All-Bright Court (20 page)

This and Zena's smile were all it took for Karo to break the string and throw the bag away.

He told his mother the string had broken and he had lost the bag in the field. Greene said nothing. Karo was almost twelve anyway. He didn't need it anymore. But when he went to sleep, Greene sat on the edge of his bed and raised the lids of his eyes to find Zena dancing in the back of them.

Greene never disliked Zena. She was never nasty to her, but she was not nice either. Sometimes Zena would appear in Greene's house, just like air, just like she had always been there. Greene never spoke to her. How could she speak to air?

Zena's mother could not keep her away from Karo, so she warned her about Greene.

“You stay from out her house, you hear?” her mother said. “And don't be eating nothing she cook. I mean nothing. Ain't telling what she might cook up in it.” Zena's mother said Greene cast the evil eye. Greene caused the sewers to back up, caused the winters to be harsher and the rivers to rise higher in the spring. She could raise ringworms and mange on children's scalps. She could even make husbands cleave to her and not to their wives. The men came to her seeking treasure. And the bats had come with Greene's arrival. They had come only that one night, and they had never returned. That could not be ignored.

Zena and Karo married in 1972. She was pregnant, and though Karo was only eighteen, Greene signed for him to marry. He went off and joined the navy.

In Zena's fifth month she became sick. Her stomach was upset and her urine turned dark. There was a milkiness, a whiteness, that passed across her irises. It drifted slowly, like a thin cloud against a windless night sky. After two days of sickness, Zena admitted to her mother she had eaten at Greene's. She'd had some potato salad and collards.

“She working a spell. I'm telling you, she working something on the baby. She done something to mark the baby,” Zena's mother said.

“That's crazy, Mama. That's just a bunch of country talk.”

But Zena never felt right after her dinner at Greene's. She was always tired, and there was an uneasiness inside her, a cold whiteness that moved from Zena's eyes and into her womb. The baby seemed to pick it up. It made the baby still.

The doctor at the clinic said there was nothing wrong, but the birth of the baby proved the doctor wrong.

She was a fat white baby with white hair and pink lips. All of the color had been washed from her.

Karo had been out to sea when the baby was born, and when he came home and saw her, he refused to hold her. He did not even want to touch her. The baby was ugly, Karo said, and Zena kept her hidden in the house. Both of their families shunned the child, but Greene had come over to see her once.

She came to bring an asafetida bag for the child. She tied it around the baby's neck, and told Zena, “I knows what these people be saying about me, but it ain't true. I ain't no conjure woman. But how can you tell people that? People believes what they want to.” That was the most Greene had ever said to her, and before she left Zena's house, she repeated, “People believes what they want to.”

Zena took the bag from the baby's neck and threw it away, and for five years she kept the child hidden.

Mikey had managed to see this all-white child, though. He had seen her far off in the darkness of the afternoon house, her milky blue eyes staring at him as he opened the screen door and placed the newspaper on the floor inside.

 

After her nap on this day, after the colorless girl awakened to find the door at the end of the closet had disappeared, she went and sat in the cool darkness of the living room. When she heard the paperboy coming up the porch stairs, she went to the screen door.

He opened the door and stared at the child's white skin, her woolly white hair, her full pink lips. He smiled at her and handed her the newspaper.

Though he had not come from the closet, she thought he was the black boy from her dreams. Her milky blue eyes moved rapidly as she tried to focus on the boy. But the brightness of the afternoon sun took her vision away, and the boy became a shadow.

“Do you have the crayons?”

The boy was confused, and before he could answer, the girl's mother was there. She was floating above her, just like air. She struck the child, knocked her to the floor. The sheets of the paper spilled over her, and the screen door slammed.

“I told you to stay away from the door. No one want to see you. Don't nobody come here to see you,” her mother said.

It seemed as though talking to this child hurt Zena, as if with each word she were spitting sand.

Mikey saw the girl get up, her mother's hand printed pink across her face. Before he left the porch, he saw the girl run from the door and disappear into the closet under the stairs.

21

“L
ITTLE SNOW
, big snow. Big snow, little snow.” This was what people said of winter storms. It was a way to gauge the strength of the storms, to predict the change they would bring.

Big snow fell in large, wet flakes. There was an openness, a boldness to it. And the snow fell slowly, floating down lazily from the fast-moving clouds overhead. It could fall all night, but by morning the storm would have waned, and there would be little snow on the ground. A snow that brought about a change just small enough to be beautiful, just big enough to be an improvement. A trace covered the dead grass, a dusting covered the naked branches of the trees.

Little snow could fall for days. It fell in tiny, light flakes driven by strong winds and brought big amounts of snow. It was the subtleness, the diminutiveness of these flakes that could deceive. Storms that carried them could start with a disinterested flurry slipping in from the lake. And at first, they too brought beauty, a softness. But when the snow didn't stop, the beauty was destroyed. As the snow rose, it began covering up, obscuring, hiding. The kind of change that came with little snow had been working in Mikey since he had begun attending Essex.

Early on, what Mikey was learning seemed to bring about a beauty in him, a softness. He was put in a speech class where he was taught formal conversation. He listened to tapes entitled “Verb Tense,” “Possession,” “Agreement.” He learned to release his vowels, to round them and pop them out of his mouth. It seemed unnatural to him at first, and he felt almost a little guilty, a little embarrassed when he practiced retaining his -
ing
's.

“Think of it as a game, like juggling eggs,” Mikey's speech teacher had said. “If you keep them all in the air, you'll dazzle the audience, but if you drop one, you'll make a mess.”

Mikey kept his teacher's analogy in mind, and practiced not dropping his -
ing'
s.

No one at school dropped them. None of the boys were constantly making messes of themselves. Mikey listened to them speak in class. He heard the joking in the cafeteria and the locker room. In these two places it seemed a boy could make a mess, a boy might be expected to make a mess. But the other boys never dropped their eggs. The two older black boys he had seen never dropped their eggs either, even when Mikey saw them speaking to each other.

Mikey wondered at them, he wondered about them. He wondered if they had ever spoken like him, and where it was they came from, and how it was they looked so comfortable. They spoke with no effort, it seemed, when he had to think about everything he said. Mikey wanted to sound like them, to look like them, to walk up and down the halls with the white boys and talk about skiing and sleep-overs. But both of these boys were in the seventh grade, while he was in the fourth, and they appeared each day with short, neatly brushed hair that had very little grease. And they showed a remarkable talent for juggling.

It was Mikey who dropped his eggs. It was Mikey who broke enough in one sentence to make himself an omelet.

“Practice” is what his speech teacher told him. “Practice at home when you speak with your family members.”

And that was what Mikey did. At the dinner table he would not say, “We be havin' fun in gym class,” but “I had fun in gym class today.”

Or, “When I was riding home today with Mrs. Cox, I saw a tanker out on the lake.”

Dorene would tease him. “Listen to him talk with all that proper talk. All the time now you be trying to talk like a white boy.”

But his parents would come to his defense. “Just cut that out,” one of them would say. “Ain't nothing wrong with the way he talk. That's the right way to talk. The rest of ya'll should try to talk that way too.”

Mikey's parents were proud of the way he spoke. He was smart and getting smarter, sounding smarter. They never corrected him when he made a mistake. They didn't know how. His parents could both see the learning was changing him, but so was the unlearning.

They did not know that during his second semester at Essex, Mikey had told a boy what his father said about monkeys.

Mikey was six when his father told him. They had been in the monkey house at the Buffalo Zoo. His mother had refused to go inside, and waited out front with Dorene and Mary.

Inside, his father said, “I'm telling you, don't pay no attention to they screaming. They smart, smart enough to talk. But they won't, 'cause if they do, they know white people going to make them work.”

“Is that true, Daddy?” Mikey asked.

“Yeah, it's true. My daddy told me so.”

Mikey had repeated the story to a boy named Scott in the school cafeteria. They had been studying evolution. He was careful to watch his diction, and censor the part about white people. He said only, “People will put them to work.”

But Scott laughed at him. He laughed so hard, he spat out a mouthful of butterscotch pudding.

“You're not serious, are you?” he asked. “Your dad isn't really stupid enough to believe that?”

“No,” Mikey said. “It's just a story he told me. Please don't tell anybody.”

“Why not? I think it's funny,” Scott said.

Despite Mikey's request, Scott repeated the story to the whole science class. Even the teacher laughed. “That's an amusing story, Michael. We all know primates have intelligence, but they have not evolved quite that far yet,” the teacher said.

Mikey was embarrassed, but he kept it covered. He kept it covered at home, too, when his father asked what he had studied at school that day. He told him they had studied evolution.

“Man didn't come from monkeys. Don't let them white people tell you that. If they want to believe they came from monkeys, fine. But don't you believe you came from them,” his father said.

“But we were studying Darwin, and he says—”

“Don't tell me what he say. I know what he say. I'm not stupid, you know. Sometime I think you don't believe nobody got sense but you. If you so smart, answer me this. If man came from them, why there still monkeys? And what monkeys turning into?”

“I don't know,” Mikey said.

“You think them monkeys in the zoo turning into men?”

“I don't know,” Mikey said. “No. No, they are not becoming men.”

His father said, “Damn right. They smarter than men. Laying up in zoos all over the world, got white men feeding them. Just because they in them cages don't mean they don't got no sense,” his father said, and he laughed.

And Mikey wanted to tell him. He wanted to say to his father, “You're not really stupid enough to believe that!” He wanted to take his father's laughter away. He was smarter than his father, and he was angered by his stupid, trick questions.

Mikey did not understand that his father was not laughing at him. He was laughing at the beauty, the simplicity of his fresh-faced cocoa boy.

“I know you got to get a education, and I want you to have one. But just don't believe everything white people tell you, son,” his father said. “With all you education you still going to be a black man in a white man's world. Sometime the only thing you going have is your beliefs.”

Mikey only half listened. His attention was focused not on what his father said, but the way he said it. He had dropped all of his eggs. There was no subject-verb agreement. His father was a stupid man who did not even know how to speak. He was a man with yolk dripping from his chin.

As Mikey continued with his education, he was more careful. He brought home little of what he learned in school. Just like all those years ago when he had seen the circus clown pulling the seemingly unending string of scarves from his mouth, Mikey had begun pulling silences from his mouth. His silences were not long and silken. They were perfect ovals, each popping out smoothly and unbroken. His parents did not know because he did not live in silence. He never stopped speaking, though he ceased talking.

Every school day Mikey was set free from a world adrift and sent into the other world. He did not have to search over open water for a place to rest his foot. He did not go out and bring back an olive leaf. He was supposed to have it with him every day before he left home, to have the waxen greenness firmly clamped between his teeth. Just as he had turned nine, he was made an ambassador and an example of what was good and right and white about black people. Mikey became afraid of doing the wrong thing, of saying the wrong thing.

Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon the summer before Mikey went to Essex. His father had said, “That's all a trick, son. That man ain't on no moon.”

When the subject came up in the school cafeteria that fall, Mikey did not say anything until he was addressed directly. He was concentrating on slicing a piece of rubbery baked chicken, fighting the urge to pick it up, when one of Scott's friends said his uncle was an aeronautics engineer who had worked on the
Apollo II
mission.

“Mikey, wouldn't it be neat to be an astronaut?” the boy asked.

Mikey swallowed a piece of the tasteless chicken. “Yes, it would be neat to go to the moon, or even another planet.”