Just Above My Head Page 17

  Martha sat stiffly on a straight-backed chair, not knowing where to look. Florence simply stared at Joel.

  “How’s my buddy, Paul?” Joel asked. “I thought he was coming by this afternoon.”

  There was something unexpectedly moving in the way he said this, as though he really needed Paul. Martha felt as though she were trapped at some secret tribal ritual, and would soon be forced to drink the blood of the sacrifice. She wanted to stand up, and run out of the house.

  But Florence, watching Joel, and knowing him better, felt something else—a tepid rage in the man, tepid like water in a saucepan over a low fire on the stove.

  She suddenly realized, too; that this tepid rage had always been there, in Joel’s style and smile. She noticed it now only because someone had lately turned up the small flame of his humiliation.

  “Paul went on to work,” Florence said. “He didn’t think we’d need him. I guess he was right.” She stood up. Martha stood up, too. “Joel, it was right in this room last night that you made Amy promise to come and see a doctor with me today!”

  “She changed her mind! What can I tell you?”

  Florence watched him.

  “How long you going to let this go on, Joel?”

  He stared stubbornly before him—he wondered, too.

  “You don’t have any idea where this—new—church is?”

  “No.” Joel sat down on the sofa. “Julia said the Lord raised it up for a purpose—then Amy, she got all excited. Julia wouldn’t tell me where the church was—said she didn’t trust me to keep a secret.” He looked up at Florence, and smiled, a smile Florence had never seen on his face before. “It ain’t all milk and honey, living with the Lord’s anointed.”

  “Especially,” said Florence, “when it’s your daughter, and you ain’t never raised your hand to her.”

  Joel smiled. “She was a real good baby. Wasn’t no need. Then—later—” He stood up, and walked to the window. “They might be back soon. You welcome to wait.”

  “No,” said Florence slowly. “They won’t be coming back while we’re here.”

  “When all this started,” Joel said suddenly, “when Amy lost her baby—we saw doctors then, and everything seemed to be all right. The doctors just told Amy to be careful, and she was supposed to keep coming back for checkups. So I thought she was. Julia didn’t know about the baby—she was surprised about that. She took real good care of her mother, and they’d always been so close, I didn’t think nothing. I stopped worrying. I’m sure worried now.”

  “Couldn’t you send Amy home to her mother?” Florence asked. She wanted to add and send Julia to Bellevue? but she held her peace.

  “Amy and her mother get along best at long distance,” said Joel.

  “Amy. Amy. Every time I ask you a question, you answer me with Amy. But you the man of the house, Joel.”

  “This house,” said Joel, “was taken over by the Holy Ghost some time ago.”

  Florence found nothing to say to this, and Martha flashed her a desperate look.

  But Florence said finally, as Martha rose, and they began edging toward the hallway, toward the door, “Joel, I’d think about that again, if I was you—the Holy Ghost, I mean. He ain’t one of them chumps on the Avenue, ain’t got nothing better to do but play with women’s minds, and wreck their homes.”

  Joel followed them into the hall. “What are you telling me?”

  Florence turned at the door, and faced him. “I think you know what I’m telling you.”

  Joel slowly began to unlock the door. The winter air beat against it, then entered the hall as the door swung back.

  “Just like that,” said Florence. “Just like you opened that door, you take your wife out of your daughter’s hands. I’m telling you. The Holy Ghost didn’t pay down on that furniture, and the Holy Ghost don’t buy your clothes.”

  She stepped into the air. Joel stared at her, with eyes as black as raisins.

  Martha said, “Good-bye, Mr. Miller.” She was standing, shivering, on the brownstone steps.

  He came briefly back to life, or was reclaimed by his reflexes. He waved one hand, and smiled that smile. “Young lady!” An utterly blind reflex made his eyes travel over the body he did not see and could not want. “I hope we meet again!”

  “I’ll send Paul over,” Florence said. “You say you want to see him. Good night. Tell Amy to call me—if that’s all right with the Holy Ghost.”

  And the two women walked down the dangerously freezing steps into the street. Martha did not hear the door close behind them, but neither she, nor Florence, looked back.

  They walked to the corner in silence, stood, waiting, for the light.

  “Martha, I’m sorry I made you come out this afternoon for nothing. I truly am.”

  “That wasn’t your fault. But I’m sorry, too, that it was for nothing.”

  They were standing in front of Jordan’s Cat—now they started walking away, not knowing I was in there. Florence was wearing her fur coat and a hat. The mother-of-pearl comb had been wrapped in tissue paper, and hidden at the bottom of a trunk and would not be seen again for a while.

  Martha shivered, her hands deep in the pockets of her coat, her head down. Florence looked at her sharply, and stopped walking.

  “Here, child, it’s cold, don’t you let me keep you no longer. You close to home—and is Hall waiting for you?”

  “Yes. It’s all right. I’ll walk you a little ways.” Martha looked into Florence’s face and smiled, and took her arm. “Come on. I’m not cold. I was just—thinking. What’s going to happen to that poor woman? And to him. What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s lazy,” said Florence. She smiled. “That might sound funny, but it’s true.”

  They walked in silence through the dark streets, not very crowded now.

  “He reminded me a little of my father,” Martha said. “He could never make up his mind about anything. It was always my mother who decided. And later on, I heard people saying, ‘Well, that’s just the way black men are—they don’t know how to make up their minds.’ ”

  Florence was listening, but not to what Martha was saying. She was listening to Martha.

  “Well, that’s just not true. And God knows, the last thing a black man needs is for a black woman to feel that way about him.”

  “I don’t know if I feel that way. But I watch the men in the hospital, in the streets—some of these men are pretty awful people, they really are slimy sewer scum, do anything to pay down on the car, to meet the damn car payments—they don’t care about women, or men, or nobody. It just seems so hopeless. My father used to come home and raise hell in the house because he didn’t dare raise hell outside. He just took it out on us.”

  “What did he take out on you?” Florence asked.

  “You know. His job—”

  “What was his job?”

  “He worked in the post office—he hated it. I guess he hated it, being a nigger all day long. Then, he’d come home and give orders like—King Kong.”

  Florence laughed, and after a moment, Martha laughed with her.

  “I hear you,” Florence said. “But there’s a little bit more to it than that.” They walked in silence for a while. Then, “The only way we can begin to get out of all this shit,” Florence said, “is to begin to look at it, like from the very beginning. I mean, in the beginning, when you was a little girl, your daddy was just your daddy—nobody had yet told you anything about black men. Then later on, you hear people talking about black men, or what the black man should do, and you start thinking about your daddy, and you think, oh, yes, that’s why—he’s a black man. And you put him in that cage you just been told about, the cage for black men.

  “But ain’t nobody else thinking about your daddy. They never heard of him, they don’t care about him. But you better care. No matter how it might hurt. The World is full of black men, but you only got one daddy. The world is full of black men, but you can only marry one—at least, in my
day, anyway, you married one at a time.” She laughed. “You understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “I think I do,” said Martha, frowning, looking down at the sidewalk, holding on to Florence’s arm. “I think I do.”

  “I don’t know what the black man is like,” Florence said. “I don’t know if I know what my husband’s like; I hardly know what my sons are like. But I know they’re not the same. If anything should happen to them, I don’t know what I’d do. And that’s enough to handle, it seems to me.” She looked into Martha’s face.

  “But,” said Martha, with a despairing hesitation, “you’ve got them to handle.”

  Florence laughed. “I got here a little bit before you, daughter. And I didn’t say them.” Then, after a moment, “There’s me to handle, too. It’s not a dead end, daughter. It’s a two-way street.”

  They walked in silence, Martha head down, with her lips pushed out.

  “Do you think black women are unfair?” Martha asked. “I mean—to black men?”

  “Most of us are unfair, in one way or another, to somebody,” Florence said, “and I don’t know anything about black women, either.”

  They passed Harlem Hospital, and turned the corner at 135th Street, toward my house. They walked the block in silence, Martha shivered again, and whistled—a low whistle, close to prayer.

  They stopped before the steps of my house. Arthur was not home yet, he was smoking pot with Peanut, Crunch, and Red. Paul was playing piano. I was in Jordan’s Cat. Martha looked at Florence, tears standing in her eyes.

  “Well. Thank you, lady,” Martha said. Then, “No matter what happens, I hope we’ll always be friends. You’re beautiful.” She kissed my mother, moved away. “Good night! Sleep well. You know where to find me if you need me.”

  “Good night,” said Florence. “God bless.” She watched Martha hurry down the street. She thought of Amy before Amy had met Joel. She thought of Julia, of Jimmy, of her husband and her sons, climbing the stairs, wondering, trying to compose a letter, knowing that any letter, now, would come too late.

  Uncle Sam’s greetings came sooner than expected, and I wouldn’t let Martha shoot me in the foot. Our last days together in New York were strange, were strangely peaceful. I felt a little cowardly, for something outside of me, outside of us, had forced a decision for which I was not responsible. Well. Martha avoided asking me to marry her, I did not ask her to marry me. We—er, I—had the Korean war as our reason. We both knew—or Martha knew—that this was not the real reason, but oddly enough, this knowledge reconciled us to our last days together. Spring came, and we wandered around New York in a kind of bittersweet luxury of happiness; a luxury we might not have been able to endure had we not known it was fleeting.

  Something, in any case, had been decided, and that always brings a certain peace.

  Arthur said good-bye to Julia on the church steps the day of Sister Bessie’s funeral, and walked out of her life for a while. By the time Amy was buried, in the summertime, he was with The Trumpets of Zion, in Nashville, and I was in Korea.

  Jimmy went South with his grandmother. Julia and Joel stayed on in the house. Julia stopped preaching. Someone said they saw her coming out of a movie. Arthur knew that she was seeing Crunch. But Arthur never saw her. Practically speaking, no one saw her, though she was going to a high school in The Bronx and she had a job after school, scrubbing floors, in the same neighborhood. Crunch and Red came on to Korea, but something was wrong with Peanut’s eyesight, and he went to Washington to Howard University.

  I’ll have to backtrack, presently, and go through this in some detail. Now, I’m just trying to get the sequence together in my mind. I was off the scene for much of this. Arthur was my principal (and unreliable) informer. He was just keeping me up-to-date, more or less, about what was happening to him and trying to amuse me with sketches of life in my old stamping ground. All he was really doing then was singing, and he and The Trumpets seemed to be working all the time, and, in holiday seasons and in the summertime, they traveled the road. ATLANTA: Walked on Peachtree Street today, brother, and all I got to say is they can have the peaches. And the trees. BIRMINGHAM: I didn’t have no banjo but I managed to get out with my knee—not ON my knee. (You only have the right to take out one knee.) CHARLOTTE: Peanut got cousins here, but they lighter than Peanut and they didn’t dig the rest of us at all, especially Crunch. I think they thought he was too niggerish. DURHAM: Red say if this is where they grow tobacco, he going to have to stop smoking. BOSTON: Here, when they shit on you, they give you a towel—so you can wipe their ass, I guess. NEW YORK: Sure miss you, brother, sure wish you was here. I ain’t got nobody to talk to no more. And: Mama’s fine, she misses you, though, we all do, brother, when is this shit going to stop? And Daddy’s got a funky piano, you know what I mean? I mean, he’s SLY, I’m just beginning to notice how he really puts it down, and I’m in love with Dizzy Gillespie! and I don’t know if I’ll ever really be a singer, brother, what do you think? and Look like Julia’s wrapped it up, you remember Julia, well, she don’t preach no more since her Mama passed. You know, Hall, I wonder if she feels GUILTY, and Brother Joel Miller is hitting the bars (and the chicks) just like a WINO, brother, or a pimp (smile) and Red left today, maybe you be seeing him over there, I hope not, sure wish that man would turn your ass loose, and I don’t see much of Crunch no more, he spends a lot of his time (I think) with Julia. I know he feels sorry for her. Crunch feels sorry for everybody. He just can’t help it and Saw Crunch today because he’s leaving next week and he figured he had to bring Julia along. I guess Julia’s all right but she’s so goddamn skinny she looks like a fucking razor and she was wearing a whole lot of LIPSTICK. What happened to the Holy Ghost? I think she thinks Crunch is the Holy Ghost now (smile) and Somebody say Julia’s pregnant and her father wants to whip her ass and Crunch left today, he might meet you over there, and the way things are going, I might meet you over there, and Hall, I know I’m very young and maybe I ask a lot of dumb questions but I hope you don’t mind but I have to ask somebody and you’re my brother and I love you, and Brother Miller whipped Julia’s ass real pitiful, and they say she lost her baby and the grandmother came and took her away and maybe Brother Joel going to have to do some time. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe life can be like that, and Happy Birthday, Hall! I sure hope you’re here on your next birthday. Or mine. I warn you that I got a birthday coming soon and I want something only YOU can choose from the funky exotic slinky mysterious EAST, your loving brother, Arthur.

  When Julia mounted the stairs to the pulpit on the embattled day of Sister Bessie’s funeral, she felt something entering into her and something departing, forever. And she knew it was forever. An unprecedented sweat was on her brow and a new agony in her belly—as she mounted the familiar steps, into a new place altogether.

  She placed her Bible on the enormous, open Bible in the pulpit, and looked up, looked out—into a great silence.

  The church was strangely packed and tense—it was a wonder where the people came from, for Sister Bessie’s friends and relatives were dead, were scattered, few. The nephew was there, with other relatives. The other people were a wonder, especially on a Wednesday or a Thursday afternoon. Arthur was sitting far in the back, alone. Bessie’s mother was resting; her father sat in the front row.

  “Dearly beloved,” she said, “we take our text today from the thirty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, the first verse.”

  She found her father’s eyes, and he stood, his open Bible in his hand.

  “My father,” she said, and helplessly, she smiled. “My beloved father, Brother Joel Miller, will read the verse for us.”

  And Joel read, in a voice which had always amazed her—always, from the very beginning of her ministry, for it did not seem like his voice at all—yet she had heard this voice, sometimes, when he was happy with her mother: Joel read now, happy with his daughter:

  In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And Isaiah the prophet the son of A
moz came unto him, and said unto him, Thus saith the Lord. Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live.

  Her father looked up at her once, closed his Bible, and sat down.

  “Amen!” said Julia. “My text is: set thine house in order.”

  Then, she paused, frightened, aware, as though for the first time, of the bier at the foot of the altar, and the pastor and the deacon, sitting in the pulpit behind her: the men who had not wanted to be responsible for Sister Bessie’s funeral.

  “We come together here,” said Julia, “because that message just came for one of us, just like it’s going to come for all of us, each and every one of us one day. She might have had her face turned to the wall, but then, she had to sit up and look around her, and hear the message and we believe, amen! that she called on the Holy Ghost, and she got busy with the Holy Ghost and she started to put her house in order. She didn’t have time for trembling, no, her trembling days were done, and oh, church, have you ever had to set a house in order? You get up off the bed but you don’t make the bed yet, you know you going to have to do that last. Maybe you go into the kitchen, bless God, and you look around you. You look at the stove and it’s needing a scrubbing. You go down on your hands and knees, amen, and you get the Old Dutch Cleanser. Oh, yes! And then you start to run the water—and you take out the big brush of faith and that little brush of love because the big brush scours the stove, children, and that little brush gets into the corners—and you got the water to running, the water of salvation! Pretty soon you see the roaches come crawling out and you scour the walls. And you look at the pots and pans and you put them in the water. And you scrub them and you wash and dry the dishes and you put everything in its place, amen, and you wash down the table and you scrub the floor and look like the windows need a cleaning, too, and you scrub the windows and let the light come pouring in!

  “Oh, yes! And all the time you moving around your house, the clock is ticking and time is running out. Lord, you hear it in every beat of your heart, and every time you run from one corner to the other, you hear time running out! You hear your neighbors dancing and playing music—they not setting their house in order! You hear someone in the street just cursing—cursing God!—he’s not setting his house in order! You hear the harlot downstairs with her fornicators!—she’s not setting her house in order! You hear the rich man and the poor man, trampling, trampling, trampling down, and you want to run through the streets, crying, ‘set thine house in order!’ You want to grab the policeman, crying, ‘set thine house in order!’ You want to grab your mother, your brother, your sister, your father, crying, set thine house in order! Set thine house in order! Set thine house in order, for thou shalt die and not live!’