Restoration

by John Ed Bradley

  “But this black man looked white enough to pass as white. He assimilated into white society.”

  “Don’t give me that assimilation shit. You really think that matters? It’s not how the man looked, Jack, it’s what he was. I don’t care if he could pass as Brad Pitt’s long-lost identical twin. There was no way in hell that little nugget was ever going to make it to print.”

  Isabel seemed pleased with herself: pleased that her revelation had sparked such a response in me, and pleased to have such juicy dirt on the family of her ex-boyfriend. “If David’s reporting is accurate—and he did admit that he wasn’t able to substantiate much of what he got—Asmore nailed more than just young Emily Weeks. He cut a swath through the whole social registry. Uptown New Orleans would do more than simply cancel their subscriptions to the paper if David’s discovery hit the press, they’d run out to the Huey P. and leap from it just like Asmore did.”

  “As far as we’ve come, we’re still not even close.”

  “Are you talking about race in this country?” Isabel laughed. “Tell me something I don’t know. The same day David came back with his big scoop, Rodger Barnett called the ‘Living’ staff together and swore us to secrecy. ‘This does not leave the building,’ he said, in that phony, high-pitched drawl of his. He later pulled me aside and told me to figure out a way to get David to shut up. He gave me two options: fire him or send him on vacation. There was no way I would agree to fire him—since you left the paper, he’s the only real writer I’ve got. And it wouldn’t have worked to send him on vacation, because he’d just come back from one. So this was Rodger’s solution: He dispatched David to the Gulf of Mexico to work on a story about the danger of life on offshore drilling rigs. And I really think Rodger’s hoping David experiences the danger firsthand, that he gets stuck in a hurricane or something. Short of learning that he’s vanished at sea, Rodger’s hoping that David gets hit real hard in the head and loses his memory, especially the area where he stored his file on Levette Asmore.”

  I summoned our server. I needed another drink. I needed two drinks. “My God,” I said to Isabel, “Levette Asmore was black.”

  “He was black.”

  The rest of the evening felt like an out-of-body experience. I would hang around just long enough to offer a comment in response to something she said, and to keep from having her think I was a total catatonic, then I’d flee to a space in the celestial haze above the old hotel where I could look down on the world and try to understand it. If nothing else I’d learned that Levette Asmore now had a motive for killing himself. He’d lied to so many people by presenting himself one way when in fact he was another that he’d probably suffered from a gangrenous case of self-hatred. Was that too simple? People have wasted themselves over lesser crimes than deceit. Another possible explanation came to mind. Maybe some white guy, the Rodger Barnett of his day, had learned that his ex-girlfriend was having an affair with the artist. After checking out Asmore’s background, much as David Charles had done, he’d discovered the truth about the artist’s phony racial identity. And maybe this guy had personally seen to it that Asmore took a leap from the Huey P.

  Perhaps I’d read too many stories and seen too many movies about black men being persecuted by whites for tinkering with their women. But whatever currents had come together to bring about Asmore’s death, I now was more intrigued than ever. His was more than a story about a tortured artist who couldn’t handle having his precious work rejected. Levette Asmore truly might’ve been the most important artist ever to come out of the American South, but the man also had been a fraud.

  “You seem distracted,” Isabel said.

  “I didn’t go back to sleep after you called. I’m tired, that’s all.”

  “This was a terrible idea, wasn’t it?”

  I put some cash on the table, then leaned forward and took her hands in mine. “Listen to me, Isabel. I’m truly sorry things went so badly for you with Freddie. But I want you to know something. I’m a great fan of yours and I always will be. You’re a lovely woman, when you let yourself be, and you surely deserve better than that spoiled little prick. Will you always remember I told you that?”

  “Which part, Jack? The one about Freddie being a prick or the one about me being lovely?”

  “You’ll forget Freddie,” I said. “Never forget how lovely you are.”

  “Will you rent a room with me, Jack? Let’s make it how it was.”

  “I can’t, Isabel. We won’t do that ever again. We shouldn’t have done it before. I’m sorry. You do understand?”

  She gave her head a shake, sending tears down her face.

  “I need to go now. Good-bye, Isabel.”

  “Good-bye, Jack.”

  Near the doors leading out of the bar I paused and had a look at another of the Ninas murals. This one showed tourists cavorting at Jackson Square. In the corner a black woman, seated on the ground like a beggar, and wearing a tignon, peddled pralines to white people. Next to her a young black boy gave a man a shoeshine. I turned back and took in all four of the paintings. In each of them blacks were depicted as subservient to whites. Blacks picked cotton or toted baskets and heavy sacks; whites either gave them orders or stood around in fashionable clothes talking to each other.

  It would be a mistake not to care about race, Rhys had told me weeks ago. I could hear her speaking these words now, and suddenly something came clear to me: if Levette Asmore was black, then maybe we all were black.

  It was Annie Rae, not Annie Mae, and the tree in the front yard wasn’t a chinaberry but a sycamore. There wasn’t a chicken in sight, although a white cat lounging in the sun did meow when I climbed up on the porch. I looked back at the fence and rickety gate, wondering how barbed wire could be confused with wood. I also wondered what other facts Isabel, quoting David Charles, had got wrong.

  “Mrs. Toussaint, it’s Jack Charbonnet,” I said through the screen.

  “The one who called me on the telephone?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked to be in excellent health for an eighty-year-old. We shook hands and though her skin felt as soft as eiderdown her grip was sure and strong. On the drive over it had occurred to me that Annie Rae Toussaint, being a cousin of Levette Asmore’s, also was a relation of Rhys Goudeau’s; but the two looked nothing alike. The old lady had a dark complexion and dark eyes and she wore her hair short and close to the scalp. There was no mistaking her race. “It wants to scare me how everybody’s been looking at me lately,” she said, pushing the door open and letting me in the house.

  “I didn’t mean to stare, ma’am. I apologize.”

  “It makes me want to put some tissue paper up to my nose. Like there’s something there I should know about.”

  “No, ma’am, everything’s fine.”

  The living room was outfitted with a sofa, a recliner and a bent-wood rocker. An oval rug lay on the floor. Plants stood on pedestals in the windows and hung from ceiling chains. It was a comfortable space, cooled today by a box fan and a small window unit that, roaring away together, sounded like an approaching freight train. She’d been reading a book; it lay open on one of the end tables. “I poured you a Kool-Aid,” she said, and gestured to the place where she wanted me to sit. A glass running with condensation was waiting on a coaster. “You like Kool-Aid, Charbonnet?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You want some cookies?”

  “No, ma’am, thank you. The Kool-Aid’s plenty.”

  I recognized the dust jacket of the book. The title was a personal favorite, and one in my collection at home: Art in the American South: Works from the Ogden Collection.

  “I went I don’t know how many years and nobody even brought up the name Levette Asmore. Now they got him in a library book. If you wait long enough, I suppose they always come and find you. Well, maybe I should say if you’ve got something to give to the world they come and find you. If you got only memories, like I do, they tend to leave you alone, not wanting to he
ar more talk. I wish I’d saved his doodles. I bet I could get something for his doodles.”

  “Do you own any of his paintings?”

  “No, I don’t, sad to say.”

  “So this is the house where he lived after his mother and father died?”

  “Yes, this is it, and it was a new house then, no more than ten years old. They call it a cottage nowadays, the real estate people do, but I remember not many years ago when everybody just called it a shack.”

  “How long was he actually here, Mrs. Toussaint?”

  “For three months, until the state came and took him. He was the saddest little boy in the world. He wouldn’t want to leave the house for anything. Wouldn’t go with us to church on Sunday. Wouldn’t talk but to say a few words every now and then. He stayed inside and drew pictures of his mama and daddy, most of them showing them being swept away with the cows and other animals. There was an old hotel in Melville, the Able Hotel. It went up two stories and he would draw it, with the water from the river up to the roof and all the people inside trapped. He would keep his pictures hidden under the bed. One time I remember Mama tried to get him to take his bath. It was a Saturday, when they would put the washtub in the kitchen and everyone took a turn. And when it was time for Levette he started screaming about the snakes in the water and they never did get him to bathe. He used to clean himself with a wet cloth and a bar of soap. I remember that. That’s all Mama could get him to use.”

  “The poor child.”

  She nodded. “I also remember I asked him once to color me a flower and he made me a magnolia. There was a big magnolia tree used to grow in front of his house—his real house, where his mama and daddy lived—that the flood took with it.”

  “Mrs. Toussaint,” I said, trying to stay on track, “I read somewhere that your father couldn’t afford to keep him. Is that true?”

  “True about halfway, not true the other half.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “My daddy farmed like Levette’s daddy did. Corn and cotton mostly. Look out the window at the land around the house, that was it. Just a small patch that he bought from the white people who owned it before us. There wasn’t any money anywhere, it was the Depression. Not a lot of food, either, except what you could grow. Sometimes Levette wouldn’t eat his supper and Daddy would take exception. He’d tell Levette to go outside and get him a switch from the camellia bush.”

  “You remember him, Mrs. Toussaint? I mean, how he looked and dressed and how his voice sounded and everything?”

  “Of course I remember Levette.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Well, he was very light-complected, if that’s your way of getting me to say it.”

  “Complected? Are you saying he had fair skin?”

  “He was bright, his skin was bright, his hair was bright. He was kind of golden, yes, he had a shine about him. His daddy and my daddy were only half brothers, you see. They had the same father, Oscar Asmore, but different mothers.”

  “How much older was Levette than you?”

  “Two years older. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re a child it’s a lot. He didn’t pay me much mind. When I was in high school he sent me a Christmas card from New Orleans saying he thought about me and wanted to wish me a happy holidays. That surprised me, because by that time I thought for sure I’d be the last thing on his mind. The card had a little picture of a French Quarter patio on the front, a little watercolor he’d done. We had a pipe burst and water got on everything and that’s what happened to it.”

  “The card was destroyed?”

  “Yes. Levette came back only once to my knowledge and he had somebody with him. They came and parked up by the road but they never got out. I was in the yard hanging clothes on the line. Levette had grown up by then. I could see him, sitting in his seat, and just looking with that other person.”

  “Was it a man or a woman he was with?”

  “A man.”

  “Was the man a white man or a black man?”

  “A white man. He looked white to me, anyway.”

  “And that day he came, Levette didn’t talk to you?”

  “No, he didn’t. He didn’t talk to anyone. I heard Mama come through the front door, and she called out for Daddy, that Levette had come back. But then the car started up and roared off down the road. Maybe he was afraid Daddy would get the switch after him again. My daddy was a good man, but when he drank, he could be mean. It was a disease with him. I remember when they came and told us Levette had jumped from the bridge. Daddy put on his coat and his hat and he walked to town. It was a hot night, and he went to the bar where they had the white entrance and the colored entrance. It was like that in those days. Daddy kept trying to get in the white entrance and the white men kept throwing him out. They liked my daddy, the white men did. He liked them, too. But that was a line you didn’t cross, not in them days. After a while they had enough of him trying to get in the white side and they beat him so bad we had to get Mr. Leroy Guidry, he was our neighbor, he’s dead now… we had to get Mr. Leroy to load him in the back of the truck and bring him home. It was like he was in pieces. It was what he wanted, for the white men to beat him up. I guess he was feeling guilty about Levette.”

  “Because he’d abused him when he lived here as a boy?”

  “Nobody said abused in those days, Charbonnet. They said spanked.”

  “Spanked? That’s treating it a little lightly, calling it spanked.”

  “To me, too.”

  She pulled herself up out of her chair and went through a swinging door into what I presumed was the kitchen. I used the time alone to have a look at a cluster of photographs hanging on the wall. None showed Levette Asmore, but there was one of Mrs. Toussaint, housed in a vintage frame behind bubble glass, that showed her as a teenage girl standing with a middle-aged couple that likely was her parents. The woman had light skin and straight hair, the man was dark and handsome, although his features were obscured by a shadow cut from his snap-brim hat. Behind them stood Mrs. Toussaint’s house. The sycamore in the yard looked like a twig stuck in the ground.

  Hanging in matching frames next to the photographs were a high school diploma and a certificate from the University of Southwestern Louisiana commending Annie Rae Toussaint for completing a correspondence course in agriculture.

  “At one time I wanted to learn if there was more to planting than just planting,” she said, as she walked past me carrying a silver service tray. The tray held a glass pot containing coffee, bowls with sugar and cream, and cookies on a plate. The cookies were covered with cellophane, which she proceeded to remove. “You know what I found out, Charbonnet? I found out the books knew less about how to farm than Daddy had taught me before I got to first grade.”

  “Mrs. Toussaint,” I said, “I’m really not hungry. You didn’t have to go through all that trouble.”

  “See that lady there? That one in the picture you were just looking at? She taught me to be polite, so I’m being polite.” She poured a cup of coffee. “You like cream and sugar, Charbonnet?”

  “No, ma’am. I like it regular.”

  “Black?”

  The way she said the word made me look up. “Yes, please.”

  She removed the glass of Kool-Aid and the coaster from the end table next to my chair and replaced them with the coffee and cookies. “You saw my little white kitty outside on the porch?” she said.

  “Yes, I did. It’s a cute little thing.”

  “Nature’s funny how it works. That little cat’s mama was black, black on every inch of her body. I don’t know who the daddy was, but the mama used to stay around here. I’d leave her scraps on the back steps. She and I got along like family. She delivered her litter under the house and in the morning I crawled under there with my flashlight to have a look. She had herself a place kind of dug out in the soil, where it was cool, and the kittens were feeding on her, and I put the light on them and every last one of them was black. Bl
ack from the tip of their nose to the tip of their tail, just like she was. They were all getting their milk, doing fine. I started to leave but then I heard a little meow. I moved the light around and I saw this little pink thing off to itself with some white hair on it. It was a baby kitty that the mama cat had pushed off to the side so it couldn’t get any milk. She had put it there to die. And it would have, too, if I hadn’t gone to check.”

  “Was this the little cat I saw out on the porch?”

  “Yes, it was. It was the only one of the litter I decided to keep. I gave all the others away and I kept the one the mama didn’t want.”

  “What happened to the mama cat?”

  “She left. I guess somebody gave her better scraps.” Mrs. Toussaint nibbled the edge of a cookie and gave me a smile. “How did that black cat have all black babies except for one, and how did that one come out white?” She lifted her eyebrows as if in expectation of an answer. “And why,” she continued, “did the mama treat the little white kitty like it did when the little white kitty was innocent and pure and had never done it anything. I forgot to tell you there were only four other kittens in the litter, so the mama had plenty of milk to go around. She just wasn’t going to have anything to do with that white cat, was she, Charbonnet?”

  “I guess she wasn’t.”

  “Nature,” she said, pronouncing the word “Nay-chuh.” “Nature made her act like that.”

  “It was nature, was it?”

  “Another thing I forgot to tell you is that the mama cat was a good cat. She was friendly, she liked everybody. She’d rub up against your ankles, sleep in your lap. She wasn’t even mean to other cats, these strays that come around. But then she had that little white one and all of a sudden she’s trying to kill it.”