Original Sins (15 page)

“Why, Kathryn honey, I just don't know how I get from one day to the next without you! I could have just killed that horrible man for taking you away from me.” They were so charming, these people. They'd have you cleaning their toilet bowls in minutes, and thanking them for the privilege.

“That's real nice of you, Mrs. Tatro. But I been doing just fine up in New York City. It's worked out real good.”

Mrs. Tatro looked at her with surprise. She was breaking the rules by not grinning and exclaiming, “Well, Miz Tatro, I misses my white folks something terrible, I surely does.”

“You'd better come on back home now, hear? Where folks care whether you live or die or not. What you want to stay up at New York City for, without you have to?” This came out as a gentle command rather than a question. Ignore it at your peril. If charm failed, coercion followed. Besides, it was true: A Negro could go to a lot more places in New York City, but nobody cared if you lay dying in the street. Another thing, she'd been watching Donny since her arrival. He had a grave self-confidence from knowing his surroundings, from being known as Ruby's grandson, from making good grades and having lots of friends and being a basketball star. She wasn't sure anymore that New York City was a good idea.

She shook herself. Pine Woods was tightening its grip. She'd better get back to New York right quick.

She sighed and said to Donny as he started up her car, “Well, they sure have grown up.”

“Yeah, I saw Emily the other day. I like to not recognized her.”

“I dee-clare! All my chilluns is growed up on me!” She laughed and scrubbed her knuckles on Donny's head. He ducked irritably.

“I been thinking, Mama. I believe I bout decided to go back up at New York City with you, like you say.” He wasn't really sure this was what he wanted, with his whole life down here. But he wanted to call her bluff. She frowned. “Well, I don't know, Donny …” “Well, I wouldn't want to interfere with your life none.”

“It's not that. It's a question of what would be best for you.”

“Ha! When has it ever been a question of what was best for me?” She gave him a pained look.

“You feel like running off to New York City, so you just up and run off to New York City.”

She sighed. “Donny, honey, you know I didn't have no choice about that”

“I don't know no such thing.” He glared at her. “You could have gone, or you could have stayed until you figured out how to take me with you.”

She looked at him, surprised. “Donny, I had to clear out of this town from one minute to the next. You know that.” “What you talking bout—one minute to the next?” She stared at him. “You don't know why I left, do you? Mama didn't tell you like I told her to.” “Tell me what?”

“Why, that old witch! Donny, honey, I hit a white man over the head with a brick.” He glanced at her. “Who?” “Mr. Blanton over at the brick company.” “How come?”

“He wanted me to … be his girlfriend.” She smiled at her uncharacteristic delicacy.

“So why didn't you just say no?” They were carefully avoiding each other's eyes.

“I did.”

“And then he …”

“Tried to.”

Donny gripped the steering wheel. After a minute he announced, “I'm gon cut that man all to pieces.”

Kathryn laughed. “Sorry, but you missed your chance. He had him a heart attack early this year. That's why I'm down here now.”

Donny trembled.

“I thought you understood this. Grandmaw was supposed to tell you. You must have been hating me all this time.” The significance of this gap in Donny's information was dawning on her. She slid over and put her arm around his shoulders. “Aw Donny, baby, I'm so sorry. I didn't just up and leave you. Hasn't a night gone by I didn't think about you, and wonder how you was doing, and want to send for you. I just couldn't see any other way to manage things.”

“Grandmaw said you'd gone to New York City to learn to be a nurse. She made me quit my job over at the brick plant. I couldn't never figure it out. Said you was gon earn money for us, but here she was making me give up what I was earning.” He beat the steering wheel with a fist. “That white son of a bitch! That pink pig of a bastard!”

After supper Donny went off in the Galaxy, leaving Kathryn and Ruby facing each other in the armchairs in the living room. Kathryn cleared her throat. “Mama, how come you never told Donny about Blanton like I asked you to?”

Ruby spat tobacco juice across the room into the coal scuttle. Tightening her head cloth, she crossed her legs at the knees and swung one tennis-shoed foot. “I told that child what I thought he was old enough to hear.”

“But Mama, I asked you to tell him the whole thing.”

“Honey, you was out of your head that night. You said a lot of things no one woulda held you to.”

“Mama,” Kathryn said, struggling to remain calm. “Donny thought until this afternoon that I went up to New York just for fun, or to earn us more money or something.”

“I told that child how it like to killed you to leave him, but that you'd be writing letters and would be back afore long. I told him how we didn't have much money, and how things would go easier once you was a nurse.”

“That may be what you told him, but what he heard was that I'd run out on him.”

Ruby stretched her neck and munched her tobacco. “You told that child the entire story this afternoon?”

“He's not a child and he should have been told four years ago!”

“Well, honey, I was in charge here, and I felt like that he shouldn't of been.”

“Damn it, Mama! You been trying to steal my son! Making him hate me!” She jumped up and pointed an accusing finger.

“I was trying,” Ruby said with a glint in her eyes, “to keep your precious boy
alive
, woman. Now shut your mouth and sit down.” Kathryn collapsed in her chair. “Losing his mama was bad enough. Now what you think that child woulda done if I'd of told him the white man who'd been so nice to him tried to rape his mama?”

Kathryn buried her face in her hands. When she looked up, her face was wet. “Mama, you got to tell them from the day they're born.”

“You just plain
wrong
, Kathryn. You got to raise them up to be strong and unafraid and full of love. Then you tell them. Then they find out for themselves.”

Kathryn shook her head no, slumped in exhaustion.

Donny walked across the yard to Rochelle's house, the last of the wooden cabins that had made up Pine Woods before the development. In the two-room house lived Rochelle, her mother, and six more children.

Donny and Rochelle sat in the Galaxy at the Wilderness Trail Drive-in playing bingo. They'd been given cards as they entered, and now the attendant was calling numbers over the speaker. “… N-6, N-6 … G-4, G-4 …” Winners brought their cards to the concession stand.

As the movie began, Donny scooted next to Rochelle and put his arm around her. They sat back to watch
That Touch of Mink.
After a few minutes Donny leaned over her. They kissed for a long time. He began running his hand up and down her neck.

“OK. That's enough,” she announced. “I don't want no fancy stuff.”

“All right,” Donny said. After his mother's story, he wasn't feeling too great.

Cary Grant pulled into the driveway of his ranch house in a new Buick Riviera. He stood smiling and waving at Doris Day, who came running down the sidewalk. Donny trembled. He wanted to grab that guy by his polka-dotted necktie and tighten the knot until that ugly white face turned red and then purple, and those eyes bugged out with terror.

The seizure passed quickly as it arrived, leaving Donny alarmed and exhausted.

Rochelle glanced at him. She took his hand in both hers. “It's like this, Donny. I done spent my whole life rocking my mama's babies. I don't wanna do nothing that might give me one of my own. Cause I got things to do first.”

“Like what?”

“First I want to finish high school. Next I want to get me a scholarship to college. I expect I'll be a teacher, or a librarian.” She wanted a house like the one Cary Grant and Doris Day had just walked into. Carpeting, appliances. She wanted a husband coming home in a suit and tie. She'd had enough of sharing a bed with her little brothers and sisters and waking up damp from their pee. She was tired of roaches in the cereal boxes and rags stuffed into broken windowpanes.

“Well, yeah, I can dig that, Rochelle. You told me this before. Don't worry bout it none.” He returned his eyes to the screen. She studied him.

“But I am worrying, Donny.” “What about?”

“About what it means if I don't let you do nothing but kiss me.

“I don't care right now. If I start to care, I'll let you know.”

“That's what I mean. I never went out before with a boy who didn't care about that stuff.”

“Well, now you have. You see, right at this particular moment, I don't feel so hot.”

“Are you sick?”

“Not with anything you could treat.” “You been fighting with your mama?” “Something like that.”

“I fought with mine today. She's having her another baby. I said, ‘This one I ain't having nothing to do with, Mama. You have them, you take care of them.' She started crying and said it made her feel like she was accomplishing something when her belly was full. And when she was nursing them. Then they started growing up and getting mean, like I was being. And it hurt her so much that she had to go right out and start another one, hoping she'd do better next time.”

“That's the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“That's what I told her. That's when I knew that's what she is—crazy.”

“I figure we all crazy,” said Donny. “It's just a question of figuring out how, not whether.”

Chapter Four
Hollowed Be Thy Name

The sun, nearly overhead, was white-hot in a deep blue sky. The cacophony of competing church bells filled the valley as the citizens of Newland, dressed in their best clothes, strolled out of almost every house over to freshly polished cars. The streets filled with snarls of traffic.

In the pasture bordering the grey river were gathered several dozen members of the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Men and boys wore suits and ties, starched white shirts and suspenders. Women and girls wore dresses and suits, heels and flowered hats with veils and white gloves. Several held umbrellas to fend off the sun. The preacher, Mr. Stump, stood before them on a hillock in a black robe and tam-o'-shanter. Next to him in a midnight-blue robe stood the deacon, Mr. Husk. In front of them were assembled half a dozen frightened adolescents in white robes with knotted white handkerchiefs on their heads.

“… and I have brothers and sisters come up to me in the street and say, ‘Mr. Stump suh, when is the bottom rail going to be the top rail?' Now I knows what these people means, friends. You knows, and I knows, bout ever kind of sorriness on the face of this earth. We knows, friends, what it is to be mocked and scorned and despised ever way in the world!”

“Yeah, tell it, preacher!” a man moaned.

“Our people been raised up to believe we'll never mount to much. We been hongry, friends, and the high and the mighty, sitting at their sagging boards, wouldn't toss us a bone! We been ridiculed, we been called beggars and crooks and scoundrels. But I'm here to tell you, friends, that they was another who was hated and despised, amen! Another who was born in a stable cause the innkeeper turned his mama away from the door!”

“Preach good this morning, Reverend!” a woman called.

“Do you
know
what happened to this man, brothers and sisters? Do you know what the big shots done to him? They tried him in a court of law, friends, and they found him guilty. Called him a traitor! Called him a blasphemer! Beat our Lord Jesus! Shoved a crown of sharp thorns on his forehead! Nailed him to a cross! They
crucified
our Lord! Murdered the Son of God!”

“Oh, yeah, He be my man!” a woman wailed.

“Some people in this church, they says to me, ‘Mr. Stump, me and my old lady, we thinking bout going up to Washington, D.C. Or to New York City.' They talk like the streets up there is paved with gold. Like they gon be waved in with palm fronds.”

“I'm Born to Die and Lay This Body Down” rose and fell softly among the congregation.

“Then they come back, these people. Yeah, I see them strutting down our streets wearing brand-new silk suits and driving big expensive Cadillac cars. They come up to me and say, ‘Stump, why don't you go up at that courthouse and get your people what's due them? Get them the vote. Get them the welfare. Get them hired out at the mill. Get them this. Get them that.' All the time reproaching me with the Reverend Mr. Hyatt over at Donley, who marched up to the school board last month and demanded that colored children go to the white high school next fall. Huh!” He snorted.

Ruby snorted, too. The idea of whites and coloreds going to the same school! Just no telling what they'd come up with next. If you was truly smart, you stayed out of the way of white folks. And when you couldn't, you acted clever and got what you wanted. And if you couldn't manage that neither, you got by, and you thanked the Lord for the strength to do it.

Kathryn narrowed her eyes at Mr. Stump, who was referring to her. She'd asked him the other day what plans Pine Woods was making to integrate the Newland schools. She'd about decided, given the chance to go to white schools, Donny was better off here. The school near her in Harlem would be all Negro. Whites had the power and money on this earth—by associating with them you could learn how to cop yourself a piece of that action. But Stump was hopeless. All this reveling in suffering, every nigger a persecuted Jesus who'd be resurrected into Glory. It made her sick. There was no question: She had to get out of this place soon, Donny with her—before he turned into one of these black masochists, consoled by the promise of an afterlife that didn't exist