All-Bright Court (23 page)

“You ever heard of such foolishness?” Mary Kate asked.

Dorene continued, “And you be telling him he should of married a white woman if he don't want no hair in his kitchen. And beside, you be burning our hair, right?”

“Right,” Mary Kate said. “Down home we say, you burn your hair that fall, 'cause if you throw it out and a bird get hold of it and make a nest out of it, you'll go crazy.”

 

Venita left after Dorene and Mary went to deliver Mikey's papers. She had made a tuna and macaroni salad for Moses, and she needed to fry some livers and gizzards before he came home. She was going to ride over to Buffalo with Sam and Kate when they took Clotel to her other grandmother.

Moses didn't like the idea when she had told him the night before. “What happen to that child ain't none of your business. Why you going, getting tied up with somebody else child?” Moses asked.

“Moses, she a good girl. I straightened her hair and combed it. We just going to run her over to Buffalo, that's all. Who going to do?” she asked. “Her mama might never come back.”

“What kind of mama is she, anyway? Leaving like that,” Moses said. “People want children, and other people be throwing them away like they nothing.”

Moses and Venita rarely spoke of children. It was too upsetting. The topic was closed, like her womb. Moses did not blame Venita, though. He would have liked to have children, to have the white silence that enveloped their lives chipped away, to have the sound of a child's voice break through its shell.

So they danced around the awkward silence their stopped conversation had created, but Moses and Venita knew that this child would not be wanted by the people she belonged to.

“I just don't see why you got to go,” Moses finally said.

“I ain't said I had to go. Mary Kate don't drive, and Samuel don't want to take the child by hisself,” Venita said.

“So he taking two women along with him. For what, protection?”

“What you got against Samuel?” Venita asked.

“Nothing. He don't like me, think I'm a cotton-picking, collard-green-eating, shuffling, Uncle Tom nigger.”

“Please,” Venita said. “He not like that. He a lot like you.”

“You got a hole on your head, woman. That man ain't nothing like me. You go on to Buffalo, put your nose in where it don't belong. I don't care,” Moses had said the night before.

But when Moses came home from work this late afternoon, when he entered the muted silence of the house, he changed his plans.

“I want to ride over there too,” Moses said while he washed his face in the kitchen sink.

“What for?” Venita asked. “I won't be gone but a little while.” She looked at him warily.

Standing at the sink with water dripping from his face, Moses threw out an excuse. “If you want to go, it's my place to take you. I ain't going to have that man driving my wife nowhere, showing me up. I ain't riding with Sam Taylor, neither. I'm taking my own car.”

Venita said, “It don't make no sense to take two cars. I'm riding with them. I done told Mary Kate, and I'm not going back on my word. How would that look?”

A knock on the door settled matters. It was Samuel.

“Moses going to ride with us,” Venita said, cutting her eyes at her husband, “if that's all right with you.”

Naw, it ain't all right with me, Samuel wanted to say, but instead he said, “Suit yourself.”

Moses and Venita climbed in the back seat. Moses said, “Mrs. Taylor, Mr. Taylor,” and tipped his straw hat to Mary Kate and Clotel, who were in the front seat.

Samuel pulled the car onto the pike. No one spoke. The radio played softly, all the windows were down, and the car filled with a moist breeze as they drove past Capital, heading north along the lakefront.

The Fruit Belt wasn't hard to find. It was only a half mile off Main Street, on the east side. The farther Samuel drove, the worse the houses looked: old two-story wood-frame structures, leering under peeling paint, threatening to slide off their crumbling foundations.

These houses were like the old houses on the streets near All-Bright Court. These streets like those streets. Change the height of the buildings, the width of the streets, and you could have been in any ghetto in the North, in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, Pittsburgh, Cleveland. If you turned into the east side, north side, south side, west side, uptown, or downtown, wherever it was black people had been pushed and crowded together, you found people who had come up from the South seeking to fulfill their dreams and had stumbled into an unending nightmare.

A swarm had gathered on Grape Street. Samuel could drive only halfway down the street because the crowd blocked his way. He parked the car.

“We need to go further down. We ain't nowhere near the house,” Mary Kate said.

“What you want me to do, Kate? Drive through these people?” Samuel said. “Ya'll stay in the car. I'm a go down the block to see if they home.”

He opened the door and got out. Moses got out of the back. Samuel looked at him and started off down the block.

The two men walked down the street like they were strangers, and each took a different path through the crowd. Somewhere near the center they both emerged into an opening, and there in the street, flowing down the slightly inclined slope, were thin veins of blood, all emanating from one source, a drying puddle, and the people had gathered around as if they expected it to speak.

Samuel and Moses pushed on, each stepping around the blood. Moses followed Samuel until they stopped in front of a house. Two patches of dirt framed either side of the short, broken front walk. The steps that led up to the house were rotted through.

“Hey,” Samuel called to a girl on the porch. She did not look much older than Mikey, and she had a baby welded to a thin hip.

“Ya'll some kin to her?” she asked.

“Who?”

“That woman what was killed,” she said in a disgusted voice.

“Is your mama home?” Samuel asked.

“My mama?” the girl said, sucking her teeth. “This my house.”

“I'm looking for the Hargroves. I was told they live here.”

“Well, they don't,” the girl said.

From the neighboring porch an older woman yelled, “Them people been moved.”

“You know where they went to?”

The woman came down from the porch. “Them people moved back south. Can you blame them? All this craziness. That woman got shot this morning. She lived just over there,” she said, pointing across the street. “Wasn't up here a year good, from Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, someplace. Her husband chased her out into the street and shot her. I was sitting on my porch trying to catch me some air when he come running out screaming something crazy about some half-cooked pork or some such foolishness. He blewed the top of her head clean off. Her brain come right out the skull, and that fool didn't even run. He dropped the gun and sat right on the porch till the police came and took him. They took the kids too. They was hollering, Lord, they was hollering. I don't think the mama or daddy had no people up here. It's a horrible thing when you ain't got no people. Them children being turned over to strangers. I done took eight aspirins since this morning, and I still got a headache. I wish some of these people would go on home. Half of them don't live this way. They just come to be nosy, mind other folks' business,” the woman said, and quickly added, “I don't mean ya'll.”

Moses was still standing behind Samuel. The men briefly glanced at each other.

“Ya'll together?” the woman half stated, half asked.

For a moment they were silent, and then they each said, “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” the woman said. “Them people been gone.”

On the way back to the car Moses followed Samuel, skirting the edge of the crowd. A crowd like this could be there whenever you turned onto a street like this on a hot summer afternoon, and the woman who told its story would be there too, perpetually descending her steps, speaking in tongues, telling the story of the drying blood while the sun slid west.

Moses stopped and caught Samuel's arm. “We can't just give that child away,” he said.

Samuel stopped, but he did not look directly at Moses. “I don't know how I got dragged into this in the first place. I'm telling you, I don't want to believe Greene a conjure woman, but I don't know.”

“What we going to do with this child? Stop downtown and put her off at city hall, the county building, wherever?”

“Why you keep saying ‘we'?” Samuel asked. He stood with his hands in his front pockets. “It seem like that's what
you
would want to do, let some white folks wind up with her, take her into some nice home, and let me tell you something, it might be the best thing for her.”

Moses shook his head. “You been waiting all these years to say something like that, ain't you? You think you know me, but you don't, and let me tell
you
something. I'm trying to live, just like you. We been working like dogs all these years, and between us, what we got? Manage to save some money and all you can get is a house like these here.”

Samuel did not answer. He looked at Moses fully, something he had not done for nearly fifteen years. Moses's hair was turning gray; his eyes were yellowing. In that moment he could see an old man rising through his skin. Half of his life was over.

“Seem like we come all this way just to die,” Samuel said, and began walking.

Moses walked alongside him. “Stay black and die,” he said. “That's what my mama used to say whenever my daddy told her she had to do something. She would say, ‘All I
got
to do is stay black and die.'”

They shared a laugh steeped in bitterness and sorrow, and as they approached the car, they could see Mary Kate and Venita standing alongside it. Each was fanning herself with a handkerchief. Clotel was in the front seat, sleeping.

Before the women could ask what happened, Samuel said, “Them folks gone south. We going to take her back to Lackawanna. Ya'll get in.”

Mary Kate and Venita looked at each other. “We heard about the shooting,” Venita said. Both women got in the back seat. Moses pushed the door closed behind them and he sat in front. Samuel got in on the driver's side and lifted Clotel to Venita in back.

They were headed down Main Street when Moses said, “Me and Venita going to take her home, look after her till her mama come back. What ya'll think?”

“It's for the best,” Mary Kate said, looking at the child stretched out over herself and Venita. Clotel's head was in Venita's lap, and Venita stroked her hair. The child flushed bright pink, and as the car cooled down, the color faded from her face.

They drove on in silence, but that silence was comfortable. There was nothing that should have been said.

They got on the pike, drove past Capital's offices and the plant along the lakefront. The smell of sulfur burned the air. From the stacks, endless plumes rose and drifted over All-Bright Court.

When they came to the turn at Holbrook, Moses said, “They say if you stay on this road it'll take you all the way south.” And they turned off.

23

T
HE LETTER
to Henry read:

 

What you doing, man? Long time no see. I bet you never expected to hear from me again. I didn't know what had happened to you. You never know with a war. I should of wrote. I been writing you for years you know how that be. Everyday you going to do something tomorrow then you going to do it the next day then the next thing you know you wake up and its been years. Its been years, man. I been in and out the navy you knew that? Maybe you knew that. My mama saw your mama so maybe you know. I was a cook. Ain't that about a blip? Me a cook. It got my ass out of Nam I tell you that. Man I been everyplace. Hong Kong, Hawaii, Guam, Australia. They got brothers in all them places some chicks too. I ain't got no love for the navy. Join the navy see the world. I saw the world from behind a steam table. I ain't complaining you know things can always be worse. But you get sick of being told what to do. Some dude mad at you at 6 in the dam morning because he don't like the way the eggs look. Shit I'm telling you, man. You be done got up a hour before his ass and you
don't like how the eggs look neither and the way they smell cause you got a hangover. I'm telling you man, cooking wasn't shit. When I felt like it I spit in the fucking pots, so I cut hair. That was where it was at. Money. You know them jacked up monkey hair cuts they make you get in the service and they got some white boy that ain't never seen a brother before basic let alone cut they head. So I got me some clippers and went to town. Money, let me tell you. I charged them dudes $2 a head all the while thinking that when I got out I was going to open up a barber shop. But let me tell you man, while I was out seeing the world every negro and his brother was getting a fro. Can you beat that? Get off that ship for the last time look at them brothers walking around LA. Thought I was on another planet. So I say the hell with being a barber I'm a be a hairdresser and let me tell you there a gold mine in black women heads. A gold mine. There plenty sisters with nappy heads but there plenty of them that come in regular once a week. Come to the shop more regular them they go to church. You know me I can slap some chemicals on a head send them naps running. You should think about coming out here to LA, man. The west coast bad. No snow. Its where its at I'm telling you. Fuck the east. The east ain't nothing. Out here things cool. Don't no white dudes hassle you. Not like them crackers back east. There ain't no crackers out here, I'm telling you. White dude come over the mountains with a attitude a hundred years ago them indians killed they ass. White people know better then to have a attitude here cause there enough niggers and Chicanos to kick some serious ass. Chicanos is west coast Portoricans but badder. They got attitudes and guns and they want something they get it. They cool you know like brothers. Them crackers back east think they got something. Them people living on the other side of the bridge. I'm telling you I rent now but when I get my house its going to be nicer then they houses. They got brothers out here live in mansions. Man, you know who I saw out here? Some boy named after syrup. Karo. I wouldn't of known his ass from Adam. But I was in this club where some brothers in the service hang out, and he was there with this white chick he brung from Germany. You know when a black dude with a white chick he got to be seen, so he got to talking to me about this and that, you know. There's a lot of brothers out here with white chicks. But I still like my coffee. Know what I'm saying? I'm a get my own shop too. The service good for something. A loan, you know. I'm working in this dude shop now trying to get my own customers. This dude take half what I make. Half. I'm telling you he missed his calling as a pimp, all his money go up his nose. He a fool. But I bootleg, do some heads out my kitchen. You got to do what it take. But I ain't write to say all this. I was thinking you should come on out here. You going to want to stay. I'm warning you about that. Be cool and write me and let me know.