On the little step stool beside the commode lay a newspaper, dated back in April, whose headline he recognized from some two weeks ago:
WORLD RENOWNED ACTRESS
DIES IN PITTSBURGH
He picked it up, to see, on the newspaper beneath it, Mary Blair kissing Paul Robeson’s hand. Might a white actress die from kissing the hand of a black man? He dropped the first paper and turned to the door.
“Boy,” Hubert said, forearm on the table, when Sam came back into the living room, “you are something! This is your idea of getting here by four o’clock?”
“Sam’s here at four o’clock,” Lucius said. “It’s just four o’clock C.P.T.”—which made everybody laugh.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked, trying to smile.
They laughed again.
“What’s C.P.T.?” he asked again.
“That’s — ” Clarice started. “That’s country people’s time!” Which made everybody howl.
“Well, if you’re going to joke like that,” Dr. Corey said, “you might as well tell the boy what it really means. C.P.T. is Colored People’s Time.”
“Why’s it colored people’s time?” Sam wanted to know, beginning to lose his grin at the joke he didn’t get.
“Our people,” Corey explained, with a deep and knowledgeable nod, “at least up here in the city, have a tendency to get distracted — especially if they’re on their way to see you.”
“Seven-come-eleven!” Lucius called out, and shook his fist, fingers up, over the table — pretending to shoot craps, like Negroes did in Raleigh’s back lots and doorways. Lucius opened his fingers, snapped up his hand. (Imaginary dice danced, glittering white with black pips, over the tables of Atlantis…) “Distracted!” Lucius repeated, nodding emphatically.
Everyone laughed again.
“That’s why I was so late getting here from the office this morning,” Corey said.
“You got deflected?” Sam asked — only just hearing himself say the wrong word, even though, by now, he knew perfectly well that wasn’t what Corey meant.
“I didn’t get distracted!” Corey said, mocking indignation. “My patient did! He wasn’t quite as late as you were — but he was almost. Now go get those plates, before Elsie has to bring them in herself!”
In the kitchen, Elsie stood at the sink by the brown, wooden ice box, its black rubber seal pressed out around the upper door. “Now they’re going to worry you to death for coming in so late for your birthday dinner. But don’t you pay them any mind.” Out the wooden washtub in the sink, she pulled, rattling from among the utensils, a long-handled wooden spoon and took a dish-towel to it. Although she wasn’t really as tall as Hap or Lucius or Hubert, Sam always had to see her standing next to them to realize it. She was also the gentlest. “Lucius didn’t get here till four-thirty-five himself — and we weren’t ready to serve till quarter of. So, no matter what they say, you are only twenty minutes late. And we aren’t having anything that’ll be spoiled by twenty minutes! You take those soup plates in for me, like a good boy?”
But once he came back in, handed out the china, and took his place between Lucius and Clarice, it was as if Elsie’s warning, even in the other room, had turned aside all further jibes at his tardiness.
Talk was of other things.
Elsie carried in the tureen from the kitchen, set it on the peach cloth, and uncovered it. Steam puffed. Inside the tureen’s oval cover in Elsie’s hand, droplets ran over white glaze. Elsie said: “Black bean soup…!”—so dark it was nearly purple, red and green pepper bits throughout. She sank the porcelain ladle: it flooded. Elsie was going to teach domestic science, and her Master’s had included a nutrition course, since which Saturday meals had grown more varied, even exotic. (And nourishing, Corey reminded them: beans — now beans were very good for you. Plenty of protein. That’s why poor people all over the world — in Africa and Italy and Mexico — ate so many!) Elsie took the tureen cover back into the kitchen while Dr. Corey asked: “Sam, when are you going to start night school?”
“Soon, I guess.” Indeed, the question was a relief. Though Corey always brought it up, once she’d asked it and he’d answered, it was over. Corey said what she had to, but she didn’t harp — and she’d told the rest in no uncertain terms they shouldn’t either. Harping would do no good — not with Sam.
As Elsie, now without her apron, stepped back through the door, Dr. Corey said: “You’re the oldest here. Elsie, you want to say blessing?”
“Let Sam say it.” Elsie took her seat at the table head around the corner from Corey. “It’s going to be his birthday in three days — and we won’t see him again before he turns eighteen.”
So Sam bowed his head, folded his hands, and recited what, at home, he’d learned as a single polysyllable all but incomprehensible — but which, since he’d been in New York, coming to dinner Saturdays at his sisters’, had begun to separate into individual words with meanings:
After the soup there was fresh ham; and peas and onions; and mashed potatoes — butter blurring yellow among white peaks and dells; and a gravy almost sweet that had prunes cut up in it — which Elsie said was not a gravy at all but a sauce.
“Well, then, you just pass that there gravy sauce right on over here,” Lucius said. “This is some fancy eating we’re doing today!”
They asked Sam what he’d done that afternoon.
“Sam went to see the Brooklyn Bridge,” Clarice told them.
“Well?” Dr. Corey wanted to know. “What did you think of it?”
“It’s a real nice bridge,” Sam said. “It’s big, too! But when I got over to the other side, it was all cornfields and meadows and little white houses — shoot, I thought Brooklyn was supposed to be part of New York. It’s nothin’ but country — just like down home!”—which made them all laugh again.
“Don’t say ‘shoot,’ ” Corey said. “That’s not nice.”
Clarice leaned toward him and said more quietly, “Don’t say ‘real nice’ either. It’s very nice — or really nice.”
Not paying either much mind, Sam finished up: “You could see some real good skyscrapers from it, though!” He’d already resolved not to tell them about the Italian in the boat. That kind of thing could upset people. Everybody was having too much fun.
Afterward Elsie brought in a big salad with water cress and raisins in it.
“This is all so good!” Lucius declared.
“Well, I’m glad,” Elsie said, considering. “I was just afraid it might be a bit tainted.”
“Tainted?” Lucius asked in surprise; he sat back. “Tainted? Didn’t the ice man bring ice for the weekend? What you mean, this food might be ‘tainted’?”
“I was just afraid, maybe,” Elsie said, “well, ’tain’t enough of it!” which was a joke Sam had first heard Lucius and Elsie go through back home years ago. But Clarice had never heard it, and clapped her hands now, screeching like a bird.
“Really, Elsie,” Lucius said, beaming bright-eyed about the table. “I do have to ask one thing: prunes, raisins, beans? Just what are you trying to do to us?”
Amidst more laughter, Corey’s voice cut over: “She’s just trying to keep you healthy — make sure you’re nice and regular.”