Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 3

But, just when he knew he had to let go, Inez would take a deep draw on her pipe and blow a sweet wave of smoke over him. The ants became long dewy blades of cool gra.s.s between his fingers and toes. The moon gave way to blue sky and At.w.a.ter was rising and falling like one of the great box kites that Fitzhew made for the windy days of fall.

At.w.a.ter Wise came out of the sky and hit the ground running. Faster than the dive-bombing b.u.mblebees and with n.o.body to tell him when to come in. There was chest-high yellow gra.s.s to run through and a hundred different odors of earth. There was the blood from his ankle, once, from a sharp rock hidden in the moss of Millwater Pond. There were the hilly nests of fire ants that would swarm over gra.s.shoppers and tired dragonflies.

Cold water was good. Blood, scabbing over and sluggish, was good. Even the fire-orange specks on the shiny green eye of the dragonfly were good.

The wind through the stiff yellow gra.s.s wheezed like an old woman. Hidden in there were all kinds of birds that were named for their colors and sizes and personalities. They sang and warbled and croaked.

Crows came from the devil but they couldn't catch him. They called his name in crow words but the little boy just laughed.

His dreams were full of colors and smells and music. There, under the blanket of Inez's sweet smoke, he ran and played while she sat back-too old to have fun anymore.

And then the kiss. Warm and moist. It was only when she thought that he was asleep that Inez kissed At.w.a.ter. The loud groan of a timber and the snick of the door told the boy that Inez had gone back to the big bed with Ruby. He could open his eyes, but now he was too tired to move.

The young boy fell asleep but the old man came awake. Tears saved up from over half a century came for the death of that poor dragonfly. The red bird, the gray fat warbler-lost. Soupspoon had tears over the great herons and the train that ran right through town carrying the big bales of cotton down to the Mississippi River.

He remembered the one-eyed cat that came to the window to look into the house; looking for Inez's praying mantis like Death searching for that one soul who slipped away behind some trees and was overlooked, half forgotten.

Soupspoon remembered days and days down by the river with his little boyfriends-fishing, rafting, swimming among the catfish and carp.

He remembered the cotton fields and all the men and women lumbering off to work from the plantation barracks. Hollers and calls came from the fields even before the sun was up. But it was silence he heard at the end of the day.

"I'm way past tired to almost dead," Job Hockfoot would say. But by midnight on Sat.u.r.day he was dancing full out.

A Negro didn't own too much back then, but he had the ears to hear music and the hands and mouth to make it. Washboards, washtubs, and homemade guitars. Mouth harps from the dime store and songs from deep down in the well . . .

"No, daddy," Kiki cried. Her voice was small and helpless. Soupspoon wondered if it was her nightmare that woke him. He sat up to look. The blankets were all kicked off her bed. Her naked behind was thrust up in the air because she was hunched over the pillow and some sheet.

"No."

A white woman; skinny b.u.t.t stuck out at me like a ripe peach on a low branch. There was n.o.body left to tell. n.o.body left to understand how strange it was, how scary it was. n.o.body to laugh and ask, "An' then what you did?"

An' then I died, Soupspoon said to himself. There was n.o.body there to hear him. And even if there was-so what?

That was the blues.

He was eleven years old the first time he heard the blues. The year was 1932. It was on a Sat.u.r.day and At.w.a.ter had been hanging around at a barn party. He got to stay late because Inez forgot to send him home.

It was Phil Wortham playing on a homemade four-string guitar with Tiny Hill working a squeeze-box. It wasn't like anything that At.w.a.ter had ever heard. The music made him want to move, and the words, the words were like the talk people talked every day, but he listened closer and he heard things that he never heard before.

Your heart breaking or your well running dry. Things like cake batter at the bottom of the bowl and the mist clinging to the road on summer mornings.

The music made At.w.a.ter want to dance, so he knew that it had to be good.

A good friend of the boy's-an older man named Bannon-had been killed only a week earlier. At.w.a.ter hadn't shed a tear.

People died in the Delta; they died all the time. At.w.a.ter hadn't cried, but a dark feeling came over him. He didn't know what it was until he heard Phil and Tiny play at the barn party. He didn't know that he had the blues.

That music had changed him. From then on at night, after Ruby and Inez had gone to bed, he'd go out the window and make it down to the Milky Way.

The Milky Way was a beat-up old chicken barn that had been coated with tar and dotted with yellow splotches of paint that were supposed to be stars. It was a lopsided ugly building in the daylight. But at night, when you came through Captaw Creek and around the old elm, it looked like something magic; like, At.w.a.ter thought, a hill house of G.o.d.

He was too young to go into a juke joint, but he made up his mind to try on his birthday.

And so on a summer's evening, when the sun was still out, At.w.a.ter told Ruby that he and Petey Simms were going to set nets for crayfish down at the creek. But really they meant to take the quarter that Fitzhew had given At.w.a.ter for his birthday and get two gla.s.ses of whiskey from Oja, the midget owner of the Milky Way.

Petey made it as far as the old elm-where he stopped and gawked as At.w.a.ter walked on ahead.

"Wha' wrong wichyou, Petey Simms?" At.w.a.ter asked when he turned to see that he was alone.

Petey just shook his head. He was a long-necked heavy-eyed youngster who everybody but At.w.a.ter called Turtle.

At.w.a.ter followed Petey's gaze to two women who were standing out in front of the juke. They were big women wearing loose dresses that flowed in the breezes, flaring up now and then to expose their legs. They had very big legs. Petey was looking at those women (especially, At.w.a.ter knew, at those legs) and shaking his head.

At.w.a.ter was scared too but he thought that they'd be safe as long as they stuck together.

"Come on," he said. "They ain't gonna bite you."

He said it loudly to shame his friend, but he didn't expect the women to hear.

"Hey you," one of them shouted.

Petey took off like a scared hare. Shoop! He was gone.

"Hey, boy!" the voice called out again. "You!"

One of them was coming toward him. She had a kind of rolling motion in her thighs as she walked. She waved for him to come to her while her friend stayed back near the juke, shading her eyes to see.

"Me?"

"Come here!" the woman shouted-none too kindly. She was tall and heavy-chested with hair that was combed straight back from her head.

"Come here!"

At.w.a.ter's bare feet obeyed, but he didn't want to walk down there.

"Hurry up, boy! I ain't got all night!" The big woman was smiling, one meaty fist on her hip.

"Yes, ma'am?" At.w.a.ter said when he stood before the woman.

"Elma," she said. Her smile revealed that one of her upper front teeth was gone. Another one had been broken in half. "Elma Ponce is my name. What's yours?"

"A-A-Atty . . ."

"A-A-Atty," Elma mocked the poor boy. "What you doin' out here, A-A-Atty? Yo' momma know you here?"

"Elma, what you messin' wit' this baby for?" The other woman had come up to them.

They seemed like women then, but now, on Kiki's couch, Soupspoon remembered them as teenagers-maybe eighteen. But they were women to Atty Wise. They wore the same cut of loose dress. Elma's dress was blue while her friend's was a washed-out orange.

"Jus' playin' wit'im, Theresa." Elma took At.w.a.ter by the arm. "What you doin' here, Atty?" The sweetness in her voice was not lost on him.

"My birfday," he whispered.

"What? Talk up."

"My birfday today."

Elma showed her snaggle teeth again. "Yo' birfday? An' you come down to Milky Way to get a kiss?"

"N-no . . ." At.w.a.ter said. He could feel himself shaking but couldn't stop.

"You scarin' the poor boy, Elma," Theresa laughed. "Let him be."

"I come to get a drink on my birfday day," At.w.a.ter said. He said it fast to keep Elma from getting mad. He didn't want to see her mad. "I come t'get a drink wit' my birfday quatah."

"You got a quatah?" Theresa asked. She was black-skinned and good-looking the way a handsome man looks good.

"Uh-huh. Yes, ma'am."

Elma, still holding the boy by his arm, pulled At.w.a.ter toward the door of the Milky Way. "Come on," was all she said.

The dark blue front door had a big drippy yellow circle painted in the middle. That circle was supposed to be the moon.

Elma pushed the door open, dragging Atty in behind her. Theresa followed up the rear, holding on to his pants.

Elma went up to the bar and shouted, "Oja! Bring a pint bottle ovah here!" She pointed across the dark room to a row of makeshift booths hammered together against the far wall.

"The h.e.l.l I will," small fat Oja replied. He climbed up on his stool to face her. "Where you gonna come up wit' money for a pint an' not ten minutes ago you couldn't even buy no beer?"

Theresa pinched Atty's b.u.t.t and giggled in his ear.

He was thankful for her closeness, because the Milky Way on the inside scared him to death. The floor was black and sticky, covered with crushed peanut sh.e.l.ls. It smelt of sweat and sour beer. The ceiling was uneven and low; at some points a full-grown man wouldn't have been able to stand up straight.

And it was hot.

"I can't pay for it," Elma hooted. "But my boyfriend here could."

Elma yanked Atty's arm, pulling him away from Theresa and up next to her.

"Well? Pay the man, Atty," she said. "You want yo' birfday toast, don't ya?"

At.w.a.ter took the quarter from the pocket of his cutoff trousers and handed it to Elma.

"Not to me. Give it to the barman an' tell'im what you want. That's what you do when you a man."

Oja had a mashed-in black face with a long cigar stuck out between his battered lips. He was too small to work in the cotton fields, so he had to go into business for himself.

"Well?" the bartender asked.

Atty pressed his quarter into the pudgy little hand.

"Yo' a'ntees know you down here, boy?" Oja asked once the coin was in his pocket.

"Yes sir."

"You sure?" Oja had this thing he did with his eyes. He'd open one very wide and close the other until it was just a glistening slit.

"Put that eye back in yo' head, n.i.g.g.e.r," Elma warned. "He done told you that they know an' he done give you his money, too. So pull down that pint. The deep brown stuff, too."

After they collected their whiskey and tin cup, Elma pushed Atty until she had him dammed up between her and the wall in the booth. Theresa sat on the other side. She held his hand from across the table. After tasting the first drink, Elma leaned up against him, rubbing his chest and holding the cup to his lips.

"Drink, Atty. Thas it. Take some more, baby. This here will make you into a man."

His tongue and throat burned. The fumes from that homemade brew made his eyes tear and his breath come short. But what Atty felt most was Elma rubbing and pinching his chest.

"We gonna grow some hair right ovah here tonight," she whispered.

Theresa's smile was bright against black skin.

They all drank. At.w.a.ter held his breath as he watched the cup go from Theresa's lips to Elma's mouth and then to him. Their hands were all over him and they laughed more and more with the liquor.

Elma was almost on top of him. She let her arm rest in his lap.

"I think A-A-Atty like me, Theresa," she said.

Theresa reached over and grabbed At.w.a.ter by the back of his neck. She pulled on him until they were kissing across the table.

"You better let up from him, b.i.t.c.h," Elma said in a serious tone. "I'm the one found'im. He mine tonight."

When they weren't fighting or feeling on Atty the women talked trash. Atty learned that they lived on Peale's Slope: a little shantytown where most Negroes slept under propped-up shelters with no walls or right outside on the ground if the weather was good. Elma stayed with her old uncle up there in a small cabin. Theresa had lived with them since her boyfriend had left her.

At.w.a.ter wanted to know everything about these women. He could repeat every word of what they said, but he didn't understand it all. For years after that night he'd remember things they said and suddenly, because of something that would happen, he'd realize what they meant.

As evening came on, people began to fill up the bar. It got noisier and smokier but At.w.a.ter hardly noticed. Theresa and Elma were enough for him. When Elma would lean close he looked down between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and she'd give him her shattered smile and say, "Atty? What you lookin' at?"

"How you girls doin'?" A slender man slid in on the bench next to Theresa, but he was looking Elma in the eye.

"Who you askin'?" Elma replied. She took Atty's hand and held it tight.

"You, baby. Who else I'ma be talkin' to?"

"All I know, n.i.g.g.e.r, is that you was s'posed t'be here nine days ago."

"n.i.g.g.e.r?" The man had a baby face, but when he smiled he looked evil. Elma's hand tightened under that smile, and At.w.a.ter's heart began to race.

"I don't know what you smilin' at. Atty here took me out for a drink, so he my boyfriend tonight." Elma's voice had lost all of its play.

The fine young face turned toward Atty. He smiled again without showing his teeth.