As long as he's mindful of it, though, he never walks with the slightest sign of any weakness.
He hasn't touched a basketball since that night.
Jesus Gawd how'd my boy hurt himself so bad. Jinx Fairchild's father grieved for weeks.
And Minnie.. never mind about Minnie.
Sugar Baby kept his distance, never asked questions. Sugar Baby let his brother alone forever after that.
April 1958, the state semifinal game against Troy, and Jinx Fairchild lost his balance falling, nobody's fault but his own; the Hammond people tried to fix the blame on one of the Troy players elbowing Jinx in the ribs after he sank his shot but Jinx says it wasn't anybody's fault, he came down wrong, hit his ankle at the wrong angle so his full weight crashed down on it, on those breakable bones.
He'd tried not to scream when they lifted him. Coming off the court he fainted.
Weeks and weeks with his foot and ankle in that heavy cast, slamming around on crutches, into hot weather, and finally when the cast was re moved he'd wake at night sweating, feeling it still on his leg, the clammy weight of it like somebody's fingers closed over him pulling him down, down.
Folks in Lowertown who know him or know of him continue to say to this day, Oh, Jinx, oh, Iceman, weren t that a shame, that was the saddest saddest thing, and Jinx makes an effort to be polite or maybe laughs, saying, naw, he never thinks about it none any more; basketball's for kids and you got to grow up sometime.
But you was going to college too, wasn t you, Jinx?
Like I say, you got to grow up sometime.
And when Minnie brings the hurtful subject up as Minnie invariably does, moaning as if the loss were fresh, not years old, and her boy still her boy not another woman's husband, Jinx points out in a reasonable voice that neither Frankie nor Dwight would be born if he hadn't broken his ankle, if he'd gone off to college. and Minnie is crazy about her grandsons, isn't she?
So that quiets his mother down. For a while at least.
About Minnie Fairchild: since Sugar Baby's death she seems to be drinking more than she used to, drinking and hiding the beer bottles like she's ashamed, surely she is ashamed, and she's gaining weight so she's now quite a stout lady and her old nice clothes don't fit but she doesn't want to get new nice clothes, reasoning that she'll slim down some and won't have any use for the new large size clothes so in the mean time she's wearing old baggy slacks and blouses and sweaters and tent-like dresses one or another of her neighbor friends have given her. Ceci, who's married now, lives a few blocks away, shakes her head disapprovingly when she sees her mother in the street, complaining to everyone that Momma's turning into the very kind of black woman she'd always been so scornful of, all bloated up from eating starches and drinking beer. and her arthritis is so very painful. and she's got female problems too embarrassing to explain to the clinic doctor, this white man who doesn't take any time with his black patients, maybe not with his white patients either for all Minnie knows, acting like there's a bad smell in the air when he's examining her, and his face, my God d'you know who he looks like, he looks exactly like Pruneface in the Dick Tracy comic strip, that's who! Minnie throws back her head, roaring with laughter, breasts shaking. but Lord, she's having a streak of bad luck with her finicky white ladlesseems you just can't please them no matter how hard you work, scrubbing their floors and tubs and nasty stained toilets and say you leave a square inch of kitchen tile unpolished or a single dustball under a bed or forget to do some laundry and they're right down on your ass and Minnie Fairchild's of an age now she answers back sometimes, mumbling under her breath Hell with you white bitch or Who you mouthin' off to white bitch or French kiss ma ass white bitch, and even if the white ladies don't pick up every syllable of Minnie's words they surely register Minnie's intention so she doesn't work as frequently or as regularly as she once did, it's a despairing thing she's about ready to apply for welfare aid like she swore she'd never never do but she isn't going to take money from her children cause they don't have any to spare but at least not working she isn't miserable hustling herself on and off those endless Hammond city buses where the drivers sometimes call her Grandma that fat lipped nappy headed nigger driving the 8 A. M. uptown is the worst, making unfunny jokes at Minnie Fairchild's expense so staying home she's better off, she can nurse her ailments, and there's day long TV, and she's on the telephone complaining to whoever's thereher married daughters, her girllriendssometimes, speech slurred so he hardly recognizes who it is, she'll call up Jinx in the evening just to talk, talk, talk: worried sick she says about the future of him and Sissy Weaver never does Minnie call her daughter in law anything but Sissy Weaver, as if Jinx never married Sissy, only took up living with her and could move out again any time he wants and those innocent little boys. yes and she's worried sick about Woodrow too, that bad hacking cough of his and stomach problems he refuses to discuss nor will he go to the clinic with her just puts his trust in the Lord he says Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings at the Second Coming African Church of Christ the Redeemer that man is happy, face lit up and eyes shining when he comes home.
rest of the time he's off in his head though he'll laugh some with Minnie watching her favorite TV program Beverly Hillbillies but mainly it's church the old fool lives for.. Minnie wishes she was that simple. yes, black folks are just too craven and eager to believe anything promising, lay themselves down for white folks to walk over or hose down or beat with billy clubs or sic police dogs on, which is why Minnie distrusts Reverend King though granting the man is a saint and she acknowledges he is accomplishing something for the colored people if not maybe for Minnie Fairchild.
What's wrong with imitating Jesus Christ, turning the other cheek and all that, is that Jesus Christ knew he was the Son of God, or was supposed to be, but nobody else is.. that's a disadvantage! And please Jinx you got to drop by the house for sure this week to fix the back steps where they're rotted almost through and insulation strips have got to be put in around the window frames and you know your father can't hustle his black ass to do anything useful. and I'm lonely Jinx I miss my children Jinx all grown up and moved out or worse like Sugar Baby but I won't get onto that subject it's just that I'm lonely and thinking if only you hadn't gone for that one basketthat one basket that one minute: that once! you wouldn't had that accident and you'd gone to college and by now you'd be a teacher or a sports coach right here in Hammond or, Jesus, maybe a doctor or a lawyer or stockbroker or something fancy and not married to that woman who took advantage of your ignorance when you weren't but a boy don't interrupt. I'm telling you what's what and your daddy and me wouldn't be living here in this house that's needing paint and re pairs surrounded by neighbors getting trashier and more shiftless every year. Oh honey why did that happen to your brother like it did? Why did you that's my smartest child do to yourself how you did? Can't nothing be changed once it starts its course going wrong?
Jinx notes how, since high school, Minnie Fairchild never calls him anything but Jinx. no more Verlyn. Must be Momma figures everybody else calls him that, so why keep up the pretense? Or maybe she'd been calling him that, in secret, all along?
Like hundreds of other workers in Hammond, Jinx Fairchild has filed his application at National Lead of Hammond across the river.
There's a new plant opening up December 1, 1963, it's said that wages will be higher than wages at any other factory in the region National Lead has a government contract so that means money big money for Hammond some kind of metal or chemical or gas operation processing fuel for government re actors is what the work is but nobody in Hammond, let alone Lowertown, has the slightest idea what that is and no questions asked.
In the Hammond Chronicle it's stated that the company is reorganizing its operations under the National Security Act but what that is nobody knows either.
Least not Jinx Fairchild, an unskilled factory worker in his early twenties, just fourteen months on the assembly line at McKenzie Radiator 'A Division of General Motors as the big sign boasts and a dues paying member of the United Auto Workers of America, local 483.
one of fewer than twenty black men in the four hundred man local and lucky, damned lucky, to be in. No matter the din of the machine shop, and the smells, and the summer heat all through September, and the banging clattering hammering in Jinx Fairchild's head repetitive and crazy as his own thoughts could he hear what those thoughts are.
Yah, you better believe you're lucky, man, some white foreman smiling on you cause you used to play basketball at the high school, hard not to know how lucky you are every morning at 8 A. M.
marching into the machine shop with all the white faces, especially those pasty pale hillbilly faces with eyes like ice picks going right through you.
A dozen times Sissy says, You heard anything about that new job, Jinx?
That place across the river? And a dozen times Jinx says, Not yet, though the truth is: word's out early on before the new processing plant at National Lead even posts its openings that management isn't hiring blacks except for janitorial work.
But he doesn' tell Sissy, it's one of those cautious peaceful pockets of time when he's hoping to please her by showing how future minded he is, holding out to her the vague prospect of making a little more money that, multiplied, might constitute the down payment on a car, or a new TV or clothes for the kids or Sissy herself. At least it's a subject for the two of them to talk about instead of their old worn out subjects or outright fighting; then they fall into bed thrashing and loving, and Sissy's the kind of hot skinned woman can be real nice when she wants to be, re al nice, so it's something, Jinx tells himself, not just nothing.
Goddamn, Jinx, what in hell you doing making that nasty old noise, you waking me up every goddamn night grinding your teethSissy's nudging him not fully awake herself and Jinx is confused half asleep and half awake, convinced there's a kind of machine right inside his head revved up and working grinding grinding grinding so he's covered in sweat and his skin stretched tight on his long skinny bones and the big molars in his jaw are aching and hot.
Keeping the U. S. Army in mind, that's Jinx Fairchild's trump card.
There's no quarrel between the two men but when Jinx Fairchild pushes into the lavatory and sees Mort Garlock at one of the sinks, and Mort Garlock's startled eyes lock with Jinx Fairchild's in the mirror, both men freeze. for a just perceptible beat. Garlock is a pasty pale white man in his mid thirties with a narrow ferret face, damp lashless eyes; he's been on the assembly line at McKenzie Radiator for years and has seniority over the oldest of the black workers; he's one of a loose group of friends at the center of which is Bill Hudkins lately Bull to his buddies in honor of his re seen blance, physical and otherwise, to Bull Connor, the much publicized police commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama: both of them re al white men's white men then Mort Garlock yanks a paper towel out of the dispenser and dries his hands roughly and tosses the wadded towel in the direction of the trash can, not minding that it falls short, falls to the already littered floor; he's on the move, eyes averted, eager to get out of these close confines.
Though there's no quarrel between the two men.
Looming up tall and very dark skinned in the fluorescent lit space Jinx Fairchild uses the lavatory, smiling to himself thinking how, in the merest flicker of an instant, he'd seen fear in the white man's eyes.
Mort Garlock. A relative of Little Red.
Could even be a brother, Jinx wouldn't know.
All the re st of that day, Jinx Fairchild feels good. Humming and singing Big Bill Broonzy under his breathGot me a new suit of clothes, got me a big new car, got me a sweet li'l gal thinks the world of me mmmmmmmmmmmm! but inside the humming and singing and the deafening crash of the assembly line he's thinking, Might be I killed one of you once and might be I can do it again any time.
He doesn't mean it, though.
Naw: Jinx Fairchild is a polite mannered young man, still boyish in manner, tall and long limbed as if his bones grew too weedy fast for the re st of him, his eyes are sometimes hooded and glazed over from so many hours in the factory and his deep rich brown black skin isn't as healthy appearing as it once was, and his big strong teeth are turning yellowish like old ivory but so slow and gradual you almost don't notice. almost don't notice. Sissy runs her re d polished nails teasing through his woolly hair murmuring Here's the one, here's ma man in the cadence of a popular song and say they're dressed in their best clothes, Sissy in her electric bright turquoise taffeta dress, spike heeled shoes with the skinny straps, wide soft crimson lips made up for her cousin Mimi's wedding, and Jinx is in his good suit too, his only suit, fawn colored, skinny lapels, tight fitting in the shoulders but still looking good, so he's smiling and frowning at his face in the mirror thinking things aren't so bad, there's Sissy crazy for him, he's got his sons Frankie and Dwight, and Sissy's little boy Vaughan looking up to him; why should it matter that, when he leaves the neighborhood, he isn't Jinx Fairchild in anyone's eyes but a black man, a man defined by his skin and by his facial features and by his voice and by that look in his eyes, how to be something other than what another sees and, seeing, defines, defines without knowing or caring in actual resistance to knowing or caring; why should it matter that, at work, at this work which if he's lucky he'll be doing for the re st of his life, the white men surrounding him re sent him for his very presence on the floor with them as if he's not only presenting himself as an equal of theirs but is in fact an equal of theirs; why should it matter that that bastard Bull Hudkins and his friends cut their eyes at him, jive talk with one another in his and other blacks' earshot; why should it matter that, if they had the power, they would extinguish him with a snap of their fingers, make extinct the entire race of which in his innocence and impotence he's the exemplar in their eyes; why should it matter? Jinx Fairchild is just biding his time in Hammond, New York.
