“Every Sunday,” Bitter tells me, “Etta lets him into the gut bucket here to do one tune. Act of mercy. Man used to be great. Claimed his old axe was made of wood from the last slave ship ever docked in America. Man, he knew them field-holler blues.” He offers Slim a dollar; I follow suit. A solemn dignity attends the crowd’s charity, and for the first time tonight, I sense a warm, admirable community, a fellowship whose embrace I’d happily welcome.
Slim transfers his earnings to his pockets, gathers his equipment, and shambles out the door, letting in a gust of heat and several gray moths. Earl screams into his mike, “Come on over, baby!” and the band lurches into a stumbling rockabilly gallop.
It’s past one now. Bitter looks tired. He rubs his chest and breathes like a running man. The ladies sip their brandy, sneaking glances my way. People are dancing now, all over the room. Watching them, I realize there are no young men here. Besides me, a few other women, the drummer and the bass player (who look like they’d rather be elsewhere), everyone is well past fifty. Where are the boys? The next generation? The future? I remember the SWAT team this afternoon, rounding up kids on the volleyball court.
Someone mad at God?
The old man dancing solo careens against the crates. A fellow helps him to a chair, gently takes his flask, then orders him coffee. A woman who’s been smoking in a corner hacks and gasps. Bitter’s buddies are nodding off, catching themselves, shaking their heads. Bitter smiles at me. “Welcome home, Seam.” It sounds like a challenge.
I push aside my empty beer bottles, lean across the table, ask him, “How’s Ariyeh? When can I see her?”
“She a schoolteacher now. You knew that, right?”
I didn’t.
“Have to give her a call. Or you can drop by her school tomorrow. They in summer session. She usually take lunch ‘round twelve-thirty or so. How the mud-dauber shack working out?”
“It’s fine.”
“Not too hot?”
“Not too hot.” I want him to know I’m up to his challenge. “Thanks for bringing me here. To this place.”
He glances away: the same I-don’t-give-a-shit the women have affected all night to flirt with Earl. Bitter yells loudly, “Hey man! Give us some of that ‘Gallis Pole’!” His breath comes hard and he winces.
Earl turns to his mates, whispers instructions, then the band eases into another old Leadbelly tune. I remember it from Uncle’s records, back when I was a girl. When I was someone else entirely. Earl chants breathlessly about needing some silver, needing some gold, anything to keep him from the gallows pole.
A chill slants down my spine. Bitter won’t look at me, his way of telling me I know what you’re here for. This is for you. Earl’s voice lunges from beat to beat like the shuffling of shackled feet, and I hear in his mournful rasp all the low-down, dirty fears of a Southern-cursed man. Dead frogs on a doorstep, ‘gators under the house … hup, two, three, four … Private, that’s a white woman there … look away, look away, look away.
Keep me from the gallows pole.
I leave several bills on the table for my beer. Bitter half turns when I rise. “Maybe tomorrow we tackle some of them questions you might be ready to ask?”
“Yes,” I say, swaying, tipsier than I’d realized.
“Find your way home all right?”
“I think so.”
“Don’t see nothing, don’t say nothing.”
His buddies wish me good-night; I push by the old scarecrow, who’s sipping oily coffee now. Etta carries a new crate of Coors behind the bar, her back a bent scythe. In the parking lot, my car is hemmed in by two big vans. I try to maneuver between them. A man smoking in the dim-bulbed doorway calls, “You ain’t gonna make it, sugar.”
I stick my head out the window. “Do you know who owns these?”
“Sure. I go find ‘em for you.” He slips inside the bar, returns with two drunks. They grumble but move their vans for me. The smoker approaches my door. “You wouldn’t have seventy-five cents, would you, so I can get me a new pack of weeds?”
I search my purse. “This is the smallest I have,” I say, and hand him a five-dollar bill. “Thanks for your help.”
“Damn!” he says, stuffing the five in his jeans. “You have a good night, now.” Grateful. Hostile. The white princess in her fine new carriage, treating everyone like property. The good Samaritan who becomes, the instant money changes hands, just another black man begging on the street. Damn is right.
I pull away, past the Flower Man’s house. Under sodium streetlights, its roses glow like coral. The bottle tree shivers, releasing a low, bluesy moan in the breeze.
I wake in the dark, in the mud-dauber shack, sweating and sore-boned. The mattress is sodden. Spiders dabble in the corner. I’d dreamed of the gallows again. Standing on the meadow’s fringes, tugging nervously on my gloves, I believed I heard my name from the shackled huddle. “Sarah! Sarah!” I strained to see past the armed guards blocking the folding chairs. A hawk called in the sky. Sun broke through the clouds.
The next thing I knew, the men were shivering on the scaffolding; creaking, the nooses were lowered. A black minister strolled among the prisoners, gently touching their shoulders, asking them if they had any final wishes. No one spoke. Then, at the clergyman’s urging, the men said, in unison, “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. Lord Jesus receive my soul.”
The dream shifted then. Ariyeh and I were little girls in peppermint nightgowns, sharing a bed. Cletus Hayes stood at the window with a broken, bloody neck. “Niece?” he gurgled. I clutched Ariyeh’s hand, whispered, “If I die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul will take …”
3
AT THREE, I’m awakened again by the heat. I sit up, still a little swirly from the beer. Flitting and buzzing, near the ceiling. I reach for the flashlight: a hoedown of roaches and moths. Groaning, I stand, then nearly trip on my bag. The Crisis pokes from its mouth — bold letters heading a lengthy article: “Prize Babies.” I pull it out. In the piece, W. E. B. Du Bois urges black families to breed and train a “new, pedigreed Negro”: “If we strive earnestly to make our children Puritan in morals …” The flashlight flickers; I give it a shake. “… there will be no baffling Negro problem a generation hence.”
I laugh loudly, sending bugs scurrying toward the corners. Well now, W. E. B., if you’d come with me to the gut bucket tonight, you’d have seen that “breeding” has a lot more to do with lubricant and a good blues groove than love of the race. Look at me. I’m no “Prize Baby.” A mix of God knows what, who sure as hell didn’t show up with any pedigree.
I need to pee. Uncle Bitter said he’d leave the back door open, but I picture myself stumbling over newspapers, records, and chairs, frightening him awake like a visit from the Axeman. So I pull on my clothes, then go squat in the yard behind the mud-dauber shack. Willow limbs whisper above me. Sleek, dark creatures slice the air. Bats? It must be past their bedtime. I wipe myself with a Kleenex, then zip my jeans. Behind Bitter’s yard, the alley smells of wet cardboard. I toss the Kleenex over the fence: a ragged line of rotting pine boards. I step through one of the gaps, into the alley, then out to the street. Childhood terror swarms my chest, freezing me. I remember the fascination of the street when I was small. Mama said it was a hazardous place. The passing cars startled me, of course, but thrilled me too with their sharp, metallic colors, their glorious speed. Terror had such power to arouse, and it was so available: look how easily alleys, sidewalks, grassy yards gave way to dangerous lanes. Did this mean that safe and not-safe were really just the same?