Juneteenth (35 page)

“Daddy Hickman,” I said, “I’m hungry.”

“What do you want now, Bliss, some popcorn?”

“No, sir.”

“What?”

“Some ice cream.”

“Do you know how to go to get it and come back without getting lost?”

“Yes, sir. I can do it. I’m kinda hungry.”

“Here,” he said, “go get yourself a cone of cream. And hurry right back, you hear?”

I got a mix, vanilla and strawberry. I didn’t like chocolate. Body did.
I’m dark brown, chocolate to the bone
, Body liked to brag about everything but I couldn’t, not about that. As I started back, I licked the cone slow to make it last.

Some ladies were dancing on a platform in front of a tent. Behind them and up high was a picture of a gorilla taking a white lady into the jungle. He had big red eyes and sharp teeth and she was screaming and her clothes were torn and her bubbies were showing. I went on. The next tent had pink lemonade and watermelon on ice. I watched a man throwing baseballs at some wooden milk bottles. He knocked them over the second time and won a Dolly Dimples Kewpie doll. He had three already. Out in front of another tent a man was saying something real fast through a megaphone and pointing to a picture of a two-headed man, and a lot of folks were listening to him. One of the heads was laughing but the other head was crying. I watched the man awhile. He waved his arm in a circle in the air like he was doing magic and some of the people were going inside. Then two big white guys came up and pinched me and I said “Oh!” and they laughed and called me Rastus. They knew me. I didn’t cry. I backed away and went behind the tent. It was quiet, the crowd was all out front. I saw the wagons and the ropes and cages for the animals. Some wet clothes were hanging on a line stretched between two of the wagons and I could hear the music coming up from the big tent and I could smell the hamburgers frying. My ice cream was running out so I ate it very slow, but it didn’t last. It was all down in the little end and I bit it off and let the cream run down in my mouth. Then I thought of some fine little-end barbecue ribs and wanted some but nobody was selling any. Pig feet neither. I went on past the back of the tent where the fat lady lived. She looked like a Dolly Dimples too, and I went around and took a look at her. She was holding a handkerchief in her two fingers and her
pinkie was crooked like Sister Wilhite’s when she drinks her coffee and her hair was cut short in a bob with a pink ribbon around it. A man said, Hi there, to her and she said, Hello dear, and smiled and winked her eye. She looked just like a big fat Dolly Dimples doll and I wondered if she was made like Body said all the littler women were. She winked at me and smiled.

I went on. I was still hungry for ice cream but I saw those two big guys again and went behind the tent and over the staked ropes and sawdust. That’s when I saw him. He was sitting on a little barrel looking down at a black and orange felt beanie with a little flower pot and a paper flower attached to the top and I didn’t know what I was going to do but when I went up to him I could see that we were the same height, then he looked up and said, Hi, kid, and I hit him. I hit him real quick and it glanced off his cheek and I could see the blackness smear away and the white coming through and then I hit him again, hard and solid this time and he yelled, Git outta here, y’little bastard! What’s the matter with you, kid? You nuts? trying to push me away and I hit and hit, trying to make all the blackness go away. He was surprised and his arms were too short to push me far and I was hitting fast with both fists, going as fast as I could go and he was cursing. Then something snatched me up into the air and I was trying to hit and kicking at him until Daddy Hickman shook me hard, saying, Boy, what’s come over you? Don’t you know that that’s a grown man you’re trying to fight? You trying to start a riot? And saying to the little clown, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry; I sent him to get an ice cream cone and here I find him trying to fight. Who are you? the little one said. You work for his folks? No, Daddy Hickman said, but I know him; he’s with me. Then you better get him the hell out of here before I forget he’s just a kid. In fact, I should get you instead. What the hell do you mean letting a wild kid like that run around loose? Don’t worry, Daddy Hickman said, we’re leaving and
I mean to take care of him. He won’t do it again.… And then he was running with me under his arm, puffing around the tent and across the lot into an alley and someone behind us screaming, “Hey, Rube! Hey, Rube!” and the blackness was all over the back of my hands….

CHAPTER 13

“… Oh, yes,” Hickman said, fanning the Senator’s perspiring face, “you were giving us a natural fit! All of a sudden you were playing hooky from the services and hiding from everybody—including me. Why, one time you took off and we had about three hundred folks out looking for you. We searched the streets and the alleys and the playgrounds, the candy stores and the parks, and we questioned all the children in the neighborhood—but no Bliss. We even searched the steeple of the church where the revival was being held but that only upset the pigeons and caused even more confusion when somebody knocked against the bell and set it ringing as though there had been a fire or the river was flooding.

“So then we spread out and really started hunting. I had begun to think about going to the police—which we hated to do, considering that they’d probably have made things worse—because, you see, I thought that she—that is, I thought that you might have been kidnapped. In fact, we were already headed along a downtown street
when, lo and behold, we look up and see you coming out of a picture house where it was against the law for us to go! Yes, sir, there you were, coming out of there with all those people, blinking your eyes and with your face all screwed up with crying. But thank God you were all right. I was so relieved that I couldn’t say a word, and while we stood at the curb watching to see what you would do, Deacon Wilhite turned to me and said, ‘Well, ’Lonzo—A.Z.—it looks like Rev. Bliss has gone and made himself an outlaw, but at least we can be thankful that he wasn’t stolen into Egypt.’ … And that’s when you looked up and saw us and tried to run again. I tell you, Bliss, you were giving us quite a time.
Quite
a time …”

Suddenly Hickman’s head fell forward, his voice breaking off; and as he slumped in his chair the Senator stirred behind his eyelids, saying, “What? What?” But except for the soft burr of Hickman’s breathing it was as though a line had gone dead in the course of an important call.

“What? What?” the Senator said, his face straining toward the huge, shadowy form in the bedside chair. Then came a sudden gasp and Hickman’s voice was back again, soft but moving as though there had been no interruption.

“And so,” Hickman was saying, “when you started asking me that, I said, ‘Bliss, thy likeness is in the likeness of God, the Father. Because, Reverend Bliss, God’s likeness is that of
all
babes.’ Now for some folks this fact is like a dose of castor oil as bitter as the world, but it’s the truth. It’s hard and bitter and a compound cathartic to man’s pride—which is as big and violent as the whole wide world. Still it gives the faint of heart a pattern and a faith to grow by….

“And when they ask me, ‘Where shall man look for God, the Father?’ I say, let him who seeks look into his own
bed
. I say let him look into his own
heart
. I say, let him search his own
loins
. And I say that each man’s bedmate is likely to be a Mary—no, don’t ask me
that—is most likely a Mary even though she be a Magdalene. That’s another form of the mystery, Bliss, and it challenges our ability to think. There’s always the mystery of the one in the many and the many in one, the you in them and the them in you—ha! And it mocks your pride, mocks it to the billionth, trillionth power. Yes, Bliss, but it’s always present and it’s a rebuke to the universe of man’s terrible pride and it’s the shape and substance of all human truth….”

… Listen, listen! Go back
, the Senator tried desperately to say.
It was Atlanta! On the side of a passing streetcar, in which smiling, sharp-nosed women in summer dresses talked sedately behind the open grillwork and looked out on the passing scene, I saw her picture moving past, all serene and soulful in the sunlight, and I was swept along beside the moving car until she got away. Soon I was out of breath, but then I followed the gleaming rails, hurrying through crowded streets, past ice cream and melon vendors crying their wares above the backs of ambling horses and past kids on lawns selling lemonade two cents a glass from frosted pitchers, and on until the lawns and houses gave way to buildings in which fancy dicty dummies dressed in fine new clothes showed behind wide panes of shop-window glass. Then I was in a crowded Saturday-afternoon street sweet with the smell of freshly cooked candy and the odor of perfume drifting from the revolving doors of department stores and fruit stands with piles of yellow delicious apples, bananas, coconuts and sweet white seedless grapes—and there, in the middle of a block, I saw her once again. The place was all white and pink and gold, trimmed with rows of blinking lights red, white and blue in the shade; and colored photographs in great metal frames were arranged to either side of a ticket booth with thin square golden bars and all set beneath a canopy encrusted with other glowing lights. The fare was a quarter and I felt in my pocket for a dollar bill, moist to my touch as I pulled it out, but I was too afraid to try. Instead I simply looked on awhile as boys and girls arrived and reached up to buy their tickets then disappeared inside. I yearned to enter
but was afraid. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t the nerve. So I moved on past in the crowd. For a while I walked beside a strolling white couple pretending that I was their little boy and that they were taking me to have ice cream before they took me in to see the pictures. They sounded happy and I was enjoying their talk when they turned off and went into a restaurant. It was a large restaurant and through the glass I could see a jolly fat black man cutting slices from a juicy ham. He wore a white chef’s cap and jacket with a cloth around his neck and when he saw me he winked as though he knew me and I turned and ran dodging through the sauntering crowd, then slowed to a walk, going back to where she smiled from her metal frame. This time I followed behind a big boy pushing a red-and-white-striped bicycle. A small Confederate flag fluttered from each end of the handlebars on which two rearview mirrors showed reflecting my face in the crowd, and two shining horns with red rubber bulbs and a row of red glass reflectors ridged along the curve of the rear fender, throwing a dazzled red diamond light, and the racing seat was hung with dangling coon tails. It was keen and I ran around in front and walked backwards a while, watching him roll it. He looked at me and I looked at him but mainly at his bike. A shiny bull with lowered horns gleamed from the end of the front fender, followed by a screaming eagle with outstretched wings and a toy policeman with big flat hands which turned and whirled its arms in the breeze as he guided it by holding one hand on the handlebar and the other on the seat. And on the fork which held the front wheel there was a siren which let out a low howl whenever he pulled the chain to warn the people he was coming. And as it moved the spokes sparkled bright and handsome in the sun. It was keen. I followed him back up the street until we reached the picture show where I stopped and watched him go on. Then I understood why he didn’t ride: His rear tire had a flat in it. But I was still afraid so I walked up to the drugstore on the corner and listened a while to some Eskimo Pie men in white pants and shoes telling lies about us and the Yankees as they leaned on the handlebars of their carts, before going back to give it another try. This time I made myself go up to the
booth and looked up through the golden bars where the blue eyes looked mildly down at me from beneath white cotton candy bangs. I …

“Bliss?”

Was it Mary? No, here to forget is best. They criticize me, me a senator now, especially Karp who’s still out there beating hollow wood to hully rhythms all smug and still making ranks of dead men flee the reality of the shadow upon them, then Who? What cast it? stepping with the fetch to the bank and Geneva with tithes for Israel while ole man Muggin has to keep on bugging his eyes and rolling those bales so tired of living but they refuse to let him die. Who’s Karp kidding? Who’s kidding Karp? making a fortune in bleaching cream, hair straightener and elevator shoes, buying futures in soybeans, corn and porkers and praising his God but still making step fetch it for the glory of getting but keeping his hands clean, he says. And how do they feel, still detroiting my mother who called me Goodrich Hugh Cuddyear in the light of tent flares then running away and them making black bucks into millejungs and fraud pieces in spectacularmythics on assembly lines? Who’ll speak the complicated truth? With them going from pondering to pandering the nation’s secret to pandering their pondering? So cast the stone if you must and if you see a ghost rise up, make him bleed. Hell, yes, primitives were right—mirrors do steal souls. So Odysseus plunged that matchstick into Polyphemus’ crystal! Here in this country it’s change the reel and change the man. Don’t look! Don’t listen! Don’t say and the living is easy! O.K., so they can go fighting the war but soon the down will rise up and break the niggonography and those ghosts who created themselves in the old image won’t know why they are what they are and then comes a screaming black babel and white connednation! Who, who, who, boo, are we? Daddy, I say where in the dead place between the shadow where does mothermatermammy—mover so moving on? Where in all the world pile hides?