I brush bread crumbs from my fingers. “How do you know this?”
“Sahry told me.”
“You knew Sarah Morgan?”
He nods.
“And Mama? Her blood? Cletus Hayes?”
“In part. From messing with Cletus, Sahry birthed your grandma Jean — ”
“Wait wait wait, Uncle, please. Before begetting and begetting, like the Bible — ”
Bitter raises his hands. “Let me start again. I’s working the oil rigs just outside Texas City. This was ‘43, ‘44. Place was booming ‘cause of the war. Oil. Cotton. Chemicals. Lotsa black famblies living there, hiring out for labor. Me and my old lady, Maeve, we move into this tinkery old building downtown, near dockside.”
I’m startled by the mention of his “old lady”; ever since I’ve known him he’s been on his own. I never even wondered where Ariyeh came from: a consequence of being plucked too soon from this world. As for Bitter’s own origins, I remember him saying once he grew up in a “hoodoo alley in the Vieux Carré” before his family moved to Texas.
“At home, I mostly kept to myself after work,” he says. “I smelt like a damn gusher all the time, oil and shit on my hands. I’d scrub and scrub and seem like I never could shuck that jelly-smell. But Maeve, she’s a real go-getter in them days, friendlied-up with everyone in the building. She’s especially close to this pair of comely ladies upstairs. Didn’t have no menfolk around. Both waitressed or something. They’s raising this little eight-year-old girly — whirlwind. I’d hear her clomping up and down the stairs after supper, screaming to go play in the park.” He sips his tea. “The parks in Texas City was more like abandoned refineries. ‘Stead of a jungle gym, you know, you’d have a cat cracker to climb on.”
I watch spiders weave their webs; I’m impatient for him to return to the garden. But I learned a long time ago, Bitter has his own pace, spinning stories.
“Wellsir, the day come when the Grandcamp caught afire. It was a French Liberty ship, pretty thing; just pulled into port, hauling cotton, tobacco, peanuts, twine, guns, and a shitload of ammonium nitrate fertilizer — ’bout two thousand tons of it, someone told me later. One of the crewmen noticed a plume of smoke in the hold early one morning, went down and tried to douse it with a jug of drinking water, but no go. The captain ordered the hatch covers sealed, figuring to smother the fire, you know. But the pressure blew the damn covers off. By that time, the volunteer firemen had come, but the poor boat was so het up now, it vaporized the water.
“I ‘member I’s already manning a rig, edge of town — it’s about nine o’clock in the morning — when I heard the ker-boom, looked up and saw this smoky ol’ mushroom rolling over the port, saw wood and ship’s rigging sailing through the air, raining like brimstone on the Monsanto plant and the dockside housing where Maeve was still in bed. I dropped everything, went running right home. Maevey was okay, but the blast had tore off part of the roof, shattered all the pipes. Water spraying like high tide. Real hairy. I stayed home rest of the day, helping famblies rescue their pictures and stuff, cleaning up. The ladies and their eight-year-old scrambled down to our place, ‘cause their ‘partment was puredee flooded. All day we’s patching pipes, clearing wood, and we heard rumors ‘bout dockside. Fellas said forty firemen had disintegrated. A hunnert and fifty workers missing at Monsanto. Terrible, terrible. Little girly crying — you could hear her up and down the stairwell, ‘long with the shush of busted toilets.
“Middle of this unholy mess, no one cottoned to the fact that the High Flyer, another Liberty ship docked in port, was also stocked with nitrate. And sulfur. It had come through the blast all right — or so everyone figured. We was wrong.
“Long story short: middle of the night, Texas City become an inferno. Flames, wood, steel rushing our way from the water like a windstorm from Hell. Oil tanks popping all over town and up and down the coast. Quarter of the city perished that night. Ashes and bone.
“Maeve and I scurried out the building, rubbing sleep from our eyes, stairs tumbling right behind us. She’s squeezing the girly to her chest. But them other two ladies, who’d sacked out on our floor, bless them, we never saw them again.”
He stops, presses his chest with his fingertips like a man playing accordion, then spoons more oatmeal for himself.
“So that’s when we move into Freedmen’s Town,” he says. “I went to work for a carpentry shop, Maevey kept our home till the cancer got her in ‘59. She raised the girly, which weren’t easy, let me tell you. Fire put the fear of Hell into that poor little soul. She’d wake middle of the night, screaming like she’s scorched.”
He sticks his spoon into his mouth and holds it there. The shed is getting hotter as the sun lifts. My patience is melting away. I get up, open the door, pull the towels back from the windows. “I’m confused, Uncle Bitter. What does all this have to do with — ”
“Your mama,” he says, placing the spoon in his bowl, fanning his fingers over his heart. His shirt is so thin, I can see his darkness beneath it. “That little flame-frightened girly.”
I stand, staring down at him. Bees flit against the windows.
“Them ladies that perished. Sahry Morgan and your grandma Jean. I didn’t know them well as Maevey did, but I’d sit with them sometimes on the stairs, drinking lemonade late in the evening, you know. I’s embarrassed around them, smelling so bad like I did all the time, but they’s easy enough with me, eventually, to tell me a thing or two.” He straightens his legs. “Now, I don’t know the particulars, you understand, but I can tell you Sahry was on the outs with her fambly ‘cause she decided to go ahead and keep the baby.”
“Cletus Hayes’s baby?”
“That’s right. Jean.”
“Did she talk about Cletus?”
“Not much. I cain’t tell you whether she got knocked up, riot night, or whether she’s already carrying. She’d been seeing Cletus on the sly since the soldiers first come to town.”
“She told you this?”
“She did.”
I slide back onto the mattress, rumpling the sheet. A spider catches a ladybug, just above the door. In my research into Cletus’s background, I’d discovered in the archives of the Texas Freedman’s Bureau a claim by an ex-slave named Leticia Hayes. Her boy, Cletus, had been taken from her by a wealthy white man, a cotton baron north of Houston. The Freedman’s Bureau was established after the Civil War so sundered families could locate one another. Mostly, it tried to help women find their kids. Leticia Hayes’s claim is dated August 1868—an earlier Cletus. But there’s more. She swears her son was stolen and whisked away to an East Texas cotton plantation while she was forced to remain in the city as a domestic aide.
The bureau did locate him and issued a written order for the boy’s release. The very next day, however, it authorized his holder to keep Cletus in return for the “young man’s continuing care, culture, and education.” I found no reason for the reversal and no further mention of Leticia Hayes. The state of Texas denied her fifteen hundred dollar reparation claim. I’m guessing she died of grief. Or hunger, if she couldn’t provide for her boy. Could this Cletus be the soldier’s father? Most members of the Twenty-fourth Infantry were recruited up north, but Private Hayes was a Houston native. Riot trial transcripts confirm this, though they say nothing else about his background.
Another thing: Leticia Hayes’s son was bound over to a man named Morgan. Son of a slave, then? At home in the old stomping grounds? Feeling his oats? This is the figure I’d patched together, my Cletus: a badly made quilt.