Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  The first weekend in December, Gilda and I both got put on midday and late shift, which meant we had to come in at one and we didn't go home until after midnight. You wouldn't think that there would be that much to do late at night but that's when Mr. Weinstock wanted us to wash windows, clean the mezzanine bathrooms, and change the big Chinese vases of flowers that were always in the lobby. It took two people to carry those vases. And he liked to have some maids on hand when there were big parties in the hotel. People would stay in bed all day and then go out at night, and when they came back they expected clean rooms.

  That Saturday night around ten o'clock, Mr. Weinstock told us to go up to the sixth floor. Guests had just left, and two rooms needed to be made up. When we got there, the floor seemed deserted, except for Brewster, who did repairs. He was carrying his toolbox, standing in front of the service elevator when we got off. He smiled politely when he saw us, especially at Gilda. “How are you girls doing tonight?”

  “Fine,” we both said.

  We chatted with him for a few minutes before we made our way down the hall.

  I worked on one room and Gilda cleaned the other. They were only about three doors apart. Maybe because I trained Gilda, she and I had similar timing, and we'd end up at the carts together. That's where we were when the man came in holding the boy by the hand.

  We both smelled evil at the same moment. The first thing that hit me was that the man was white and the boy, who must have been about seven or eight, was Mexican. He was a scrawny little kid, not dressed for the chilly weather. He was wearing shorts and an undershirt, and he had on sandals. His little legs and arms were dirty. The man was drunk, and the boy looked scared, the kind of scared that means he has to go along with the show because of the money that's waiting when the curtain comes down. I'd seen that fear before at Braddock, in the eyes of young hookers with old johns who stumbled down the hall beside them. I'd never seen that expression on a child's face, and to tell you the truth, I didn't want to look.

  They went into the room between the ones we'd just made up. When the door closed, my eyes met Gilda's. She whispered, “He is a bad man.” When she said the words her body started shaking, and she had to wipe away the moisture that started popping out on her forehead.

  I knew he was a bad man but he was a bad white man, and he was a guest. I thought about calling Mr. Weinstock, but Ole Sweat and Farts wouldn't do anything to help a Mexican street kid if it meant offending a paying customer. I considered contacting the police, but then I'd have to give my name, take them to the room, and by that time the damage would be done. And if Mr. Weinstock found out, I could forget about my job, and my candy store.

  Gilda walked right to the room. We could hear the boy crying, soft, pitiful sounds. I knocked on the door and said, “Is everything all right in there?” I tried to sound stern, like a teacher, which is what I would have been if my daddy had had money for college.

  Before he could answer, Gilda had pulled out her key and opened the door. “Girrrrrrl,” I said, and put my hand on her shoulder to hold her back. But she shook it off and walked in, and I followed her.

  The room smelled like sour milk. The little boy was naked, lying on the bed facedown. The man was on top of him with his pants and shorts around his ankles. He jumped up. His penis was hard and red. His cheeks looked slapped. “What the hell are you doing in here?” he said. “Get out, the both of you.”

  “You stop hurting that boy,” Gilda said.

  “Get the hell outta here.” He turned back to the child.

  Gilda pulled something shiny out of her sweater pocket. When I saw it was a knife, I opened my mouth and couldn't close it, but not a sound came out. The next thing I knew she was stabbing the man in his ass.

  He jumped up and grabbed himself, wiping off the blood and staring at Gilda as though he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Truth be told, I was looking at her the same way.

  “Get out! Get out! Get out!” She was screaming, waving the knife. He started coming toward Gilda. I grabbed the table lamp and held it like I was going to bash his head in. He stopped when he saw me do that, then he started backing up toward the door, pulling up his pants. Crazy Gilda kept coming toward him, waving the knife so close to him that I was afraid he was going to take it away from her and I would have to hit him upside his head. But he kept backing up. She got right up on him and then her voice went down real low. She said, “You go tell. See what happens to you tonight. I have the key.”

  “Fucking bitch,” he said, and with his next breath he turned to me. “Nigger.” Then he fled out the door.

  After he left, Gilda went over to the little boy. He was still crying and whimpering something in Spanish. We took him in the bathroom, gave him a bath and washed his hair. Gilda dried him off and took a small bottle from her sweater pocket, poured something white and creamy in her palms, and started rubbing him all over with it. Then we helped him get dressed. He didn't say anything, but he wasn't crying anymore.

  We took him down the back stairwell that led to the street. Outside the air was biting. Gilda took off her sweater and put it on the child, and we each gave him a dollar. Then we watched as he walked back to wherever he came from.

  “Damn, girl,” I said when we were riding up on the service elevator. I kept looking at her, trying to see what I couldn't see.

  We were back in Our Room when I noticed the numbers on Gilda's arm, little blue tattooed numbers, a brand. Then I figured things out, but not all of it. Even on this side of the fence, there are some things I'll never understand.

  We were sitting on the broken-down sofa. There was some church music playing in the background. Gilda started talking. Gilda loved gospel music and all kinds of hymns. The first time I played the Five Blind Boys for her, she started crying. On this night, The Mighty Clouds of Joy were singing a real slow song. I can't remember the name of it but the lyrics seemed to meld into her story. She told me how the Germans rounded up her family and put them in the death camps and how everybody she loved—her mother, father, brother, aunts, uncles, grandparents—had been killed. Her father's brother had settled in America before the war. When she was liberated she came to Los Angeles, because he and his wife lived here with their children. Four people were her only remaining relatives. It was her uncle who got her the job. Mr. Weinstock's brother owned the apartment building where they lived.

  Her crying started as a tiny, weak noise, like a newborn might make. Came from way down inside her somewhere and then kept rising and getting deeper. I pulled her into my chest and held her, rubbed her back a little, told her not to be afraid, that everything was all right now. I spoke the words as soon as they came to my mind. “You need to take those numbers off your arm.”

  She sat up, looked at me, then cried a little bit more. She said, “I have no one, no one, no one,” the words an echo that kept turning on itself.

  “You do have someone,” I said. “You have you. And you have what's in you. That's how you survived, girl.”

  Gilda didn't say anything for a long time. Then she looked at me and said, “Will you take me to get it done?”

  I took her to the dentist first. The way I figured, the sooner she started smiling, the better for her. I asked her if she knew of any dentists in her neighborhood but she looked troubled and told me that we couldn't go there. So, one day after work, I took her to a colored dentist over on Central Avenue. He seemed surprised to see the two of us together, but that was just in his eyes. He didn't say anything. She had to go back a couple of times but he cleaned her teeth, got all the brown off, and when she smiled that first time, she looked pretty, not like Lana Turner or Liz Taylor, or any of the movie stars or models. She had her own special kind of frizzy-haired beauty, which wasn't even American, at least not yet.

  We went to a tattoo parlor not too far from the dentist and the owner examined the numbers under a magnifying glass, and then patted her arm the same kind of way my daddy used to when I fell down or was crying. He told her tha
t whatever he could do for her would leave a scar. Gilda hesitated, then she said, “Go ahead.” I guess she figured that the numbers were the worst scar. He used needles and some kind of acid. Gilda was moaning a little bit the entire time he was working on her. She grabbed my hand while he was doing it, and she liked to squeezed me to death.

  Riding the bus on our way back from the tattoo place, I told her about Inez. Gilda said it was another kind of death camp, that the poison gas came out in spurts, not enough to kill the body, just the soul. She had a lot of questions for me. She wanted to know why colored people couldn't go certain places, why our hair wasn't as long as white people's, why our voices sounded different from theirs. I didn't have all the answers but I did my best.

  “They are envious of you,” she told me.

  “Who?”

  “The white people.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have the most beautiful skin. White people sit in the sun to try to get your color. Your features, your lips and nose, are warm. You make wonderful music. And your spirit is powerful. They try to crush your spirit, but they can't.”

  We never heard from the man Gilda stabbed, and she and I never mentioned him. I found myself looking whenever I saw a group of Mexicans, but I didn't see the little boy again either. Gilda and I seemed to be together a lot more after what happened. When we had lunch at the same time, we ate side by side. Sometimes at the end of our break, she'd pull out a book and start reading. She still studied from the English manual, but she read other things as well. Her books were about history and science, and she liked novels, too. Often she'd read a portion to me and get me so interested in the story that when she finished, I'd pick it up. A couple of times, Fern would ask me what I was reading, and I'd share it with her.

  Gilda told me that she had been attending college when the war broke out. “I studied literature,” she said, and there was sadness in her voice.

  I hadn't ever had enough time to read just for the pure pleasure of it, but that's one hobby I acquired from Gilda. As I read, I became aware of mistakes that I was making when I spoke, and I began to improve, little by little. In a way, I started sounding like Thomasine, who Tuney had broken up with, thank God.

  The other maids noticed the new way I was speaking. One time when I finished saying something, Winnie said, “La-di-da,” and looked toward Hattie, who was muttering under her breath that I was trying to be white. She knew better than to say it to my face. But those “la-di-das” put an alley between the other women and me. Gilda and I were walking down the main boulevard together.

  Will Not Be Televised

  BY JEWELLE GOMEZ

  I slammed through the elegantly carved wood door of the hotel's Mayflower Bar like government forces were on my trail and flung myself onto a bar stool at the far corner of an extravagant expanse of mahogany. I knew this shit would happen. CL Leonard still has radar, after all these years. Why is it that the last man in the world you want to see is always the first one in your path? I pretended not to be hiding from an ex-boyfriend as I turned away from two twenty-something white guys in expensive lawyer suits who were trying not to notice my dramatic entrance. How could I still be so annoyed with a man I haven't said more than ten words to in thirty years?

  See! I knew I didn't need to come to some damn reunion. Who wants yesterday sitting up in your face? With my luck Sheila would be next. And the only thing worse than an “ex” you can't stand is your slightly testy, former roommate carrying a thirty-year grudge about a burning stick of patchouli incense accidentally falling on her favorite Marvin Gaye album or some other ancient madness.

  I knew that couldn't be the only reason Sheila and I lost contact after graduation, but I was hanging onto to it like a life raft. Inseparable for four years, we practically invented student unrest together on our mostly white Boston campus. Churning out the black weekly paper, Off the Pig, and turning the ever popular sit-in into an art form were a major part of our curriculum. Those old days may not all have been good but they changed how we saw the world and how the world saw us. Everything I feel about activism today started right there in our dorm room where we waded through the most effective methods for reporting Nelson Mandela's imprisonment and figured out whether to invite The Last Poets or Tina Turner to campus first.

  I volunteer at the Bethany AIDS hospice and attend community board meetings today just because I can remember the tears and the rage in Sheila's eyes when we read about the Black students shot at Jackson State. All those late night political conversations made us promise each other to always follow our motto: “Don't just mourn—do something.”

  There had to be a monumental reason Sheila was angry with me. Was it something I said about Baldy after they got married? Did I not send them birthday cards regularly after graduation? Had I gotten so involved in my marriage that I put our friendship too far at the back of the stove? Half the cells that store my memory are on an accelerating path to oblivion so how am I supposed to know? And I've always been too chicken to contact her and find out.

  Call me the sensitive child of divorced parents, call me a menopausal wuss but deliberately putting myself in the down draft of one of Sheila's notorious icy breezes was not my idea of a good time. I only needed to be given the cold shoulder once—which I was when I bumped into her the afternoon I was photographing a conference in Washington fifteen years ago.

  I peered back at the door to be sure CL hadn't followed, then ordered a glass of Merlot to forget the chill. I took the first sip to wash the thought of him and Sheila out of my mind. It went down so smoothly I closed my eyes, cut their images loose and let them drift away. I didn't even wave good-bye.

  I glanced behind the bar at my face reflected in the highly polished mirror, which was the size of a small town skating rink. The burnt orange silk and linen jacket I'd finally settled on was just right for my oak-brown skin and dark eyes. I'd recently cut my dreadlocks to shoulder length and was pleased with the effect. The roundness of my face, no longer a surprise to me, was actually appealing. As my favorite aunt Henrietta says: a few extra pounds never hurt anyone. So what was it about CL's attentions, be it 1971 or 2001, that set me off? Maybe it was as simple as I wasn't interested and he always chose to ignore my signals. I was going to have to brush up on my rejection skills in order to get through this weekend.

  Insistent beads of perspiration decorated my forehead and I blotted them with the skimpy little napkin they always set out with drinks as if you were going to leave a water ring on their grandmother's table. I wasn't sure if my rising heat was the effect of the wine, of running into CL, or one of those predictable hormonal flushes, but I took another sip and leaned back. I closed my eyes again to really push the image of CL away. What replaced it were pictures just as old as my relationship with him.

  The moment that sealed the sisterhood between Sheila and me unfurled in my mind and I could almost feel the breeze on my face. A tingle of panic had crawled across my skin as my brain registered that the view from the fourth floor of the administration building might as well have been from the fortieth. Clutching the window frame, I gulped for air as the Temptations song, “I Can't Get Next to You,” played in my head. I stretched dangerously out the window. Still the banner remained out of my reach. I looked to see if campus security had shown up yet. No sign of the cops, but Tank was below, waving down the “Say Brother” news van that was pulling into the quadrangle. At least that part of Sheila's plan was going right. “Don't look down!” Sheila called from the fifth-floor window where she held the top end of the red, black and green banner. Her voice caught me and the dizziness cleared. Swinging my gaze back up toward the symbol of Black Power flapping in the breeze, I did my version of a prayer.

  “Shit!”

  If I screwed this up just because I'd skipped all those physical education classes I wouldn't have to worry about being expelled for staging a building takeover. I'd die of embarrassment first. I dropped my olive-drab jacket behind me onto the floor of
the office and dug my toes practically through my Frye boots into my perch—the top of the air conditioning unit just inside the window—as I stretched out again. “Shit” became my mantra as I pushed my fingers higher, climbing the gray brick wall like Spiderman.

  How could this part foul up? Our group had negotiated the support of other progressive student caucuses. We'd gotten ourselves into the administration building with enough food for a week and managed to chain all the exits and get word to the press. Our allies, consisting of Edie, the Jewish girl who lived across the hall from me and Sheila in the dorm, and her boyfriend in from Brandeis for the weekend, were distracting campus police over by the parking lot. Tank was getting our leaflets into the hands of anybody who passed. Now, if I could just get the damn banner!

  I still didn't hear any sirens. Good sign. I exhaled, shoved myself against the window frame like it was the last man I'd ever have, and reached out one more time. The red, black and green banner waved just beyond my fingertips. I looked up at Sheila terrified I'd mess up and our occupation of the admin building would go down the tubes. Her eyes were glistening with fear and excitement. Her look told me I could do it.

  Pretend it's George Wallace's neck, I thought. Grab it! Damn, if only I had those fake nails like Blanche, I'd have . . . Got it!

  “Right on!!!” I exclaimed.

  Then I realized someone was standing beside me at the bar; I was almost too embarrassed to open my eyes. I peeked through one, prepared to put my boxing gloves back on if it was CL, I was relieved to see Tank grinning down at me.

  “Sisters should never drink alone especially when it makes 'em talk to themselves!”

  I slid off the stool, my embarrassment and surprised squelched by my genuine joy at seeing him. A lot of folks, back in the day, used to think Tank was an agent but I'd never believed it. He threw his arms open and we stood in the big loud embrace of people who've known each other's youth.