All-Bright Court (24 page)

Be cool,

Skip

 

Wait I forgot to tell you something. I'm sending you something. A surprise.

Later

 

The next week the package arrived, an afro wig, balled up like a small, black, hibernating animal, along with a note:

 

Hey man how you like it? Its made out of plastic so don't be putting it in no hot water and whatever you do don't be near no hot stove in it.

 

“You should write that boy back,” Henry's mother said.

“He not a boy, Mama. He a grown man like me, and I don't know why you say write him. You never liked him,” Henry said.

“That's not true. I ain't got nothing against the boy, never did. When I saw his mama, I give her the address to send to him. If I had something against him, I wouldn't have done that.”

Henry said, “He doing real good, Mama. He want me to come out there.”

“I think he a blessing. Lord knows I never thought I'd say that 'bout Skip. You should go on out there, though. This sure ain't the place to be. You know Isaac was arrested on the other side of the bridge. They say he was robbing a house.”

“He should know better to be over there,” Henry said.

“What he going to steal over here? Ain't nothing over here, unless he was going to steal one of these kids running 'round here,” Henry's mother said. “Yeah, you should get while the getting good. But is you going to wear that wig?”

“I don't know. Skip say brothers out there be wearing them,” Henry said.

“I bet
he
say that. What is it with that boy and hair? I still ain't forgot the time he put that process in your head, the slick-head fool,” Henry's mother said.

“I'm a go,” Henry said.

“I got a dream of going out there one day. Skip mama been out to see him. Watts is where she say he at. She say black folks living good out in California, got fancy houses and cars, making barrels of money.”

Henry said, “That's what Skip say.”

24

Z
ENA CAME
for Clotel. She was coming, had been coming. Even before the girl was born, Zena had passed through Venita's dreams. There in the garden, all those years ago, hidden under the hardness of the earth, under the darkness of the night, she snatched the child away.

Zena showed up on a night of cold rain in the late spring of 1976. It had been nearly a year since she left.

Venita would have liked to say the knock at her front door sounded different. She would have liked to think this scene would be tragic, dramatic, that she would swoon in Moses's arms and he would revive her by gently patting her face and sprinkling water on her. A small baptism. She would have liked to see herself and Moses gnashing their teeth at the Lord. Oh, what had they done to deserve this?

But Moses was asleep when Zena came, and so was Clotel. All Zena said was, “I understand you got my baby. I come for her.” Her breath was sweet, like mint.

“Come in,” Venita said. “She upstairs. I'll go get her.”

Walking on numb feet, Zena's sweet breath caught up in her nose, Venita slowly ascended the stairs, woke Moses up, and told him Zena was downstairs. Moses did not say anything, and would not even get out of bed. So Venita went into Clotel's room, turned on the light, and packed her things. She refused to let herself look at Clotel.

Not long after she and Moses had taken Clotel in, Mary Kate told Venita, “Maybe ya'll should bring her downtown, get something done legal, so if her mama come back, she can't take her.”

“I ain't going downtown messing with no white people. They might take her.”

“They won't take her. You and Moses good people. Why would they take her?”

“This don't sound like you, Kate,” Venita said.

“Mikey the one that said it,” Mary Kate said, and added softly, “I know the boy don't make no sense sometime, but what he say got some truth in it, and you know time coming up for her to go to school.”

“We going to send her.”

Mary Kate dropped the subject. She and Venita both knew that a girl as young and fickle as Zena, who would take off so suddenly, could just as suddenly reappear.

Venita had rehearsed the scene, had written the entire play, so when the time came she would be ready, believing in the absurd notion that if you rehearsed for tragedy, you were better prepared to face it.

When her father had died back in '65, when she had received the call from her Aunt Hattie, she thought then she would be ready. The buying of the black dress, the long bus ride home, the knowing her father was dead, did not prepare her for seeing him in a small coffin, his face gray, his stiff hands clenched around a Bible, a book he never read, since he could not read. Though she had thought herself ready, she still expected to see him with a drink in his hand, and when he was buried, she had wailed with the rest of the women.

Sorrow has a finite depth, breadth, width. Venita knew this, for she had woven hers into a cloak and hidden behind it. Sorrow could not touch her as she looked at the child who had come and broken the silence in her life with Moses.

It was not as if Clotel had done anything, said any one thing to change their lives, for she was a quiet child. It was the sight of her combing a doll's hair, the feel of her hand in theirs, the sound of her walking upstairs over their heads, the sound of her breath while she slept.

The first time Moses and Venita heard her laugh, they were in bed on a cold Saturday morning, deciding if they should make love, if they had time before Clotel woke up. Having to decide added secrecy and intimacy to their lives, which they had not had since they were teens and made love in the far corner of Venita's parents' garden the summer before Moses went north. He would wait impatiently for her in the night, calling like an owl from the woods. They would lie with his shirt bunched under her head, their eyes closed, their ears open to any sound rising from the green and soft earth.

On that Saturday morning, as she and Moses lay together, the girl's laughter rose, eddying and curling around the banister, every bit as shocking as the smell of smoke. They left the bed quietly and walked halfway down the stairs, to see Clotel and her doll sitting less than a foot away from the television, watching cartoons.

Like anyone who retreats into a world of dreams, Clotel would awake in the night, blinded by the blackness of her room, and think she was still sleeping, lying in a dreamless void, waiting to be awakened. Dreams now passed her by on their way to children who needed them more than she.

She slept less, entered more into the world of wakefulness, and began stumbling through the house, breaking things. The first thing she broke was an ashtray Venita had gotten in Atlantic City. She bumped into the cocktail table, and the dish shattered on the floor. Clotel ran and hid in the closet under the stairs, expecting to be beaten. She refused to come out for hours, even when Moses came home from work. Not until after dinner did she emerge, her eyes puffy, her face flushed. She was not beaten. She was given her dinner. Moses and Venita were never angry with her, even when she dropped her fork, spilled a glass of milk, splashed water from the tub. Zena would fly into a rage over offenses smaller than these. Once she had beaten Clotel because she had forgotten to flush the toilet.

Clotel never asked where her mother was, why she had gone, but to Venita it seemed the child's restless, searching eyes were watching out for Zena. Her mother had told her that her protruding blue eyes made her look ugly, like a fish, and Clotel had come to feel that way, submerged in the blueness of her house, as colorless as a creature on the floor of the deepest of oceans, unexposed to light, living under atmospheres of pressure.

But in this new house life drifted down to her.

Before school started, the Taylor girls Jonetta and Olivia came over to Venita's to play with her. This was beyond her experience. The knock on the door was for her. Someone had come to see her. She went out with them and watched them play hand-clapping games, singing all those names she had heard ringing through All-Bright Court so many times: Miss Mary Mack, Miss Sue, the pretty little Dutch girl, Punchinello.

When they sang Sally Walker, they gyrated their hips and shook their shoulders, urging on the weeping Sally sitting in the middle of the circle:

 

Rise, Sally, Rise.

Wipe them tears out eyes.

Put your hands on hips,

And let your backbone slip.

Ah, shake it to the east,

Ah, shake it to the west,

Ah, shake it to the very one you like the best

Sally West.

 

Clotel liked this game. There was no falling down, not like ring around the rosie, when the girls turned themselves into piles of ashes. Here was only a rising up as the girls danced and shook their troubles away.

It was not until the spring that Clotel entered the game, when Jonetta picked her to come into the center.

And there, in the brief and late spring, Clotel rose from the ground that still held winter. The earth was yet to give way to the softness, the gentle push of warmth, sun, rain. It did not yield when Clotel began shaking as if in a trance, her hands on her hips, her head thrown back, her white face turned up to the sun. She shook to the east and west. When the girls stopped singing, she kept on dancing, shaking to the north, to the south, and all the girls stood around watching.

One finally said, “Stop, girl, and pick somebody.”

Clotel did not stop. She kept on dancing until Jonetta jumped into the center and grabbed her by the shoulders. Clotel stopped and stood squinting at the blueness of the sky, waiting for rain to chase her back into hiding. None fell, and still looking upward, she walked from the center of the circle.

 

Venita could not put off looking at Clotel any longer. It was time to wake her. She sat on the bed next to the child, who was curled up on her side like a baby.

Below the lids, Clotel's eyes were moving rapidly. Venita called to her, but she would not respond. She shook the child, and when this did not wake her, she tried to lift her. But she was so heavy in sleep that Venita could not move her.

She went to get Moses to take the child down. But he could not face Clotel to say goodbye.

“That woman waiting now,” Venita pleaded. “Get on up.” Moses would rather have stayed in bed, his face to the wall, but he got up and walked past Venita into Clotel's room.

Venita followed. Clotel lay more tightly curled than before, and when Moses went to lift her, it seemed as if she had fastened herself to the bed. When he finally got her up, she went limp in his arms. Venita picked up her things, and they descended the stairs. It was as though they were being summarily dismissed, given back their unadorned life. And they were going to go back without a fight, back into an existence that was as white and slick as the inside of an eggshell, into a seamless life that curved around itself, defining its own scope. Even before the rising of the sun, Venita would be up cooking Moses breakfast, packing him a lunch. Moses would go to work, and when he returned Venita would have his dinner ready. Later, when neither could avoid it any longer, they would drift upstairs, and though they would sleep in the same bed, they would be at opposite ends of an open field, he calling to her like an owl, she no longer able to hear him.

Zena was sitting, smoking, flicking ashes into a cut-glass candy dish. She took a few more drags before she put the cigarette out, and she stood up.

“This all her stuff?” Zena asked, taking the things from Venita and moving toward the door.

“I'll carry her to where ya'll going,” Moses offered.

“I got a car outside, and you can put her down. She ain't even sleep,” Zena said. “You ain't even sleep,” she said to Clotel. “Get up.”

The child stiffened in Moses's arms, and then her legs arched downward as she made an effort to stand. Moses placed her on her feet.

“Let's go,” Zena said to her, taking her by the hand. Clotel began walking, her eyes closed. There was no need to open them, for she would still be in bed, still dreaming.

“Wait,” Venita said. “I forgot her doll, and her coat. She shouldn't go out without a coat. I'm a run up and get them.”

“Don't trouble yourself. She be all right. She ain't going to need a coat. We going to California,” Zena said, her smoky breath in Venita's face.

Zena led Clotel out the door, and Clotel kept her roving eyes shut tight, even as the rain began to fall.

25

M
IKEY
had sulked when he found out his father did not have the money to send him on his class trip. Over the spring break, the class was going to Washington, D.C., to celebrate the bicentennial year. Mikey did not dare tell anyone at school that he could not go because of money. He simply said his family had made other plans. His friend Scott wasn't going either. He and some of his friends were driving to Florida. Mikey didn't understand why his father didn't have the money. He did not know that his father had been a slave for four years now.

 

“We have been sold into slavery!” the local representative screamed at the rank and file gathered in the union hall. It was two weeks before Christmas. Nixon had been reelected. The men, still dazed by the layoffs that had come earlier that year, sat tired and confused. In the back of the room was a line of men. Samuel stood in the line. The hall was not even full, but there were not enough seats. At a meeting the previous week, half of the wooden folding chairs had been destroyed.

The men had been called in to view a film,
Where's Joe?
Joe was an American steelworker without a job. Joe had not worked hard enough. He had wanted too much money, too many benefits. Joe was on the unemployment line.