All about Skin (27 page)

“Yes.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Is she here? In this town?”

“She's not like Harold and Ida.”

“What does that mean?”

“She's not somebody it would serve you to know.”

“I should trust you to know that?”

Atlas gave Daniel a cutting look. “Harold raised you to talk to me like that?”

“No, sir,” Daniel said, but bluntly added, “You don't want to know me. She might.”

“She's never been more than thirty miles off the farm. Didn't make it past grade school. You're gon' to be a lawyer.”

“Her name—please.”

“You don't know this kind of people.”

“How did you know her? Who was she to you?”

Atlas drew himself straighter in his seat.

Bayles Plantation had once been a world unto itself. That was Atlas's sole defense. Elise and Justin, his wife and son, were out visiting. At home, reviewing the plantation's books, Atlas passed the kitchen window and saw the young girl bent over the wash tub. She was growing out of her dress; it rode tight across her breasts and ass.

His wife's chemises and slips soaked in bluing solution ten feet from where he had the girl, behind the garden shed with the sun hot on his back and splinters knifing into the palm he used to brace himself. She smelled of wood smoke and lye soap, so different from Elise. He was not careful or kind. When he was done, he zipped his pants and tucked his shirt, but she stood like a shed plank, eyes squeezed shut, fists balled, legs stiffly gaping, drawers bunched around her left ankle.

“Fix yourself,” he'd said.

She did not move. Elise and Justin might be coming down the path. He squatted to yank up the girl's underpants. He had to lift her foot. Her trembling shook the wall of the shed. Sensing a loosening scream, Atlas moved with care. He drew the rough, unbleached cotton up over the thin legs. Her waist was yet straight, like a boy's. Her limbs were lithe, muscle and bone—a body built for tree climbing. He threaded her hands into the sleeves. It felt like dressing a child.

He said, “She was the girl who did the laundry. She happened to be in the yard—”

Daniel scraped back his chair. The force scarred the floor.

“Some good might come of it,” Atlas said, calmly. “You were raised by good people. I made sure of that. Educated. You might do great things for colored people. I would be glad about that.”

Daniel looked down on Atlas Bayles. “The good I do will buy your pardon?”

Atlas's hand barely trembled as he reached across the table for Daniel's full glass of liquor. “Yes.”

Daniel strode from the kitchen out into the white walls and varnished floors of the hall. Without pause, he swept past an ornate silver frame draped in black crepe. It sat squarely on a polished table in the wide and light-filled hallway.

From behind, in a strangled voice, Atlas said, “You bear him quite a resemblance.”

“That is a shame,” Daniel said. He left through the front door.

Coloreds claim they can tell by the tops of the ears, the skin around the fingernails, the hue of knees and elbows. Whites claim to know from the walk, the jut of the jaw, bumps in the skull. Stanford could not have said how he knew. He stood across from the young man, separated by the width of the counter, surreptitiously watching as he counted money into the register, and it came to him. He saw something and recognized it, without surprise, the way he knew his own face in any mirror.

“Who your people?” Stanford asked.

Daniel lowered the whiskey bottle. Through clenched teeth, he drew in hot, humid air, but his voice was frigid. “You don't know my people.”

“You don't care for colored folk much, do you?” Stanford asked.

Daniel studied the store clerk from the close-packed silver hair to the scarred toes of his boots. His face was bronzed, the cheeks speckled like the tough skin of a muscadine. His tea-colored eyes were shrewd.

“I wasn't raised to,” Daniel said.

“Fair 'nough,” Stanford said. “Why?”

Daniel snorted. He glanced quickly around the room before he set his whiskey on the counter. He walked toward the shelves and snatched up a box labeled “California Fig Bitters.”

On the box was a broad black woman, her hair in stubby plaits, her thick legs in striped stockings. Her dress bunched above her waist as she bent over, exposing dark, naked buttocks. “Oh my!” she exclaimed as she expelled a cloud of gas. “Guess this will fix me!”

Daniel set the box on the counter.

“You b'lieve that's real colored folk?” Stanford asked.

Daniel scoffed. On any shelf in the store—lard, soap, flour, or candy—he could find a beribboned pickaninny, a banjo strumming “Coon,” or a goose-stepping “Darkie” with goggling eyes and red, watermelon-slice lips, grinning and exclaiming, “Dis sho am good!” He could stand at Atlas Bayles's kitchen door and feel like one.

“Yes,” Daniel answered. Groping for his pocket, he said, “Give me another.”

Daniel woke in a windowless room among shelves of canned meat and motor oil, between barbed-wire stretchers and cotton scales. The room was sweltering. He crashed into boxes and bags and knocked his shins against unyielding tools until he found the door.

The warm night air carried late the last sweetness of honeysuckle and privet and the clarity of stars. Daniel slid down the doorjamb and let his head rest against the frame. The numbing effects of the whiskey were almost gone. The sickness would come later. He did not know where he was; he didn't care enough to worry. Daniel's only sensation was unsatisfied want. Wider, deeper, hungrier than when he drove into town, it was the want of his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It would be the want of old age.

It wasn't that Harold and Ida had not been good to him. They were as good as circumstances allowed, but Daniel was a reminder of dark blood in a small, color-conscious community. Beneath the discriminating eye, the curl of his hair intimated kink. Summer sun exposed latent sable in his skin. Though he was near in age to her children and raised alongside them, Ida, his quadroon aunt, did not allow Daniel to call her “Mother.” When new visitors came, she introduced him as “Daniel—my husband's family.”

Uncle Harold was quadroon as well. His grandmother had been a slave in the Bayles family. Quietly and only once, it was explained to Daniel that Harold and Atlas shared a grandfather. But while Atlas Bayles lived and worked on the family's acreage, Harold made his way in the world as a boot maker and cobbler. He catered mostly to whites and white-skinned Negroes. He kept his clientele exclusive through excellent craftsmanship and extravagant prices. Harold relieved his conscience by giving liberally to causes for the “betterment” of the Negro—octoroon- and quadroon-run charities dedicated to the “uplift” of their black brethren—but Daniel, with barely enough yellow in his skin to betray him, was the darkest person to enter at their front door. Harold explained the delicate matter: “A better class of Negro we may be, but in
their
eyes we are still Negro. To associate with blacks is to become one of them.”

One-half. One-forth. One-eighth. One-sixteenth. One drop.

In for a penny
, Daniel reckoned,
in for a pound
.

“Brung you something to eat,” Stanford called as he stowed the whip and dismounted his horse, ol'Amy. “Bread and lard soak up the whiskey in your belly. Won't be so sick.”

Daniel rose from his seat on the doorsill. Behind him, over the fields and low-slung store, morning approached like an eavesdropper.

Stanford thrust a cotton towel filled with warm pork sausage and biscuits at Daniel, who took the offering and held it, staring down at the breakfast so long that Stanford bristled.

“Ain't nothing wrong wit' that food. You don't want it, gi' here. Some at the house do.” He reached for it, but Daniel drew back. Looking up, he asked, “How long have you lived here?”

“Sixty-five years. Never been nowhere else.”

“You know all the people?”

“Them in the houses an' them in the graveyard too.”

Daniel nodded. He looked over the fallow field that edged the store. The mist had not yet lifted.

“Where do you live?” Daniel asked.

“You got right many questions this mornin'.”

“You had plenty for me last evening.”

“What was you doing up at Bayles's?”

A lie can be a protective reflex, no different than throwing out the hands to save one's self from a fall. Daniel's lie was not self-serving but self-saving. Salvage something or be lost.

“Searching for my mother,” he said.

If Daniel expected shock, he was disappointed. The old man looked off in the direction of Atlas Bayles's house, then studied the boy. “Wondered,” he said.

“Do you know her?”

Stanford nodded. “You do too,” he said, unable to keep the edge of punishment out of his voice. “Walked right past her in the store.”

Daniel remembered that the women wore short-sleeved dresses, the men bibbed overalls and undershirts. They all wore faded head scarves or straw hats. He failed to recall faces. He saw, in his mind's eye, “field niggers” loafing around when there was work to be done.

He passed the food from one hand to the other. He did not ask, “Which one was she?” There was no point. Instead, in a tone quiet enough to be humble, he said, “Tell me about her.”

“Lou Ella,” Stanford said, “got a husband name'a Jack Pearson. He alright. Go off on a drunk sometime, but he don't bother nobody.”

Stanford sat on a crate from the storeroom. Daniel sat on the sill of the doorway, biscuits and sausage occupying his lap and hands. He ate as he listened. “Six other younguns since you. Youngest 'round four, I reckon.”

Daniel chewed slowly. He had not thought of other children. Brothers and sisters.

“She work the fields like everybody else. Pick more cotton than some men. A member down to Ashland, where I belong. Support missions.” Stanford shrugged. “She a good woman, far as I can see. Way I heared it, won't her idea to let go'un you. Bayles give her a choice. You go or they all go. Times was changed. Couldn't have no chile look like you growing up under Miz 'Lise nose.

“Well, it was winter. Owners got all the families they was gon' take. Nowhere to go, and there was a lot'un'em. This 'fore her gandpappy and grandma died, so there was them. Her mama and papa. Five other children. Lou was fourteen, the oldest. Bayles said he'd put you with people who'd give you a life better'n she could. She put you in his hands, the Lord's I mean, and let go'un you. What else you wanna know?”

Daniel opened his mouth to speak but instead doubled over. He heaved globby chunks of biscuit and sausage into the dirt between his feet.

Stanford looked down on the mess and the red-faced boy with streaming eyes. He grunted. “Sometime it ease you,” he said. “Sometime it don't.”

Pressing his hands to his knees, he stood. “Guess I better get 'round here an' open this store.”

Daniel cleaned up at the pump out back then passed through a doorway that separated the storeroom from the main store. Stanford was on his knees, restocking a low shelf with cans of cling peaches in heavy syrup.

“If you can spare the cot,” Daniel said, “I'd like to stay a few days.”

Stanford did not rise or even look over his shoulder. “You gon' see her?”

“I don't know.”

Stanford shrugged. “Ain't my business.”

Daniel stood awkwardly, still trembling from too much liquor and the violence of being sick. He wished the old man would turn around. “I don't know your name,” Daniel said.

“Stanford.”

“Daniel.”

“Well, Daniel,” Stanford said, finally looking the boy in the face, “you gon' stay, you gon' work.” He nodded toward the battered straw broom propped behind the register. Daniel stepped toward it, but first he stopped to shelve the box of California Fig Bitters.

Daniel spent those first days in the background. He stocked, scooped, filled, and listened. Blacks became less strange. They talked of what everyone else talked of: weather, crops, and children—things that grew and changed; God and politics—things that stayed the same. They were quick-witted, possessed of simple good sense. “You see one a them Morris' in a fight with a bear, help the bear!” one vociferous hand advised about a notorious local family, “'Least you 'spect that bear to turn 'round and maul you!”

It was clear to Daniel, though, that in his presence they were not as raucous as that first day. He saw the looks they arched at Stanford. “That's Daniel,” was all the old man would say, but his unuttered approval proved enough. They began to say “Mornin'” and “Afternoon” to Daniel before they cranked up the banter.

Each day brought a different set of hands, depending on who had already picked their “weight” and had pocket change. Stanford never signaled that Lou Ella was among them. Daniel was impatient but glad. He swept corners, kept out of their way, grew less afraid.

On Saturday afternoon, the buzz of gossip began to rise like the noise of cicadas. The hands propped their feet on crates and leaned against the soda chest. They pried the tops off their RC Colas and passed around a tin of saltines.

“Gimme a pig foot when you done,” Sam said gruffly to Stanford, who wrapped cheddar chunks in little squares of white butcher's paper and lined them up on the counter.

“Daniel! Get Sam a pig foot!”

The store fell quiet enough to hear a metal cola lid plink against the concrete floor. Sam looked ready to recant, ready to deny his desire for vinegar and red-pepper soaked pig-flesh, but Daniel set aside the broom.

Dressed in a shirt and pants loaned by one of Stanford's sons, and wearing a clean but stained butcher's apron, Daniel did not look so out of place. He grasped the jar and twisted off the lid and frowned just a little at the smell. With a long-handled fork, Daniel speared a pickled pig's foot, then drew it up through pink brine and lacy fat. He stuffed it into a small paper bag, the size Stanford taught him to use for sour pickles or three cents' worth of roasted peanuts.