[1 of 5] Song of Solomon, A novel by Toni Morrison (1977) - Chapters 1-3

Author: Toni Morrison

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, (Chapters 1–3).

Daddy

The fathers may soar
And the children may know their names

Foreword

I have long despised artists’ chatter about muses—“voices” that speak to them and enable a vision, the source of which they could not otherwise name. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one’s insight, to avoid questions like “Where do your ideas come from?” Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction. I regarded the “mystery” of creativity as a shield erected by artists to avoid articulating, analyzing, or even knowing the details of their creative process—for fear it would fade away.

Writing Song of Solomon destroyed all that. I had no access to what I planned to write about until my father died. In the unmanageable sadness that followed, there was none of the sibling wrangling, guilt or missed opportunities, or fights for this or that memento. Each of his four children was convinced that he loved her or him best. He had sacrificed greatly for one, risking his house and his job; he took another to baseball games over whole summers where they lay in the grass listening to a portable radio, talking, evaluating the players on the field. In the company of one, his firstborn, he always beamed and preferred her cooking over everyone else’s, including his wife’s. He carried a letter from me in his coat pocket for years and years, and drove through blinding snow-storms to help me. Most important, he talked to each of us in language cut to our different understandings. He had a flattering view of me as someone interesting, capable, witty, smart, high-spirited. I did not share that view of myself, and wondered why he held it. But it was the death of that girl—the one who lived in his head—that I mourned when he died. Even more than I mourned him, I suffered the loss of the person he thought I was. I think it was because I felt closer to him than to myself that, after his death, I deliberately sought his advice for writing the novel that continued to elude me. “What are the men you have known really like?”

He answered.

Whatever it is called—muse, insight, inspiration, “the dark finger that guides,” “bright angel”—it exists and, in many forms, I have trusted it ever since.

The challenge of Song of Solomon was to manage what was for me a radical shift in imagination from a female locus to a male one. To get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the site of my work. To travel. To fly. In such an overtly, stereotypically male narrative, I thought that straightforward chronology would be more suitable than the kind of play with sequence and time I had employed in my previous novels. A journey, then, with the accomplishment of flight, the triumphant end of a trip through earth, to its surface, on into water, and finally into air. All very saga-like. Old-school heroic, but with other meanings. Opening the novel with the suicidal leap of the insurance agent, ending it with the protagonist’s confrontational soar into danger, was meant to enclose the mystical but problematic one taken by the Solomon of the title.

I have written, elsewhere and at some length, details of how certain sentences get written and the work I hope they do. Let me extrapolate an example here.

“The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at 3:00.”

This declarative sentence is designed to mock a journalistic style. With a minor alteration it could be the opening of an item in a small town newspaper. It has the tone of an everyday event of minimal local interest, yet I wanted it to contain important signs and crucial information. The name of the insurance company is that of a well-known black-owned company dependent on black clients, and in its corporate name are “life” and “mutual.” The sentence starts with “North Carolina” and closes with “Lake Superior”—geographical locations that suggest a journey from south to north—a direction common for black immigration and in the literature about it, but which is reversed here since the protagonist has to go south to mature. Two other words of significance are “fly” and “mercy.” Both terms are central to the narrative: flight as escape or confrontation; mercy the unspoken wish of the novel’s population. Some grant it; some despise it; one makes it the sole cry of her extemporaneous sermon upon the death of her granddaughter. Mercy touches, turns, and returns to Guitar at the end of the book, and moves him to make it his own final gift to his former friend. Mercy is what one wishes for Hagar; what is unavailable to and unsought by Macon Dead, senior; what his wife learns to demand from him, and what the townsfolk believe can never come from the white world, as is signified by the inversion of the name of the hospital from Mercy to “No-Mercy.” But the sentence turns, as all sentences do, on its verb. “Promise.” The insurance agent does not declare, announce, or threaten his act; he promises, as though a contract is being executed between himself and others. He hopes his flight, like that of the character in the title, toward asylum (Canada, or freedom, or the company of the welcoming dead), or home, is interpreted as a radical gesture demanding change, an alternative way, a cessation of things as they are. He does not want it understood as a simple desperate act, the end of a fruitless life, a life without examination, but as a deep commitment to his people. And in their response to his decision there is a tenderness, some contrition, and mounting respect (“They didn’t know he had it in him”), an awareness that his suicide enclosed, rather than repudiated them. The note he leaves asks for forgiveness. It is tacked on his door as a modest invitation to who-ever might pass by.

Of the flights in the novel, Solomon’s is the most magical, the most theatrical, and, for Milkman, the most satisfying. Unlike most mythical flights, which clearly imply triumph, in the attempt if not the success, Solomon’s escape, the insurance man’s jump, and Milkman’s leap are ambiguous, disturbing. Solomon’s escape from slavery is also the abandonment of his family; the insurance man leaves a message saying his suicide is a gesture of love, but guilt and despair also inform his decision. Milkman believes he is risking his life in return for Pilate’s, yet he knows his enemy has disarmed himself. These flights, these erstwhile heroics, are viewed rather differently by the women left behind. Both the quotation and the song of the title fairly shout that different understanding. To praise a woman whose attention was focused solely on family and domestic responsibilities, Milkman summons a conundrum: that without ever leaving the ground she could fly. My father laughed.

Part I

Chapter 1

The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house:
At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.
(signed) Robert Smith,
Ins. agent

Mr. Smith didn’t draw as big a crowd as Lindbergh had four years earlier—not more than forty or fifty people showed up—because it was already eleven o’clock in the morning, on the very Wednesday he had chosen for his fl
ight, before anybody read the note. At that time of day, during the middle of the week, word-of-mouth news just lumbered along. Children were in school; men were at work; and most of the women were fastening their corsets and getting ready to go see what tails or entrails the butcher might be giving away. Only the unemployed, the self-employed, and the very young were available—deliberately available because they’d heard about it, or accidentally available because they happened to be walking at that exact moment in the shore end of Not Doctor Street, a name the post office did not recognize. Town maps registered the street as Mains Avenue, but the only colored doctor in the city had lived and died on that street, and when he moved there in 1896 his patients took to calling the street, which none of them lived in or near, Doctor Street. Later, when other Negroes moved there, and when the postal service became a popular means of transferring messages among them, envelopes from Louisiana, Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia began to arrive addressed to people at house numbers on Doctor Street. The post office workers returned these envelopes or passed them on to the Dead Letter Office. Then in 1918, when colored men were being drafted, a few gave their address at the recruitment office as Doctor Street. In that way, the name acquired a quasi-official status. But not for long. Some of the city legislators, whose concern for appropriate names and the maintenance of the city’s landmarks was the principal part of their political life, saw to it that “Doctor Street” was never used in any official capacity. And since they knew that only Southside residents kept it up, they had notices posted in the stores, barbershops, and restaurants in that part of the city saying that the avenue running northerly and southerly from Shore Road fronting the lake to the junction of routes 6 and 2 leading to Pennsylvania, and also running parallel to and between Rutherford Avenue and Broadway, had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street.

It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please the city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street, and were inclined to call the charity hospital at its northern end No Mercy Hospital since it was 1931, on the day following Mr. Smith’s leap from its cupola, before the first colored expectant mother was allowed to give birth inside its wards and not on its steps. The reason for the hospital’s generosity to that particular woman was not the fact that she was the only child of this Negro doctor, for during his entire professional life he had never been granted hospital privileges and only two of his patients were ever admitted to Mercy, both white. Besides, the doctor had been dead a long time by 1931. It must have been Mr. Smith’s leap from the roof over their heads that made them admit her. In any case, whether or not the little insurance agent’s conviction that he could fly contributed to the place of her delivery, it certainly contributed to its time.

When the dead doctor’s daughter saw Mr. Smith emerge as promptly as he had promised from behind the cupola, his wide blue silk wings curved forward around his chest, she dropped her covered peck basket, spilling red velvet rose petals. The wind blew them about, up, down, and into small mounds of snow. Her half-grown daughters scrambled about trying to catch them, while their mother moaned and held the underside of her stomach. The rose-petal scramble got a lot of attention, but the pregnant lady’s moans did not. Everyone knew the girls had spent hour after hour tracing, cutting, and stitching the costly velvet, and that Gerhardt’s Department Store would be quick to reject any that were soiled.

It was nice and gay there for a while. The men joined in trying to collect the scraps before the snow soaked through them—snatching them from a gust of wind or plucking them delicately from the snow. And the very young children couldn’t make up their minds whether to watch the man circled in blue on the roof or the bits of red flashing around on the ground. Their dilemma was solved when a woman suddenly burst into song. The singer, standing at the back of the crowd, was as poorly dressed as the doctor’s daughter was well dressed. The latter had on a neat gray coat with the traditional pregnant-woman bow at her navel, a black cloche, and a pair of four-button ladies’ galoshes. The singing woman wore a knitted navy cap pulled far down over her forehead. She had wrapped herself up in an old quilt instead of a winter coat. Her head cocked to one side, her eyes fixed on Mr. Robert Smith, she sang in a powerful contralto:

O Sugarman done fly away

Sugarman done gone

Sugarman cut across the sky

Sugarman gone home….

A few of the half a hundred or so people gathered there nudged each other and sniggered. Others listened as though it were the helpful and defining piano music in a silent movie. They stood this way for some time, none of them crying out to Mr. Smith, all of them preoccupied with one or the other of the minor events about them, until the hospital people came.

They had been watching from the windows—at first with mild curiosity, then, as the crowd seemed to swell to the very walls of the hospital, they watched with apprehension. They wondered if one of those things that racial-uplift groups were always organizing was taking place. But when they saw neither placards nor speakers, they ventured outside into the cold: white-coated surgeons, dark-jacketed business and personnel clerks, and three nurses in starched jumpers.

The sight of Mr. Smith and his wide blue wings transfixed them for a few seconds, as did the woman’s singing and the roses strewn about. Some of them thought briefly that this was probably some form of worship. Philadelphia, where Father Divine reigned, wasn’t all that far away. Perhaps the young girls holding baskets of flowers were two of his virgins. But the laughter of a gold-toothed man brought them back to their senses. They stopped daydreaming and swiftly got down to business, giving orders. Their shouts and bustling caused great confusion where before there had been only a few men and some girls playing with pieces of velvet and a woman singing.

One of the nurses, hoping to bring some efficiency into the disorder, searched the faces around her until she saw a stout woman who looked as though she might move the earth if she wanted to.

“You,” she said, moving toward the stout woman. “Are these your children?”

The stout woman turned her head slowly, her eyebrows lifted at the carelessness of the address. Then, seeing where the voice came from, she lowered her brows and veiled her eyes.

“Ma’am?”

“Send one around back to the emergency office. Tell him to tell the guard to get over here quick. That boy there can go. That one.” She pointed to a cat-eyed boy about five or six years old.

The stout woman slid her eyes down the nurse’s finger and looked at the child she was pointing to.

“Guitar, ma’am.”

“What?”

“Guitar.”

The nurse gazed at the stout woman as though she had spoken Welsh. Then she closed her mouth, looked again at the cat-eyed boy, and lacing her fingers, spoke her next words very slowly to him.

“Listen. Go around to the back of the hospital to the guard’s office. It will say ‘Emergency Admissions’ on the door. A-D-M-I-S-I-O-N-S. But the guard will be there. Tell him to get over here—on the double. Move now. Move!” She unlaced her fingers and made scooping motions with her hands, the palms pushing against the wintry air.

A man in a brown suit came toward her, puffing little white clouds of breath. “Fire truck’s on its way. Get back inside. You’ll freeze to death.”

The nurse nodded.

“You left out a s, ma’am,” the boy said. The North was new to him and he had just begun to learn he could speak up to white people. But she’d already gone, rubbing her arms against the cold.

“Granny, she left out as.”

“And a ‘please.’”

“You reckon he’ll jump?”

“A nutwagon do anything.”

“Who is he?”

“Collects insurance. A nutwagon.”

“Who is that lady singing?”

“That, baby, is the very last thing in pea-time.” But she smiled wh
en she looked at the singing woman, so the cat-eyed boy listened to the musical performance with at least as much interest as he devoted to the man flapping his wings on top of the hospital.

The crowd was beginning to be a little nervous now that the law was being called in. They each knew Mr. Smith. He came to their houses twice a month to collect one dollar and sixty-eight cents and write down on a little yellow card both the date and their eighty-four cents a week payment. They were always half a month or so behind, and talked endlessly to him about paying ahead—after they had a preliminary discussion about what he was doing back so soon anyway.

“You back in here already? Look like I just got rid of you.”

“I’m tired of seeing your face. Really tired.”

“I knew it. Soon’s I get two dimes back to back, here you come. More regular than the reaper. Do Hoover know about you?”

They kidded him, abused him, told their children to tell him they were out or sick or gone to Pittsburgh. But they held on to those little yellow cards as though they meant something—laid them gently in the shoe box along with the rent receipts, marriage licenses, and expired factory identification badges. Mr. Smith smiled through it all, managing to keep his eyes focused almost the whole time on his customers’ feet. He wore a business suit for his work, but his house was no better than theirs. He never had a woman that any of them knew about and said nothing in church but an occasional “Amen.” He never beat anybody up and he wasn’t seen after dark, so they thought he was probably a nice man. But he was heavily associated with illness and death, neither of which was distinguishable from the brown picture of the North Carolina Mutual Life Building on the back of their yellow cards. Jumping from the roof of Mercy was the most interesting thing he had done. None of them had suspected he had it in him. Just goes to show, they murmured to each other, you never really do know about people.

The singing woman quieted down and, humming the tune, walked through the crowd toward the rose-petal lady, who was still cradling her stomach.

“You should make yourself warm,” she whispered to her, touching her lightly on the elbow. “A little bird’ll be here with the morning.”

“Oh?” said the rose-petal lady. “Tomorrow morning?”

“That’s the only morning coming.”

“It can’t be,” the rose-petal lady said. “It’s too soon.”

“No it ain’t. Right on time.”

The women were looking deep into each other’s eyes when a loud roar went up from the crowd—a kind of wavy oo sound. Mr. Smith had lost his balance for a second, and was trying gallantly to hold on to a triangle of wood that jutted from the cupola. Immediately the singing woman began again:

O Sugarman done fly

O Sugarman done gone…

Downtown the firemen pulled on their greatcoats, but when they arrived at Mercy, Mr. Smith had seen the rose petals, heard the music, and leaped on into the air.

The next day a colored baby was born inside Mercy for the first time. Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings must have left their mark, because when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier—that only birds and airplanes could fly—he lost all interest in himself. To have to live without that single gift saddened him and left his imagination so bereft that he appeared dull even to the women who did not hate his mother. The ones who did, who accepted her invitations to tea and envied the doctor’s big dark house of twelve rooms and the green sedan, called him “peculiar.” The others, who knew that the house was more prison than palace, and that the Dodge sedan was for Sunday drives only, felt sorry for Ruth Foster and her dry daughters, and called her son “deep.” Even mysterious.

“Did he come with a caul?”

“You should have dried it and made him some tea from it to drink. If you don’t he’ll see ghosts.”

“You believe that?”

“I don’t, but that’s what the old people say.”

“Well, he’s a deep one anyway. Look at his eyes.”

And they pried pieces of baked-too-fast sunshine cake from the roofs of their mouths and looked once more into the boy’s eyes. He met their gaze as best he could until, after a pleading glance toward his mother, he was allowed to leave the room.

It took some planning to walk out of the parlor, his back washed with the hum of their voices, open the heavy double doors leading to the dining room, slip up the stairs past all those bedrooms, and not arouse the attention of Lena and Corinthians sitting like big baby dolls before a table heaped with scraps of red velvet. His sisters made roses in the afternoon. Bright, lifeless roses that lay in peck baskets for months until the specialty buyer at Gerhardt’s sent Freddie the janitor over to tell the girls that they could use another gross. If he did manage to slip by his sisters and avoid their casual malice, he knelt in his room at the window sill and wondered again and again why he had to stay level on the ground. The quiet that suffused the doctor’s house then, broken only by the murmur of the women eating sunshine cake, was only that: quiet. It was not peaceful, for it was preceded by and would soon be terminated by the presence of Macon Dead.

Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. His hatred of his wife glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. Under the frozen heat of his glance they tripped over doorsills and dropped the salt cellar into the yolks of their poached eggs. The way he mangled their grace, wit, and self-esteem was the single excitement of their days. Without the tension and drama he ignited, they might not have known what to do with themselves. In his absence his daughters bent their necks over blood-red squares of velvet and waited eagerly for any hint of him, and his wife, Ruth, began her days stunned into stillness by her husband’s contempt and ended them wholly animated by it.

When she closed the door behind her afternoon guests, and let the quiet smile die from her lips, she began the preparation of food her husband found impossible to eat. She did not try to make her meals nauseating; she simply didn’t know how not to. She would notice that the sunshine cake was too haggled to put before him and decide on a rennet dessert. But the grinding of the veal and beef for a meat loaf took so long she not only forgot the pork, settling for bacon drippings poured over the meat, she had no time to make a dessert at all. Hurriedly, then, she began to set the table. As she unfolded the white linen and let it billow over the fine mahogany table, she would look once more at the large water mark. She never set the table or passed through the dining room without looking at it. Like a lighthouse keeper drawn to his window to gaze once again at the sea, or a prisoner automatically searching out the sun as he steps into the yard for his hour of exercise, Ruth looked for the water mark several times during the day. She knew it was there, would always be there, but she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was life and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside herself.

Even in the cave of sleep, without dreaming of it or thinking of it at all, she felt its presence. Oh, she talked endlessly to her daughters and her guests about how to get rid of it—what might hide this single flaw on the splendid wood: Vaseline, tobacco juice, iodine, a sanding followed by linseed oil. She had tried them all. But her glance was nutritious; the spot became, if anything, more pronounced as the years passed.

The cloudy gray circle identified the place where the bowl filled every day during the doctor’s life with fresh flowers had stood. Every day. And when there were no flowers, it held a leaf arrangement, a gathering of twigs and berries, pussy willow, Scotch pine…. But always something to grace the dinner table in the evening.

It was for her father a touch that distinguished his own family from the people among whom they lived. For Ruth it was the summation of the affectionate elegance with which she believed her childhood had been surrounded. When Macon married her and moved into Doctor’s house, she kept up the centerpiece-arranging. Then came the time she walked down to the shore through the roughest part of the city to get some driftwood. She had seen an arrangement of driftwood and dried seaweed in the homemakers section of the newspaper. It was a damp November day, and Doctor was paralyzed even then and taking liquid food in his bedroom. The wind had lifted her skirt from around her ankles and cut through her laced shoes. She’d had to rub her feet down with warm olive oil when she got back. At dinner, where just the two of them sat, she turned toward her husband and asked him how he liked the centerpiece. “Most people overlook things like that. They see it, but they don’t see anything beautiful in it. They don’t see that nature has already made it as perfect as it can be. Look at it from the side. It is pretty, isn’t it?”

Her husband looked at the driftwood with its lacy beige seaweed, and without moving his head, said, “Your chicken is red at the bone. And there is probably a potato dish that is supposed to have lumps in it. Mashed ain’t the dish.”

Ruth let the seaweed disintegrate, and later, when its veins and stems dropped and curled into brown scabs on the table, she removed the bowl and brushed away the scabs. But the water mark, hidden by the bowl all these years, was exposed. And once exposed, it behaved as though it were itself a plant and flourished into a huge suede-gray flower that throbbed like fever, and sighed like the shift of sand dunes. But it could also be still. Patient, restful, and still.

But there was nothing you could do with a mooring except acknowledge it, use it for the verification of some idea you wanted to keep alive. Something else is needed to get from sunup
to sundown: a balm, a gentle touch or nuzzling of some sort. So Ruth rose up and out of her guileless inefficiency to claim her bit of balm right after the preparation of dinner and just before the return of her husband from his office. It was one of her two secret indulgences—the one that involved her son—and part of the pleasure it gave her came from the room in which she did it. A damp greenness lived there, made by the evergreen that pressed against the window and filtered the light. It was just a little room that Doctor had called a study, and aside from a sewing machine that stood in the corner along with a dress form, there was only a rocker and tiny footstool. She sat in this room holding her son on her lap, staring at his closed eyelids and listening to the sound of his sucking. Staring not so much from maternal joy as from a wish to avoid seeing his legs dangling almost to the floor.

In late afternoon, before her husband closed his office and came home, she called her son to her. When he came into the little room she unbuttoned her blouse and smiled. He was too young to be dazzled by her nipples, but he was old enough to be bored by the flat taste of mother’s milk, so he came reluctantly, as to a chore, and lay as he had at least once each day of his life in his mother’s arms, and tried to pull the thin, faintly sweet milk from her flesh without hurting her with his teeth.

She felt him. His restraint, his courtesy, his indifference, all of which pushed her into fantasy. She had the distinct impression that his lips were pulling from her a thread of light. It was as though she were a cauldron issuing spinning gold. Like the miller’s daughter—the one who sat at night in a straw-filled room, thrilled with the secret power Rumpelstiltskin had given her: to see golden thread stream from her very own shuttle. And that was the other part of her pleasure, a pleasure she hated to give up. So when Freddie the janitor, who liked to pretend he was a friend of the family and not just their flunky as well as their tenant, brought his rent to the doctor’s house late one day and looked in the window past the evergreen, the terror that sprang to Ruth’s eyes came from the quick realization that she was to lose fully half of what made her daily life bearable. Freddie, however, interpreted her look as simple shame, but that didn’t stop him from grinning.

“Have mercy. I be damn.”

He fought the evergreen for a better look, hampered more by his laughter than by the branches. Ruth jumped up as quickly as she could and covered her breast, dropping her son on the floor and confirming for him what he had begun to suspect—that these were strange and wrong.

Before either mother or son could speak, rearrange themselves properly, or even exchange looks, Freddie had run around the house, climbed the porch steps, and was calling them between gulps of laughter.

“Miss Rufie. Miss Rufie. Where you? Where you all at?” He opened the door to the green room as though it were his now.

“I be damn, Miss Rufie. When the last time I seen that? I don’t even know the last time I seen that. I mean, ain’t nothing wrong with it. I mean, old folks swear by it. It’s just, you know, you don’t see it up here much….” But his eyes were on the boy. Appreciative eyes that communicated some complicity she was excluded from. Freddie looked the boy up and down, taking in the steady but secretive eyes and the startling contrast between Ruth’s lemony skin and the boy’s black skin. “Used to be a lot of womenfolk nurse they kids a long time down South. Lot of ’em. But you don’t see it much no more. I knew a family—the mother wasn’t too quick, though—nursed hers till the boy, I reckon, was near ‘bout thirteen. But that’s a bit much, ain’t it?” All the time he chattered, he rubbed his chin and looked at the boy. Finally he stopped, and gave a long low chuckle. He’d found the phrase he’d been searching for. “A milkman. That’s what you got here, Miss Rufie. A natural milkman if ever I seen one. Look out, womens. Here he come. Huh!”

Freddie carried his discovery not only into the homes in Ruth’s neighborhood, but to Southside, where he lived and where Macon Dead owned rent houses. So Ruth kept close to home and had no afternoon guests for the better part of two months, to keep from hearing that her son had been rechristened with a name he was never able to shake and that did nothing to improve either one’s relationship with his father.

Macon Dead never knew how it came about—how his only son acquired the nickname that stuck in spite of his own refusal to use it or acknowledge it. It was a matter that concerned him a good deal, for the giving of names in his family was always surrounded by what he believed to be monumental foolishness. No one mentioned to him the incident out of which the nickname grew because he was a difficult man to approach—a hard man, with a manner so cool it discouraged casual or spontaneous conversation. Only Freddie the janitor took liberties with Macon Dead, liberties he purchased with the services he rendered, and Freddie was the last person on earth to tell him. So Macon Dead neither heard of nor visualized Ruth’s sudden terror, her awkward jump from the rocking chair, the boy’s fall broken by the tiny footstool, or Freddie’s amused, admiring summation of the situation.

Without knowing any of the details, however, he guessed, with the accuracy of a mind sharpened by hatred, that the name he heard schoolchildren call his son, the name he overheard the ragman use when he paid the boy three cents for a bundle of old clothes—he guessed that this name was not clean. Milkman. It certainly didn’t sound like the honest job of a dairyman, or bring to his mind cold bright cans standing on the back porch, glittering like captains on guard. It sounded dirty, intimate, and hot. He knew that wherever the name came from, it had something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when thinking of her, coated with disgust.

This disgust and the uneasiness with which he regarded his son affected everything he did in that city. If he could have felt sad, simply sad, it would have relieved him. Fifteen years of regret at not having a son had become the bitterness of finally having one in the most revolting circumstances.

There had been a time when he had a head full of hair and when Ruth wore lovely complicated underwear that he deliberately took a long time to undo. When all of his foreplay was untying, unclasping, unbuckling the snaps and strings of what must have been the most beautiful, the most delicate, the whitest and softest underwear on earth. Each eye of her corset he toyed with (and there were forty—twenty on each side); each gros-grain ribbon that threaded its pale-blue way through the snowy top of her bodice he unlaced. He not only undid the blue bow; he pulled it all the way out of the hem, so she had to rethread it afterward with a safety pin. The elastic bands that connected her perspiration shields to her slip he unsnapped and snapped again, teasing her and himself with the sound of the snaps and the thrill of his fingertips on her shoulders. They never spoke during these undressings. But they giggled occasionally, and as when children play “doctor,” undressing of course was the best part.

When Ruth was naked and lying there as moist and crumbly as unbleached sugar, he bent to unlace her shoes. That was the final delight, for once he had undressed her feet, had peeled her stockings down over her ankles and toes, he entered her and ejaculated quickly. She liked it that way. So did he. And in almost twenty years during which he had not laid eyes on her naked feet, he missed only the underwear.

Once he believed that the sight of her mouth on the dead man’s fingers would be the thing he would remember always. He was wrong. Little by little he remembered fewer and fewer of the details, until finally he had to imagine them, even fabricate them, guess what they must have been. The image left him, but the odiousness never did. For the nourishment of his outrage he depended on the memory of her underwear; those round, innocent corset eyes now lost to him forever.

So if the people were calling his son Milkman, and if she was lowering her eyelids and dabbing at the sweat on her top lip when she heard it, there was definitely some filthy connection and it did not matter at all to Macon Dead whether anyone gave him the details or not.

And they didn’t. Nobody both dared enough and cared enough to tell him. The ones who cared enough, Lena and Corinthians, the
living proof of those years of undressing his wife, did not dare. And the one person who dared to but didn’t care to was the one person in the world he hated more than his wife in spite of the fact that she was his sister. He had not crossed the tracks to see her since his son was born and he had no intention of renewing their relationship now.

Macon Dead dug in his pocket for his keys, and curled his fingers around them, letting their bunchy solidity calm him. They were the keys to all the doors of his houses (only four true houses; the rest were really shacks), and he fondled them from time to time as he walked down Not Doctor Street to his office. At least he thought of it as his office, had even painted the word OFFICE on the door. But the plate-glass window contradicted him. In peeling gold letters arranged in a semicircle, his business establishment was declared to be Sonny’s Shop. Scraping the previous owner’s name off was hardly worth the trouble since he couldn’t scrape it from anybody’s mind. His storefront office was never called anything but Sonny’s Shop, although nobody now could remember thirty years back, when, presumably, Sonny did something or other there.

He walked there now—strutted is the better word, for he had a high behind and an athlete’s stride—thinking of names. Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name. His own parents, in some mood of perverseness or resignation, had agreed to abide by a naming done to them by somebody who couldn’t have cared less. Agreed to take and pass on to all their issue this heavy name scrawled in perfect thoughtlessness by a drunken Yankee in the Union Army. A literal slip of the pen handed to his father on a piece of paper and which he handed on to his only son, and his son likewise handed on to his; Macon Dead who begat a second Macon Dead who married Ruth Foster (Dead) and begat Magdalene called Lena Dead and First Corinthians Dead and (when he least expected it) another Macon Dead, now known to the part of the world that mattered as Milkman Dead. And as if that were not enough, a sister named Pilate Dead, who would never mention to her brother the circumstances or the details of this foolish misnaming of his son because the whole thing would have delighted her. She would savor it, maybe fold it too in a brass box and hang it from her other ear.

He had cooperated as a young father with the blind selection of names from the Bible for every child other than the first male. And abided by whatever the finger pointed to, for he knew every configuration of the naming of his sister. How his father, confused and melancholy over his wife’s death in childbirth, had thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that seemed to him strong and handsome; saw in them a large figure that looked like a tree hanging in some princely but protective way over a row of smaller trees. How he had copied the group of letters out on a piece of brown paper; copied, as illiterate people do, every curlicue, arch, and bend in the letters, and presented it to the midwife.

“That’s the baby’s name.”

“You want this for the baby’s name?”

“I want that for the baby’s name. Say it.”

“You can’t name the baby this.”

“Say it.”

“It’s a man’s name.”

“Say it.”

“Pilate.”

“What?”

“Pilate. You wrote down Pilate.”

“Like a riverboat pilot?”

“No. Not like no riverboat pilot. Like a Christ-killing Pilate. You can’t get much worse than that for a name. And a baby girl at that.”

“That’s where my finger went down at.”

“Well, your brain ain’t got to follow it. You don’t want to give this motherless child the name of the man that killed Jesus, do you?”

“I asked Jesus to save me my wife.”

“Careful, Macon.”

“I asked him all night long.”

“He give you your baby.”

“Yes. He did. Baby name Pilate.”

“Jesus, have mercy.”

“Where you going with that piece of paper?”

“It’s going back where it came from. Right in the Devil’s flames.”

“Give it here. It come from the Bible. It stays in the Bible.”

And it did stay there, until the baby girl turned twelve and took it out, folded it up into a tiny knot and put it in a little brass box, and strung the entire contraption through her left earlobe. Fluky about her own name at twelve, how much more fluky she’d become since then Macon could only guess. But he knew for certain that she would treat the naming of the third Macon Dead with the same respect and awe she had treated the boy’s birth.

Macon Dead remembered when his son was born, how she seemed to be more interested in this first nephew of hers than she was in her own daughter, and even that daughter’s daughter. Long after Ruth was up and about, as capable as she ever would be—and that wasn’t much—of running the house again, Pilate continued to visit, her shoelaces undone, a knitted cap pulled down over her forehead, bringing her foolish earring and sickening smell into the kitchen. He had not seen her since he was sixteen years old, until a year before the birth of his son, when she appeared in his city. Now she was acting like an in-law, like an aunt, dabbling at helping Ruth and the girls, but having no interest in or knowledge of decent housekeeping, she got in the way. Finally she just sat in a chair near the crib, singing to the baby. That wasn’t so bad, but what Macon Dead remembered most was the expression on her face. Surprise, it looked like, and eagerness. But so intense it made him uneasy. Or perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps it was seeing her all those years after they had separated outside that cave, and remembering his anger and her betrayal. How far down she had slid since then. She had cut the last thread of propriety. At one time she had been the dearest thing in the world to him. Now she was odd, murky, and worst of all, unkempt. A regular source of embarrassment, if he would allow it. But he would not allow it.

Finally he had told her not to come again until she could show some respect for herself. Could get a real job instead of running a wine house.

“Why can’t you dress like a woman?” He was standing by the stove. “What’s that sailor’s cap doing on your head? Don’t you have stockings? What are you trying to make me look like in this town?” He trembled with the thought of the white men in the bank—the men who helped him buy and mortgage houses—discovering that this raggedy bootlegger was his sister. That the propertied Negro who handled his business so well and who lived in the big house on Not Doctor Street had a sister who had a daughter but no husband, and that daughter had a daughter but no husband. A collection of lunatics who made wine and sang in the streets “like common street women! Just like common street women!”

Pilate had sat there listening to him, her wondering eyes resting on his face. Then she said, “I been worried sick about you too, Macon.”

Exasperated, he had gone to the kitchen door. “Go ‘head, Pilate. Go on now. I’m on the thin side of evil and trying not to break through.”

Pilate stood up, wrapped her quilt around her, and with a last fond look at the baby, left through the kitchen door. She never came back.

When Macon Dead got to the front door of his office he saw a stout woman and two young boys standing a few feet away. Macon unlocked his door, walked over to his desk, and settled himself behind it. As he was thumbing through his accounts book, the stout woman entered, alone.

“Afternoon Mr. Dead, sir. I’m Mrs. Bains. Live over at number three on Fifteenth Street.”

Macon Dead remembered—not the woman, but the circumstances at number three. His tenant’s grandmother or aunt or something had moved in there and the rent was long overdue.

“Yes, Mrs. Bains. You got something for me?”

“Well, that’s what I come to talk to you about. You know Cency left all them babies with me. And my relief check ain’t no more’n it take to keep a well-grown yard dog alive—half alive, I should say.”

“Your rent is four dollars a month, Mrs. Bains. You two months behind already.”

“I do know that, Mr. Dead, sir, but babies can’t make it with nothing to put in they stomach.”

Their voices were low, polite, without any hint of conflict.

“Can they make it in the street, Mrs. Bains? That’s where they gonna be if you don’t figure out some way to get me my money.”

“No, sir. They can’t make it in the street. We need both, I reckon. Same as yours does.”

“Then you better rustle it up, Mrs. Bains. You got till”—he swiveled around to consult the calendar on the wall—“till Saturday coming. Saturday, Mrs. Bains. Not Sunday. Not Monday. Saturday.”

If she had been younger and had more juice, the glitter in her eyes would have washed down onto her cheeks. New, at her time of life, it simply gleamed. She pressed the flat of her hand on Macon Dead’s desk and, holding the gleam steady in her eyes, pushed herself up from the chair. She turned her head a little to look out the plate-glass window, and then back at him.

“What’s it gonna profit you, Mr. Dead, sir, to put me and them children out?”

“Saturday, Mrs. Bains.”

Lowering her head, Mrs. Bains whispered something and walked slowly and heavily from the office. As she closed the door to Sonny’s Shop, her grandchildren moved out of the sunlight into the shadow where she stood.

“What he say, Granny?”

Mrs. Bains put a hand on the taller boy’s hair and fingered it lightly, absently searching with her nails for tetter spots.

“He must’ve told her no,” said the other boy.

“Do we got to move?” The tall boy tossed his head free of her fingers and looked at her sideways. His cat eyes were gashes of gold.

Mrs. Bains let her hand fall to her side. “A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see. A terrible, terrible thing to see.”

The boys looked at each other and back at their grandmother. Their lips were parted as though they had heard something important.

When Mrs. Bains closed the door, Macon Dead went back to the pages of his accounts book, running his fingertips over the figures and thinking with the unoccupied part of his mind about the first time he called on Ruth Foster’s father. He had only two keys
in his pocket then, and if he had let people like the woman who just left have their way, he wouldn’t have had any keys at all. It was because of those keys that he could dare to walk over to that part of Not Doctor Street (it was still Doctor Street then) and approach the most important Negro in the city. To lift the lion’s paw knocker, to entertain thoughts of marrying the doctor’s daughter was possible because each key represented a house which he owned at the time. Without those keys he would have floated away at the doctor’s first word: “Yes?” Or he would have melted like new wax under the heat of that pale eye. Instead he was able to say that he had been introduced to his daughter, Miss Ruth Foster, and would appreciate having the doctor’s permission to keep her company now and then. That his intentions were honorable and that he himself was certainly worthy of the doctor’s consideration as a gentleman friend for Miss Foster since, at twenty-five, he was already a colored man of property.

“I don’t know anything about you,” the doctor said, “other than your name, which I don’t like, but I will abide by my daughter’s preference.”

In fact the doctor knew a good deal about him and was more grateful to this tall young man than he ever allowed himself to show. Fond as he was of his only child, useful as she was in his house since his wife had died, lately he had begun to chafe under her devotion. Her steady beam of love was unsettling, and she had never dropped those expressions of affection that had been so lovable in her childhood. The good-night kiss was itself a masterpiece of slow-wittedness on her part and discomfort on his. At sixteen, she still insisted on having him come to her at night, sit on her bed, exchange a few pleasantries, and plant a kiss on her lips. Perhaps it was the loud silence of his dead wife, perhaps it was Ruth’s disturbing resemblance to her mother. More probably it was the ecstasy that always seemed to be shining in Ruth’s face when he bent to kiss her—an ecstasy he felt inappropriate to the occasion.

None of that, of course, did he describe to the young man who came to call. Which is why Macon Dead still believed the magic had lain in the two keys.

In the middle of his reverie, Macon was interrupted by rapid tapping on the window. He looked up, saw Freddie peeping through the gold lettering, and nodded for him to enter. A gold-toothed bantamweight, Freddie was as much of a town crier as Southside had. It was this same rapid tapping on the window-pane, the same flash-of-gold smile that had preceded his now-famous scream to Macon: “Mr. Smith went splat!” It was obvious to Macon that Freddie now had news of another calamity.

“Porter gone crazy drunk again! Got his shotgun!”

“Who’s he out for?” Macon began closing books and opening desk drawers. Porter was a tenant and tomorrow was collection day.

“Ain’t out for nobody in particular. Just perched himself up in the attic window and commenced to waving a shotgun. Say he gotta kill him somebody before morning.”

“He go to work today?”

“Yep. Caught the eagle too.”

“Drunk it all up?”

“Not all of it. He only got one bottle, and he still got a fist fulla money.”

“Who’s crazy enough to sell him any liquor?”

Freddie showed a few gold teeth but said nothing, so Macon knew it was Pilate. He locked all his drawers save one—the one he unlocked and took a small .32 from.

“Police warn every bootlegger in the county, and he still gets it somehow.” Macon went on with the charade, pretending he didn’t know his sister was the one Porter and anybody else—adult, child, or beast—could buy wine from. He thought for the hundredth time that she needed to be in jail and that he would be willing to put her there if he could be sure she wouldn’t loudmouth him and make him seem trashy in the eyes of the law—and the banks.

“You know how to use that thing, Mr. Dead, sir?”

“I know how.”

“Porter’s crazy when he drunk.”

“I know what he is.”

“How you aiming to get him down?”

“I ain’t aiming to get him down. I’m aiming to get my money down. He can go on and die up there if he wants to. But if he don’t toss me my rent, I’m going to blow him out of that window.”

Freddie’s giggle was soft, but his teeth strengthened its impact. A born flunky, he loved gossip and the telling of it. He was the ear that heard every murmur of complaint, every name-calling; and his was the eye that saw everything: the secret loving glances, the fights, the new dresses.

Macon knew Freddie as a fool and a liar, but a reliable liar. He was always right about his facts and always wrong about the motives that produced the facts. Just as now he was right about Porter having a shotgun, being in the attic window, and being drunk. But Porter was not waiting to kill somebody, meaning anybody, before morning. In fact he was very specific about whom he wanted to kill—himself. However, he did have a precondition which he shouted down, loud and clear, from the attic. “I want to fuck! Send me up somebody to fuck! Hear me? Send me up somebody, I tell ya, or I’ma blow my brains out!”

As Macon and Freddie approached the yard, the women from the rooming house were hollering answers to Porter’s plea.

“What kinda bargain is that?”

“Kill yourself first and then we’ll send you somebody.”

“Do it have to be a woman?”

“Do it got to be human?”

“Do it got to be alive?”

“Can it be a piece of liver?”

“Put that thing down and throw me my goddam money!” Macon’s voice cut through the women’s fun. “Float those dollars down here, nigger, then blow yourself up!”

Porter turned and aimed his shotgun at Macon.

“If you pull that trigger,” shouted Macon, “you better not miss. If you take a shot you better make sure I’m dead, cause if you don’t I’m gonna shoot your balls up in your throat!” He pulled out his own weapon. “Now get the hell outta that window!”

Porter hesitated for only a second, before turning the barrel of the shotgun toward himself—or trying to. Its length made it difficult; his drunkenness made it impossible. Struggling to get the right angle, he was suddenly distracted. He leaned his shotgun on the window sill, pulled out his penis and in a high arc, peed over the heads of the women, making them scream and run in a panic that the shotgun had not been able to create. Macon rubbed the back of his head while Freddie bent double with laughter.

For more than an hour Porter held them at bay: cowering, screaming, threatening, urinating, and interspersing all of it with pleas for a woman.

He would cry great shoulder-heaving sobs, followed by more screams.

“I love ya! I love ya all. Don’t act like that. You women. Stop it. Don’t act like that. Don’t you see I love ya? I’d die for ya, kill for ya. I’m saying I love ya. I’m telling ya. Oh, God have mercy. What I’m gonna do? What in this fuckin world am I gonna dooooo?”

Tears streamed down his face and he cradled the barrel of the shotgun in his arms as though it were the woman he had been begging for, searching for, all his life. “Gimme hate, Lord,” he whimpered. “I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love, Lord. I can’t carry it. Just like Mr. Smith. He couldn’t carry it. It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know. You know all about it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy? Don’t you see, Lord? You own son couldn’t carry it. If it killed Him, what You think it’s gonna do to me? Huh? Huh?” He was getting angry again.

“Come down outta there, nigger!” Macon’s voice was still loud, but it was getting weary.

“And you, you baby-dicked baboon”—he tried to point at Macon–“you the worst. You need killin, you really need killin. You know why? Well, I’m gonna tell you why. I know why. Everybody…”

Porter slumped down in the window, muttering, “Everybody know why,” and fell fast asleep. As he sank deeper into it, the shotgun slipped from his hand, rattled down the roof, and hit the ground with a loud explosion. The shot zipped past a by stander’s shoe and blew a hole in
the tire of a stripped Dodge parked in the road.

“Go get my money,” Macon said.

“Me?” Freddie asked. “Suppose he…”

“Go get me my money.”

Porter was snoring. Through the blast of the gun and the picking of his pocket he slept like a baby.

When Macon walked out of the yard, the sun had disappeared behind the bread company. Tired, irritable; he walked down Fifteenth Street, glancing up as he passed one of his other houses, its silhouette melting in the light that trembled between dusk and twilight. Scattered here and there, his houses stretched up beyond him like squat ghosts with hooded eyes. He didn’t like to look at them in this light. During the day they were reassuring to see; now they did not seem to belong to him at all—in fact he felt as though the houses were in league with one another to make him feel like the outsider, the propertyless, landless wanderer. It was this feeling of loneliness that made him decide to take a shortcut back to Not Doctor Street, even though to do so would lead him past his sister’s house. In the gathering darkness, he was sure his passing would be unnoticed by her. He crossed a yard and followed a fence that led into Darling Street where Pilate lived in a narrow single-story house whose basement seemed to be rising from rather than settling into the ground. She had no electricity because she would not pay for the service. Nor for gas. At night she and her daughter lit the house with candles and kerosene lamps; they warmed themselves and cooked with wood and coal, pumped kitchen water into a dry sink through a pipeline from a well and lived pretty much as though progress was a word that meant walking a little farther on down the road.

Her house sat eighty feet from the sidewalk and was backed by four huge pine trees, from which she got the needles she stuck into her mattress. Seeing the pine trees started him thinking about her mouth; how she loved, as a girl, to chew pine needles and as a result smelled even then like a forest. For a dozen years she had been like his own child. After their mother died, she had come struggling out of the womb without help from throbbing muscles or the pressure of swift womb water. As a result, for all the years he knew her, her stomach was as smooth and sturdy as her back, at no place interrupted by a navel. It was the absence of a navel that convinced people that she had not come into this world through normal channels; had never lain, floated, or grown in some warm and liquid place connected by a tissue-thin tube to a reliable source of human nourishment. Macon knew otherwise, because he was there and had seen the eyes of the midwife as his mother’s legs collapsed. And heard as well her shouts when the baby, who they had believed was dead also, inched its way headfirst out of a still, silent, and indifferent cave of flesh, dragging her own cord and her own afterbirth behind her. But the rest was true. Once the new baby’s lifeline was cut, the cord stump shriveled, fell off, and left no trace of having ever existed, which, as a young boy taking care of his baby sister, he thought no more strange than a bald head. He was seventeen years old, irreparably separated from her and already pressing forward in his drive for wealth, when he learned that there was probably not another stomach like hers on earth.

Now, nearing her yard, he trusted that the dark would keep anyone in her house from seeing him. He did not even look to his left as he walked by it. But then he heard the music. They were singing. All of them. Pilate, Reba, and Reba’s daughter, Hagar. There was no one on the street that he could see; people were at supper, licking their fingers, blowing into saucers of coffee, and no doubt chatterning about Porter’s escapade and Macon’s fearless confrontation of the wild man in the attic. There were no street lights in this part of town; only the moon directed the way of a pedestrian. Macon walked on, resisting as best he could the sound of the voices that followed him. He was rapidly approaching a part of the road where the music could not follow, when he saw, like a scene on the back of a postcard, a picture of where he was headed—his own home; his wife’s narrow unyielding back; his daughters, boiled dry from years of yearning; his son, to whom he could speak only if his words held some command or criticism. “Hello, Daddy.” “Hello, son, tuck your shirt in.” “I found a dead bird, Daddy.” “Don’t bring that mess in this house.” There was no music there, and tonight he wanted just a bit of music—from the person who had been his first caring for.

He turned back and walked slowly toward Pilate’s house. They were singing some melody that Pilate was leading. A phrase that the other two were taking up and building on. Her powerful contralto, Reba’s piercing soprano in counterpoint, and the soft voice of the girl, Hagar, who must be about ten or eleven now, pulled him like a carpet tack under the influence of a magnet.

Surrendering to the sound, Macon moved closer. He wanted no conversation, no witness, only to listen and perhaps to see the three of them, the source of that music that made him think of fields and wild turkey and calico. Treading as lightly as he could, he crept up to the side window where the candlelight flickered lowest, and peeped in. Reba was cutting her toenails with a kitchen knife or a switchblade, her long neck bent almost to her knees. The girl, Hagar, was braiding her hair, while Pilate, whose face he could not see because her back was to the window, was stirring something in a pot. Wine pulp, perhaps. Macon knew it was not food she was stirring, for she and her daughters ate like children. Whatever they had a taste for. No meal was ever planned or balanced or served. Nor was there any gathering at the table. Pilate might bake hot bread and each one of them would eat it with butter whenever she felt like it. Or there might be grapes, left over from the winemaking, or peaches for days on end. If one of them bought a gallon of milk they drank it until it was gone. If another got a half bushel of tomatoes or a dozen ears of corn, they ate them until they were gone too. They ate what they had or came across or had a craving for. Profits from their wine-selling evaporated like sea water in a hot wind—going for junk jewelry for Hagar, Reba’s gifts to men, and he didn’t know what all.

Near the window, hidden by the dark, he felt the irritability of the day drain from him and relished the effortless beauty of the women singing in the candlelight. Reba’s soft profile, Hagar’s hands moving, moving in her heavy hair, and Pilate. He knew her face better than he knew his own. Singing now, her face would be a mask; all emotion and passion would have left her features and entered her voice. But he knew that when she was neither singing nor talking, her face was animated by her constantly moving lips. She chewed things. As a baby, as a very young girl, she kept things in her mouth—straw from brooms, gristle, buttons, seeds, leaves, string, and her favorite, when he could find some for her, rubber bands and India rubber erasers. Her lips were alive with small movements. If you were close to her, you wondered if she was about to smile or was she merely shifting a straw from the baseline of her gums to her tongue. Perhaps she was dislodging a curl of rubber band from inside her cheek, or was she really smiling? From a distance she appeared to be whispering to herself, when she was only nibbling or splitting tiny seeds with her front teeth. Her lips were darker than her skin, wine-stained, blueberry-dyed, so her face had a cosmetic look—as though she had applied a very dark lipstick neatly and blotted away its shine on a scrap of newspaper.

As Macon felt himself softening under the weight of memory and music, the song died down. The air was quiet and yet Macon Dead could not leave. He liked looking at them freely this way. They didn’t move. They simply stopped singing and Reba went on paring her toenails, Hagar threaded and unthreaded her hair, and Pilate swayed like a willow over her stirring.

Chapter 2

Only Magdalene called Lena and First Corinthians were genuinely happy when the big Packard rolled evenly and silently out of the driveway. They alone had a sense of adventure and were flagrant in their enjoyment of the automobile’s plushness. Each had a window to herself and commanded an unobstructed view of the summer day flying past them. And each was both old enough and young enough to actually believe she was a princess riding in a regal chariot driven by a powerful coachman. In the back seat, away from the notice of Macon and Ruth, they slipped off their patent leather pumps, rolled their stockings down over their knees, and watched the men walking down the streets.

These rides that the family took on Sunday afternoons had become rituals and much too important for Macon to enjoy. For him it was a way to satisfy himself that he was indeed a successful man. It was a less ambitious ritual for Ruth, but a way, nevertheless, for her to display her family. For the little boy it was simply a burden. Pressed in the front seat between his parents, he could see only the winged woman careening off the nose of the car. He was not allowed to sit on his mother’s lap during the drive—not because she wouldn’t have it, but because his father objected to it. So it was only by kneeling on the dove gray seat and looking out the back window that he could see anything other than the laps, feet, and hands of his parents, the dashboard, or the silver winged woman poised at the tip of the Packard. But riding backward made him uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going—just where he had been—troubled him. He did not want to see trees that he had passed, or houses and children slipping into the space the automobile had left behind.

Macon Dead’s Packard rolled slowly down Not Doctor Street, through the rough part of town (later known as the Blood Bank because blood flowed so freely there), over the bypass downtown, and headed for the wealthy white neighborhoods. Some of the black people who saw the car passing by sighed with good-humored envy at the classiness, the dignity of it. In 1936 there were very few among them who lived as well as Macon Dead. Others watched the family gliding by with a tiny bit of jealousy and a whole lot of amusement, for Macon’s wide green Pac
kard belied what they thought a car was for. He never went over twenty miles an hour, never gunned his engine, never stayed in first gear for a block or two to give pedestrians a thrill. He never had a blown tire, never ran out of gas and needed twelve grinning raggle-tailed boys to help him push it up a hill or over to a curb. No rope ever held the door to its frame, and no teen-agers leaped on his running board for a lift down the street. He hailed no one and no one hailed him. There was never a sudden braking and backing up to shout or laugh with a friend. No beer bottles or ice cream cones poked from the open windows. Nor did a baby boy stand up to pee out of them. He never let rain fall on it if he could help it and he walked to Sonny’s Shop—taking the car out only on these occasions. What’s more, they doubted that he had ever taken a woman into the back seat, because rumor was that he went to “bad houses” or lay, sometimes, with a slack or lonely female tenant. Other than the bright and roving eyes of Magdalene called Lena and First Corinthians, the Packard had no real lived life at all. So they called it Macon Dead’s hearse.

First Corinthians pulled her fingers through her hair. It was long, lightweight hair, the color of wet sand. “Are you going anyplace special, or are we just driving around?” She kept her eyes on the street, watching the men and women walking by.

“Careful, Macon. You always take the wrong turn here.” Ruth spoke softly from the right side of the car.

“Do you want to drive?” Macon asked her.

“You know I don’t drive,” she answered.

“Then let me do it.”

“All right, but don’t blame me if…”

Macon pulled smoothly into the left fork of the road that led through downtown and into a residential area.

“Daddy? Are we going any special place?”

“Honoré,” Macon said.

Magdalene called Lena pushed her stockings farther down on her legs. “On the lake? What’s out there? There’s nothing out there, nobody.”

“There’s a beach community out there, Lena. Your father wants to look at it.” Ruth reasserted herself into the conversation.

“What for? Those are white people’s houses,” said Lena.

“All of it’s not white people’s houses. Some of it’s nothing. Just land. Way over on the other side. It could be a nice summer place for colored people. Beach houses. You understand what I mean?” Macon glanced at his daughter through the rear-view mirror.

“Who’s going to live in them? There’s no colored people who can afford to have two houses,” Lena said.

“Reverend Coles can, and Dr. Singleton,” Corinthians corrected her.

“And that lawyer—what’s his name?” Ruth looked around at Corinthians, who ignored her.

“And Mary, I suppose.” Lena laughed.

Corinthians stared coldly at her sister. “Daddy wouldn’t sell property to a barmaid. Daddy, would you let us live next to a barmaid?”

“She owns that place, Corinthians,” Ruth said.

“I don’t care what she owns. I care about what she is. Daddy?” Corinthians leaned toward her father for confirmation.

“You’re going too fast, Macon.” Ruth pressed the toe of her shoe against the floorboard.

“If you say one more thing to me about the way I drive, you’re going to walk back home. I mean it.”

Magdalene called Lena sat forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Ruth was quiet. The little boy kicked his feet against the underside of the dashboard.

“Stop that!” Macon told him.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” said his son.

Corinthians held her head. “Oh, Lord.”

“But you went before we left,” said Ruth.

“I have to go!” He was beginning to whine.

“Are you sure?” his mother asked him. He looked at her. “I guess we better stop,” Ruth said to nobody in particular. Her eyes grazed the countryside they were entering.

Macon didn’t alter his speed.

“Are we going to have a summer place, or are you just selling property?”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m thinking of buying and then renting,” Macon answered her.

“But are we—”

“I have to go,” said the little boy.

“—going to live there too?”

“Maybe.”

“By ourselves? Who else?” Corinthians was very interested.

“I can’t tell you that. But in a few years—five or ten—a whole lot of coloreds will have enough to afford it. A whole lot. Take my word for it.”

Magdalene called Lena took a deep breath. “Up ahead you could pull over, Daddy. He might mess up the seat.”

Macon glanced at her in the mirror and slowed down. “Who’s going to take him?” Ruth fiddled with the door handle. “Not you,” Macon said to her.

Ruth looked at her husband. She parted her lips but didn’t say anything.

“Not me,” said Corinthians. “I have on high heels.”

“Come on,” Lena sighed. They left the car, little boy and big sister, and disappeared into the trees that reared up off the shoulder of the road.

“You really think there’ll be enough colored people—I mean nice colored people—in this city to live there?”

“They don’t have to be from this city, Corinthians. People will drive to a summer house. White people do it all the time.” Macon drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, which trembled a little as the car idled.

“Negroes don’t like the water.” Corinthians giggled.

“They’ll like it if they own it,” said Macon. He looked out the window and saw Magdalene called Lena coming out of the trees. A large colorful bouquet of flowers was in her hand, but her face was crumpled in anger. Over her pale-blue dress dark wet stains spread like fingers.

“He wet on me,” she said. “He wet me, Mama.” She was close to tears.

Ruth clucked her tongue.

Corinthians laughed. “I told you Negroes didn’t like water.”

He didn’t mean it. It happened before he was through. She’d stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he’d turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

But if the future did not arrive, the present did extend itself, and the uncomfortable little boy in the Packard went to school and at twelve met the boy who not only could liberate him, but could take him to the woman who had as much to do with his future as she had his past.

Guitar said he knew her. Had even been inside her house.

“What’s it like in there?” Milkman asked him.

“Shiny,” Guitar answered. “Shiny and brown. With a smell.”

“A bad smell?”

“I don’t know. Her smell. You’ll see.”

All those unbelievable but entirely possible stories about his father’s sister—the woman his father had forbidden him to go near—had both of them spellbound. Neither wished to live one more day without finding out the truth, and they believed they were the legitimate and natural ones to do so. After all, Guitar already knew her, and Milkman was her nephew.

They found her on the front steps sitting wide-legged in a long-sleeved, long-skirted black dress. Her hair was wrapped in black too, and from a distance, all they could really see beneath her face was the bright orange she was peeling. She was all angles, he remembered later, knees, mostly, and elbows. One foot pointed east and one pointed west.

As they came closer and saw the brass box dangling from her ear, Milkman knew that what with the earring, the orange, and the angled black cloth, nothing—not the wisdom of his father nor the caution of the world—could keep him from her.

Guitar, being older and already in high school, had none of the reluctance that his young buddy still struggled with, and was the first one to speak.

“Hi.”

The woman looked up. First at Guitar and then at Milkma
n.

“What kind of word is that?” Her voice was light but gravel-sprinkled. Milkman kept on staring at her fingers, manipulating the orange. Guitar grinned and shrugged. “It means hello.”

“Then say what you mean.”

“Okay. Hello.”

“That’s better. What you want?”

“Nothin. We just passin by.”

“Look like you standin by.”

“If you don’t want us here, Miss Pilate, we’ll go.” Guitar spoke softly.

“I ain’t the one with the wants. You the one want something.”

“We wanna ask you something.” Guitar stopped feigning indifference. She was too direct, and to keep up with her he had to pay careful attention to his language.

“Ask it.”

“Somebody said you ain’t got no navel.”

“That the question?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t sound like a question. Sound like an answer. Gimme the question.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you have a navel?”

“No.”

“What happened to it?”

“Beats me.” She dropped a bright peeling into her lap and separated an orange section slowly. “Now do I get to ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“Who’s your little friend?”

“This here’s Milkman.”

“Do he talk?” Pilate swallowed a piece of the fruit.

“Yeah. He talk. Say something.” Guitar shoved an elbow at Milkman without taking his eyes off Pilate.

Milkman took a breath, held it, and said, “Hi.”

Pilate laughed. “You all must be the dumbest unhung Negroes on earth. What they telling you in them schools? You say ‘Hi’ to pigs and sheep when you want ’em to move. When you tell a human being ‘Hi,’ he ought to get up and knock you down.”

Shame had flooded him. He had expected to feel it, but not that kind; to be embarrassed, yes, but not that way. She was the one who was ugly, dirty, poor, and drunk. The queer aunt whom his sixth-grade schoolmates teased him about and whom he hated because he felt personally responsible for her ugliness, her poverty, her dirt, and her wine.

Instead she was making fun of his school, of his teachers, of him. And while she looked as poor as everyone said she was, something was missing from her eyes that should have confirmed it. Nor was she dirty; unkempt, yes, but not dirty. The whites of her fingernails were like ivory. And unless he knew absolutely nothing, this woman was definitely not drunk. Of course she was anything but pretty, yet he knew he could have watched her all day: the fingers pulling thread veins from the orange sections, the berry-black lips that made her look as though she wore make-up, the earring…. And when she stood up, he all but gasped. She was as tall as his father, head and shoulders taller than himself. Her dress wasn’t as long as he had thought; it came to just below her calf and now he could see her unlaced men’s shoes and the silvery-brown skin of her ankles.

She held the peelings precisely as they had fallen in her lap, and as she walked up the steps she looked as though she were holding her crotch.

“Your daddy wouldn’t like that. He don’t like dumb peoples.” Then she looked right at Milkman, one hand holding the peelings, the other on the doorknob. “I know your daddy. I know you too.”

Again Guitar spoke up. “You his daddy’s sister?”

“The only one he got. Ain’t but three Deads alive.”

Milkman, who had been unable to get one word out of his mouth after the foolish “Hi,” heard himself shouting: “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead! My sisters. You and him ain’t the only ones!”

Even while he was screaming he wondered why he was suddenly so defensive—so possessive about his name. He had always hated that name, all of it, and until he and Guitar became friends, he had hated his nickname too. But in Guitar’s mouth it sounded clever, grown up. Now he was behaving with this strange woman as though having the name was a matter of deep personal pride, as though she had tried to expel him from a very special group, in which he not only belonged, but had exclusive rights.

In the heartbeat of silence that followed his shouts, Pilate laughed.

“You all want a soft-boiled egg?” she asked.

The boys looked at each other. She’d changed rhythm on them. They didn’t want an egg, but they did want to be with her, to go inside the wine house of this lady who had one earring, no navel, and looked like a tall black tree.

“No, thanks, but we’d like a drink of water.” Guitar smiled back at her.

“Well. Step right in.” She opened the door and they followed her into a large sunny room that looked both barren and cluttered. A moss-green sack hung from the ceiling. Candles were stuck in bottles everywhere; newspaper articles and magazine pictures were nailed to the walls. But other than a rocking chair, two straight-backed chairs, a large table, a sink and stove, there was no furniture. Pervading everything was the odor of pine and fermenting fruit.

“You ought to try one. I know how to do them just right. I don’t like my whites to move, you know. The yolk I want soft, but not runny. Want it like wet velvet. How come you don’t just try one?”

She had dumped the peelings in a large crock, which like most everything in the house had been made for some other purpose. Now she stood before the dry sink, pumping water into a blue-and-white wash basin which she used for a saucepan.

“Now, the water and the egg have to meet each other on a kind of equal standing. One can’t get the upper hand over the other. So the temperature has to be the same for both. I knock the chill off the water first. Just the chill. I don’t let it get warm because the egg is room temperature, you see. Now then, the real secret is right here in the boiling. When the tiny bubbles come to the surface, when they as big as peas and just before they get big as marbles. Well, right then you take the pot off the fire. You don’t just put the fire out; you take the pot off. Then you put a folded newspaper over the pot and do one small obligation. Like answering the door or emptying the bucket and bringing it in off the front porch. I generally go to the toilet. Not for a long stay, mind you. Just a short one. If you do all that, you got yourself a perfect soft-boiled egg.

“I remember the messes I used to make for my father when I cooked. Your father”—she directed a thumb at Milkman—“he couldn’t cook worth poot. Once I made a cherry pie for him, or tried to. Macon was a nice boy and awful good to me. Be nice if you could have known him then. He would have been a real good friend to you too, like he was to me.”

Her voice made Milkman think of pebbles. Little round pebbles that bumped up against each other. Maybe she was hoarse, or maybe it was the way she said her words, with both a drawl and a clip. The piny-winy smell was narcotic, and so was the sun streaming in, strong and unfettered because there were no curtains or shades at the windows that were all around the room, two in each of three walls, one on each side of the door, one on either side of the sink and the stove, and two on the farther wall. The fourth wall must back on the bedrooms, Milkman thought. The pebbly voice, the sun, and the narcotic wine smell weakened both the boys, and they sat in a pleasant semi-stupor, listening to her go on and on….

“Hadn’t been for your daddy, I wouldn’t be here today. I would have died in the womb. And died again in the woods. Those woods and the dark would have surely killed me. But he saved me and here I am boiling eggs. Our papa was dead, you see. They blew him five feet up into the air. He was sitting on his fence waiting for ‘em, and they snuck up from behind and blew him five feet into the air. So when we left Circe’s big house we didn’t have no place to go, so we just walked around and lived in them woods. Farm country. But Papa came back one day. We didn’t know it was him at first, cause we both saw him blowed five feet into the air. We were lost then. And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

“Now, we lost and there was this wind and in front of us was the back of our daddy. We were some scared children. Macon kept telling me that the things we was scared of wasn’t real. What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? I remember doing laundry for a man and his wife once, down in Virginia. The husband came into the kitchen one afternoon shivering and saying did I have any coffee made. I asked him what was it that had grabbed hold of him, he looked so bad. He said he couldn’t figure it out, but he felt like he was about to fall off a cliff. Standing right there on that yellow and white and red linoleum, as level as a flatiron. He was holding on to the door first, then the chair, trying his best not to fall down. I opened my mouth to tell him wasn’t no cliff in that kitchen. Then I remembered how it was being in those woods. I felt it all over again. So I told the man did he want me to hold on to him so he couldn’t fall. He looked at me with the most grateful look in the world. ‘Would you?’ he said. I walked around back of him and locked my fingers in front of his chest and held on to him. His heart was kicking under his vest like a mule in heat. But little by little it calmed down.”

“You saved his life,” said Guitar.

“No such thing. His wife come in before it was time to let go. She asked me what I was doing and I told her.”

“Told her what? What’d you say?”

“The truth. That I was trying to keep him from falling off a cliff.”

“I bet he wished he had jumped off then. She believe you? Don’t tell me she believed you.”

“Not right away she didn’t. But soon’s I let go he fell dead-weight to the floor. Smashed his glasses and everything. Fell right on his face. And you know what? He went down so slow. I swear it took three minutes, three whole minutes to go from a standing upright position to when he mashed his face on the floor. I don’t know if the cliff was real or not, but it took
him three minutes to fall down it.”

“Was he dead?” asked Guitar.

“Stone dead.”

“Who shot your daddy? Did you say somebody shot him?” Guitar was fascinated, his eyes glittering with lights.

“Five feet into the air…”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who and I don’t know why. I just know what I’m telling you: what, when, and where.”

“You didn’t say where.” He was insistent.

“I did too. Off a fence.”

“Where was the fence?”

“On our farm.”

Guitar laughed, but his eyes were too shiny to convey much humor. “Where was the farm?”

“Montour County.”

He gave up on “where.” “Well, when then?”

“When he sat there—on the fence.”

Guitar felt like a frustrated detective. “What year?”

“The year they shot them Irish people down in the streets. Was a good year for guns and gravediggers, I know that.” Pilate put a barrel lid on the table. Then she lifted the eggs from the wash basin and began to peel them. Her lips moved as she played an orange seed around in her mouth. Only after the eggs were split open, revealing moist reddish-yellow centers, did she return to her story. “One morning we woke up when the sun was nearly a quarter way cross the sky. Bright as anything. And blue. Blue like the ribbons on my mother’s bonnet. See that streak of sky?” She pointed out the window. “Right behind them hickories. See? Right over there.”

They looked and saw the sky stretching back behind the houses and the trees. “That’s the same color,” she said, as if she had discovered something important. “Same color as my mama’s ribbons. I’d know her ribbon color anywhere, but I don’t know her name. After she died Papa wouldn’t let anybody say it. Well, before we could get the sand rubbed out of our eyes and take a good look around, we saw him sitting there on a stump. Right in the sunlight. We started to call him but he looked on off, like he was lookin at us and not lookin at us at the same time. Something in his face scared us. It was like looking at a face under water. Papa got up after a while and moved out of the sun on back into the woods. We just stood there looking at the stump. Shaking like leaves.”

Pilate scraped the eggshells together into a little heap, her fingers fanning out over and over again in a gentle sweeping. The boys watched, afraid to say anything lest they ruin the next part of her story, and afraid to remain silent lest she not go on with its telling.

“Shaking like leaves,” she murmured, “just like leaves.”

Suddenly she lifted her head and made a sound like a hoot owl. “Ooo! Here I come!”

Neither Milkman nor Guitar saw or heard anyone approaching, but Pilate jumped up and ran toward the door. Before she reached it, a foot kicked it open and Milkman saw the bent back of a girl. She was dragging a large five-bushel basket of what looked like brambles, and a woman was pushing the other side of it, saying, “Watch the doorsill, baby.”

“I got it,” the girl answered. “Push.”

“About time,” said Pilate. “The light be gone before you know it.”

“Tommy’s truck broke down,” the girl said, panting. When the two had managed to get the basket into the room, the girl stretched her back and turned around, facing them. But Milkman had no need to see her face; he had already fallen in love with her behind.

“Hagar.” Pilate looked around the room. “This here’s your brother, Milkman. And this is his friend. What’s your name again, pretty?”

“Guitar.”

“Guitar? You play any?” she asked.

“That ain’t her brother, Mama. They cousins.” The older woman spoke.

“Same thing.”

“No it ain’t. Is it, baby?”

“No,” said Hagar. “It’s different.”

“See there. It’s different.”

“Well, what is the difference, Reba? You know so much.”

Reba looked at the ceiling. “A brother is a brother if you both got the same mother or if you both—”

Pilate interrupted her. “I mean what’s the difference in the way you act toward ’em? Don’t you have to act the same way to both?”

“That’s not the point, Mama.”

“Shut up, Reba. I’m talking to Hagar.”

“Yes, Mama. You treat them both the same.”

“Then why they got two words for it ‘stead of one, if they ain’t no difference?” Reba put her hands on her hips and opened her eyes wide.

“Pull that rocker over here,” said Pilate. “You boys have to give up your seats unless you gonna help.”

The women circled the basket, which was full of blackberries still on their short, thorny branches.

“What we have to do?” Guitar asked.

“Get them little berries off them hateful branches without popping’em. Reba, get that other crock.”

Hagar looked around, all eyes and hair. “Why don’t we pull a bed out the back room? Then we can all sit down.”

“Floor’s good enough for me,” said Pilate, and she squatted down on her haunches and lifted a branch gently from the basket. “This all you got?”

“No.” Reba was side-rolling a huge crock. “Two more outside.”

“Better bring them in. Draw too many flies out there.”

Hagar started for the door and motioned to Milkman. “Come on, brother. You can help.”

Milkman jumped up, knocking his chair backward, and trotted after Hagar. She was, it seemed to him, as pretty a girl as he’d ever seen. She was much much older than he was. She must be as old as Guitar, maybe even seventeen. He seemed to be floating. More alive than he’d ever been, and floating. Together he and Hagar dragged two baskets up the porch stairs and into the house. She was as strong and muscular as he was.

“Careful, Guitar. Go slow. You keep on busting ’em.”

“Leave him alone, Reba. He got to get the feel first. I asked you did you play any. That why they call you Guitar?”

“Not cause I do play. Because I wanted to. When I was real little. So they tell me.”

“Where’d you ever see a guitar?”

“It was a contest, in a store down home in Florida. I saw it when my mother took me downtown with her. I was just a baby. It was one of those things where you guess how many beans in the big glass jar and you win a guitar. I cried for it, they said. And always asked about it.”

“You should of called Reba. She’d get it for you.”

“No, you couldn’t buy it. You had to give the number of jellybeans.”

“I heard you. Reba would of known how many. Reba wins things. She ain’t never lost nothing.”

“Really?” Guitar smiled, but he was doubtful. “She lucky?”

“Sure I’m lucky.” Reba grinned. “People come from everywhere to get me to stand in for ’em at drawings and give them numbers to play. It works pretty well for them, and it always works for me. I win everything I try to win and lots of things I don’t even try to win.”

“Got to where won’t nobody sell her a raffle ticket. They just want her to hold theirs.”

“See this?” Reba put her hand down in the top of her dress and pulled out a diamond ring attached to a string. “I won this last year. I was the … what was it, Mama?”

“Five hundred thousandth.”

“Five hundred…no it wasn’t. That ain’t what they said.”

“Half a million is what they said.”

“That’s right. The half a millionth person to walk into Sears and Roebuck.” Her laughter was gay and proud.

“They didn’t want to give it to her,” said Hagar, “cause she looked so bad.”

Guitar was astonished. “I remember that contest, but I don’t remember hearing nothing ’bout no colored person winning it.” Guitar, a habitual street roamer, believed he knew every public thing going on in the city.

“Nobody did. They had picture-taking people and everything waiting for the next p
erson to walk in the door. But they never did put my picture in the paper. Me and Mama looked, too, didn’t we?” She glanced at Pilate for confirmation and went on. “But they put the picture of the man who won second prize in. He won a war bond. He was white.”

“Second prize?” Guitar asked. “What kind of ‘second prize’? Either you the half-millionth person or you ain’t. Can’t be no next-to-the-half-millionth.”

“Can if the winner is Reba,” Hagar said. “The only reason they got a second was cause she was the first. And the only reason they gave it to her was because of them cameras.”

“Tell ’em why you was in Sears, Reba.”

“Looking for a toilet.” Reba threw her head back to let the laughter escape. Her hands were stained with blackberry juice, and when she wiped the tears from her eyes she streaked the purple from her nose to her cheekbone. Much lighter than Pilate or Hagar, Reba had the simple eyes of an infant. All of them had a guileless look about them, but complication and something more lurked behind Pilate’s and Hagar’s faces. Only Reba, with her light pimply skin and deferential manner, looked as though her simplicity might also be vacuousness.

“Ain’t but two toilets downtown they let colored in: Mayflower Restaurant and Sears. Sears was closer. Good thing nature wasn’t in a hurry. They kept me there fifteen minutes gettin my name and address to send the diamond over to me. But I wouldn’t let ’em send it to me. I kept asking them, Is this a real contest? I don’t believe you.”

“It was worth a diamond ring to get you out of there. Drawing a crowd and getting ready to draw flies,” said Hagar.

“What’re you going to do with the ring?” Milkman asked her.

“Wear it. Seldom I win something I like.”

“Everything she win, she give away,” Hagar said.

“To a man,” said Pilate.

“She don’t never keep none of it….”

“That’s what she want to win—a man….”

“Worse’n Santa Claus….”

“Funny kind of luck ain’t no luck at all….”

“He comes just once a year….”

Hagar and Pilate pulled the conversation apart, each yanking out some thread of comment more to herself than to Milkman or Guitar—or even Reba, who had dropped her ring back inside her dress and was smiling sweetly, and deftly separating the royal-purple berries from their twigs.

Milkman was five feet seven then but it was the first time in his life that he remembered being completely happy. He was with his friend, an older boy—wise and kind and fearless. He was sitting comfortably in the notorious wine house; he was surrounded by women who seemed to enjoy him and who laughed out loud. And he was in love. No wonder his father was afraid of them.

“When will this wine be ready?” he asked.

“This batch? Few weeks,” Pilate said.

“You gonna let us have some?” Guitar smiled.

“Sure. You want some now? Plenty wine in the cellar.”

“I don’t want that. I want some of this. Some of the wine I made.”

“You think you made this?” Pilate laughed at him. “You think this all there is to it? Picking a few berries?”

“Oh.” Guitar scratched his head. “I forgot. We got to mash them in our bare feet.”

“Feet? Feet?” Pilate was outraged. “Who makes wine with they feet?”

“Might taste good, Mama,” said Hagar.

“Couldn’t taste no worse,” Reba said.

“Your wine any good, Pilate?” asked Guitar.

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Never tasted it.”

Milkman laughed. “’t even taste?”

“Folks don’t buy it for the taste. Buy it to get drunk.”

Reba nodded. “Used to anyway. Ain’t buying nothing now.”

“Don’t nobody want no cheap home brew. The Depression’s over,” Hagar said. “Everybody got work now. They can afford to buy Four Roses.”

“Plenty still buy,” Pilate told her.

“Where you get the sugar for it?” Guitar asked.

“Black market,” said Reba.

“What ‘plenty’? Tell the truth, Mama. If Reba hadn’t won that hundred pounds of groceries, we’d have starved last winter.”

“Would not.” Pilate put a fresh piece of twig in her mouth.

“We would have.”

“Hagar, don’t contradict your mama,” Reba whispered.

“Who was gonna feed us?” Hagar was insistent. “Mama can go for months without food. Like a lizard.”

“Lizard live that long without food?” asked Reba.

“Girl, ain’t nobody gonna let you starve. You ever had a hungry day?” Pilate asked her granddaughter.

“Course she ain’t,” said her mother.

Hagar tossed a branch to the heap on the floor and rubbed her fingers. The tips were colored a deep red. “Some of my days were hungry ones.”

With the quickness of birds, the heads of Pilate and Reba shot up. They peered at Hagar, then exchanged looks.

“Baby?” Reba’s voice was soft. “You been hungry, baby? Why didn’t you say so?” Reba looked hurt. “We get you anything you want, baby. Anything. You been knowing that.”

Pilate spit her twig into the palm of her hand. Her face went still. Without those moving lips her face was like a mask. It seemed to Milkman that somebody had just clicked off a light. He looked at the faces of the women. Reba’s had crumpled. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Pilate’s face was still as death, but alert as though waiting for some signal. Hagar’s profile was hidden by her hair. She leaned forward, her elbows on her thighs, rubbing fingers that looked bloodstained in the lessening light. Her nails were very very long.

The quiet held. Even Guitar didn’t dare break it.

Then Pilate spoke. “Reba. She don’t mean food.”

Realization swept slowly across Reba’s face, but she didn’t answer. Pilate began to hum as she returned to plucking the berries. After a moment, Reba joined her, and they hummed together in perfect harmony until Pilate took the lead:

O Sugarman don’t leave me here

Cotton balls to choke me

O Sugarman don’t leave me here

Buckra’s arms to yoke me….

When the two women got to the chorus, Hagar raised her head and sang too.

Sugarman done fly away

Sugarman done gone

Sugarman cut across the sky

Sugarman gone home.

Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar’s voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own. When he thought he was going to faint from the weight of what he was feeling, he risked a glance at his friend and saw the setting sun gilding Guitar’s eyes, putting into shadow a slow smile of recognition.

Delicious as the day turned out to be for Milkman, it was even more so because it included secrecy and defiance, both of which dissipated within an hour of his father’s return. Freddie had let Macon Dead know that his son had spent the afternoon “drinking in the wine house.”

“He’s lying! We didn’t drink nothing. Nothing. Guitar didn’t even get the glass of water he asked for.”

“Freddie never lies. He misrepresents, but he never lies.”

“He lied to you.”

“About the wine-drinking? Maybe. But not about you being there, huh?”

“No, sir. Not about that.” Milkman softened his tone a bit, but succeeded in keeping the edge of defiance in his voice.

“Now, what were your instructions from me?”

“You told me to stay away from there. To stay away from Pilate.”

“Right.”

“But you never told me why. They’re our cousins. She’s your own sister.”

“And you’re my own son. And you will do what I tell you to do. With or without explanations. As long as your feet are under my table, you’ll do in this house what you are told.”

At fifty-two, Macon Dead was as imposing a man as he had been at forty-two, when Milkman thought he was the biggest thing in the world. Bigger even than the house they lived in. But today he had seen a woman who was just as tall and who had made him feel tall too.

“I know I’m the youngest one in this family, but I ain’t no baby. You treat me like I was a baby. You keep saying you don’t have to explain nothing to me. How do you think that makes me feel? Like a baby, that’s what. Like a twelve-year-old baby!”

“Don’t you raise your voice to me.”

“Is that the way your father treated you when you were twelve?”

“Watch your mouth!” Macon roared. He took his hands out of his pockets but didn’t know what to do with them. He was momentarily confused. His son’s question had shifted the scenery. He was seeing himself at twelve, standing in Milkman’s shoes and feeling what he himself had felt for his own father. The numbness that had settled on him when he saw the man he loved and admired fall off the fence; something wild ran through him when he watched the body twitching in the dirt. His father had sat for five nights on a split-rail fence cradling a shotgun and in the end died protecting his property. Was that what this boy felt for him? Maybe it was time to tell him things.

“Well, did he?”

“I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him. From the time I was four or five we worked together. Just the two of us. Our mother was dead. Died when Pilate was born. Pilate was just a baby. She stayed over at another farm in the daytime. I carried her over there myself in my arms every morning. Then I’d go back across the fields and meet my father. We’d hitch President Lincoln to the plow and…That’s what we called her: President Lincoln. Papa said Lincoln was a good plow hand before he was President and you shouldn’t take a good plow hand away from his work. He called our farm Lincoln’s Heaven. It was a little bit a place. But it looked big to me then. I know now it must a been a little bit a p

lace, maybe a hundred and fifty acres. We tilled fifty. About eighty of it was woods. Must of been a fortune in oak and pine; maybe that’s what they wanted—the lumber, the oak and the pine. We had a pond that was four acres. And a stream, full of fish. Right down in the heart of a valley. Prettiest mountain you ever saw, Montour Ridge. We lived in Montour County. Just north of the Susquehanna. We had a four-stall hog pen. The big barn was forty feet by a hundred and forty—hip-roofed too. And all around in the mountains was deer and wild turkey. You ain’t tasted nothing till you taste wild turkey the way Papa cooked it. He’d burn it real fast in the fire. Burn it black all over. That sealed it. Sealed the juices in. Then he’d let it roast on a spit for twenty-four hours. When you cut the black burnt part off, the meat underneath was tender, sweet, juicy. And we had fruit trees. Apple, cherry. Pilate tried to make me a cherry pie once.”

Macon paused and let the smile come on. He had not said any of this for years. Had not even reminisced much about it recently. When he was first married he used to talk about Lincoln’s Heaven to Ruth. Sitting on the porch swing in the dark, he would re-create the land that was to have been his. Or when he was just starting out in the business of buying houses, he would lounge around the barbershop and swap stories with the men there. But for years he hadn’t had that kind of time, or interest. But now he was doing it again, with his son, and every detail of that land was clear in his mind: the well, the apple orchard, President Lincoln; her foal, Mary Todd; Ulysses S. Grant, their cow; General Lee, their hog. That was the way he knew what history he remembered. His father couldn’t read, couldn’t write; knew only what he saw and heard tell of. But he had etched in Macon’s mind certain historical figures, and as a boy in school, Macon thought of the personalities of his horse, his hog, when he read about these people. His father may have called their plow horse President Lincoln as a joke, but Macon always thought of Lincoln with fondness since he had loved him first as a strong, steady, gentle, and obedient horse. He even liked General Lee, for one spring they slaughtered him and ate the best pork outside Virginia, “from the butt to the smoked ham to the ribs to the sausage to the jowl to the feet to the tail to the head cheese”—for eight months. And there was cracklin in November.

“General Lee was all right by me,” he told Milkman, smiling. “Finest general I ever knew. Even his balls was tasty. Circe made up the best pot of maws she ever cooked. Huh! I’d forgotten that woman’s name. That was it, Circe. Worked at a big farm some white people owned in Danville, Pennsylvania. Funny how things get away from you. For years you can’t remember nothing. Then just like that, it all comes back to you. Had a dog run, they did. That was the big sport back then. Dog races. White people did love their dogs. Kill a nigger and comb their hair at the same time. But I’ve seen grown white men cry about their dogs.”

His voice sounded different to Milkman. Less hard, and his speech was different. More southern and comfortable and soft. Milkman spoke softly too. “Pilate said somebody shot your father. Five feet into the air.”

“Took him sixteen years to get that farm to where it was paying. It’s all dairy country up there now. Then it wasn’t. Then it was…nice.”

“Who shot him, Daddy?”

Macon focused his eyes on his son. “Papa couldn’t read, couldn’t even sign his name. Had a mark he used. They tricked him. He signed something, I don’t know what, and they told him they owned his property. He never read nothing. I tried to teach him, but he said he couldn’t remember those little marks from one day to the next. Wrote one word in his life—Pilate’s name; copied it out of the Bible. That’s what she got folded up in that earring. He should have let me teach him. Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read. Got his name messed up cause he couldn’t read.”

“His name? How?”

“When freedom came. All the colored people in the state had to register with the Freedmen’s Bureau.”

“Your father was a slave?”

“What kind of foolish question is that? Course he was. Who hadn’t been in 1869? They all had to register. Free and not free. Free and used-to-be-slaves. Papa was in his teens and went to sign up, but the man behind the desk was drunk. He asked Papa where he was born. Papa said Macon. Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said, ‘He’s dead.’ Asked him who owned him, Papa said, ‘I’m free.’ Well, the Yankee wrote it all down, but in the wrong spaces. Had him born in Dunfrie, wherever the hell that is, and in the space for his name the fool wrote, ‘Dead’ comma ‘Macon.’ But Papa couldn’t read so he never found out what he was registered as till Mama told him. They met on a wagon going North. Started talking about one thing and another, told her about being a freedman and showed off his papers to her. When she looked at his paper she read him out what it said.”

“He didn’t have to keep the name, did he? He could have used his real name, couldn’t he?”

“Mama liked it. Liked the name. Said it was new and would wipe out the past. Wipe it all out.”

“What was his real name?”

“I don’t remember my mother too well. She died when I was four. Light-skinned, pretty. Looked like a white woman to me. Me and Pilate don’t take nothing after her. If you ever have a doubt we from Africa, look at Pilate. She look just like Papa and he looked like all them pictures you ever see of Africans. A Pennsylvania African. Acted like one too. Close his face up like a door.”

“I saw Pilate’s face like that.” Milkman felt close and confidential now that his father had talked to him in a relaxed and intimate way.

“I haven’t changed my mind, Macon. I don’t want you over there.”

“Why? You still haven’t said why.”

“Just listen to what I say. That woman’s no good. She’s a snake, and can charm you like a snake, but still a snake.”

“You talking about your own sister, the one you carried in your arms to the fields every morning.”

“That was a long time ago. You seen her. What she look like to you? Somebody nice? Somebody normal?”

“Well, she…”

“Or somebody cut your throat?”

“She didn’t look like that, Daddy.”

“Well she is like that.”

“What’d she do?”

“It ain’t what she did; it’s what she is.”

“What is she?”

“A snake, I told you. Ever hear the story about the snake? The man who saw a little baby snake on the ground? Well, the man saw this baby snake bleeding and hurt. Lying there in the dirt. And the man felt sorry for it and picked it up and put it in his basket and took it home. And he fed it and took care of it till it was big and strong. Fed it the same thing he ate. Then one day, the snake turned on him and bit him. Stuck his poison tongue right in the man’s heart. And while he was laying there dying, he turned to the snake and asked him, ‘What’d you do that for?’ He said, ‘Didn’t I take good care of you? Didn’t I save your life?’ The snake said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Then what’d you do it for? What’d you kill me for?’ Know what the snake said? Said, ‘But you knew I was a snake, didn’t you?’ Now, I mean for you to stay out of that wine house and as far away from Pilate as you can.”

Milkman lowered his head. His father had explained nothing to him.

“Boy, you got better things to do with your time. Besides, it’s time you started learning how to work. You start Monday. After school come to my office; work a couple of hours there and learn what’s real. Pilate can’t teach you a thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one. Let me tell you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too. Starting Monday, I’m going to teach you how.”

Chapter 3

Life improved for Milkman enormously after he began working for Macon. Contrary to what his father hoped, there was more time to visit the wine house. Running errands for Macon’s rent houses gave him
leave to be in Southside and get to know the people Guitar knew so well. Milkman was young and he was friendly—just the opposite of his father—and the tenants felt at ease enough with him to tease him, feed him, confide in him. But it was hard to see much of Guitar. Saturdays were the only days he was certain to find him. If Milkman got up early enough on Saturday morning, he could catch his friend before Guitar went roaming the streets and before he himself had to help Macon collect rents. But there were days in the week when they agreed to skip school and hang out, and on one of those days Guitar took him to Feather’s pool hall on Tenth Street, right in the middle of the Blood Bank area.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning when Guitar pushed open the door and shouted, “Hey, Feather! Give us a couple of Red Caps.”

Feather, a short squat man with sparse but curly hair, looked up at Guitar, then at Milkman, and frowned.

“Get him out of here.”

Guitar stopped short and followed the little man’s gaze to Milkman’s face and back again. The half-dozen men there playing pool turned around at the sound of Feather’s voice. Three of them were air force pilots, part of the 332nd Fighter Group. Their beautiful hats and gorgeous leather jackets were carefully arranged on chairs. Their hair was cut close to the skull; their shirt cuffs were turned neatly back on their forearms; their white scarves hung in snowy rectangles from their hip pockets. Silver chains glistened at their necks and they looked faintly amused as they worked chalk into the tips of their cues.

Guitar’s face shone with embarrassment. “He’s with me,” he said.

“I said get him outta here.”

“Come on, Feather, he’s my friend.”

“He’s Macon Dead’s boy, ain’t he?”

“So what”

“So get him outta here.”

“He can’t help who his daddy is.” Guitar had his voice under control.

“Neither can I. Out.”

“What his daddy do to you?”

“Nothing yet. That’s why I want him outta here.”

“He ain’t like his daddy.”

“He ain’t got to be like him—from him is enough.”

“I’ll be responsible for—”

“Stop messing with me, Guitar. Get him out. He ain’t old enough to have wet dreams.”

The pilots laughed and a man in a gray straw hat with a white band said, “Aw, let the boy stay, Feather.”

“You shut your mouth. I’m running this.”

“What harm can he do? A twelve-year-old kid.” He smiled at Milkman, who stopped himself from saying, No, thirteen.

“But it ain’t your problem, is it?” asked Feather. “His daddy ain’t your landlord, is he, and you ain’t got no operating license to hang on to either. You ain’t got nothing….”

Feather turned on the man with the white hatband the same acid manner he’d used with the boys. Guitar took the opportunity offered by Feather’s new target to shoot his hand out like a double-edged hatchet slamming into a tree, and shout, “Later for you, man. Come on. Let’s shake this place.” His voice now was loud and deep—loud enough and deep enough for two. Milkman slid his hands into his back pockets and followed his friend to the door. He stretched his neck a little to match the chilly height he hoped the soldiers had seen in his eyes.

Silently they ambled down Tenth Street until they reached a stone bench that jutted from the sidewalk near the curb. They stopped there and sat down, their backs to the eyes of two men in white smocks who were watching them. One of the men leaned in the doorway of a barbershop. The other sat in a chair tilted back to the plate-glass window of the shop. They were the owners of the barbershop, Railroad Tommy and Hospital Tommy. Neither boy spoke, not to the men nor to each other. They sat and watched the traffic go by.

“Have all the halls of academe crumbled, Guitar?” Hospital Tommy spoke from his chair. His eyes were milky, like those of very old people, but the rest of him was firm, lithe, and young-looking. His tone was casual but suggested authority nonetheless.

“No, sir.” Guitar answered him over his shoulder.

“Then what, pray, are you doing out here in the streets at this time of day?”

Guitar shrugged. “We just took a day off, Mr. Tommy.”

“And your companion? Is he on sabbatical too?”

Guitar nodded. Hospital Tommy talked like an encyclopedia and Guitar had to guess at most of his words. Milkman kept looking at the cars going by.

“Neither one of you appears to be having much fun on your holiday. You could have stayed in the halls of academe and looked evil.”

Guitar fished for a cigarette and offered one to Milkman. “Feather made me mad is all.”

“Feather?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t let us in. I go in there all the time. All the time and he don’t say nothing. But today he throws us out. Said my friend here is too young. Can you beat that? Feather? Worrying about somebody’s age?”

“I didn’t know Feather had so much as a brain cell to worry with.”

“He don’t. Just showing off is all. He wouldn’t even let me have a bottle of beer.”

Railroad Tommy laughed softly from the doorway. “Is that all? He wouldn’t let you have a beer?” He rubbed the back of his neck and then crooked a finger at Guitar. “Come over here, boy, and let me tell you about some other stuff you are not going to have. Come on over here.”

Reluctantly they stood up and sidled closer to the laughing man.

“You think that’s something? Not having a beer? Well, let me ask you something. You ever stood stock still in the galley of the Baltimore and Ohio dining car in the middle of the night when the kitchen closed down and everything’s neat and ready for the next day? And the engine’s highballing down the track and three of your buddies is waiting for you with a brand-new deck of cards?”

Guitar shook his head. “No, I never…”

“That’s right, you never. And you never going to. That’s one more thrill you not going to have, let alone a bottle of beer.”

Guitar smiled. “Mr. Tommy,” he began, but Tommy cut him off.

“You ever pull fourteen days straight and come home to a sweet woman, clean sheets, and a fifth of Wild Turkey? Eh?” He looked at Milkman. “Did you?”

Milkman smiled and said, “No, sir.”

“No? Well, don’t look forward to it, cause you not going to have that either.”

Hospital Tommy drew a pinfeather toothpick from under his smock. “Don’t tease the boy, Tommy.”

“Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ’em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ’em to. No. And you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and every day. That’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ‘29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.”

A few men passing by stopped to listen to Tommy’s lecture. “What’s going on?” they asked Hospital Tommy.

“Feather refused them a beer,” he said. The men laughed.

“And no baked Alaska!” Railroad Tommy went on. “None! You never going to have that.”

“No baked Alaska?” Guitar opened his eyes wide with horror and grabbed his throat. “You breaking my heart!”

“Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.”

“Mr. Tommy, suh,” Guitar sang in mock humility, “we just wanted a bottle of beer is all.”

“Yeah,” said Tommy. “Yeah, well, welcome aboard.”

“What’s a baked Alaska?” They left the Tommys just as they had found them and continued down Tenth Street.

“Something sweet,” answered Guitar. “A dessert.”

“Taste good?”

“I don’t know. I can’t eat sweets.”

“You can’t?” Milkman was amazed. “Why not?”

“Makes me sick.”

“You don’t like nothing sweet?”

“Fruit, but nothing with sugar. Candy, cake, stuff like that. I don’t even like to smell it. Makes me want to throw up.”

Milkman searched for a physical cause. He wasn’t sure he trusted anybody who didn’t like sweets. “You must have sugar diabetes.”

“You don’t get sugar diabetes from not eating sugar. You get it from eating too much sugar.”

“Then what is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It makes me think of dead people. And white people. And I start to puke.”

“Dead people?”

“Yeah. And white people.”

“I don’t get it.”

Guitar said nothing, so Milkman continued, “How long you been like that?”

“Since I was little. Since my father got sliced up in a sawmill and his boss came by and gave us k
ids some candy. Divinity. A big sack of divinity. His wife made it special for us. It’s sweet, divinity is. Sweeter than syrup. Real sweet. Sweeter than…” He stopped walking and wiped from his forehead the beads of sweat that were collecting there. His eyes paled and wavered. He spit on the sidewalk. “Ho—hold it,” he whispered, and stepped into a space between a fried-fish restaurant and Lilly’s Beauty Parlor.

Milkman waited on the sidewalk, staring at the curtained window of the beauty shop. Beauty shops always had curtains or shades up. Barbershops didn’t. The women didn’t want anybody on the street to be able to see them getting their hair done. They were ashamed.

When Guitar emerged, his eyes were teary from the effort of dry heaving. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get us some weed. That’s one thing I can have.”

By the time Milkman was fourteen he had noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other. When he stood barefoot and straight as a pole, his left foot was about half an inch off the floor. So he never stood straight; he slouched or leaned or stood with a hip thrown out, and he never told anybody about it—ever. When Lena said, “Mama, what is he walking like that for?” he said, “I’ll walk any way I want to, including over your ugly face.” Ruth said, “Be quiet, you two. It’s just growing pains, Lena.” Milkman knew better. It wasn’t a limp—not at all—just the suggestion of one, but it looked like an affected walk, the strut of a very young man trying to appear more sophisticated than he was. It bothered him and he acquired movements and habits to disguise what to him was a burning defect. He sat with his left ankle on his right knee, never the other way around. And he danced each new dance with a curious stiff-legged step that the girls loved and other boys eventually copied. The deformity was mostly in his mind. Mostly, but not completely, for he did have shooting pains in that leg after several hours on a basketball court. He favored it, believed it was polio, and felt secretly connected to the late President Roosevelt for that reason. Even when everybody was raving about Truman because he had set up a Committee on Civil Rights, Milkman secretly preferred FDR and felt very very close to him. Closer, in fact, to him than to his own father, for Macon had no imperfection and age seemed to strengthen him. Milkman feared his father, respected him, but knew, because of the leg, that he could never emulate him. So he differed from him as much as he dared. Macon was clean-shaven; Milkman was desperate for a mustache. Macon wore bow ties; Milkman wore four-in-hands. Macon didn’t part his hair; Milkman had a part shaved into his. Macon hated tobacco; Milkman tried to put a cigarette in his mouth every fifteen minutes. Macon hoarded his money; Milkman gave his away. But he couldn’t help sharing with Macon his love of good shoes and fine thin socks. And he did try, as his father’s employee, to do the work the way Macon wanted it done.

Macon was delighted. His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth, and he was relieved at not having to walk all over town like a peddler collecting rents. It made his business more dignified, and he had time to think, to plan, to visit the bank men, to read the public notices, auctions, to find out what plots were going for taxes, unclaimed heirs’ property, where roads were being built, what supermarkets, schools; and who was trying to sell what to the government for the housing projects that were going to be built. The quickie townlets that were springing up around war plants. He knew as a Negro he wasn’t going to get a big slice of the pie. But there were properties nobody wanted yet, or little edges of property somebody didn’t want Jews to have, or Catholics to have, or properties nobody knew were of any value yet. There was quite a bit of pie filling oozing around the edge of the crust in 1945. Filling that could be his. Everything had improved for Macon Dead during the war. Except Ruth. And years later when the war was over and that pie filling had spilled over into his very lap, had stickied his hands and weighed his stomach down into a sagging paunch, he still wished he had strangled her back in 1921. She hadn’t stopped spending occasional nights out of the house, but she was fifty years old now and what lover could she have kept so long? What lover could there be that even Freddie didn’t know about? Macon decided it was of no importance, and less often did he get angry enough to slap her. Particularly after the final time, which became final because his son jumped up and knocked him back into the radiator.

Milkman was twenty-two then and since he had been fucking for six years, some of them with the same woman, he’d begun to see his mother in a new light. She was no longer the person who worried him about galoshes and colds and food, who stood in the way of most of the little pleasures he could take at home because they all involved some form of dirt, noise, or disarray. Now he saw her as a frail woman content to do tiny things; to grow and cultivate small life that would not hurt her if it died: rhododendron, goldfish, dahlias, geraniums, imperial tulips. Because these little lives did die. The goldfish floated to the top of the water and when she tapped the side of the bowl with her fingernail they did not flash away in a lightning arc of terror. The rhododendron leaves grew wide and green and when their color was at its deepest and waxiest, they suddenly surrendered it and lapsed into limp yellow hearts. In a way she was jealous of death. Inside all that grief she felt when the doctor died, there had been a bit of pique too, as though he had chosen a more interesting subject than life—a more provocative companion than she was—and had deliberately followed death when it beckoned. She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity. Regardless of what Macon had done, she’d always suspected that the doctor didn’t have to die if he hadn’t wanted to. And it may have been that suspicion of personal failure and rejection (plus a smidgen of revenge against Macon) that made her lead her husband down paths from which there was no exit save violence. Lena thought Macon’s rages unaccountable. But Corinthians began to see a plan. To see how her mother had learned to bring her husband to a point, not of power (a nine-year-old girl could slap Ruth and get away with it), but of helplessness. She would begin by describing some incident in which she was a sort of honest buffoon. It began as a piece of pleasant dinner conversation, harmless on the surface because no one at the table was required to share her embarrassment; but all were able to admire her honesty and to laugh at her ignorance.

She had gone to the wedding of Mrs. Djvorak’s granddaughter. Anna Djvorak was an old Hungarian woman who had been one of her father’s patients. He’d had many working-class white patients and some middle-class white women who thought he was handsome. Anna Djvorak was convinced that the doctor had miraculously saved her son’s life by not sending him to the tuberculosis sanatorium back in 1903. Almost everybody who did go to the “san,” as they called it, died in it. Anna didn’t know that the doctor had no practicing privileges there, just as he had none at Mercy. Nor did she know that the cure for tuberculosis in 1903 was precisely the one most detrimental to the patients. All she knew was that the doctor had prescribed a certain diet, hours of rest to be rigidly adhered to, and cod-liver oil twice a day. The boy survived. It was natural that she would want the miracle doctor’s daughter at the wedding of this son’s youngest daughter. Ruth went and when the congregation went to the altar to receive the host, she went also. Kneeling there with her head bowed, she was not aware that the priest was left with the choice of placing the wafer on her hat or skipping her. He knew immediately that she was not Catholic since she did not raise her head at his words and push out her tongue for the wafer to be carefully placed there.

“Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi,” said the priest, and then, to her, a sharp whisper: “Ssss. Raise your head!” She looked up, saw the wafer and the acolyte holding a little silver tray under it. “Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam…” The priest held the host toward her and she opened her mouth.

Later, at the reception, the priest asked her point-blank whether she was Catholic.

“No. I’m Methodist,” she said.

“I see,” he said. “Well, the sacraments of the Church are reserved for—” Just the
n old Mrs. Djvorak interrupted him.

“Father,” she said, “I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter. Her father saved Ricky’s life. Ricky wouldn’t be here today if…”

Father Padrew smiled and shook Ruth’s hand. “Very pleased to meet you, Miss Foster.”

It was a simple occurrence, elaborately told. Lena listened and experienced each phrase of her mother’s emotion from religious ecstasy to innocent confidence to embarrassment. Corinthians listened analytically, expectantly—wondering how her mother would develop this anecdote into a situation in which Macon would either lash out at her verbally or hit her. Milkman was only half listening.

“‘Are you Catholic?’ he asked me. Well, I was embarrassed for a minute, but then I said, ‘No. I’m Methodist.’ And he started to tell me that only Catholics could take communion in a Catholic church. Well, I never heard of that. Anybody can take communion, I thought. At our church anybody can come up on the first Sunday. Well, before he could get it out, Anna came up and said, ‘Father, I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter.’ Well, the priest was all smiles then. And shook my hand and said he was very pleased and honored to make my acquaintance. So it all turned out all right. But honestly, I didn’t know. I went up there as innocent as a lamb.”

“You didn’t know that only Catholics take communion in a Catholic church?” Macon Dead asked her, his tone making it clear that he didn’t believe her.

“No, Macon. How would I know?”

“You see them put up their own school, keep their kids out of public schools, and you still think their religious stuff is open to anybody who wants to drop in?”

“Communion is communion.”

“You’re a silly woman.”

“Father Padrew didn’t think so.”

“You made a fool of yourself.”

“Mrs. Djvorak didn’t think so.”

“She was just trying to keep the wedding going, keep you from fucking it up.”

“Macon, please don’t use that language in front of the children.”

“What goddam children? Everybody in here is old enough to vote.”

“There is no call for an argument.”

“You make a fool of yourself in a Catholic church, embarrass everybody at the reception, and come to the table to gloat about how wonderful you were?”

“Macon…”

“And sit there lying, saying you didn’t know any better?”

“Anna Djvorak wasn’t the least bit—”

“Anna Djvorak don’t even know your name! She called you Dr. Foster’s daughter! I bet you one hundred dollars she still don’t know your name! You by yourself ain’t nobody. You your daddy’s daughter!”

“That’s so,” said Ruth in a thin but steady voice. “I certainly am my daddy’s daughter.” She smiled.

Macon didn’t wait to put his fork down. He dropped it on the table while his hand was on its way across the bread plate becoming the fist he smashed into her jaw.

Milkman hadn’t planned any of it, but he had to know that one day, after Macon hit her, he’d see his mother’s hand cover her lips as she searched with her tongue for any broken teeth, and discovering none, tried to adjust the partial plate in her mouth without anyone noticing—and that on that day he would not be able to stand it. Before his father could draw his hand back, Milkman had yanked him by the back of his coat collar, up out of his chair, and knocked him into the radiator. The window shade flapped and rolled itself up.

“You touch her again, one more time, and I’ll kill you.”

Macon was so shocked at being assaulted he could not speak. He had come to believe, after years of creating respect and fear wherever he put his foot down, after years of being the tallest man in every gathering, that he was impregnable. Now he crept along the wall looking at a man who was as tall as he was—and forty years younger.

Just as the father brimmed with contradictory feelings as he crept along the wall—humiliation, anger, and a grudging feeling of pride in his son—so the son felt his own contradictions. There was the pain and shame of seeing his father crumple before any man—even himself. Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.

He also felt glee. A snorting, horse-galloping glee as old as desire. He had won something and lost something in the same instant. Infinite possibilities and enormous responsibilities stretched out before him, but he was not prepared to take advantage of the former, or accept the burden of the latter. So he cock-walked around the table and asked his mother, “Are you all right?”

She was looking at her fingernails. “Yes, I’m fine.”

Milkman looked at his sisters. He had never been able to really distinguish them (or their roles) from his mother. They were in their early teens when he was born; they were thirty-five and thirty-six now. But since Ruth was only sixteen years older than Lena, all three had always looked the same age to him. Now when he met his sisters’ eyes over the table, they returned him a look of hatred so fresh, so new, it startled him. Their pale eyes no longer appeared to blur into their even paler skin. It seemed to him as though charcoal lines had been drawn around their eyes; that two drag lines had been smudged down their cheeks, and their rosy lips were swollen in hatred so full it was about to burst through. Milkman had to blink twice before their faces returned to the vaguely alarmed blandness he was accustomed to. Quickly he left the room, realizing there was no one to thank him—or abuse him. His action was his alone. It would change nothing between his parents. It would change nothing inside them. He had knocked his father down and perhaps there were some new positions on the chessboard, but the game would go on.

Sleeping with Hagar had made him generous. Or so he thought. Wide-spirited. Or so he imagined. Wide-spirited and generous enough to defend his mother, whom he almost never thought about, and to deck his father, whom he both feared and loved.

Back in his bedroom, Milkman fiddled with things on his dresser. There was a pair of silver-backed brushes his mother had given him when he was sixteen, engraved with his initials, the abbreviated degree designation of a doctor. He and his mother had joked about it and she hinted strongly that he ought to consider going to medical school. He’d foisted her off with “How would that look? M.D., M.D. If you were sick, would you go see a man called Dr. Dead?”

She laughed but reminded him that his middle name was Foster. Couldn’t he use Foster as a last name? Dr. Macon Foster. Didn’t that sound fine? He had to admit that it did. The silver-backed brushes were a constant reminder of what her wishes for him were—that he not stop his education at high school, but go on to college and medical school. She had as little respect for her husband’s work as Macon had for college graduates. To Milkman’s father, college was time spent in idleness, far away from the business of life, which was learning to own things. He was eager for his daughters to go to college—where they could have found suitable husbands—and one, Corinthians, did go. But it was pointless for Milkman, particularly since his son’s presence was a real help to him in the office. So much so that he had been able to get his bank friends to speak to some of their friends and get his son moved out of I-A draft classification and into a “necessary to support family” status.

Milkman stood before his mirror and glanced, in the low light of the wall lamp, at his reflection. He was, as usual, unimpressed with what he saw. He had a fine enough face. Eyes women complimented him on, a firm jaw line, splendid teeth. Taken apart, it looked all right. Even better than all right. But it lacked coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self. It was all very tentative, the way he looked, like a man peeping around a corner of someplace he is not supposed to be, trying to make up his mind whether to go forward or to turn back. The decision he made would be extremely important, but the way in which he made the decision would be careless, haphazard, and uninformed.

Standing there in the lamplight, trying not to think of how his father had looked creeping along the wall, he heard a knock at his door. He didn’t want to see the face of Lena or Corinthians, nor to have any secret talk with his mother. But he was not any happier to see his father looming there in the hall. A line of blood was still visible in the thin cut at the corner of Macon’s mouth. But he stood straight, and his eyes were steady.

“Look, Daddy,” Milkman began, “I—”

“Don’t say anything,” Macon said, pushing past him. “Sit down.”

Milkman moved toward the bed. “Look here, let’s try to forget this. If you promise—”

“I told you to sit down. And down is what I mean.” Macon’s voice was low, but his face looked like Pilate’s. He closed the door. “You a big man now, but big ain’t nearly enough. You have to be a whole man. And if you want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth.”

“You don’t have to do any of this, you know. I don’t need to know everything between you and Mama.”

“I do have to do it and you do need to know it. If you’re in the business of raising your fist at your father, you better have some intelligence behind that fist the next time you throw it. Nothing I’m about to say is by way of apology or excuse. It’s just information.

“I married your mother in 1917. She was sixteen, living alone with her father. I can’t tell you I was in love with her. People didn’t require that as much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and—and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive. The important thing, when you took a wife, was that the two of you agreed on what was important.

“Your mother’s father never liked me and I have to say I was very disappointed in him. He was just about the biggest
Negro in this city. Not the richest, but the most respected. But a bigger hypocrite never lived. Kept all his money in four different banks. Always calm and dignified. I thought he was naturally that way until I found out he sniffed ether. Negroes in this town worshipped him. He didn’t give a damn about them, though. Called them cannibals. He delivered both your sisters himself and each time all he was interested in was the color of their skin. He would have disowned you. I didn’t like the notion of his being his own daughter’s doctor, especially since she was also my wife. Mercy wouldn’t take colored then. Anyway, Ruth wouldn’t go to any other doctor. I tried to get a midwife for her, but the doctor said midwives were dirty. I told him a midwife delivered me, and if a midwife was good enough for my mother, a midwife was good enough for his daughter. Well, we had some words between us about it, and I ended up telling him that nothing could be nastier than a father delivering his own daughter’s baby. That stamped it. We had very little to say after that, but they did it anyway. Both Lena and Corinthians. They let me do the naming by picking a word blind, but that was all. Your sisters are just a little over a year apart, you know. And both times he was there. She had her legs wide open and he was there. I know he was a doctor and doctors not supposed to be bothered by things like that, but he was a man before he was a doctor. I knew then they’d ganged up on me forever—the both of them—and no matter what I did, they managed to have things their way. They made sure I remembered whose house I was in, where the china came from, how he sent to England for the Waterford bowl, and again for the table they put it on. That table was so big they had to take it apart to get it in the door. He was always bragging about how he was the second man in the city to have a two-horse carriage.

“Where I’d come from, the farm we had, that was nothing to them. And what I was trying to do—they didn’t have any interest in that. Buying shacks in shacktown, they called it. ‘How’s shacktown?’ That’s the way he’d greet me in the evenings.

“But it wasn’t that. I could put up with that, because I knew what I wanted, and pretty much how to get it. So I could put up with that. Did put up with it. It was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I tried to get him to spend some of that money out of those four banks once. Some track land was going for a lot of money—railroad money. Erie Lackawanna was buying. I had a good hunch where the track would be laid. I walked all around over there, the Shore Road, the docks, the fork in routes 6 and 2. I figured out just where the tracks would have to go. And found land I could have got cheap and sold back to the railroad agents. He wouldn’t lend me a dime. If he had, he would have died a rich man, instead of a fair-to-middling one. And I would have been way ahead. I asked your mother to talk him into it. I told her exactly where the Erie was headed. She said it had to be his decision; she couldn’t influence him. She told me, her husband, that. Then I began to wonder who she was married to—me or him.

“Well, he took sick.” Macon stopped, as though the mention of illness reminded him of his own frailty, and pulled a large white handkerchief out of his pocket. Gingerly he pressed it against the thin cut on his lip. He looked at the faint stain it made on his handkerchief. “All that ether,” he said, “must have got in his blood. They had another name for it, but I know it was that ether. He just lay down and started swelling up. His body did; his legs and arms just wasted away. He couldn’t see patients anymore, and for the first time in his life the pompous donkey found out what it was like to have to be sick and pay another donkey to make you well. One of them doctors, the one that was taking care of him—one of the same ones wouldn’t let him set foot in their hospital, and who, if he had delivered their daughter’s or wife’s baby, had even thought of it, would have run him out of here on a rail—one of them, the ones he thought worth his attention, well, he came in here with some magic potion, Radiathor, and told him it would cure him. Ruth was all excited. And for a few days he was better. Then he got sicker. Couldn’t move, holes were forming in his scalp. And he just lay there in that bed where your mother still sleeps and then he died there. Helpless, fat stomach, skinny arms and legs, looking like a white rat. He couldn’t digest his food, you know. Had to drink all his meals and swallow something after every meal. I believe to this day that was ether too.

“The night he died, I’d been over on the other side of town, fixing a porch that fell down. Mr. Bradlee’s house. Porch had been leaning for twenty years, and then just fell down, split clean away from the foundation. I got some men to help me and went over there to get it back up so the people wouldn’t have to jump to get out the house and climb up three feet to get in it. Somebody tiptoed up to me and said, ‘Doctor died.’ Ruth, they said, was upstairs with him. I figured she was upset and went up right away to comfort her. I didn’t have time to change clothes from working on the porch, but I went up anyway. She was sitting in a chair next to his bed, and the minute she saw me she jumped up and screamed at me, ‘You dare come in here like that? Clean yourself! Clean up before you come in here!’ It vexed me some, but I do respect the dead. I went and washed up. Took a bath, put on a clean shirt and collar, and went back in.” Macon paused again and touched his cut lip as though that were where the pain that showed in his eyes was coming from.

“In the bed,” he said, and stopped for so long Milkman was not sure he was going to continue. “In the bed. That’s where she was when I opened the door. Laying next to him. Naked as a yard dog, kissing him. Him dead and white and puffy and skinny, and she had his fingers in her mouth.

“Now, I want you to know I had a terrible time after that. I started thinking all sorts of things. If Lena and Corinthians were my children. I come to know pretty quick they were, cause it was clear that bastard couldn’t fuck nothing. Ether took care of whatever he had in that area long before I got there. And he wouldn’t have been so worried about what color skin they had unless they were coming from me. Then I thought about his delivering Ruth’s babies. I’m not saying that they had contact. But there’s lots of things a man can do to please a woman, even if he can’t fuck. Whether or not, the fact is she was in that bed sucking his fingers, and if she do that when he was dead, what’d she do when he was alive? Nothing to do but kill a woman like that. I swear, many’s the day I regret she talked me out of killing her. But I wasn’t looking forward to spending the rest of my days on some rock pile. But you see, Macon, sometimes I can’t catch hold of myself quick enough. It just gets out. Tonight, when she said, ‘Yes, I am my daddy’s daughter,’ and gave that little smirk…” Macon looked up at his son. The door of his face had opened; his skin looked iridescent. With only a minor break in his voice, he told him, “I am not a bad man. I want you to know that. Or believe it. No man ever took his responsibilities more seriously than I have. I’m not making claims to sainthood, but you have to know it all. I’m forty years older than you and I don’t have another forty in me. Next time you take it into your head to jump me, I want you to think about the man you think you whipping. And think about the fact that next time I might not let you. Old as I am, I might not let you.”

He stood up and pushed his handkerchief into his back pocket.

“Don’t say anything now. But think about everything I’ve said.”

Macon turned the doorknob, and without a backward glance, left the room.

Milkman sat on the edge of his bed; everything was still except for the light buzzing in his head. He felt curiously disassociated from all that he had heard. As though a stranger that he’d sat down next to on a park bench had turned to him and begun to relate some intimacy. He was entirely sympathetic to the stranger’s problems—understood perfectly his view of what had happened to him—but part of his sympathy came from the fact that he himself was not involved or in any way threatened by the stranger’s story. It was quite the opposite from the feeling he’d had an hour or less ago. The alien who had just walked out of his room was also the man he felt passionately enough about to strike with all the fervor he could summon up. Even now he could fe
el the tingle in his shoulder that had signaled the uncontrollable urge to smash his father’s face. On the way upstairs to his room he had felt isolated, but righteous. He was a man who saw another man hit a helpless person. And he had interfered. Wasn’t that the history of the world? Isn’t that what men did? Protected the frail and confronted the King of the Mountain? And the fact that the frail was his mother and the King of the Mountain his father made it more poignant, but did not change the essential facts. No. He would not pretend that it was love for his mother. She was too insubstantial, too shadowy for love. But it was her vaporishness that made her more needful of defense. She was not a maternal drudge, her mind pressed flat, her shoulders hunched under the burden of housework and care of others, brutalized by a bear of a man. Nor was she the acid-tongued shrew who defended herself with a vicious vocabulary and a fast lip. Ruth was a pale but complicated woman given to deviousness and ultra-fine manners. She seemed to know a lot and understand very little. It was an interesting train of thought, and new for him. Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a apart from allowing or interfering with his own.

Milkman put on his jacket and left the house. It was seven-thirty in the evening and not yet dark. He wanted to walk and breathe some other air. He wouldn’t know what to feel until he knew what to think. And it was difficult thinking in that room where the silver-backed brushes with the M.D. initials shone in the light and where the chair his father had just sat in still held the imprint of his buttocks in the cushion. As the stars made themselves visible, Milkman tried to figure what was true and what part of what was true had anything to do with him. What was he supposed to do with this new information his father had dumped on him? Was it an effort to cop a plea? How was he supposed to feel about the two of them now? Was it true, first of all? Did his mother…had his mother made it with her own father? Macon had said no. That the doctor was impotent. How did he know? Well, he must have known what he was talking about, because he was much too eager for it to be true to let it go if there were any possibility it could have taken place. Still, he had admitted there were “other things” a man could do to please a woman. “Goddam,” Milkman said aloud. “What the fuck did he tell me all that shit for?” He didn’t want to know any of it. There was nothing he could do about it. The doctor was dead. You can’t do the past over.

Milkman’s confusion was rapidly turning to anger. “Strange motherfuckers,” he whispered. “Strange.” If he wanted lay off, he thought, why didn’t he just say that? Just come to me like a man and say, Cool it. You cool it and I’ll cool it. We’ll both cool it. And I’d say, Okay, you got it. But no. He comes to me with some way-out tale about how come and why.

Milkman was heading toward Southside. Maybe he could find Guitar. A drink with Guitar would be just the thing. Or if he couldn’t find Guitar, he’d go see Hagar. No. He didn’t want to talk to Hagar, to any woman, just yet. Talk about strange. Now, that was a really strange bunch. His whole family was a bunch of crazies. Pilate singing all day and talking off the wall. Reba turning on for everything in pants. And Hagar…well, she was just fine, but still, she wasn’t regular. She had some queer ways. But at least they were fun and not full of secrets.

Where would Guitar be? Never anywhere when you really needed him. A real pop-up. Popped up anywhere, anytime, but never on time. Milkman realized he was whispering every now and then and that people on the street were looking at him. Suddenly it seemed to him that there were a lot of people out for that time of day. Where the hell was everybody going? He made an effort not to vocalize his thoughts.

“You want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth,” his father had said. Couldn’t I be a whole man without knowing all that? “You better have some intelligence behind that fist.” Okay. What intelligence? That my mama screwed her daddy. That my grandfather was a high-yellow nigger who loved ether and hated black skin. So what did he let you marry his daughter for? So he could screw her without the neighbors knowing it? Did you ever catch them doing it? No. You just felt something you couldn’t put your finger on. His money, probably. He wouldn’t let you put your finger on that, would he? And his daughter wouldn’t help you, would she? So you figured they must be gettin it on the operating table. If he’d given you those four bankbooks to do what you liked, to buy up the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, he could have had her all he liked, right? He could have come right in your bed, and the three of you could have had a ball. He’d get one tit and you’d get…the…other….

Milkman stopped dead in his tracks. Cold sweat broke out on his neck. People jostled him trying to get past the solitary man standing in their way. He had remembered something. Or believed he remembered something. Maybe he’d dreamed it and it was the dream he remembered. The picture was developing, of the two men in the bed with his mother, each nibbling on a breast, but the picture cracked and in the crack another picture emerged. There was this green room, a very small green room, and his mother was sitting in the green room and her breasts were uncovered and somebody was sucking them and the somebody was himself. So? So what? My mother nursed me. Mothers nurse babies. Why the sweat? He walked on, hardly noticing the people pushing past him, their annoyed, tight faces. He tried to see more of the picture, but couldn’t. Then he heard something that he knew was related to the picture. Laughter. Somebody he couldn’t see, in the room laughing…at him and at his mother is ashamed. She lowers her eyes and won’t look at him. “Look at me, Mama. Look at me.” But she doesn’t and the laughter is loud now. Everybody is laughing. Did he wet his pants? Is his mother ashamed because while he was nursing he wet his pants? What pants? He didn’t wear pants then. He wore diapers. Babies always wet their diapers. does he think he has pants on? Blue pants with elastic around the calf. Little blue corduroy knickers. Why is he dressed that way? Is that what the man is laughing at? Because he is a tiny baby dressed in blue knickers? He sees himself standing there. “Look at me, Mama,” is all he can think of to say. “Please look at me.” Standing? He is a tiny baby. Nursing in his mother’s arms. He can’t stand up.

“I couldn’t stand up,” he said aloud, and turned toward a shop window. There was his face leaning out of the upturned collar of his jacket, and he knew. “My mother nursed me when I was old enough to talk, stand up, and wear knickers, and somebody saw it and laughed and—and that is why they call me Milkman and that is why my father never does and that is why my mother never does, but everybody else does. And how did I forget that? And why? And if she did that to me when there was no reason for it, when I also drank milk and Ovaltine and everything else from a glass, then maybe she did other things with her father?”

Milkman closed his eyes and then opened them. The street was even more crowded with people, all going in the direction he was coming from. All walking hurriedly and bumping against him. After a while he realized that nobody was walking on the other side of the street. There were no cars and the street lights were on, now that darkness had come, but the sidewalk on the other side of the street was completely empty. He turned around to see where everybody was going, but there was nothing to see except their backs and hats pressing forward into the night. He looked again at the other side of Not Doctor Street. Not a soul.

He touched the arm of a man in a cap who was trying to get past him. “Why is everybody on this side of the street?” he asked him.

“Watch it, buddy,” the man snapped, and moved on with the crowd.

Milkman walked on, still headed toward Southside, never once wondering why he himself did not cross over to the other side of the street, where no one was walking at all.

He believed he was thinking coldly, clearly. He had never loved his mother, but had always known that she had loved him. And that had always seemed right to him, the way it should be. Her confirmed, eternal love of him, love that he didn’t even have to earn or deserve, seemed to him natural. And now it was decomposing. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone. His visits to the wine house seemed (before his talk with his father) an extension of the love he had come to expect from his mother. Not that Pilate or Reba felt the possessive love for him that his mother did, but they had accepted him without question and with all the ease in the world. They took him seriously too. Asked him questions and thought all his responses to things were important enough to laugh at or quarrel with him about. Everything he did at home was met with quiet understanding from his mother and his sisters (or indifference and criticism from his father). The women in the wine house were indifferent to nothing and understood nothing. Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch and interpret every sound in the universe. Now he questioned them. Questioned everybody. His father had crept along the wall and then come upstairs with a terrible piece of news. His mother had been portrayed not as a mother who simply adored her only son, but as an obscene child playing dirty games with whatever male was near—be it her father or her son. Even his sisters, the most tolerant and accommodating of all the women he knew, had changed their faces and rimmed their eyes with red and charcoal dust.

Where was Guitar? He needed to find the one person left whose clarity never failed him, and unless he was out of the state, Milkman was determined to find him.

His first stop, Tommy’s Barbershop, was fruitful. Guitar was there with several other men, leaning in various attitudes, but all listening to something.

As Milkman entered and spotted Guitar’s back, he was so relieved he shouted, “Hey, Guitar!”

“Sh!” said Railroad Tommy. Guitar turned around and motioned him to come in but to be quiet. They were listening to the radio and muttering and shaking their heads. It was some time before Milkman discovered what they were so tense about. A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him—his murderers had boasted freely—and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.

Railroad Tommy was trying to keep the noise down so he could hear the last syllable of the newscaster’s words. In a few seconds it was over, since the announcer had only a few speculations and even fewer facts.
The minute he went on to another topic of news, the barbershop broke into loud conversation. Railroad Tommy, the one who had tried to maintain silence, was himself completely silent now. He moved to his razor strop while Hospital Tommy tried to keep his customer in the chair. Porter, Guitar, Freddie the janitor, and three or four other men were exploding, shouting angry epithets all over the room. Apart from Milkman, only Railroad Tommy and Empire State were quiet—Railroad Tommy because he was preoccupied with his razor and Empire State because he was simple, and probably mute, although nobody seemed sure about that. There was no question whatever about his being simple.

Milkman tried to focus on the crisscrossed conversations.

“It’ll be in the morning paper.”

“Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” said Porter.

“It was on the radio! Got to be in the paper!” said Freddie.

“They don’t put that kind of news in no white paper. Not unless he raped somebody.”

“What you bet? What you bet it’ll be in there?” said Freddie.

“Bet anything you can lose,” Porter answered.

“You on for five.”

“Wait a minute,” Porter shouted. “Say where.”

“What you mean, ‘where’? I got five says it’ll be in the morning paper.”

“On the sports page?” asked Hospital Tommy.

“Or the funny papers?” said Nero Brown.

“No, man. Front page. I bet five dollars on front page.”

“What the fuck is the difference?” shouted Guitar. “A kid is stomped and you standin round fussin about whether some cracker put it in the paper. He stomped, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.”

“What’d he do it for?” asked Freddie. “He knew he was in Mississippi. What he think that was? Tom Sawyer Land?”

“So he whistled! So what!” Guitar was steaming. “He supposed to die for that?”

“He from the North,” said Freddie. “Acting big down in Bilbo country. Who the hell he think he is?”

“Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy.

“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”

“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.

“Who?” asked Freddie.

“Till. That’s who.”

“He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.”

“A living coward ain’t a man either,” said Porter.

“Who you talking to?” Freddie was quick to get the personal insult.

“Calm down, you two,” said Hospital Tommy.

“You!” shouted Porter.

“You calling me a coward?” Freddie wanted to get the facts first.

“If the shoe fits, put your rusty foot in it.”

“You all gonna keep that up, you have to get out of my shop.”

“Tell that nigger somethin,” said Porter.

“I’m serious now,” Hospital Tommy went on. “There is no cause for all this. The boy’s dead. His mama’s screaming. Won’t let them bury him. That ought to be enough colored blood on the streets. You want to spill blood, spill the crackers’ blood that bashed his face in.”

“Oh, they’ll catch them,” said Walters.

“Catch ’em? Catch ’em?” Porter was astounded. “You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.”

“Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero.

“They got to catch ’em.”

“So they catch ’em. You think they’ll get any time? Not on your life!”

“How can they not give ’em time?” Walters’ voice was high and tight.

“How? Just don’t, that’s how.” Porter fidgeted with his watch chain.

“But everybody knows about it now. It’s all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.”

“You wanna bet? This is sure money!”

“You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar.

“They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said.

“They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.”

“I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” said Freddie.

“You should keep yours shut,” Guitar told him.

“Hey, man!” Again Freddie felt the threat.

“South’s bad,” Porter said. “Bad. Don’t nothing change in the good old U.S. of A. Bet his daddy got his balls busted off in the Pacific somewhere.”

“If they ain’t busted already, them crackers will see to it. Remember them soldiers in 1918?”

“Ooooo. Don’t bring all that up….”

The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.

And Guitar. His animation had died down, leaving its traces in his eyes.

Milkman waited until he could get his attention. Then they both left, walking silently down the street.

“What is it? You looked pissed when you came in.”

“Nothing,” said Milkman. “Where can we get a drink?”

“Mary’s?”

“Naw. Too many broads hasslin you.”

“It’s just eight-thirty. Cedar Lounge don’t open till nine.”

“Shit. You think. I’m tired.”

“I got a taste at the pad,” Guitar offered.

“Solid. Your box working?”

“Uh uh. Still broke.”

“I need some music. Music and a taste.”

“Then it’ll have to be Miss Mary. I’ll keep the ladies working elsewhere.”

“Yeah? I want to see you tell those ladies what to do.”

“Come on, Milk. This ain’t New York; choices are limited.”

“Okay. Mary’s.”

They walked a few blocks to the corner of Rye and Tenth streets. When they passed a tiny bakery, Guitar swallowed hard and quickened his steps. Mary’s was the bar/lounge that did the best business in the Blood Bank—although each of the three other corners had a similar place—because of Mary herself, a pretty but overpainted barmaid/part-owner, who was sassy, funny, and good company for the customers. Whores worked her bar in safety; lonely drunks could drink there in peace; cruisers found chickens or hawks—whichever they preferred, even jailbait; restless housewives were flattered there and danced their heels off; teen-agers learned “life rules” there; and everybody found excitement there. For in Mary’s the lights made everybody beautiful, or if not beautiful, then fascinating. The music gave tone and texture to conversations that would put you to sleep anywhere else. And the food and drink provoked people into behavior that resembled nothing less than high drama.

But all that began around eleven o’clock. It was practically empty at eight-thirty in the evening, when Guitar and Milkman arrived. They slid into a booth and ordered Scotch and Milkman drank his up quickly and ordered another before asking Guitar, “How come they call me Milkman?”

“How the fuck would I know? That’s your name, ain’t it?”

“My name is Macon Dead.”

“You drag me all the way over here to tell me your name?”

“I need to know it.”

“Aw, drink up, man.”

“You know your name, don’t you?”

“Cut the shit. What’s on your mind?”

“I decked my old man.”

“Decked?”

“Yeah. Hit him. Knocked him into the fuckin radiator.”

“What’d he do to you?”

“Nothin.”

“Nothin? You just up and popped him?”

“Yeah.”

“For no reason?”

“He hit my mother.”

“Oh.”

“He hit her. I hit him.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.” Milkman sighed heavily. “I know.”

“Listen. I can understand how you feel.”

“Uh uh. You can’t understand. Unless it happens to you, you can’t understand.”

“Yes I can. You know I used to hunt a lot. When I was a kid down home—”

“Oh, shit, do we have to hear about Alabama again?”

“Not Alabama. Florida.”

“Whatever.”

“Just listen, Milkman. Listen to me. I used to hunt a lot. From the time I could walk almost and I was good at it. Everybody said I was a natural. I could hear anything, smell anything, and see like a cat. You know what I mean? A natural. And I was never scared—not of the dark or shadows or funny sounds, and I was never afraid to kill. Anything. Rabbit, bird, snakes, squirrels, deer. And I was little. It never bothered me. I’d take a shot at anything. The grown men used to laugh about it. Said I was a natural-born hunter. After we moved up here with my grandmother, that was the only thing about the South I missed. So when my grandmother used to send us kids back home in the summer, all I thought about was hunting again. They’d pile us on the bus and we’d spend the summer with my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Florence. Soon’s I got there I looked for my uncles, to go out in the woods. And one summer—I was about ten or eleven, I guess—we all went out and I went off on my own. I thought I saw deer tracks. It wasn’t the season for deer, but that didn’t bother me any. If I saw one I killed one. I was right about the tracks; it was a deer, but spaced funny—not wide apart like I thought they should be, but still a deer. You know they step in their own prints. If you never saw them before you’d think a two-legged creature was jumping. Anyway, I stayed on the trail until I saw some bushes. The light was good and all of a sudden I saw a rump between the branches. I dropped it with the first shot and finished it with the next. Now, I want to tell you I was feeling good. I saw myself showing my uncles what I’d caught. But when I got up to it—and I was going real slow because I thought I might have to shoot it again—I saw it was a doe. Not a young one; she was old, but she was still a doe. I felt…bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man.”

Milkman was gazing at Guitar with the wide steady eyes of a man trying to look sober.

“So I know how you felt when you saw your father hit your mother. It’s like that doe. A man shouldn’t do that. You couldn’t help what you felt.”

Milkman nodded his head, but it was clear to Guitar that nothing he had said had made any difference. Chances were Milkman didn’t even know what a doe was, and whatever it was, it wasn’t his mother. Guitar ran his finger around the rim of his glass.

“What’d she do, Milk?”

“Nothin. Smiled. He didn’t like her smile.”

“You’re not making sense. Talk sense. And slow down. You know you can’t hold liquor.”

“What you mean, I can’t hold liquor?”

“’Scuse me. Help yourself.”

“I’m trying to have a serious conversation and you talking shit, Guitar.”

“I’m listening.”

“And I’m talking.”

“Yes, you talking, but what are you saying? Your papa clips your mama cause she smiles at him. You clip him cause he clipped her. Now, is that the way you all spend the evening in your house or is there something else you’re trying to say?”

“Came up to talk to me afterwards.”

“Who?”

“My old man.”

“What’d he say?”

“Said I had to be a whole man and know the whole thing.”

“Go on.”

“He was gonna buy the Erie Lackawanna, but my mother wouldn’t let him.”

“Oh, yeah? Maybe she needs beatin.”

“That’s very funny, man.”

“Why ain’t you laughing, then?”

“I am laughing. Inside.”

“Milk?”

“Yeah?”

“Your daddy slapped your mama, right?”

“Right. Right.”

“You hit him, right?”

“Right.”

“Nobody appreciates what you did. Right?”

“Hey, Guitar. You right again.”

“Not your mother, not your sisters, and your daddy appreciates it least of all.”

“Least of all. Right.”

“So he bawls you out.”

“Yep. No. No. He…”

“He talks quiet to you?”

“Right!”

“Explains things to you.”

“Yeah.”

“About why he hit her.”

“Uh huh.”

“And it’s all about something that happened a long time ago? Before you were born?”

“You got it! You are a very smart little colored boy. And I am going to tell Oxford University about you.”

“And you wish he’d kept it to himself because it don’t concern you and you can’t do nothin about it anyway.”

“You have just passed the course. Guitar Bains, Ph.D.”

“But it bothers you just the same?”

“Let me think.” Milkman closed his eyes and tried to prop his chin on his hand, but it was too difficult. He was trying to get as drunk as possible as rapidly as possible. “Yes. Well, it did bother me. Before I came in here it did. I don’t know, Guitar.” He became serious and his face had the still and steady look of a grown man trying not to vomit…or cry.

“Forget it, Milk. Whatever it is, forget it. It ain’t nothin. Whatever he told you, forget it.”

“I hope I can. I sure hope I can.”

“Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can’t help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don’t even know why. But look here, don’t carry it inside and don’t give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can’t, just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.”

“I don’t know, Guitar. Things seem to be getting to me, you know?”

“Don’t let ’em. Unless you got a plan. Look at Till. They got to him too. Now he’s just an item on WJR’s evening news.”

“He was crazy.”

“No. Not crazy. Young, but not crazy.”

“Who cares if he fucks a white girl? Anybody can do that. What’s he bragging for? Who cares?”

“Crackers care.”

“Then they’re crazier’n he is.”

“Of course. But they’re alive and crazy.”

“Yeah, well, fuck Till. I’m the one in trouble.”

“Did I hear you right, brother?”

“All right. I didn’t mean that. I…”

“What’s your trouble? You don’t like your name?”

“No.” Milkman let his head fall to the back of the booth. “No, I don’t like my name.”

“Let me tell you somethin, baby. Niggers get their names the way they get everything else—the best way they can. The best way they can.”

Milkman’s eyes were blurred now and so were his words. “Why can’t we get our stuff the right way?”

“The best way is the right way. Come on. I’ll take you home.”

“No, I can’t go back there.”

“No? Where then?”

“Let me stay in your pad.”

“Oh, man, you know my situation. One of us’ll have to sleep on the floor. Besides…”

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Besides, I may have company.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Come on, let’s go.”

“I ain’t going home, Guitar. Hear me?”

“Want me to take you over to Hagar’s?” Guitar motioned to the waitress for the check.

“Hagar’s. Yeah. Sweet Hagar. Wonder what her name is.”

“You just said it.”

“I mean her last name. Her daddy’s name.”

“Ask Reba.” Guitar paid their bar bill and helped Milkman negotiate to the door. The wind had risen and cooled. Guitar flapped his elbows against the cold.

“Ask anybody but Reba,” said Milkman. “Reba don’t know her own last name.”

“Ask Pilate.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask Pilate. Pilate knows. It’s in that dumb-ass box hanging from her ear. Her own name and everybody else’s. Bet mine’s in there too. I’m gonna ask her what my name is. Say, you know how my old man’s daddy got his name?”

“Uh uh. How?”

“Cracker gave it to him.”

“Sho’nough?”

“Yep. And he took it. Like a fuckin sheep. Somebody should have shot him.”

“What for? He was already Dead.”

DMU Timestamp: April 02, 2025 13:01