Wednesday nights Sarah’s group still congregated and the remarks once again quickly wafted upward toward the attic nursery. The laundry chute conducted them even more than the staircase: maybe the words just climbed the stairs themselves, not even halting on the landings. The voices were alternately operatic, vaudevillean, sybillant, and tedious. Sometimes what sounded like singing was mockery. Sometimes what sounded like mockery was a request for food. Sometimes comments sounded seasick, or shopworn, or shot down, or like a station on the radio.
“The healthcare system and the school system and social security have to have means testing. It has to be the reverse of the way it’s been: poor people in, rich people out.”
“This whole racial blindness thing. These people who insist they don’t notice what color other people are. These parents who come to pick up their kids at daycare and pretend they’ve never noticed Jared’s skin. I wanna say, ‘Honey, if you’re racially blind like you say, that’s something of a handicap. Let me give you a cane! You’ll notice, by the way, that it’s white. Or maybe, since you’re colorblind, you won’t.’ ”
“The phrase race card, as in ‘playing the race card,’ where did that come from?”
“O.J.”
“Before that, I think.”
“Race card—what the hell does that even mean? Another white idea.”
“Hey, as I said, we white people had a lot of bright ideas.”
“A black person can’t accuse a white person of playing the race card, as the white race card is played every day.”
“In fact, it’s not really even a card. It’s more like a deck.”
“It’s more like the whole game.”
“Do you know Alta?”
“She’s an awful fake poet. Oops — did I say that?”
“I do feel I know a whole lot about her body just by reading her work.”
“Oh, her work is so fake, that’s not even her body.”
“A poet with a body double.”
“I would like a body double — just for grocery shopping.”
“Do you get those looks in the aisles when you’re with your kid? That look that says I see you’ve been messing around with colored people — we hope you’re paying cash.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“The suspiciousness.”
“And the suspiciousness of religion, too. I find that antiblack.”
“Don’t get me started on Islam.” It was the don’t-get-me-started-on-Islam person.
“What is the purpose of busing? They bus in the poor black kids and then segregate them anyway, sticking them in the basement, in the shop classes.”
“Were you here last week? Or was it longer ago that we were already talking about that?”
“When I first brought Kaz in to have him tested, to see whether he should be entering school as a first-grader or a kindergartner? I sat outside the room listening while this lady gave him some crazy-ass test that went ‘Foot is to shoe as blank is to muff.’ He was five years old! How’s he supposed to know what a muff is?”
“Someday he will!”
“Stop! I mean, that is just the most antique and ridiculous analogy! I think he said something completely random like ‘rabbit.’ And afterward she came out to me with this worried look and said he was learning disabled and we would have to put him in special ed. He was five years old!”
“They track them early, for funding purposes. They need the numbers to be high enough for hiring. So the black kids take it in the teeth.”
“The internal segregation of even integrated schools is famous.”
“They have no concrete agenda other than that?”
“It’s pretty much a crock.”
I had seen quite a few crocks in my life — some of them moldering in barns, some cracked, some of them beautiful. All of them empty. I couldn’t remember a one that had had anything in it.
“It sure does give you a sense of what it is to be African-American in this world.”
“Well, yes and no.”
“Thank you.”
“Sorry to bring up hair again: Someone mentioned someone before, a woman who can do black hair? I need an address. I’m getting grief for Emmie’s afro.”
“Yeah, she should have some braids!”
“Elva down on South Elm can — she is cool and loves the kids. On Christmas she goes down to the homeless shelters and gives everyone free haircuts, black or white.”
“Is this Sarah Vaughan on the stereo?”
“Sure is.”
“Man, listen to her scat.”
“And you say you don’t believe in such a thing as black culture.”
“I don’t.”
“Ever heard Julie Andrews scat?”
“I don’t believe in gay culture or white culture or female culture or any of that. It’s just so …”
“Dream world, baby.”
“Ever heard Julie Andrews at all?”
“Hey, you don’t need blue eyes if you got blue earrings.”
I didn’t know what they were talking about most of the time. But sometimes, in recalling certain remarks, the context would clarify them. Certain phrases, like a dusting of sand, would float across my mind and heat to a sort of glass. I’d seen scat! And now here it was as an admirable thing.
“Vaughan takes ‘Autumn Leaves’ and turns it into Finnegans Wake.”
“Is that your argument?”
“Yeah. Kind of an Irish one: over beer. I am drinking beer.”
“When we were in France, the French customs officials looked at us in a bewildered way. ‘But look,’ they said, as if they were pointing out something we had failed to notice. ‘You are white and your son is black — how can this be?’ As if it defied science or as if we had never regarded our own skin color before. And I had to say in English, and in anger, ‘This is what an American family looks like!’ ”
“The rest of the world doesn’t understand the ungovernable diversity of this country.”
“Diversity made even more extreme by capitalism.”
“And by Karl Rove. I was once in a restaurant and saw Karl Rove sitting across the room. For five minutes I thought: I could take this steak knife and walk over there and change history. Right now.”
“And?”
“Well, as you can see I chose to stay a free woman. Would anyone care for a timbale?”
“Is there meat in them?”
“Oh, stop already with the meat. She’s become an actual member of PETA.”
“Not yet.”
“No. That’s good. Though I give them ten years and you watch: they’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize. Last year I gave them fifteen years, but I think the climate is changing very quickly in their favor. The rationale will be that humane treatment of animals can only mean more humane treatment of people.”