In the next month and a half, the majority of Darlene’s notebooks got stolen or destroyed. As she turned the pages of her textbooks during classes she found the words WHORE, SLUT, and CUNT scrawled across them in red Magic Marker. The faces of her family in photos she’d left on her dresser grew mustaches and beards. Their eyes were blacked out and crude drawings of genitals sprang from the children’s heads and mouths. Her sorority sisters, including her roommate, Kenyatta, denied responsibility for the vandalism. Darlene received phone calls from strangers at very early hours, the weirdest at three a.m. on a Wednesday, a computer voice that sounded like a children’s toy threatening to cut her throat.
Someone put sports cream in her bra, and the burning came on during an econ exam, numbing and searing her chest until she gasped and nearly passed out, even after carefully twisting free of the straps without removing her shirt and hiding the icy-hot garment between her legs. She flunked the test. Nobody admitted doing any of it, and she had too many suspects to point at anyone in particular. It staggered Darlene to discover how terribly people, even so-called sisters, could treat you as soon as they had an excuse. Hazel hadn’t needed any powder. It turned out black magic didn’t work because of spells or potions but because of the fear of persecution and conspiracy that roiled under people’s lives like contaminated groundwater.
Darlene struggled against the abuse, thinking it would eventually subside, but it didn’t. The authorities, meanwhile, saw the pranks as isolated incidents, not a system of torture, and didn’t offer Darlene help. Her sisters hid behind their reputation. Sigma Tau Tau girls volunteered at soup kitchens, as the school’s administrators frequently reminded her, they led can drives and supported upward mobility in the black community with their bake sales. They performed, in their trademark periwinkle and tangerine, at senior citizens’ centers. They organized step shows and church bazaars and raised funds for people with cerebral palsy. Nobody believed that they had ganged up on Darlene, and finally she felt she had no choice but to leave Grambling.
Nat had grown extremely protective of Darlene, and as the attacks against her continued, their social world shrank and their bond intensified. He claimed responsibility for everything that happened to her and insisted on leaving school along with her. Darlene and Nat arranged with their professors to complete as many finals and papers as they could while missing a few classes and took steps to transfer to Centenary, in Shreveport, explaining as little to their families as possible, evading any questions about their relationship. Nat’s excitement grew at the thought of transferring when he found out that Centenary had a basketball team with great potential—the Gentlemen, a name that made Darlene laugh. The NCAA was punishing the Gents, he said, by failing to report their statistics; Nat had met a Centenary player named Robert Parish, a center, who had one of the best records in college ball, but nobody knew. To Darlene it sounded like Nat had more disappointment and injustice in store, but she donated an empty smile to his efforts anyway.
Even before the semester ended, they fled to Shreveport, living together not because other young unmarried couples had begun to make it fashionable, but because they had nobody else to rely on. Darlene’s sister, Bethella, was the only other family member who had gone to college before her, and she’d run off to Houston and never turned back. Darlene felt she couldn’t return to her family’s country ways after taking on all her college-girl habits and aspirations. The last time she’d gone home, her older brother, himself a high-school dropout, had pushed her psychology textbook off the table while she was studying and later, at the same dining-room table, told everybody how proud he was of her. Still, she had never gotten the highest grades, and her banishment dampened her mood and lowered her academic standing. It could’ve been worse; Nat’s adoptive father, Puma, a religious and shrewd man, figured out the whole story, and what he called Nat’s profligacy, mendacity, and premarital fornication disgusted him so thoroughly that he wouldn’t allow his son back home.
Afraid of campus housing at Centenary, after a few months, they found a small house with a wide yard on Joe Louis Boulevard. While talking to a new neighbor, they heard that Holiday in Dixie would begin that night. It was a lackluster, month-late shadow of Mardi Gras; that event truly happened only in New Orleans, but this second-rate party welcomed them in a way that Grambling never would again. Even the lukewarm gumbo bought from a truck stand filled their heads with the memory of hotter spice and juicier andouille, and though the salmon in their beggar’s pouches was all gray flesh and skin, the oily phyllo still flaked properly against their teeth, and that provided just enough comfort. They felt they had made the right choice.
Despite the loss and shame of leaving Grambling, Darlene felt she had won whenever she glanced at Nat. He’d agreed to go with her when he could have stayed and forsaken her along with the rest. He’d settled for a less impressive basketball scholarship. Words can’t prove true love, she would think, only the list of sacrifices you make to keep it alive. Nat had demonstrated his love through his honor.
Nat didn’t know much about his real parents, only his mother’s first name. The agency might have known more, but they refused to release any information to him. His foster parents had adopted him at thirteen, after the system had pinballed him through unstable East Texas homes where supposed brothers stole his baseball cards, mothers beat his shins with pool cues, and sisters tied him to chairs as a playtime activity. Only his growth spurt put an end to the abuse. Out of the six homes he passed through, he’d wanted to stay in only two of them, the first belonging to an affectionate divorcée with apple-shaped hips, the second to the family who ultimately adopted him, the Hardisons: his foster mother LaVerne, a tubby young woman with freckles and keloids scattered on her skin; his adoptive father, Patrick, nicknamed Puma, a sturdy throne of a man the color and complexion of a walnut, a tense and authoritarian ex-Marine whose tough love contained very little of the latter ingredient. From Puma, Nat absorbed a fervent admiration for the military and respect for authority, as well as the desire to emulate the straight-backed heroes of Iwo Jima and Korea.
Their few new friends at Centenary did not know that Nat and Darlene’s intense and somewhat paranoid bond had arisen from their persecution at Grambling. On a double date, a couple they knew from the Black Students’ Union stared when they shared from one plate and when Nat rose to let Darlene out of the booth to go to the bathroom and then followed her to the door. They joked uncomfortably when the two returned, but Nat couldn’t see what they found so unusual. Darlene mentioned shyly that they had registered for most classes together too.
We’re both majoring in econ, she said, and we help each other through all the madness. I make flash cards for us. It’s fun. We’re practically the same person now.
Their supper companions smiled and changed the subject, and they often had standing plans when Darlene contacted them in the future.
Almost concurrently with their banishment from Grambling, a deputy in Pensacola had shot a black man dead at point-blank range with a .357 Magnum. A little later, someone strangled a material witness who’d said that she had a relationship with the deputy and had seen the murder. By the end of January, the grand jury had acquitted the deputy. Hundreds of people took to the streets in Pensacola, but seventy policemen beat them with clubs. Nat followed all of this and became outraged; he showed as much anger over these events as he had about what had happened to Darlene, and she wondered if he was letting Pensacola stand in for the earlier, more personal injustice. Now he insisted that they had to work for equality, even on a small scale. Then Darlene realized that she was pregnant, the child probably conceived a week or so after they’d decided to transfer from Grambling.
Now Nat felt inspired to move to a smaller town, like the one near Lafayette where Darlene had grown up. The pregnancy seemed to make his wishes inevitable, even necessary. Somewhat randomly, Nat chose Ovis, Louisiana, a village on the shores of the Mississippi, half submerged under the poverty line, in part
for its odd name. The name sounded humble to him, like the sort of place where he could organize and mobilize small-town black folks. He’d also gotten inspired by Tom Bradley’s and Maynard Jackson’s political careers; it seemed a portal had opened for black mayors to get common people to recognize that safety and power came with the right to vote and that involvement in politics could raise their standard of living and prevent injustices like the one in Pensacola. The nation would soon turn two hundred years old—it was about time.
The fetus, however, as if to scorch the edges of their idealism, did not come to term. Nat and Darlene kept the door to the second bedroom of their new home closed for the greater part of the next year as they regained the strength to want a child again.
The following September, Eddie was born—prematurely, and the difficulty of caring for him added to the upheaval in his parents’ lives. With so little money, they ended up waiting to get married until Eddie was about six months old. They had no doubts about their relationship, but the official fussiness and expense of a wedding, added to the obligation to mobilize their families, had always seemed trivial and irritating compared to their monumental romance, their social dreams.
Though Nat, through his family, had known the stubbornness of rural folks firsthand as a child in East Texas, he still maintained a dreamy faith about the potential they represented. He had, after all, made something of himself, and he knew others could also. Occasionally he’d speak immodestly of himself as a Moses-like figure leading his people through the desert, but in truth, he faced a maddening grind convincing people to register to vote when they still felt that they might be harmed for attempting to better their lives. Nevertheless, Nat and Darlene opened a general store called the Mount Hope Grocery on the town’s tiny main street, and lonely, destitute men and women gathered in its back room to drink in the peace and companionship of similarly hopeless people. For the most part they admired Nat’s determination to mobilize the community, his fund-raising, his voter-registration drives, but they did not expect rapid change.
Sparkplug McKeon, however, a shiny-faced man whose compact body had taken on the shape of the three-legged, threadbare living-room chair that was his favorite in the dusty yard out back, would shake his head diagonally every time Nat launched a new initiative. Won’t none of this come to no good, he growled. I seened it too many a time.
He told three tales of recent, nearby woe to illustrate his point. The first involved a Northern activist, a black girl of seventeen who had been abducted, raped, and gutted with a fish knife in Acadia Parish, probably by the Ku Klux Klan.
Cold case, Sparkplug said, raising an eyebrow, and we all know what that mean.
The second had to do with a Jew who was shot in the face outside Baton Rouge because of a rumor that he’d been having an affair with a white woman prominent in the community. Sparkplug told this one to prove that the hatred ran deeper than just prejudice against Negroes.
Catholics too, he said. Ain’t nobody different had no chance in this damn state, he asserted, shaking his head.
The third tale was about his own uncle, Louis McKeon, who had refused to give up a parcel of land to a white man and gone missing soon afterward.
My cousin Grant wasn’t but six month old at the time. You tell me what McKeon man gonna leave off his new child like that, Sparkplug said, never hearing hide nor hair of him again. I tell you it never happen—we honorable folk. My cousin Geneva? Said she heard some white man talkin ’bout that they dumped Uncle Lou’s body in the Mississippi and watched the gators feedin on it, and they was jus a-laughing, taking bets or some shit. And white folks say niggers is animals, that we next door to a ape. I tell you I’d rather be next door to a ape than next door to a goddamn cracker. At least a ape be my friend from Africa, wouldn’t sell his damn house on Tuesdy if I move next door on Mondy. See, to these folks, a animal is even more of a nigger than a nigger is. And you know animals is some beautiful creatures of God. What they think so bad ’bout being a ape?
And yet the residents of Ovis appeared to have accepted the injustices they’d suffered as inescapable. Nat felt he could’ve knelt down in front of their strained smiles and gathered their impacted anger in his hands as he went door to door and filled baskets with the harvest, but his attempts to plant it or grow it into any kind of action often proved futile.
Well, he’d ask Sparkplug, why don’t you register to vote, my man?
Sparkplug, the most frankly angry man for miles, often in the process of arranging his poker hand, didn’t usually look up. The one time he did reply, he said, Vote for who? The son of the cracker sumbitch killed my uncle?
The men passed laughter between them like beer, mollifying a shared disappointment, frustration, and rage intense enough to turn murderous if you provoked it, though the opportunity to vent wouldn’t ever arrive. Even if they got a chance, the talons of injustice would swoop down soon enough, dismember these men, and be gone, and everybody would forget that any of it had happened, leaving no trace aside from a lingering miasma that might rise into the Spanish moss.
Gradually, though, some of the men and women came to Nat privately, and he began to convince these few to see past their hopelessness and wrath into an easier future, if only a slightly easier one. A few signed up. They joked about a time when their despair would lift, when someone would cut them a break, and with a proud smirk, Nat saw that they’d taken the first step toward shedding their perpetual despair. But all his activity, despite the optimism at the heart of its politics, quickly attracted negative attention in the form of threatening phone calls, unpleasant words on the street, and bad service in local businesses. They’d been through this sort of thing before, from their own people, Nat reminded Darlene, so they should know not to pay it any mind. Still, Nat tended to measure these minor wrongs against far larger ones, like the atrocities committed against Henry Marrow, Medgar Evers, and Emmett Till, so he failed to see them for what they were: the opening moves of a chess game he could never win, considering how many moves ahead his opponents were already thinking.
4.
We Named the Goat
This chick standing by that navy blue minibus parked at the side of the road seem okay to Darlene—better than okay. Firstly the woman had on a clean blouse, in a multicolored African triangle pattern, almost like a stained-glass window. Only a couple holes in that shirt—same with them acid-wash jeans and them skippies on her feet. The minibus seem sorta new, mostly. Wasn’t no scratches or dents you could see under the white light in front the Party Fool, the next lot over from the one where Darlene just lost three teeth. The minibus tires was all waxy shiny, the hubcaps too. The sliding door slid open smooth, and you could smell the plasticky new-car odor inside even from a couple feet away. Them windows be shining, them seats look like they could actually bounce, and when Darlene leant sideways round the woman and peeked inside, she could tell the brothers in the back was comfortable.
The lady—said her name Jackie—done started in like some direct-marketing TV huckster, talking fast ’bout this place and this job that sounded real good, and that Darlene and I should go with her. A wet Jheri curl went sproing on her head, then it gone partway down the back of her neck, with the hairpins pushing the sides above her ears for that business-casual look. Darlene ain’t concentrated on nothing Jackie said, though, ’cause she said more than need be, the way people do when they already decided that you gonna turn down they pitch.
While we listening, Darlene had to plant her feet to keep from shouting with joy, even with all that dried blood caked up in her nose and gums and them scratched-up knees. Sound like this lady had a job they wanna give her, without no interview or nothing, hard work but good work, no more tryna sell her body and getting stabbed or having to watch no shame-loving Cajun get busy with no melon.
Jackie said, The company’s associates do agricultural work, harvesting a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, and legumes. She actually said them actual phrases, like it’s out a book s
he ain’t never finished reading herself.
Darlene grown up doing that shit in the first place, so she got lonely for her childhood. On this job she gon be picking fruits and vegetables, like she a innocent little girl again. Jackie also made the farm sound like the kinda place where Darlene and I could go together and wouldn’t nobody stop us from hanging out and doing our thing, and that seemed so perfect that we wondered if we mighta made it up ourself.
A image come up in Darlene mind, of a bodacious-ass horn of plenty that had all kinda green and red peppers and shit spilling out, and bananas and carrots and grapes and whatnot, and everything be cold, crispy, fresh, and wet with morning dew on account a being just picked. In her head, somebody snapped a carrot and it sprayed a li’l bit of mist up into the air.
Darlene said to me, See, Scotty. The book works. I put positivity and love out on my antenna and the universe sent it back to bless me.
Jackie said, Three-star accommodations. She said, Olympic-size swimming pool. Said, Recreation activities. Competitive salary. Vacation. Then she showed Darlene a picture of some condo-type complex with a motherfucking kidney-shaped pool smack-dab in the center. Then Jackie top it off with benefits, health care. We got a dentist that could help out with any problems you might have, Jackie said, looking at Darlene mouth, as well as day care. To be honest, she said, the pay ain’t super-high, but we offer our workers a salary above minimum wage, the competitive rate in the field.
Darlene appreciated the honesty. Even better than getting a high salary was the feeling that you working with people you could respect, who told your ass the truth, motherfuckers you could communicate with. This here felt like the first luck Darlene had touched in the whole six years since she lost Nat. Above minimum wage? She thought she could reach up to that luck and stroke it and the luck would go purr.
Delicious Foods Page 6
