The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man

by Odie Hawkins

  Diane, on top of his semi-arguments unmercifully, “Yes, Nathan, you were against the idea of movin’ out south, at first but then you rejected the northside ’cause you said you didn’t know anybody over there. You said you didn’t like the westside because of what you called ‘all them crazy ass Miss’ssippi niggers runnin’ ’round with switchblades.’

  “We don’t have anything but the lake to the east of us, so actually it was your idea, to begin with, to move out south, if we were goin’ to buy property anywhere.”

  “She’s right, Daddy,” Byron added solemnly, feeling more heroic with every moment that passed without his father attacking him.

  Nathan Holt stubbed out the fag-end of his cigarette, lit another one and stared out of their front room window, pissed off. The el train, passing by a couple blocks away, shot past his view and gave the apartment its customary tremor. The squalling of a police siren, shotgun blasts, or the backfire from someone’s car, coupled to an obscene argument being had on the sidewalk below their window filtered up to their ears during Father Holt’s silent interim.

  “Well?” he asked finally. “Whatchall want me t’ say?”

  “Tell Momma you dig the idea of us ownin’ a pad of our own, Daddy!” Byron blurted out, an earnest look on his thin, sensitive face.

  Mrs. Holt waved away the suggestion with a fluttered movement of her hands, her head lowered sadly. “No, no … By’, don’t ask your father to do no such thing …” She paused, as though searching for something to say that she couldn’t find the words for, heavy old woman’s lines suddenly etched in her face.

  “You know something?” she continued thoughtfully, speaking to no one in particular. “Just about all my life I’ve had someone accuse me of wantin’ more than they thought I was entitled to. When I was young, down home, with my light skin and what they used to call ‘good hair,’ colored folks was on my case ’cause they thought I was tryin’ to be white, while the peckerwoods called me an uppidy nigger wench who was always fulla sass.…”

  “Diane!?”

  She ignored her husband’s attempted interruption, speaking through it as though she were in a trance. “Then, later on, after we moved up north and I had a chance to go to a junior college for almost two years, I had people tell me that it didn’t make sense for a black girl to be wastin’ time in school ’cause all I was gonna do was get married ’n have babies anyway.…”

  “Momma?”

  “I resented that for a long time, that is, ’til I got married, got lucky would be a better way to put it, and had a couple beautiful sons.…”

  The apartment had developed an eerie look, lit in the front room by the flickering neon lights from outside, from within from the kitchen light shining through the hallway.

  “Nathan?” she veered off at him suddenly.

  “Yeah, baby,” he responded in a low voice.

  “You remember what it was like for us when we first got married, how hard things were right after the Depression?”

  Nathan nodded, his face a glacial African mask in the dim light.

  She looked at Byron warmly, mother’s memories swelling her mind. “Raising two screamin’, hungry at one point, I thought Perry was gonna eat me alive. People were havin’ it harder than they’d ever had it, but we kept right on pushin’ yes indeed, we kept right on pushin’.”

  Byron folded his arms and leaned on the table, staring at his mother reverently.

  She reached across the table and placed her hand on top of her man’s big work-veined paw. “We kept right on pushin’ because I have a man who has never let me down.”

  Nathan patted her hand, stroked it on top of his, warmly.

  She spoke directly to Byron, “He’s made fun of me, from time to time, about listenin’ to classical music, white folks’ music, and going to art shows or doin’ a few other things that we don’t see eye to eye on, but,” and here she turned back to her husband, “he’s never let me down. Now, after we’ve gone through all the trials ’n tribulations to make ends meet, fought with your folks and mine … yours, ’cause they didn’t think I was good enough for you, and mine ’cause they thought I was too good for you … after we’ve gone through all that, in addition to raisin’ two wonderful sons in the middle of all this.”

  She swept her hands out to embrace the grimy apartment, shaking slightly again from another train, the wandering roach trekking up the wall behind her and the hip rats patiently waiting for them to split so that they could check out the scene for leftovers.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” Nathan reassured her grimly, before she could go on, “I’m not gon’ let you down this time either. When’re those people movin’ out of our house?”

  Byron resisted the urge to go around the corner of the table and kiss his father, knowing he would never understand.

  Mother Holt, taking it all in stride, replied, easing away from the table with their dessert saucers, “Next week. We can start packin’ Friday.”

  Byron followed his mother from the table into the kitchen, gave her a peck on the cheek and moved on to his room, George Cain’s Blueschild Baby waiting to be read. Nathan Holt sat in the darkened front room thinking evil thoughts.

  Bet the goddamned President would be happy as a pigeon with a perch on city hall to see me settin’ here in the dark, with his save-the-energy bullshit.

  “Nathan! I’m goin’ to bed, you comin’?” his love called from the kitchen seductively.

  “In a few minutes, honey,” he called back, his baritone huskier than usual, and lit another cigarette. Why in the world should I not be wantin’ to move to a more decent place? he questioned himself as another train rumbled past. He sat smoking, fighting with the question, rejecting all of his old objections one by one. Friends? Shit! I can see them on the weekend. Or whenever. Being farther away from work? Transportation was better out south, and you wouldn’t have to fight a bunch of young gangsters with no respect for their elders for a seat Well, not all the time anyway.

  And what was really wrong about owning somethin’ of your own anyway? Even if it did take twenty years?

  Perry popped in, eyes shining and pants front stiff from a half hour of declared love and wonderful promises.

  “Heyyy, Dad, what’s happenin’?” he asked in his usual flighty manner. “Why you sittin’ up here in the dark, fuses blown again?”

  Nathan Holt stubbed his cigarette out and strolled past his number one son growling, “Where were you when I needed you, boy?”

  Perry followed his departure through the narrow hallway leading to his parents’ bedroom, extremely puzzled by his old man’s morose question.

  Wowwww wonder what that was all about? Oh well, wonder if Momma left me somethin’ in the stove?

  Lubertha tiptoed through the short hallway, heading for her room.

  “Lubertha!” her father’s gruff voice stopped her, caused her to roll her eyes to the ceiling in exasperation.

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  He leaned around the corner separating the hallway from the kitchen, in his tattered, plaid, horse collar, terry cloth robe. “C’mon on in here ’n have a beer with me,” he said to her, the invitation sounding more like an order.

  She slouched through the hallway, tired from a full day’s work and four hours of Club business. She sat across the kitchen table from her father, watching him pop the top on two beers. She smiled her thanks at him as he pushed the can out to her with gruff grace.

  Fathers are really funny, she thought, looking over the edge of her can at her own. The beer ritual, for example, had started exactly on her twenty-first birthday Prior to that she had received every threat that an authoritarian like Ed Franklin could hand out on the subject of intoxicants of all kinds. Since that time they had been into a jug of Jack together a few times.

  “You up pretty late, ain’t you, Daddy?”

  He belched twice and stroked the suds from his walrus mustache, filled with gray hair, Lubertha noticed, a little surprised at the sight. “Couldn�
��t sleep,” he answered in his usual, laconic fashion. They matched sips a few times, each waiting for the other one to lead.

  She watched him spin his beer can around slowly in the wet ring it had made on the table, knowing that he wanted to rap, but that his basically conservative nature wouldn’t allow it to happen, not right off, anyway.

  “How’s Kwendi?” he asked, leading off finally.

  The thought slipped through her head before she answered That’s really sweet, ol’ man really sweet of you to ask that.

  “He’s doin’ o.k. I got a long letter from him Friday.”

  Ed Franklin tensed his jaw muscles and took a long dip. “You know somethin’? I been doin’ a lil’ thinkin’ about that conversation we had the other night.…”

  Lubertha stifled a full-fledged grin, knowing that he would have had to do more than just a “lil’ thinkin’” on the subjects they had tripped through a six pack on.

  “First off, I’m gon’ say this, I ain’t never been ’shamed to admit when I was wrong.”

  “What were you wrong about, Daddy?” she asked sweetly.

  “Well, a couple thangs,” he admitted cautiously, getting another brew from the box “You want another one o’ these?”

  She quickly drained her can and nodded yes. It looked suspiciously like a three can discussion brewing. A bit of her weariness dissolved with the prospect of rappin’ with her ol’ man.

  “O.k., now then,” he continued, “I still don’t go ’long with all the funny styled ideas you and Kwendi and y’all’s bunch believe in, but I go ’long with what you was sayin’ ’bout the political parties … there really ain’t too daggoned much difference between the Democrats ’n the Republicans.…”

  “What made you reach that conclusion?”

  “Well,” he searched for the right answer for a few seconds, “hell, I been studyin’ ’em all my life.”

  “But what made you come to that conclusion?” she persisted.

  “Let’s just say I been studyin’ ’em but I hadn’t been thinkin’ about ’em.”

  They smiled at each other and took unison sips.

  “But anyway,” he went on, lowering the can, “even if there ain’t too much difference ’tween ’em, we still need ’em.”

  Ohhh ohhh, here we go, Lubertha thought, knowing that he was egging her into one of their pet discussions, one that she was forcing him to pay more and more attention to all the time. She placed her can on the table and leaned toward him, the cords in her throat pulsing out.

  “Daddy, you know that ain’t true.”

  “What ain’t true?”

  “That we need the present system.”

  “That’s not what I said, I said we need the political parties we got, even if ain’t too much difference ’tween ’em.”

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about, the Democrats and the Republicans represent the present system, and the present system stinks.” The words snapped out with a little more force than she had intended, causing her father to stare at her for a hard five seconds. “O.k.,” she continued, a bit more mildly, “let me put it this way, for a few hundred years now, the people who run this country, the rich people, meanin’ the white folks, have tried to convince all the rest of us that all we had to do, in order to change things was to vote for the Republicans if you didn’t like the way things were goin’, or the Democrats, whichever one was in power at the moment.”

  “I been a Democrat for twenny years,” Father Franklin shot in, not exactly delighted to hear his daughter run down the America he had voted for.

  “But,” Lubertha continued earnestly, “what they didn’t tell us, the lil’ po’ dumb believers, is that the money people run both parties, and when it gets to a point of makin’ a decision about whether we’re goin’ to have good government or dirty money, it’ll be dirty money every time.”

  Ed Franklin fished a pack of cigarettes out of his robe pocket, lit up and looked at Lubertha with a deep frown.

  “Hold on now, you done lost me somewhere … and I don’t mean about the money part; I know, for a fact that all them slimy politicians got they hands in the kitty but I’m still sayin’ that this system is still the best.”

  Lubertha rode past her father, knowing that she would get bogged down if she allowed him to deviate too much. “Daddy, let’s just stay with the money part for a minute ’cause that’s really what it’s all about. Those names they’ve stuck on these so-called political parties don’t really count. For all we know, a couple billionaires in Argentina or somewhere may have gotten together with a couple billionaires in the U.S. of A. to decide who was gonna be president for the next four years, or vice versa.…”

  “Ain’t you forgettin’ somethin’?” he asked sarcastically, certain that he had a nail for her.

  “What’s that?”

  “What about the people? You forget, we vote whoever we want into office even in Miss’ssippi nowadays.”

  Lubertha gulped her beer and almost choked on it in her hurry to reply. “I disagree, Daddy. We think we vote whoever we want into office. In this day ’n age, television, meanin’ Big Money, makes the vote happen for whoever Big Money is behind.”

  Ed Franklin smiled at his daughter’s logic, liking and disliking her opposition. “Hmf! Sho’ is cold, daughter. Sho’ is cold. To let you tell it, the American voter ain’t got a leg to stand on.”

  “It may sound cold, but facts are colder still. If the American voter had a leg to stand on, things wouldn’t be in the messed up shape they’re in now.”

  He shook his head slowly, picked up his can and drained it, thinking hard. “Awright, things ain’t as good as they could be, but we still got it better than most other folks in the world.”

  “The reason why,” she answered promptly, “is because we’ve no, no, I can’t say we, lets say they’ve exploited, cheated, conned, warred and ripped off all the rest of the world for as long as they’ve been in power, the only things we’ve received have been the leftovers, the crumbs from the ripoffs and you can bet your bottom dollar that if they had a way of keeping the crumbs away from us, they would’ve done it a long time ago.”

  “These billionaires you talkin’ about?”

  “Uh huh, one ’n the same, some of ’em have English names, Spanish, Greek, Indian, German, Arabic, Jewish a lot of ’em have Japanese names these days. The point is, when they link up to exploit, their names are all the same, Exploitation.”

  Ed Franklin shrugged away the wild urge to snatch his daughter across the table, pull her across his knees and spank her. “Awright! awright! money rules! the rich run every damned thing and all the rest of us fools is just runnin’ ’round tryin’ to survive. Awright! I’ll go for it. Now lemme ask you this, since you seem to have all the answers. What other way could thangs be? And how you gonna get ’em that way?”

  Lubertha shook the dregs of her can down her throat, a warm, deliberate calm settling over her. What other way, and how? “Let me put it a couple ways, Daddy. Number one, I think we ought to change the jive political system that doesn’t guarantee the best standard of life possible for all the people.”

  “Nawww, no m’am, you ain’t gon’ take me all over the world, I’m just dealin’ with the U-nited States, let’s just stay up in here for awhile.”

  She listened to his slight slurring carefully, aware that she would have to be a little more diplomatic now, knowing from past experience how easily his aggression was set off by her theories.

  “O.k., just in America, hugh?”

  “Thasss right, just in America!”

  “Well,” she started in again, the brew and her thoughts swirling around, “I don’t wanna get placed in a position of havin’ to say that this should be done before that, or vice versa.”

  Ed Franklin, up to pull the last two brews out of the box, spoke over his shoulder. “I don’t give a damn what order you put ’em in, just lay it out for me. You always talkin’ ’bout changes ’n revolutions ’n whatnot, well, here’s
your chance! Run it out for me.”

  Lubertha accepted another can, took a deep sip. “Well, to begin with, the best thing we could do to start off with is to equalize things make certain that there were no outrageously rich people or outrageously poor people.”

  “Oh, you talkin’ about communism then!” he announced smugly.

  “No, not really,” she answered, her mind wandering. “That’s the trouble with how we get hung up between semantics and concepts. The concept of everybody havin’ enough to eat, a decent place to stay and good clothes to wear doesn’t mean communism. What I’m talkin’ about has to do with the people being granted the human right to live like human beings, minus all the fake hustle and drummed up drama that the people who control things lay on us.”

  She paused for a long sip, into it now. “I mean, look at it this way, Daddy this country is too rich for anyone to be poor in it. It just doesn’t make sense. Like, is it really necessary for some ol’ dude to be livin’ in a fifty room house, just because he manages to cheat somebody out of a million bucks a year?

  “O.K., startin’ with the wealth factor, spread that all the way out, that way you wouldn’t have Big Money runnin’ the political setup. It might mean that the best man could be found for the job of runnin’ the country, or the county, or the city or whatever, rather than the one who has the most oil money behind him.

  “I could stay for a long time on the money thing because that’s what messes up a lot of other things here.

  “But it’s so tied in with the racism thang that you really can’t separate the two. The white people who run this place, the altogether racists, not the All in the Family racists, have such a vested interest in institutional racism that they are even thinkin’ of, if not actually callin’ their own children niggers, not in the sense that they called us niggers, but in a different kind of way, simply because their children don’t want to be oppressors like their mothers ’n fathers have been.”