“What you starin’ at, boy?”
I said nothing.
Then he punched me, a left to the face, that hurt much less than I imagined it would. We yanked at the chain back and forth, trading a couple of punches. Even while we rolled around in pathetic mortal combat I considered that the presence of at least a meager intellect was necessary for Fesmerian success.
Though I’d had much truck with being beaten up, I was not an experienced fighter. I was, however, more fit and slightly larger than my opponent, and it turned out that Raymond’s sadistic karate instruction had stayed with me more than it was reasonable to expect. I was able to block most of Patrice’s punches and keep him more or less off balance. However, what he lacked in skill and size he compensated for in stupidity, a stupidity that made his movements highly unpredictable. For example, a couple of times he tried to run away from me, forgetting that we were linked together, only to get yanked back like a dog on a long leash. He would then come flying back at me with the wildest roundhouse punch. I realized during the scuffle that my instinct to throw a blow was simply absent, and I realized as well that if I did hit him and managed to knock him silly or out, then I would be tethered to deadweight, a dumbbell, if you will. Finally, I was on top, straddling his torso with my knees pinning his shoulders to the ground.
That’s when the business end of a rifle was shoved in my face.
At the other end of the weapon was a singularly ugly redheaded boy of perhaps twelve years. I had never thought a child could be ugly, but his mouth was too small for his pie face, and yet his teeth were those of a larger person. All this set below a nose out of something by Erskine Caldwell. And all that on a head far too large for his scrawny body. Even with the gun pointed at me I wondered immediately how I could take in so many features so quickly and wondered further if he could close those lips over his bathroom-tile teeth.
“Y’all be careful wit dat peashooter naw, boy,” Patrice said.
I moved away from Patrice, and we slowly found our feet.
“Why you two chained up like dat?” The boy looked at Patrice, but kept the rifle pointed at me. “You takin’ him to jail?”
“Yeah, sumpin’ like that,” Patrice said. “You live round chere?”
“I lives over dat ridge, through the holla, up a hill, and past the branch.” He pointed. “Not far.”
“Who you live wit, boy?”
“My ma and my sister.”
“What ’bout yer pa?”
“Ain’t got no pa.”
“What ’bout neighbors? You got neighbors?”
“Ain’t got no neighbors.”
“What ’bout kin? Cousins? You got cousins?”
“Ain’t got no cousins.”
I watched and listened to those two idiots.
“What yo name?” Patrice asked.
“They call me Bobo.”
“Well, Bobo, you gots a spider on yer gun.” When the boy looked down, Patrice knocked the rifle away. He also managed to knock the boy to the ground. “Dumbass,” Patrice said.
I grabbed the rifle and realized that the boy was not moving. I put my hand behind his head and felt a rock there. “He hit his head,” I said.
“So what? Let’s go.”
“He might be hurt.” I touched the boy’s wide face and said his name a couple of times.
His eyes opened and he leaped up and away from me to hide behind the legs of Patrice.
“You got food at your house, boy?” Patrice asked.
“We got some.”
“Take us there.”
I kept the rifle.
It was no short walk to the boy’s house. As if the heat and humidity were not enough, it was dusk when we came to the branch, and mosquitoes were swarming. The house turned out to be a shack right out of every hillbilly’s origin fantasy. Had it been constructed of logs it might have had a rustic charm, but being made of clapboard and tin it had no charm at all. On a line hung from a post to a stunted tree hung clothes at wild and odd angles. Just in front of the porch was an open well surrounded by loose and broken bricks.
“Sis!” the boy called out.
A young woman stepped out onto the rickety porch. A look at her face left no doubt that she and the boy were related. The way she tilted her head to locate our sounds told me she was blind. “Bobo, who you got out dere wit y’all?”
“We don’t want no trouble, ma’am,” Patrice said, sounding almost human. “We just want some water and sumpin’ ta eat.”
“Dey’s chained together, Sis.”
“Do you have any tools?” I asked the boy, but he only looked at me and ignored my question. I glanced at Patrice.
“You got any tools?” Patrice asked.
“Yeah, we got some tools.”
“Go fetch us’all a chisel and a big hammer.”
“We gonna come in naw,” Patrice said to the woman. “You be a good girl and fix us up some food.”
The woman knocked over a chair on her way to the stove. “I gots some beans a-cookin’,” she said.
The place was a mess. Piles of clothes were everywhere. Clean or dirty, I couldn’t say. There was no fire burning in the place. The stones of the fireplace were thick with soot, and the timbers that held up the tin roof had been darkened by smoke as well.
The woman dropped a couple of bowls and spoons onto the table. We ate. The beans were awful, and they were cold. I looked and saw that there was no fire in the cookstove. But I knew I needed the energy if I was going to keep running, so I chewed and swallowed and tried to kill the taste with some very stale bread.
Patrice talked with his mouth full. “What yer name?”
“Sis,” she said.
“What that short fer?”
“Ain’t short fer nothin’.”
“Huh. Sis,” he said to himself. “That’s a purty name. Got any coffee?”
“I’ll git it.”
I looked up from my bowl at Patrice. “What does this taste like to you?”
“Taste like food, that how it taste.”
Sis came back with the coffee just as Bobo arrived with the mallet and chisel. Patrice and I jumped up for the tools and went and sat at the hearth. I put the chisel to his cuff and pounded it.
Bobo said, “One of ’em’s a nigga.”
“Which one, Bobo?” Sis asked.
“Da black one.”
“Which one dat be?”
The cuff fell away from Patrice’s wrist, and he set to work on mine. He said, “I the white one.”
“Which one is you?”
“This one.”
My cuff came off, and I stood and walked across the room, grabbing the rifle from the table as I did. “I’m the black one, and I’m over here,” I said. “That should clear things up.”
Patrice tried to stand up, but let out a yell and fell backward. “What’s wrong?” Sis asked.
“It’s his back,” I said. “I think he’s hurt pretty bad. Here, help me get him to a bed.”
We put him on a cot surrounded by piled clothes. I looked down at him, helpless there, and I resolved to leave him in the morning. Somehow he read that intention in my face and said, “If’n you does, I’ll sho nuff tell where you headed.” With that, exhaustion took him, and he fell asleep.
“Is you really black?” Sis asked me.
“He sho am,” Bobo said.
“My great-grandpappy used to have him some slaves,” the blind woman said. “They say he owned a plantation.”
“How nice for him,” I said. I felt myself growing sleepy. “Listen, I’m just going to sit over here and close my eyes for a bit.” I held the rifle cradled against my chest and drifted.
My dream spiraled like all things spiral: life, reflection, desire toward some truth, but never aimed directly at it. The year was 1861. Somehow I knew that and somehow I knew that I was in New Orleans, though I had never been there and certainly hadn’t been there in the nineteenth century. Though it was only March, the air was wet and hot, wetter
than air should be, hotter than air should be. My clothes, my clothes were magnificent. I was dressed in a canary yellow frock suit, fitted at my trim waist and just a little snug across my chest. My shirt was white and crisp in spite of the humidity, and I realized that for some reason I was not perspiring like those around me. People watched me, I believed, with some admiration and some respect and perhaps fear. The yellow of my suit made my dark brown skin seem smooth in the bright sun. Other slaves wore tattered work clothes as they labored loading and unloading cargo. The ship’s captain, with whom I was dealing, was wrapped in drab attire, as was the white dock foreman, a short, fat man in a vest. They all called me Raz-ru, and I heard a black man refer to me behind my back as the claw.
“That does it, Raz-ru,” the captain said, handing me a copy of the shipping bill. “Tell me, will we ever see Mr. Bond down here again? Or are you taking over everything?”
“Maybe,” I said, intentionally leaving it unclear about which question I was answering. “Maybe.”
As I walked away from the docks a black man named Jason joined me. I greeted him by name. He was taller than I, very slender, and his voice was unusually high pitched.
“They says the war is comin’, Raz-ru. They says we gonna be free men,” Jason said.
“Who is they?” I asked.
“Everybody.”
I stopped and looked him in the eyes. “I hope it’s true. I believe it is true. Are you ready for it?”
“I’m ready.”
“Good man. Stay ready.”
Then I was wandering with less ease, but more than I would have expected, through a crowd of white men, ugly faces, some with tobacco-stained chins, some dressed in finery. I was in an auction hall, and the merchandise was slaves. The item on the block was a man about my size, built very much like me, square jawed like me. The auctioneer barked out his attributes, said he was as strong as an ox, could lift and run all day and didn’t mind the heat or the humidity. He then gestured, and the man ran back and forth through the aisle, the muscles of his back rippling, his head down. The first bids were called out, and I heard fifty, then seventy-five, but I didn’t hear what price he finally fetched.
A sudden hush fell upon the room as what looked very much like a white woman was pushed onto the block. But she couldn’t have been white because she was on the block. In New Orleans there were hundreds like her, but this woman wore the clothes of a so-called lady, and by that I mean that she was dressed from the waist up as well as below, given a respect that any other slave could never have expected. She stood with her back straight, her chin out, defiant. All the slaves behind the block came together as if a choir and then, as a choir, sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” their voices soft, mellow, round, their gaze a collective one, dumb and lost.
“I have here a high-, high-yellow bitch of good lines,” the auctioneer called. “Her good white blood is evident, but I can guarantee her hot and steamy nigger disposition. From her hips you can see she’s probably not much for breedin’, but she’s great for rehearsin’. Her skin might be white, but she bleeds black. A fine luxury purchase for the discriminating gentleman.”
Before the bidding began, a familiar voice rang out, offering five thousand dollars. It was the voice of the man who owned me. Hamish Bond stepped forward, dashing and comfortable in his camel dress coat, his tightly cinched green cravat, his camel top hat, his oiled hair graying at the temples just below the brim. Bond was not nearly as tall as me, but he carried himself entirely erect, as if he had been constructed anew for the day.
“I have a bid of five thousand dollars from Mister Hamish Bond,” the auctioneer sang. “Five thousand dollars. Do I hear any other bids? Five thousand once. Twice. Sold to Hamish Bond.”
The woman looked liked every other mulatto in New Orleans, but Bond paid for her and took her back to his place in the Quarter. I arrived a couple of hours later to find myself standing in the kitchen, hearing about the new acquisition from the last high-yellow object of affection, Michelle.
She moved around the kitchen in a long dress, a scarf around her head. Her dark eyes blazed. She moved with some grace, but not much. “Raz-ru,” she said, pointing at the ceiling. “She’s up there right now, in that room that used to be mine. And I have to wait on her, treat her with respect and deference.”
The cook, another young mulatto woman, said, “The way we used to have to treat you.”
“Shut up, Dolly,” Michelle said. “No one asked you.”
“I have to treat her like she’s more than nothing while he tiptoes around her like she’s made of glass or some such, like she’s white like he is. Why did I fall from favor, Raz-ru? He used to treat me like that. Why no more? Did he drill deep enough to strike black, and now he needs a new well?”
“And he’ll need a new well again,” I said.
Dolly came over, a big wooden spoon in her hand, talking like the voodun princess she was, “Might be the last well he get.” She stirred the air with her spoon. “It’s comin’. Change be comin’. It’s in the air. Soon, Master Hamish won’t be having his yellow cookies.”
“Dolly, go about your business!” Michelle said. “Take the tea up to that … that new one.”
Michelle watched Dolly leave. “Samantha Moon, that’s her name. She was living high and mighty up in Virginia, thinking she was white, and then the truth came back to roost. She got to live free for a long spell and she ought to be happy about that, but she doesn’t believe she is what she is. I would also feel sorry for her except that she had those free years that I didn’t have. I’m beginning to think the only difference between being black and being white is that if you’re white you just don’t know about your blood, you’re dumb to your blood, ignorant about that one drop. White people fear that one drop like we fear the rope.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, but they also love that one drop. Like the way Bond loved you and will love her. Fleetingly.” I studied her face. “Tell me, do you really love that man?”
“He is so kind.” Her face did a dreamlike thing, it became long, then fat and I had to think to fix it and I was not sure it was ever the same.
“The devil is often kind. He controls with his kindness. His darkies collect and sing him praises for his kindness. They huddle together and parade like a single creature behind that wagon he calls kindness. He kills with his kindness.”
“You ask me why I love him,” Michelle said, her dead-doll eyes locked on mine. “Why do you hate him so?”
“You don’t need to ask that.” I realized I was still holding my hat in my hands. I was nervous because I had no place to go. “So, this woman upstairs, who has been dragged from her home, sold on the block, she cannot accept her blood?”
“Cannot and will not, Raz-ru.”
“She may soon wish that her blood will accept her.”
“She will not,” she said.
“Then she is more than a fool. She is stupid.”
And in the dream, the words felt strange in my mouth, the faces seemed in soft focus, no hard edges, no sharp contrasts, except that rage burned inside me, my not so much feeling it as knowing it. The slaves irritated me with their love of singing. Michelle irritated me with her love of Bond. I irritated myself with my artificial dignity, my station as boss Negro, a meaningless designation. The chorus of slaves appeared in the kitchen. Swing low, sweet chariot, coming fo’ to carry me home. With the awful music as background I wondered about the pale woman upstairs and wondered why her blood mattered to any of us, except of course that she, like us, was property, and somehow it was an offense that she did not care or that she was incapable of holding that fact in her head. The choir of slaves kept singing, and I turned to shout at them, “Would you niggers please shut the fuck up!”
They looked shocked, taken aback.
“Just shut the fuck up,” I repeated.
Grumbling, they disbanded, and the scene broke away into pieces, and I found myself being asked by Bond to sing a song for him and his sea captai
n visitor. Though I did not want to, I could not stop the song from finding my throat. My mouth opened and out it poured while I tasted bile. “Blow the man down,” I sang, and as I did, my voice deeper than usual, I sought to punctuate it with irony that of course fell on deaf ears. “Give me some time to blow the man down,” I sang the last line and then walked away from them as a storm approached.
Finding myself in the room of the new mulatto princess I was at once confused, outraged, and saddened. I could find no words to share with her, and it soon became clear to me that she was not only unaware of my presence, but unable to see me. The wind blew the French doors open wide, and the curtains danced like loose sails. Samantha Moon tried to push against the wind to close the doors, but she was beaten back. Then Bond dashed in from the veranda and, as if fighting a wind that possessed agency, he closed the doors and locked them. He went to Samantha Moon and helped her to her feet. They stared deeply into each other’s eyes, as deep as they could stare, and kissed. I wanted to puke over and over while they wrestled through brief and uninteresting sex, not knowing why I was made so sick, not knowing why they were having sex. All this while a slave who looked just like Barry White stood at the foot of the bed singing, “Can’t get enough of your love, babe.”
Spiraling around and around I found myself standing on the deck of a riverboat. As it docked dozens of black people gathered on the hill beyond the dock and began to sing, sing in that mellow and sweet-sad and sickening way of gospel music, sing praises to the master arriving home. I followed Bond and Samantha Moon off the boat and across the dock. There he placed her on the seat of a buckboard that had been decorated with magnolia blossoms and red and white ribbons, and he stood in the bed of it. The wagon carried him and his mistress to the plantation, the singing Negroes dancing behind, singing, cakewalking, grinning, grinning, grinning. One short, spry, bald black man high-stepped the whole way beside the wagon. I lagged behind, wondering at once what I was doing there as Raz-ru and what I was doing in this dream that certainly could not be my own.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier Page 7
