Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 38

So down to Lola's I went. And I met me somebody. A big, black, burly somebody. Six and a half feet tall. King was there taking pictures of the colored folks dancing and drinking and flirting with each other's wives. He'd snap awhile, then duck back in that room behind the bar awhile. It was crowded that Sat.u.r.day night, seemed like everybody wanted their picture took. King stuck his head out the door and hollered over where I was sitting drinking my soda pop, trying to make like it was something else.

"Come on in here and help me, girl."

Turned out to be, King had a darkroom set up in there where he was printing up the pictures as quick as he could shoot them. I got a quick lesson and was left to develop film and print pictures for the rest of the evening. We were a good team from day one. Just like a key and lock when they're well greased and not rusty. One works the other.

King, he was a natural-born salesman. Loud and friendly, could tell a Shine joke to a church mother and have her laughing at the filthiest lines. People just took a liking to him. He'd jolly them into having their pictures took; sweet-talk the womens, buddy up the mens. We'd sometimes pull in two hundred dollars on a good night. We'd work Chicago, Gary, Milwaukee, Peoria, and every place in between. Lord, wasn't that the good life?

See, me-I was the quiet type. I was happy to be in the back in the dark, with the noise and the music and the laughter floating back to me. I never missed a thing. Anything I ain't overheard, the pictures told the story the minute they start coming to life in the fix.

And if they didn't have nothing to say, King sure would. When the night was over we'd go on back home, count up our money, and King would tell me which woman got drunk and danced the hootchie-kootchie on the bar, who beat whose b.u.t.t in what fight, what songs the band was singing that night.

King had him a good singing voice. He could croon just as good as that other man they called King who used to work the same juke joints we did before he went and got famous singing: "Unforgettable, that's what you are."

What went wrong with your daddy and me? The lock ran out of grease. The key wore down. Children started being born.

Maybe I should never have had kids. Lord knows I love you both. But when I had taken care of other people's babies it was so easy. When I had my own, it was hard as day-old biscuits. Hard as a pimp's heart. Hard as the sun-baked row you know you got to hoe. That's why I look after old folks now. Seems I'm better helping ease folks out of life than I am raising them up in it.

Your brother, Benny, wasn't right from the beginning. He wanted to go out of this life the minute he came in it. Maybe they should have let him. They worked on him a good twenty minutes to bring him back. But part of him stayed over on the other side. He always hung back. Slow to crawl, slow to walk, slow to talk. Took him ten years to get up to where most boys would be at two. And he ain't never went no further.

Big, lively King and his slow son, Benny. It broke his heart every time he looked at the boy. And it broke my heart when I saw him looking. He never laid blame, but I always felt to blame. Like I must have done something wrong to make a child that wasn't right. Maybe it was the smoke in the air of all them juke joints. Maybe it was the chemicals I always had my hands in.

When I got pregnant again King made me come off the road.

"You a mother now. Soon to be mother of two. These late nights and smoky taverns ain't the right life for a mother."

You was a normal child, even though you came six weeks early. Black as a raisin and smart as a whip. But Lord, I ain't never seen such a colicky baby. Always wanted somebody to be holding you. If not, you cried. Girl, you could lay up there for an hour, flailing those little legs and wailing those little lungs. Once you got started good, Benny would join in. Sometimes I'd have to go out on the porch just to get away from the noise and have a minute to myself.

King was away working nights, sometimes overnight. And my mind would be working overtime. I'd be seeing him with some woman in the corner of a tavern somewhere. I'd hear his deep laugh mixed in with her soft one, while I sat up and listened to babies screaming.

Motherhood turned me into somebody I didn't like. A prying, jealous, hateful somebody. The kind of woman who goes through wallets and listens in on phone calls. A woman who boils water and sharpens knives. King was a traveling man. I knew that when I met him. One day he went out on the road and didn't come back.

Well, they say what goes around, comes around. And I lived to have a man who would do me like I did King. You know who I'm talking about. A man so jealous-hearted he couldn't stand to hear another man's name on my lips. A man who burned up my clothes on the barbecue grill because he said they showed too much of me. A man who wants to own every step I take, every thought I think, every breath I draw. I know you two never got along, but Otis ain't a bad man in his way. Sometimes I wish I had let him straight alone. It's too late to fret on that now.

And I don't hold hard feelings for King no more. He was a man who couldn't live with chains dragging at him. If I saw him today I would tell him that I lived to understand why he had to go.

Lola, Dennis, or King? Who do you think would make the best story? Or what would you say if I told you this? My most Unforgettable Character is me. Callie Mae Clemmons, forty-five years old. Born in Battle Creek, Michigan, raised up in Cairo, Illinois.

My daddy was a traveling man, too. He was an evangelist who went all up and down the country preaching revivals. He used to say that G.o.d got him up one morning and told him to spread the word far and wide. And he never stopped moving until a lightning bolt caught him while driving to a revival one night.

I never knew my mother. They say she used to go out on the road with him, singing gospel and pa.s.sing the plate. I was born on the road, halfway between a church anniversary in Chicago and a revival in Detroit. My mother died giving birth to me.

Maybe that's why I come up wanting to be a traveling woman. Like that train named the City of New Orleans that would come whistling through Cairo in the night. I wanted to c.o.c.k my hat to the side, jam my hands in my pockets, and jump aboard. Just move any which way the railroad would take me. I wanted to ride that train. I wanted to be that train.

But it took a while for the blood to take. Daddy stayed on the road, I stayed on the truck farm with Big Momma. Working the land, pulling at the roots of sweet potatoes, and feeling like I was growing roots that didn't belong in that place.

I just wanted to be out somewhere. Don't you remember being so little you couldn't even wipe your nose right, but always dreaming? Wanting to be out in the world with people who ain't known you since birth. People with things left to find out about them.

I ain't done too bad. I haven't traveled far, but I've been a lot of places. From Battle Creek to Cairo. Cairo to San Francisco and back again. Phoenix, Illinois. The night side of at least a dozen little cities in Illinois and Indiana. And Chicago, that's where it all ended up.

But don't a day pa.s.s when I don't wonder what I would have done and where I would have gone if I'd lived my whole life as a free woman. With no babies to keep me home, would I be laughing on King's arm right now in some other city? Ain't no telling.

Y'all kids are gone now. I'm as free as I'm ever going to be. I could go off tomorrow if I wanted to. But seems like once I got shed of one anchor, here come another one to weight me down. A piece of job to go to, a piece of house to pay on. A piece of man to keep me company as the years go by. Well, I guess my life wouldn't make no kind of story. I lived it long, but maybe not so well. But I tell you what.

I got me a daughter who is one Unforgettable Character. That's you, baby. Allie Mae Peeples. Still as black as a raisin and smart as a whip. I guess I give you a name something like mine because I thought you would be another one of me. But, honey, ain't no such thing as making yourself over in somebody else. You don't belong to n.o.body but yourself. Allie Mae ain't hardly Callie Mae. I guess you calling yourself Alma now.

It tickled me to death when you went and done like Cousin Lola did. Changed your name to suit yourself. What you say Alma Peeples means? "Soul of a people"? It takes a writer to think up with something like that.

When I was coming up it wasn't no such thing as a colored girl making a living as no writer. But the only difference between ain't yet and could be is trying. You sure tried. Through no help of mine, Lord forgive me.

I tried to pa.s.s my ignorance on down to you. Tried as hard as I could to write can't on your soul. But I was writing with a white crayon that couldn't make a mark. So can't wasn't never a part of your makeup.

Remember when you started busing? You must have been about twelve years old. Livia was so happy when we got you and Clarisse in the white children's school. I wasn't sure about it at first, but Livia talked me into it. You girls was so smart, but that school you'd been going to wasn't for s.h.i.t. To me and Livia, this was a chance to get our daughters a little piece of the future.

It wasn't nothing special we were dreaming of. You'd get to finish high school without having a baby. Go to college maybe. Get a job as a schoolteacher or nurse. Just the stingy little dreams of poor colored womens.

I knew it was going to be rough on you girls. But Livia said it like this. "At least there'd be two of you." White folks was going to make it hard, but at least you would have each other to lean on. And be getting that good education, couldn't n.o.body take it away. Y'all got an education alright.

I seen what you went through every night on TV. It was just as bad as Little Rock ten years before. Bunch of grown-a.s.s white womens, carrying signs and hollering at a busload of helpless children. Nothing I had ever taught could have got you ready to be called n.i.g.g.e.r by womens old enough to know better.

Livia didn't get nothing but grief for her dreaming. "What did Clarisse die from?" you used to always ask me. I didn't think that knowing would help, young as you was then. I guess I might as well tell you now. You remember that last time they carried her to the hospital? Clarisse had the sickle cell, she died in the County after having the fit that day in school.

What did I get for my dreaming? It's hard to say. You met the lynch mob at the age of twelve, lost your best friend to it. You know, I wanted to pull you out but Livia wouldn't hear of it. Said her baby's death wasn't going for nothing. Maybe you can tell me now. Was it worth it?

You stayed. Got that good education. And gone on to do much more in life than the raggedy little dreams I dreamed for you. You grew up strong, learning early on that to keep from being a beggar you had to be a fighter. But was it because of, or in spite of, me? I guess I'll never know.

All I know is that I would come home from work so late most evenings, you was already done cooking dinner and putting Benny to bed. You'd be sitting up at the kitchen table, just writing. Sometimes so mad you couldn't even speak. But writing like the lessons on that paper would save your soul. And to tell you the truth, I don't begrudge you your anger. It helped you make a way for yourself in a world where most colored womens scared to walk.

I told you that I ran into Dennis the Menace again? I was on the ward one day, collecting my sheets for the laundry. And here comes this white man loping down the hall after me, hospital gown hanging all open in the back. Thirty years later and Dennis MacAvie still showing his behind.

The money his parents had and the gumption I gave him had made him a big shot in the business world. But he was still little snotty-nosed Dennis the Menace to me, just living high in filthy-rich Lake Forest instead of San Francisco. He couldn't believe that life hadn't taken me no further than the hospital laundry.

"If you'd just apply yourself, Callie Mae, you could conquer the world. h.e.l.l, you've got twice the b.a.l.l.s of the average corporate CEO out there."

"n.i.g.g.e.r," I said. Since the boy had been so interested in being colored, I felt free to call him by some of the worser names we're known by. "Don't be telling me to apply myself. I taught you the ropes when you didn't know your a.s.s from a hole in the ground. You better be out there telling your corporate boys to apply themselves and get they feet off my peoples' necks."

I ain't asked Dennis for but one thing. I figure he owed it to me for raising him. It wasn't nothing for him to get you that college scholarship. And you acted like it was nothing for you to get it, too.

"Payback," I remember you saying when you was packing for the trip out east. "Just paying back a few pennies of the millions they've made off us for the past four hundred years."

I should have knowed that being a schoolteacher or nurse would never be my girl's speed. You been writing things up so long, I bet you still got ink stains on your fingers. I kept everything you wrote, too. Shoot, I still got s...o...b..xes in the closet, full of the lists and letters and stories you been writing since you was old enough to pick up a pen.

See, you're like your mama and your daddy and grandfolks before you; a traveling woman. You're going places in this life. You know how to go out, yet you know how to come home. You ain't a train, you a ship. Can pull those anchors up, and put them back down again.

Or being a woman of today, maybe I should say my Alma is a plane with wings spread wide. With the Lord beside you and the wind behind you, ain't no telling how far this life will take you.

Now I know what you going to say. "Mama, you lived the life. So you write the story." But I just don't have the experience. So you take it and fix it up, make it so it reads right. I guess since you turned out to be My Most Unforgettable Character, it's only right that I split the money with you. So finish it up just as fast as you can, do we get that little piece of pocket change.

Be a good girl up there, now. Remember what Big Momma used to say. "Boys and books don't mix." Keep your mind stayed on your lessons, don't fool around and get pregnant, and everything will come out alright.

Your mother,

Callie Mae Clemmons.

Draggin' the Dog.

BY ANIKA NAILAH.

I eat. A lot. Some people dance. Some people drink. I eat. So does everyone in my family. I could say we're big-boned, but h.e.l.l, I'm from New York, okay? We're fat.

We've all got our reasons, you know? Most of it comes from growing up in a house of folk who loved to argue. Everything was a debate, from what channel we should be watching to whose turn it was to do the dishes. Only time we were quiet was when we were sitting around that table eating. That's when folks quit jawin' and got busy. We had some of our happiest times around that table. But that's not my excuse. I eat because I'd rather be fat than on trial for murder.

You see, I'm a princ.i.p.al of a high school where black children are killed every day. And last winter, there was this teacher and a dog . . . She's a big reason why I eat myself into Fat Land. But wait a minute. You're thinking the kids are dangerous, right? You're seeing them walking around with Uzis in their backpacks? You got it all wrong. Thugs don't do well in my building. Would you want to mess with a five-foot-eleven, 262-pound black woman with a bad att.i.tude in the middle of a hot flash? The kids know better than to bring Miss Carter nonsense on her own turf. I don't play that. No, it's not the kids. It's the adults who are the problem.

Adults. That's what I'm talking about. Stay with me now. Take the music kids listen to, for example. Okay, we all know it's not Aretha or The Stylistics. Definitely not about no romance no kind of way. "Straight up I'ma do it to ya." As Grandma Lucas says, "It ain't nothin' but nasty," but who you think is responsible for getting this music into our kids' ears and hands? Adults. Honey, let me tell you. Those label people, they'd put their mama in half a skirt above her navel for that Judas purse. So I ask you, who will stand for the children?

When I started here, I was just a teacher. The princ.i.p.al at that time was a wrinkled-up, dry, white man who looked like a dandelion on the way out; thin as he could be, with one or two puffs of white hair on his head. On my first day, he offered me his ghostly hand, then stood there like someone who had walked into a room and forgotten what he came for. Then I realized he was trying to squeeze a smile out of the left side of his face.

We shook hands and he gave me the same speech he gave all the new teachers: "You're gonna love it here. Don't wear jewelry and don't ever take the stairs."

That was my introduction to this school. The teachers' cafeteria was a trip, too. The black teachers sat at their tables. The white teachers sat at theirs. The latinos divided themselves between the two. Every now and then, you'd see a brave soul sitting at a table looking like Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

The conversations were about sports, travel, shopping, and what "the animals" had done that day. Yes, that's what they called the children. Animals. Teachers who'd been there since dirt gave tips to rookies like me about how to survive the day, like it was a recovery room in a trauma ward.

No one listened to what I had to say back then. "You're new here, aren't you?" they'd say, not really asking. Now they have to listen to me whether they like it or not. Most times they don't like it, 'cause teachers are creatures of habit. They don't like change.

First year I made princ.i.p.al, all I did was change. The color of the walls. My hair. Rules. Staffing. d.a.m.n near everything but, well, my dress size.

I'd been here nineteen years by then. I'd had enough and seen it all. A teacher crocheting and calling it a Reading Cla.s.s. A teacher coming in high so she wouldn't have to feel low. Another teacher reading the newspaper in front of the cla.s.s all day, every day, and calling it Social Studies. One teacher exploring himself behind his desk. You guessed it. He taught Biology. I even caught a teacher with a student in the supply room. Let me put it to you like this. She was getting more than paper clips. Educating the children? Well, that's somewhere on the list, but it's like that thing you keep forgetting to pick up at the supermarket, it just ain't there on the kitchen table when you're putting those groceries away.

Don't get me wrong. I know there are some righteous adults out there. There are some good teachers in my building, too. I treat them like kings and queens. Sunup to sundown I'm here for those good ones. They know it.

But back to those other folks-the dead weight-and why I eat. I'd have to say it's because it's better than wringing folks' necks on a continuous basis. Let me tell you a story. You already know it has a dog in it. I'm getting to that part. I need to tell you about the boy first. We'll call him "Ray," alright?

I became aware of Ray when he was just a soph.o.m.ore. Beautiful boy. Reminded me of my son when he was a little guy and I'd take him places and white folks would say how cute he was. Always bothered me because I knew these same ones who were oohing and aahing him now, as soon as he grew up, they'd be clutching their pocketbooks like he was going to cut their heads off.

Well, Ray was beautiful like that, too, except he was black, blue black, so he didn't know how beautiful he really was. Kids made fun of him so much, he just looked evil all the time. Just had a permanent scowl, you know? But I knew that the beautiful Ray was still in there. I don't just mean how he looked. I mean what he was giving off. The boy was pure. He had something gentle and patient and innocent inside him, like an angel being tested for the first time.

And that was the thing about Ray. Street-smart kids could see he needed protection. They X-rayed him from a distance and knew there wasn't a tough bone in his body. Boys who'd been through the system had seen tough. They knew Ray wasn't it. So he was useful. An easy mark. He could be talked into things. Things he knew deep down weren't right. But these were the guys who were treating him like a brother. To his face. Giving him money. Clothes. Jewelry.

He was a kid. Fifteen. What do you know at fifteen? So, I was sure he could be turned around, you know? Hey, I've been in this game long enough to recognize when a kid turns a corner or crosses a line. The map is in his eyes.

Ray's map had lots of no-name streets, dead ends without signs to let him know where he was headed, stop signs where there shouldn't have been any, and no traffic lights at his most dangerous intersections. Somehow, though, he managed each year, studying just enough to pa.s.s.

I noticed him again when he was a junior. I'd see him sometimes, his hands probably sweating inside his pockets, just standing by the staircase near the front door. Standing there like he couldn't decide whether to go up or down, stay in or out.

Now, I have to tell you, I am not a princ.i.p.al who hides in her office behind a pile of papers. I got a secretary who does that real well. I like to move around, see what's going on. You know that bubble-wrap stuff people use to pack things in? Well, I will roll my triple-plus self down the halls in a heartbeat, breaking up those little bubbles of kids standing around. They whisper, "Here come Big Mama," thinking I'm deaf. But even though I don't tell them, I don't mind them calling me that. Least they know this is my house and I am their mama 'til they get back home.

So, on those standing-by-the-staircase days, I'd call Ray into my office using my princ.i.p.al voice, which is not the one I use when I'm explaining to my pastor why he hasn't seen me in church or the one you can barely hear when my doctor asks me if I'm trying to kill myself or do I just have a thing for refrigerators? So Ray, he'd hear me and suddenly he was no bigger than a minute. He'd egg-step over, walking on his toes like he was scared to break something or wake up babies no one else could see. He'd look up at me when he got closer, trying to give me that what's-this-broad-want-now? face. But you could see he was happy someone had noticed him splashing in the water. 'Cause he was the kind of kid who'd drown before he asked for help.

He'd come into my office, look around, stare at how big all the furniture was. Finally, he'd surrender to the same chair he always sat in. The leather would hold him like some giant suction cup in a science fiction novel, and we would talk.

"Aren't you late for your sixth period cla.s.s, Mr. Taylor?" I'd ask him.

"Mr. Jacobs don't care I come or not," he'd say.

And we'd be off to the races about how it wasn't about Mr. Jacobs or Miss Lewis or anyone else but him, and didn't he know they were the ones who had already graduated from high school and he hadn't?

One time he told me about his daddy, who drove in and out of his life whenever he got the notion, with one fancy car after another and a different woman every time, and his brothers and sisters all over town he'd never met but heard about, as well as the five he shared a mother with. He was the last of the litter, the baby of three older brothers and two sisters, all but one had grown up and moved away.

"I give my mom big respect. She takes care of me," he said. "Even when she's tired."

Yes, he sure did love his mama, but he was in love with Ms. Jamieson, the science teacher he met in his senior year. At least until the trouble happened.

Ms. Jamieson was probably the first white woman who Ray felt had treated him right. He had no behavior problems when he was in her cla.s.s. He even did all his homework and the extra credit. When she needed someone to stay after cla.s.s to help her with a cla.s.sroom project, Ray's hand was the first to go up. All because she'd told him he was smart. No one had ever told him that before. It wasn't like someone had said to him, "You're dumb," but it was the way too many teachers, for too many years had looked at him through their do-right pity, like surgeons whose eyes peek out between their caps and masks, and say without a word there's no sense in trying. The patient is too far gone. You see, Ray had gotten so used to everyone thinking he was stupid, he'd forgotten he wasn't. He'd given up trying to prove that the color of his skin did nothing to diminish the power of his mind.

Quiet as it's kept, when you study this child's records (and this is what I told them at the hearing) you'll find his scores are high, always were, all the way up through the third grade. Then something happened. His grades dropped like a downhill skier who had to pee.

My guess is he stopped feeling that joy of learning and love for himself as a special black boy. He came into the system with a gift, but we didn't have s.p.a.ce for it on our paperwork. I always tell my teachers, every child has something, a delicate, little flame, whether it's a pretty smile or his ability to memorize all the words to a song. It's up to us to work that flame. Honey, we got to work it, you hear me, into a bonfire.

Somebody shoved Ray's flame down his throat. It wasn't shining anymore. Just burning him up. Same intelligence, but locked down in a pit of fire. 'Cause somewhere down there, he knew (even if he didn't know how to say it) that it wasn't supposed to be like this or feel like this as he went through life. Dr. Kunjufu says it's a "conspiracy to destroy Black boys." (It gets done to the girls too, but in a different way.) From fourth grade on, Ray's records showed that there were problems. "Att.i.tude" was what most of the comments were about. But what does that mean? Black folks got to have att.i.tude just to get by in this world. We are characters by necessity. How you think we made it through our first Holocaust? But suddenly Jamieson was a key. Yes, Lord. In his senior year, the flame in Ray began trying to break free. I think he even began to believe he might be halfway smart. I loved visiting his science cla.s.sroom just to see the process take shape.

And the other good thing about his excitement about Ms. Jamieson's cla.s.s was having a domino effect on his other subjects. He had lost interest in being with the kids who meant him no good. Or maybe they'd lost interest in him. Either way, he seemed to finally be swimming with a gang of new ideas in a pond of his own. Graduation was on the horizon and maybe even a small community college.

It all fell apart at the Science Fair.

Ray had never thought about entering it before, but his progress in Jamieson's cla.s.s gave him courage. He outdid himself. Do you hear what I'm saying? Created a project in quantum physics. The child was asking questions like "What is now?" and "How can we prove that time exists?" He did all kinds of research. Even interviewed scientists at the local university. It was brilliant. Okay, granted we all knew he did what he did to please Ms. Jamieson, but so what? Isn't that part of the game? Let them think they're making a big ole boat for you, and when it's all done and pretty and they're standing back and can't wait to see that look on your face, you show them that the boat was really theirs all along and you help them sail away.

Now what do you think happened? There was a tie between him and Wayne, an Asian boy who was used to winning every year. So I came to work one Tuesday morning and h.e.l.l had not only broken loose, but it had splattered itself into a pool of folk in front of my office door. There was Wayne, his mother, father, and grandmother, Ms. Jamieson and Mr. Wycoff, the self-declared, most important Negro in the school, and head of the Science Department, all talking at the same time and trying to calm each other down. They were all waiting for me. The breakfast I'd bought was also waiting for me inside my pocketbook.

After I stepped inside my office to hang my coat up and gulped down a few quick bites of heaven, I called Jamieson in, because I knew all this commotion had something to do with Ray. Wycoff tried to push his long head through the door, too, but I told him I only wanted to speak with Ms. Jamieson at the moment, thank you very much. I closed the door on him mid-sentence and asked her what was going on. She paced and hemmed and hawed and finally said Wycoff thought Ray had cheated on his science project. That's when I felt a vision of a double cheeseburger and super-size fries coming on. Lord help me, I knew I was going to have to wring some necks that day.

Seems that Wycoff had looked Ray's cla.s.swork over and decided that he couldn't possibly have done it. I asked her if Wycoff had any proof Ray had cheated. He didn't. She said he was sort of hoping she would back him up on this. I asked her point blank what she was going to do. I'll never forget the terrified look on her face, her eyes bugging out of her head, but at the same time looking straight ahead, but no voice, no response.

Course Wayne's people wanted to know what their son had done wrong that he wasn't exclusively in first place. After all, everyone knew how smart he was.

They all expected me to open my door to their twenty-ring circus. I was not having it. No one, and I mean no one, was going to completely ruin my breakfast. I kept that door closed after Jamieson left. I was eating and thinking, thinking and eating. I decided to speak to each party alone, in a soft voice, with my belly full.

Of course, I had to call Ray in, too. He was nervous. Real nervous. He couldn't sit down. I told him how proud I was of how hard he'd worked this year. I told him not to worry. His graduation was not in jeopardy. Then I told him what he'd been accused of.

Slowly, he sat down.