by Pearl Cleage
Mitch drowned two years ago this February, and in the dictionary under the words freak accident, there would be a picture of that shit. A couple of years ago the lake in front of their house got real popular with ice fishermen. These guys would come out early in the morning, drill a big hole in the ice, and sit there all day drinking beer, peeing in the hole, and wondering why the ‘spose to be that stupid fish didn’t swim on up and commit suicide for a chance at a plastic cricket.
By evening, the fishermen were too drunk and disappointed to clearly mark the area with safety flags like they’re supposed to do, so the lake was dotted with all these open holes. Once it got dark, they froze over with a thin sheet of ice, not enough to support your weight, but just enough to camouflage the hole.
Mitch and Joyce went walking beside the lake on this particular night and he started sliding around on the ice, doing tricks, showing off for Joyce. They had been married twenty-three years and he still acted like she had just accepted his invitation to the senior prom. So he got up some speed, slid way out, opened his arms into the wind, hollered, “I love my wife!” and disappeared. By the time they pulled him out, he was gone. Mitch was the sweetest man I ever knew, and for a long time after he died, I kept thinking how unfair it was for him to die that way. I was still naive back then. I thought fairness had something to do with who gets to stay and who gots to go.
In the bad-luck department, there’s also the fact that my mother chose Joyce’s wedding night to mourn my father’s death five years earlier by taking all the sleeping pills she’d been hoarding for this occasion and drinking herself to death with a fifth of Johnny Walker Red. She left a note for Joyce, who was almost eighteen, saying she was sorry and that maybe Joyce would understand if anything ever happened to Mitch. I was still a kid and didn’t even have a boyfriend yet, so she didn’t leave anything for me.
I don’t know whether or not Joyce finally understood when Mitch fell through that ice, but my mother’s choice made a lot of sense to me when my doctor gave me the bad news. It occurred to me for the first time that there might be circumstances where what you don’t know is infinitely preferable to those things of which you are already certain.
I was glad me and Joyce were going to get a big dose of each other before I moved three thousand miles away. I waited for her to take a breath and then told her I’d be on the four-o’clock flight to Grand Rapids on Tuesday and for her to swear she wouldn’t be late to pick me up. She swore, like she always does, but I knew she was still going to be late.
Before we hung up, Joyce asked me if I ever prayed. I told her I had tried to start up again when I got sick, but I quit because I knew I was just hedging my bets. I figured if I was smart enough to know that, God must know it, too, and would probably not only refuse to grant my selfish prayers, but might figure I needed to be taught a lesson for trying to bullshit him in the first place. I know once you repent, Jesus himself isn’t big on punishment, but according to all the Old Testament stories I ever heard, his father was not above it.
• 3
joyce sent wild Eddie Jefferson to pick me up. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been sitting there for an hour and a half, which is a long time to be waiting, even for Joyce, when I see this brother with a head full of beautiful dreadlocks, some kind of weird-looking Chinese jacket, and some Jesus sandals walk up to the gate and look around. Now, there is no reason for the look since everybody else on the plane has been picked up by their grandparents or caught a cab to meet their boyfriend and ain’t a soul in sight but me. The way he’s looking, you’d have thought it was rush hour at Grand Central Station and he was trying not to miss somebody in the crowd. He takes his time like he’s got no place to be but here and nothing to be doing but looking.
At first I thought I recognized him, but I didn’t want to stare, so I looked away. The last thing I needed was some wanna-be Rastafarian thinking I wanted company for the evening. When he didn’t move on, I took another look at him, just to be sure. He had one of those smooth, brown-skinned faces that could be any age from twenty-five to fifty. He had great big dark eyes and he was looking right at me in a way that you don’t see much in the city anymore. Like he had nothing to prove.
When he caught me looking at him, he walked right up, stuck out his hand, and called my name like we were old friends.
“Ava?” he said. “You probably don’t remember me. I’m Eddie Jefferson. Mitch’s friend.”
As soon as he smiled, I knew exactly who he was. Remember him? Was he kidding? The exploits of Wild Eddie Jefferson were beyond legendary. He had done everything from getting into a fistfight with the basketball coach to threatening his father with a shotgun for beating his mother. He drank, smoked reefer before I even understood that there was such a thing, and had two babies by two different women before he got out of high school. One of them graduated and moved away. The other one, a thirty-year-old divorcée, went back to her ex-husband, convinced him the baby was his, remarried immediately, and lived happily ever after.
Mitch was always so straight-arrow, nobody could believe they were friends, but they were so close, they might as well have been brothers. The last time I saw Eddie was at Joyce’s wedding. He was Mitch’s best man and he brought a date from Detroit who had on a red strapless dress and silver shoes at eleven o’clock in the morning. After that, he got sent to Vietnam, and by the time he came back, I had finished high school and headed up the road to Detroit.
I’m sure he was at Mitch’s funeral, but I don’t really remember. That whole thing is still a blur to me. Besides, he looked so different, I probably wouldn’t have recognized him, although I’d sure have remembered that hair. I wanted to touch it to see if it was as soft as it looked.
“How ya doin’, Wild Eddie?” I said before I thought about it.
He cringed a little like he’d just as soon I forgot the history that produced the nickname. “Just Eddie.”
Joyce had sent him to pick me up because some woman had shown up on her doorstep in labor and had to be driven to the hospital in Big Rapids, more than an hour away. They left so quickly, Joyce didn’t even have a chance to call Eddie until she got there, which is why he was so late.
That was typical. Anybody with trouble knew if they could get to Joyce, she’d take care of it. Her feeling was that all crises could be handled if someone would take responsibility and start moving. Joyce could get going faster in an emergency than anybody I ever saw. When I first called and told her I was sick, she was on a plane and at my door by nine-thirty the next morning. Once I explained everything the doctor had said, I think the hardest part for her was realizing that there was nothing she could start doing that would fix it.
Eddie’s truck was so clean, I could see my reflection in the passenger door. The truck was old, but it’s bright red exterior was polished to a high gloss and the inside was spotless. The old fabric on the seat was soft and smooth when I accepted Eddie’s hand, hopped in, and slid over to pop the lock for him.
I’m sorry automatic door locks eliminated the necessity to lean over and open the door for your date after he helped you get seated. In my younger days, I liked that lean because you could arch your back a little and push your breasts up and out just enough to make sure your boyfriend noticed. I didn’t do it this time, though. It’s a little late for all that now.
“Do you always keep your truck this nice, or were you expecting company?”
He smiled to acknowledge the compliment. “Don’t you recognize it? This is Mitch’s truck.”
I was amazed. That meant this was the truck I learned to drive a stick shift on the summer I graduated from high school. I was on my way to Detroit as fast as I could get there and I was honing my survival skills. I didn’t want to ever find myself needing to make a quick exit from someplace I probably had no business being in the first place and find I couldn’t because the getaway car wasn’t an automatic. Mitch agreed to teach me and we spent a day lurching up and down the road until I finally got the hang o
f it.
“Joyce gave it to me after he died. She knew I wanted it and I think she likes the way I restored it.”
I guess she does. To say he restored the truck implies that it once looked this good and had now been returned to its former glory. No way. Mitch ran this truck so hard it would rattle your teeth. Now it rode soundlessly over the bumpy road.
I was wondering what Eddie had been doing for the last couple of decades, but I couldn’t figure out a polite way to ask without opening myself up for a lot of questions in return, so I just looked out the window as we rode. Things didn’t seem to have changed much around here, despite Joyce’s conviction that her church group was all that stood between Idlewild and the Apocalypse. I was always amazed that Joyce had chosen to make her life here. You can’t help where you get born, but as soon as I was old enough to know there was a world outside the confines of Lake County, I started making plans to get there.
“How long since you been home?” Eddie said.
“Almost two years,” I said. “How about you?”
“This is home,” he said. “I moved back for good.”
“That sounds pretty final,” I said, but he just shrugged.
“It was time.”
He didn’t offer to tell me why it was time and I didn’t ask him. Timing is truly a personal thing. It’s not such a bad place, I guess. Some people really love it Look at Joyce and Mitch, but they’re probably not a good example since when you’re in love like that it doesn’t matter as much where else you are.
The two-lane highway into town still offered cheap motels for vacationers on a tight budget, fast-food joints, and bait shops with vending machines out front where you could put in a dollar’s worth of quarters and pull out a small box of live crickets or a ventilated container full of fat night crawlers. The smell of sweet grass was blowing in the window and I was remembering what I wrote on page one of the diary I bought when I first moved away: Good-bye, Idlewild! Hello, world!
• 4
when you first come to Idlewild, there are two stories the old-timers will tell you. It’s strange, too, since it’s an all-black town and both the stories are about Indians, but the place has never been known for making much sense. The first story is about The Founder.
The Michigan history books were always full of stories about courageous Indians and wily fur traders and white guys who wore stiff uniforms and built forts and thought there could really be such a thing as Manifest Destiny. We still said Indians back then. Not out of any disrespect. We thought they were cool. It was the word we knew.
Pontiac was one of the most famous of the Indian chiefs, according to the books we read anyway. He was also one of the baddest, but he still got tricked. When it came down to the final moment, he negotiated with the stiff white guys from a position of as much strength as he could muster and did the best he could, but it was all downhill from there.
Once Pontiac signed the papers and got his picture painted for the history books, nobody seemed to need him anymore and gradually his people died off, or moved away and left the guys in the stiff uniforms to their own devices. Except for one. This one Indian stayed around because he had decided to try and figure out what happened. He wanted to understand how his people had been defeated so rapidly and displaced so completely. And he wanted to structure his life in such a way as to avoid as much future contact with his enemies as humanly possible.
A noble quest, and one that still engages great minds from Atlanta to Capetown, but this one remaining Indian was not concerned about all that. He was looking to understand some things a little closer to home as he settled in for a long period of intense contemplation in the section of the Great North Woods that is bounded by towns with names like White Cloud and Wolf Lake and Big Rapids. Places where the lakes freeze solid and the first big snow is already old news by the middle of November.
One early fall morning, he was walking along through the woods and the day was perfectly clear and absolutely quiet and every once in a while he would see deer melting off into the trees of either side of him, and suddenly he understood. He went back to his house and took out all the money he had saved doing all the things he had been doing and bought up as much land as he could and wrote into his covenant that no white folks would be allowed to live in this small but identifiable sector he was bringing under his control. He welcomed his own blood brothers and sisters and any black people who would promise not to act a fool. And then he went back and sat down on his porch and sighed a deep sigh because he was finally at peace. He had not only figured out who and what the problem was. He had figured out a solution.
By this time, most of the remaining Indians had been moved farther west or had walked on over into Canada, but there were a lot of black folks with new money in their pockets crowded up in Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland who didn’t know anything about The Founder’s vision of an all-colored paradise, but who were soothed by the beauty of the lakes and moved by the mystery of the pine trees. First came one-room cabins for men-only fishing trips. Then, maybe a little reluctantly, summer cottages for the whole family. Enterprising Negro entrepreneurs opened businesses and stayed on year-round to keep things ready for the summer folks who always came flocking the first of June with lungs full of city grit and fists full of factory dollars, ready to enjoy the all-black paradise in the middle of the Great North Woods.
No one is sure how The Rajah came to Idlewild, but people always talked about his arrival as if The Founder had passed things on like Carl Lewis leaning into the last leg of the relay even though he and The Founder weren’t even the same kind of Indian. The Rajah was supposed to be a Bombay Indian, as opposed to an Iroquois, or a Lumbee, or a Sioux, so he didn’t come from generations of people who had lived and hunted and wandered in these woods. One day he was just there, his big square head wrapped in a snow white turban, and shoes on his feet that seemed to turn up at the toes even if they really didn’t. He bowed low when he talked and he was traveling with a not-so-young white lady who seemed to be his wife or his business partner or both, but ultimately it didn’t matter. She was white. That was the critical thing about her.
Everybody knew right off The Rajah was a regular Negro and not an Indian. Bombay by way of Hastings Street, they used to say. Why would a real Bombay Indian bring a white woman all the way to Idlewild, Michigan, to open a restaurant? He wouldn’t. But this brother was laying it on thick, with an accent and everything, and what the hell? He wasn’t the first Negro to opt for exotica as the most viable protective coloration and he sure wouldn’t be the last one.
Back then, the place more than lived up to its name with idle men, wild women, and unlimited night life featuring stars like Dinah Washington and Jackie Wilson and Sammy Davis, Jr., before he went solo. For his part, The Rajah was convinced that Idlewild could support his establishment in much the same way that the community sustained The Paradise Lounge, The Flamingo Club, The Purple Palace, and a boardinghouse called The Eagle’s Nest, renting exclusively to young Negro women, looked after by a large, handsome matron who never knew that after she rolled her hair at ten o’clock and went to bed, the ones who were working as shake dancers in the big nightclubs sometimes went skinny-dipping in the moonlight.
The Rajah’s place was too small for shake dancers and too intimate for live musicians. There was only room enough for eight couples at a time, a modest number, but one that allowed The Rajah to treat each customer like the royalty he seemed to believe they were. Obsessed with service, The Rajah was the kind of host who hovered.
The place did good business right from the very beginning. The lighting flattered sun-kissed faces. The food was delicious, and the service, exquisite. Even when the place was full, The Rajah made each patron feel pampered. The water glass was never empty. The napkin was always freshly laundered. The butter rested in individual pats on beds of crushed ice in fluted silver dishes. The Rajah had class and a clientele who recognized and appreciated it. From the carefully made-up doctors’ wives w
ho no longer had to do their own manicures, to the misplaced romantics who spent all their time and hard-earned vacation money trying to impress the unimpressible showgirls, The Rajah’s place was the place to see and be seen.
Now, the white woman was pretty much out of sight during this time, so everybody just assumed she was the cook because somebody was back there cooking up a storm and it wasn’t The Rajah, who was forever out front being smooth. But nobody can say for sure whether that had anything to do with what happened. Everybody said it was a shame, too, because the place was doing so well.
The story is that one night, long after closing time and cleanup, a big party of folks came strolling over, drunk and happy and wanting something good to eat. Although he was locking up for the night and the white woman was already standing at the foot of the porch steps, he couldn’t say no. He graciously unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and ushered them inside to a table.
The woman didn’t move. The Rajah went to the door and spoke to her firmly. The woman still didn’t move. The Rajah spoke to her again, more sharply this time, and it is at this point that the two versions of the story diverge. In one version, she hisses “nigger” at him from outside so loudly that the patrons can hear the insult from where they sit. In another version, she comes back in and shouts it at him from across the room.
In any case, wherever she was when she said it, she said it, and The Rajah narrowed his eyes and turned away from the chair he was holding for a bronzed beauty in a calico sundress and leaped at the white woman like a for-real Bombay tiger. They fought all the way out the door and down the steps and disappeared into the Great North Woods with her hollering and him hollering and that turban and that accent and that shouted charge of secret negritude flying every which-a-way, and nobody ever saw either one of them again.
