All-Bright Court (11 page)

Venita sat down on a kitchen chair and pulled Dorene up on her lap. “What you was saying 'bout Sarah?”

“Sarah from the Bible,” Mary Kate said, and eased herself down on a chair. Mary climbed into her lap. “The Lord blessed her.”

Venita remembered the story. The Lord had opened up her womb when she was an old woman. “You think he can do it for me?”

“He got something good planned for you.”

Venita smiled and hugged Dorene close to her.

“I got a taste for something sweet,” Mary Kate said. “I got some corn bread at home. We could have that with some Alaga. Would you like that?” she asked Venita.

“I would. I ain't had bread and syrup in a long while, since I came north.”

“My mama call it a hard-time dessert, but it's all I got.”

On the walk over to Mary Kate's, Venita couldn't help smiling. Mary Kate was blessed. She must know. There was no need to worry. Mary Kate
had
to know.

If the truth be told, Mary Kate did not know. All she knew was that when she lay with her husband she came up pregnant. Her mother had told her that. “You lay down with a man, you come up with a baby.” It was just that simple.

Venita knew this. She knew babies did not come from cabbage patches, but from men. But what Venita did not think of, what she had never thought of, was going to a doctor. There was nothing a doctor could do. He could not give her a baby. All there was for her to do was wait. When it was time, a child would come to her.

11

H
ENRY HAD
come back from Vietnam with a scarred face. It looked like melted plastic. It was shiny and the skin was thick. Half of his hair had been burned away. Some of the children called him Halloween.

Samuel talked to him in the Red Store a week after he returned. “I hear it was napalm.”

“Yeah, it was. It came from a flame thrower. I never knew what hit me,” Henry said. “I found out when I was in the hospital.”

Dorene was with her father that day. It was early evening, and as they had walked across the field to the store, a yacht of a car floated up Holbrook toward the pike.

When the car passed, Dorene began singing a song to herself. She sang it over and over until she saw Henry. In the store, while her father spoke, she hid behind him. She was too young to remember Henry's slick hair, his smooth skin. She was born the year he went to Vietnam.

Two weeks after Dorene heard Henry talking about napalm, she still hid under a blanket when the evening news came on.

Mikey watched, her parents watched, and sometimes even Mary watched. But as the black-and-white Motorola played in the living room, Dorene hid. She had to protect herself from the ugly. She did not even want to listen to news of the war. But she could still hear it in the kitchen, and she was scared to go upstairs by herself, so she lay on the couch and heard Walter Cronkite, tried not to listen to Walter Cronkite, and protected herself from the ugly. She could hear the bombs exploding and the machine guns firing in the living room. And then there was the napalm. It fell from the sky on the Vietnamese children, and it made them ugly.

Dorene knew it was white men who told these war stories. They came on every night to tell what was happening. She knew what was happening. Napalm was being dropped on some little, stupid Vietnamese children. Dorene thought Vietnam was probably close. Maybe you could get there on a bus. She was afraid war would come to All-Bright Court. She was afraid a white man would come here and tell war stories, that her mother would be seen on television, running down the street holding her limp, ugly body.

For the last two weeks while Dorene lay hidden under her blanket, listening and not listening, peeking when she dared, Newark and Detroit had burned. Sixty-six people were killed. Dorene pushed events together, the sirens, the looting, the men in uniforms, the white reporters, the talk of angry Negroes. Everything was one.

While Mikey and Mary played with the baby Olivia, their mother would say, “Unh, unh, unh” or “Will you look at that, Samuel. Negroes done gone crazy. This don't make no sense.”

He did not answer. Once, Dorene peered out, expecting her father to be asleep, expecting her mother to be talking to the walls. But her father was awake, sitting on the edge of his chair. He looked as if he were about to cry.

On this night, again, Dorene was ready for the war. Before the news started, she asked softly from under the blanket, “Daddy, do napalm make you ugly?”

“No, Little Bit, it kill you,” her father said.

“You sure it don't make you ugly?”

“I told you, it kill you. What make you think it make you ugly?”

“'Cause it didn't kill Henry. It made him ugly,” Dorene said. “He say napalm fell on him. Didn't he used to have a face, Daddy?”

“Sure, he had a face. He still got one.”

“No he don't. He got a Halloween mask,” Mikey said.

“Don't say things like that,” Mrs. Taylor said.

“It's true,” Mikey said. “All the kids be calling him that.”

“Well, don't you be calling him that. If I hear you call Henry out his name, I'm a beat your ass,” Mr. Taylor said.

“How napalm make Henry ugly?” Dorene asked.

“He got burned. That stuff burned him. Henry like to died in Vietnam.”

“I never seen him on the news, Daddy. Why wasn't he on the news?”

“They don't be showing the whole war on the news. If they did, it would be all they showed. The war go on day and night.”

Dorene asked, “They going drop napalm here?”

“Naw. Vietnam way on the other side of the world. There won't be no war here. We safe here.”

And Dorene came out from under her blanket. She went and sat on her father's lap. She didn't open her eyes while the war was on. Before it was over, her father's eyes were closed too.

12

“Y
OU DONE
turned white, and you can't stay here. You got to go live with white folks,” Mikey's father told him.

“But Daddy, let me tell you—”

“Don't ‘but' me, boy. You ain't got nothing to tell me that I want to hear.” With this, he pushed Mikey out the front door. It was snowing, and as Mikey tumbled into the yard he saw his arms, his legs. He was white. Dressed only in his underwear, he jumped up and headed toward the house. He would die out here. He would die. Didn't his father know that? He must know. Mikey had to get back inside before he froze, but the house was gone, and he heard laughter.

Mikey ran toward it and found Cheryl. She was laughing at him from an upstairs window. The entire first floor of the building was bricked up, no windows, no door. There was not even a porch.

“What do you want, smarty?” she asked.

“Let me in,” Mikey pleaded.

It had stopped snowing, and a rope dropped from the window. When Mikey tried to pull himself up, he couldn't. The rope was greased. Cheryl laughed, and the rope jerked from his hands so hard that it burned him.

“Adiós!” she said.

Mikey fell, picked himself up, and saw his arms, his legs. He was black, and he reached for the rope again. It disappeared from the window. Cheryl disappeared from the window. Then the window disappeared, filling in brick by brick.

Mikey started for home. It was snowing again, and he was lost. There was nothing around him except a nebulous, cold whiteness. He thought of giving up and saw himself lying down.

He had died, but he was not dead. There were two of him. A white him was lying on the ground, being rapidly covered with snow. The black him was watching. He had to get home to tell his father he was dead. The way it was snowing no one would ever find him, and his mother would never know what had become of him.

“Mama, mama,” he yelled, but his yell came out as barely a whisper. The wind was reaching into his mouth, taking his voice away.

“Mama, mama,” he whispered, and was surprised to hear the sound of his voice rippling through the darkness of his room. He was glad that his voice had been soft. If he had yelled, his mother would have come to him, and he did not know what he would have told her. He could not tell her that
it
had happened, that everything had to do with Cheryl, the Chug-a-lug, even though the Chug-a-lugs had come and gone. They had been gone for more than two weeks.

During the spring, the Zakrezewski family had moved into 24, the apartment at the end of the row where the Taylors lived. No white family had moved in in nearly four years, and their arrival seemed strange. The white flight was nearly complete. When the Zakrezewskis moved in, only two white families remained. They both lived on the very last row, right next door to each other. They spoke to their neighbors when coming or going, or upon seeing them on the street. Other than that, they were quiet and kept to themselves. To their neighbors this made them respectable. But right away the Zakrezewskis seemed different.

They had no upper lips. Not one member of the family had one. This made their faces seem unbalanced, overly long. But when the children sang about the Zakrezewskis, they made no mention of their lips.

The children nicknamed them the Chug-a-lugs, and they made up a rhyme about them:

 

Three skinny bennies

And two fat tubs,

We call 'em the Chug-a-lugs.

 

The rhyme had only this one verse, which was sung over and over. It was the kind of song that seemed not to have been started by any one child, but in the cool, dry, windy summer of 1967, all of the children knew it. This one verse was blown on the wind, and the children sang about the Chug-a-lugs like they sang about Sally Walker, Miss Sue, Miss Mary Mack. The song was never sung directly to any of the family members. It was sung when one of them was spotted around All-Bright Court. If the Zakrezewskis had listened closely, they probably could have figured out they were the Chug-a-lugs.

All the males, the father and the two boys, were very thin. Their pants rode halfway down their behinds. They were the skinny bennies. The females were fat, the mother and daughter. The two fat tubs. They were the kind of females who looked pregnant, and always would look pregnant, no matter their ages.

The little girl, Cheryl, was only seven, and she looked like a pregnant child. She was a twin, but the only way she and her brother Chris resembled each other was that they didn't have upper lips. Cheryl claimed she and Chris were identical twins who did not look alike, and they were the only set of identical twins in the world who were a boy and a girl. And not only that, she said; her name was Chris too. They were Chris and Chris, but everyone in her family called her Cheryl so they wouldn't get them mixed up.

Mikey asked his mother about it.

“That white girl was pulling your leg. Only two boys or two girls can be identical.”

“How come?” Mikey asked.

“That's the way things is. That's the way babies come.”

“Come from where? Where babies come from?”

“Heaven,” his mother said.

“Really, Mama? How they get from way up there?” he asked, pointing at the ceiling.

“Storks.”

“I never saw no stork 'round her,” Mikey said.

“Why you got to question everything, boy?”

“But Mama, Cheryl say she and Chris identical—”

“And she told you her name was Chris too. And another thing. She shouldn't be putting her family business out in the street, even if it's a story. That's trashy. That's what trash do.”

This was why the adults were wary of the Chug-a-lug clan. They put their business in the street, told their business in front of other people. A child running around telling anyone who was willing to listen that she was a two-sex nonlook-alike identical twin who was going under an alias was a child who had no upbringing.

Mikey confronted Cheryl about her story, but she would not discuss it with him. Instead, she asked him a question. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

Mikey could not believe how simple the question was. “The chicken,” he blurted out.

“Well, if you're so smart, where did the chicken come from?”

“A egg,” Mikey said.

“Aha!” Cheryl said. “You said the chicken came first.”

Mikey was stunned.

“You don't know where the chicken came from, do you, smarty?”

That night when he was in the tub he thought about it, pressing his eyelids together tightly, turning eggs into chickens, chickens into eggs. The answer would not come to him, and that bothered him. Mikey liked knowing about things, how they happened, how they worked.

His father came into the bathroom. “Boy, if you stay in that tub any longer, you going to turn white.”

“For real?”

“Yeah, for real. Then me and your mama will have to send you off to live with some white folks. You couldn't stay here with us.”

Mikey looked down at himself. “For real, Daddy?” he asked, his eyes getting big.

His father laughed. “No, not for real. Can't you tell when somebody's pulling your leg? You need to get out the tub. The water getting cold, and you know your sisters got to get in here.”

Mikey stood up and began washing himself. “Daddy, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“The chicken.”

“Aha!” Mikey yelled. “Well, where the chicken come from?” Mikey asked. He could not help giggling.

“God,” his father said. “Clean your neck.”

Mikey stood there holding his washcloth. He hadn't planned on this. Cheryl had not mentioned anything about God.

“Clean your neck, or do you want you mother to come in here and wash it?”

Mikey began scrubbing again. “Well, where God come from?”

“He always was and always will be.”

“That don't make no sense, Daddy.”

“What you mean, it don't make no sense? Why God got to make sense to you?” his father asked.