“Aw, Reggie — ”
“Go get it, now. And don’t bring that shit into my house no more.” To me he says, “Telisha, I’ve got another meeting in half an hour, downtown. Sorry. I’m afraid I haven’t organized my afternoon very well. Here’s what I’m thinking. Come to this gallery tonight.” He hands me a card. Brazos Fine Art. “We’ll discuss Sister Davis.”
“Wait — ”
“It’s a fund-raising party for the Row Houses. A few of our regular donors — ”
“I don’t think so, Reggie. Do your business, and — ”
“Ariyeh will be there. Wine and cheese, very relaxed.” He chugs water from his bottle. “And I promise I’ll give you a chance to tell me what a prick I am. Seven o’clock. Check you then.”
“Reggie — ”
“Seven. Ariyeh’ll be glad to see you.” A quick wave and he’s gone. Making me wait because he can. Arrogant bastard. But I have to smile. He’s smooth.
I find the keys in my purse. Several of the boys are bouncing and passing a basketball outside, laughing and taunting one another. I’m nervous, watching them scatter down the street. What’s waiting for them just around the corner? Behind Reggie’s desk, beneath the list of donors on the wall, Michael, sullen, packs away his tunes.
Bitter and his friend Grady sit in the grass in front of the mud-dauber shack, picking dandelions. Grady looks like he’s on a short furlough from the boneyard and is due back any minute.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hangover,” Grady says and plucks a flower. Bitter nods hello. With a kitchen knife he slices a catfish on the ground. He sets the knife down, dribbles fish blood on a pile of petals and stems, then rolls them into a ball in his hands. Some kind of gris-gris for the shakes? He doesn’t explain and I don’t bother asking.
I tell him I’ll be eating out tonight, meeting Ariyeh and Reggie. Can I bring him anything?
“We be fine. Mosey down the block here after while, get some chicken or something.”
“I washed and folded your clothes.”
“Saw that. Thank you, Seam.”
“I noticed you’ve got one of Mama’s old quilts.”
“Got two or three of ‘em somewheres in the house.”
“Do you remember the song she used to sing while she sewed? Something about ‘Follow the gourd’? I’ve been trying to recall it.”
He grins. “Sure,” he says and begins:
“That’s it!” I say. Grady sways in the grass, humming.
Grady grips his belly. “Whoa now,” Uncle says and squeezes his buddy’s arm. He picks up the fish, shakes blood from a gash beneath its gills. With narrowed eyes he signals me to go.
I nod. “Thank you for the song,” I say. “You brought her back to me there for a minute.”
He looks like he might cry. “Say hi to Ariyeh. Oh, Seam — you got some kinda ‘fficial-looking letter. Come today.”
“Yeah?”
“Kitchen table.”
“Thanks.”
It’s official, all right: Texas Department of Corrections. From the man I’d talked to on the phone. I’d told him I worked for Dallas’s mayor, and that seems to have done the trick. He informs me that Elias Woods has granted me a visit and I should call the prison to set up an appointment. No pencil, paper, tape recorders, or cameras. “TDC rules prohibit inmates from receiving any gifts.” Fine and dandy, I think, amazed at how easy this was. What did Uncle say about a waiting list? Mr. Woods must not get many guests.
I wash up and change: plum-colored skirt, light yellow blouse. My job requires a few gallery-hopping outfits, and it’s become a habit with me to pack them whenever I travel. When I leave the house, Bitter is rocking Grady on the lawn, his hands around the fellow’s arms. “You gointer be fine,” he’s saying. “Let it go. Just let it all go.”
The Brazos Fine Art Gallery sits between a rare book dealer and a Guatemalan weaving shop on Bissonnet Street just down the block from the Contemporary Arts Museum, whose sleek metallic walls reflect the setting pink sunlight. Caddies and Beamers crowd the small parking lot. The cars are newer and cleaner than the ones in Freedmen’s Town, but their purpose is the same, and I’m coming to recognize it has more to do with proclaiming power and prestige than with providing simple transportation. Claiming the highest ground of all, a bumper sticker on a gold LeBaron says, COMES THE RAPTURE/YOU CAN HAVE THIS CAR.
Tinted green windows frame the gallery’s narrow front door. Red brick, white wooden trim. Inside, an aggressive odor of floor wax and blue cheese, grapes, expensive sweet perfume. A roomful of buppies. After a few days in Freedmen’s Town, among the Nikes and back-ass-ward baseball caps, the filthy shoes and shirts, it’s a shock to see blacks decked out in fine silk dresses and pearls, Ralph Lauren polo pants, and one or two wildly red and yellow Rush Limbaugh ties. I scold myself for typecasting my own folks.
The man serving wine has the darkest skin in the room. Some things don’t change. I take a glass of merlot and squeeze into a corner between a pair of sharp metal sculptures. I don’t see Reggie or Ariyeh, but the room is packed and I don’t have the gumption yet to push through milling bodies. Thin fluorescent tubes — red, yellow, white, and blue — line the walls, spotlighting the ceiling, drawing it closer to the eye. A posted statement by the door says the tube sculpture is by Dan Flavin, a noted Minimalist who worked with mass-produced industrial materials to question the primacy of the arrist’s hand and to challenge traditional notions of art. I think of Kwako’s beer can birds and car bumper serpents, improvised using mass-produced materials, not to make a “statement,” but because that’s all he can afford to use. I wonder how this crowd feels about the art at the Row Houses — primitive, I’m sure, by the gallery’s standards. Quaint and naïve. But presumably these are a few of Reggie’s donors, Houston’s black upper class. They must have seen where their money goes.
A glimpse of Ariyeh’s pretty smile. She’s in the back, next to a framed abstraction, green and white. Her bright blue dress nicely complements the painting. Reggie, beside her, appears to be displaying Natalie as though she were a rare carving. Her grin wavers, and her whole body lunges awkwardly whenever she reaches to shake someone’s hand. It will take me a few minutes to wend my way to them; from a table I snatch a cracker with some cheese, then begin my slide through the press of buttocks and backs, shoulders and arms.
“… victimization,” someone behind me insists. “In the magazines, the movies. When’s the last time you saw a well-off black man in the media or on the news — aside from Bill Cosby or Michael Jordan?”
“Telling you, man, the camera loves black ‘pathology.’”
I slip by a big bearded man, accidentally smearing brie on his coat. He doesn’t notice and I can’t turn around, now, to tell him. I move on.
“… things’ll play if Dubya makes it to Pennsylvania Avenue?”
“Seems to me he’s been pretty fair on race.”
“He’s been absent on race.”
“Hey, ‘absent’ is fair, in my book.”
“I don’t know. He likes having his picture taken eating tacos. That shows facial awareness.”