Odyssey

by Walter Mosley

  “That must have been awful,” Winifred uttered softly but clearly.

  “You would have thought so, Mama, but really it made me understand so much. You know there’s people runnin’ around with eyes wide open but seeing only what they think they see.”

  “Oh, baby,” Winifred said, “don’t you know it. The older I get the more people look like those that I knew a long, long time ago. And it’s so crazy, because I know it’s not the same people, but I feel for them the same way I did the people they look like from forty, fifty years ago. I met this one man in the store in downtown Pomegranateville and invited him to dinner because he looked so much like Lucius Lowery, a man I knew before I met your father. We was halfway through the meal before I realized that I couldn’t get the right words out of him.”

  The food came then, brought in on platters by two adolescent boys, both of them dark brown and deferential.

  The scramble was hash browns mixed in with eggs, onions, bacon, and a homemade sausage of some kind. The pancakes were whole-wheat with strawberries and real maple syrup. They were all served with a beverage made of chicory and coffee, and fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  When they started eating, Eddie began regaling them with stories from their childhood—a childhood experienced in that very room, albeit in another town and state. When Zenith laughed at the stories, Sovereign remembered that she had always been partial to his younger brother, from afar at least. He hadn’t been fully conscious of this as a child. When he was young, Eddie was his best friend, not hers. That was what his philosophy professors would have called an ontological fact—as reliable as the existence of the Pacific Ocean or the phases of the moon.

  Eddie reeled out one memory after another while the serving boys, under the watchful eye of Mary Klay, kept food on their plates. Zenith laughed and nodded, while Winifred’s eyes kept drifting back to Sovereign, who neither ate nor drank but filled his eyes and ears with the long-ago that he was sure had been lost.

  “… and, and, and,” Eddie was saying excitedly, “there was that time that Mr. Kurisawa from next door told Dad that the cherry tree marked the line between our properties.”

  “I remember that,” Sovereign said. His voice sound odd in his mouth. It didn’t sound to him like who he should have been in that conversation. He was supposed to be younger, more excited.

  “What do you remember, Sovy … I—I—I mean Sovereign?” Zenith asked.

  The question made Sovereign realize that he had frozen in the middle of his interruption. He was just saying that he remembered Mr. Kurisawa and the feud between Solar and the oldest resident of their neighborhood.

  Both men honestly believed that the tree proved his property line, but each felt that the far side of the tree from his property was the marker. Each man hankered to put up a fence to prove his claim, but every time one of them made the attempt the other would come out yelling and cursing.

  They argued and fought for more than a year before Mr. Kurisawa called Solar James over for a drink one afternoon. Winifred was afraid that the men would kill each other, but after two hours Solar came back and said that the men agreed to hire a land surveyor to come over and mark out both property lines. The man who was proven wrong would have to pay the twenty-five-hundred-dollar fee.

  Sovereign remembered the story but he didn’t speak it. This was because he had forgotten who had won the bet. The fence was never built.…

  “Sovereign?”

  “Yes, Mama?”

  “What’s wrong, baby?”

  “I need to go outside for some air,” he replied.

  He stood up from the table of his childhood and found the door that led to an external staircase.

  Going outside he felt a definite sense of displacement. He was expecting the old yard with its Saint Augustine grass and slatted redwood fence across the back. Instead he found a patchy landscape of weeds and bare soil, a scattering of pine and dogwoods. There was no fence. The property just went on and on as if no one owned it. It was hot and muggy. Sovereign felt sweat forming on his brow and back.

  He started walking over the uneven terrain, thinking that he would stop only if he came to a fence or maybe some natural barrier.

  It was early morning but the summer heat was palpable; it felt like a pressure on his lungs and head. His breathing was labored in the heavy atmosphere. His feet hit the ground flat and hard. The impacts were uneven, as if he were staggering toward an end rather than headed somewhere.

  “Sovereign.”

  The clouds in the sky were everything from white to Brooks Brothers gray. Insects dive-bombed him, but Sovereign was unimpressed by their challenge. He was headed somewhere, probably wouldn’t make it. He was coming from a definite place but he was not certain of that origin.

  “Sovereign.”

  He wasn’t even sure if he had stopped before or after hearing his name the second time. He did think about the name, though. Sovereign. That was the address for a king.

  “Sovereign.” It was Zenith.

  “Hey,” the defendant said to his sister.

  “What’s wrong, Sovereign?” Zenith asked as she walked up to him.

  There was a man inside the man standing before the Midwestern housewife. The inside man, the old Sovereign, wanted to ridicule her stupidity. What’s wrong? I was blind and then I nearly killed a man. And now I’m going to stand trial for attempted murder. Do I have to be bleeding for you to see my problem?

  “You can call me Sovy, Z,” the new Sovereign James said.

  The woman’s intense eyes and dark ochre-colored skin seemed to be at odds with each other in some indefinable way. Then the gaze softened and she took him in her arms, pressing his head down on her shoulder with her right hand.

  “Sovy,” she whispered into his ear.

  “I was all alone, Z,” he said. These words brought his mind to the edge of the darkness that had been his blindness. He could see the impenetrable gloom but still failed at making the connection.

  “What do you mean?” Zenith asked.

  Moving back from the embrace the siblings held hands, forming an imperfect circle between them.

  “I don’t know,” Sovereign said. “I mean, I … for years I was just going forward as if I was trying to get somewhere. Everything seemed to make sense. I cooked some pork chops, called women on the phone. I had an important job and a secret agenda. I wanted to have a child but don’t ask me why.”

  When Zenith let go of her brother’s hands he felt as if he might fall, even though they hadn’t been leaning away from each other.

  “Let’s get back,” she said.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t come out here to stop me walking away and then just turn your back.”

  “But, Sovy, I’m not a doctor.”

  “You’re my sister.”

  “We haven’t seen each other in twenty years.”

  “But can’t you talk to me anyway?”

  “What do you want me to say?” Zenith asked, the old edge in her words. “I don’t know you anymore.”

  The old Sovereign was defeated by these words. The new man who stood in his stead felt liberated from a yen that had never been satisfied. The old, dissipating persona wanted to say, loudly, You never knew me. But the new man kept his mouth shut.

  “Sovereign,” Zenith said.

  “Let’s get back before the grits get cold,” newly self-named Sovereign the Second said.

  He walked ahead of his sister at first but she caught up. When they were walking side by side he asked about her children.

  After the breakfast was over Sovereign and his mother sat in his father’s old den. The shelving and blue carpet, walnut desk, and even the books were the same. There were no curved walls in Winifred James’s new house, but the innards were, in some limited instances, exact replicas of a life gone by.

  After spending enough time, Sovereign realized that the color of the walls was similar but not the same as in his f
ather’s den. Those walls were antique white but the new borders were brighter. Here and there were doodads and little photographs from Winifred’s current life in South Carolina. There was a photograph of one of the serving boys when he was six or seven, mugging for the camera.

  These differences lent a stronger sense of reality to the home. It was as if life had continued in the home of his childhood. During his long absence the family had gone on.

  Mother and son sat side by side on a sofa upholstered in animal skin. Solar James used to say this was the skin of a lion he’d killed in the Kenyan desert. The children all believed him until Drum-Eddie one day said that there were no hairy brown lions in the World Book Encyclopedia.

  “It’s so good to see you, Eddie, um, I mean Sovy,” the slightly distracted older black woman said.

  “Eagle wasn’t Papa’s real father,” Sovereign replied.

  Winifred’s skin had begun graying as her hair had obviously done over the years. This lightening process made her seem less tangible, like a fading dream in the material illusion of the South Carolinian home.

  She squinted and finally said, “No?”

  “He was impotent. I guess she was fooling around.”

  “Eagle told you about that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m raisin’ three hogs two miles out of town on my old friend Georgia’s farm. I go out there almost every morning to feed and visit them. When they hear me comin’ they get all excited and grunt and squeal.”

  “You raise ’em for meat?” Sovereign asked while looking across the shelves.

  Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Booker T. Washington, LeRoi Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, and a hundred other black literary lights filled out the library. Sovereign had rarely, if ever, asked his father about these books. But now, in the displaced San Diego library, he realized that his entire life had been governed by the content and impact of books that he’d never read.

  “No, baby,” Winifred said. “I mean, I guess that was my intention at first, but after a while I just started to love ’em.”

  “What?”

  “The hogs. Clyde, Mr. North Hampton, and Earl. They rely on me even though I had at one time planned to kill ’em.”

  “Are you all right, Mama?”

  “Eddie says that he wants to take you down South America. I think you should go with him.”

  “What about you?” Sovereign asked.

  “It’s too hot down there for me,” she said, casting a casual gaze at the window. “And Spanish makes my head hurt. I mean, it’s a beautiful language but I don’t know it.”

  “Portuguese.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what they speak in Brazil.”

  “You’re young enough that you could learn, baby.”

  “What do you think about Eagle and Dad?”

  “Father is just a word, baby. We all related when you come right down to it—the sharks and dogwoods, snails and men.”

  “And sea anemone,” Sovereign the Second uttered.

  “Say what?”

  “It’s an animal that acts like a plant,” he said. “It anchors itself to a rock or crevice and then waits for food to come by.”

  Winifred pried her gaze from whatever she’d seen outside. Her eyes were pale brown, maybe, Sovereign thought, a little occluded. But they saw him well enough.

  “The only problem is the air,” she said after the long, noncompetitive test of wills.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s heavy with moisture. Solar can’t be here because the air is wrong. But I can still remember him. Sometimes I forget but then I’ll be standing in one a’ his old rooms and it hits me. I see him passin’ by a door or hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. That’s always a little second of happiness for me. That’s how I am—jumpin’ from one little spot of happiness to the other and raisin’ my hogs.”

  “It’s time to go, JJ.”

  Drum-Eddie was standing at the door to Solar’s displaced den.

  “Oh,” Winifred said.

  “Yes, it is,” Sovereign said.

  He leaned over to kiss his mother. She pulled away at first and then stayed in place long enough for her son to plant an awkward kiss along her jawline.

  She put a hand on his knee and said, “You’ll come back to see me now and then, won’t you, son?”

  “Yes, Mama. I just gotta get this court thing settled.”

  “Do what Eddie tells you, baby. He knows about the law.”

  Zenith was waiting outside the front door. She carried a brown paper bag and a nine-by-twelve-inch folder of black leather. Drum-Eddie and his brother approached their older sister. Behind her was Theodore, standing at the side of his teal Caddy.

  “Mom made you some pork sandwiches and banana bread,” she said, handing the bag to Drum. “And I put together this little album of pictures, Sovy. It’s the boys mostly—over the years, growing up.”

  She handed the folder to Sovereign and moved forward, toward the front door. In this way she handed him the book and went past at the same time, not giving him a chance to even thank her.

  She was going into the house as he was turning.

  Sovereign searched for the words to stop his sister, the incantation to make her into someone who might someday love him. But the spell eluded him.

  “Z got a whole lotta problems, JJ. It ain’t you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Excuse me, sirs,” Theodore said, “but if we want to make your flight we will have to go.”

  In the backseat Sovereign stared out the windows until the little town his mother had colonized was out of sight. He settled back down, looking at his hands in his lap.

  Seeing his hands was part of the recurring revelation of sight. It was a touchstone of awareness of the blessing (yes, he thought, the blessing) of the magic of vision. This moment of grace—when it happened, sporadically after he’d tried to murder Lemuel Johnson—usually opened a door to some other miracle or near-miracle.

  At that moment it was his mother and her replication of a life with a man who’d died thousands of miles away. Through Winifred he felt a sense of history that changed with the moments and years that passed. This history, Sovereign felt while gazing at the creases in his pinkish-brown palms, was like the ocean: undeniable and yet never the same.

  “You can’t take it personally,” Drum-Eddie said, breaking into the reverie.

  “What?”

  Sovereign looked up at his brother then. He noticed that even though Eddie wore an elegant lightweight tan suit and a dark blue linen shirt, his belt was two lengths of rough hemp rope knotted together at the front.

  “I don’t know what it’s like for other families, Jimmy J, but we, all of us James kids, got one thing in common.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kinda like that movie I liked so much when I was a kid.”

  “The Wizard of Oz?”

  “That’s it. Here you got a scarecrow, robot man, and a lion, and all of ’em wantin’ sumpin’ they ain’t got. Every one of ’em all magic and shit but they still out there searchin’ for stuff don’t mean a thing.”

  “What’s Z missing?”

  “Love.”

  “You mean she doesn’t know how?”

  “That might be true, but no, that’s not what she after. Z come an’ see Mama six times a year, but all Mama want is to see you and me—and Pops too, even though he’s dead. Mama think Z’s there for the men. And Daddy took Zenith for granted. Just ’cause she did everything he said, he didn’t really seem to care about her.”

  “But she has her own family.”

  “Yeah,” Eddie agreed. “Maybe it’s different there, but when she comes here everything looks the same.”

  “And me? What am I missing?”

  “You? That’s easy. You always lookin’ for that perfect spin. You know, like when someone skim rocks on the water and wanna make that flat stone jump really far and then bounce ten
or twelve times—that’s what you always been after. Like when you would only say a few words instead of a whole sentence. You did that, on and off, for six months. It was like you was lookin’ for the one word that would say everything. And because you don’t have that one answer it’s like you don’t have anything.”

  “And you, Eddie?” Sovereign asked. “You don’t seem to be missing a thing.”

  “I’m the worst one, Sovy—the worst. I don’t have an anchor, man. I was born so free that I could leave my family behind on a whim. I robbed that bank with those two fools and thirty-six hours later I was laid up with a mamacita learnin’ Spanish and drinkin’ mescal. I left my whole country behind and didn’t even give it a second thought.

  “No, Sovy, you, me, and Z been on that Yellow Brick Road for our whole lives—singin’ and dancin’ and worried ’bout that Wicked Witch.”

  “But you and Z got families, man. You got kids.”

  “You somebody’s kid, JJ. You got a brother and sister and a mother that you don’t never see.”

  Sovereign looked out the front window, past the elderly chauffeur. He wondered if maybe all that had gone wrong in his life wasn’t his fault—not exactly. He wondered if the decisions he’d made were just extensions of paths laid out well before he was born. Maybe there was some gene from the father of his father, the man whom no one knew. Maybe it was the death of his grandmother delivering Solar to an impotent father.

  But all of that had changed with his blindness. The loss of sight had erased the world and now what he saw was not the same. Blindness had reclaimed his family, as much as possible. Blindness had brought love and passion into his life.

  “You grinnin’, Jimmy J,” Drum-Eddie said.

  “I guess even the psyche has an immune system,” Sovereign replied.

  They drove for hours, finally reaching the airport at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Sovereign paid for their tickets with a debit card and they went to the gate to wait for the plane to LaGuardia.

  Somewhere in the middle of the drive the brothers went silent. They sat next to each other, enjoying a physical closeness they hadn’t known since their teens. At the airport they maintained this fraternal quiet.