Dark Don't Catch Me

by Packer, Vin

  Over the old black iron stove there is a calendar sent the Hoopers every year by the Paradise Feed Company. Miss Vivie always makes a present of it to Bissy, who follows its printed advice and predictions religiously, making Major read off the next day’s weather and horoscope every night before bed.

  Last night he had read:

  A.M. Those of whom you are fond look to you for aid. You now can find right thing to do for them to bring them peace of mind. P.M. Get together with companions for cultural pursuits; music, art, literature. Weather: Cold with seasonable temperatures.

  “You better take your coat to your pallet with you,” she had told Major. “S’gone be cold, hah?”

  And Major had said, “Aw Ma, Ma. Don’t you know that calendar is printed up North!”

  “Don’t matter who prints it if it say the truth. I felt a chill all day.”

  “Ma, look,” Major had said. “This calendar goes all over the country. The Paradise Feed Company just tacks their name on the end. How you think someone can predict weather for all over the country, huh?”

  Bissy Post had mulled that one over, going right on with her darning without answering her son.

  “And those horoscopes are the same way. How you think the same thing’s going to happen to everyone who looks up under Tuesday on the calendar?”

  “Well, all I know,” Bissy Post had told him, “is I’m not studying no trouble and don’t want no one else in this house to. And whatever that means ‘bout aid tomorrow, better not mean trouble!”

  But trouble had come, just the way Bissy was sure it would; come down the hill hollering, and Bissy’d known the nature of the trouble the second she saw her child, the dirt on the back of her dress, known the nature of it before she saw the blood, and thought, Gawd Jesus, not so soon. Not so young.

  “They said if I didn’t show them they was gonna scalp me with a jack-knife,” the child cried, “so I showed ‘em and they held me down and took sticks and — ”

  “Hush, now, Marilyn Monroe,” Bissy had soothed her, holding her naked brown body as she stood her in the tin pail in the kitchen and bathed her. “Hush and forget.”

  And old Hussie, sitting in the rocker and puffing on her corncob, declared, “I won’t forget! I won’t! A baby like that! You wait till I give Miz Hooper a piece ‘bout that devil she raisin!”

  “They hurt me, Mama. Hurt me awful!”

  “Hush, honey, now,” Bissy had whispered. “We gonna see the doc soon as you washed.”

  It had to happen some time; eventually, it had to. Bissy was just glad the first time had been a boy only a few years older than Marilyn Monroe; and not like it had been with Bissy, when she was just ten and a red-faced, fat, poor-white peckerwood, big as a bull, had caught hold of her in the woods on her way from school, forced her on the twig-blanketed ground under him and placed his mammoth hand across her face while he put pain in her she thought she’d die of; and afterwards, running and crying her way back to the shanties of Colored Town, Bissy, the girl, had thought, wait till my papa mop the floor up with that cracker for doin that — not knowing then what Bissy now knew: crackers can do what they please to a colored man’s woman, and the colored man loves life better than to say a mumbling word….

  Bissy had stayed home from picking purposely, knowing Hussie was in a fit at it; thinking Hussie’s fit won’t do nothing but stir up trouble, and fearing to be up on Linoleum Hill when it started. She had listened on the radio to the kindly voice of Daddy Tap, feeling some vague reassurance in knowing there was someone bent on fixing the misery in this life, and going to call him up and ask for the hymn had somehow bolstered her spirits — even though her request had already been played, and the program over, by the time she returned home. Then when Bryan came from work she told him what little Thad had done; and she had felt almost completely restored to herself after they had talked about it this way:

  “I’ll go back up there to Hoopers place an’ kill ‘em!”

  “Naw, Bryan. No good.”

  “Kill him and his kid, doing things like that to Marilyn Monroe!”

  “You gotta calm, nigger. You gotta calm, cause no good’s coming of it. The Lord’ll show him when death stops him in the road and cuts him down.”

  “Yeah, Gawd don’t need no feeler-uppers or knocker-downers in heaven. Gonna be a black Gawd sittin’ judgment on white crackers ‘at think black women made for maulin’!”

  “They gonna burn. Hell gon smell of white skins burning like barbecue.”

  “I oughtta kill ‘em but the Lord’ll do it better, Gawd knows that, Bissy!”

  “The Lord will!”

  “The devil’s got lots of cheese in hell, now all he need is crackers!”

  “An’ he gonna get plenty of them!”

  “The Lord’s writin’ it down, sittin’ up there an’ lookin’ down and writin’ down everything he sees, and he already wrote in what happens to Marilyn Monroe. An ain’t nobody gonna erase the writin’.”

  “I know it. I believe it.”

  “Has to be, Bissy. Has to!”

  “Couldn’t be no other way.”

  Thinking back on it, Bissy thinks Major sure gonna bust his gut when he hears it. Major just like Hussie, got fire burning in him. Can hide the fire but can’t do nothing about the smoke; smoke’s gotta come out in the open, same as with old Hus. Bissy worries thinking about it. It gonna get him into trouble yet. Major don’t know he’s black sometimes, Gawd help him; hung around with the James niggers and some of it rubbed off on him.

  She pokes the hush-puppies and they siss at the grease; and she shouts so Bryan can hear her outside: “It’s a mighty deaf nigger ‘at don’t hear de dinner-horn!”

  “C’mon, Claus,” Bryan Post’s voice booms. “C’mon Marilyn Mon-roe. We got hush-puppies and catfish waitin’ on us!”

  Coming through the kitchen door, Claus Post asks: “Whatsa oven-belly bitch anyhow?”

  “You hush dat language up,” his father warns, “or I’ll knock you looser quicker’n you kin say Gawd wid your mouth open!”

  “That’s what little Thad telled me I was when I tell him Hus say I cain’t play with him no more cause what he done to my sister!”

  “Hush, child!” Bissy says. “Hush! We gone have dinner right off, cause Daddy is gotta fetch your cousin from up North in the pickup.”

  Marilyn Monroe Post, still sucking on her dip stick, ambles over to the tin table and stands meditating, while Bryan pulls the orange crates, set on end, around the table. “Sit you down, now,” he tells her and Claus, “and don’t let me hear nothin’ but the sound of forks on plates! We ain’t studying conversation round here t’night.”

  “I’m a bitch,” Marilyn Monroe Post announces. “Little Thad tole me that too before he hurt me.”

  “Child, hush!” Bissy tells her. “Hush! Now I got something good to talk about.” She forks the hush-puppies onto plates stacked beside the old stove. “I bet you don’t know the fact I talked to Mr. Tap Wood on the radio. Yes sir, bet you all didn’t have no idea ‘bout that.”

  “Sure she did,” Bryan Post says. “She did, she did. An what’d he say, huh, Bissy? Re-late!”

  Bissy beams, bringing the plates to the table. “He just say, ‘Why thank you, Bissy,’ just as nice. He say, ‘Why thank you, Bissy. I’m glad you done called Bissy.’ “

  “He say more’n that, don’t he?” Bryan says, fitting his handkerchief under his collar. “What else he say?”

  “He say, ‘I hope you are well, Bissy.’ He say, ‘I hope you and your family are right peart.’ “

  “Sure enough?” Claus asks.

  “Sure enough he say that to your maw, boy. It come out right over the radio!”

  Bissy sits herself on a crate beside her daughter. “Here, girl, now put that dip stick down and get at them hush-puppies, hmmm?”

  “Doc James gave me this stick,” Marilyn Monroe tells her father, “after he stopped the bleeding.”

  “Was you bleedin’, sister? I nev
er knew you was bleedin’!”

  “What else did Tap Wood say, Bissy, huh? Relate!”

  “T’morrow,” Claus Post declares. “Ah’m gonna do de same thing ta his sister, ‘n see how that go over wid dat dumb stupid snowflake!”

  Suddenly, without warning, Bryan Post reaches out, grabs his son by the collar and shoves him off the crate, shouting, “You nev-er, say that! You nev-er open your big mouth wid dat talk! Nigger boy, you nev-er think dat thought! Goddam it damn! You hear?”

  Shocked, incredulous, the twelve-year-old sits on the worn wooden floor staring up at his father, knuckling his eye the way he does before he cries, his eyes wide and frightened and injured.

  “No, Gawd,” Bissy moans, getting off her crate, stooping and pressing the boy’s body against her own. “Gawd, Bryan, tell him another way. Don’t beat facts in when all he wanna do is love his sister.”

  Standing now, his back turned on his family, head hung, Bryan Post mumbles, “Got to beat dat fact in. Got to be no mistake bout dat fact. Dat’s sure.”

  “What else the preacher say, Mama?” Marilyn whines from the table.

  Still kneeling with Claus pressed against her, rocking back and forth gently, now slowly, Bissy Post makes herself begin again, “He say, ‘I hope you and your family are right peart — ’ “

  “You say he say that already,” the child whines. “You already say he say that.”

  “And he say God looking out over Claus Post, Marilyn Monroe Post, Major Post, Bryan Post — the whole Post family, cause he say God knows we good people.”

  “Why, sure enough he say that,” Bryan Post says softly, returning to the table, straddling the crate and raising his fork from his plate. “Sure enough,” he murmurs, looking down at his food. “Relate it to ‘em, honey. Relate. Relate.”

  13

  At the airport where Millard is to change to the Dixie Airways for the rest of his trip, a porter stops him.

  The porter says, “You going in the wrong door, boy.”

  “Isn’t this where I go to get on another plane?”

  “Over there.” The porter points at a sign which reads For Colored Passengers Only. “That door”

  Millard frowns up at the sign, thinks, Christ what the hell, laughs a puzzled laugh of dejection and walks into the airport offices through that door. Besides two ministers standing staring out the window at the runway, there are no other Negroes in this small room. At the baggage claim counter a white man stands, talking on the telephone. As Millard walks toward him he thinks how like a baby’s the white man’s voice is, rattling on in that slurry Southern accent.

  “Yeah, now you know dat’s a fact, isn’t it?” the man is saying, giving a high, giggling laugh. “Why sho I am, hun-ny! Huh? Huh? Yeah? Well, wha you know, huh?” ending every sentence in a question.

  Millard stands waiting for him to finish, stands holding his baggage claim ticket waiting. When finally the man finishes he doesn’t look at Millard right away, but takes out a magazine and starts flipping the pages.

  Millard says, “Is this where I get my baggage from the plane I was on, sir?”

  “Now just a minute, boy” the white man says. “I be with you in just a pretty minute.”

  “Yes sir,” Millard says, seeing his suitcase being rolled in on a cart then. “There’s my bag now.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you hold them horses, boy,” the man says, turning the pages of the magazine.

  A Negro porter puts the bag up on the ramp in front of Millard, and Millard starts to reach for it.

  “Uh-uh, boy,” the man says without taking his eyes from his magazine. “You got to wait until I take your ticket.”

  “I have to catch another plane, sir,” Millard tells him. “I have to get on the Dixie Airways flight, sir.”

  “Well, you just be patient now, boy, hear?”

  Millard’s shoulders slump in exasperation. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, waiting, watching the white man. Then he remembers the stickers in his pocket which he planned to paste on his cardboard suitcase, and he takes them out. The round one with the airline’s name and the picture of the super-constellation, he turns over, licks, and then reaches out to slap on the old valise. The white man stops reading the magazine.

  “What’re you doing, boy?” he asks.

  “Putting a sticker on my suitcase, sir”

  “How do I know that’s your suitcase. I haven’t seen the ticket yet.”

  “Ticket’s right here,” Millard says, offering it to the man after he presses the sticker against the cardboard.

  The man reaches down and pulls the sticker, still wet, off the bag. “I can’t let you mark up baggage until I know it’s yours.” The man smiles sweetly at Millard. “You can understand that, can’t you, boy?” He wads the sticker up in a ball and tosses it behind him.

  “But here’s my baggage check,” Millard says.

  “You should have showed me that in the first place, boy. You understand I can’t let you do anything you want to do to baggage unless I know it belong to you.” The man chuckles. He takes the check from Millard’s hand. “Yeah, you’re right. Your baggage all right, I reckon.” He keeps his hand on the handle of Millard’s bag then. “What you got in the grip, boy?”

  “My clothes,” Millard answers, bottling up his fury but afraid too.

  “Zoot-suits, huh?” “No,” Millard says.

  “Up North don’t you colored boys wear zoot suits when you go out strutting, huh?” “No,” Millard says.

  “You colored boys up North live it up, huh, don’t you? Dance and carry on? Huh?”

  Millard says, “No, sir. Please, sir, I want to catch my plane.”

  “Well, you go on and catch it, boy. It’s been loading out on Gate sixteen for twenty minutes now. Oh, they know you’re coming, boy. Don’t you worry none about that.”

  “Gate Sixteen?” Millard says, reaching for his bag. The white man still holds on to it.

  “That’s right, boy. You ‘member to take the seat up front now, so no one has to tell you, won’t you, huh?”

  “Up front?” Millard looks puzzled.

  “Up over the motors, boy. You know about that, don’t you? The colored generally prefer to sit up there. You know, boy?”

  Millard understands then. “Yes,” he mumbles, “Yes — sir.”

  The white man lets go of Millard’s bag and Millard picks it up. Pushing through the revolving door, Millard feels for the first time the breathless mugginess of the sticky weather. And when he feels the tears want to come in his eyes, he sinks his teeth hard into his lower lip, battling them back, fighting those goddam chicken tears with everything in him, until he tastes his own blood. And instead of swallowing it back inside of him, he spits it out on the sun-baked Southern soil to the right of the ramp to Gate Sixteen.

  14

  WALKING away from the circle made by his guests around the fire, below the brow of Linoleum Hill, Thad Hooper sets off for the top of the hill where the stew and barbecue are cooking. It irritates him that the evening has started off badly, first with the petty incident between little Thad and the nigger kid, which had incited old Hussie’s anger, as well as Major’s, Thad guesses; and then with the inevitable scene between himself and Vivian, both before and after their love-making. Finally, Vivian had deliberately, Thad decides, put on that flimsy blue cotton for the party, put it on knowing full well how it shows her in the front, when she bends to talk to someone or serve someone or stand beside Major at the plank table, his tallness looking down on her, as if to flaunt the very thing Thad had criticized her for after they had risen from their bed late that afternoon and talked while they dressed.

  “Can’t see what you’re getting at, Thad,” she had complained. “Isn’t it normal to feel like making love?”

  “I’m not referring to that now. I’m talking about self-control in everything. The way you dress and take naps and — ”

  “But you were talking about that. You were trying to make me seem l
ike some kind of loathsome — ”

  “Vivian, please! Don’t try to begin an argument.”

  “No, now let me talk. Let me say what’s on my mind. You used the word wiggle, Thad. You said you didn’t like it when I got to wiggling like a bitch in heat. What did that mean? I don’t know what that meant.”

  “I didn’t say that. You’re twisting what I said.”

  “You said wiggle. You said I wiggle. What does it mean?”

  “God damn it, Vivian, you know, honey! I just mean people have to — people can’t go around without any self-control! You’re a grown lady!”

  “And grown ladies don’t wiggle in their husband’s embrace, ah?”

  “Vivie, honey, now, damn! I just mean you have this little thing about you that is — well, sometimes it’s right vulgar.”

  “Oh, that’s good!” She had laughed sardonically. “That one’s rich! You stand there and tell me that, and I like to died laughing. You stand there and say a thing like that to me, when you just get through ordering me on to the bed like some tart up in Mary Jane Frances Alexander’s cat house! That’s good! That’s typical! If it’s your idea to go to bed, everything’s right fine. But if it’s mine you manage to make me ashamed for getting the idea in the first place, and then when you’ve managed to do that and I’m out of the mood, you order me onto my back!”

  “Vivian!”

  “Well, isn’t that true?”

  “Vivian, I just — I get sick — sick inside when you speak that way. Use words like that. I don’t know what comes over you sometimes. Sometimes I can’t believe my ears, or my eyes. Vivian, I seriously mean it. There’s something in you that’s got to be bridled. Some kind of little worm that’s — ”

  “Wiggling?” she’d interrupted him, laughing bitterly.

  “All right. All right. Please. Please, not today. Today of all days.”

  And then she had said the cruelest thing of all. “Oh, yes, lest we forget that paragon of virtue, Thelma Ann Hooper!”

  • • •

  That had hurt. It still hurt. To bring his sister into filthy talk in the bedroom. To mention her name and call up to Thad’s screen of memory the vision of the sweetness of the child, his twin, his sister in the womb, and the agony her loss had caused, the recurrent agony pricked by nostalgia for the time when they were young together, growing up as one, remembering only last Sunday in church the robbed and forsaken feeling that had crept through him as Joh read from Solomon’s Songs: How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!