“I remember your mama crying in a back bedroom, in the dark, all by herself. It’s one of my strongest childhood memories. I don’t know why. She used to scare me, she was sad so much.”
“I wish I could cry for her. I mean, I know she had a hard life, I know she moved us to give me opportunities she never had … but I feel such rage at her, now, for orchestrating my life.”
Ariyeh reaches over, takes my hand, and holds it on the seat between us. We pass a pair of hitchhikers, a long-haired couple with bedrolls and a cardboard sign saying ALBUQUERQUE. I’m still thinking of Mama, and the hitchhikers remind me of the one time I had to bum a ride — on the day she died. I’d stayed upset with Dwayne, with everything that had happened the night of our date. I kept hearing in my head, “The dark side. The dark side.” One Monday, on my lunch break, I decided to exorcise this voice, to cancel Dwayne’s challenge to me and tackle what he so clearly felt I wasn’t facing.
But that wasn’t all. I was running from Mama, too, that day — not so much her sickness and the duties it required … refilling prescriptions, bathing her, reading to her. I was happy to do those things. It was the pretense. The get well cards from friends. By now, we all knew she wasn’t going to get well. The flowers. The move back home from the hospital, as though nothing had ever happened. The bedsheets her husband washed every damn day, as though she lay in a fancy hotel suite rather than a sickbed (she didn’t sweat and barely moved enough to soil the linens). Dale told me he was doing everything he knew to “make her feel comfortable.” But it seemed to me that he and Mama did everything they could to deny what was happening, the way Mama had disavowed our past. Just another whitewash. I wanted no part of it. I didn’t mean to be cruel. But I did want to grieve — openly, and with Mama. Apparently, that wasn’t allowed in Dale Licht’s subdivision.
So one Monday — though I knew Mama had worsened, and I should stick by a phone — I headed for Deep Ellum. I hoped it would be a dark and dreary place, that it would remind me of Houston, that it would confirm for me that my beginnings were as awful as I thought (that day) they were … as wretched as my Dwayne-and-Dale-infected mood.
Rain and wind buffeted the trees, made the streets hard to negotiate. I checked a map and soon found myself crossing railroad tracks, bumping along old brick roads. Since the night with Dwayne, I’d been reading about Deep Ellum — the history buff in me — and had come across a description of the neighborhood in an old black weekly, on microfilm in the public library: “Down on ‘Deep Ellum’ in Dallas, where Central Avenue empties onto Elm Street, is where Ethiopia stretches forth her hands. It is the one spot in the city that needs no daylight savings time because there is no bedtime, and working hours have no limits. The only place recorded on earth where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling and stealing go on at the same time without friction.”
I saw an empty train caboose, a streetcar shell, and several soft brick buildings, many of them burned, with faded signs on what remained of their walls: TOOL SHOP AND LOANS,INDIAN HERB EMPORIUM, SHOWS NIGHTLY. But mostly I saw slick new department stores, fern bars, antique shops. The neighborhood was rapidly redeveloping — the city didn’t want to face its dark past, either. Whatever secret places Dwayne knew, holdovers from the old days, I wouldn’t be able to find on my own in this driving rain. Discouraged, angry, still aching between my legs (more psychological now than physical), I turned around, tears in my eyes, to head back to work, and the car began to sputter. The “oil” light came on. I chugged another block or two before the engine died altogether. I didn’t have an umbrella, so as I walked, looking for a gas station or a pay phone, I sought shelter in doorways, under awnings. Inadvertently, I’d looped back onto one of the undeveloped blocks. Broken glass, metal strips torn from dead buildings curled across the walks. Drunks huddled on porches or under boarded-up windows, begging change. The nasty. This is what I’d come to find — to degrade myself out of spite, out of anger at Mama, Dwayne, Dale — but it didn’t make me feel any better. I heard a saxophone stutter somewhere inside an echoey room. Steam coiled from rusty grates in the concrete.
I was shivering and soaked when an old Ford Fairlane, dented and red, pulled up beside me, splashing my feet. It was as scratched and weathered as an old horse. A young black woman on the passenger side rolled down her window. “Need a lift?” I got in back, wary but grateful, and asked to be dropped at the nearest service station. Behind the wheel, a big, gruff man, bearded and with an afro the size of a bowling ball. The car smelled of French fries and talcum powder. We drove for several blocks, none of us speaking. Finally, at a stoplight, the guy turned to me. “I want you to know, I don’t normally stop for white folks,” he said. “It’s only on account of my old lady here that I’m giving you this ride.” I nodded and croaked, “Thank you.” He let me off at a Shell station. I had the car towed and wound up back at work around four. I called to check on Mama, and Dale, weeping, told me she’d passed away unexpectedly an hour ago (who wasn’t expecting it, you poor, pathetic …).
I sat at my desk, gripping the phone till my hand hurt. I’d been playing in the dark while my mama died. And the dark wasn’t really there anymore. Everything was a lousy, stupid joke. This is what I’d thought I wanted to happen — for the truth to burst through the laundered veneer of our lives, but no, it wasn’t what I wanted at all, not at all. What I really wanted, I knew now, was to return from Deep Ellum with the “dark side” all over my skin — inside-out, upside down — enough to shock Mama out of her sickbed stupor and force her to tell me everything, everything, right from the start. But now she was gone. How much of me, I wondered, went with her? I tried to weep, then and for several days afterward, but by now I was well-trained. Whatever’s inside, I’d learned, you keep back, like an old dollar bill in a mint tin.
By coincidence I see a Shell station and pull off the highway to fill up. Ariyeh has been quiet for several miles. As the young attendant wipes my windshield, she turns to me and says softly “I’ve just been thinking. Trying to decide whether I’m making this up or not, and I don’t think so. I believe I remember your daddy coming to the house one day.”
I sit up straight. The smell of gas through my open window dizzies me. The car shivers in the breeze of passing trucks.
“We would have been … oh, I don’t know, five or six? Can that be right? I’m not sure where you were. Off with your mama somewhere. I remember my own mama, Cass, was yelling and screaming about money or some-such, giving Daddy hell over something, and I’m just trying to stay out of the way, you know, when this strange man walks up on the porch, real slim, puffing a cigarette, and asks Daddy can he borrow a sawbuck or two? This is the part that seems like I’m making it up, ‘cause for all her yelling, Cass was never really violent … but it’s also the part that catches in my mind like an actual memory, it was so unusual. Cass rears back and hurls an open honey jar at the screen door, right where the man is standing, shaking sort of, like he’s sick, and she shouts at him, ‘Ain’t a dime in this house, and if’n there was, you’d never see it!’ I see him slouching there on the porch, spattered with gold, shaking his head and mumbling — I can’t believe I remember this now — ’Heads or tails, either way you lose.’ I asked Daddy about him later, and something he said made me think he was your dad.”