“I tried once, at ten or eleven. Talked Daddy into shelling out the cash — he still had his carpentry practice then. Right away I discovered ballet was not for black girls! Those pink tights? Supposed to blend in with the white girls’ skin, but my ass showed right through. Chocolate syrup in a strawberry sundae! And the movements, all shoulders, and tall, stiff postures — not for us low-slung types. Teacher used to scream at me, ‘Pull your hips up,’ and I’d tell her, ‘Lady, these hips ain’t going nowhere!‘ It was the one time Daddy yelled at me when I was a kid, the day I wanted to quit. I’d pestered and pestered him for the lessons, and he’d wasted good money. Told me I had to put up with the embarrassment. That’s the way it is for folks like us. He’d done it all his life. It’s the kind of attitude Reggie can’t stand in him.” She slumps in the seat. The outing is over for her; her world has come pressing back in. “I don’t know. I guess it worked in Daddy’s time — up to a point. Most fellas didn’t get hurt, putting on a silly clown act for the buckras. Reggie had the Movement, you know. It was on TV every night. Malcolm and H. Rap. He learned to clench his fist. And that worked too — up to a point.”
I spot a DQ sign and exit. “What about now?”
“Now?” She sags again.
In the Dairy Queen, Mexican kids clamber over mustard-smeared tables. Their father, tiny, in a straw hat and dirty shirt, stands helplessly by the napkin dispensers. A woman I take to be his wife balances four or five soft drinks in a mushy cardboard container and yells at the kids in Spanish. Ice cream drips like Elmer’s glue from a silver machine just behind the counter. The cashiers are either high school kids in braces or grandma types who can’t hide their contempt for their young partners, who will probably work here only for the summer. “You can supersize that for only sixty more cents,” a girl behind a register tells an overweight woman desperately counting her change. While Ariyeh buys our treats I’m standing back trying not to lose the hanging field. Its soft light, its moldering mulch smell. But even as I tighten my mental grip, it’s slipping away from me. The present is too damned insistent. Cletus shatters again, and Sarah Morgan. As ever, I’m left on my own. It’s now, it’s August, Ariyeh needs thirty-six — no, thirty-eight — more cents. I scrabble in my purse and hand her the coins.
8
WE’RE BACK at Etta’s on a Sunday night. Ariyeh has talked Reggie into showing up, and he sits across the table from me, sullen, gripping a leather bag as though it’s his last earthly possession. Earl and his boys are taking their sweet time setting up. Bitter’s buddies trickle in, one by one — overalls, straw hats, ratty cotton shirts (only the women are dressed to the nines) — and make their way to the bar.
“Hey man, what up?”
“End of the world.”
“I can co-sign that.”
“Mickey Mouse in the house and Donald Duck don’t give a fuck.”
“Etta darling, how ‘bout a Forty or an Eight Ball?”
“Hen Dog for me, and some of them hog maws.”
“Pass the pluck-wine.”
Like last week, the brandy women settle regally at a table, placing their paper sacks in a delicate row, and as before, Earl, dressed in green and purple silk, courts them lewdly. “Mmm-mmm! Looka the box on that fox! Sugar, you sharing them cakes?”
The women ignore him, but they’re trying hard not to smile.
A man at the bar, knocking back cup after yellow cup of what he calls “do-it fluid,” ogles Ariyeh. “You jingling, babe,” he says, swaying. “You ain’t no haincty bitch, is you?”
Reggie scowls, and another man says to the first, “Parlay, slick. Don’t be beaming on the brother’s girl. He liable to jump salty on you.”
“You damn skippy,” Reggie growls.
The first man turns to me. “Fried, dyed, and laid to the side,” he says, pointing at my hair. “Am I right? You muh-rhine-ee, ain’t you?”
“Dead it, slick. Git ghost,” the man’s friend says, watching Reggie nervously, and both men move away toward the Coors crates stacked against the wall.
“Charming place,” Reggie tells Ariyeh. “A throwback to the twenties, when the only ambitions allowed the black man were to get drunk and get laid.”
“Chill, Reggie. Please. And try to be nice to Daddy.”
The old scarecrow leans against a wall holding a malt liquor can, grinning in private ecstasy. Etta shivers past rows of ripped, cotton-spitting chairs, ferrying a tray of Olde English 800s. I’m struck, again, by everyone’s age. Reggie, Ariyeh, and I, along with the bass player and drummer, are the only under-fifties. Reggie has noticed this too, I suspect — he glares distastefully, sizing up the room. In the malarial light from the bar’s beer signs, Bitter and his posse appear ancient, wrinkled, and discarded. Packed-away paper. They crowd our table now, bearing drinks: OEs and Hennessy’s “Very Special” cognac. The old men smell of aftershave and peanuts. Reggie gestures at the band members, who are talking and laughing with one another while their guitars remain in cases and the drummer’s cymbals lay stacked on the floor like extrathin cake layers. “It’s after ten already,” he mutters harshly.
“Listen him,” says a short man next to Bitter. “I think he wearing a white man’s watch, eh Bitter? Best sit back and relax, brother. We on CP Time in here.”
The men — three of them, and Uncle — all laugh.
“When you live by your hands, the way we done, you learn to ‘ppreciate a slower pace, know’m saying?” the man continues. I’ve heard Bitter call him Grady. The two of them worked together in Texas City, roughnecking and unloading bananas from Peruvian freighters. “Last job I had, canning shrimp down in Galveston, ever’ three day or so, the factory upped its niggamation — you know, speeding up the ‘ssembly line so we’d work harder and faster for the same amount of pay. Now, that timepiece you wearing and that impatient scowl on your face, brother, they based on niggamation. White man’s tricknology. You feel a whole lot better, you let it go.”
Reggie’s fists tremble on the bag in his lap. “I’ve spent the last three years renovating twenty-three row houses on Alabama Street, using only hammers, screwdrivers, and saws,” he says, low and precise. “Don’t assume I haven’t worked with my hands.”
A tall man whistles and laughs. “Ooh-ee, Grady, better watch yo’ ass. He be thinking he the Head Nigger in Charge!”
“Mack Daddy!”
“Word to the mother!”
Ariyeh’s hand moves like a blown leaf up Reggie’s arm. He frowns, squirms in his chair, but doesn’t say anything. Finally, the band rolls into its first tune. Earl is already sweating. The drummer flick-flicks the hi hat — a sassy skirt-switch — and the bass fills in with betcha bottom dollar, betcha bottom dollar. The lead riffs lonesome me, and Earl scats and grunts like a catfight. You get them every morning when that train whistle blows and the factory doors burst open; you get them at lunch when the bugs are so bad you can’t sit still and eat your bread; you get them in the evening when the pint bottles empty and that greased steel blows once-a-more, once-a-more, once-a-more, ah, I’m talking about the blues …
The scarecrow closes his eyes and goes into his solo dance; politely, folks shove back their chairs to make room. The brandy ladies order setups and ice, squeeze their plastic limes. You get them every night when the bedbugs start to bite. The room smells sweet and sour: gin and cologne, perfume, food, and sweat. Black faces, brown faces, yellow, gold, and tan. I’m glad for Bitter’s lanky old frame, hunched just a few feet away; glad for Ariyeh’s beauty and Reggie’s indulgence on her behalf; glad for Earl’s graceful bulk. In only my second time here, the place feels deeply familiar, like a rag doll from childhood rediscovered in an attic, stained with years-old dog slobber, spit-up, and dirt, smelling faintly of all those nights you clutched it in bed as a girl, tucked between your legs or tight beneath your arm. I sip some of Uncle’s cognac. It warms my mouth and throat.