"They think I talk like a Yankee."
He seemed to be grinning. It was just like Lee to grin when it made no sense, assuming it was a grin and not some squint-eyed tic or something. You couldn't always tell with him.
"We'll go to my house," Robert said. "We have eleven kinds of antiseptics."
Robert Sproul at fifteen resembled a miniature college sophomore. White bucks, chinos, a button-down shirt open at the collar. This was the second time he'd encountered Lee in the streets after he'd been knocked around by someone. Some boys had given him a pounding down by the ferry terminal after he'd ridden in the back of a bus with the Negroes. Whether out of ignorance or principle, Lee refused to say. This was also like him, to be a misplaced martyr and let you think he was just a fool, or exactly the reverse, as long as he knew the truth and you didn't.
It occurred to Robert that there was, as a matter of fact, a trace of Northern squawk in Lee's speech, although you could hardly blame him for it, knowing what you knew of his mixed history.
He spent serious time at the library. First he used the branch across the street from Warren Easton High School. It was a two-story building with a library for the blind downstairs, the regular room above. He sat cross-legged on the floor scanning titles for hours. He wanted books more advanced than the school texts, books that put him at a distance from his classmates, closed the world around him. They had their civics and home economics. He wanted subjects and ideas of historic scope, ideas that touched his life, his true life, the whirl of time inside him. He'd read pamphlets, he'd seen photographs in Life. Men in caps and worn jackets. Thick-bodied women with scarves on their heads. People of Russia, the other world, the secret that covers one-sixth of the land surface of the earth.
The branch was small and he began to use the main library at Lee Circle. Corinthian columns, tall arched windows, a rank of four librarians at the desk on the right as you enter. He sat in the semicircular reading room. All kinds of people here, different classes and manners and ways of reading. Old men with their faces in the page, half asleep, here to escape whatever is out there. Old men crossing the room, men with bread crumbs in their pockets, foreigners, hobbling.
He found names in the catalogue that made him pause with a strange contained excitement. Names that were like whispers he'd been hearing for years, men of history and revolution. He found the books they wrote and the books written about them. Books wearing away at the edges. Books whose titles had disappeared from the spines, faded into time. Here was Das Kapital, three volumes with buckled spines and discolored pages, with underlinings, weird notes in an obsessive hand. He found mathematical formulas, sweeping theories of capital and labor. He found The Communist Manifesto. It was here in German and in English. Marx and Engels. The workers, the class struggle, the exploitation of wage labor. Here were biographies and thick histories. He learned that Trotsky had once lived, in exile, in a working-class area of the Bronx not far from the places Lee had lived with his mother.
Trotsky in the Bronx. But Trotsky was not his real name. Lenin's name was not really Lenin. Stalin's name was Dzhugashvili. Historic names, pen names, names of war, party names, revolutionary names. These were men who lived in isolation for long periods, lived close to death through long winters in exile or prison, feeling history in the room, waiting for the moment when it would surge through the walls, taking them with it. History was a force to these men, a presence in the room. They felt it and waited.
The books were struggles. He had to fight to make some elementary sense of what he read. But the books had come out of struggle. They had been struggles to write, struggles to live. It seemed fitting to Lee that the texts were often masses of dense theory, unyielding. The tougher the books, the more firmly he fixed a distance between himself and others.
He found enough that he could understand. He could see the capitalists, he could see the masses. They were right here, all around him, every day.
Marguerite browned flour in a heavy-bottomed pan. They watched each other eat. She was always right there, hands busy, eyes bright behind the dark-rimmed glasses. He could see the strain and aging in her face, the flesh going taut at the hairline, and he felt something between pity and contempt. They watched TV in the next room. Miniature willow baskets hung on the wall. Her skull was showing through.
"Lillian says I spoil you to a T. You think you own me, she says."
"I'm your son. You have to do what I want."
"I admit this, which I shouldn't say a word, but your brothers were a burden on my back. They demanded attention which it was not humanly possible to give. This is where the human element comes in. When I think of all the tragedies. Your daddy felt a pain in his arm, out mowing. The next thing I know."
"They're in the service to get away from you."
"When I think of being a grandparent who is denied affection. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. I took you to Godchaux's in a stroller."
Ever since he could remember, they'd shared cramped spaces. It was the basic Oswald memory. He could smell the air she moved through, could smell her clothes hanging behind a door, a tropical mist of corsets and toilet water. He entered bathrooms in the full aura of her stink. He heard her mutter in her sleep, grinding the death's-head teeth. He knew what she would say, saw the gestures before she made them.
"I am entitled to better."
"So am I. I'm the one. I have rights," he said.
He helped her hang half-moon wall shelves. He would find a communist cell and become a member. This was a city with a hundred kinds of foreigners and ideas and influences. There were people who ran ads in the paper to seek favors of a patron saint. There were people who wore berets, who did not speak ten words of English. Down at the docks he saw oppressed workers unloading ninety-pound banana stems from Honduras. He would find a cell, be given tasks to prove himself.
"Lillian expects endless thanks. She lives off thank-yous and you're-welcomes."
"She thinks we're one jump up from handouts in the street."
"She thinks we're beholden," Marguerite said. "I was a popular child. I am willing to stand on the facts."
They'd lived with her sister Lillian on French Street. They took an apartment on St. Mary Street, eventually moving to a cheaper apartment in the same building. Then they moved to the Quarter.
He is a quiet and studious boy who demands his meals, like any boy.
"The Claveries were poor but not unhappy. We ate red beans and rice on Mondays. Just because she let us stay a few weeks, I know what she says behind my back. They talk and make up stories, which I am not surprised. They have hidden reasons they aren't telling for how they feel. They say I fly off too quick on the handle. I just can't get along, so-called. They never say it could be they're the ones at fault. They're the ones you can't reason with. She says I take one little word and make a difference out of it, which stands between us until we see each other on the street when it's 'Oh hello, how are you, come see us real soon.' '
"She thinks because she gives me money to rent a bike."
They lived in a three-story building in an alley that opened onto Canal Street, the dodging bodies and shopwindows glaring hot. The building had arched entranceways with decorative crests. That's what Marguerite liked most. It was otherwise a sad show. Lee had the bedroom, she took the studio couch.
In St. Louis Cemetery Number One he sees an old Negro snoring in his stocking feet, body propped against one of the oven vaults, the sun beating down on smashed amber glass.
They watched each other eat. He practiced chess moves at the kitchen table. She described houses and yards and furniture way back to the early decades of the century, in New Orleans, where she was raised, a happy child. He knew these things were important. He did not deny the value of what she said or the power of the images she carried with her. These were important things, family, money, the past, but they did not touch his real life, the inward-spinning self, and he let her voice fall through a hole in the air.