High Cotton (33 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
He declined to say another word to bird, child, or bored nurse’s
assistant in the days that were left to him. He betrayed no interest in the news items we dangled before him and breathed in answer to such questions as who raked the gravel drive to the nursing home, or why did he want to hide and miss that delicious black bottom pie. Grandfather looked at us and our glossies as if from a great height, enveloped in the stillness mountain climbers are said to discover once the summit is gained.
assistant in the days that were left to him. He betrayed no interest in the news items we dangled before him and breathed in answer to such questions as who raked the gravel drive to the nursing home, or why did he want to hide and miss that delicious black bottom pie. Grandfather looked at us and our glossies as if from a great height, enveloped in the stillness mountain climbers are said to discover once the summit is gained.
I gave up hope of the heirlooms, the stories of how, in the old days, the poor boiled dirt to recover the salt that fell from meat as it cured. Grandfather checked his vest pocket to make sure that during the one-way hug I hadn’t lifted his valuable, handed-down tale of hooded night riders advancing under an ashen moon.
Grandfather was moved from the nursing home into the hospital and died after a lengthy rehearsal period in the form of a diabetic coma. His death in 1985 came to me in New York in the shape of a yellow envelope, a terrifying telegram lying on the floor. I hadn’t paid several telephone bills. I knew it was bad news. I opened it, lying on my back so that I had the telegram’s view of the mail slot in the door. I was relieved that it was Grandfather and not someone I was not then and am not now reconciled to losing.
I didn’t go to Grandfather’s funeral and never visited his grave. In the end, I went to Georgia to say goodbye to him, because, in spite of myself, I believed that if he was anywhere, he would be there, wandering along the banks of the Ogeechee River.
“Be careful of crackers,” Grandfather once said to me. We were talking about the farm he used to have. Many blacks were forced off their land. Grandfather wasn’t one of them, though it sometimes suited his mood to think of himself as such. In fact, he’d been anxious to get away after my father’s mother died.
I reminded him of what he’d always said about good whites.
He was peeling an orange. His hands shook. “I know. It just seems like I ran into so many bad ones.”
He was peeling an orange. His hands shook. “I know. It just seems like I ran into so many bad ones.”
“What do you make of all that now?”
“That it’s typical.”
“Painful?”
“No. Well, if it is I don’t believe I have much right to the pain.”
“Why not?”
“Because I haven’t earned it.”
The farm had long since been turned into a motel, but Grandfather made pilgrimages to see the trees he’d planted. Everyone thought these sudden trips of his dangerous, at his age, but once he had made up his mind no one could turn him left or right. He had begun to show signs that he could remember in detail things that happened years ago, yet what had occurred the day before was a blur to him, like an interval at sea.
I was told that on his final journey to Georgia, sometime in the late 1970s, Grandfather had been very jumpy and often rushed to the window to follow the sound of a distant train. He landed in a small town in South Carolina. A black woman found him. He had no clothes, no money, no idea of who he was, where he was, or how he had traveled so far. She took Grandfather to the sheriff, who put him in jail for his own safety.
The sheriff’s wife cooked when there were prisoners. They enjoyed talking to him, somehow discovered his name, where he had family, and called around. After that he was kept under the close guard of old age. No more uprisings against himself. He’d been on his way to his ancestral home at Sugar Creek.
I had not been South since my childhood and still believed in the hurry-sundown Dixie of movieland. The New South was a surprise. Augusta, the last of the Fall Line cities, had treated
itself to a facelift. Along the Savannah River, dwellings once “segregated in place, but integrated in sin,” as Grandfather remembered them, had been turned into a historic development. The bordellos and their world of paydays had given way to crab-cake parlors done in a sort of minstrel-era decor.
itself to a facelift. Along the Savannah River, dwellings once “segregated in place, but integrated in sin,” as Grandfather remembered them, had been turned into a historic development. The bordellos and their world of paydays had given way to crab-cake parlors done in a sort of minstrel-era decor.
New businesses had taken over the old mansions; shopping centers had conquered the cotton fields. In the cafeterias, small families made room for larger parties, who in turn gave up corners to youngsters on dates. Not everyone was either black or white anymore, but people apparently hadn’t caught on yet to the multiracial shoving of “up North.” Even the fundamentalist churches in what had been butcher’s shops appeared to go out of business cheerfully. I was taken to praise the new addition to the medical center. The president of a black college told me he was trying to persuade his daughter to transfer from her predominantly white school to his because he found out she didn’t know who Joe Louis was.
The graveyards were the last remnants of the Old Country. I was shown the way across the park through which Grandfather and his brothers had hurried when they were late to church. The house where he grew up wasn’t there anymore, but beyond the cedar branches was a cemetery. The plots flooded in heavy rain, including one topped by a large pink stone.
Grandfather’s sisters were lined up behind his mother, as they had been in life. One of them, I was told, ended her days in a web of superstitions, which included a time-consuming dislike of blacks darker than herself and putting a bowl of water with a fork in it under her bed in order to trap the hostile spirits that might get her while she slept.
Another sister was reported to have said, “Such a pity about Eustace, getting one of those nasty men’s diseases.”
“How did you work that out?”
“Just like Waldo. When he went bald Mother wouldn’t let him in the house. She said he had one of those nasty men’s diseases.”
The youngest sister, the first to die, had had an almost punishing interest in the cause of convicts. In those days, hangings in the yard of the city jail drew crowds that watched from across the street. Men on chain gangs were starved, put in stocks, hogtied, flogged. It was said that the desperate letters from some prisoners almost tempted her to burn down a warden’s house. In 1932 an eighteen-year-old on the Chatham County chain gang, suffering from tuberculosis, killed himself. He had been laughed at when he asked for medicine. It was a famous story that spread quickly around the state. They said Grandfather’s mother, fearing what revenge his sister had in mind, locked her in the cellar until she cooled down.
Grandfather’s mother hadn’t liked his first wife because she was too light. She didn’t like blacks much either. That was enough, his wife said, she was through trying to please a woman so active in the church. They were buried within yards of one another, in competing family plots, so to speak. Grandfather once told me that long ago he had overheard his mother talking to his first wife.
“How did you get up here?”
“By that road.”
“Don’t be arrogant, child.”
“I walked.”
“I suppose you think you’re sitting pretty now.”
“No, I’m talking to you.”
What frightened him, Grandfather said, was that the conversation had taken place in the cemetery, his mother in her grave and his wife in hers.
The feeling of the Old Country also survived in some of the churches. Visitors to the Thankful Baptist Church were given paper shamrocks to pin to their lapels. Old Esau was remembered as a fine, upstanding churchman in a semicircle of white glass above the main door, mostly, it seemed, because he’d brought central heating to the church.
People who didn’t know me at all opened their doors and hearts, just because I was family. “Root hog or die,” they called hospitality. I was moved by the elderly who spoke of Grandfather as one who had been born in this church, who had grown up in this church. They were very proud and thought of themselves as contemporaries of the church. The immense vault of brown brick they called home was built in 1893, in the “cathedral style,” they said. True, there was a nave, a rose window, a tower, and the big bell rang lustily at eleven o’clock.
The entire church was light green carpet, from the street door, up the first few steps, through more white doors, all the way to the pulpit and the back wall. The old panels had been replaced by a perhaps accidentally primitive painting, a copy of a copy. John had his hand casually on the Lord’s shoulder. They had hippie rather than biblical hair and beards and were half submerged in aquamarine blue, posed for a snapshot taken on a freshwater fishing trip. The halo around Christ waited to turn into a cartoon bubble. People pointed out to me the newness of the windows along the walls and the freshness of the white clapboard ceiling.
The Gospel Choir sang “I feel like going home,” with someone, somewhere, letting out a long, low, dry “Yes,” and the emotion I’d been looking for all those years finally came. Beaten armies learn well, they say.
Perhaps the old-timers were right to insist that we, the Also Chosen, live wholly in the future and, like early Christians, preserve only detached sayings and a wagonful of miracles from the past. The facts were many, too many. If I’d sat where they’d sat, my trousers would still be burning.
As in the game where the word selected at the start of the row changes as it is whispered from ear to ear, it was their faith that being black would not mean what it did twenty years before, or back when the larder always had to be filled, when the woodpile could never go down, when the dairy had to furnish butter and cream, and the pickaninnies had to have molasses and gungers. They could not foresee that anyone would want to revise the story or renegotiate the terms of belonging after them.
Their understanding of what it meant to be colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, their experience of the life because of it and the life in spite of it haunted me much like a religion you are born into and struggle to either reject or accept. I looked to my elderly relatives as revealed texts, guides to a great landslide that would tell me what to feel about this ode in a shell called blackness when the time came. Meanwhile, there was a big hole in the middle of my heart that needed filling up.
I had taken a utilitarian view of Grandfather. What else were old blacks for, except to be repositories of racial lore? Beautiful, maligned, obsolete Negroes, discussing themselves, “this race thing,” and feeling like philosophers—I used to sit back and wonder how they managed to be all-inclusive. It never occurred to me that they might be making it up as they went along and sometimes backing down.
My piety and resentment toward the tales of what I had missed before the thaw, what had been gone through for my sake, turned out to be like a camouflage maneuver, a prolongation of the adolescent lament that I wasn’t real but everyone else was, a comfortable resignation of the self that was also useful as a sort
of certificate of exemption. But one thing about the real world, if you aren’t careful it will tell you what you are and just how low you stand.
of certificate of exemption. But one thing about the real world, if you aren’t careful it will tell you what you are and just how low you stand.
I had the most dramatic conclusion in mind for my visit to the Old Country. I would walk over the bridge from Augusta into South Carolina, as a kind of humbling of myself before history. My fossilized picture of a rustling, pregnant landscape had me in the sweet myrtle, the dagger-pointed leaves of Spanish bayonet, and then in the great swamp of the Congaree. I’d make noises, the way a child alone in a creaking room adds his own sounds just to scare himself more.
The span over the river was much longer and higher than it had looked from my hotel window. The water below ran with red suds and the way ahead promised only more highway unfriendly to someone on foot. A hydraulic whine blotted out the sounds of my steps. I simply turned back. Even Grandfather’s memories were lost to me, like the Book of Jashar was to the Israelites, as he himself would have said.
Someone bequeathed to me the “fifty miles of elbow room” I took for granted. It was a luxury to believe that better days were being kept in layaway just for me or that the elderly held my consciousness in trust and I could take up the burden of knowing later, after my youth was no longer renewable and my second chances had all been spent.
The future in my early youth was a wide sea of aloneness and my catalogue of adventurers read: children of calamity, offspring of sin, outlaws, isolates, Negroes, and me. Two slaves ran away from the Dutch trading station during the Tokugawa period when Japan was closed to foreigners. They dressed in geisha clothes, made their way into Nagasaki, and were hacked to bits. I didn’t get to a place that far out.
I never could explain or admit to myself what I was fleeing
from and what I was escaping to. I assumed that either time or defeat would fill in the blank spaces. However, escape I did, the accidents of opportunity or sloth I interpreted as divine corroboration, and getting away was easy, like skipping school, avoiding the job, slipping out of the theater—a kind of gigantic, trivial something.
from and what I was escaping to. I assumed that either time or defeat would fill in the blank spaces. However, escape I did, the accidents of opportunity or sloth I interpreted as divine corroboration, and getting away was easy, like skipping school, avoiding the job, slipping out of the theater—a kind of gigantic, trivial something.
The sociological heat in which I grew up said you could live by yourself, but not for yourself. The community’s pastor shared everything, but he didn’t share the problems unless he came from the community. That was the difference between the war correspondent and the soldier. The former was not under orders. The situation would not change. You would always be pursued by it, and by your being who you were. If you had your ticket out, then you were under an obligation to allow your imagination to tell you what it was like for others.
Then the psychological terrain shifted violently, an entire history lay exposed, right there under our sandals and tennis shoes, as profound as a lost city. Appreciation of it called for initiation, a degree of worthiness, as in the practice of certain mystical sects, and you had to defer to those people who had known the worst, what seemed more true. I didn’t like the togetherness that expressed itself as suspicion; now I miss those whom injury made gracious and also those who simply uglied up and died.
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