— What he say?
— He ain say shit. Turn red as a baby, a crab moreso. Bout to cry right in that sto.
— You talks funny, Erasmus. Say “widdat” and “sto,” and I bet you say “ho,” what hell else you gone say, but even you is not gerng say “Ise gwyne down to duh ribber,” or maybe, if the lady here will cooperate, you is. She ain know what she doin. She done put you and all us on her grocery list.
— I believe, Satch, that the departures in my diction from the true path are justified given the trail of travail our tongue has trippingly took to be at dis point. They is, as I know you know, and it bruise me to point this out to you, procrastinating and prevaricating on the one hand, which would be the white hand, since I am being so crystal clear this morning, and shuckin and jivin on the other hand, and we all know out here on the courthouse lawn whose hand that is. Speaking of which, I feel a bad breeze blowing somewhere, do you?
— I smell a horse. I am askeert of a horse.
— Something like ammonia blow through here.
— What state he in!
— I been loss, but never like dat!
— Amenhotep to that.
— Who?
— Jesus, another name for Jesus.
— Is?
— Might as well be. Jesus hard.
— That he is. That he is for sho.
The Land
FORREST COULD NEVER TALK this way, so Mrs. Hollingsworth made him:
Dark now only when the station wagon headlights do not illuminate it, rolling over its swell and slough, crushing what is left of its game, the urban-adapting coon, the strange-no-matter-where-you-put-him possum. The snakes are flattened to dust and blown away into herpetological archives. The alligator and the deer have received protection. All the rest have been allowed to perish.
The trees are under cultivation, bristling like large weeds, rent this way and that and spindly, after a not thorough job of weeding by a hasty, mad hand getting out of the garden before sunstroke sets in.
That is the land, the wilderness. The pristine tracts of the new wilderness are the fresh expanses of asphalt around the malls. A new petroleum air of virgin potential resides there, but only until the Volvos and the skateboards pull in. The Volvos discharge baby strollers and easy-listening FM, the skateboards the funk of boys, all taming the new wilderness.
Queers and Cigars
FORREST MIGHT TALK LIKE this, so she let him:
Hard on the Negro? Jesus is hard on the Negro, buddyro. Negro hard on himself too. Still, I will tell you something. Given Davis and Bragg over me, playing keep-away with the ordnance and men, and Bobby Lee wrapping his battle orders around cigars and giving them to the enemy, if the Negro were in charge today we’d stand a sight better chance of winning this fight. The Negro has not cost me one empty saddle at the end of a fight. Them what talk for a living has. The Negro does not talk for a living. Not yet.
Carp
THE GOLDEN-FLOORED ROOM fills with golden carp. The oak is as hard and clean as marble slabs for fish in a proper poissonerie. The carp do not resist flooding into a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi. The river has not been kind to them for some time. They relax. On the cot a man and a woman relax.
The carp say, “Psst!” and the woman props up on her elbow and beholds them. “Why, y’all are just a bunch of lonely boys,” she says, affecting some kind of drawl that pleases the carp. The carp affect drawls themselves, among fishes, and they wonder how the woman knows to play with them like this, if she does know how and is not just goofing. The carp do not have time to speculate or to question the woman about this. Their time on the floor is limited, a fact they sense without knowing the limit.
“The floor is filled with fish, babe,” the woman says to the man, who reclines on his back with his arm across his eyes.
“What kind?”
“Redhorse suckers.”
“Hmm. Had me two bluegills at wunst on my onliest hook, saw a yellertail, din’t see no carp.” The man is doing put-on talk too. The carp are delighted with these people, their hosts.
The carp flow out of the room by the drain of the window, leaving the floor cleaner than it was before their tour. When they are back in the river, the river is kinder to them. All day they say, Wunst we went to a room, and the river says, Sure you did, boys.
Bream Bedding
— I SMELL FISH. YOU smell fish?
— Smell like … no.
— Like bream beddin! That a smell now, people say you cain smell no fish under water but you sure as—
— We know that, Erasmus. Save it for the tourists.
— Ain no tourist.
— We know that too. What we do not know is why not. The Negro woman can hold a fond court among her handicrafts upon the roadside, or wrap her head and sell pancakes or God knows what else, baskets, you name it, and be blinded by flashbulbs. But I have yet to see a council of elders such as ourselves holding court on the courthouse lawn all the live-long day, as we do, with so much as one person interested in us at all.
— Cept if he don’t know what state he in.
— Exception duly noted. Short of that, the white man has no use for us. Why is this?
— Is we got any use for us?
— Erasmus, that is entirely beside the point, existentially speaking.
— Well scuse the doowop out of me. I smell fish, an I tell you something: they come out that winder up there bout a half-hour ago, a funk parade to beat the band.
— You saw them — what, fish po out that window?
— Shet up wid yo po. No, Satchmo, they disnt not po out, I disnt not eben see em, I done smelt em, as I told you in a straightforward reportorial manner innocent of shuck, jive, prevaricate, and procrastinate. If you were not so concerned with the want of a gaggle of tourists who you somehow fantasize could be interested in us and the anachronistic reminder of the pox on their land that we represent, you would perhaps be in a position to listen to someone. When, ah mean, he speak to you. Bout something impotent.
— Fish.
— Right on. Come out dat winder up yonder. Girl up in deah too, lookin good.
— With Mr. Whatstate?
— Yessiree. You tell me, existentially speaking, how a man don’t know what state he in get a woman like that in his bed — you tell me that, existentially speaking, you be tellin me something.
Differently Different
YOU COULD GET CIGARS and even guys at the grocery store, though not by fiat, Mrs. Hollingsworth reflected, but you could not get carp, or bluegill, or bream. She was getting stranger in her shopping wants. She was getting further from what was available. The meal she was assembling was going to satisfy only a hungrier, larger fool than the kind of fool she had originally thought she might invite to dinner.
This getting stranger did not bother her. It had been coming on for some time. She had felt restless, of course, in specific and vague ways, all her life, as have, she figured, all people paying sufficient attention to their lives to admit that their lives are utter mysteries. But lately there had been an agreeable yawning in her heart, a surmising of new hollow. She was trying to draw a breath of something with nothing visible or prudent in it, just other air. When she breathed this air, or tried to, or pretended to, or merely hoped to, she fancied that she was trying to breathe an air that no one near her cared or knew anything about. Her daughters, for example: they had makeup, men, ambition or not, they were fatigued or not, with the world or with her or not. Her husband was … well, himself. Men did not entertain the vapors, or if they did, which she allowed might happen, they went off the edge entire and wound up in institutions of either a gentle or a cruel kind. But there was a safe zone for women to lose their minds and remain among the zombies who had not, and to not be recognized as having lost their minds. The zombies, after all, were pretty slow to appreciate someone other than themselves, and they had been schooled not to denigrate the different. They were attending just now, in fact, a large adult-education academy, studying a curriculum that insisted there was no such thing as difference at all. The harbinger for this had been, she supposed, handicapped-person legislation. It had come from somewhere, and it had received a great activating boost of philosophically underpinning energy from the American academy, which had invented political correctness, a new language, to shore up the shaky proposition that there were no differences among people. Mrs. Hollingsworth discovered this when she went to the local university to take a night course in Coleridge and found instead, in the scheduled room at the scheduled time, a course entitled “Theorizing Diaspora, Adjudicating Hybridity.”