by Lewis Nordan
NO ONE had missed me, of course. And when they saw me no one noticed that I had been transformed by imagination and the possibility of distances.
The danger of what I had just done was small—a fall from a height of a few feet at walking speed was less dangerous than a dozen risks I took every day of the summer. Often, with other boys my age, I jumped from the Roebuck trestle into a few feet of water to test how far I could stick myself into the mud of the lake bottom. One boy actually hit a submerged boat and broke his back, and yet we jumped. But for all its benign aspect, my illicit ride on the Southern was not a secret I was likely to share with either my father or my mother. The danger of being chopped up by the wheels was meaningless. I was afraid my parents would understand the real danger, the great magnetism, the centrifugal pull away from everything familiar and true.
I WOULD not tell my parents, but I considered telling my blind grandfather, who despised me. It was a Saturday afternoon and the sun shafts through the window of his room were as solid as pine planks. The Delta was a steam bath, and my grandfather’s space heater was roaring like a log fire. My grandfather was dressed up, as always, in a suit and vest and silk ascot and a watch and fob chain as heavy as leg irons and sweating in the impossible heat like a man on death row. My grandfather believed he might sweat the blindness out of his system. The dark glasses that he wore to cover his affliction kept slipping down his oiled nose and he had to push them up again with his forefinger.
As I came into my grandfather’s room the hypnotist was just giving up. My grandfather paid him, and he scurried away with big wet spots underneath the arms of his shirt.
Grandfather said, “He was more useless than the faith healer.”
I said, “I rode on the freight train.”
He said, “Musial just batted. You missed it.” He was listening on the big Philco, which partly explained the hypnotist’s failure.
I said, “I jumped off at Quito station.”
He said, “Tripled off the right field fence, but you missed it. You always miss it.”
I said, “I danced on a boxcar.”
He said, “Will dancing cure blindness?”
I said, “It might.”
He said, “Go git me a Co-Cola.”
I said, “What time is it?”
He pulled out his watch and checked it. He said, “I don’t know. I’m blind.”
I said, “The equator is a railroad track.”
He said, “Go git me that Co-Cola. Acupuncture don’t work. Surgery don’t work. Power of positive thinking don’t work.”
I said, “Can I have a drink out of it?”
He said, “Voodoo don’t work. Ophthalmology sure as hell don’t work.”
I brought him a Coca-Cola and took a big swig before I handed it to him.
He said, “You slobbered all over it.”
I said, “Slobber might work.”
He said, “Don’t nothing work. Won’t nothing cure blindness.”
I said, “Where does the train go when it leaves Quito station?”
He said, “Hush. Musial is about to bat.”
I said, “He just batted.”
He said, “Hush. He’s on deck. Stan the Man is in the batter’s circle.”
My failure as a baseball fan was a cause of my grandfather’s blindness and isolation. Musial batted every time I walked into the room.
NOT THIS night but a night in the same summer, my family sat eating together, my mother’s nightmarish cooking before us. With the proper tools a patio could have been built from my mother’s rice. The only thing that could penetrate it was her acid gravy, in which now soaked some substance in the shape of meat. The table was covered with a sheet of something we called oilcloth, and when my mother warned against spilling gravy on it, I took her warning seriously, having once heard the words chemical reaction.
It was August, and whatever it was that governed my solitude—rage, I think now—was disguised as comfort. For weeks I had ridden the train across town. More often I only put my ear to the steel rail and listened to the solitary music as the train rolled onto the Runnymeade trestle. Once I put a penny on the track and let the train roll over it. When I found it again, the coin was a wafer the size and color of a perfectly cooked pancake. Abraham Lincoln was as unfamiliar as a midget in the sideshow.
And now, just hours before this bad meal, Portable Justice had arrived in Arrow Catcher in a van that looked like the Bookmobile.
The electric chair was part of an exhibit sponsored by the State of Mississippi and hauled around to eighty-two county seats. It was happening, the State was telling us. The execution was real. A man would die in this incredible chair before Labor Day, and Mississippians were invited to lay eyes upon the instrument of his destruction.
I stood in the air-conditioned van with other children and adults and looked at the chair. The van was brightly lighted. There were framed pictures on the walls—the president, the governor. Even a framed news clipping of the first man ever put to death by electrocution, a New York Times article dated April 28, 1898. The man’s name was there, and even his picture, with a starched collar and a silly smile.
The chair itself was as big as a roadside fruit stand. It was hardly a chair at all, a horrible throne. It was made of oak timbers, it had a seat wide enough for three condemned men, arms wide enough to rest a dinner plate on. There were two heavy-duty wires. One went to a steel beanie for the head, the other went to a steel cuff for the right calf. There were heavy leather straps that seemed darkened with sweat. Two straps came down from the top of the chair to hold the condemned man by the shoulders. There were straps for the wrists and the ankles and even a strap for the forehead. There was a heavy leather strap a foot wide that went across the condemned man’s waist. One of several high school boys looking at the exhibit said, “Buckle up for safety,” and the others snickered.
The exhibit guide was a thin man with a narrow nose and thin lips. He gave the high school boys an evil look. He seemed to say, “You go on acting like that and it could be you sitting in that chair some day.” I agreed with the look. I was silent and respectful.
The guide said, “The condemned man may choose anything he wishes for his last meal.” I thought, If he chose my mother’s rice, he wouldn’t need to waste the electricity. I thought I would choose steak and french fries. Or maybe I would just ask for suggestions.
The guide said, “The top of the head is shaved.” He said, “The right calf is also shaved.” The high school boys said, “Woo-woo,” and pretended that sounded sexy. The weasely guide gave them another look and they shut up. The guide said, “A salt solution is applied to the shaved areas to insure perfect contact.”
Suddenly I said, “Can I sit in it?”
The guide looked at me. He said, “Suit yourself,” and stood aside to allow me to sit down.
I looked back at the high school boys, who suddenly seemed quiet and afraid. I sat in the chair. Then I heard one of them say, “You’re sitting where many a grinning nigger died.”
It was this same night that I was sitting at my parents’ table.
My mother said, “More rice and gravy?” Speaking to my father.
My father said, “Well, you bet.” My father loved my mother’s incredible cooking.
I said, “I don’t want none, Mama.”
My grandfather said, “Sugar don’t know what’s good. You go blind, you’ll appreciate good food.” He said, “I’m hungry, I’m so hungry I can’t see straight.”
My mother said, “Hand me your plate, Pap. Some rice and gravy might help.”
I said, “I’m taking the freight train to the execution.”
My grandfather said, “Won’t nothing help. Won’t nothing cure blindness of the eyes.”
I said, “Mock it down. I’m taking the freight train to see a man get the shock of his life.”
My father said, “They’s a blue smoke coming off this gravy.”
My mother said, “Spoon some over a slice of
that Wonder Bread, you want a special treat.”
My grandfather said, “I don’t even remember the color blue, I been blind so long.”
I said, “It’s the color of sparks flying out of your nose when they pull the switch.”
My grandfather spooned the chemical fluid straight out of the gravy boat and into his mouth to break up a rice blockage in his throat. He said, “Getting rid of you might help.”
He said this beneath his breath, but he was fierce and serious and I heard him.
My mother said, “Now, Pap.”
My grandfather said, “Eleven years old and still don’t know how to listen to the radio.”
I said, “Can I watch television?”
My father said, “I don’t want you watching any colored people on that television.”
My grandfather said, “Sammy Davis is on tonight. I heard about it.”
My father said, “Better leave the TV alone tonight, Sugar.”
My grandfather said, “If he knew how to listen to the radio he wouldn’t have to watch a bunch of coons on the TV.”
My mother, said, “Now, Pap.”
I DID NOT attend the execution, obviously. Even I knew it was impossible. The man did die, though. His name was in the paper, not his picture, which meant he was a black man. I cried my guts out when I heard about it. Right in front of my father I turned on the television and watched Pearl Bailey sing “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey” and said, “She’s pretty.” My father left the room in disgust and got so drunk he had to be taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. I had always known he drank because of me, and for the first time I didn’t care. I wished he would die and then I cried my guts out about that too. My mother said, “If anybody asks you, just say he got food poisoning.” My grandfather said, “If he was blind, he would have something to get drunk about.” I said, “If it was food poisoning going to kill him, he’d been dead long time ago.” My mother looked at me like this. I looked right back and double-dog-dared her to say a word and she didn’t.
You might as well know the end of this. What is the point of dragging it out? I got up from the dinner table that night and left the house without speaking to anyone. I walked straight to the Baptist church and climbed into the loft and, with a four-foot board, I swatted down a metallic-colored pigeon from the rafters and stomped it till its hard eyes popped out, and pulled out all its feathers and stuffed them in my mouth and puked and swore I would never say, not even to condemn it as evil, the word nigger for the rest of my life. Today, for the one millionth time, as I tell this story, I am breaking that vow. I have no explanations. To seal the vow I pulled down from a corner of the church loft a wasp nest, papery and alive with terrified little red dive-bombers, and squeezed the fiery nest in my hand until my hand was filled with poison and big as a football and I was stung many times all over my body. I also vowed to catch the train. This has no explanation either. I had been wearing a steel beanie and a steel cuff on my leg all my life. I had been eating my last meal forever, and it was not what I ordered. Goodbye, I’m leaving, I’m gone.
I SLEPT in my bed that night and caught the train the next day and rode it forty hard miles. I was sick with fever from the wasp stings. My damaged hand glowed like a bulb. I could scarcely cling to the ladder of the boxcar. I could still taste pigeon feathers in my mouth and throat.
A thousand times, when the train slowed or stopped, I thought of jumping off. I wanted to die in a ditch. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a different history and geography. In rhythm with the wheels I said I want I want I want I want I stayed on the train. I breathed the hot exhaust from the diesel. I clung with my one good hand to the ladder and a part of me dreamed a joyful waking dream of falling beneath the wheels. Once, at a cattle crossing, where the train slowed, two children threw rocks at me, and one of the rocks hit my bad hand. The pain of loss and hopelessness caused by that lucky shot was inseparable from my father’s drunkenness and the big Philco and Stan the Man. I yelled at the children, “Niggers!” The train slogged on down the line. I yelled, “You could put somebody’s eye out!” I laughed my damn head off when I heard myself say this. I sounded just like my mother. I thought of my blind grandfather and Sammy Davis, Jr. I was a sick and bitter child.
Later that day, delirious with fever and loss, I stepped off the train into a cinder lot in sight of the Mississippi River. I did not even look at the river. I had escaped nothing, proved nothing. I walked far across the train yard until I came to a warehouse with baggage carts parked beside it. Under one of the carts was a black man having an epileptic seizure. It lasted a long time, and all I knew to do was stand and watch. I had never heard the word epilepsy at this time. I was so sick I actually thought for one second that I was at home in my bed having a nightmare about living in the house with my family. When the seizure ended the man slept and snored and finally woke up and sat up for a while with his face in his hands. At last he struggled to his knees and then to his feet, and set out across the lot with a slow and wobbly gait. Behind him I called, “I’m sorry!” I sat down where he had been sitting, under the baggage cart. I thought of the long black train. I thought of bean fields and rice paddies and buckshot and gumbo. I lay down and believed that I would die. I suffered chills and fever, and I slept two hours of black sleep before I woke, feeling better.
And now here is a strange thing. In fact, it’s the strangest thing I know of.
When I woke up, no one was nearby. The cinder lot was deserted. I looked around for the man who had suffered the seizure, but he was gone, of course. I walked out of the railroad yard and down long sad streets of shanties. I lost sight of the big river.
I came to a small café with a sign that said REGAL. It was owned by a skinny white-trash man with a big Adam’s apple and a yellow dog.
The man looked at me. I was black with cinders and train filth. The man let me use the telephone.
I said, “Mama?”
My mother said, “Sugar?”
I said, “I’m filthy and I’m hungry and I’m sick and I want to die. I watched a man have a fit.”
My mother said, “Sugar-man, your grandfather can see! It’s a miracle.”
I said, “I’m in Greenville. Can you come get me?”
She said, “Of course we can, Sugar-man, but aren’t you happy? Your grandfather who was blind is no longer blind and now can see. It’s like the Bible.”
I said, “Something worked.”
My mother said, “I think it’s love. Love is always the answer.”
The white-trash man with the yellow dog said, “I wouldn’t want to rush you, son, but like the poet said, Time is money.”
I hung up and said, “My grandfather’s sight came back. He was blind until today.”
The white-trash man took a big handful of the skin of the dog’s back in his hand and gave it a couple of good yanks. The dog looked back over its shoulder at the man, lovingly, and the man yanked the dog’s skin again. The man said, “Your granddaddy ain’t the first white man to get cured for spite.”
I said, “He’ll have to learn how to watch television.”
The white-trash man said, “You ort to get somebody to look at that hand.” He said, “Don’t be touching my dog, I wouldn’t want it to catch nothing.” This was a joke, so we both laughed. The yellow dog ambled over to me and so I sat in a chair and gathered the dog’s skin into my good hand and gave it a few good yanks.
I said, “So you’re saying spite works?”
The white-trash man said, “You bet. Spite works when nothing else won’t.”
The white-trash man gave me two big gulps out of a bottle of sweet wine and so I felt better. I thought of the train. The train ride seemed to have taken place in another life. I thought of the crossing signals. I thought of the arms of the semaphore. I thought of the mileposts. I thought of the click of the rails, the jingle of the wheels. I thought of the many little stations I had passed—Quito, and Colony Town, and Victim, and Cruger. I thought of wome
n in headrags picking wild fruit into clean lard buckets along the tracks. When I thought of these things, with the red wine in my stomach and the yellow dog beneath my hand, I was a happy child and the world was a place of safety and peace.
THERE IS one more thing to tell. Many days later, when my illness was coming to an end, and the bandages were removed from my infected hand, I was lying in bed between clean sheets and with my head on two fluffed-up pillows my mother had put there, my grandfather, who now could see, came into my room and sat in a chair beside my bed. He had never done such a thing before.
Then he moved from the chair and actually sat on the bed itself, right beside me. I have to tell you, I was frightened. He could have said anything in the world to me. He could have killed me this day with his bitterness.
He said, “Sugar, long time ago there was a man name of Harper. This is when I was a boy. Harper had a friend who was a midget. Harper and the midget were violent men, don’t ask me why, I can’t explain. One time the midget held a dog on a rope and Harper poured gas on it and they set the dog on fire. Dog name of Holyghost, don’t ask me why, I can’t explain that neither. I started to watch Harper and the midget. I watched them drink coffee in the Delta Cafe. I watched them run trotlines on Roebuck and on Quiver River. I watched them drink whiskey. I watched them cut wood with a chainsaw. One day Harper lost control of the chainsaw and accidentally cut off his own hand. I watched him do that too. The midget drove him in the pickup to Dr. Hightower’s office, and Harper lived and so did the midget, of course. But they forgot to take the hand. I got the hand. I brushed the sawdust off. I gave it a firm handshake. I waved bye-bye to Harper with it. I played peep-eye behind it. I sang ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord.’ I picked my nose with it. I bit its fingernails. I scratched my ass with it. I said, ‘Gimme five.’ I said, ‘Lend me a hand.’ I saluted the flag. I yanked a yellow dog. I shot the bird. I thumbed my nose. I thumbed a ride. I took it to a palm reader. I said, ‘Read this, sister.’” My grandfather said, “Do you see what I mean?”
