Ira's father was built like a
stump, his chest streaked with fine black hair. He enjoyed stripping to
the waist and working alongside his Negroes to demonstrate he was their
equal if not superior at any physical task, heaving sacks of sweet
potatoes into a wagon, prizing a cypress tree out of clay, splitting
firewood that cracked like a rifle shot.
One winter Ira's mother
contracted pneumonia. The fever and deliriums passed but the cough
never left her lungs and the handkerchief she often kept balled in her
fist was sometimes freckled with blood. When she leaned down to kiss
her son's head, her breath made the skin of his face tighten against
the bone.
His father moved out of the
main bedroom and slept on a leather
sofa in
the
library.
Unlike some of his male
neighbors, he did not visit
the
slave
quarters at
night.
He didn't have to. As Ira learned
at age ten, his father had another life in Baton Rouge.
Ira's father left him to play
in the yard of a friend while he rode a livery horse down into the
bottoms, an area of Baton Rouge that was still undrained, the streets
lined with saloons and tanneries. But Ira had always been allowed to go
anywhere his father went, and he slipped out of the yard and followed
his father to a cottage, the only one on the street that was painted
white and had ventilated green shutters on the windows and a vegetable
garden in the side yard.
The front door was closed,
even though the weather was warm. Hanging baskets of flowers and ferns
swayed from the eaves of the gallery, creaking in the wind, their
colors riffling in the shade. Ira sat on the top step and watched the
paddle-wheelers and scows on the river and the Irish boat hands from
New Orleans unloading stacks of cowhides that they dumped into smoking
vats behind the tanneries. He felt himself dozing off, then he heard
his father's voice and the laughter of a woman inside the cottage.
He rose from the step and
walked into the side yard where the shutters of a window were opened
behind a stand of banana trees. He pushed aside the banana leaves and
propped a wood box against the side of the cottage and pulled himself
up to eye level on the windowsill, expecting to play a joke on his
father and see his father's face light with surprise and goodwill.
Instead, he looked upon the
naked, clay-colored back of a woman whose knees were splayed across his
father's loins. Her head reared back and her mouth opened silently,
then a sound broke from her lips that he had never heard a woman make
before. She blew out her breath, as though the room had grown cold,
bending down toward his father now, her knees and thighs clenching him
as if she was mounted on a horse. Her back shuddered again and her
hands touched his father's face with a tenderness and intimacy that
somehow seemed stolen from his mother and misused by another.
Ira's thoughts made no sense
and were like shards of glass in his head.
Then the box broke under his
feet and he was left hanging from the sill, the woman's eyes fastening
on his now, his father's uplifted face popping with sweat like
pinpoints of dew on a pumpkin.
Ira fell into the
banana
sta;ks
and ran through the yard,
dirty and hot and itching with
ants, his head ringing as though someone had clapped him on both ears.
A moment later his father
appeared on the gallery, barefoot, his shirt hanging outside his pants.
"Sit down with me, son," his
father said.
"No," Ira said.
His father walked down the
steps, his silhouette blocking out the sun. He touched Ira under each
eye with his thumb. "There's nothing to cry about," he said.
"Who is
she?" Ira said.
"A woman I see sometimes." He
took his son's hand and led him back up to the gallery. They sat
together on a swing that was suspended on chains from an overhead beam.
It was spring and the willows and cypresses along the riverbanks were
filled with wind and green with new leaf.
"Your mother has the
consumption. That means we can't have the normal life of a husband and
wife. I just hope God and you both forgive my weakness," his father
said.
"She's a nigger. She was
sitting on top of you," the boy said. His father had been stroking his
head. But now he took his hand away and looked at the river and a hawk
that hung motionlessly in the wind above the trees.
"Will you be telling your
mother about this?" he asked.
"I hate you," Ira said.
"You tear my
heart out, son."
"I hate you. I hate you.
I hate you," Ira said.
Then he was running out of the
yard and down the street in his short pants, running through mud
puddles, past the grinning faces of whores and teamsters and drunk
Irishmen, his legs and face splattered with water that was black and
oily and smelled like sewage and felt like leeches on his skin.
BACK at Angola Plantation, Ira
refused to eat, fought with his British schoolmaster, and attacked a
mulatto dressmaker at the dirt crossroads in front of the plantation
store.
She was a statuesque,
coffee-colored woman who wore petticoats and carried a parasol. She had
been waiting for a carriage, fanning herself, her chin pointed upward,
when Ira had gathered up a handful of rocks, sharp ones, and began
pelting her in the back.
The store clerk had to pick
him up like a sack of meal and carry him across the pommel of his
saddle to Ira's house.
His mother sat with him in the
kitchen, her eyes and cheeks bright with the fever that never left her
body. The light was failing outside, the clouds like purple smoke above
the bluffs on the river. Ira could hear the pendulum swinging on the
clock in the dining room, the soft chimes echoing off the walls.
"What frightens you so?" his
mother said, stroking his head.
"I'm not afraid of anything,"
he replied.
"Something happened in Baton
Rouge, didn't it? Something you're trying to hide from your mother."
He clenched his hands in his
lap and looked at the floor.
"Is that why you hit the
sewing woman with rocks? A well-dressed mulatto woman?" she said.
He scraped a scab on his hand
with his thumbnail. His mother lifted his chin with her finger. Her
black hair was pulled back like wire against her scalp, her dark eyes
burning.
"You have my looks and my
skin. If you don't inherit my family's bad lungs, you'll always be
young," she said.
"He let her sit on him. He put
her"
"What?"
his mother
said, her face contorting.
"He had her breast in his
mouth. They were naked. On a bed in Nigger Town."
"Get control of yourself. Now,
start over. You can trust me, Ira. But you have to tell me the truth."
She made him go through every
detail, describing the woman, the positions on the bed, the words his
father had spoken to him outside the cottage.
"What is her name?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said,
shaking his head.
"You must know. He must have
used her name."
But Ira couldn't speak now.
His face was hot, his eyes swimming with tears, his voice hiccuping in
his throat. His mother rose from her chair and looked for a long time
out the window. Ira's father was in the garden, snipping roses, placing
them in a bucket of water. He did not see his wife watching him.
Then he glanced up at the window and waved.
She turned back toward her son.
"You must never tell anyone
about this," she said.
"Is Papa going to know I told?"
"You didn't tell me anything,
Ira. This didn't happen," she said.
She walked close to him and
pulled his face into the folds of her dress and rubbed the top of his
head with both hands. He could smell an odor like camphor and animal
musk in her clothes. He put his arms around her thighs and buried his
face against her stomach.
"When you were a baby I bathed
you every morning and kissed you all over. I kissed your hands and your
little feet and your bottom and your little private places. You'll
always be my little man. You're my good little man, aren't you?" she
said.
"Yes," he replied.
She released him and, with no
expression on her face, walked out of the room. For reasons he could
not understand he felt a sense of numbness, violation, shame and
desertion, all at the same time. It was a feeling that would come
aborning in his dreams the rest of his life.
FOR his birthday a week later,
his father had the cook bake a strawberry cake and fry a dinner basket
of chicken and convinced Ira's mother to join the two of them and an
elderly black body servant named Uncle Royal for a picnic on the
southern end of their property, three miles down the river.
His father chose this
particular spot because it had been the site of a Spanish military
garrison, supposedly overrun and massacred by Atakapa Indians in the
eighteenth century, and as a boy Ira's father had played there and dug
up the rusted shell of a Spanish helmet and a horseman's spur with an
enormous spiked rowel on it.
They spread a blanket in a
glade and set fishing lines in the river, and for a birthday present
his father gave him a windup merry-go-round with hand-carved wooden
horses on it that rotated in a circle while a musical cylinder played
inside the base.
The river was yellow from the
spring rains, thick and choked with mud, swirling with uprooted trees
that floated southward toward New Orleans. The wind was drowsy and
warm, the glade dotted with buttercups and bluebonnets and Indian
paintbrush, and for a while Ira forgot his father's infidelity and the
brooding
anger
in
his
mother
eyes
and the blood-spotted
handkerchief that stayed balled in the palm of her hand.
The body servant, Uncle Royal,
wore a tattered black coat, a white shirt, a pair of purple pants and
looked like he was made of sticks. He was fascinated by the windup
merry-go-round that rested in the center of the blanket, next to the
cake.
"Where something like that
come from, Master Jamison?" he asked.
"All the way from England,
across the big pond," Ira's father said.
"Lord, what my gran'child
would give to play with something like that," Uncle Royal said.
"I tell you what, Royal, the
storekeeper in Baton Rouge has another one just like it. On my next
trip there, I'll buy it for you as an early Christmas present," Ira's
father said.
"You'll do that, suh?" Uncle
Royal said.
"You bet I will, old-timer,"
Ira's father said.
Ira never admired his father
more.
He and his parents ate the
chicken and strawberry cake on the blanket while Uncle Royal fished,
then Ira's father decided he would entertain his wife and son by
climbing on a pyramid of pine logs that were stacked and penned with
stobs on a grassy shelf six feet above the shallows.
He walked up and down on the
crest of the logs, perhaps twenty feet above the glade, his arms
outstretched for balance, grinning idiotically.
"Watch this!" he called. Then
he flipped up on his hands and held his feet straight up in the air,
his muscular body quivering with tension.
The ground was soft and moist
from a week's rain. A stob on the far side of the logs bent backward
against the additional weight on the pile, then one log bounced down
from the top, followed by another. Ira's father flipped back on his
feet and balanced himself, smiling, looking about, waiting for the rush
of blood to leave his head. Suddenly the entire pile collapsed and
rumbled downward into the river, taking Ira's father with it.
Ira and his mother and Uncle
Royal rushed to the edge of the bluff and stared down at the mudflat.
Ira's father lay pinioned under a half
dozen
crisscrossed
logs, his legs in
the
water,
his face white, his powerful arms
trying to push away the weight that was crushing the air from his lungs.
Ira and Uncle Royal climbed
down from the embankment and pushed and lifted and tugged on the logs
that held his father, but to no avail.
"Go to the house. Come back
with a team and chains," Ira's father said.
"I got to get your head up out
of the water, Master," Uncle Royal said.
"I think my back's broken. You
have to get help," Ira's father said.
"You gonna be all right,
suh?"
Uncle Royal asked.
"Don't be long," Ira's
father replied.
Ira watched Uncle Royal climb
back up the embankment, the clay shaling over his bare ankles.
"Come on, son," his mother
said, reaching her hand down to Ira. Her eyes seemed to avoid both him
and his father.
"I'm staying," he
replied.
"No, you can't be out here by
yourself," she said.
"Then you or Uncle Royal
stay," he said.