Gold Dust (6 page)

“No, as a matter of fact, our guest’s field is literature.”

We reached high C with that groan.

“He is a professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature over at Boston University, and has generously donated his time to...”

Sister continued her glowing introduction, but my attention was pulled by Napoleon slinking down in his seat and covering his eyes.

“What’s up with you?” I asked.

“My father,” he said.

“Really? That’s him? Cool.”

“Yes? How would you like for your father to come and speak to your classmates?”

“And what, lecture us about mufflers and brake pads? I’d love to see him try. No, my man, you’re the lucky one. This’ll be fun.” I reached over and gave Napoleon’s forearm a squeeze.

“Please, let it not be fun,” Napoleon said.

“Sorry, that’s out of my control,” I said.

“... welcome Doctor Malcolm Ellis,” Sister concluded, as Dr. Ellis strode into the room and we all politely clapped for him.

He was a serious-looking guy, about six foot one, with a lean face that had sharp angles like it was carved from stone, tightly cut graying hair, a trim mustache, and black frame glasses. He wore a pearly gray overcoat that he removed to reveal a dark blue suit with a vest. And a long scarf. Sister took his things and disappeared, leaving Dr. Ellis to us. We were silent, and more polite than we were for the average speaker, as he looked us over, expressionless. Then he smiled, and an entirely different face opened up as the flesh of his face rose and inflated, making roundness where there were those hard edges before.

Manny raised his hand. Dr. Ellis nodded at him.

“Doctor, I have this problem with nosebleeds—”

“Try cutting your fingernails shorter, son,” he answered before Manny could even close his mouth.

We love Manny. But we love to see Manny get topped. Most of the class laughed out loud, and clapped. But not everyone.

“I rode two buses to see a minstrel show,” somebody from the back said in a low voice. Napoleon glanced over his shoulder, then faced front again.

“Good one, Doc,” Manny said, pointing at the speaker. “I like that. Can I have it?”

“You may if you can tell me what it would be called if you appropriated my work in writing, without permission.”

“Plagiarism,” Manny shot back.

“Ah, we are a well prepared group. That is good. For I am really only here to check the quality of my son’s education.” The broad smile opened wider as Dr. Ellis peered down at his son. His son smiled weakly. Everyone looked at Napoleon now.

But, aside from the basic and obvious fact that it was the guy’s father, there seemed to be no reason to be embarrassed. As far as speakers went, the good doctor was not bad.

He launched into a history of Caribbean literature, which didn’t figure to be on any test so I didn’t listen too hard. But what I did catch, and found impossible to ignore, was the sound of him. He spoke with a style, with a kind of music to him that was enough to hold some part of your attention no matter how boring his subject was.

He seemed to hum, as he spoke, and sometimes to be laughing although I would catch this and look up and find that he wasn’t laughing at all but was in fact speaking intensely on some bit of literature that even the best of our students cared about only a little and the rest of us couldn’t even fake. There were moments when you could have been pulled all the way in, when he talked about somebody named Lovelace, and some mad-sounding book with dragons and carnivals and when he was whipping it up you thought, Get me that book. Until you realized Dr. Ellis was performing, selling little bits of a thing like they did in commercials, and the thing itself was going to wind up meaning all but nothing to the likes of you, so reading an entire book of it was out of the question.

You wanted to believe him, you wanted to care, and you could, if you didn’t worry too much about the message and just listened to the way he would swing through certain words, like “forward,” which came out like
far-ward,
and “the minister of finance,” which rolled out as
dee meeneestah of fee-naanse.
It sounded very slick to me, and I noticed somehow his hands did a sort of mime version of the same thing as he sang the words accompanied by a fluttering of those hands—birdlike toward the ceiling, then a quick loud
clap,
then a challenging long finger in somebody’s face, then all our faces as he spanned the room asking, “You think so? I think so. You think so?” to one obscure literary idea or another.

I had never heard anybody like Dr. Ellis before. Right, I was sitting next to his son, but just the same, I felt as if I had never heard it before, in any form. Why? I looked over to Napoleon. “He’s great,” I whispered.

Napoleon nodded. He smiled, and I could tell he was proud. But then the smile slipped away. If it was me I would have held it a little longer.

I went back to listening to sounds instead of ideas, and found myself so lulled by him that I was caught flat when he asked for questions. There was a bit of a silence, followed by the whispering, as people tried coming up with questions that had some thin connection to what the doctor had been talking about for the last half hour. I looked up at the small box of a window at the front door of the class to see framed in it the soft and kind but not-too-pleased face of Sister Jacqueline. It was considered terrible form not to ask our guest speakers a slew of informed questions, and if we didn’t, the scene after he left would not be pretty.

Miraculous Manny rescued us for a start.

“The way you speak, it’s almost a singsong, more like a little kid than an adult.”

Dr. Ellis was pleased. “I am not an adult, I am a writer.”

“Hah,” Manny said. Manny was developing a new hero. Unfortunately he was not developing any follow-up questions.

“Ask him what forms he writes in,” came the quiet, island-inflected voice on my right. Again, it made me think of the differences in their speech, father and son. Napoleon was so much more... controlled.

“I write realism,” Dr. Ellis said, “until realism wearies me. Then I write fables, allegories, plays, songs, verse, essays, and letters to my friends. But in the end, I write about the same two things. The same two things, I think, that everyone writes about. I write about my dreams, and about my doubts. Dreams and doubts, they will keep a person’s mind occupied for a great long while.”

There was silence then. Sister was smiling, pleased, in her window, like a big canary in a small cage.

“And mulligatawny,” he added.

More silence.

“Mulligatawny. It has a lovely sound, does it not? I have always loved the sound of mulligatawny, the very loveliness of the syllables, the play in there. And it is a very fine soup. As words, it is beautiful, mulligatawny, as food it is beautiful, mulligatawny, so it fills me twice. I write about mulligatawny whenever I can because
that
is what it is all about. I keep a can on my desk even, for inspiration.”

After a brief pause, Dr. Ellis thanked us and we broke into applause. “Really, Napoleon,” I could say louder now with the cover of hands clapping, “he’s great.”

Napoleon Charlie Ellis was smiling again, but still looking not too sure about it. “Yes, well, you would be less enthusiastic if you had to eat mulligatawny four times per week. I am missing my mother’s cooking.” He waited. But he wasn’t finished. “I am missing my mother.”

I was in no doubt about what was the right thing to do then.

I looked away.

We were allowed to buzz for a few minutes after we had a speaker, so Sister could chat with them, ask all the questions we hadn’t, and basically butter them up enough to come back for another free visit next year. While this was going on, we suddenly got the call. Sister was motioning for Napoleon to come up, and when he did, to my surprise, he tugged a chunk of my shirt sleeve to haul me along.

“Hello, sir,” I said. “Nice talk.”

“Thank you, Mr. Moncreif,” Dr. Ellis said, shaking my hand.

I stood there like a dummy.

“Napoleon has talked quite a bit about you. Says you are a fine baseball player.”

Wa-hoo. Familiar territory. “Well, yes sir, I do love baseball. I play all the time. I want to get Napoleon playing too, as much as I can. Do you like baseball?”

He smiled at me, checked his watch. Sister Jacqueline rolled her eyes and bugged them at me at the same time, which is quite a sight. She was giving me the old ix-nay on the oring-bay aseball-bay face. Like I really bore all our speakers into never returning.

“Yes, as a matter of fact I have followed it somewhat. But I plan to watch a lot more of it this season since I am working so close to Fenway Park and all. Do you know I can see the Citgo sign from my office window?”

I gasped. I actually did. “Napoleon never told me that. You never told me that.”

Napoleon sighed. “I was saving it.” He sounded a little sarcastic.

“Anyway,” Dr. Ellis said, though it sounded more like
ahh-na-wey.
“I must be going. But I thought it was time I met you. And we will continue our discussion at the dinner. I am looking forward to it.”

I was completely lost. But I had never heard of a student at St. C’s contradicting an adult on school property, in front of a nun, and living to tell the tale. Not even a normal adult, never mind a big-time international speaker with a “Doctor” at the front of his name.

“I’m looking forward to it too.”

I looked at Napoleon out of the corner of my eye. He looked away with his entire face.

We were walking home together.

“You don’t have to go,” he said quietly. He sounded embarrassed.

“Why wouldn’t I want to go?” I had never been to a restaurant in my life. Not a proper one anyway, that took reservations and credit cards and stuff. Never really wanted to go to one either.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the whole thing is... foolish.”

“Nah,” I said. “No it isn’t. We’ll go. It’ll be fine. Where are we going to go?”

“Someplace called Anthony’s Pier Four.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Pier. That means water. That means fish. Is this going to be a fish place? Am I going to have to eat fish?”

“What is wrong with fish? Fish is wonderful food.”

“Fish is what people eat when they can’t find any real food. It’s like disaster food.”

As he often, mysteriously does, Napoleon seemed to take this personally. “I am sure they will have some meat for you.”

“Cool,” I said.

We walked in silence for a bit.

“So, you picked me,” I said, in a sort of wonder.

“My father wanted to get acquainted with my circle. You are my circle.”

My first impulse was, I wanted to make a joke about that. I had to. I looked at Napoleon.

“Thanks,” I said.

The whole day he had seemed off. Unsure of himself. Not as rigid or as hard as I had come to expect. I figured his father had done that by showing up. If my father had shown up, my day would have been thrown off too.

“Can I ask you a question, Napoleon?” I said. When he didn’t say anything, I asked it anyway. “How come your accent’s not as strong as your dad’s?”

Napoleon looked me face-on, right into my eyes, and he looked hard and grim, and suddenly old. His voice came out very flat.

“Worlds within worlds,” he said.

I didn’t even try. “Huh?”

“Because we function in our own worlds, even though we live in essentially the same place. My father is in the business of being West Indian, and people everywhere love him for it. While his son, on the other hand, spends his days in a place where it would be better not to make a point of it.”

“What? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

What came next was the first harsh thing Napoleon Charlie Ellis or Richard Riley Moncreif ever said to each other.

“How stupid are you, Richard, may I ask?”

My first response was—I could feel it even if I couldn’t see it—to go all red in the face. My second was to walk faster and try to leave Napoleon behind.

“No, no, listen to me,” he said, staying with me.

“No. I don’t want to listen to you. I don’t want to listen to
that,
all right. You know, Napoleon,
everything
doesn’t have to do with
that,
does it? You’re always talking about the same thing, no matter what anybody else is talking about.”

“What?” he said, and he laughed when he said it. But he didn’t think it was a bit funny. “Listen to you. Always talking about
that
? You can’t even speak it. You can’t even say what
that
is.”

“Yes I can.”

“No, you cannot.”

I breathed a couple of loud, exasperated, steamy whistly breaths through my nose. Then I said it. “Blackness,” I said.

I knew why he was laughing now. I tried to hold my hard-guy face but it was a chore. I had heard myself, after all. I said the word in such a ridiculous stage whisper, like a three-year-old with a secret. It was the best argument I could have made for Napoleon’s side of things.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I said, giving up to a small laugh myself.

Anyhow, I had managed to make him laugh. No small task. I didn’t want to mess with that just yet.

We were nearing the bus stop in the square, the stop where all the Ward 17s waited to get bused out of here.

“Right,” said Napoleon. “Here is a good example. You read the papers—”

“Sports pages only,” I quickly pointed out.

“Yes, well if you were not
hiding
in the sports pages you would know that this city is a place where a lot of people would do anything to keep from going to school with black people.”

“Maybe, but—”

“Richard, you have to know that that means a great many of the people who wind up in a school like yours—”

“Ours—”

“
Yours.
You have to know that they are there because of hate. Because somebody hates—”

“I don’t have to know that. I don’t have to—”

“Yo,” came the call from the bus stop.

“What?” I answered Butchie. Naturally enough I figured he meant me. But no. Not this time.

“Yo,” he said again.

Napoleon ignored him, held his head even higher than usual, and strode on.