A Matter of Souls (3 page)

They had argued about Freddie Boy having the truck in the first place. Alfred ranted over how their son was too young to understand the responsibility, that he would sure enough somehow lose that truck before he got a hundred miles on it. Mamie patiently stated the facts that her husband believed but could not say. That a Colored boy like Frederick, too smart and too aware of what he didn't have and couldn't get, was not safe in the world of White men. The truck would carry him straight into such a world. Mamie knew this, and she hated it all the same.

It was Alfred who was not ready for what his son would find there. He was not ready for his boy to be challenged on his right to own anything worth something. And what if it was found out that Freddie Boy had practically made the truck himself, that he had skills and a brain to go with them? Alfred jumped angry. He'd put his fist down on the table so hard the cat leaped onto the stove, and then he roared about that.

“What is it all for, then?” Mamie raised her voice, and Freddie Boy slammed out the front door to get away from them. His part in this argument was through. “You tell me what the doggone point is for us to be sendin' him to school; us scrapin' cents together to send him down to that college, if you too scared to let him live?”

“Colored folk don't live, Mamie Lee!” Alfred spun
around to face her, and Mamie saw defeat plain in his face. This was no argument, really. They didn't disagree on the main things. His eyes were wide and bright, his long cheeks flushed. His chin trembled beneath his rough, brown beard.

Mamie had never seen him so; she knew at that moment that in twenty years she had never really seen him.

“Alfred?” She called his name quietly, wondering if the man she loved was still inside him. She had grabbed the back of a chair and held it so tight her knuckles began to ache.

“No bank's gonna give us a loan.” Alfred's words dropped like rocks. Mamie felt her shoulders sag, but she jerked them up.

“Maybe—”

“Been to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, far as New Orleans, Mamie. Ain't no bank willing,” he said without looking at her. “Paid our every bill on time. Got nearly a thousand dollars saved. Even the house wasn't enough, and it's paid for!”

Alfred would not look at her.

“They'll give a Colored man money to buy a new car, long as it's a Ford and last year's model. But to start a business? Damn 'em! Damn 'em to hell!” He leaned against the wall.

They had talked about starting a clothes-cleaning business ever since Freddie Boy was a baby. Mamie had built a clientele. Alfred had worked his way up from shoeshine
kid to chief steward at the Tucker Hotel in his thirty years of perfect service.

It was a dream they'd had together.

“I can't give you what you want, Mamie.”

“Alfred, I don't need nothin' else,” she'd said.

But that blow from the banks had hurt him bad. Mamie watched him retreat deeper and deeper into himself. One gray morning a year ago, he went silently to work, and he never came home. He had left his leather-banded watch on the table beside the bed, as if time no longer meant anything to him.

Mamie had never blamed him. How could she? He had it in his head and his heart that he had failed her, and that he had raised his son to believe in a future that was a lie. And she had never realized how the weight had worn him down year after year, disappointment after disappointment, until it was too late.

Mamie breathed deep and caught the last smoky scents of fall leaves somebody had burned somewhere. She hunched her shoulders, not wanting to think about fire; not wanting to give in to the shivers running up and down her spine.

There was a rustling on the ground a few yards away, which startled her. She stopped, slowly rolling her head in the direction of the sound. Two glossy yellow eyes looked
back at her. Possum. Mamie stomped her foot and watched it run. She hated those creatures. Always night searching. Always pale and bony-faced, like death.

“Frederick!” she cried out. The possum had scuttled off to the right, and so she eased the opposite way. She felt her son, her baby, so close and at the same time farther away from her than he had ever been.

She walked. For every inch her body went forward, her thoughts crept backward.

She had listened to the radio earlier in the day as she vigorously scrubbed Miss Virginia Walburton's cotton percale drawers on the small washboard. Miss Virginia had always been a sweet potato pie or two on the heavy side, and since she was elderly now she liked only light starch and no creases in her “intimate garments.” The only hands she had ever allowed to touch her fifty pairs of lace-trimmed underwear were her own and Mamie's.

(Mamie was quite happy that Miss Virginia was so peculiar and particular. Miss Virginia had promised, if Mamie and Alfred ever opened up their own full-service place, to entrust the remainder of her extensive wardrobe to their care and attention. What did banks know about trust?)

On the radio, the man talked about dogs being set on five Colored boys who had lingered too long after their high school football game. They had run, and some of
them interrupted two White waitresses walking home from work.

Mamie reached so abruptly to shut off the rest of the story that she dropped a wad of pale blue onto the floor. She'd picked it up and set it aside without rinsing it again.

She didn't need to listen to find out what happened to those boys. She knew.

Now she called out to her own. “Freddie Boy!” Her voice was hoarse, and only crickets answered. Her heart started beating fast. Thumping faster.

A short distance away, she thought she saw lightning bugs flash their behinds on and off. But it was way too late at night for them, wasn't it?

Mamie took off running toward the impossible glowing. She tripped over roots. The light grew fainter and vanished.

She stumbled and fell, hearing glass crunch under her knee just before she felt the sting of the cuts as the glass shards pushed into her skin. She glanced down as she put her hands out to steady herself.

Beer bottles. The stale stench floated up. There seemed to be a flat trail in the grass—a tire track. She located the other one by narrowing her eyes. There were bourbon jugs and more beer bottles.

Mamie fought the panic rushing between her ears. Slowly, she raised her head.

A tree stood where the swarm of lightning bugs had appeared. She was right upon it.

It was old and broad and gnarled and knotty. Mamie followed the wide trunk up to heavy branches hanging low and laden with dark ovals, nuts overlooked or never picked. The branches were surely sturdy enough for the clothesline Mamie allowed herself to view with dry eyes.

She took a step forward, and then her limbs refused to obey.

The world stopped around her.

“Freddie Boy?”

Her stomach shook, but she tried to gulp back everything. Everything.

It had taken them seven years to have Freddie Boy. Alfred's mother claimed she had prayed on it and accepted the fact that the Lord had been testing her by giving her son a barren woman. Mamie's own mother had brought by every herb in her experience, moved their bed around the entire house, chanted, and even studied Alfred's dreams.

Alfred never gave up. And when she was finally with child, as soon as she was sure, she told Alfred. She met him at the front door with her hair done up and wearing her best Sunday dress.

“Afternoon, Daddy,” she said. He knew the happy news instantly because Mamie never referred to him by
hussyfied juke-joint nicknames or in any vulgar way.

Alfred dropped to his knees and cried when Mamie told him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and laid his head where her baby was.

“Frederick Douglass Holmes, are you in there?”

Those were Alfred's first words to his son.

That clothesline could never hold a man. Mamie pressed her hands against her stomach as if Freddie Boy was still safe inside.

The night and Mamie's despair swallowed up the color of her son's hair and windbreaker and pants. He was a crumpled heap an arm's length away. Mamie imagined there must be blood soaking the ground. There would certainly be blood.

The line could not hold him, she told herself again.

“Frederick. Oh, my Frederick.” Mamie bent over with no expectation. He was turned away from her. She hitched up her skirt and carefully stepped over him, squatting on his other side.

With a calm bordering on madness, she looked at his face.

He was seventeen. He was a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy.

His laughing chocolate eyes were swollen into two purple lumps the size of those golf balls Alfred used to
bring home from his weekend job as a caddy. The flesh underneath both was even darker, and on one side seemed black with bruising. On the other his whole face jutted out horribly around his jawbone.

His face looked too big for his slender neck. Mamie thought it might wobble like the snapped neck of a turkey not-quite-killed for the Thanksgiving table. She shook her head, aware of the crazy comparison. Not quite dead.

Blood trickled from the corner of Freddie Boy's mouth. His mouth looked normal, with his wide lips parted only slightly. She could not see any of his teeth.