Five Smooth Stones

by Ann Fairbairn

  "Yes," said Geneva. "I reckon that's what I means. We got God here now, with us; we got Him close because we needs Him so bad. He ain't never far from us. Just so long as we keeps Him and keeps His son, Jesus, near us, we ain't plumb lost."

  Knudsen watched her without speaking, without answering her. He must not, he thought, speak what was in his mind, for this above all things she would not have understood. Behind her, he told himself, there were generations that had been taught the belief of "no cross, no crown," generations inculcated with the doctrine that through suffering they would find happiness in some vague hereafter. That doctrine had come from the whites, their masters and their owners, who had known the way, diabolically had known the way, to keep an oppressed and enslaved people from revolt, perhaps without even realizing that they knew the way. Yet if that faith had brought them thus far, who was he to say that, with learning, it would not bring them entirely out of the darkness and into the light?

  When at last, in midafternoon, they finished dinner and he stood at the door just before leaving, there were two ten-dollar bills on the table and a five-dollar bill on David's blanket. "With your permission, Mrs. Champlin?" he had said when he laid it there, and she had nodded, smiling but not speaking.

  To Li'l Joe he said, "You will come with your banjo tomorrow, my friend?"

  "Sure will. You knows that. And don't go forgetting, Professor, these next lessons are on me. You done paid for 'em today."

  As he strode across the cobbles of the courtyard, the Pro-

  fessor was muttering, addressing himself, as he often did, in Danish, bad though it might be for his English.

  "In a dresser drawer. Kind God in Heaven, in a dresser drawer. And You in there with him. That is what they believe, what they know with every atom of their being. What they know. Bjarne Knudsen, you are an ignorant man. There is a dull knife in your kitchen. Go home and cut your throat with it."

  CHAPTER 5

  A child's mind drifted in the midst between waking and dreaming. In the dream part of the mist, behind sleep-heavy eyelids, there was a shimmer of silver light on wide, dark water, and sleep-dulled ears heard the voices of many people singing beside the water. Although it was night and his eyes were closed, the child could see the people, all black, all singing, all somehow known to him. There were no words to the song, only the great sound of the voices mingling with the sound of flowing water and a nearer song, that of the woman who held him. His head rested on her shoulder. The softness of her breast and thighs cradled his small body, and the dark sweetness of her voice was in his head: " 'Oh, Mary, don' you weep, don' you moan.... Pharaoh's army got drownded.... Oh, Mary, don' you weep...."' Then the voices on the banks of the dark, shimmering river were singing the same song, and the sound swelled inside his head and became one with her voice.

  He stirred, and the lids weighted with sleep fluttered as he felt strong, thin arms lifting him, heard gentle words: "I'll carry the chile home, Neva." Then he no longer heard the woman's song, only the warm soft sound of all the many black people that were the dream part of the mist, all singing on the banks of the dark, shimmering river; then there was the nothingness of the sleep of a tired child.

  ***

  David Champlin murmured sleepily, opened, then squeezed his eyes closed against light, tried to, but could not, follow his grandmother's words as she knelt beside his cot: " 'Our Father, who art in Heaven...' " He sighed tremulously and slipped again into nothingness at," 'Give us this day.' "

  There had never been a day like it before; it had been the most exciting, the most satisfying, the happiest day of his short life. For the first time bare feet had run through grass with no one to call out, "No!" For the first time bare brown toes had curled into country dust and dirt; small, long-fingered hands had picked flowers that grew wild and undisciplined, and a small body just outgrowing chubbiness had rolled in rough undergrowth. There had been a fat brown dog that came and rolled with him, a dog that came from nowhere just to play with him and then returned to nowhere. There had been a solemn, skinny black boy who crossed a bumpy, ill-paved road and watched, then shared a licorice whip with him. Then there had been a time of racing through the empty rooms of a half-finished house, crowing, laughing, shouting.

  His happiness had been marred only once that day, when his grandfather, smiling, had said, "You reckon you'd like to live here, son? Reckon you'd like to move over the river and stay in this house? Have your own room and all?"

  He stood motionless, looking up first at Gramp, then at Gram. The dark eyes widened as he rolled them, looking around at walls whose unplastered lath framework gave a vista of every room from where they stood. Tears spilled over, the round face crumpled. Gram picked him up quickly. "Baby!"

  He fought back sobs. "Where'm I going to sleep? Where's David going to sleep?"

  "With us, baby," said Gram. "Just like it is now. Don't you fret. We fixes your cot like it is now, at the foot of our bed."

  His grandfather said, "Shucks, you knows we ain't going to turn you loose to sleep by yourself, son. Least, not till you learns to stay in the bed and not keep falling out. Gets mighty cold some nights for an old man like your Gramp to go traipsing around into another room to pick you up every time you falls out of bed."

  That had made it all right, and happiness came rushing back. Gramp and Gram had never lied to him. If, in this new place, Gramp would be as near as he had always been to pick him up from the floor to which he fell so often with a soft,"Plop!" in the night, there was no need for fear. Some day he would be older and wouldn't fall out of bed and waken with

  a wail of fright. Gramp had told him that. But until then he could go to sleep without fear, knowing that should that startled wakening come in the dark there would be, almost at the same moment, the quiet slap of Gramp's feet on the floor, the sleepy murmur, exasperated but without reproof, "Jesus have moicy! There he goes again!" and the feel of Gramp's arms, and Gramp's voice very close. "So-so, little man, so-so." And then the safety of his cot again with the covers tightening over him as Gramp tucked them in firmly.

  ***

  Geneva Champlin gave full credit to the Almighty for her husband's good fortune when disaster and tragedy were common fare for almost everyone. She was also sure she knew the reason for His kindness: that she and her husband would be able to take care of the child He had placed in their care. Tant' Irene said only, in her high, quick voice, "I told you, Joseph. God never made the mouth He wouldn't feed. See you thank Him, hear?"

  Sometimes, in Jones's Funeral Home, working over an eviscerated, post-mortemed cadaver from Charity Hospital or the city morgue, Li'l Joe found it hard to make his thanksgiving without reservations. He had done a kind and thoughtful thing one morning and stopped in to see Zeke Jones, who had broken his collarbone a few days before. He didn't suppose God had too many rewards to pass out in those bad times, and tried to be duly grateful when Zeke offered him the job of helper, working under Zeke's own expert guidance. "You do a good job, Li'l Joe," Zeke said, "maybe you can stay on permanent. That man I got ain't a bit of good no more. Shucks, he's taken to drinking so bad I even watches the embalming fluid. You dependable, Li'l Joe; you always been dependable." With an unspoken prayer to the Almighty not to hold it against him if he didn't stay permanent, what with the various unpleasantnesses of the job, Li'l Joe agreed. "Times is bad," said Zeke. "Still, folks keeps on dying. Seems like there's more dying now than ever. Most folks got a little piece of insurance to bury theirselves with. I'll be fair with you, Li'l Joe. You knows that."

  "Lawd!" he said to Geneva, a few nights after he started the job. "Anyone told me a while back I'd be helping an undertaker lay out co'pses, I'd have said they was crazy. It's going to take a heap of getting used to."

  "You got a lot to be thankful for," said Geneva sternly.

  "You think Zeke's any prize to work for, you got another think coming, woman."

  "He ain't white," said Geneva. "He ain't white. That's the main thing."


  Her husband did not answer. Didn't do any good with Geneva to point out that their own people could cheat and chisel and underpay and overwork their help as bad as any white. Didn't matter to Neva. She'd rather get a bad deal from one of her own people any day than say "thank you" to a white. He understood and sympathized and, in principle, agreed. It just wasn't practical, that was all.

  Didn't do any good either to try and make Neva admit that there were a lot of colored wouldn't stack up so good come Judgment Day. She knew as well as he did that there was a whole different world of Negro life from the one they lived in, a world of violence and drinking and bad things happening all the time, but she would push the knowledge to the back of her mind. When word came to them of bad things happening in the Quarter or over on the other side of town, her lips would set tight and she'd shake her head, but she never got self-righteous about it the way most did. Once when a friend of his had been knifed by a jealous woman in a barroom fight, he'd said, "Scum—" and she'd jumped him.

  "Ain't no one born bad," she'd said. "Man or woman. But they's some as goes bad under trouble. It's the way they's made, but it don't mean they was born plumb bad clear through."

  Li'l Joe didn't agree with her, but he always kept his arguments to himself on a point like this there wasn't any proving of. Instead he had teased her.

  "Whites, too?" he said.

  "Don't ask me nothing 'bout no whites. I ain't studying 'bout no whites. I ain't even trying to figure out if they bad or what. Don't matter, do it?"

  Almost immediately after he went to work for Zeke, Geneva decided their grandson would do well to go to embalming college. "That way he ain't ever going to have to work for whites," she said. "He gets his education and he goes to embalming college, and he ain't never going to be broke. Right now everyone's out of work, everyone's broke, and Zeke Jones, he's doing so well he can hire hisself a helper when he gets hurt."

  "Time enough to worry about that when the chile gets his education. That's the first thing, that's the very first thing," said Li'l Joe, but he had to admit there was merit in her idea. There sure as the devil was security in the funeral business. There wasn't any worry about supply and demand. Competition was the only menace.

  When the WPA began putting people to work as laborers, Li'l Joe augmented what he made at Zeke's with pick-and-shovel work when things were slow at the funeral home, and occasionally with a "little piece of change" from a music gig or parade when there was one to be played. Everything that he and Geneva made, over and above what they needed for themselves and their grandson, was carefully saved. Never overly trustful of banks, and with the memory of the bank holiday still vivid, they put paper money under the rug, while coins were hoarded in all manner of unlikely places. Only for their grandson were these hoards ever broached for anything but necessities. They disciplined the child, but with more gentleness than they themselves had been disciplined by parents of another generation. "Mebbe he's spoilt," said Geneva. "But he ain't spoilt rotten."

  When David outgrew the carton beside the bed and the dresser drawer, they moved. The new rooms were only a block away, and no great improvement on their previous cramped quarters, except for an anteroom that might once have been a trunk closet. Into this they managed to squeeze a bed, a dresser and, first, a borrowed crib, then a borrowed cot that they managed to fit at the foot of their bed. On the days when Li'l Joe and Geneva both worked, they took the boy to Ambrose Jefferson's house, next door to Pop Jefferson, his brother, the Abraham Jefferson of Li'l Joe's childhood.

  Joseph Champlin could not remember when there had not been a lot of Jeffersons in his life. They were scattered through the French Quarter in an ever-growing and progressively more intricate pattern of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and small sons and daughters. It was the first Abraham Jefferson who had been with Li'l Joe's father, David, when that doomed man had died on a pile of blazing logs in a nearby state. Abraham had managed to escape somehow, and by blind instinct found his way to New Orleans, but had never been coherent enough again to tell all that had happened on that spring afternoon when his friend had died in flames, with the howling laughter of a mob in his ears. "Abr'am just never did come to hisself," said Gran'Cecile.

  It was the sight of a white doctor, sent for by Cecile, that had sent the half-crazed Abraham running from the house, a mad, screaming black man no one dared stop, a man who ran like the wind, with bulging eyes and wide-open mouth, ran through the streets of the French Quarter straight and fast as an arrow to the docks, crying "Jesus! I'm coming, Jesus! Take me Jesus!" until the kind waters of the river filled the screaming mouth, closed over the frenzied eyes, and did not give him up for three days. There were old people still alive in the French Quarter who remembered that day.

  When Li'l Joe and Geneva were both working and they took David to Ambrose Jefferson's house, Geneva fretted. "They got a lot of white children coming in, playing in that neighborhood," she said one morning.

  "You can't help that, Neva. Chile's got to know there's whites, got to learn what they're like. Can't wrap him up in cotton wool all his life."

  "Onlies' white he knows now is the Professor. Suits me if he don't ever have to know no more."

  "You talking foolishness, Neva. He's going to think all whites is like the Professor, way it is now."

  "He ain't going to think it long."

  She nagged her husband to keep after Zeke Jones about their grandson's future.

  "Gawd sake, Neva, the chile ain't even walking yet, and already you wants him to start laying out co'pses."

  The Professor, admittedly hazy about the mental working of the very young, gave them a set of alphabet blocks when the boy was four. To Geneva, whose scant knowledge of reading and writing had come long after she was grown, some of it with the help of her husband, alphabet blocks were not playthings. They were means to an end, and to Li'l Joe they represented the same opportunity—to start his grandson on the right road. He spent hours on the floor with the child whenever he could, making a game of the alphabet, using pictures of dogs and cats and cows and horses until at five David could spell out simple sentences.

  It did not bother the child that the only plumbing in their home was a single cold-water faucet, his only playground the cobbled courtyards and banquettes. He was, in the words of his grandfather, "just as happy as if he had good sense." When he was very small he would stand, jigging up and down with excitement, at the kitchen table, his eyes just over its top, while his grandfather cleaned and repaired the broken, secondhand toys they managed to get for him. Gramp could make them work, he knew that; Gramp could make them shine and gleam, and if an old tap washer had to replace a missing truck wheel it made no difference.

  Geneva tried to keep the acrid envy out of her eyes and heart in those days when she saw the train sets and fire engines and shiny toy trucks on the floors of the families she cleaned for now and then; tried to keep the bitterness out of her eyes when she took her employers' children to play on park grass where her grandson would not be allowed to set foot.

  There were always plenty of books and pictures in the house. The Professor saw to that. The books the Professor brought were new, with no pages missing or defaced by crayons like the ones Geneva brought home, and David learned that if he marked them up or did not take care of them retribution would be swift. At night after Li'l Joe came home he would hold his grandson on his lap and as far as his own limited education would allow he read aloud, the light of the oil lamp, soft and yellow, mellowing the outlines of the shabby furniture. The Professor never missed a chance to pick up a book or magazine with stories about Africa, or with pictures of wild animals, and sometimes Li'l Joe would become so engrossed in the tales of Africa his voice would trail off and David would have to prod him back to reading aloud. "There's where your people comes from, son," Li'l Joe would say. "Don't you never be like some of these colored, shamed your people comes from there. Can't no white say they comes from the same part of the world as Kin
g Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Wouldn't be surprised but what Moses and a lot of them couldn't ride in the front of the bus was they down here."

  Both Gramp and Gram would bring home toy animals, some of them cloth, some of them china or pottery, all of them damaged but new and exciting to him. They joked about the damage. "See," Gram said once. "It's a three-legged dog. Reckon he got in a bad fight. That's what happens, baby, when you gets in fights."

  "Gramp'll fix it."

  "Can't fix this. Nope. Reckon that other dog he got messed up with runned off with his leg."

  They cleaned and mended and restuffed the cloth animals. One tiger defied them, and at last they re-covered the tattered beast with bits and pieces of calico, adding green glass button eyes and drooping yellow wool whiskers. Tant' Irene was there the Sunday afternoon they finished it, and when her great-grandson shouted aloud with laughter she said, "David," and her stern face grew soft. Li'l Joe, looking at her, knew she was not speaking of her grandson but of her dead husband.

  "Mane," said David. "Where's its mane?"

  "Shucks, tigers don't have no manes, son."

  "This one do, Gramp, this one do."

  And so they made a tiger's mane for him of loops of wool of many colors, red, green, yellow, blue, and cut the loops, and Gramp gave one look and said, "Lawd! Set that pore thing down in the middle of Africa he'd be one lonesome tiger. All the other tigers'd run like five hundred minute they seen him."

  To David it was the most wonderful tiger in the world, and he slept with it every night.

  ***

  David Champlin was a shy child with those outside his immediate environment, and less aggressive than most of his playmates. The first time he ran afoul of the neighborhood bully he came sobbing to his grandfather, who withheld sympathy.

  "You let that boy see you crying?" asked Gramp. "Did you?"

  David shook his head, dislodging tears. He was stunned that the usual ready comfort was not there.