Just Above My Head Page 32

  He looked around the table, but especially at me.

  “We didn’t wait for white people to have a change of heart, or change their laws, or anything, in order to be responsible for each other, to love our women, or raise our children. You better not wait, either. They ain’t going to change their laws for us—it just ain’t in them. They change their laws when their laws make them uncomfortable, or when they think they can see some kind of advantage for them—we ain’t, really, got nothing to do with it.”

  “If we had ever,” said Florence, “depended on white folks for anything, there wouldn’t be a black person alive here today.”

  “Mama,” asked Arthur, “you think they can’t change?”

  She looked down; then she looked at Arthur. “I’m saying you can’t depend on it. You’ve got to depend on yourself.” She touched one earring. “Anyway, I’m not really talking about white people. I’ve known some white people who were beautiful and some black people who were rats.” She paused, looking at Arthur again. “Look. When was the last time we sat down at this table and talked about white people? The only reason we talking now is because it looks like they’ve decided to desegregate this and desegregate that. I hope they do. It might make life a little easier for you and a little better for them. But we’re not really talking about them: we talking about us. Whatever they do, honey, you still got your life to live. I’m glad you don’t have to ride in no Jim Crow car, like me and your daddy had to do. But, Jim Crow car or no Jim Crow car, we still had to raise you—it was a good thing they changed the law, but we couldn’t wait for that!” Then she turned to Peanut, with a smile. “So you go on down, and test them waters—part of the trouble is, you afraid they just might mean it—and then, how you going to look at them, how you going to look at yourself? But just remember—it don’t so much matter what they mean to do: it matters what we mean to do.”

  I said—it was partly a question, partly a discovery: “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  “Of course, I mean that. How you think we sitting at this table? You think me or your daddy waited to get permission from some white man?” She laughed. “Why, honey, they don’t give themselves permission to do much.” She looked very young and happy, her green earrings flashing in the light. “Pass me your brother’s plate, Arthur. I ain’t going to fatten him for the slaughter, but I’ll be damned if I don’t strengthen him for the battle.”

  After supper, we went back to the living room. It was still early, the sun had just gone down. The light in the streets was a kind of gray-purple, the streetlights just beginning to be turned on: you could see them way downtown, beyond the park, creeping uptown. It was very quiet, as though everyone had decided to catch their breath at the same time and were doing what we were doing, just sitting around.

  I sat at one window, near my father; my mother sat at the other window. Peanut sat at the piano. Arthur sat on a hassock, his head leaning on the sofa. Peanut was humming a song, “Where He Leads Me, I Will Follow.” Florence hummed along with him.

  “We ain’t told you about what happened to Julia,” Arthur said. He said it in a strange, dry, distant way, looking up at the ceiling: he said it as though it hurt him.

  Florence stopped humming.

  “I heard she stopped preaching,” Peanut said, “and then dropped out of sight.”

  “She dropped out of sight, all right,” said Florence. “She was pushed out of sight.”

  Paul shifted in his seat, started to speak, held his peace.

  “You wrote me about it,” I said to Arthur, “some time ago.”

  “That was some time ago. I didn’t write you all of it. All of it hadn’t happened—or I didn’t know all of it.” He lit a cigarette.

  “I had just seen her a couple of nights before, down on Fourteenth Street.” He paused. “She had started spending a lot of time down there.” He sat up, his hands clasping his knees. “I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “That’s all right.” Then, “I got this phone call, Hall, early one morning, and I didn’t recognize the voice, it sounded so wild and frightened. The voice kept crying, screaming, Mama Montana! Mama Montana! and I still didn’t recognize it. The voice said, Come up here, please, come up here, please, please, I think I’m dying. I said, Who is this? Who is this? and the moment I asked that, I knew who it was, don’t know how. She said, It’s Julia, Julia, please come, please come, and she started to crying like I hope you ain’t never heard nobody cry. I got into my clothes and ran up there. I took a taxi.

  “Time I got there, some neighbors had already got into the apartment because she was crying so, and the door was open. And Hall, I never saw nothing like it, not in all my life. You remember how skinny Julia was? Well, the skinny little thing had been beaten to an inch of her life. Her face, it wasn’t no face, it was just a mess of blood and puffed-up flesh. Didn’t have no lips, didn’t have no eyes—just little dark slits where the eyes was supposed to be. I said, ‘Who did this?’ I thought somebody had broke in and tried to rob them. And she never answered me, she just kept saying, ‘I’ve lost my baby, I know I’ve lost my baby.’ And I was so turned around, Hall, I couldn’t make no sense of what she was saying. Somebody wanted to call the police, but I said, ‘No, let me call the ambulance, we got to get this girl to a hospital.’ So I called the hospital, and, just lucky I got Martha on the telephone. I wrapped up the child as best I could, in blankets—and the blood came seeping through those blankets, I just knew she was going to bleed to death—and then, for the first time, what she’d been saying about losing a baby made sense, she was bleeding heavy from between her legs. I said again, ‘Who did this?’ and somebody said, ‘Her father. Her father beat her, and he gave her that baby, too.’

  “Well, I didn’t have time to think—I couldn’t think on all that, then. The ambulance came and they put her in the ambulance and I got in with her and rode to the hospital. And thank God Martha was there, or we’d still be in that hall, answering stupid questions and filling out papers. Martha got rid of all them people and got Julia inside and I sat down on a bench. Everything had happened so fast, wasn’t nothing clear in my head.

  “But I sat on that bench for a while. And, look like”—she turned away from us, looking out of the window—”a whole lot of my life came back to me while I was sitting on that bench. And I lost a baby, too, one time, didn’t nobody know it but me and Paul. But I wasn’t a girl, like Julia, I was married, and it was Paul’s baby and I’d already had three children.” She caught her breath and looked away again. “And I was a young girl a long time ago, somewhere else. It wasn’t like some of them young ones sitting on that bench with me, that morning.

  “Martha came back, and said that Julia had been beaten pretty bad, but that wasn’t the worst—the beating had brought about a miscarriage and Julia was into her third month. They were doing all they could. She might pull through, she might not; she was a mighty frail girl, and she’d lost a lot of blood.

  “Then she asked me to get hold of her father, because he was the next of kin.

  “She looked me dead in the eye when she said that, like she knew what I was thinking—she was remembering, and I was, too, the time we’d been up there together, before Amy died—and, when she said that, my blood just stopped and froze. I looked at her, but I couldn’t answer: I couldn’t pronounce his name, I swear I couldn’t. Somehow, when Martha asked me that, I knew—for the first time, I knew!—that everything I’d been scared to think—was true—that woman had been telling the truth when she said, Her father, he beat her, and he give her that baby, too.”

  Now it was dark. I could hardly see my mother’s face, or anybody’s face. The streetlights were on. A dim, deep, soft hum of music and voices came in from the streets.

  Paul turned to me. “Your mama wanted me to find Joel,” he said, “and so I went looking for him. It took me all day. It took me part of a night. He wasn’t on his job. I didn’t hardly think he’d be home, knowing him, but I w
ent up there, anyway, and almost got arrested. The cops were still there, and they thought I was him. Well. The place was a mess, I mean it was a slaughterhouse, partly from whatever had gone on there that morning, and partly from the cops—they had turned out the joint, looking for anything but especially for dope. Hall, there was still blood on one of the windows, blood in the sink, blood on the sofa. And I could see that nobody wanted to believe that a man could do this to his child. It was more like what might happen if a dude just went crazy and came home and bounced everything he could get his hands on off his woman. One of the cops, a black dude, said, ‘If this chick’s still breathing, she’s lucky—must be they just didn’t have no room up top for her yet.’

  “But all the neighbors swore it was him—that it couldn’t have been nobody but him. They heard all the noise before he left, and they heard him leave. And then they heard Julia screaming and crying—they was there when your mama came—they swore it was him.

  “I didn’t want to believe it. Maybe I never thought much of Joel, but I thought more of him than that—you just naturally think more of any man than that. Especially if you know him, or you think you know him, and you’ve had drinks with him, and all, and he knows your wife, and your children. And I’m a father, too—no, it was hard for me to believe. But I knew Florence believed it, and she don’t believe things easy. It’s funny”—he paused, looked at me, looked away, looked down—“I didn’t believe it, and yet, I wanted to find that hyena and beat him as bad as he beat Julia and then throw the rest of him into a police station.”

  “You didn’t believe it,” Florence said, “but you knew it. Just like me.”

  “Well, I covered Broadway. He used to like to hang out in some of the musician’s joints down there. No dice. I went to the Village. No Joel. Came on back up, going to one place, then going to another, doubling back. Went to Jordan’s Cat, although I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be in there. I went back to his house.

  “I sat down on the top step. I guess my brain was kind of in a turmoil. I just sat there. I figured he was going to have to come here, sooner or later, I even rang the bell. There were no cops around and no cop cars, but I figured that one of the neighbors had arranged to call the police station as soon as he showed up. And, I don’t know why, I figured Joel was just too dumb to realize that, just like he was too dumb to know what people really felt about him while he was carting little Sister Julia around, and him eating out of her hand. Anyway, I sat there, I was tired.

  “But I was going to be late for work, too, so I went on up to the bar where I was playing then, a few blocks past Jordan’s Cat, place called The Window Shades, and, wouldn’t you know, there he was, sitting at the bar.

  “I’ll never know, until the day I die, if he knew I was playing piano in that bar and was waiting for me, or if he just happened to crawl in there because it was close to home and he was afraid to go home and afraid to be too far from home. I’ll never know. My name was in the window, but, in the state he was in, I doubt that he’d have noticed that.

  “He was a mess, too, really, but it hardly showed, unless you looked hard at him. He had some scratches and bruises and his upper lip was swollen—but, if you didn’t know, he just looked, really, like he’d been drinking a little too heavy, a little too long.

  “He looked at me, and I went over. He said, ‘Paul, I’m so glad you came in. I got something to tell you.’ I just looked at him. He said, ‘Some people broke in the house this morning, they tried to rob us, and I think they hurt Julia.’ I still just looked at him. He said, ‘You know who I think they were?’ He said, ‘Paul, I hate to tell you this, but my daughter—Julia’—and then he started to cry—’I think she had a nervous breakdown, since her mama died, she ain’t been the same.’ He said, ‘Paul, I hate to tell you this about my only daughter, but she turned into a prostitute, she been peddling it on the streets, man, and one of her pimps broke in this morning and beat her up. My only daughter. Man. Can you believe it? And they want me to testify against her. Now, you know I can’t do that. You can’t testify against your own flesh and blood, the Bible tells us that’s a sin against the Holy Ghost, you can’t never be forgiven for that.’ And he was really crying, real tears was dripping through his fingers, and his shoulders was shaking.

  “Well. I didn’t know if Joel knew it, but I knew that some of the people in that bar lived in his building—the cops would soon have his ass. All my anger left me. He really believed his story. I just left him there, went on to my piano. The cops picked him up that night, or soon after—they didn’t pick him up in the bar—but they couldn’t hold him.” He looked at Florence. “Weren’t no eyewitnesses. Julia couldn’t talk, and, by the time she could talk, she was in New Orleans—her grandmama hustled that child out of here.”

  No one spoke for a long while. I wondered what Florence was thinking—about her old friend, and her friend’s daughter, and granddaughter: I sensed that she was trying to find a key to all this in a past which only she remembered. And she was not sure that she remembered it now—she was ransacking the past for the details she had overlooked.

  “Well,” Florence said finally, “she never wanted to say nothing against her father—maybe because it wasn’t just her father. Anyway,” she added, after a moment, “she never did. And I guess we have to respect that.”

  “It was Crunch’s baby,” Arthur said. “When Julia could talk, and I went to see her at the hospital, that’s what she told me.”

  I asked, “The grandmama, she didn’t bring little Jimmy back with her?”

  “Of course not,” Florence said. “What for? She left him with some of their relatives down there.”

  “Poor Jimmy,” Arthur said.

  “One thing for sure,” I said. “She must have damn sure wanted it to be Crunch’s baby.”

  Arthur nodded at me, emphatically, his eyes very big and bright, and older than I had ever seen them.

  Peanut said, “You mean that Brother Joel Miller was sleeping with his own daughter? I didn’t hear that!”

  “What did you hear,” Arthur asked, “way down there in Washington?”

  “It’s a small world.” Peanut glanced at Florence, then at Paul. “I heard—she’d been turning tricks—you know, like Brother Miller said—with white men, down on the Bowery, and in the Village, and Brother Miller found out about it and that’s why he whipped her—that’s why he beat her up.”

  “Well,” said Paul, “look like his story’s the one that got sold. Anyway, he’s still around. You go out tonight, you might run into him. The women still like him.”

  “How much does Crunch know about this?” I asked Arthur.

  “Well—I think he knows that Julia was going to have a baby by him, and she lost it.” He hesitated. “He had told me about—their affair—before he left here.” He lit a new cigarette from the coal of an old one, stubbed out the old one in the ashtray on the coffee table. He looked up at me. “Crunch don’t say a whole lot in his letters—I was the only one writing him, really, and I don’t know what Julia told him. I didn’t think it was for me to tell him!”

  I said, “You’re right.” Then, “He should be home soon.”

  Peanut looked at Arthur. “Your heart,” said Peanut, and smiled. Then, “Sure wish I had some news from Red. But I really have my doubts, man, that he ever learned to write.”

  Peanut and Arthur laughed together.

  “They both be coming home soon,” Arthur said. “Don’t worry. We be seeing them any day now.”

  Paul looked over at Arthur. “Come on and play something for us. Your brother ain’t heard your voice in a long time—and, I know, once he hits them streets, he going to be out there for a while—move your behind, Peanut. I don’t think Hall ever heard his brother sing and play at the same time.”

  Peanut moved, and Arthur rose. “Okay, I’ll do my best.” He grinned at me. “But you just remember, this is a command performance—you might just have to grit your teeth and bear it.” He sat down at the pi
ano. “For you, brother.”

  I sat in the window, watching him—space at my back, my arms folded, watching him. He looked down at the keyboard, strummed the keys; it was a different face than I had seen before, and it was a different sound. He turned his face for a second and looked at me, then turned again to the keyboard. His face changed again.

  Shine,

  looking at me for a second, and at the space behind me, then back down to the keyboard,

  on me.

  I watched his fingers on the keyboard. His eyes were closed.

  Shine

  on me.

  I watched his face and his hands, as though I had never seen them before, and felt him beginning to drag his song up out of me.

  Let the light

  from the lighthouse

  shine on me.

  It was more than strange how the two voices came together, one issuing through his fingers, the other through his throat, both from the same center; and he was the center only because, out of the vast and unmapped geography of himself, he sang, for us, our song. I watched his face, and I really wondered how anybody could bear that.

  Let it

  shine

  on me!

  Oh,

  let it shine

  on me.

  I want,

  the piano rolling like a river,

  the light from the lighthouse,

  the voice rising out of our whirlwind, the whirlwind transfiguring Arthur’s face,

  to shine on me.

  He opened his eyes for a moment, as though to check the distance from one place to another, looked down, began again.

  I heard the voice of Jesus say,

  and out of the space beneath, behind me, I heard a cheerful black lady’s voice, a little drunken, calling out to another black lady, and I heard their laughter,