I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

  “It will be built over there,” she said.

  Sister Irenaeus led me across the yard, past the chicken coop where Sisters Eusebius and Firmilian were trying to stretch and staple wire netting about twenty yards on to a large clearing. “Here,” she said. “You will build it here, and we will help you.”

  I laughed. “Sister, I told you, I don’t know how to build anything, much less a building. No, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll fix my car and get back on the road before you ask me to turn water into wine.”

  The other sisters had formed in a huddle behind us. They said nothing, neither to me nor to each other. I smiled weakly as I stepped by them and back toward the chicken coop. Sister Irenaeus and the others followed me back to my car where they hovered like bees making no sound, and yet I could feel them buzzing.

  As suggested in my trusty car-service manual, tightening the belts was not so difficult. I used my lug wrench as a pry bar and stuck it between the alternator and the water pump. While I was tightening the bolt on the alternator bracket, contorting my body to keep sufficient pressure on the bar to keep the belt taut, I noticed the faces of the sisters under the hood with me, staring at my progress. I managed to get the bolt tight, and they all said, “ahhhh,” as I pulled away.

  “You are good with tools,” Sister Irenaeus said.

  “Nice try, Sister,” I said.

  I tossed my tools in the trunk and shut it, then fell in behind the wheel. I turned the key and the engine started and ran smoothly, at least as smoothly as it ever had. I decided that it was best to say good-bye from inside the car, that I might feel less guilt if I were already rolling away, as opposed to a more formal standing, hand-shaking farewell. Even then I laughed at myself, wondering why I should feel guilt at all. For what? Refusing to perform a task I was incapable of doing? I drove away. I leaned out the window and waved as I approached the bend in the dirt drive. They did not wave, but looked to the sky. The mere thought of them praying should have been enough to keep me driving and yet their faces were so innocent, so open, so, so stupid. I got to the highway and drove back toward Smuteye.

  My stomach was twisted with hunger, and so I stopped at the sadly, but no doubt aptly, named Smuteye Diner. It was not a railcar, not even a large Airstream trailer, but a sad rectangle of a mobile home, set up on cinder blocks with a bent set of prefab metal stairs. I entered and sat at the counter.

  A large woman turned to me and smiled. “Food?” she asked.

  “Please,” I said.

  She pointed over her broad shoulder at the menu hand printed with a marker on a poster board.

  “What’s good?” I asked.

  “It’s all good,” she said. “At least it’s all the same.”

  “I’ll have two scrambled eggs.”

  “Bacon or sausage?”

  “Bacon, I guess.”

  “We’re out of bacon,” she said.

  “Then why did you … ”

  “I was just joking,” she laughed. “We got bacon, lots of it.”

  I was relieved and relaxed by her sense of humor.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. “It’s hard to get here and here ain’t on the way to no place else. Believe me, I know. So, you’re family to somebody here, which I doubt, or you’re lost.”

  “I was lost. I think I know where I am now.”

  “You think so, you do?” she said. “You want coffee?” She was already breaking eggs one-handed into a bowl.

  I didn’t want to stop her. “Maybe later.”

  “Got lost in the night?”

  “Late yesterday. I ended up fixing a roof for some crazy nuns or something. I guess they couldn’t be nuns.”

  “Pentecostals,” she said.

  I nodded. The sound of the bacon on the griddle and the smell of it were making me hungrier.

  “Those poor sisters,” she said. “They come here from Montana or someplace because somebody left some land to their church.”

  “North Dakota,” I said.

  “What?”

  “They came from North Dakota.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Montana.”

  “Well, it don’t make no difference no way. It might as well be Russia, it’s so far away. Anyway, I suppose they’ll be hitchhiking back there soon enough. You can’t eat dirt.”

  “They want to build a church,” I said.

  The woman laughed a big laugh. She had a big laugh and it went with her big hair. It was a mountain of black hair with red streaks and big loop earrings stuck out of it.

  “They might do it.”

  She smiled at me. “You liked them, huh?” She slid the paper plate of eggs and bacon in front of me. I studied the plate as the grease stained the paper around the edges of the food. “Toast will be right up.”

  “Thanks.” I took a bite. “Good.”

  “If them sisters build anything, it’ll be a miracle.”

  “I think they’ll do it.”

  “You’re as crazy as they are. What’s your name, crazy man?”

  “Poitier,” I said. “Sidney Poitier.”

  “You do look just like him. But what’s your name?”

  “Sadly, that is my name.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. What’s your name?”

  “Diana Ross,” she said. “Got you!”

  “That was good.”

  “You name’s not Sidney Poitier, is it?”

  What a question she had put to me without even knowing what she was doing, and so I answered truthfully the question she didn’t know she was asking. “It is.”

  “Must be rough,” she said. She scraped the griddle with a wide spatula. “Having the same name and looking so much like him.”

  “Not so rough. I’m better looking.”

  She laughed. “I like you. Where you on your way to?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “Sidney Poitier would be.” She put a plate of toast in front of me.

  “So, what’s your name?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s not as pretty a name as yours. My name is Diana, but it’s Diana Frump.”

  “Frump?”

  “Frump.”

  “I like Poitier better,” I said.

  “Thought you might.”

  “Diana is a pretty name.”

  “Thanks for saying so.” She poured ketchup from a big plastic bottle into smaller plastic bottles.

  “Tell me what you know about the sisters.”

  “Oh, they come around here every so often. That bossy one gets on my nerves a little, to tell the truth. What’s her name?”

  “Irenaeus,” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever. And that’s another thing, who the hell can say those names, much less remember them? There’s Oxygen and Firmament and then the others. Anyway, they come round here looking for donations. I don’t get many customers in the first place, and I don’t want them bothered for handouts.”

  I nodded.

  “They even asked me for money. Want to build a church. I ain’t got nothing extra. Nobody around here does. I say, ‘Why don’t you get it from your main church office, whatever you call it?’ and that Sister Iranus gives me this dumbass look like she’ll pray for me. I don’t say nothing. I’m a good Christian. I’m a Baptist. I should be the one praying for her. Hell, we got us a church.”

  The screen door opened, and a short man in a ball cap walked in. “Hey, Diana,” he said.

  “Hey, Dan.”

  The man sat next to me at the counter and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  Diana put a cup of coffee in front of him. “We were just talking about the sisters.”

  “Those crazies?” he said. “Gonna build themselves a church. Out of what, is what I want to know.”

  “They might,” I said. I didn’t know why I said it.

  “I don’t see how,” he said. “They ain’t got no money. I wish they did. We could use some jobs around here. There used to be a paper mill up the
road about a thousand years ago.”

  I put down my plastic fork and knife and wiped my mouth with my paper napkin and considered just how much money I had. I could finance this church myself. The thought of it was repulsive in some ways, since I found religion generally offensive and off putting; my mother had always been adamantly opposed to absolutely anything having to do with the notion of a so-called higher being. But my impetuous, abrupt, and inexplicable desire to assist the forlorn sisters had nothing to do with a god, religion, a sudden onset of a messiah complex or/and certainly not my own (perhaps, sadly needed) salvation. It had simply to do with a newfound and fairly ironic way to spend my ridiculously easy-to-come-by money.

  “May I use your phone?” I asked.

  “There’s a pay phone on the side of the trailer over there.” She pointed. “Next to the porta-johnny. It’s the only phone I got. Need quarters?”

  “No, thanks.” I excused myself, nodded to Dan, and left the diner. The screen door slammed. The phone was not in a booth, but bolted to the vinyl side of the trailer. I placed a collect call to Podgy, and while I waited to be connected I studied the words, names, and numbers scratched into the wall.

  I hate Farley

  Jiggles Boatwright sucks for free

  Call Janifer 234-756

  Sheraff Purkins is a shithole

  If you here reading this you fucked

  Podgy accepted my call. “I need you in Smuteye, Alabama,” I said.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me. Sidney.”

  “I know no Sidney.”

  “Not Sidney,” I corrected myself.

  “Mr. Poitier?”

  “It’s me. I need you down here in Smuteye, Alabama.”

  “Surely, there is no such place.”

  “There is and I’m here.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, I want you to build something.”

  “What?”

  “A church,” I said, not quite believing it. There was thick, awkward silence. “Podgy?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, Podgy,” I said, again. “Not Sidney.”

  “I will not come to a place called Smuteye,” he said.

  “I want to build a church for someone.”

  “I know nothing about building. You have money. Hire somebody. I am too busy with the network. I am producing a special about the rap music.”

  I looked at the phone in my hand. He was right. I had a checkbook. It was my money. I didn’t need Podgy Patel holding my hand. “You’re absolutely right, Podgy,” I said.

  “I know I’m right. Just as I know there is no Smuteye. You are too funny, Mr. Not Sidney. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back with my posse.”

  I drove back to the sisters’ place and found them, frighteningly, much as I had left them, with their heads upturned stupidly to the sky. Of course my return could only be construed as prayers answered, and who was I to dispute this belief? After all, my complete faith in the nonexistence of their god notwithstanding, I was at a loss to explain my reappearance.

  “We knew you would come back,” Sister Irenaeus said as I got out of my car. There was an arrogance in her tone that made me immediately sorry I’d returned. Yet I did not leave. Inexplicably.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” I said. “To all of you.”

  They stared at me.

  “Can we go inside?”

  We marched up the one step, through the solid wooden door, and into the austere two-room building. I assumed the room in the back was where they slept. I gestured for them to sit and so they did. The windows were shut tight and so it was not only hot inside, but airless.

  “So, you want to build a church,” I said.

  “You know that is true,” Sister Irenaeus said. The others nodded.

  “Do you have a plan for this structure?” I asked.

  “We do.” Sister Irenaeus looked over at Sister Firmilian and nodded. Sister Firmilian got up and walked to the writing table against the far wall. She opened the drawer, withdrew a paper, and brought it to me.

  I looked at it. It was a crude sketch on lined, white-notebook leaf. Two angles were depicted—from above and from in front. The church was to be a rectangle with a pitched roof.

  “What do you think?” Sister Irenaeus asked.

  “I don’t know how to build a church,” I told them. “However, I have a lot of money.” I let this sit with them for a moment. “And I’m willing to pay for the materials and labor to have it built.”

  All their eyes lit up.

  “God has answered our prayers,” Sister Irenaeus said.

  Sisters Chrysostom and Eusebius immediately went into a state and started rattling away in tongues; their eyes rolled up into their heads and pretty much scared the living shit out of me. The other three carried on as if nothing was happening.

  “As I was saying, I will pay for your church. But you’re going to have to find an architect to draw something usable.”

  “You will do that for us,” Sister Irenaeus said.

  “No, you have to do it.”

  “God has sent you.”

  “No, bad judgment has sent me.” I pulled out my checkbook and started writing. “This is for fifty thousand dollars. This should get you started.”

  “I do not have a bank account,” Sister Irenaeus said.

  I looked at her.

  “We have no money,” Sister Origen said.

  “You will take care of it for us,” Sister Irenaeus said.

  “No,” I said, sick of saying it. “I’ll find a bank, cash a check, bring you the money, and then I’ll leave.” With that I walked out, thinking that I should forget everything, but I’d told them I’d give them the money and so I would. I wondered as I fell in behind my steering wheel if there was a bank in Smuteye.

  The sign on the one-story brick building set between a dry goods store and a defunct mortuary said Smuteye Farmers Savings and Loan, and I had no reason to doubt it. I parked diagonally in an unmarked space, only because the one other car there was so parked. It was across the street from nothing. The bank was quite naturally tiny: one old-fashioned teller’s window with one old-fashioned teller, a man, and just one desk on the floor behind which sat an old white woman with a canister of platinum blond hair set upon her small head. Since the check I sought to cash was relatively large I went to the desk instead of the teller.

  “I’d like to cash a check,” I said.

  “I see,” she said without really looking up at me, though I knew that she had looked me over and was still doing so. “Well, have a seat and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

  I sat.

  “I don’t believe you have an account with us.”

  “That’s true, I don’t have an account here. And it’s a rather large check I’d like to cash,” I told her.

  “Hmmm. How large?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  She whistled and I thought I saw a disbelieving smile behind her cat-eyed, horn-rimmed bifocals. “Hmmm. Is it a cashier’s check?” she asked.

  “No, it’s my own personal check.”

  “I see.” She showed no reaction. At least she showed no reaction that I, not knowing her, was able to read. She began to rearrange the items on her desk. She moved her stapler a few inches to her left, then her coffee cup of pencils and pens toward her a short distance. She fussed with the edge of the blotter. “The problem, young man. What is your name?”

  “Poitier.”

  “The problem, Mr. Poitier, is that I don’t know you.”

  “That’s very true,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen you.”

  I nodded. I understood her position and her reservation completely. “Would it be possible for me to have the funds transferred here from another bank?”

  “You mean a wire transfer?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could do that. That would give us permission to dispense the money, but I
’m afraid it wouldn’t create the cash for us to dispense. You see, we don’t have that kind of money.”

  “This is a bank?”

  “A savings and loan,” she corrected me. “Mr. Poitier, this is Smuteye, Alabama.”

  I nodded.

  “The only reason I’m not stepping on the alarm under my desk, aside from the fact that it doesn’t work, is that any fool can see that there’s no money here in this godforsaken hamlet.”

  All of this was no doubt true, and I felt the requisite amount of pity for her and her community, but all I said was, “So, how would I go about getting my money?”

  “I guess you could go over to Eufaula. Troy is closer. The bank in Perote might be able to help you. That’s not far at all.”

  “Thank you.” I started to leave, then asked, “Are there any architects around here?”

  She pretended to consider my question. “I don’t think so.” I was impressed that she was able to say it without a hint of sarcasm. Neither did she show any interest in why I might need or want so much money in Smuteye.

  I nodded.

  As I drove those desolate Alabama back roads it became clear to me, through no feat of intellect, that my merely suggesting to someone that I’d like to cash a personal and out-of-state check for such a large amount would do far more than find a raised eyebrow as accompaniment to a resounding no. And like the Smuteye Farmers Savings and Loan, the local Western Union offices were not likely to have enough money to accommodate such a hefty wire. So I was left to wonder just how I would deliver the money I had promised to the sisters. I stopped at a truck stop, a lot full of big rigs and Confederate flags, and called Podgy from a pay phone. From where I sat I watched a fat trucker play a video game and watched another walk out of the washroom still brushing his teeth.

  “Okay, Podgy, how can I get fifty grand down here to Smuteye, Alabama?” I asked.

  “I will wire it to you.”

  “They don’t … nobody here has that kind of money. Not even the Western Union office.”