“Sahry told me.”
“You knew Sarah Morgan?”
He nods.
“And Mama? Her blood? Cletus Hayes?”
“In part. From messing with Cletus, Sahry birthed your grandma Jean—”
“Wait wait wait, Uncle, please. Before begetting and begetting, like the Bible—”
Bitter raises his hands. “Let me start again. I’s working the oil rigs just outside Texas City. This was ‘43, ‘44. Place was booming ‘cause of the war. Oil. Cotton. Chemicals. Lotsa black famblies living there, hiring out for labor. Me and my old lady, Maeve, we move into this tinkery old building downtown, near dockside.”
I’m startled by the mention of his “old lady”; ever since I’ve known him he’s been on his own. I never even wondered where Ariyeh came from: a consequence of being plucked too soon from this world. As for Bitter’s own origins, I remember him saying once he grew up in a “hoodoo alley in the Vieux Carré” before his family moved to Texas.
“At home, I mostly kept to myself after work,” he says. “I smelt like a damn gusher all the time, oil and shit on my hands. I’d scrub and scrub and seem like I never could shuck that jelly-smell. But Maeve, she’s a real go-getter in them days, friendlied-up with everyone in the building. She’s especially close to this pair of comely ladies upstairs. Didn’t have no menfolk around. Both waitressed or something. They’s raising this little eight-year-old girly—whirlwind. I’d hear her clomping up and down the stairs after supper, screaming to go play in the park.” He sips his tea. “The parks in Texas City was more like abandoned refineries. ‘Stead of a jungle gym, you know, you’d have a cat cracker to climb on.”
I watch spiders weave their webs; I’m impatient for him to return to the garden. But I learned a long time ago, Bitter has his own pace, spinning stories.
“Wellsir, the day come when the Grandcamp caught afire. It was a French Liberty ship, pretty thing; just pulled into port, hauling cotton, tobacco, peanuts, twine, guns, and a shitload of ammonium nitrate fertilizer—’bout two thousand tons of it, someone told me later. One of the crewmen noticed a plume of smoke in the hold early one morning, went down and tried to douse it with a jug of drinking water, but no go. The captain ordered the hatch covers sealed, figuring to smother the fire, you know. But the pressure blew the damn covers off. By that time, the volunteer firemen had come, but the poor boat was so het up now, it vaporized the water.
“I ‘member I’s already manning a rig, edge of town—it’s about nine o’clock in the morning—when I heard the ker-boom, looked up and saw this smoky ol’ mushroom rolling over the port, saw wood and ship’s rigging sailing through the air, raining like brimstone on the Monsanto plant and the dockside housing where Maeve was still in bed. I dropped everything, went running right home. Maevey was okay, but the blast had tore off part of the roof, shattered all the pipes. Water spraying like high tide. Real hairy. I stayed home rest of the day, helping famblies rescue their pictures and stuff, cleaning up. The ladies and their eight-year-old scrambled down to our place, ‘cause their ‘partment was puredee flooded. All day we’s patching pipes, clearing wood, and we heard rumors ‘bout dockside. Fellas said forty firemen had disintegrated. A hunnert and fifty workers missing at Monsanto. Terrible, terrible. Little girly crying—you could hear her up and down the stairwell, ‘long with the shush of busted toilets.
“Middle of this unholy mess, no one cottoned to the fact that the High Flyer, another Liberty ship docked in port, was also stocked with nitrate. And sulfur. It had come through the blast all right—or so everyone figured. We was wrong.
“Long story short: middle of the night, Texas City become an inferno. Flames, wood, steel rushing our way from the water like a windstorm from Hell. Oil tanks popping all over town and up and down the coast. Quarter of the city perished that night. Ashes and bone.
“Maeve and I scurried out the building, rubbing sleep from our eyes, stairs tumbling right behind us. She’s squeezing the girly to her chest. But them other two ladies, who’d sacked out on our floor, bless them, we never saw them again.”
He stops, presses his chest with his fingertips like a man playing accordion, then spoons more oatmeal for himself.
“So that’s when we move into Freedmen’s Town,” he says. “I went to work for a carpentry shop, Maevey kept our home till the cancer got her in ‘59. She raised the girly, which weren’t easy, let me tell you. Fire put the fear of Hell into that poor little soul. She’d wake middle of the night, screaming like she’s scorched.”
He sticks his spoon into his mouth and holds it there. The shed is getting hotter as the sun lifts. My patience is melting away. I get up, open the door, pull the towels back from the windows. “I’m confused, Uncle Bitter. What does all this have to do with—”
“Your mama,” he says, placing the spoon in his bowl, fanning his fingers over his heart. His shirt is so thin, I can see his darkness beneath it. “That little flame-frightened girly.”
I stand, staring down at him. Bees flit against the windows.
“Them ladies that perished. Sahry Morgan and your grandma Jean. I didn’t know them well as Maevey did, but I’d sit with them sometimes on the stairs, drinking lemonade late in the evening, you know. I’s embarrassed around them, smelling so bad like I did all the time, but they’s easy enough with me, eventually, to tell me a thing or two.” He straightens his legs. “Now, I don’t know the particulars, you understand, but I can tell you Sahry was on the outs with her fambly ‘cause she decided to go ahead and keep the baby.”
“Cletus Hayes’s baby?”
“That’s right. Jean.”
“Did she talk about Cletus?”
“Not much. I cain’t tell you whether she got knocked up, riot night, or whether she’s already carrying. She’d been seeing Cletus on the sly since the soldiers first come to town.”
“She told you this?”
“She did.”
I slide back onto the mattress, rumpling the sheet. A spider catches a ladybug, just above the door. In my research into Cletus’s background, I’d discovered in the archives of the Texas Freedman’s Bureau a claim by an ex-slave named Leticia Hayes. Her boy, Cletus, had been taken from her by a wealthy white man, a cotton baron north of Houston. The Freedman’s Bureau was established after the Civil War so sundered families could locate one another. Mostly, it tried to help women find their kids. Leticia Hayes’s claim is dated August 1868—an earlier Cletus. But there’s more. She swears her son was stolen and whisked away to an East Texas cotton plantation while she was forced to remain in the city as a domestic aide.
The bureau did locate him and issued a written order for the boy’s release. The very next day, however, it authorized his holder to keep Cletus in return for the “young man’s continuing care, culture, and education.” I found no reason for the reversal and no further mention of Leticia Hayes. The state of Texas denied her fifteen hundred dollar reparation claim. I’m guessing she died of grief. Or hunger, if she couldn’t provide for her boy. Could this Cletus be the soldier’s father? Most members of the Twenty-fourth Infantry were recruited up north, but Private Hayes was a Houston native. Riot trial transcripts confirm this, though they say nothing else about his background.
Another thing: Leticia Hayes’s son was bound over to a man named Morgan. Son of a slave, then? At home in the old stomping grounds? Feeling his oats? This is the figure I’d patched together, my Cletus: a badly made quilt.
I ask Bitter, “Was Cletus’s father a slave on the Morgan farm, before they moved to town?”
He shakes his head. “I know squat about Cletus ‘cept he didn’t rape nobody. That was Sahry’s fambly, embarrassed by their daughter, looking for someone to blame. She told me Cletus was trying to leave her, and she was pissed about it.”
“Why did he want to break things off?”
“Cain’t answer that.”
“Why did she decide to keep the baby?”
“Don’t know that, neither, Seam
.”
My forehead is sweating. “And my grandma? Jean?”
“Jean struck me as a lost young lady, tell you the god’s honest truth. She had that light skin, like your mama and you. Flirted with all the boys in the building—found her exotic, I guess.”
I grip my knees.
“Well. Lord knows who your mama’s father was. Some roughneck in the oil fields.”
“Black?”
“We didn’t mix with no whites. ‘Cept Sahry. Poor ol’ misfit, shoved out on her own.” He reaches for the teapot and winces. His hand shakes, and he sits back, wheezing.
“Are you all right, Uncle Bitter?”
“Getting old, that’s all.”
“What is it?”
“Damn chest squeezing me lately.” He rubs his elbow.
“Is the pain in your arm, too?”
“I don’t need no nurse.”
“Uncle, those are heart symptoms—”
“On’iest thing wrong with my goddam heart is it’s broke, way your mama run from us.” He reaches again for the pot, pours himself some tea, and sips it sullenly. I’m ashamed that, along with concern for him, I feel a spike of resentment: after caring so long for Mama, then coming all this way, now I’ve got to care for Bitter too? He’s supposed to watch after me. Another shameful thought: like the “uncle” routine, pain is expected of him, so of course he displays it. He’s always provided what’s called for. And to an extent, that’s really what’s paining him now, I think—the confines of a ready-made identity. Watching his fingers and the gnarled veins in the backs of his hands, I realize for the first time I’ve never seen him as a man, or as a worker, a father. He’s always been just “Uncle” to me, always one of the “old ones.” I’ve taken him for granted, yes; on the other hand, as a child, I thought certain old men, like Bitter, were the only men of feeling. They were the only people I trusted. Unlike the boys I saw, most of them didn’t drink in the middle of the day (Bitter was an exception). They actually listened and talked. They carried hankies in their pockets and were quick to offer one if you cried. They went to church. They knew amazing skills: carpentry, plumbing.
He looks better now.
“Do you want to stop?” I say.
“Go ahead. Ask.”
“You’re sure?”
“Seam—”
“Not if you’re—”
“Goddammit, girl—”
“Okay, okay. Mama.”
“What about her?”
“She ran because of my father? Something to do with a man?” I watch the rhythm of his breathing.
“That’s what we figgered. She never did say directly.” He’s still wheezing. “She’s awful unhappy here. Missed Maevey something fierce. I married again for a short spell—Ariyeh’s ma—woman name Cass. You ‘member her?”
“No.”
“Neither does Ariyeh, much. Both too young when she left. Your mama and Cass never did square with each other.”
“And my dad?”
He sits up on his knees, kneading his calves. His joints creak. “You want it all at once, do you?”
“Your answers just leave me with more questions.”
“It’s always gonna be that way. You know that.”
“Please.”
“It’s hard for me to talk about your dad.”
“Why’s that?”
He scratches his head. “Jim Clay Washington was his name.” Simple. Flat. The awful secret all these years. Just a pair of words, Jim Clay, a couple of lost buttons in the dust beneath a bed. Damn it, Mama, what was so hard about two words? “Worked as a wildcatter, played the juke joints at night. I didn’t like him when he first come sniffing around Helen. Real arrogant manner. I come to see, later, he’s mostly bluff. Scared puppy, like the rest of us. Scared of the Man. Scared of being poor. He had some greatness in him as a singer. Frittered it all away. Booze and such. You know. The old story.”
“Did he play at Etta’s?”
“Sometime.”
“He met Mama there?”
“Might have.”
“They never married?”
“No.”
“And I was just a mistake. A bottle baby.”
Bitter squeezes my hand. “He run off about the time Cass did. I wish I had more to tell you.”
“Why don’t you like to talk about him?”
“It’s just painful for us all. ‘Specially Helen. She stuck around awhile, helping me raise Ariyeh and you. Then she up and took you north.”
I snort. “She was going to better herself.”
“No. Well, sure. But she wasn’t like the others who left once they got a little money or once the white-owned businesses started moving in and taking over. You know”—a rueful laugh—“we used to have high standards around here. You could ‘better yourself ‘thout leaving home. But since the integration and such, that’s all been lost. Pride in the neighborhood been lost. Anyways, your mama, she was running sad, like she knew no ‘betterment’ could save her. At first, I talked her into visits—mostly for you kids, pining for each other so. Then: nothing. Till you show up two days ago.”
“I’m sorry, Uncle Bitter.” I pause. “Can I still call you Uncle?”
“We fambly, Seam. Not by blood, maybe, but by circumstance. I don’t know about you, but I look around, all I see is circumstance.”
I smile. “Thank you for breakfast.”
“You get what you come for?”
“Like you said, there’ll always be more questions.” I pull my damp T-shirt away from my skin. “And I don’t really know what I came for. A break in my routine, maybe.” Running sad, I think. Damn straight.
“How’d you start trailing Cletus?”
“In college, I tried to study the Houston riot. There wasn’t much on it anywhere. Finally, from a federal records center, I got hold of the trial transcripts… all I knew from Mama—her version of things—was that a black soldier had raped my great-grandma. I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. I figured that incident, whatever its truth, had to be the beginning of me. The black and the white.” My head spins from the heat—and the news Bitter has brought me. Suddenly, I need to go. To be on my own for a while. “I have a lot to chew on, Uncle.”
“That you do.”
“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a drive. Then I’ll stop by and see Ariyeh.”
“You okay, Seam?”
“Yeah. You? Your chest?”
“Healthy as a radish. How long you got here? Your Sabbath-leave?”
I stand and reach for my purse. “I don’t really know. I took a month off from work, but I hadn’t given it much thought … why?”
“I’s just thinking it’s good to see you.”
I nod. Opening the door, I catch a red flash. “Uncle, what’s that flannel for? Nailed to the wall?”
“Wards off hurt. My buddies who sleep here—fellas at Etta’s—they feeling, you know, pretty hurt most the time.”
“I thought maybe you were trying to get rid of me.” I grin at him.
“Hell, I already been rid of you, girl. You’d think I’d throwed a black chicken over your head. That’s how you chase folks off.” He laughs, wheezing. “When I’s a boy, to make the cats come home, we used to spoon sugar into they mouths every morning, then make ‘em look in the mirror. They’s back at sunset, never fail. I gotta do that to you?”
I bend and kiss his forehead. “I’ll be home this evening. I’ll go shopping and bring us some supper, okay?”
“I be jinks swing!” He kisses my hand. “Might be I could get used to you being here, Chere.”
Noon sun, reflecting off law firms and banks, ripples past power lines. I adjust my visor. The skyscrapers’ windows are magnifying lenses focusing heat onto tiny rental homes. I pass a landfill—“Mount Trash-more,” Uncle used to call it, “one of Houston’s few hills”—seething with flies next to an elderly woman’s house. She’s rocking in a porch swing as if meditating on rotting paper, food, clothes.
A city bus chuffs past the cemetery. Its roundness reminds me of a barbecue grill, passengers sizzling like ribs inside. The buses in Dallas seem bigger, nicer, cleaner than these, and I think, I’m back in the South now, where a bus is not just a bus, but a ghost of the old social order.
And I think of Bitter’s patter, his stories and jokes: if it was all a mask at first—now hardened into flesh—who could blame him for hiding behind it? Whites didn’t feel threatened by an “uncle”; in our own community, old men and uncle types were second only to babies in the amount of affection they received from the women.
As for his “hoo-raw,” his tale of my family, twisted and murky as the bayou, the more I ponder it, the more I lose it. Bitter used to take me to the water, hold my hand on the bank, grab a stick and point out catfish and carp, wriggling among algae, paper cups, hubcaps, and broken toasters dumped into the stream. I’d glimpse the fish then lose them, never sure if I’d seen or imagined them.
It’s like that now, with my family.
In this part of town, weeds, moisture, and heat gnaw concrete and wood, and you can see the hellish swamp this really is without motors and steel, pulleys, glass, and Our Blessed Lord and Savior, central air-conditioning. Uncle once told me Mexicans and Negroes cleared the land because whites couldn’t have survived the mosquitoes, malaria, snake bites, and dirty water involved in erecting the city.
Now, billboards and buildings form flimsy, elaborate masks covering the chaos, ready to suck us down if we stand too still—a precariousness I’ve known all my life. Bitter may have adopted a safe routine; I’ve stayed camouflaged too. In college, freshman and sophomore years, I masked myself as wealthy, white, partying on the weekends, studying on the run. I’d received an academic scholarship to Southern Methodist in Dallas, one of the state’s most expensive private schools, pleasing Mama no end (if the Affirmative Action officers, whose files listed me as African American, had ever seen me, they would have accused me of running a scam). Classes were easy and boring, until one term in English the teacher assigned us Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. “Ellison once wrote, ‘Whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.’ What did he mean by that?” the instructor, a young Bostonian with an Irish accent, asked.
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