White People (4 page)

I have lots of room on this table we inherited early from my farmer grandfather and his shy-in-public wife. It was built to seat a family of ten, plus guests. I am alone here at my usual end. Mother, Daddy, Bradley, and I each have a whole side to ourselves and must speak up to be heard by everyone. Venetian blinds cross the dining-room window, and sunshine throws a laddered shadow straight across the walnut surface of the table. The round-ended bars of light rest there in a row, like giant versions of my own crayons.

My brother and his friends are playing baseball in the front yard. They chant their jeers to various Episcopalian cadences. A few minutes back, a foul ball rattled off the roof. The grandfather clock in the foyer musically commemorates each and every fifteen minutes, however uneventful, and my crayon seems responsible for every drowsy sound.

The surface of the table gives a sudden jerk, and the crayoned frond of the potted palm I’m drawing takes an unexpected twist. I look up and watch my handsome father seat himself at the far end of the table and spread his mail like a game of solitare. Crosshatched with sunlight, his white shirt is dazzling and reflected in the tabletop. From his favorite coffee cup, steam climbs. It twists and plaits itself up through the alternating stripes of sun and slatted shadow. He holds an envelope to the light and rips into it with one finger. With that same hand, he slapped me two days ago. It burned across my face and swiveled my whole head in that direction. I go back to my control of crayons. Maybe he’ll take his bills into the study and leave me here to excel privately at drawing.

His voice startles me. “Why don’t you go outside and play with the others? It would do you some good.” I continue drawing. Indoor clouds rain blue and purple pellets on the houseplants. “Did you hear me down there?” “Yes sir.” “What don’t you like about baseball? Are you afraid you’ll get hurt or what?” I know I must say something. “I like drawing.” A pause. Still watching me, he drinks from his coffee cup. “But it’s summer, Bryan. It’s a beautiful summer morning and you’re seven years old and when—” “Eight,” I say, not looking up. “What?” “Eight years old.” “All right, then, eight, all the more reason. If you’ve got to draw on a day like this, what’s in
here that you can’t draw just as well outside?” All the floating clumps of leaves have sprouted pots. “I asked you a question. What do you find to draw, sitting in here like this?” A challenge. He thinks I don’t know. Most Imaginative of My Age, and he thinks I don’t even know what I’m drawing. Tell him an airplane, tell him an airplane. “You,” I say, despite myself. “Drawing me?” Why did I tell? Now he’ll want to see it. Casually, he glances again through his mail. “So, you’re drawing your dad, huh? Well, let’s have a look.” I note that he’s forgotten all about the baseball game. After slapping me two times in one week, he’s crazy if he thinks I’ll spend all morning drawing him and then get up and walk to the far end of the table and deliver it. He only notices my drawing when he wants to show that it’s a waste of time. I won’t let him see this. Absolutely not. Unless it’s that or getting slapped again.

“It’s really not any good,” I assure him.

“Let me see it.”

“You won’t think it’s any good. You’ll get mad ’cause it’s not the way you really look.”

“Bring it here.”

“Well, I drew in the door and plants behind you, and I think you really have to see it from down here at this end, because this is where I drew it from.”

“I can turn around and see those,” he says, peeved at conceding this. “Bring it here, Bryan.”

I concentrate on the black crayon in my damp right fist. I study the picture itself. “Daddy,” I begin, definite. “I just don’t feel like you would … I don’t want you … to see it … yet. I’ll show you later, in a minute, later on.”

“This is getting ridiculous, young man. I’m asking you to bring that to me. Are you going to bring it or aren’t you? It’s that simple.”

I have included him here, but that makes the drawing even more mine, less his. It’s the one thing in this house of his that’s really mine right now. The man’s mouth is a single horizontal line. The boy’s a silly U-shape. “It’s mine,” I say quietly.

“You said it was a picture of me.”

“It is, but I’m the one that did it. Please Daddy, don’t make me this time.”

A long silence from the far end of the table. “I’m waiting, Bryan. Bring that down here right this second.”

Almost before I think of it, the crayon is scribbling. In tight black loops it traps and then eclipses half the page. I choose one figure. The face and hands are lost forever underneath an oily whorl. There is the chanting from the front yard, the scratchy circling of my crayon, less loud as black wax accumulates. My exertion delicately clinks his coffee cup against its saucer. As I scrawl, feeling sick and elated at this solution, I grind my teeth and stare straight at my enormous father, smaller than usual at the far end of the table. He seems to be sitting for a portrait as I furiously describe a neat black cyclone on the page. His jaw is set. I can hear his breathing. I know the signs. Any second he will lunge down here, grab me by the shirt, lift and shake me, slap me once with a hand the full size of my head; he’ll shove me, stumbling, toward my room, shrieking in my own defense. Now, just as he places both palms on the table to come for me, I stand. I lift the drawing by its upper corners and carry the page as if wet.

I move toward his chair, the only chair with arms. He is waiting there to punish me for drawing during summer, for drawing anything but him all day, for then un-drawing him without permission. I stare between his eyes at the faint inch making two eyebrows one grim horizontal line.

I warily approach him in my acolyte’s gait. I hold up the drawing, a white flag, between his body and mine. I am now beside his chair. Seated, he is just as tall as I am standing. On his forehead there are rows of pores, and over that the teeth marks where the comb passed through his hair. His back is pressed straight against the chair, hands still tense on the table’s edge. Over his business mail I place my artwork. One flimsy piece of white paper with some colored markings on it. His eyes move from my face down to my drawing. He sees the figure there. I hear him quietly exhale. His solid hands reach out and pick the paper up. I am very conscious of the hands. There I
am, that’s me, I feel him thinking. He has recognized himself. I release my breath and gratefully inhale some of Miss Whipple’s wonder at my own imagination. Good for something, it has just spared me a whipping. I’ve sketched an image of him for himself, while I am permanently off the page, and saved. He is not asking why the uniformed gentleman’s longer arm is weighed with this bristling black cancellation. He is now responding to the easy magic of a drawing of a uniform on a tall figure, the horizontal mouth, the buttons and braid.

“So, there I am …,” he says, relaxing. “Why’d you do this crossing out? What was that under there?”

I have lost interest in the drawing. I stare out the window at the summer lawn where my brother and six neighbor kids are climbing a young evergreen, tilting it almost to the ground. “Nothing,” I say.

“So, there I am. Those are sure some ears you gave me. What are these round things here on front? Are those medals? Medals for what?” He hesitates to risk a guess. I look back from the Venetian blinds and stare at him. He sits studying the drawing, his face rosy, jovial now. More than anything, I want suddenly to hug him, to move forward and throw my arms around his neck. I want to cry and have him hold me. Lift me off the floor and up into the air and hold me. Instead, there seems to be a layer of electricity around him. I know I will be shocked for touching him with no reason. Somewhere in the house an alarm will sound, the grandfather clock will gong all out of sequence, the door chimes will go wild, sirens will howl out of the heating ducts, and foul balls will crash through every window in the place. I look at him and, in answer to his question, shrug.

He holds the drawing out for me to take. He’s done with it. Slipping past his chair, I saunter to the back door and, on my way outside, turn around. I see him seated in stripes of light at the vacant family table. Sad, he holds my own drawing out to me as if offering a gift or an apology or some artwork of his own. Something changes in me, seeing him like this, but as I pass into the sunlight I fight to keep my voice quite cool and formal and call back, “I’m finished, Daddy. You may keep it now. It’s yours.”

1972-73

Dear Mrs. Whiston,

I was in Africa on Father Flannagan’s Tour of the World with your parents when they were killed. I want to tell you how it happened. My son-in-law is a doctor (eye, ear, nose and throat) at Our Lady of Perpetual Help outside Toledo, and he says I should write down all I know, the sooner the better, to get it out of my system. I am a woman of sixty-seven years. I have a whole box of stationery here. If this doesn’t turn out so hot, I’m sorry. My mind is better than ever but sometimes my writing hand gets cramped. I’ll take breaks when I need to. I’ve got all morning.

I blame the tour organizers. They should be informed about the chances of a revolution happening while one of their buses is visiting some place. When I first looked at Father Flannagan’s literature, I got bad feelings about Tongaville. I’d never even heard of it, but on these package deals you just go where the bus goes. You take the bad cities with the good.

Your parents were the most popular couple on our tour. They always had a kind word for everyone. They’d made several other world trips, so your mother knew to be ready for the worst. She shared her Kaopectate with me when I most needed it outside Alexandria. I’m sending along a picture I took with my
new camera at the Sphinx. It’s not as sharp as I expected but here it is. Your mother is the one in the saddle and your father’s holding his baseball-type cap out like he’s feeding her camel. He really stood about ten feet in front of it because we were told they bite. The woman off to the right is Miss Ada McMillan, a retired librarian just full of energy and from Winnetka, III. She is laughing here because your father was such a card, always in high spirits, always cheering us up, keeping the ball rolling in ways our tour guide should have. I hope knowing more about your parents’ death will be better for you than remaining in the dark. I think I’d want the whole truth. What I’ve read in American papers and magazines about the revolution is just plain wrong, and I believe that using the photograph of your poor parents lying in the street was totally indecent and unforgivable. I pray you have been spared seeing it. That started as a Polaroid snapshot taken by my neighbor and ex-friend Cora White. She was along on the African tour. I hear she sold the picture to a wire service for 175 dollars. I will never speak to her again, I can promise you that, Mrs. Whiston.

I’m rambling already, so I will begin to sketch out what I remember. If you choose to stop reading here, I can understand that. But I’m going on anyway. If I don’t get this Africa business laid out in the open, I know my dreams and housework will stay like they are now, a big mess.

My memory is one thing I’ve always been proud of. I can rattle off restaurant menus from lunches I ate with my late husband in 1926. Till now, the only good this ability has done me is not needing to keep grocery lists and never forgetting any family member’s birthday.

The bus had to wait for sheep to cross the road just outside the capital city. I was putting on my lipstick when we heard the explosion. Tongaville is made of mud walls like what’s known as stucco in America. The town was far off, all one color on a flat desert so it looked like a toy fort. One round tower blew into a thousand pieces. The shock waves were so strong that sheep fell against the front of our bus. They got terrified and
were climbing up on each other. They don’t look like our American sheep but are black and have very skinny legs. Their coats are thick as powder puffs, only greasy. Seeing how scared they were scared me.

Some of us tried talking sense to our tour guide. He wasn’t any Father Flannagan. We’d all expected a priest, even though the brochure didn’t come right out and promise one. This guide was not even Catholic, but some Arab with a mustache. He spoke English so badly you had to keep asking him to repeat and sometimes even to spell things out. We told him it would be a mistake, driving into a town where this type of thing was happening. But he said our hotel rooms were already paid for—otherwise, we’d just have to sleep on the bus and miss the Game Preserve the next morning. We were so tired. Half of us were sick. Somebody asked for a show of hands. Majority ruled that we go in and take our chances. But my instinct told me, definitely no.

Mrs. Whiston, we’d been in Egypt earlier. It is dry and outstandingly beautiful but as far as a place to live and work, it lags way behind Ohio. But, maybe that’s just me. Thanks to Egypt, I had the worst case of diarrhea I have ever heard of or read about. You cannot believe how low a case of diarrhea can bring a person’s spirits and better judgment. Because of it, I voted Yes, enter Tongaville. In my condition, a bus parked on the desert, where there’s not one blade of grass much less a bush for fifty miles, was just no place to spend the night. So, like a pack of fools, we drove into Tongaville, right into the middle of it.

The bus was air-conditioned, and we couldn’t exactly hear what all of them were shouting at us. Then Miss McMillan, who’s in your parents’ snapshot and at seventy-nine is still sharp as a tack, she said, “CIA, they’re yelling CIA,” and she was right. First it sounded like some native word but that was because they were saying it wrong. Miss McMillan was on target as usual. The only ones who’d voted to skip Tongaville were her and the three Canadian teachers who often acted afraid of
us Americans, especially the Texans, and who wore light sweaters, even in Egypt. “Father Flannagan’s World Tours” was spelled out in English all over the bus. Some of our people said it had probably tipped off the natives about our being Americans. But after three weeks with this group, I knew we weren’t that hard to spot. I never thought I’d be ashamed of my home country, but certain know-it-all attitudes and rudenesses toward Africans had embarrassed me more than once. This might have been my first world trip, but wherever I am I can usually tell right from wrong. The Texans especially were pushy beyond belief.