They came with pickaxes, shovels, and dynamite. They came by the wagonloads, by the buggyfuls; they came walking. Their horses muddied the creek my grandparents used for drinking; their children stole melons from the garden. And the fifth baby would scream throughout the day as explosions rocked the earth around them. Most gave up in a few weeks; the hardiest lasted a year. The longer they’d stayed, the cheaper it was for my grandfather to buy off their claims. It ain’t worth ten cents an acre, one disgusted prospector spat out; just stay here until you drop and call it a gift from heaven. But my grandmother insisted on my grandfather paying them something, if only a penny a parcel, to make the sale papers legal. The Yumas had already learned what the white man could do when your land was given by God.
So they ended up with a little over 3,000 acres of cacti, dwarf cedars, and wild sage. But my grandmother was to realize her vision of water flooding the desert, because the Imperial Canal was completed just before she died. And she had given my grandfather those dark sons—eight of them—and two daughters. The white gold was to come later. Cotton wasn’t only king in the South; we grew a lot of it in California. And we were able to produce the finest staples of it on our farm, the long-fibered pima cotton, because my father’s older brothers had been trained in agricultural science. They wouldn’t have been welcome at the nearest county school; a Negro is a Negro. So, keeping her husband far in the background, my grandmother had enrolled them in the missionary school set up on the Yuma reservation. And since an Indian is an Indian, their mother was able to get them an education while their father had gotten them the land.
Papa was their last child and never really suited to be a farmer. In another time and place, my father would have been a philosopher or perhaps a poet. His brothers just thought him spoiled and lazy. And sadly, I thought him a coward. He’d had engraved on my mother’s tombstone: Flower of the Desert. Daughter of the Wind. Wife of My Heart. Mother of Our Future. I guess he would have kept going on, but he ran out of space, needing something leftover for her name and the date. She was murdered young. My mother was the youngest child of a fugitive Texan slave and a Mexican ranchero. I don’t remember her, but they told me she spoke only Spanish, and she was fiery and beautiful and as dark as the midnight air she liked riding bareback in. Her father never forgave her for marrying mine, especially after he wouldn’t help them lynch the itinerant drifter who had raped her and left her to die in a ravine. My father just had no stomach for castrating a man and then roasting him alive on an open spit. Aunt Hazel did; she kept them supplied with the wood because my mother was one of her favorite sisters-in-law.
But Papa loved my mother; he was the only one of his brothers who had actually married for love. The others knew that something like that was risky at best. Wives were to be chosen who were suited for the life my uncles had to offer in Imperial Valley. And I had aunts of all assortments: pure-blooded Yumas; full-blooded Negroes; full-blooded Mexicans; Yuma-Mexicans; Mexican-Irish; Negro-Mexicans; and even one pure-blooded African who still knew some phrases in Ashanti: all hearty and strong. Women who could straddle a row of cotton all day and still straddle a man at night. Because there had to be a lot of babies; we had a lot of land.
Growing up, I never gave much thought to what my cousins and I were; you could get a little dizzy tracing all of those lines. The Americans had no problems with our identities, though; they imported one six-letter word to cut through all that Yuma-Irish-Mexican-African tangle in our heritage. And after the valley was flooded with water, we watched them pour in across the eastern border. Brawley, Holtville, and Westmorland became thriving towns, and El Centro an actual city. The American flag was hoisted in front of the new post offices and on the tops of city halls. Our profits almost doubled because shipping costs were cut in half with the new cotton exchange set up in El Centro; the American flag flew over that too. And in the valley we learned the new language of progress: Hoover Dam. Electricity. Highway. My uncles’ wives left the fields, to be replaced by migrant workers and sharecroppers. My cousins went off to private academies. Papa couldn’t bear to part with me, and he said he didn’t trust what I’d be taught in any of their schools, so he hired a special tutor. All of this in the middle of a depression, because even with the times so hard, Princeton and Harvard certainly didn’t close down, and nightclubs flourished; we were growing the pima cotton for those dress shirts.
We were pretty much ignored by the Americans until they found out we actually owned all of the land we were farming, and the barns and the reapers and the trucks and the gin mills. They’d stand speechless at the edge of our fields, which stretched farther than they could see over any horizon; progress had given them no vocabulary to reconcile the land and us. They already knew what we were and any fool could see what the land was worth. But how do you put the two together? And having no words for what was in front of them, they believed it had no right to exist. The real Americans didn’t know that this is what they actually believed because, you see, what they’d been taught in school is that they believed every man—whatever race of man—had a right to anything he was willing to work and sacrifice for. But somehow, somehow, the sight of Papa pulling up in front of the Holtville bank in his La Salle convertible would set their teeth on edge. He’d come back out of the bank to find all of his whitewalls flat and that six-letter word scrawled in mud over his windshield. Hoodlum pranks, the sheriff would tell him. And yes, he’d tried to find witnesses from even the last time, but it was funny how nobody claimed to see a thing. Papa would make his job a whole lot easier if he’d just stop asking for trouble and not bring that automobile into town.
But he couldn’t go into town without any clothes on. And besides good motor cars, my father liked tailored suits. The weather made us dress differently in southern California; short-sleeved shirts with open vests and cotton slacks were just common sense, as well as the huaraches and moccasins. Top that off with either a straw panama or a sailcloth cap, and you had what we called Holtville casual. Papa tended more toward Esquire casual (dandy clothes, my uncles sneered) and stayed about as comfortable as we did, but there was no mistaking that his hunter jackets and foulard scarves were straight out of Palm Springs. And if he didn’t like huaraches, he didn’t like huaraches. Your toes don’t burn; mine don’t either, Papa would say. And he’d wear those linen loafers with the calf trim, even though they always managed to get stepped on in town.
I understand a lot now that I didn’t then. I thought my father was pathetic for never fighting back. He had to know it wasn’t accidental that a wad of tobacco spit would splatter right in front of us, staining the cuffs of his slacks. No storekeeper was so nearsighted that he waited on everyone else at the counter before he finally saw us. Holtville wasn’t so crowded that we had to be bumped and shoved aside while trying to cross the street. My uncles wouldn’t have stood for it. And none of that, certainly, happened when Aunt Hazel was with us. Witch Hazel, they whispered behind her back in town. And she took it as a compliment. Aunt Hazel was the only mother I knew, she having raised me and taken care of our home after my real mother was killed. Everything I’d learned about my grandparents, she’d passed on to me. And she said that one day I would understand that my father was also teaching me something very special: how to be my own man.
But I didn’t see him as a man at all. I was the only one of the boys who didn’t get a cowboy suit and a pair of cap pistols for Christmas—I got books. And I was the only one who couldn’t go to the pictures when a Tom Mix feature was showing. We don’t applaud genocide in this house, he’d say. But kids are still going to play cowboys-and-Indians, and with me never having a holster and pistols, I was tagged for the Indian. Even my cousin Tomaso, whose mother was a full-blooded Yuma and had named him after a famous chief, even he got a cowboy suit. But there I was, the one always having to climb up into the cottonwoods and give a blood-curdling cry before I was shot down and made to eat dust. A loser. And the son of a loser, the way my uncles told it. The older one
s still had memories of what it had been like to survive in a desert and they were hard, dry men who saw Papa as soft. They called my father butter britches. They’d never tell me what it meant. I wanted to believe the nickname grew from his being the baby brother and the only one my grandmother had the time and leisure to coddle. But knowing that they considered my father strange in waiting so long to marry and in not remarrying after my mother died, and knowing how my uncles’ minds turned, butter britches had to mean something much, much nastier.
They thought his library was a waste of good money—not that they were against books, but his books were bound in Moroccan leather and gold-leafed, and not one of the damn things could help you fight a boll weevil—or anything else. Sure, their sons were off in school, studying, but even though it worried the hell out of them for the boys to be taking up an old maid’s language like Latin, at least it was by reading The Wars of Caesar; while that little pansy he was raising had to learn it through Plutarch’s Lives. Aesop. Aristotle. Aurelius. He kept them in alphabetical order. He read almost everything but only chose to bind certain ones. Dante. Donne. Du Bois. Dunbar. I’m leaving you a legacy, he’d say, a carefully chosen legacy. Personally, I wasn’t very interested in either James, C. L. R. or Henry, Sr. Philosophy hadn’t saved my father from the contempt we met in town. Philosophy didn’t give him guts. I hated being ashamed of my father and when I finally told him so, there were tears in his eyes. And I was ashamed of him for that.
Funny, I had almost decided not to follow him into Holtville that day. I had three more weeks before I left for the university, and I was counting. He was really excited because my graduation gift had been freighted in, but who wanted it? I hadn’t gone to a real school, like my cousins, so what was I graduating from? And I didn’t call a complete set of Shakespeare a real gift—cream vellum or not, from England or wherever. And the prevailing theory was that the old Bard had had some real dilemmas over his manhood. Manhood is a pervasive preoccupation when you’re an adolescent boy, and you tend to see a fairy under every bush. I definitely saw one lurking under Iago, Brutus, that whining Hamlet. And here Papa was, expecting me to haul that crap all the way to Stanford. Stanford, mind you, while my cousin Tomaso, who was so dumb he could hardly tie his shoelaces and barely eked into one of the state colleges where they had to take anyone—even us—had gotten a box of French rubbers from his father. And my uncle had patted him on the back and said, Make sure to use ’em all in one place. Now, that was a real gift. A man’s gift. So, thank you but no, Papa, I don’t feel like riding into Holtville.
But my father was so proud over what I’d managed to accomplish, he wasn’t even going to let me stand in the way. He waxed the La Salle and then got himself really spiffy that afternoon: double-breasted blazer, madras silk for the foulard scarf and matching pocket handkerchief, a coconut straw for the sun, and yes, those linen loafers with the calf trim. After he was dressed, he leaned against the convertible and played his trump card. The bank wouldn’t honor any drafts I drew while away at school unless they had my signature on file, and I might consider it a useful bit of information to know that today was one of the precious few that, in spite of my attitude, he felt moved enough to vouch for my identity as his son. Translation: Get into the car or else, you ungrateful little snot. But he did let me pretend I still had to think the whole thing over. He even waited patiently while I took my dear, sweet time changing into my own clothes: a beat-up pair of dungarees and a plaid cotton shirt. I sauntered back out of the house and announced with all the arrogance that only an eighteen-year-old who someone else is supporting can summon up, I’m not going if we don’t take the truck. I’m sick of changing flat tires.
We took the truck. But it still didn’t matter—he was fair game by then. And while the Gatlin boys would probably have shared my opinion of Shakespeare if they hadn’t been illiterate buffoons and had had the slightest inkling of who he was, they knew that whatever was in those crates being loaded into the back of our truck was bought with money they didn’t have, from a farm where they’d been considered too shiftless even to be taken on as sharecroppers. Real Americans, like them, turned down from working, mind you, by the likes of us. This country wasn’t shit. This country was going to the frigging dogs. When the four of them weren’t warming the bench in front of the freighting office, they were getting drunk and beating each other up at the local barroom; and when they’d gotten thrown out of there, if it was late enough in the day, they could make it to their Klan meetings.
The Ku Klux Klan got imported into California not too long after the American flag; created in the heartland of the country, it radiated out from Indiana until there were chapters in almost every state. But it had a hard time catching on in our area, although, like the Communist party, it started gaining strength during the depression. The displaced Okies, running from starvation, had a problem with our being so close to the Mexican border; they soon discovered that the other migrant workers weren’t just niggers who spoke Spanish but a bunch of sneaky lunatics who spoke Spanish, and when you mauled one of their women, they’d more than likely follow you back home at night and slit your throat. And actually, rowdy members like the Gatlins were an embarrassment to the local Klan and discouraged from joining. Our Klan was a quiet social club of businessmen and wealthy landowners. They met to reaffirm their right to be and ours to not, while working through the chamber of commerce and Grange to keep it that way. They hid the good brandy whenever the Gatlins showed up, and they were forced to sit in pained silence as they were denounced as a bunch of dickless wonders.
As a matter of fact, the head clerk at the freighting office was a Klan member. Peters was a nearsighted, hunchbacked little fellow who was never without a worn copy of Collier’s or a penny dreadful. He told us to open the crates in front him because he wasn’t honoring any claims for damage once those boxes left the place. But Papa already knew that’s how he conducted business with us and had come prepared with his own crowbar. Peters never seemed to have one that he could spare for our use. I turned my back on the whole operation and stared out the office window. He could make me tag along, but I saw no reason to help. The streets were getting busy again, people slowly venturing out, with the hottest part of the day almost over. The Gatlins were still out there in their regular spot, and I remember thinking how strange it was that they hadn’t said too much as we walked in. One of them had given a halfhearted attempt at making monkey noises, but that was pretty light. The weather had probably slowed them down.
I could hear Papa grunting as he worked with the crowbar to remove the lid. The crate was packed with straw, and nested inside were oilcloth envelopes. Each envelope closed with a hook and eye, and inside was a bundle wrapped with brown paper and taped firmly. After the brown paper was removed, there was still a wrapping of royal blue felt to be undone before you got to the single volume. As Papa finally uncovered the first volume, Peters emitted a slow whistle. It was a work of art.
—How many of ’em you got there? Peters whispered.
—There should be thirty-eight, Papa said.
Neither man’s eyes left the finely stitched binding and jet silk cover as Papa turned it over and over in his hands.
—But Shakespeare only wrote thirty-seven plays, Peters said.
And then each looked into the other’s eyes, knowing what they were doing while knowing they couldn’t stop.
—There’s a separate volume for the poems and sonnets, Papa answered.
Peters nodded, and Papa handed him the book. Peters opened the cover like a man making love and wiped his sweaty hands on his trousers before daring to touch the tissue overleaf.
—I ain’t never seen nothing like this.
The title page was wood cut, the edges hand sheared.
—You musta mortgaged the back forty.
—He’s my only son, Papa said.
And Peters nodded again. The spell was broken as the bell over the front door clanged and the postman came in to drop off th
e afternoon mail. Peters gave the volume brusquely back to Papa and said, No point in trying to check each one, you’d be here until doomsday. Just take ’em on home and if anything’s wrong, bring ’em back for reshipment. It was the first time he’d ever said that and also the first time he offered to carry anything out to the truck.
The Gatlins were stunned when Peters came out with the first crate. And by the time he’d loaded all three crates, they’d worked themselves into a silent fury. Next thing you know, that spineless turd will be eating dinner with ’em. Next thing you know, he’ll be asking them to join the Klan. Papa was getting ready to sign the release forms when they came in. They entered one at a time, the bell clanging, the door slamming behind each one, until all four stood blocking the entrance. A slight tremor started around Peters’s mouth, and he swallowed real hard. Papa ignored them. He was on his second reading of the release forms, always checking everything twice before he signed it. He told Peters that the delivery date was wrong and needed to be changed; today was August 12th. Peters snapped, Change it yourself, and then gave the Gatlins a nervous smile. But it was too little and too late.
The fat Gatlin reached back and pulled the bolt on the door. The greasy Gatlin drew the shades on the windows. Peters was shaking visibly: Please, boys, I don’t want no trouble. I had started inching toward the crowbar on the counter when the bald Gatlin beat me to it. He handed it to the cross-eyed Gatlin, who took it and jabbed Papa in the middle of the chest: We came in here to ask you a question.
—So ask it, Papa said.
Animals like them can smell fear, but the only ones sweating in that room were me and Peters. My father folded up the release forms and put them in his jacket pocket and stood there waiting. He had the expression on his face of a man who was becoming extremely bored. The cross-eyed Gatlin was at a loss; he looked at the greasy Gatlin, who looked at the bald Gatlin, but it was the fat Gatlin who finally stepped forward: Well, my brothers and me was out there asking ourselves how it is that a low-down, scum-bag, filthy piece of shit like you—ya know, something that looks like it swung in from a jungle—how it is that he thinks he can parade all up and down town wearing them clothes? And then he grinned as he braced himself with his fists balled at his side as the other Gatlins started to close in. Papa looked the fat Gatlin straight in the eye.
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