The next time she saw her, Zella had come into the shop for a haircut on the weekday allotted for colored customers, and Ouida had watched her enter and approach Alton’s chair, struck by the way she moved with authority over space. She was tall and slender, and a few years older than Ouida, almost thirty. Her skin was copper-colored and her hair was a mass of dark ringlets, but it was her large flashing black eyes that were remarkable, one smaller than the other. When she walked over to Alton’s chair and sat down, he came around to face her and declared, “Now you don’t need a shave, and I know you not even thinkin’ ’bout cuttin’ off all that pretty hair, so just what are you doin’ in my chair?”
Zella frowned and gave him a look that was a challenge. “You cut hair, don’t you,” she stated, rather than asked, and Alton nodded. ‘Well,” she said, “I suspect you cut it like your customers ask you to, is that right?” and Alton nodded again. “Then I suggest you get busy with your scissors and crop mine just above my cheek. Right about here,” she said, gesturing with her hand.
Alton argued with her for a while, but he gave in when Zella said, “Why is it that colored folks feel every bit of our hair ought to be on our heads! If we were as concerned with what’s in our heads as we are with what’s on them, we’d be a lot further along.”
At that, Alton had to laugh, and he took up his scissors. He shook his head as her hair fell to the floor, and exclaimed what a shame it was the entire time, and after Zella looked at the finished product in the mirror, she got up, paid him, and left, nodding to Ouida on the way out.
“Well,” Alton said, as she was leaving, “Girl, bet’ not mess with that one. I know her peoples, and she ain’t quite right. What I mean to say is…she ain’t normal.”
When Ouida stared at him, wanting to know more but afraid to ask, he continued, “I know she’d like a sweet young thing like you all for her own. Her kind, they like that.”
“Now that’s a lovely woman,” Zella said to herself once she was outside. She turned back and caught Ouida’s eye through the window, and there was between them a moment of recognition, whose power made them turn away.
Ouida went to the family house that evening and stayed the night, and Vesta sat on the edge of her bed working lotion into her face while Ouida was brushing and plaiting her hair. “Vesta, I met someone who’s different,” she ventured, unsure of herself.
“Different…” Vesta replied. “What does that mean?” And Ouida paused. “I don’t know. Different, somehow. I don’t know how to explain it.” “You gotta do better than that, Ouida,” Vesta said. “It’s late and I’m not up to reading minds tonight.”
“Well…she gets her hair cut short, and at the shop,” she began, to which Vesta raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know, she’s kind of not feminine, but she is feminine after all.” Vesta just looked at her.
Ouida told Vesta what Alton had said and then she stopped brushing and asked, “What do you think, Vesta? You know anything about these things?”
Vesta didn’t and so she shook her head. “I’ve heard of people like that, but no, I don’t know at all about that sort of thing. I can say, for sure, though, that it sounds like trouble to me,” and then she finished up with her face, turned her bed down, and curled up facing the wall. But she lay there in the darkness considering what Ouida had said, and it was a long time before she fell asleep.
The next time Ouida saw Zella, two weeks later, she had thought about what Alton and Vesta had said and she was ready for Zella’s greeting, but not for the way she made her feel, like a dry part of her was being watered. “Rain,” she whispered to herself, “Rain.”
After her haircut, Zella sat down at Ouida’s table and said, “I think I’m due for a manicure.” In fact, she had never had a manicure, but something in Ouida’s response to her glance had pulled her there, and she had to see what her voice sounded like.
“My name is Zella,” she opened, and Ouida responded, “Ouida… Ouida is my name.”
They smiled and Zella asked her what kind of name it was and where she got it. She said, quietly, “It was passed down. Or so my mother said.” As Ouida worked on Zella’s hands, she noticed how strong and worn with experience they looked and felt, and she wanted to know where those hands had been.
Zella began to feel the need for a weekly haircut or a manicure, and she and Ouida found themselves sitting for hours talking while she surrendered her fingers to Ouida’s, and felt something in her tear loose. Each time she left she told herself on the way home that she was risking her heart foolishly, that in the end, she would be destroyed. She knew, somehow, that Ouida had known only men, and she told herself that she could never have her and that she had to stop going. But she always found a reason to return.
She stayed one time until the barbershop closed, and the two of them kept on walking down the street toward Ouida’s flat. They stopped to buy fruit and when they got to the flat, Ouida made tea and offered Zella one of her chipped cups, and then they sat in the nook she had made next to the kitchen with her cerulean blue chairs, telling about themselves until their hands, both reaching for the teapot, touched.
“Say yes,” Zella whispered.
“Yes,” Ouida answered. “Yes.”
They sat in the last light of the day as it thickened and became gold, entering through the window, coming down to them, meeting them. Lowering itself into their laps, the golden light thick with all that the day had held. Light not merely for seeing, but for touch. For love. It was almost dawn again. Almost light, but not yet, not yet. Zella rose from the bed and went to the icebox to get a pear. She sliced it into wedges and removed the seeds, and little beads of juice stood out on the cool inner surface of the fruit. She knelt beside the bed and said, quietly, “Close your eyes.”
And she turned a wedge of the iced fruit, turned it to Ouida, and the open cool innerness of the wedge met her lips. Ouida sank her mouth into it, giving in to it, and Zella fed her, after she was spent, but not really, not quite, not yet, as the fire rose in her again, mingling with the ice-hot wetness of the fruit, into an ache that had to be quenched even though it was getting light, pale light, pale and thin and tinged with blue, thin, but not yet, not yet, and it had to be now, even though there would be time for it all again and again and again across the years, it must be now and now and now.
RANDALL KENAN
[1963–]
RANDALL KENAN’S SCHOOL YEARS COINCIDED WITH THE FIRST integration of public schools in Duplin County, North Carolina, an experience the Brooklyn-born author later put to use in his fiction. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he initially studied physics. But literature soon won his attention, especially the works of Toni Morrison and other African American writers, and he graduated with a degree in English literature in 1985. In fact, through the connections of Morrison he landed his first publishing job at Random House.
Working as a book editor, Kenan became familiar with the writing of James Baldwin, whose autobiographically based references to race, homosexuality, and his relationship with the black church inspired the content of Kenan’s first book, the novel entitled A Visitation of Spirits (1989). Following its publication, the author left Random House for a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College, where he continued to write. Among Kenan’s other titles are a young adult biography, James Baldwin (1994), and an ethnographic travel book, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Century (2000). He is the recipient of a National Book Critics Award nomination, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sherwood Anderson Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Prix de Rome.
In “The Foundations of the Earth,” a short story drawn from Kenan’s collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), Maggie MacGowan Williams, an elderly black woman living in rural North Carolina, struggles to come to terms with the homosexuality of her estranged (and now deceased) grandson Edward. Six months after his funeral, where Mrs. Williams had first discovered that Edward had been gay, she invites Gabriel, her gr
andson’s white lover, to visit her in the hopes of learning more about Edward’s private life.
The Foundations of the Earth
[1992]
I
Of course they didn’t pay it any mind at first: just a tractor—one of the most natural things in the world to see in a field—kicking dust up into the afternoon sky and slowly toddling off the road into a soybean field. And fields surrounded Mrs. Maggie MacGowan Williams’s house, giving the impression that her lawn stretched on and on until it dropped off into the woods far by the way. Sometimes she was certain she could actually see the earth’s curve—not merely the bend of the small hill on which her house sat but the great slope of the sphere, the way scientists explained it in books, a monstrous globe floating in a cold nothingness. She would sometimes sit by herself on the patio late of an evening, in the same chair she was sitting in now, sip from her Coca-Cola, and think about how big the earth must be to seem flat to the eye.
She wished she were alone now. It was Sunday.
“Now I wonder what that man is doing with a tractor out there today?”
They sat on Maggie’s patio, reclined in that after Sunday-dinner way—Maggie; the Right Reverend Hezekiah Barden, round and pompous as ever; Henrietta Fuchee, the prim and priggish music teacher and president of the First Baptist Church Auxiliary Council; Emma Lewis, Maggie’s sometimes housekeeper; and Gabriel, Mrs. Maggie Williams’s young, white, special guest—all looking out lazily into the early summer, watching the sun begin its slow downward arc, feeling the baked ham and the candied sweet potatoes and the fried chicken with the collard greens and green beans and beets settle in their bellies, talking shallow and pleasant talk, and sipping their Coca-Colas and bitter lemonade.
“Don’t they realize it’s Sunday?” Reverend Barden leaned back in his chair and tugged at his suspenders thoughtfully, eyeing the tractor as it turned into another row. He reached for a sweating glass of lemonade, his red bow tie afire in the penultimate beams of the day.
“I…I don’t understand. What’s wrong?” Maggie could see her other guests watching Gabriel intently, trying to discern why on earth he was present at Maggie MacGowan Williams’s table.
“What you mean, what’s wrong?” The Reverend Barden leaned forward and narrowed his eyes at the young man. “What’s wrong is: it’s Sunday.”
“So? I don’t…” Gabriel himself now looked embarrassed, glancing to Maggie, who wanted to save him but could not.
“‘So?’ ‘So?’” Leaning toward Gabriel and narrowing his eyes, Barden asked: “You’re not from a church-going family, are you?”
“Well, no. Today was my first time in… Oh, probably ten years.”
“Uh-huh.” Barden corrected his posture, as if to say he pitied Gabriel’s being an infidel but had the patience to instruct him. “Now you see, the Lord has declared Sunday as His day. It’s holy. ‘Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore, the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.’ Exodus. Chapter twenty, verses nine and ten.”
“Amen.” Henrietta closed her eyes and rocked.
“Hez.” Maggie inclined her head a bit to entreat the good Reverend to desist. He gave her an understanding smile, which made her cringe slightly, fearing her gesture might have been mistaken for a sign of intimacy.
“But, Miss Henrietta—” Emma Lewis tapped the tabletop, like a judge in court, changing the subject. “Like I was saying, I believe that Rick on The Winds of Hope is going to marry that gal before she gets too big with child, don’t you?” Though Emma kept house for Maggie Williams, to Maggie she seemed more like a sister who came three days a week, more to visit than to clean.
“Now go on away from here, Emma.” Henrietta did not look up from her empty cake plate, her glasses hanging on top of her sagging breasts from a silver chain. “Talking about that worldly foolishness on TV. You know I don’t pay that mess any attention.” She did not want the Reverend to know that she secretly watched afternoon soap operas, just like Emma and all the other women in the congregation. Usually she gossiped to beat the band about this rich heifer and that handsome hunk whenever she found a fellow TV-gazer. Buck-toothed hypocrite, Maggie thought. She knew the truth: Henrietta, herself a widow now on ten years, was sweet on the widower minister, who in turn, alas, had his eye on Maggie.
“Now, Miss Henrietta, we was talking about it t’other day. Don’t you think he’s apt to marry her soon?” Emma’s tone was insistent.
“I don’t know, Emma.” Visibly agitated, Henrietta donned her glasses and looked into the fields. “I wonder who that is anyhow?”
Annoyed by Henrietta’s rebuff, Emma stood and began to collect the few remaining dishes. Her purple-and-yellow floral print dress hugged her ample hips. “It’s that ole Morton Henry that Miss Maggie leases that piece of land to.” She walked toward the door, into the house. “He ain’t no God-fearing man.”
“Well, that’s plain to see.” The Reverend glanced over to Maggie. She shrugged.
They are ignoring Gabriel, Maggie thought. She had invited them to dinner after church services thinking it would be pleasant for Gabriel to meet other people in Tims Creek. But generally they chose not to see him, and when they did it was with ill-concealed scorn or petty curiosity or annoyance. At first the conversation seemed civil enough. But the ice was never truly broken, questions still buzzed around the talk like horseflies, Maggie could tell. “Where you from?” Henrietta had asked. “What’s your line of work?” Barden had asked. While Gabriel sat there with a look on his face somewhere between peace and pain. But Maggie refused to believe she had made a mistake. At this stage of her life she depended on no one for anything, and she was certainly not dependent on the approval of these self-important fools.
She had been steeled by anxiety when she picked Gabriel up at the airport that Friday night. But as she caught sight of him stepping from the jet and greeted him, asking about the weather in Boston; and after she had ushered him to her car and watched him slide in, seeming quite at home; though it still felt awkward, she thought: I’m doing the right thing.
II
“Well, thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Williams. But I don’t understand… Is something wrong?”
“Wrong? No, nothing’s wrong, Gabriel. I just thought it’d be good to see you. Sit and talk to you. We didn’t have much time at the funeral.” “Gee… I—”
“You don’t want to make an old woman sad, now do you?”
“Well, Mrs. Williams, if you put it like that, how can I refuse?”
“Weekend after next then?”
There was a pause in which she heard muted voices in the wire.
“Okay.”
After she hung up the phone and sat down in her favorite chair in the den, she heaved a momentous sigh. Well, she had done it. At last. The weight of uncertainty would be lifted. She could confront him face to face. She wanted to know about her grandboy, and Gabriel was the only one who could tell her what she wanted to know. It was that simple. Surely, he realized what this invitation meant. She leaned back looking out the big picture window onto the tops of the brilliantly blooming crepe myrtle trees in the yard, listening to the grandfather clock mark the time.
III
Her grandson’s funeral had been six months ago, but it seemed much longer. Perhaps the fact that Edward had been gone away from home so long without seeing her, combined with the weeks and days and hours and minutes she had spent trying not to think about him and all the craziness that had surrounded his death, somehow lengthened the time.
At first she chose to ignore it, the strange and bitter sadness that seemed to have overtaken her every waking moment. She went about her daily life as she had done
for thirty-odd years, overseeing her stores, her land, her money; buying groceries, paying bills, shopping, shopping; going to church and talking to her few good living friends and the few silly fools she was obliged to suffer. But all day, dusk to dawn, and especially at night, she had what the field-workers called “a monkey on your back,” when the sun beats down so hot it makes you delirious; but her monkey chilled and angered her, born not of the sun but of a profound loneliness, an oppressive emptiness, a stabbing guilt. Sometimes she even wished she were a drinking woman.
The depression had come with the death of Edward, though its roots reached farther back, to the time he seemed to have vanished. There had been so many years of asking other members of the family: Have you heard from him? Have you seen him? So many years of only a Christmas card or birthday card a few days early, or a cryptic, taciturn phone call on Sunday mornings, and then no calls at all. At some point she realized she had no idea where he was or how to get in touch with him. Mysteriously, he would drop a line to his half-sister, Clarissa, or drop a card without a return address. He was gone. Inevitably, she had to ask: Had she done something evil to the boy to drive him away? Had she tried too hard to make sure he became nothing like his father and grandfather? I was as good a mother as a woman can claim to be, she thought: from the cradle on he had all the material things he needed, and he certainly didn’t want for attention, for care; and I trained him proper, he was a well-mannered and upright young fellow when he left here for college. Oh, I was proud of that boy, winning a scholarship to Boston University. Tall, handsome like his granddad. He’d make somebody a good… So she continued picking out culprits: school, the cold North, strange people, strange ideas. But now in her crystalline hindsight she could lay no blame on anyone but Edward. And the more she remembered battles with the mumps and the measles and long division and taunts from his schoolmates, the more she became aware of her true anger. He owes me respect, damn it. The least he can do is keep in touch. Is that so much to ask?
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