“I’m driving down to the prison, see this fellow Bitter told me about.”
“Well, at least it’s not a crisis. I guess there’s no rush.”
“Try to get some rest, hm? Tell Reggie it’s time for some TLC.”
She nods wearily.
Uncle’s found Satchmo. The cornet grunts and shouts as though it’ll lift the house off the ground.
I stand on the porch and wave good-bye to Ariyeh. Bitter slips an arm around my shoulders. “Don’t like no dirty tricks,” he says. “But I ‘ppreciate you worrying ‘bout me, Seam.”
“No you don’t. If you did, you’d go to the hospital and get that test.”
He laughs. “I never passed no test in my life. Don’t mean nothing.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“I just got you back, Seam.” He kisses my cheek. “I ain’t going nowheres. Promise.”
12
KWAKO hammers a railroad spike through a piece of oak the size of his arm. Then he splashes brown paint on a milk jug, jams the jug on the spike—a taccoon’s face or a bear’s—stands the oak up straight and whittles it with a small axe. I’ve parked my car on a gravel patch near the sign welcoming visitors to the Multicultural Museum. When I first walked up, he nodded hello but said he needed to finish this detail, so I’m standing to the side by a holly bush, watching him conjure an animal. I haven’t seen Barbara.
This whole coastal area, southeast of Houston, remains flooded, slushy and sodden, seething with mosquitoes. I wonder if the city or the county has done any drainage studies here, considered easements for detention ponds … a ten-year … no, a fifty-year … storm-event capacity …
Mud speckles my Taurus and the bottoms of my shoes. The humidity is as dense as a sheet. Kwako drills holes in the wood then inserts a pair of garden spades. His stiff leather gloves smell like hot rubber. He pulls them off, stands back, almost bowing to his work. Mockingbirds cackle in the willows. “Miss Washington,” he says. “How you been?”
“You remembered my name.”
“Tell you the truth, not many white—’scuse me—folk like you drop by here. You’s easy to recall. What can I do for you? Interested in one of Barbara’s quilts?”
I hesitate, wiping my shoes on the slick Bermuda grass. Its blue blades tickle my ankles. Kwako smiles at my awkwardness, steps behind me to a pile of loose wood. He bends, wags his head to bring me over. I squat beside him. “See this here?” He brushes a finger through a groove in the oak, stirring brittle, leaflike fragments. His long arms are like crate slats. “Wing casings,” he says. “Formosan termites. I bought these-here rayroad ties, sight unseen, to sculpt with from a fellow over Loosiana way, but most of ‘em worthless. Critters munching ‘em.” He snaps a board across his knee. It crumbles like old bread. “The Formosan is a fearsome thing. Imported sometime in the forties on army cargo ships, friend of mine says. Now they eating up the French Quarter over to N’Awlins, eating their way down the coast. Back in June, during the swarming season, couple we know down the road apiece was serving dinner to a roomful of guests when a cloud of these things come flying out of the dining room walls, dropping into the gravy. Kindly drained the sociability out of the evening.”
“Hurricanes, termites, floods …”
“Yeah, we up to our butts in plagues.” He grins, in love with his life in spite of it all.
A door slams. I peer across a tomato garden to the house. Barbara is touring a small group of visitors around the grounds. One man hands her some money; a woman next to him carries a box. “Bingo,” Kwako sighs. “On’y sale this week.” The people head to their cars and Barbara returns to the house, emerging a minute later with a bundle of laundry, which she hauls to a tiny shed adorned with horse collars and rusty plow blades. A washer cranks up inside the shed. Barbara comes back out with a pair of shears. A red scarf wraps her head. Brown skirt. Squash-yellow blouse. Kwako calls to her. “‘Member Sister Washington?
She waves the shears, wipes her hands on her skirt, joins us. Sweating, tired. Her hands are blistered. “Miss Telisha. Welcome back.” She pats her forehead with her arm.
“If I’m not disturbing you …,” I begin.
“No no.” She slips the shears into a dress pocket. “Let me make us some tea.”
We follow her to the house. It’s hotter inside than out. Her kitchen smells of nutmeg and vanilla. Small blue bottles with trumpet lips line her windowsills. They’re filled with sunlight. A framed painting of Jesus gazing upward, looking very much like a twenties movie star, Rudy Valentino or somebody, tilts on the dining room wall; a yellowed palm leaf fans out behind it. Kwako and I sit at a table whose Formica top is peeling, patchy like a giraffe’s hide. Chunks of lumber and metal lie scattered throughout the house, even in the kitchen, and Barbara has to step around them as she pours water into a kettle and reaches into a cabinet for ribbed glass tumblers.
Kwako watches me, stroking his tangled beard. The house settles and creaks. I can barely breathe in the heat. I undo the top button of my blue cotton blouse, rub the soppy V at the base of my neck. “Elias Woods,” I say. “I’ve received permission to visit him up in Huntsville.”
“Well, now,” Kwako says. Barbara pulls fresh mint leaves from a sprig.
“I wanted to ask both of you, since you know him, if you’d mind accompanying me.”
They look at each other.
“You wouldn’t be allowed inside—you’d have to wait for me somewhere while I actually talked with him. But prison … it’s not a drive I want to make by myself.” I’m aware I’m talking quickly, unsure of myself, embarrassed. “I’d ask my uncle, but his health’s got me worried and I don’t want to strain him right now. My cousin works during the day. So I thought of you.”
Barbara dumps ice cubes onto a counter and fills the tumblers. Kwako’s still tugging his beard. “He’s gonna lead you to your daddy, is he?”
“My uncle says Elias knew him. That’s all I know. I just want to put some questions to him. I know you don’t know me very well, and this is a lot to ask—”
“Here you go.” Barbara sets the tea in front of me.
“—but you made me feel welcome last time I was here. And you know Elias—”
“We didn’t traffic with him all that much, you understand,” Kwako says. He slurps his tea.
“Well. I’m probably on a wild goose chase, anyway.”
Barbara reaches over and pats my hand. Her callused fingers feel like wood grain. Kwako says, “I heard your daddy play once. I’s telling Barbara after you left last time. Little club near Baytown for sailors and oil workers. Must have been … oh, ‘65 or so. ‘66, maybe. Bayou Jim Washington. Hell of a player. Dark and slender, wearing him a fancy new Stetson and slick black boots.”
I lean forward, waiting for more, but Kwako shakes his head. “On’y time I ever seen him. Didn’t talk to him or nothing. Didn’t know Elias knew him. Them days, Elias was spending lots of time in the city with the law students from over at Texas Southern, doing sit-ins at the lunch counters. Real active, he was.”
“Did he really kill his wife?”
“Cops say he confessed. They’s always at each other’s throats, Elias and his woman.”
“Why?”
“Like I say, we didn’t know him all that well.”
Barbara pours us more tea.
“Anyway. I’d be happy to pay for your time, since I’d be taking you away from your business …”
“When you going?”
“Thursday.”
Kwako glances at Barbara. “Gives me two days to buy new wood and finish my bears.”
“Gives me time to scrub the linens.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, looks like you got company,” Kwako tells me. “Little vacation might be nice. We hardly never get one.”
“I’m very grateful.”
We finish our drinks in silence, then Kwako asks if I’d like to see some of Barbara’s quilts. I u
nderstand he’s suggesting I buy one in compensation for the favor they’re doing me. We squeeze into a back bedroom. It’s also jammed with lumber. Lovely quilts of all colors droop over clothes racks, chests of drawers, chairs, and the bed. Outside, a rose bush scrapes the window screen. The bed’s headboard ticks in the room’s awful swelter. The air burns my throat. I stumble against a framed poem on the wall. Barbara catches me and it. I apologize; she smiles. I study the words. “These were part of our wedding vows,” she tells me. “Goes all the way back to slavery days.” She straightens the frame on the wall:
HE: De ocean, it’s wide, de sea, it’s deep
Yes, in yo arms I begs to sleep
Not for one time, not for three
But long as we’uns can agree
SHE: Please gimme time, suh, to “reponder”
Please gimme time to “gargalize”
Then ‘haps I’ll tu’n away from out yonder
And answer up ‘greeable for a s’prise
Barbara’s eyes mist, but I can’t tell if it’s nostalgia of the heat. “Reminds me of the song my mama used to sing while she did her piecework,” I say, fingering a brown and yellow quilt on the bed. The fabric cools my palm. “Foller the drinking gou’d…”
Barbara grins. “When the sun come back / When the first quail call / Then the time is come / Foller the drinking goud…”
“So it’s a famous tune?”
“Oh my, yes. Old slave song, from the Underground Railroad. My grandma taught it to me.”
“What’s its significance? Do you know?”
“Sure. Grandma said there’s a feller name Peg Leg Joe, former sailor, an abolitionist, who’d travel from plantation to plantation, working, and while he’s there, he’d teach the slaves this song. Always, the following spring after he’d gone—when the first quail called—a few slaves would disappear, heading north, following the Big Dipper, on the trail he’d scoped out for them.” She steps past me and unfolds a huge blue quilt from a chair. “I made this one after patterns Old Granny taught me, designs going back to slavery.” She runs her fingers across appliqué and beadwork in the upper right-hand corner. “These represent stars, see, the spring constellations. Plantation women worked from can to can’t—sunup till after dark every day—so the stars was there in the morning when they started, just beginning to fade, and they’s there when they finished up at night. After supper, the women would all gather on a porch and commence talking and piecing.” She asks Kwako to help her spread the quilt on the bed. Vibrant colors—reds and greens across the blue. But I’m embarrassed for her when I see how crooked the lines are: just like Mama’s. As if hearing my thoughts, she tells me, “Old West African superstition, says Evil travels in a straight line, so the slave women, they’d sew their lines all cattywompers, block Evil’s path.”
“On purpose?”
“You bet. To throw off suspicion, too—see, these quilts was signs in the Underground Railroad. The patterns formed a map. When they got word it was safe to travel, the women would hang their quilts out over windowsills or on porch railings, signal folks the running time had come. The masters, they didn’t think twice about it. Figgered quilting was just a hobby for Mammy, kept her happy in the evenings, and the sloppier-looking the work, the less attention it drawn to itself. But all the slaves knew what these things meant.”
“Road guides.”
“That’s right. Hidden in plain sight.” She pats a square to the left of the stars. “Shoofly.”
“My mama used that one.”
“Well, Shoofly say it’s time to shoo!” She points to another square, just below the first. “This here’s the Monkey Wrench.
“… which turns the wagon wheel.
“… till you come to the crossroads.
“When you see the flying geese.
“… you stay on the drunkard’s path through the woods.
“… and follow the stars up north.”
The “drunkard’s path” is another raggedy-ass pattern Mama made. I run my hands across it. “So this is how it’s supposed to look?”
Barbara nods. “Your mama must have been real proud of her roots, hewing to the old piecing ways.”
“She—” I lift the quilt, rub it against my cheek. My eyes sting. “I don’t know.”
“You like it?” Kwako asks. “Two hundred bucks, even. Real bargain.”
She scowls at him.
I clear my throat. “I do like it.”
“We’ll work something out when you pick us up on Thursday, how’s that?” Batbara says.
Kwako peers out the window, past the rose bush, picking his teeth with his little finger. “Yessir, business sure slow today.”
“No, that’s okay,” I say. “I’d like the quilt. I’d be honored to have it.” I pull the checkbook from my purse.
“Here at the Multicultural Museum, we only prepared to deal in cash,” Kwako says.
“Oh. Of course. Well then—”
“Thursday will be fine,” Barbara assures me, touching my arm. “Take it. I hope it pleases your mama.”
“Actually,” I say, “my mama’s passed.”
Kwako steps over to help me fold the quilt. “Then I guess we’d better find your daddy, eh?”
On a dirt road between flooded rice paddies and Houston’s southern edge, I stop the car and pull Barbara’s quilt across my knees.
In Dale Licht’s house, in that white man’s house, she sang a slave song, stitched a freedom map into her African patterns. My mama, who ran from the niggers, who denied her own family. My mama, who refused me a black heritage (though she did name me Telisha, didn’t she—why?), weaving for herself a rich, down-low world.
Hidden in plain sight.
What did she value about her own darkness? What part of her wouldn’t let go? I bunch the beaded stars in my lap, lift the fabric to my lips, and kiss the flying geese.
The sky is smudged paper, soiled by refinery smoke. Heavy air force planes drone low over the land whose still water glistens among spreading weeds. A chain-link fence, tilted and slack, runs along the road near my Taurus. A rusty sign on it says, AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL SECURITY,INC. Through my rolled-down window I smell the lot’s years of neglect. Rotted leaves in the mud, a thousand insect eggs gone to ruin. Dust scuffles. The day’s bad breath. Wrecked cars sit in a field up ahead. On broken antennae they snag cottonwood fuzz from the air, strands of wind-ripped spider webs. Foam rubber spills from split seats. Torqued metal. Fine raw material for Kwako. Gather up rubber, plastic, leather, glass. Hammer, sand, plane, and saw. Make me a mama, sir, will you please, sir? A figure I can lift and carry. Pencil mouth. Shoe-heel ears. A bra stuffed with nothing (those cancerous breasts). Top her off with a plume—a shredded get well card, sent a day too late.
I’m staining the quilt with my tears. My hands hurt, gripping its edges so hard. If I could make it through the muck out there I’d comb through the death-cars, the nuts and bolts of abandonment, until I found a radio that would sing to me from far across the years, my mama’s voice, the voices of buried slaves, steady, fearful, hushed: Foller the drinking gou’d / Foller the Risen Lawd.
Bitter stares at the receiver in his hand. “Where’s the cord?” he says.
“It’s a cell phone,” I explain, tossing the wrapping and the box. “I want you to keep this handy on Thursday while I’m gone. If you have the slightest pain, even a twinge, you call Ariyeh at school. I’ve left the number on the table.”
“Ahh—”
“I’m serious, Uncle. Don’t mess with this.”
He leaves the phone on the counter, next to a jelly-smeared knife, then goes to play a record. I pour myself a glass of water, walk to the porch, stretch my back and arms. Across the street, in the Magnolia Blossom, two paper-pale men stroll among the tombstones. Satchmo purrs “The Potato Head Blues.” I stiffen. I don’t want to assume, automatically, that any fancy-dressed white man poking through a black neighborhood is the enemy. I’m no conspiracy nut, like Reggie.
“Want a beer, Seam?”
“Thanks.” I take a last look. The fact is, I know a developer when I see one.
On Thursday, I spin along the swamp roads, pick up Kwako and Barbara. On the radio a newscaster tells us that the “former H. Rap Brown,” now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, is awaiting trial in Georgia for murdering a sheriff’s deputy. “Mr. Al-Amin once helped lay the foundation of the civil rights movement, along with Julian Bond, John Lewis, Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael, registering voters, forming the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,” the newsman says. “In the ensuing years, the civil rights leaders scattered into various philosophical camps, some distinguishing themselves, others falling into disgrace.”
In the back seat, Kwako clucks his tongue. “Hot-headed boogee. Had so much going for him. How he let it all get away from him? It’s just like Elias.”
I switch the radio off. “Tell me about him,” I say.
“Elias? Well, let’s see. I ‘member the day the Texas Southern students sat at the Weingarten’s lunch counter over on Almeda Street, protesting the WHITES ONLY sign. Elias was with them. Till then, Houston papers was proud to say, ever’ day, how ‘docile’ the city’s coloreds had been. But one or two lunch counters, and that was it in Houston. The moneymen was too damn skittery. Signs came down straightaway.”
“And that was the end?”
“Not overnight. The Major Leagues had integrated their teams, so when a guy like Willie Mays come to town, you had to put him up in a nice hotel with all the rest of the players. Baseball what finally broke the color line here. But Elias and them others, they was out front early. Solid and brave.”
“So what happened to him?” I ask. All around us, in barbed-wired fields, cows wobble, heat-stunned, near steaming stock tanks. Old barns crumble into kudzu. I roll my window up, punch on the AC.
“Drifted out to West Texas, worked at the Pantex plant, making nukes. Come back here—”
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