The Taste of Salt (4 page)

So right now I'm going to leave the scene with my brother and my parents. Indulge me as I tell the story of a
family, the story of my family. I will invite in other voices, because one thing I've learned in science is that the first truth you see is rarely the whole truth. I will hypothesize and extrapolate, if you will. I will even imagine scenes I did not witness, speak the thoughts of other people. Theories can't be formed and understanding can't be reached without hypothesis, extrapolation, and though we in the biz don't like to admit it, imagination. So I'll start in 1969, five years before I was born. That year, my father, Ray Henderson, met my mother, Sarah Jenkins. Back then, Cleveland was only beginning its long, slow decline. Despite the riots in Hough in 1966 and King's death just a couple of years later, there was still plenty of industrial work available right in the city. My father worked at the Coit Road GM plant for nearly twenty years. Do you know how many car doors he must have attached in that amount of time? The mind reels. And drinking steadily much of the time. He never missed a day of work either. I don't know how he did it. Any more than I knew how to get him to stop.

In 1969, long before he could even have dreamed how things would go in his life, he was a tall, good-looking twenty-nine-year-old with money in his pocket and a smooth, sweet way of whistling.

Back then, a man could always find work if he was
willing. There was money to be made in Cleveland, and plenty of places to spend it. East 105th Street glowed like the Las Vegas strip. Every Saturday night, there'd be folks pimpwalking up and down the street, going from club to club. In the fifties, it was Muddy Waters and Coltrane and all the big names. Later, Motown moved in—Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and the Supremes and God only knows who else. But you can bet it was somebody good. They all came through Cleveland. If you walk down 105th now, the street is nearly a ghost town in the few places where it isn't covered by the hulking red-brown buildings of the Cleveland Clinic. 105th Street near Euclid is a series of shabby attempts at strip malls and a dazzling number of fast-food places and boarded-up businesses and factories. Head further downtown into the East Sixties and Seventies and the scene is much the same.

But when Ray met Sarah at Leo's Casino on East Seventy-ninth in 1969, this was all in the future. Aretha Franklin was coming through that night. The air was alive, sparkling. Ray was nursing a beer when my mother came in. Sarah was tiny and delicate-boned—she looked like music and sunshine. She had big brown eyes and the prettiest smile he'd ever seen. She came in with a girlfriend, but the girlfriend didn't make much of an impression on Ray. The women sat down at the bar, just a stool away from him, and
ordered some girly kind of drinks. Something pink with a silly name. Sarah sat there like a little bird, looking at everything that was going on around her, so interested. Ray found himself looking at her mouth as she sipped at her drink. After a few minutes he got up and walked over to them.

“Hello, ladies,” he said. The friend made a little pout and looked away, but Sarah looked up and looked Ray right in the eye. “Hello,” she said.

“What brings you here tonight?”

“We love Aretha Franklin.” This was from the friend, who immediately established herself as the bossy one. Ray played along—he could wait. And if they were friends, no sense alienating the one when you wanted to get to the other.

“Oh, yeah, that sister is all right. Y'all from down south?”

“No sir,” said the friend. “We both come from Chicago. We came here to go to school. We've been here about two months. We go to the Bolton nursing school—in that new building over at Case Western.”

Nursing school? An educated woman? A pretty black woman like her knows enough about having a good time to come out and see Aretha
and
is in nursing school? Ray felt as though he must have done something right that day to meet someone like her. He thought of his small, book-cluttered
room and how he didn't dare tell anyone he worked with about how much he loved to read—they found out later, but not then. “What you wanna know all that white-boy stuff for?” they would ask. And laugh. He couldn't explain it to them. That it wasn't “white boy” stuff. It was human stuff. That's why he loved it so: because he just felt human when he read it. Maybe a college girl would appreciate that. No one from back home in Alabama did—not that he ever even talked to them anymore. There was no one he could share it with. He looked at the friend again and said, “Well, can you ladies tell me your names before I buy us all another round?”

The friend, who seemed to feel that she should do all the talking, said, “Thanks. My name's Elizabeth and this here is Sarah.” Sarah turned her gaze on Ray and smiled, and that was it. He was gone. Choirs of angels and all the rest. He said to both of them but mostly looking at Sarah, “Well, it's nice to meet you.” But Elizabeth might as well have been a post, a tree, a rock. He managed to take a step closer to Sarah and she said, her voice music only he could hear, “Nice to meet you, too.”

So that was it. They talked, they drank, they listened to Aretha (who rocked the house; she tore up “I Say a Little Prayer” that night). He somehow managed to maneuver himself so that he was standing next to Sarah. He could
smell her. Back home, before he came up north, it was mostly work and sweat, work and sweat. Didn't have time to notice much else. But sometimes, just for a minute at the end of the day, the air would clear and he could forget about the work for a minute and it would smell sweet, the warmed earth all around him, sometimes the sound of a bird. She smelled like that. Sitting next to her gave him that same feeling of peace. Her hair was pressed with a hot comb, and it smelled a little burned and a little like Ultra Sheen, but he could still smell the sweet earth underneath. When it was time for the girls to leave, she slipped her number into his hand when Elizabeth wasn't looking, before he could even ask. He didn't know why she did it like Elizabeth wouldn't approve. But he liked that, too. That she would give her number to a man in a bar, something a proper girl would never do. He liked that.

H
E DIDN'T WAIT TOO
long to call her. He kept thinking about that smile, how it lifted him up. He kept thinking about her mouth. Her hands looked strong, like she used them a lot, taking care of people. She looked like a person who took good care. She had long, elegant fingers and smooth, perfectly shaped nails. He didn't usually notice a woman's nails but he noticed hers. Maybe because they made such a beautiful, light contrast to her dark skin.
Skin he could imagine pressing his lips to. He was thinking about that as he called her, as they talked, as she agreed to have dinner with him.

S
HE WAS WEARING
A
light pink dress with a full skirt. It set off her skin beautifully, making it look warm and velvety. The sight of her struck him dumb—it seemed he was being offered everything he'd ever wanted. “Well?” she said, hands on hips, mock-annoyed, when he didn't even say hello or stick out his hand to shake or anything.

“You look so beautiful.”

She laughed. “Now, that's what a woman likes to hear in the first ten minutes of a date.” She took his hand, unselfconsciously. “Come on.”

So that's how it started. They went out to a steak house not far from where they'd met. They talked and talked. Neither of them could believe how easy it was to talk to each other. Neither of them were virgins. But finding someone you could share your mind with wasn't the same as finding someone you could share your body with. Sarah kept laughing, and after a while, would punctuate what she said with a light touch on his shoulder or his arm. Ray kept having this music feeling about her—the same joy he felt when he was in a club or at a concert and everything was perfect, the music was perfect, freeing something inside of him. He took
her hand after a little while. He told her about the shotgun shack where he was born, in a town near Mobile that was so small that it wasn't on any maps. About deciding to follow a friend up north to a decent job after his parents died. There was no one left in Alabama for him by that time anyway—he was the last of three and ten years younger than his youngest sister—they were long gone to different cities up north and had left their baby brother behind as surely as they had left behind the red dirt of the South. She listened, fascinated. Then she told her story; it was very different from his. She was the daughter of one of very few black doctors in Chicago—she'd gone to Howard and, after that, decided that she wanted to help people in the same way her father did. He didn't say anything while she told him all this. But his heart shriveled up a little—why would she keep going out with a man who had barely even finished high school? Who was working on an assembly line just to keep body and soul together. He was alone in the world; she had all the warm cushion that family and money could provide. What did she see when she looked at him?

But her gaze never wavered, steady and warm. It wasn't long before he found himself telling her things that he hadn't told anyone. Things that no one else would listen to: About what it was like to read the books he loved, go all over the world in his imagination, and then spend the
day on the line at the auto plant, hanging doors on car after car after car. About how he hoped that wouldn't be all he'd ever do, that he'd like maybe to write a book himself. He'd like to tell a story about the people he knew, the way Ralph Ellison had, the way Langston Hughes had. She listened and nodded and smiled. And at the end of the night, they knew there would be other nights.

And there were: dinners and walks and visits back to that club. She sometimes had a glass of wine or a fruity drink but mostly she stuck to club soda. He always had a beer or two but not too many, never too many. And after a few—no, many—nights of talking, there was the night he told her this story. This was the story that made her fall in love with him for good.

Here's what he told her: “I been working at the GM plant since I came up here. When I first come up north, I rented a room so tiny and so filthy that it made me want to cry or punch something whenever I set foot inside of it. I missed the outdoors something awful. So I would walk the streets after work. Didn't know a soul in this city. The library was open late and it was warm. So one night I walked in there. I hadn't been up here more than three months.

“It was pretty empty, close to closing time. The woman behind the counter could have been from down home. That surprised me, seeing her there. But there she sat, big as life.
She was reading herself, just waiting for the last half hour to pass so she could close up, I suppose. She was reading
Invisible Man.
She looked up at me and smiled. ‘May I help you, young man?' I didn't know what to say. I didn't even know why I'd come in. I said the first thing that came to mind. ‘It's cold out and it's warm in here. What are you reading?'

“She laughed, even though I hadn't said anything funny. She lifted up the book so I could see it better.
Invisible Man.
It's by Ralph Ellison,' she said.

“‘Who's he?'

“She showed me his author picture. He looked a little like my daddy. I know I must have looked like someone slapped me. ‘He's black?' Though I'd been reading a lot, I'd yet to encounter a black writer—hard to believe, I know. But it's the truth.

“‘Yes indeed,' she said, giving me a good long look. To this day, I don't know what she saw there. But instead of chasing me out of the library, she said, ‘Wait a minute.' And she went and got another copy of that book off the shelf and gave it to me. Showed me how to get a library card, too. I took that book home that night and started reading. I'll never forget how it began: ‘I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and
I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.' Well, that was that. No going back after I read those words—and all that followed. No going back to the man I was before. I had to go back to the librarian a lot—Miss Scott her name was—and ask her what certain things meant. She helped me. She helped me learn how to use a dictionary and how to think and she helped me find what to read after Ellison and after that and after that. I don't know if I ever thanked her. But I should have. I hope I see her again someday so I can do that.

“The books saved me in the end. Really saved me. Because I was still at a point where I easy could have gone either way. Yeah, I was earning good money at GM but I hustled a little, too. Nothing that was gonna get me killed, just little shady stuff. Some pool hustling, a little run and gunning; I was a lookout for a numbers runner, kept a little extra money in my pocket. And I'll admit it—I kind of liked the guys. But here's what happened in the end:

“It was a clear August night and I was looking out, just like I was supposed to. Folks were coming and going, playing the numbers, playing that foolish hope, just like they always do, just like usual. I was reading
The Faerie Queene.
I'd come that far, can you believe it? You know what that
is? It's from the 1500s—it's all what you call Spenserian sonnet form. Edmund Spenser, the guy who wrote it, invented the way he wrote it. Can you imagine? Damn. When I first started it, I couldn't make head or tail of it. But I taught myself enough, with Miss Scott's help, to read something like that. Not only read it, love it. I loved it. I was living inside it, so far away from Cleveland, so far away from the assembly line, so far away from the numbers, so far from the smell of cigarette smoke.

“So I was reading and reading and reading, and gradually, I stopped looking up. I stopped looking out. I was tucked into this little alcove so I could see but not be seen. I had just read these lines,