers on the Greek vase in the study doing?

  These were the things Dr. Bernard instructed me to say to the busloads of curious foreign tourists and rowdy school children and locals who had always wondered what went on inside the yellow brick mansion on Dimple Court.

  In 1933 Mason's father, Simon Dimple, was the richest black man in the state of Georgia. He had spent his youth as a house slave on a plantation owned by his white father. He had been taught to cook by his mother, who was the plantation cook. He ran away from home when he was thirteen years old and earned his way in the world as a cook for rich white Northern college students. He met his future wife, Daisy, an octoroon girl from Louisiana, on a train in New York. They both were passing for white. He fell in love with her, and they returned to Georgia. He used Daisy and her brothers, who also passed for white, to purchase land and hire labor to build a restaurant on the outskirts of a growing town. They quietly ran the business behind the scenes and joined the local elite black community. Neither Daisy nor Simon could eat in the dining room of their own restaurant because it was for whites only. It was very popular and enabled Simon to invest in other businesses and real estate and make a fortune. The Dimples' firstborn child, Mason, they sent away to boarding school in Switzerland from the time he was a small boy to shelter him from the pain of racism. He spent summers with his family and eventually went to Yale, graduating with a degree in business.

  At Simon Dimples' Plantation Restaurant, black women, dressed like Aunt Jemima in red-and-white checkered head kerchiefs, voluminous skirts, and white aprons, served the white patrons with a grin and a shuffle. The entire kitchen staff was made up of black men in white uniforms. The food was old-fashioned Southern cooking. Fried chicken, collard greens, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, chicken and dumplings, lemon cheesecakes, blackberry cobblers, rice puddings, barbecued ribs, biscuits and cornbread. As good as the food was, that was not why the restaurant was so popular. It was the novelty of whites being served in the manner of their ancestors by a wait staff that reminded them of the good old days. The Dimples were members of the NAACP even though many members protested that the Dimples' restaurant perpetuated the stereotype of a slave plantation, where the white masters were still being served by happy blacks.

  The Dimples considered themselves good and patriotic Americans. They raised the flag on holidays, bought war bonds, and wanted the world to see them as they saw themselves—successful, sophisticated citizens who contributed to their community. The Dimples were generous philanthropists, donating large sums of money to their church and black colleges and medical facilities all over the South. They were good businessmen and, after his parents died, Mason Dimple sold the offensive restaurant and most of the other properties. He set up a foundation to ensure the preservation of his home as a memorial to his parents after his own death.

  A year after Mason Dimple himself died, the board of directors he had set up was ready to hire someone to organize the home's collection. My first job was to catalog everything in the house and develop a system for marking. First I looked through the photographs. Mason seemed to have been a happy child, in short velvet pants, white ruffled shirts, and high buttoned boots. As he grew older his smiles faded to a hard line and he wore pressed tailored suits and posed stiffly for the camera's eye. He still looked like a boy even after his hair had thinned and his small rimless glasses sat on his nose like little windows.

  Under the stairs in the basement of the dead man's house there were several boxes of books Dr. Bernard didn't seem to know existed. One rainy afternoon when tours were slow and Dr. Bernard was attending a conference at a downtown hotel, I opened one of the boxes and flipped through the pages of historical novels and murder mysteries that Mason was so fond of. Behind the boxes was a small trunk half hidden by a large, brightly patterned rug. I dragged the trunk into my office and opened it. Inside were a packet of letters and several photographs. In the photographs Mason Dimple's eyes seemed happy only once. In one photograph he was walking through a flock of birds in a square in Venice. He was smiling at a young man who faintly resembled Dr. Bernard and who seemed to be flapping his arms to make the birds fly. There was a well-dressed young woman in the picture. She was wearing a tall hat and stood nearby watching both men with a weary, tight little smile.

  The tiny black leather notebook fit in the palm of my hand. I found it sewn inside a linen bag in a secret compartment in Mason Dimple's traveling office trunk designed by Louis Vuitton in the mid 1800s. It was slender, the leather was smooth to touch, and inside, each page overflowed with tiny black lines like marching ants. The words were crowded together carefully as if they had been written in a small, dark place by someone with plenty of time, lots to say, and no one to listen. My hands were trembling as I cut open the neat stitches with my pocket knife. As archivist for the house museum where Mason Dimple was born and died I had access to every silver spoon and faded photograph that made up his life. Mason Dimple was a complicated man, there was no doubt about that. He had wanted to be a poet and so he went where poets went, tried to live as they did, but his money got in the way. He died a bachelor with no heirs and left a substantial fortune in a trust that would preserve the family home and the Dimple name forever.

  I wanted to be a poet and I knew early on, but it was not practical for a girl born into a poor family to be a poet. At first I studied biology in preparation for life as a nurse. This was to ease my parents' minds that I would be able to take care of myself, but I became fascinated with history and poetry and the lives of artists. I was never a practical girl. Five years out of college I found myself working in the basement of a dead man's house, sorting through intimate details of his life, discovering common ground.

  The letters were faded, but I could read the words, which told a story different from the one I recited to visitors to the house. It was in his handwriting. I knew it from the dull entries in the diaries I had cataloged. Places visited, foods eaten, and the prices in local currency of gifts purchased.

  There were love letters:

  My tongue is wasted on words when you would be of better use in my mouth.

  There were rooms full of secrets:

  The Great Hall, where the family received guests and gave lovely parties.

  Mother made me scrub the floors on my hands and knees this morning as she recited prayers for my sinful soul.

  The music room, where the family entertained their guests.

  Mother tied me to the piano bench until I could play perfectly. Finally my fingers behaved. What a bad boy to make Mother unhappy. She speaks French when she is unhappy.

  The master bedroom, where the father slept.

  It is curious how Father never sleeps alone at night, nor does he sleep with Mother.

  The pink bedroom, where the mother slept.

  She cries at night. Her weeping is my lullaby.

  Mason Dimple's bedroom, closed to visitors.