Grace

by Robert Ward

  “ ‘Whatsa matter, J.J.!’ I yelled. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  “Then I managed to make out his face. It wasn’t J.J. Randall at all. To my total surprise and horror I looked down and saw a short, thin, delicate-featured Negro boy of around my own age.”

  “‘O Lord, forgive me,’ I said.

  “I dropped the branch and knelt by his side. His eyes were closed, and he was making a terrible sound.

  “ ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Please, talk to me.’

  “Slowly his eyes opened. The largest, most luminous, and most intelligent brown eyes I’ve ever seen. He looked at me and then gave this strange little laugh. More like a gagging sound than a laugh.

  “He said: ‘I heard you were a remarkable person, but I had no idea … just how remarkable.’

  “And that, my dear grandson, is how I first met Wingate Washington. He had followed me from school and was waiting for me to get far enough away so that he might introduce himself. But he was afraid to come out, fearful that I might not want to meet him after all; afraid, too, that someone might see us. I looked down at his wide, slightly hooked nose, his large, beautiful mouth. His features were outsized, just as his head was for his body. He looked in some ways like a black pixie, I thought, not like any other Negro I’d seen or any white either. He was, I knew from talking to him only a few minutes, an altogether remarkable person. After I’d made my apologies and we saw that he had only a large welt on his chest, that he could breathe, he wanted to make no more of it.

  “ ‘Let’s pretend it never happened,’ he said. ‘I want to talk with you … but I’ve picked a bad time. You have to get home and …’

  “ ‘No, I don’t,’ I said.

  “ ‘Won’t your uncle worry?’

  “ ‘Him? I seriously doubt it. I’ll just tell him my piano lesson went longer than I expected. We can talk here … if you like.’

  “ ‘No, not here,’ he said. ‘Would you trust me enough to go somewhere with me?’

  “ ‘Yes, I would,’ I said.

  “I said it just exactly like that, right off I don’t know what it was … but I felt … no, I knew that I could trust him perfectly. I knew it … even after all the stories I’d heard all my life of Negro boys raping white women. I had never really believed them anyway, and I knew that Wingate would never hurt me in any way.

  “I went with him that second … in the dark, walking next to him through the woods. I had never done anything so bold in my life. Soon I had no idea where we were at all. Some place to the north of my uncle’s home, not far from the coast, because I could smell the sea, but that was all I could say. And then we came to a little culvert, where I stumbled over a log and he reached out and took my hand. I grabbed his, and there we were walking hand in hand through the dark woods.

  “ ‘You must be careful here,’ he said. ‘Lots of fallen trees to trip over.’

  “I held on to him for dear life, and we scrambled over a ledge … and came up a hill, and suddenly, there we were at the door of an abandoned cabin. An old place with a sagging roof. But the door was still on its hinges, and we went inside.

  “Of course, it was pitch-dark, and for the first time I felt afraid. What was I doing here with this stranger? But within seconds he’d lit a lantern and I saw what he’d done to the room. He’d built a little table and two chairs from saplings. There was a cross on the table, made from driftwood … a cross he’d carved and sanded. And on the wall there was a picture of a Negro woman and a man … older people … I guessed they were his parents. The little lantern flared and made the place seem suddenly cozy, intimate.

  “ ‘This cabin is over a hundred years old,’ he said. He looked at me, and there was pride and a certain arrogance in his smooth, deep voice.

  “ ‘It’s like your own little hideaway,’ I said.

  “He smiled with one side of his mouth, again a curious, pixieish smile. As if he had a secret and might or might not share it with me.

  “ ‘Did you do all this yourself?’

  “ ‘Yes. I come here to be alone. A retreat.’

  “ ‘It’s wonderful.’

  “He looked up, and that’s when I saw the hole in the roof and the winter moon shining down on us.

  “ ‘And if the weather’s clear, you don’t even need a lantern.’

  “I walked over and looked up through the rooftop and saw the cloudy winter moon.

  “ ‘Amazing,’ I said.

  “ ‘Bonnie tells me you’re a wonderful person,’ he said.

  “ ‘Oh, God—Bonnie,’ I said. I was blushing.

  “ ‘So be wonderful,’ he said.

  “ ‘You first,’ I shot back.

  “We both laughed then. And it occurred to me that under his bluster he was as nervous as I was.

  “ ‘I hear you’re a preacher,’ I said.

  “ ‘Guilty as charged,’ he said. Then he gave me a curious smile.

  “ ‘And I hear you know history,’ he said. ‘I’ll trade you my sermons for your knowledge.’

  “ ‘I’d get the best end of that bargain,’ I said. ‘Because I know very little history.’

  “ ‘Then you know a little more than me,’ he said. ‘I have a cousin in Harlem … my cousin Sonny. He has written me letters, and poetry. He’s said that in Harlem, educated Negro men and women write poems and essays and novels.’

  “ ‘Yes, I’ve heard about that,’ I said. ‘I had a teacher in Baltimore named Caroline. She even gave me a magazine from Harlem, called The Messenger.’

  “His eyes sparkled in the lamplight.

  “ ‘You’ve read it?’ he said, leaning across the table.

  “ ‘I’ve got one of them with me at my uncle’s.’

  “ ‘Really? Can I see it?’

  “ ‘Of course,’ I said.

  “He smiled for the briefest of seconds. Then he got an intensely serious look in those big eyes and stared at me so intently I felt that he was literally photographing my heart. People will tell you they long for someone to know them deeply, intimately … but when it’s happening, it’s not an entirely comfortable sensation, believe you me. I felt shy, awkward, nearly naked in front of him. It was as though we were fated to meet, and that scared me, because if it was true, then something cataclysmic was going to happen, and though I’d always prayed for something to happen, really happen with my life, now that it was, I didn’t know if I could stand it.

  “We stared at each other for a long time. It was strange. He could do that, just stare at you and make you feel connected to him. I felt that I couldn’t bear the intensity of his gaze, and yet if he stopped looking at me, I’d be lost. I don’t remember exactly what we said that night … nothing, really. He had already said all he needed to say to me. I wanted to know him and find out everything about him, and he made me feel that I was the most important person on earth.”

  She stopped then. I said nothing, and she got up and walked to the window and looked out, but I felt that she wasn’t seeing anything out there at all … certainly not Singer Avenue. She was back at Mayo, thinking of her own past, lost in that cabin with the hole in the roof under the chill winter moon, and for that matter, so was I. I felt that whatever had happened there between them would be of the deepest significance to me as well. I thought of what she’d said, of “waiting for something to happen,” and it occurred to me that this was a pretty good description of my own life … waiting and waiting for something … and now, now was my time just as that time had been hers. And that somehow, too, they were the same time.

  My Father’s rendering of mayo

  W e met in secret maybe six times over the next few weeks, and we kept the bargain we’d made that first night. I told him the history I’d learned from Caroline Wright, and he told me about his experiences growing up in Mayo, his mother and father’s hard life, working various jobs in the county, barely staying out of the street. He also told me about having a vision at the age of thirteen. He’d been walking across the
iced-over South River when suddenly he heard a sharp noise. He looked down and before he knew it, the ice was cracking beneath his feet. He watched himself falling into the water … and he knew he was going to die. The water was cold, freezing cold, and he couldn’t pull himself out. And then it happened.

  “ ‘I felt something picking me up,’ he said, ‘as though I was as light as a feather. I hovered over the ice for a second, then the same force that had dished me out laid me down on the solid ice. I knew then that I had been saved for some reason … and the reason was to tell my people of God’s glory.’

  “Well, I listened to this with a doubting heart. When I questioned him about it, he admitted that he was barely conscious from the cold, and so I suggested that perhaps he had somehow pulled himself out. But he simply smiled and said softly:

  “ ‘You don’t believe in signs or omens or miracles?’

  “ ‘I don’t know.’

  “ ‘But you say you’re a religious person. A Methodist. What about the star of Bethlehem? Don’t you believe that it signaled Christ’s birth?’

  “I laughed nervously when he said that. I had sung the hymns and heard the stories of Jesus’ birth all my life, and if someone had asked me, I would have said that of course they were true. But when Wingate asked me to examine the individual parts of the story, like the star of Bethlehem, when he asked me if I really believed that a star shone over Jesus’ manger, lighting the way for the Three Wise Men, I realized that I wasn’t sure. That for me, the story was emotionally true, like a legend might be … but real, absolutely real? I realized for the first time that I wasn’t at all sure I believed it. Not like he was sure, that was for certain.

  “He wouldn’t let me off the hook, though.

  “ ‘You must believe in it,’ he said. ‘We must take it on faith … and my faith is strong.’

  “ ‘Well, so is mine,’ I said, reassuring him. But inside I wondered … how strong?

  “That was a tricky moment, and it worried me. But not at first. There was such joy between us, the joy of true friends discovering each other, of like souls … the kind of joy you can only know with people when you are both very young. It’s hard to put it into words…. ‘Sympathy’ doesn’t really express it. ‘Companions’ is too weak…. It was something so mysterious, so compelling that it seemed wondrous, something nearly perfect … but also at times ominous, as though whatever it was that compelled us to see each other was almost beyond any rational description.”

  She stopped again, struggling to find the words.

  “I bet I know what you’re thinking … that all this is just an old woman’s old-fashioned way of saying we were attracted to each other … but neither one of us could admit it.”

  I felt my face redden. Sometimes Grace credited me with a prescience I didn’t have. In fact, though, this time she was partially right. I had begun to think of a notion somewhat along those lines, though it was scarcely a true thought. I was, after all, fifteen years old, and if the idea of my grandmother having sex with my grandfather was a fairly radical notion, the thought of her having sex with a Negro in 1920 … well, that was almost unthinkable. Still …

  “Well, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said, “and I can see by your sudden sunburn that it is, you’re dead wrong. First of all, I had those feelings, Bobby, but they weren’t for Wingate. They were for that strange, muscular, yet amazingly graceful skater I’d seen skating on that cold day on the South River. But I hadn’t been able to find out much about him … except that he was older than me and he’d already quit school, and Bonnie said that one of the girls she knew thought maybe he was a Bayman … a crabber.

  “And second, having a friendship with Wingate was radical enough. And Wingate never gave any indication that he wanted any other kind of relationship.

  “In fact, he told me several times that he admired Gandhi for his chastity … as I did. We were, after all, young idealists and very much in love with the idea of purity.

  “So, my friendship with Wingate grew. We were able to talk to each other in a way that I’d never talked with another person before…. I showed him The Messenger I had with me, the magazine by A. Philip Randolph, who later organized the railroad porters. Wingate was thrilled. He said that his cousin Sonny was supposed to send him copies but had never gotten around to it. He loved the magazine, read it over and over, and we discussed the rise of his people. He felt that the world was entering a new era, that men and women would see things clearly, that they needed to relearn basic things … trust, love, and most of all the love of the earth through Christ.

  “One afternoon while we were eating a basketful of crabs in the woods, he leaped up on a tree stump and said:

  “ ‘Look at the trees and see the face of God. Look at the animals and feel God’s glory. White people put their trust in machines … but it’s a false trust.’

  “I smiled at him. I was in love with his passion … but he frowned at me.

  “ ‘Do you know the twentieth psalm?’

  “I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t. He looked down at me from the stump and quoted:

  “ “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.” ‘

  “I loved that line … ‘Some trust in chariots.’ He was referring to World War I, which had crushed so many people’s spirits but, he said, not the Negroes’.

  “He laughed and told me that Negroes had already been crushed so many times that they had an advantage now over whites. They knew how to survive disaster, while white people were experiencing it as a race for the very first time. He said that everything pointed to the Negro’s rise … the brilliance of the culture and politics he’d heard about up in Harlem, the Negroes’ sense that they had to unite as a people …

  “And he knew that he was destined to play a part in it all. He wasn’t sure what it would be, but he knew that God would send him a sign, just as he had before.

  “ ‘What kind of sign?’ I asked. Once again I was uncomfortable with such talk.

  “ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It might come in the form of an animal, it might come in the form of a storm. A leaf, a rock … I’ll just know when I know.’

  “ ‘Where did you first hear about signs?’ I asked. ‘The Bible?’ “He nodded, then added, ‘And from my grandfather, Moses Washington.’

  “Then he told me the saga of this grandfather who’d raised him when his own father disappeared and his mother had died. Moses was a country preacher and as far as I could tell a rambler, storyteller, and gambler.

  “Moses believed in signs, symbols. Some came from the Bible, some from local folklore. If Moses saw a crab on Monday, it meant that he would have bounteous fishing and hunting all week. If he heard an owl hoot three times in the morning, he believed that the day would bring rain. If he saw a shooting star, he knew that money was coming his way.

  “ ‘Grandaddy was a two-faced man,’ he said. ‘He was a preacher but he was also a gambling man. And he could throw some mean dice.’ “ ‘Ah, I see. Your grandaddy was Janus,’ I said. “Wingate looked at me and shook his head.

  “I explained to him that Janus was the gatekeeper in mythology, something my mother had taught me.

  “Wingate was fascinated. I explained to him that Janus had two heads that signaled change … that the gatekeeper ushered in a kind of change.

  “That sent Wingate off in a new direction. He wanted to know more … no, not more, everything about myths and legends. Though I was no expert in mythology, I told Wingate all I knew of such things, but he was insatiable. Finally, I went to the little country library in Mayo and found an old book on mythology. I met Wingate in our cabin, and we turned on the lamp and began reading it.

  “And there in our little cabin in the sandy woods outside of Mayo, by candlelight, things that I might have smirked at in the past suddenly took on a new meaning. And Wingate’s belief in such things, his absolute faith that we were learning the hidden reality, the tru
e meaning of the universe, was like a drug to me. The more we met, the more we studied, the more I came to believe …