Dancers on the Shore

by William Melvin Kelley

  But other strange things had happened after that. In the beginning she and her mother, as always before, had gone downtown to the market, to shop amid the bright stalls brimming with green and yellow vegetables and brick-red meats, tended by dark, country Negroes in shabby clothes and large straw hats. It would get very quiet when they passed, and Jennie would see the Negroes look away, fear in their eyes, and knots of white men watching, sometimes giggling. But the white women in fine clothes were the most frightening; sitting on the verandas or passing in carriages, some even coming to their windows, they would stare angrily as if her mother had done something terrible to each one personally, as if all these white women could be the one who drove by each morning. Her mother would walk through it all, her back straight, very like her father’s, the bun into which she wove her waist-length braid on market days, gleaming dark.

  In the beginning they had gone to the suddenly quiet market. But now her mother hardly set foot from the house, and the food was brought to them in a carton by a crippled Negro boy, who was coming just as Jennie and her father left the house that morning.

  Balancing the carton on his left arm, he removed his ragged hat and smiled. “Morning, Mister Herder. Good luck at the shooting match, sir.” His left leg was short and he seemed to tilt.

  Her father nodded. “Thank you, Felix. I do my best.”

  “Then you a sure thing, Mister Herder.” He replaced his hat and went on around the house.

  Walking, her hand in her father’s, Jennie could see some of the women of Liberty Street peering out at them through their curtains.

  Downtown was not the same. Flags and banners draped the verandas; people wore their best clothes. The Square had been roped off, a platform set up to one side, and New Marsails Avenue, which ran into the Square, had been cleared for two blocks. Far away down the Avenue stood a row of cotton bales onto which had been pinned oilcloth targets. From where they stood, the bull’s-eyes looked no bigger than red jawbeakers.

  Many men slapped her father on the back, and furtively, looked at her with a kind of clinical interest. But mostly they ignored her. The celebrity of the day was her father, and unlike her mother, he was very popular. Everyone felt sure he would win the match; he was the best shot in the state.

  After everyone shot, the judge came running down from the targets, waving his arms. “Maynard Herder. Six shots, and you can cover them all with a good gob of spit!” He grabbed her father’s elbow and pulled him toward the platform, where an old man with white hair and beard, wearing a gray uniform trimmed with yellow, waited. She followed them to the platform steps, but was afraid to go any farther because now some women had begun to look at her as they had at her mother.

  The old man made a short speech, his voice deep, but coarse, grainy-sounding, and gave her father a silver medal in a blue velvet box. Her father turned and smiled at her. She started up the steps toward him, but just then the old man put his hand on her father’s shoulder.

  People had begun to walk away down the streets leading out of the Square. There was less noise now but she could not hear the first words the old man said to her father.

  Her father’s face tightened into the same look she had seen the day the letter came, the same as this morning in the kitchen. She went halfway up the stairs, stopped.

  The old man went on: “You know I’m no meddler. Everybody knows about Liberty Street. I had a woman down there myself…before the war.”

  “I know that.” The words came out of her father’s face, though his lips did not move.

  The old man nodded. “But, Maynard, what you’re doing is different.”

  “She’s your own daughter.”

  “Maybe that’s why…” The old man looked down the street, toward the cotton bales and the targets. “But she’s a nigger. And now the talking is taking an ugly turn and the folks talking are the ones I can’t hold.”

  Her father spoke in an angry whisper. “You see what I do to that target? You tell those children in their masks I do that to the forehead of any man…or woman that comes near her or my house. You tell them.”

  “Maynard, that wouldn’t do any real good after they’d done something to her.” He stopped, looked at Jennie, and smiled. “That’s my only granddaughter, you know.” His eyes clicked off her. “You’re a man who knows firearms. You’re a gunsmith. I know firearms too. Pistols and rifles can do lots of things, but they don’t make very good doctors. Nobody’s asking you to give her up. Just go back home. That’s all. Go back to your wife.”

  Her father turned away, walking fast, came down the stairs and grabbed her hand. His face was red as blood between the white of his collar and the straw yellow of his hair.

  They slowed after a block, paused in a small park with green trees shading several benches and a statue of a stern-faced young man in uniform, carrying pack and rifle. “We will sit.”

  She squirmed up onto the bench beside him. The warm wind smelled of salt from the Gulf of Mexico. The leaves were a dull, low tambourine. Her father was quiet for a long while.

  Jennie watched birds bobbing for worms in the grass near them, then looked at the young, stone soldier. Far off, but from where she viewed it, just over the soldier’s hat, a gliding sea gull dived suddenly behind the rooftops. That was when she saw the white man, standing across the street from the park, smiling at her. There were other white men with him, some looking at her, others at the man, all laughing. He waved to her. She smiled at him though he was the kind of man her mother told her always to stay away from. He was dressed as poorly as any Negro. From behind his back, he produced a brown rag doll, looked at her again, then grabbed the doll by its legs, and tore it part way up the middle. Then he jammed his finger into the rip between the doll’s legs. The other men laughed uproariously.

  Jennie pulled her father’s sleeve. “Papa? What he doing?”

  “Who?” Her father turned. The man repeated the show and her father bolted to his feet, yelling: “I will kill you! You hear? I will kill you for that!”

  The men only snickered and ambled away.

  Her father was red again. He had clenched his fists; now his hands were white like the bottoms of fishes. He sighed, shook his head, and sat down. “I cannot kill everybody.” He shook his head again, then leaned forward to get up. But first he thrust the blue velvet medal box into her hand. It was warm from his hand, wet and prickly. “When you grow up, you go to the North like your mother tells you. And you take this with you. It is yours. Always remember I gave it to you.” He stood. “Now you must go home alone. Tell your mother I come later.”

  That night, Jennie tried to stay awake until he came home, until he was there to kiss her good night, his whiskers scratching her cheek. But all at once there was sun at her window and the sound of carts and wagons grating outside in the dirt street. Her mother was quiet while the two of them ate. After breakfast, Jennie went into the yard to wait for the gray buggy to turn the corner, but for the first morning in many months, the white woman did not jounce by, peering at the house, searching for someone or something special.

  Enemy Territory

  I PEERED OVER a rotting tree stump and saw him moving, without a helmet, in the bushes. I got his forehead in my sights, squeezed the trigger, and imagined I saw the bullet puncture his head and blood trickle out. “I got you, Jerome. I got you!”

  “Awh, you did not.”

  “I got you; you’re dead.”

  I must have sounded very definite because he compromised. “You only wounded me.”

  “Tommy? Tommy! Come here.” Her voice came from high above me.

  I scrambled to my knees. “What, Ma?” She was on the porch of our house, next to the vacant lot where we were playing.

  “Come here a minute, dear. I want you to do something for me.” She was wearing a yellow dress. The porch was red brick.

  I hopped up and ran
to the foot of our steps. She came to the top. “Mister Bixby left his hat.”

  As I had waited in ambush for Jerome, I had seen Mister Bixby climb and, an hour later, chug down the steps. He was one of my father’s poker playing friends. It was only after she mentioned it that I remembered Mister Bixby had been wearing, when he arrived, a white, wide-brimmed panama hat with a black band.

  Entering my parents’ room on the second floor, I saw it on their bed. My mother picked it up. “Walk it around to his house. Now walk, I say. Don’t run because you’ll probably drop it and ruin it.” It was so white a speck of dirt would have shone like a black star in a white sky. “So walk! Let me see your hands.”

  I extended them palms up and she immediately sent me to the bathroom to wash. Then she gave me the hat. I did not really grip it; rather, with my finger in the crown, I balanced it, as if about to twirl it.

  When I stepped onto the porch again, I saw them playing on their corner—Valentine’s Gang. Well, in this day of street gangs organized like armies, I cannot rightly call Joey Valentine, who was eight, and his acquaintances, who ranged in age from five to seven, a gang. It was simply that they lived on the next block, and since my friends and I were just at the age when we were allowed to cross the street, but were not yet used to this new freedom, we still stood on opposite sides of the asphalt strip that divided us and called each other names. It was not until I got onto the porch that I realized, with a sense of dread that only a six-year-old can conjure up, that Mister Bixby lived one block beyond Valentine’s Territory.

  Still, with faith that the adult nature of my mission would give me unmolested passage, I approached the corner, which was guarded by a red fire alarm box, looked both ways for the cars that seldom came, and, swallowing, began to cross over.

  They were playing with toy soldiers and tin tanks in the border of dry yellow dirt that separated the flagstones from the gutter. I was in the middle of the street when they first realized I was invading; they were shocked. At the time, I can remember thinking they must have been awed that I should have the unequaled courage to cross into their territory. But looking back, I realize it probably had little to do with me. It was the hat, a white panama hat. A more natural target for abuse has never existed.

  I was two steps from the curb when Joey Valentine moved into my path. “Hey, what you got?”

  Since he was obviously asking the question to show off, I bit my lips and did not answer. I saw myself as one of my radio heroes resisting Japanese interrogation. I was aloof. However, the white panama hat was not at all aloof. Before I knew it, Joey Valentine reached out a mud-caked hand and knocked the hat off my finger to a resounding chorus of cheers and laughter.

  I scooped up the hat before any of them, retreated at a run across the street, and stopped beside the red alarm box. Wanting to save some small amount of my dignity, I screamed at them: “I’ll get you guys! I’ll get you. I’m not really an American. I’m an African and Africans are friends of the Japs and I’ll get them to bomb your house!”

  But even as I ranted at them, I could see I was doing so in vain. Across the way, Valentine’s Gang lounged with the calm of movie Marines listening to Japanese propaganda on the radio. I turned toward my house, inspecting the hat for smudges. There were none; it was as blinding white as ever. Already I felt tears inching down my cheeks.

  Not until I was halfway up the porch steps did I see my grandmother sitting in her red iron chair. But before I could say anything, before I could appeal for understanding and comfort, she lifted herself out of the chair and disappeared into the house. She had seen it all—I knew that—and she was too ashamed of me to face me.

  Suddenly, she was coming back, holding a broom handle. She had never before lifted a hand to me, but in my state, I felt sure that many things would change. I closed my eyes and waited.

  Instead of the crunch of hard wood on bone, I heard her chair creak. I opened my eyes and found the end of the broom handle under my nose.

  “You know if you don’t go back and deliver that hat, you’ll feel pretty bad tonight.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, take this. We don’t like you fighting. But sometimes you have to. So now you march down there and tell those boys if they don’t let you alone, you’ll have to hit them with this. Here.” She pushed the broom handle at me.

  I took it, but was not very happy about it. I studied her; she looked the same, her white hair bunned at her neck, her blue eyes large behind glasses, her skin the color of unvarnished wood. But something inside must have changed for her actually to tell me to hit someone. I had been in fights, fits and starts of temper that burned out in a second. But to walk deliberately down to the corner, threaten someone, and hit him if he did not move aside, this was completely different, and, as my parents and grandmother had raised me, downright evil. She must have realized what I was thinking.

  “You know who Teddy Roosevelt was?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, he once said: Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

  I understood her, but to do something like this was still alien to my nature. I held back.

  “Come on.” She stood abruptly and took my hand. We went into the house, down the hall, and into her bedroom. “I have to see to the mulatto rice. You sit on my bed and look at the picture on the wall.” She went on to the kitchen. I was still holding the broom handle and now put it down across the bed, and climbed up beside it, surrounded by her room, an old woman’s room with its fifty years of perfume, powder, and sweet soap. I felt a long way from the corner and Valentine’s Gang.

  There were three pictures on the wall and I was not certain which she wanted me to study. The smallest was of my granduncle Wilfred, who lived on Long Island and came to Thanksgiving dinner. The largest was of Jesus, the fingers of His right hand crossed and held up, His left hand baring His chest in the middle of which was His heart, red and dripping blood. In the cool darkness of the room, He looked at me with gentle eyes, a slight smile on His lips. The third was my grandmother’s husband, who had died so long before that I had never known him and had no feeling for him as my grandfather. He was light, like my grandmother, but more like some of the short, sallow Italian men who lived on the block. His black hair was parted in the middle. He wore a big mustache which hid his mouth. His jaw was square and dimpled. With black eyes, he seemed to look at something just above my head.

  “Well, all right now.” My grandmother came in, sweating from standing over the stove, and sat in a small armchair beside the bed. “Did you look at the picture?”

  “I didn’t know which one.” I looked at Jesus again.

  “No, not Him this time. This one.” She indicated her husband. “I meant him.”

  * * *

  —

  NOW PABLO [CORTÉS], your grandfather—she started—was just like you, as gentle as a milkweed flower settling into honey, and as friendly as ninety-seven puppy-dogs. He was from Cuba, which is an island in the Atlantic Ocean.

  He was so kind that he’d meet every boat coming in from Cuba and talk to all of the people getting off, and if he found that one of them didn’t have a place to stay, and no money for food, he’d bring him home. He’d lead his new friend into the kitchen and say: “Jennie, this is a countryman. He got no place to sleep, and he’s hungry.” And I’d sigh and say: “All right. Dinner’ll be ready in ten minutes.” They’d go into the living room and sing and roll cigars.

  That’s what he did for a living, roll cigars, working at home. The leaves were spread out all over the floor like a rug and I never did like cigars because I know somebody’s been walking all over the leaves, sometimes in barefeet like your mother did when she was a little girl.

  Pablo was so friendly he gave a party every day while I was at work. I’d come home and open the door and the cigar smoke would tumble out and through the haze I would see twe
nty drunken Cubans, most with guitars, others rolling cigars, and all of them howling songs.

  So now fifty years ago, I’d come from down South to stay with my brother Wilfred, and I was so dumb that the first time I saw snow I thought somebody upstairs’d broken open a pillow out the window. So my brother Wilfred had to explain a lot of things to me. And the first thing was about the neighborhoods. In those days, New York was all split up into neighborhoods. The Italians lived in one neighborhood, and the Polish in another, and the Negroes and Cubans someplace else. After Pablo and I got married, we lived with the Negroes. And if you walked two blocks one way, you’d come to the Irish neighborhood, and if you were smart, you’d turn around and come back because if the Irish caught you, they’d do something terrible to you.

  I don’t know if Pablo knew this or not, or if he just thought he was so friendly that everybody would just naturally be friendly right back. But one day he went for a walk. He got over into the Irish neighborhood and got a little thirsty—which he did pretty often—so he went into an Irish bar and asked for a drink. I guess they thought he was new in this country because the bartender gave him his drink. So Pablo, smiling all the time, and waiting for them to smile back, stood there in that Irish bar and drank slow. When he was finished the bartender took the glass and instead of washing it, he smashed it down on the floor and stepped on it and crushed the pieces under his heel. What he meant was that it was pretty bad to be a Cuban and no Irishman would want to touch a glass a Cuban had drunk from.

  I don’t know if Pablo knew that either. He asked for another drink. And he got it. And after he finished this one, the bartender smashed it in the sink and glared at him.