David (19 page)

That I'd just discovered I was soon to be homeless wasn't what was on my mind. “You're not going to tell the police?” I said.

“Out of respect for your mother, and because I still hold out hope that you will one day conquer your drug lust and be the man I know you can be, I see no reason for your future to be clouded by a criminal record. Of course, you understand that there is no question of your finding support for your education, financial or otherwise, from these quarters. If, however, in, say, a year's time, you can convincingly demonstrate that you have freed yourself from the clutches of this sickness that has claimed your will and—”

I laughed.

The lack of sleep; my mother's death; the future behind bars I'd been forced to envision for myself: for whatever reason—I laughed. Which only further confirmed the Reverend King's belief that I was a hopeless morphine addict. In spite of which, “I'm not a drug fiend,” I said.

The Reverend King straightened in his chair, linked his fingers at desk level again. “I am not going to refute your lies, David. You were seen purchasing morphine in Chatham. You were seen returning with morphine to Buxton.”

“I bought it, yes, but—”

“But what? But you did not plan to use it? But it was for someone else, perhaps? For the sake of your mother's soul and the merciful Lord who rescued her from her long, long suffering, stop your lying, David. Can't you see what this filth has done to you, how it has rotted away your very mind and conscience?”

“You're wrong.”

“For the love of Christ, David, stop your lying.”

“You're wrong,” I said. He was wrong. The Reverend King was wrong.

*

My mother was buried in the cemetery in Buxton the same day that Lee surrendered to Grant. I mourned the one and celebrated the other by riding into Chatham and getting too drunk to ride back. There wasn't any point in pretending to be pious anymore anyway. If I was honest, I'd be guilty of murder. If I lied, I'd be excommunicated from Buxton and blocked from going to university.

The Reverend King was fond of quoting,
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free
.

That was one more thing he was wrong about.

*

As promised, the Elgin Association paid me in cash for my mother's house and decided to allow me two weeks to vacate, but I didn't need them, put what little I wanted to keep of my mother's belongings in storage at George's house and took a room at the Griffin House in Chatham, a new hotel where Negroes were welcome. George's father returned to Mississippi almost as soon as the armistice was announced, so George had plenty of extra room. Now that the war was over, the exodus immediately commenced the other way, north to south, back to familiar seasons and forgone friends and family members. At the first light of the false dawn that was Reconstruction, even free-born, Elgin-educated Negroes were abandoning Buxton, hurrying to take up positions as much-needed teachers, ministers, doctors, and even politicians in the reshuffled Southern states.

Mr. Rapier, one of the Reverend King's first six graduates, returned to Alabama after the war and became its first coloured congressman. He and I used to have contests over who could recite from memory more lines from
The Aeneid
. Because I won more often than I lost, he didn't tell the Reverend King when, later, I nagged him into bringing me back a copy of Lucretius's
On the Nature of the Universe
from Toronto, where he was attending Knox College, where everyone knew that all of the smartest boys from Buxton went on to study. Almost all of the smartest boys.

Making his steady rise to the top of the pile at the potash factory, George had decided to stay behind in Buxton. George was like me: might have been born in the South but became himself in the North, a field of white forever a field of snowflakes, not cotton balls. All of Buxton turned out for my mother's funeral, but George's words were the only ones I heard.

A tide of warm hands and moist cheeks reminded me that my mother was going to a better place, that no one who knew her would ever forget her, that Jesus had called her home. The Reverend King shook my hand and told me my mother was a good woman. Back at Clayton House, where the reception was held, George waited until all the others had paid their respects and were busy filling their plates with the cold buffet lunch that the women of Elgin had prepared.

“You should eat something,” he said.

“If I was hungry, I would.”

In fact, in spite of myself, I was. I'd discovered that nothing cut through a whiskey hangover like a cold roast beef sandwich dressed with plenty of horseradish, but at the moment, doing what was good for me seemed wrong. The throb in my temples and the churn in my stomach, on the other hand, felt absolutely right. George looked at the loaded-down
plate in his hand like a thief caught with his fingers in the till.

“It should get eaten, though,” I said. “A lot of people went to a lot of trouble putting it all together.”

George nodded, pushed around his ham with his fork. I watched Mr. Freeman bending over to hear better what Mrs. Hampton, the Kings' nearest neighbour, was saying to him from her chair. Mrs. Hampton had been “old lady Hampton” since we were boys. Now we were men, and she was still old lady Hampton.

“When is your father leaving?” I said.

“Soon. As soon as he hears from his people down there that they're ready for him.”

“If they're his people, they're your people too, aren't they?”

George took a bite of his ham. “I suppose.”

Now that the service was over and the body was in the ground and everyone was together inside eating and chatting, if one hadn't known what had been going on that morning, the spirited conversations taking place throughout Clayton House might have seemed like a communal lunch intended to celebrate the imminent end of the war. And if more people were talking about the death of slavery than that of my mother, who could blame them? The Confederacy's demise meant, finally, freedom for all our people. My mother's death didn't mean anything.

“Are you going to stay on in your mother's house?” George said.

He knew I wasn't. I knew he knew. I told him no anyway, that I'd already sold it back to the Settlement. The Reverend King had assured me that my expulsion was no one's concern but his, mine, and God's, and that as far as the villagers knew I was simply making a fresh start after my mother's death. George knew better. Even without anyone telling him what had happened, he knew better.

“Where are you going to go?” he said. He used his fork to drag his green beans from one side of his plate to the other.

“I don't know.”

He divided his beans into two, then three, then four separate piles. “I suppose you can go anywhere you want now. Do anything you want.”

It took me a moment to understand what he meant. “I'm free now,” I said.

George stabbed a green bean and stuck it in his mouth. “We're all free now.”

I liked living in Chatham.

I liked the crowded shops and the congested streets in the daytime. I liked the loud saloons at night. I liked waiting out a hangover sitting in the shade on the bank of the Thames watching the steamboats glide by in the afternoon. I liked it that no one knew who I was and that I wasn't expected to know who anyone else was. I even liked the polite insolence that frequently met my questions, or sometimes just my face. Partly, I knew, the result of having a black face, but partly also the result simply of mixing among strangers, of living in a city whose citizens weren't united by a proud historical pedigree or a higher moral purpose, of being just one of many thousands of people whose primary societal obligation was to try to not bother anyone else too much.

My first night at Griffin House, once I'd unpacked my clothes and my books, I decided to go for a walk. The porter, a Negro from Detroit not much older than me, told me the name and address of a saloon I should visit if I liked good whiskey and pretty women. After walking for over an hour in the after-dinner dusk, not minding terribly that I wasn't sure where I was or where I was going, I stopped in front of a house where an old white man in a rocking chair was sitting on his porch. It wasn't near being warm yet, but people were
beginning to reappear, slowly recovering from winter's long assault.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I'm looking for Eugenie Street.”

The man didn't bother to stop rocking. “It's a free country,” he said.

I kept going, couldn't help laughing. That sonofabitch, you know, he wasn't wrong.

*

I wasn't particular about how I kept myself in cheap whiskey and expensive mail-order books. Not at first, anyway. I made bricks at the James Cornhill Brick Yards, flour at the Kent Mills, barrels and casks at the Chatham Pump, Stave and Barrel Factory, candies and biscuits at Chatham Confectionery Works. The only thing I wouldn't do was anything agricultural, not so much a reasoned decision as a spiritual injunction. No matter that no omnipotent overseer reigned over the fields anymore, the picking of crops was somebody else's job as of the day the South surrendered, my people having spent more than their fair share of time sowing the soil for someone else's reaping. The closest I came to bringing in a harvest was the six months I worked at the Thames Cigar Company. The Turko-Russian War was every newspaper's number one news story, and the owner of TCC decided to capitalize on the public's interest by renaming several of his products after the war's most famous figures. I helped manufacture the Czar, the Sultan, the Ali, the Suliman, and the Iron King. “Be a King, Smoke an Iron King,” the advertisement in the
Chatham Planet
said. There must have been a lot of men who secretly imagined they were kings—the Iron King was our most popular brand by far.

Most factories wouldn't hire Negroes, but because I could spell and count and compose a proper telegram to suppliers,
I generally worked at white-owned businesses. If they'd had their preference, of course, a white man would have been in my place, but because few white men who could spell and count and compose a proper telegram wanted a filthy, exhausting, tedious factory job, an exception could be made in my case. Once I'd demonstrated my usefulness, it wasn't unusual for the man who'd hired me to inform me, usually come payday, that he was pleased I'd managed to fit in as well as I had. Handing me my pay packet, “You're a credit to your people, David, a real example of what they can accomplish if they put their minds to it. I'm just glad I was able to offer you a helping hand when I did.” I'd take the money and remind myself that this fucking fool had never read Plato's dialogues or even a single aphorism of Lichtenberg's and that I was the superior, not to mention happier, human being because I had. You find your worldly compensations where you can, and self-righteous condescension is in no way the least satisfying.

I could have gotten a job at a Negro-owned business. There were restaurants, grocery stores, barbershops, even shoe stores that sold exclusively to Chatham's darker-skinned citizens. But white-run businesses were bigger and paid better. And to be honest, working alongside whites turned out to be easier than the time I spent at the all-Negro mills and warehouses on the Boyd Block, where the bulk of the coloured businesses were located. At worst, whites would ignore you, leave you alone with your lunch, never call you by your name, only by “Hey.” Eventually, though, in tiring time, just one more overworked, underpaid
Us. Us
as in
Us
and
Them
. No matter where you ended up working or whom you ended up working with and for, always
Us
and
Them
.

Negroes didn't trust me. A white man might ignore you, might not even acknowledge you as a fellow man, but even if I didn't want allies when I worked among my own kind, only to do my job and collect my pay, I didn't want to be mistaken
for a spy. Yet every time I preferred a book as a lunchtime companion, every time I didn't want to wager that week's pay at a Friday night dice game, every time I said “isn't” instead of “ain't,” “you” instead of “youse,” my skin turned another degree paler. I was invisible to the white man, I was a white man to the coloured man. I chose to be a ghost instead of a devil.

I did my job and made my pay and went my own way. When a better-paying job became available, I took it. When my rooming-house room became too small for my growing library, I moved. Every night, I read myself to sleep, except for Saturday night, when I got drunk at a saloon and let whiskey and a strange woman put me to sleep in a bed not my own. My mother was dead, I might as well have been dead to everyone in Buxton, and if I died in my room, the only reason anyone would care would be because of the smell my corpse made.

One Saturday night, instead of going to a whore after the saloons closed, I went to a man on Lacroix Street who gave tattoos, mostly to sailors stopping off in Chatham during their travels down the Thames.

“What do you want it to say?” the man said, dabbing alcohol along my forearm, preparing my flesh for his instrument.

For the past several weeks I'd been reading
Paradise Lost
when I wasn't selling my time to the biscuit factory, surprised but pleased to learn that Satan had most of the best lines. Alone late one night in my small, under-heated rooming-house room—motherless, friendless, my back still sore from a long day's heavy lifting—
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven
, I read.

“Non Serviam,”
I said.

The man stopped rubbing, looked at me. “You better write it down.”

When he was done, there were ten raised letters stencilled across my right forearm, a long scar of language that reminded me of George's father's scars. Except that my scar was self-inflicted. And my scar meant that I was free.