The Salt Eaters (15 page)

Velma was spinning in the music. A teenager at the rink in a fluffy white angora and a black and white checked skating skirt. Spinning in some corny my gal sal merry-go-round organ grinder music. Just the thing, the skaters joked, to keep Black
folks off-balance. Spinning. The photo-lined walls, the concession stand, the rows of lockers, the entranceway, the organ stall—all flying around, merging. Photos on the lockers, the mayor shaking hands with a keyboard, the organist playing the cash register in the entranceway to the ladies’ room, racks of hot dogs suspended from the lobby light, spinning. The mud mothers on the ice building a fire, fanning the babies.

Trying to scream, or maybe it was the weight in her left-hand pocket that was tipping her to the side, a rock a white kid had thrown at them from the bus, a bracelet Palma’s best friend had stolen from the 5&10, her keys. The weight pulling her to the side, the left blade not planted quite right on the ice. But Velma afraid to think on it, correct it, lest her ankles bump and she fall, or worse, she spin and twist like the Turkish taffy figures in cartoons.

Spinning and something very much the matter. Radios going and slide shows and movies and the records of special effects—waterfalls, and buffalo stampedes, and guns and high-pitched wailing, and chanting. Spinning, and then the women by the turnstile covered with leaves, covered with mud. And it’s too cold for them babies, young Velma wants to shout out. But the words bubble like foam in the chapped cracks round her mouth then whip around her cheek, the back of her neck, her ear, and seal her mouth closed.

“I can feel it when something ain’t right,” Lorraine was saying to Jan that time, her foot out of her mules and on the kick wheel, her thigh bunching through the shiny skirt she’d kept from the old days. The pottery wheel spinning.

And Velma was like the lump of clay, two hands holding her on the wheel, one hand pushing her hard up against the other in an effort to get her centered. And she was turning and lifting at last, the ridges of her sides smoothing out, rising moist and
spreading, opening up, flaring out. But a lump in the beat, the rhythm wobbly. The healer’s hands steadying her, coaxing her up all of a piece.

“Like being in bed with a Black trick who’s been sleeping white a long time, ya know?” Lorraine hiding her eyes, certain she’d gotten the attention of the girls. “The beat’s just off.” She paused while they howl. “Way off.”

“A loss of rhythm,” Jan said slowly, mulling it over. The ceramics group too intrigued with what Lorraine is wearing and saying and promising for the afternoon to pay much attention to Jan’s efforts to bring them back round to the clay. Jan leaning, holding her hands over Lorraine’s jug as if it might spring off any minute.

“A lump somewhere,” muttering it, not wanting to interrupt the dialogue between the girls and Lorraine, or miss the points of correspondence in what’s beginning to look like an interesting parallel. Velma holding up one of the plaster bases, chipping a piece off. The girls can watch Jan and Velma and listen to Lorraine and get several lessons in one.

“Sleep white and your rhythm goes right off. Hmph, hmph, hmph.”

A piece of plaster from the base is buried in the clay, throwing the jug off its axis. They all can hear the offbeat.

“That Reilly boy’s on the offbeat track. You watch and see,” Lorraine said to Jan and Velma. And the whole group watched the jug wobble up sideways as if it were Teddy Reilly himself.

“Let’s concentrate on the clay now,” Jan finally said, clearing her throat with a theatrical flourish, just as the sliver of plaster came tearing through the terra cotta walls.

Velma tapped Ruby and then tucked her feet under her on the couch, and tried not to give Robert a target. She didn’t
blame him for being warm. Jan had picked a not-so-cool time to do what she was doing. She was tracking him across the carpet, throwing her hands about, trying to explain how difficult it is to pull up straight if you’re a girl and no women are getting their wagons around you, or if you’re a boy and no men are getting their wagons in a circle.

Robert was lining his golf club up with the edge of an old bugle bell. There was a bridge made of wooden hangers tied together with the pants rod removed, several “psych” jars of water, and some pebbles from the fish tank strewn about the carpet for effect.

“Look, that’s his business. Or his father’s,” Robert said. And Jan waiting for him at the bugle bell was pressing the soft V at the base of her throat as if to dislodge a fish bone.

“You could talk to him, Robert.”

They all watched the golf ball roll under the chair and then drag another inch forward on the shag.

“And just what am I supposed to say to him? ‘The sisters don’t like you humping white girls?’ ‘Keep off the Heights fore they lynch ya, boy!’?”

“Oh, Robert.”

And Ruby muttering that what somebody needs to do is get a wad of lamb’s wool and a can of chloroform and bring the brother home. Robert’s look makes the roots of Velma’s hair tighten. He’s swung his club over his shoulder like a back scratcher and is all for abandoning the ball in favor of the cards, which is what the two invited them over for. But Jan is still trying to coax him out of the sandtrap.

“It’s not about sisters being uptight, Robert. Or white folks being uptight. It’s about the boy himself. Old Man Reilly is so old. And that boy’s been to all those white schools, white camps.”

Robert is considering a bank shot off the legs of the chair.
Ruby reviews her freshman math. But Robert buries the club head in the carpet, folds his hands, and gives Jan his attention.

“I always took you for your word, Robert. Nation building?” Jan’s whispering, realizing finally that she might have done this in private. But Velma appreciating finally why she didn’t. ‘And don’t forget to build the inner nation, Robert.”

“The nation,” Robert says, checks his watch and takes his shot.

“I don’t believe this,” Ruby snorts and Velma pushes a pillow in her face.

“It’s like trying to build a bowl when you haven’t got the clay properly centered,” Jan was saying after Robert left the house, confident they all agreed on a common reference for ‘it.’ “It’ll rise, it’ll flare, it’ll look good for a minute. But it’ll wobble and tear. It won’t stand up.”

“Who you telling?” Ruby was on her feet wrassling a chunk of air onto a wheel of similar substance. “Yeh, like trying to get this bowl done without doing a scientific analysis of the objective conditions and primary issues.”

“Ruby. Quit.”

“Or taking a serious position on the woman question, the national question, the gay question, the so-forth-and-so-on questions.”

“Just stop, Ruby.”

“It’s a case of Little Red Henism most of the time. Notice how fewer and fewer people are ready to build. Hence my bowl here is jeopardized.”

Velma and Jan laughing and holding each other while Ruby wrassles the bowl in the air, her head wagging no, no, miming with each spin the tear that was growing more critical, the lump that was curling the lip of the bowl over in a sneer.

“Your performance just does not make me feel good, Ruby.”

“She’s perverse, Velma.”

She was on the piano stool with the baby in her lap. They were turning, getting taller, her feet farther and farther away from the pedals, the baby riding, his legs round her waist. And James was at the desk editing the Academy manual. And Mama Mae was sitting in the horsehair Chesterfield, chanting in that way of hers, “Dahlin, when M’Dear told me the news, I fell on my knees and cried, ‘Glory!’ It’s a beautiful thing.” She was misting up, and the fact that she’d passed up the opportunity to emphasize that she’d had to get the news from M’Dear about the adoption made Velma misty too. “Lawd, all them babies; all them babies inside all them places waiting on us to bring’m on home.” And Velma was turning slowly on the stool, smiling at Mama Mae, smiling at the baby there was no name for yet, big as he was. Then James standing, turned toward the window, arms wide to the sun, then turned toward her and the baby. “I orient myself,” he smiled. “I de-occident myself,” she answered. A private joke whose origins they’d forgotten and Mama Mae frowned, leaning over to take her grandson from its funny-talking mama.

“Health is my right,” Velma finally said with some clarity, no longer reeling and rocking on the stool. Her eyes were opening and the healer’s hands were patting her. “My right,” she said again.

Just what so many patients maintained indignantly when the bill came. The original statement had been more than done in bas-relief over the Infirmary archway more than a hundred years ago by carpenters, smiths and other artisans celebrated throughout the district in song, story and recipe and immortalized finally in eight-foot-high figures of eye-stinging colors on the east wall of the Academy of the 7 Arts. Those black men
of old who had flat out refused to haul them stones anutha futha no matter what the surveyors and other standing-about-with-pipes experts had to say on the subject of gradients and silt and faults and soil mold. Cause the stars said and the energy belts led and the cards read and the cowries spread and the wise ones reared back in their rockers, spat a juicy brown glob into a can, shaded their eyes and took a reading of the sun and then pointed—that spot and none other.

So the Southwest Community Infirmary, Established 1871 by the Free Coloreds of Claybourne, went up on its spot and none other at the base of Gaylord Hill directly facing the Mason’s Lodge, later the Fellowship Hall where the elders of the district arbitrated affairs and now the Academy where the performing arts, the martial arts, the medical arts, the scientific arts, and the arts and humanities were taught without credit and drew from the ranks of workers, dropouts, students, housewives, ex-cons, vets, church folk, professionals, an alarming number of change agents, as they insisted on calling themselves. The Infirmary at the base of the hill; its north windows looking out toward the post office that had gone up on the first bluff where cars, buses and trucks shifted gear for the second pull up. And the Infirmary’s sun deck overlooking the Regal Theatre marquee which jutted out so close to the curb, bold children on the school buses would lean out on a dare and snatch bulbs or remove letters from the racks leaving baffling announcements, while the driver shifted gears for the final pull up to Gaylord Heights where a fountain ought to have been, or a plaza for couples to promenade about on Sunday afternoons, or a public garden with a pond and some of the statuary on exhibit in the halls of the Academy should have been. But where stood like a sentinel, the gaslight in front of the wrought-iron gate of the Russell estate, eager to annex unto itself the whole of Gaylord Hill, the prime real estate of Black turf that
ended somewhere between the lane—where the bus turned carrying away the chemical plant workers and Heights’ domestics and the schoolchildren—and the mailbox some six hundred feet below the gaslight. The flame in a nervous flicker always. Fire going out. Animals closing in. The tongue of the flame darting, striking at the globe. Each year a new globe to replace the one shattered not by the fanglike flame but by the bus riders just before turning into the lane. Each year a globe more ornate and preposterous than the last, as if the Russells were convinced it was their manifest burden to bear the torch, to bring light to the natives of Gaylord Hill.