“Go ahead if you want. But like I say — finish up before Clarice gets here. She don’t approve of smoking.”
Only on opening it and pushing aside shirts and underwear (which he didn’t really wear, unless Mama insisted) did Sam see the folded paper bag with Jules’ soap. “Hubert, don’t let me forget this when we go over to Elsie and Corey’s.” Taking a bar from the bag to leave Hubert, Sam put bag and bar up on the pink quilting. Translucent as isinglass, the bar’s paper immediately unfolded, like a thing volitional.
With a notable amount of white moneys — but a treasured portion of black — by his astonishing energy (that, even now he was over sixty, awed Sam), Papa and several of his friends had helped develop the small Negro college. Papa was now Vice-Chancellor. Mama was Dean of Women. That same energy had already pushed Sam’s slave-born father to learn Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Two years ago it had gotten him elected Bishop of the Archdiocese of North and South Carolina — this prodigy of black learning, this learned black prodigy, this prodigious black learner. Black and white ministers both had elected him. Papa was a voyager on the ocean of theology and ancient languages. Sharp-tongued Corey had seemed, for a while, the one likely to follow Papa into that sea. Then she had turned from its waters — sharply — with the realization there was little enough a black man could do with Greek and Aramaic. (Though Mama always insisted it was more than well-deserved, the suffrage bishopric was after all an anomaly.) Still less, a black woman. She had followed her younger brother, Hap, first to New York, then into dental school.
Cigarette still fuming between his teeth, Sam was just buttoning his shirt when, outside in the hall, someone twisted the doorbell key.
Clarice came in.
Hubert’s girlfriend was — like last time — another pale-complected creature, who looked, really, whiter than Hubert. (This one’s name was Clarice!) “This is your little brother? He’s not so little at all! How come all you boys in this family are so good looking?” Within moments Sam learned, now from Clarice, now from enthusiastic Hubert — when Clarice suddenly remembered to be modest — that she wrote poems that got published in newspapers and sometimes in small magazines (Hubert brought some out to show him) with titles like Broom and Spark. Their ragged-edged pages were thick as fabric as you turned them. Passionate about the Negro Question (as was Hubert), she read The Messenger and Opportunity and knew writers and artists, black and white — Wally and Richard and Bruce and Jean and Angelina and Waldo and talked about them at length and a woman named Lola at whose house on Ninth Street she had met a number of them — from Washington to New York, from Harlem to Gay Street, the block-long colored enclave in Greenwich Village, she explained. Greenwich Village was where Hubert went, in the evenings, to his law classes at New York University Law School.
And they were all expected at Elsie and Corey’s at four o’clock for Saturday dinner — Elsie and Corey were his and Hubert’s oldest sisters; and Saturday dinner, Hubert said now, was easier for them than Sunday, because of Elsie’s studying for School on Monday — not to mention Hubert’s.
The surprise, that evening, was that Hap — another brother — and his wife came too.
“Sam, how’s everybody down at the college?” Dr. Corey wanted to know. Calling her “Doctor Corey” was something of a joke, because she was a woman. (They didn’t call Hap “Doctor Hap”—or Lemuel, his oldest brother who was a real doctor, not just a dentist, “Doctor Lem.”) But Corey had decided it was her due. She’d tell you in a moment, if you asked: “Filling teeth and getting paid for it is a lot better than teaching Greek to a bunch of hands, straight out the field, who couldn’t care less about the difference between a first and a second aorist!”
Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine, they all laughed over that long Thanksgiving letter Hubert wrote — Sam repeated.
“Oh, yes,” Elsie said. “Hubert came and read it to us before he sent it. I thought that would tickle Mama.”
Corey sent him to the bathroom to wash his hands.
As Sam stood, caressive water falling warm over his fingers from the verdigrised faucet, in the alley outside someone called, again and again, sounding now like, “Dandelion…!” now like, “Handle-iron…!” The voice was shrill — the shrillness of a man who was going to call for a long time and wanted folks to hear. Sam tried to imagine the body with that voice: brown face under a squashed-down hat, hard hands, bony hips in loose pants, sharp shoulders in an old vest…
More because he was tired than because he had to go, Sam dropped his pants and sat on the commode’s wood ring. (At Hubert’s the commode was behind a door out in the hall.) Newspapers lay on the two-tiered stool beside him. Lifting up the first few, he saw a green-covered magazine and slipped it out, certain it was one with Clarice’s poems. He read the title: Mnemosyne. Flipping through a few pages, however, he realized a good deal of it was in Latin. Turning back to the cover, he caught the date — 1918: no, it was one of Corey’s journals from the time of her language pursuits. Again he opened it, to page through — 132, 133, 134—where a passage Corey had marked caught him. The article explained the lines were from a Chorus closing the second act of Seneca’s Medea.
In careful pencil, at a gray slant, Corey had inscribed her marginal translation (five days ago? in distant 1918? sometime in between?):
The article explained how Christopher Columbus’s son and biographer, Fernando, had marked just this passage in his own copy of Seneca, jotting down in the margin:
Haec propheteia expleta est per patrem meum
Christopher Colon almirantem ano 1492.
Corey’s marginal gloss:
This prophecy was fulfilled by my father
Christopher Colon _________ in the year 1492.
Beside that, she had written: “almirantem? Ask Papa. C.C.’s place of birth? Elmira? But it’s not capitalized.”
When Corey and Elsie had first visited New York, almost ten years ago now, with Mama as chaperone, they’d taken the boat up from Norfolk. But Sam had been mad to take the train — nearly as eager over that as he’d been about the skyscrapers. All that water…? He closed Mnemosyne, put it down on the newspapers — then, in afterthought, pulled up two or three papers and put them back on top.
Outside, the shrill cry was blotted up by silence.
He’d often thought he’d have liked to follow Papa and Corey in their linguistic explorations. But (said Papa) he was too mercurial for such diligence. Sam stood, reached up and pulled the wooden handle on the flush chain. As the water roared from the wooden tank above, he bent, pulled his pants up, buttoned them, and buckled his belt.
After washing his hands once more, he opened the bathroom door — to be startled by the mirror in the hall right between the glass-chimneyed gas lamps, where his surprised double surprised him, pausing, bewildered in the frame, Sam the Stranger, unknowingly about to walk in on him.