X (7 page)

Neither Wilfred nor Hilda came out to the porch, so I sat there, long after the thick billowing exhaust fumes faded into the white landscape. I sat until my fingers were numb where they curled against the familiar planks of wood that my father had laid with his bare hands all those years ago. I sat until the sky went dark and my stomach growled, low and insistent, and I realized that I didn’t have to sit here any longer. I could go get supper with my foster family.

I pushed off the porch and crunched across the ground. In the cold air, I caught a whiff of the promise of fresh snow; soon it would obscure my footsteps leading away. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes or my face. I just wanted to get warm. I picked up my feet, faster and faster, until I was dashing full speed across the frozen earth. Thinking:
I’m alone now.

Trying not to think.

Thinking:
I’m alone still.

Trying not to think.

Thinking:
Put it behind me and go. Go. Go.

I ran to my foster home, where, indeed, the walls broke the chill wind. Ate my fill of hot biscuits and chicken stew. Stood by the hearth until I could feel my fingers, if not my heart.

On the Bus, 1940

The farther east we go, the brighter it gets. As the sun rises, casting fresh, full light through the windshield, I sigh with the simple relief that comes along with daytime. My mind relaxes and my eyes have enough to take in to distract me from my melancholy thoughts. The landscape is textured now, rolling hills covered more often by trees than farm fields.

We pass through small rural towns nestled in the Pennsylvania mountains. The old miner reports the names of many of the towns and their approximate sizes, which he knows off the top of his head and apparently finds very interesting. The numbers don’t mean all that much to me.

I find the trees especially striking, the way the rising sunlight glints off the leaves, highlighting various shades of green in different places. In the middle of admiring these colors, I spot something that makes me look again.

“What’s that?” I say aloud. I squint into the distance at what appears to be a long something hanging from a branch of a tree up on one of the hills.

The old miner follows my gaze. “Oh,” he says. Then softly, “Oh, rest his soul.”

The bus winds along the road, bringing us closer to what I had seen. Eventually I can make out what looks like dangling legs. Arms. The rounded top of a head. Black hair. Brown skin.

“Is that . . . a person?” I ask. It’s hard to say the words.

“Surely was,” the old miner says in a leaden voice. “Until they strung him up.”

The branch bows with the weight of the . . . body. Heavy with the cruelty of such an act. Yet at the same time, the thing that once was a person seems narrow and strangely weightless, swaying slightly in the breeze. Weightless because it’s lifeless, I suppose, but all dressed up in now-ragged clothes. Did it hurt? I wonder. Was he a papa? Was he someone’s son?

The bus rounds a curve that brings us closer still. “Avert your eyes, son,” the old miner says. “No cause to be looking at that.”

He reaches out with a callused hand and covers my eyes.

It doesn’t matter. I’ve already seen.

“Why?” I say.

“There’s never a why,” he answers. “They’ll give one, but it ain’t . . .” His voice trails off. “’Round these parts, they can lynch a Negro like that.” He snaps his fingers in front of my face. Lowers his hand. The sight is behind us now. Yet in my mind, it’s still along for the ride.

“Maybe he owed a debt,” he says. “Maybe he looked wrong at a white woman. No way to know.”

Lynch
. A too-familiar word. It floats back to me from long ago. Things I overheard at Papa’s funeral, when I was much too small to understand:

There might not have been a rope, but it was a lynching all the same.

They done lynched Earl. Didn’t even have the courage to do it outright.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” the old miner tells me. “Shame of a thing for a kid like you to carry. We were having a nice ride, I thought.”

No way for him to know: I’m carrying it already.

I know without knowing: the man in that tree was a proud black man.
Uppity
, some might say.
Out of his place
, some might say.
Too smart for his own good.
I can hear the words, see those pink lips moving, spitting the words that promised his death. His back never bent underneath it, and they hated that most. I know plenty.

“It’s OK,” I tell him. “It’s just how it is. I know that.”

“There’s gonna be a better time,” the old miner says.

“How do you know?” I ask. “Isn’t this how it’s always been?”

“It’s been all kinds of ways. It’s been worse.” He looks at me. “Son, you don’t know your history.”

I do know it. It’s etched on my bones. Too deep to dig up. Better to bury it. “You don’t know me.”

“Hmm.”

I could tell him all the things I know. Mom used to sit us around the table, teaching history. Way-back history, about queens and princes ruling Africa, and close-up history about black people breaking the chains of slavery. She made it sound like black people are great and powerful: we can rule again; we can overcome. We could rule when we were on our own, maybe, but not in this white world. In this white world, they enslaved us. In this white world, they lynch us. White families take their children out onto the hillsides, sit on blankets with lunches, and watch. Black men, women, and sometimes even children strung up from trees. Never cut down. No dignity.

I look away from the window, straight forward at the dingy gray back of the seat in front of me. The old miner’s staring at me. Or past me, I can’t tell.

“What’s the point of looking backward?” I tell him. “I’m going to Boston.”

Lansing, 1931

I was six years old. Too young to understand much of anything. Not like I understand it any better now.

The policeman came long after supper, after we were all in bed on our way to sleep. We heard his heavy footsteps on the wooden slats of the porch. We knew enough to be afraid, but not enough to know why. Mom did. She started screaming before the knock even came at the door.

“Earl, Earl!” she yelled. But Papa wasn’t home. He’d left hours ago, headed downtown to pick up money people owed him for some chickens he had sold.

“Earl, Earl!” Mom yelled again. If any of us had been asleep, we weren’t anymore.

Then came the knock. Heavy with dread, it seemed to shake the whole foundation.

Mom was crying. The policeman came in. We could hear the voices from the other room, but not what they were saying. My brothers and I sat up in bed and listened. Wilfred slipped out from between the sheets and went to the door. He cracked it open so we could hear better.

“It was a terrible accident,” the policeman was saying to Mom. “Your husband’s been badly injured.”

Philbert scooted close to me and slid one arm around my shoulders and the other around Reginald’s. That’s when I knew something was really terribly wrong. Last time Philbert had an arm around me, it was to wrestle me to the ground. My stomach knotted with fear.

Wilfred opened the door all the way and went out into the main room of the house. He was eleven years old, but he stood straight and tall and talked to the policeman, just like Papa would have wanted. Hilda came out of the girls’ room and took baby Yvonne from Mom’s arms.

“Go on, Mother,” Hilda said. “We’ll be all right.”

Philbert kept on holding us, and together the three of us tumbled out of bed. We tiptoed to the doorway.

“It doesn’t look good,” the policeman said. “You’ll want to be with him.”

“Of course. I’m coming.” Through her tears, Mom blew us a kiss, picked up her purse, and followed the policeman to the door.

“I’m coming with you, Mom,” said Wilfred.

We had never seen this police officer, a white man, before. And here Mom was about to go with him and get into his car, a thing that she would usually never do. I didn’t like it. A lot of the police around Lansing didn’t like Mom or Papa very much.
Uppity troublemakers
, some white people called them. Papa always said it was because he and Mom were smart, and they had big ideas about what black people like us could be and could do.

The police car rumbled off down the lane, away from our farm, and toward the rest of town. We all looked to Philbert, wondering what to do. He was looking out the window, standing perfectly still. I heard him murmur under his breath, and it sounded like he said, “They’re trying to kill him.”

I started to cry. Philbert turned and looked at me. “Shh, Malcolm,” he said. “It’s all right.”

But we both knew it wasn’t.

Hilda nudged me. “Go get Wesley,” she said. I went into Mom and Papa’s room and scooped up Wesley out of the crib. Just two years old, he’d managed to sleep through the commotion. When I picked him up, he stirred, then slumped against me. I brought him into the living room where the rest of us were.

The four of us sat around the table, Hilda, Philbert, Reginald, and me, plus baby Yvonne in Hilda’s lap and Wesley asleep on a pillow on the floor. It felt important, to be all together. We waited.

“Papa doesn’t have accidents,” Philbert said sometime in the night, out of nowhere.

“Hush,” Hilda said. “We don’t know what happened.”

“Yeah, we do,” Philbert said bitterly.

“What happened?” I asked, confused.

He sighed. “We don’t know,” he said, even though that’s not what he had said a minute ago.

By morning, when Mom and Wilfred returned, we did know. The policemen brought them back to the house, two of them carrying Mom inside. She couldn’t stand up. She couldn’t stop crying.

“A streetcar accident,” one policeman told us. “He fell on the tracks and was run over.”

Wilfred saw the policemen to the door with his back straight. Proud, like the man of the house, which, of course, he was now. Then he joined the rest of us in our small, sad clump, where we stood, very, very frightened.

Then the women started to come, friends of Mom’s. They swarmed into the bedroom and brought food with them and took her in their arms and tried to stop her crying. The men who followed them came with whispered stories about what might have really happened to Papa. Sinister words on their lips, like “murder.” “The Black Legion was out to get him,” they said. “The Klan. Some white folks thought Earl was stepping out of place.”

I knew what it meant. Papa didn’t have an accident. He died for being a proud black man. He died because someone killed him. Someone who was going to get away with it.

I knew this, but I didn’t know what to do about it. My thoughts were with Papa.

Papa, who sat and told us stories by the firelight in the evenings.

Papa, who would take the strap to our backs if we failed to finish our chores.

Papa, who instructed us to always hold our heads up, who promised us we were worthy, who assured us we were descended from kings — and from architects and farmers and healers and visionaries — no matter what all the hateful people in the world had to say about us.

Papa, who always took care of us, and who always knew what to do to put things right.

Papa was never coming home.

On the Bus, 1940

The old miner gets off at his stop somewhere in Pennsylvania. He shakes my hand and says, “Fare thee well,” which strikes me as the kind of thing people say in books.

“Bye,” I tell him. I don’t know what else to say.
Thanks? I’ll be seeing you?
Except, of course, I won’t.

I watch as he disappears into the bus station to wait for his connection. He settles a tight little cap on his head. From the back he could be almost anyone. Not quite a stranger, not quite a friend.

This is how it is, I suppose, now. People drift in and drift out. Foster families and welfare men, and so-called friends and schoolmates. Family. Some you remember and some you forget, whether you want to or not, in either direction. It’s a far cry from my first world, full of my brothers and sisters and Mom and Papa. When everyone I loved was always there with their arms around one another, laughing and building our home.

The bus pulls out, and I’m alone again.

My family is far behind me now. I don’t know what’s ahead.