Trinity, p.5
Trinity, page 5
The next day, the two of them stood in the Negro Baptist church that neither of them had ever attended. They listened to a woman neither of them knew, sing. The two brothers and the four members of that church who attended funerals as a habit were naked in the tambour of the woman’s voice. Unaccompanied, she sang up to the moldy rafters and made the particles of hair, skin, and earth rain down in dust. Her guttural call was something neither of them could discern—a life before Mississippi, a life harmonized by the continuity of brown boys fishing the African coast of the ocean, hunting in the sun and growing into men without the pain of whips. Their bellies stirred as her voice called in the words “amazing grace.” Her tone resonated the dormant coding in their DNA. In that moment, time was held open, a portal between the Congo and the Delta, and the two of them bowed their heads. Stimulated by the loss of their father, they cried for the loss of their mother—Lenard’s loss aligned with the stories in town that the near-white bitch stole from Genorette and fled, Bennie’s loss forcing the two hemispheres of his brain to float away from each other: murderous, child.
The marine and the tall young man sat solitary on the church pew, having each made a pact to remember: tobacco blunt, mule whip, grace notes whispered in the random mouths of a congregation. But promises are hard to remember when the desire to survive overrides any other intentions.
That night Bennie sleepwalked through his dreams to find Lottie. He climbed into the dark, moldy windows of Mr. Genorette’s tavern, set the mason jars of corn whiskey free from spiderwebs, wrapped the jarred medicine in his uniform shirts and stuffed it into the Marine-issued duffel bag along with her spirit that wrapped itself in the shirts, stowaway determined to see the imprisoned boy she nursed through to her version of grace.
After Old Deddy’s burial, Bennie boarded the bus to St. Louis with Lenard. Got them out of Mississippi, to make a better life for both of them.
“I’m gonna pay for you to go to college. You got a good head on your shoulders.”
“Where you gonna get the money for that?”
“Don’t worry about it. I got the GI money, and you more fit for schooling than I am,” Bennie assured, doubting the GI Bill promise.
When the bus pulled into the station in St. Louis, Bennie tried to keep his eyes normal sized, not wide and curious looking. He and Lenard walked along the crowds going against the flow, the sound of trains clacking over tracks, buses spewing fumes outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Lenard shouted, “Hello!” His voice bounced off marble floors and walls, and Bennie glared at his grinning face the way Old Deddy might: “Fool, hush!”
When the two of them emerged into the electric lights of the place, Bennie’s chest opened up; large columns, something about the way they supported the massive arched ceiling, and he smelled the dry factory air that had wafted out of the package James sent to Mississippi for Bennie’s eighteenth birthday. The top of his head tingled with hopefulness in the spot that was already going slightly thin. He took the smell of the bus fumes into his lungs, and he and Lenard walked out into the rainy city, he in uniform, Lenard in a light trench coat with sleeves just short enough to show he was not yet a man, though he was Bennie’s height.
There were Negroes and whites in overcoats, and Bennie wondered, as he had once wondered about James, how they could afford such things, and he did something he hadn’t done since he was a little boy. He giggled, because he knew he had survived what seemed unsurvivable.
The first chunk of what Bennie saved from his military pay was spent to set the two of them up in a little apartment above Sara Lou’s, the Negro-woman-owned fried-shrimp and french-fry place. Picnic tables in the backyard, where music wafted up from a hi-fi along with joyful sounds of the good life of other folks who had come up from the South, who worked the factory by day and stopped by for their meal and some good conversation with community. That day, the two of them climbed the steep wooden steps that led to their apartment, and Sara herself yelled back at their smiling, just-up-from-Mississippi faces, “Y’all come back down here for ya first meal free on ya landlord.”
“Yes, ma’am,” and they hurried to pack their things away in the closets with peeling wallpaper that promised to nurture them both.
Bennie tucked the stowaway spirit and the mason jars of whiskey in the chest of drawers, but first he took a sip to soothe his nerves and poured some in his flask before heading out to find James, who it seemed everybody on the west side knew. Bennie took another sip to count out the remainder of his money, tucked a roll of bills for Lenard’s tuition at Stowe Teachers College. When he counted what was left, he figured with two months’ rent up front he’d have enough for another month but would need a job. He took another sip that made him more at ease about the money and another to numb the emotions of going out to visit the brother who had left him behind years ago.
With the orange dust of Mississippi coating their worn leather shoes, they entered James’s tavern to the disappointment that shone in his eyes—fear that his two Mississippi kin had traversed the mountains and crossed the river into the calm of his life, bringing with them the memory of his own days of being called nigger rather than sir, of the whippings he escaped from the man who he held no remorse for and had spent years undoing any resemblance to. The sight of their boyhood eyes set into the faces of men brought back memories of his own sinful hands turned praying hands.
Lottie was singing one morning. She and James, thirteen years old and rivaling like jealous siblings, both hating and wanting Old Deddy’s attention. Lottie scrubbed up and down on the washboard, her song offering that part of her soul that could find happiness wherever it abided—in the smell of spring on a sunny morning because, though the trees were in bloom, it was still crisp and chilly. James watched her from the back porch door, annoyed at how loud she was.
Stitch them quilt squares in the row
Drop the whipstitch, drop the hoe
Turn ’round Suzy, don’t ya know
I ain’t got no chains no mo
Gonna take ya by the hand
Drop that stitch, turn back the land
When the man say round and round
I’m gone spin you out of town
James stood there with the old dirty shirt he wore every day to do the field work, his hair cut off crooked, but as black and curly as Lottie’s. He spit off the porch, half-smiling, half-mean, hoping to show himself more man than boy. “What you singin. Old Deddy don’t like no singin. Don’t let him get back for his breakfast after his first plowin and find you ain’t got no biscuits on the table and still washin on these clothes and singin.”
She rolled her eyes and sang the next verse to let him know he don’t tell her what to do. “I’m the woman of the house!” and she turned her back to him.
Round and round and back again
Suzy spin around the mens
When they holler dosey doe
Don’t you pay no mind no mo
She shot him a look like the bull when he was sick of being prodded, and James turned back around to the house and came back with his hand in a fist. He walked up to the washtub, frost coming from his breath, and said, just like Old Deddy, “Heifer, watch yo damn mouth!” And instead of smacking her, he threw a hand full of the biscuit flour in her face and made himself laugh, because it was better than admitting that some part of himself startled at the reality of Old Deddy’s ways showing up in his hands. It was the first time he wanted to run away but didn’t know where to go except around and around in his own mind. He coughed in the cloud of flour, straightened himself up, and ran off to help Old Deddy in the field. “Have the damn biscuits done when we get back.”
She found her own ways to set James straight. Sometimes she’d put her cigarette in the chair where he was about to sit, then apologize when he burned his ass. It stayed like that for years, until the fistfight when the two of them were just older than eighteen.
The old preacher came to talk to James while Lottie and her Boy Bennie sat on the porch. It was late on a Sunday after church, and he made the rounds to men like James, who didn’t attend but clearly sought salvation. The preacher stood there with one raggedy shoe up on the porch, the other planted firmly on the ground, like a swamp egret fishing for tadpoles. With the Bible in his hand, he told James, “God say man is the ruler, but don’t never hit no woman.”
Lottie pretended to ignore him and touched the little bulge of her pregnant belly under her dress. She threatened to expose her breast as she snatched at Bennie with the other hand. Under her breath she mumbled, “Bible say one thing, but the men of my house got they own crooked way of dealin with women.”
Then she said out loud, shooting James a sideways look, “You cain’t spect people to look up to you just cause you read the Bible and don’t never hit no woman.” Lottie was good at having the last word, of saying only what needed to be said, but just enough to give the men something to think about for days to come.
One night, James, who was as big as a house now, decided to go to the swamp-bottom tavern that Old Deddy wouldn’t never let Lottie go to.
That night, she put Bennie down after she cut his hair. She walked ten paces behind James. Every time he stopped to see if he was just hearing his own feet crunching on the ground in the dark or if somebody was following him, she stopped and hid behind a tree.
The yellow lights hung on the deck. The springtime frogs sang, and the moss hung in the trees. It was the best music Lottie had ever heard, the piano and the washtub bass, a man playing the harmonica. Dressed in a smock dress that resembled a potato sack, she followed James right into the place. Everyone looked at the country barefoot pregnant woman and let out a cackle right along with the piano man, who struck up the laughter by playing faster.
Lottie didn’t care. She took the invitation of the music to be free and cut up like she hadn’t done since she was a girl and her Papa would say, “May, don’t let the girl dance like that, talk so much like that, runs these boys like she the boss.”
Lottie stomped up the good-time blues, and James came to the edge of the circle to see who was making such a spectacle. He grabbed hold of her arm. “What the hell you doin! Old Deddy gonna kill yo ass. Then he gonna kill my ass. Get outta here!” And he pushed her.
She yelled back, “Preacher told you don’t never hit no woman!” And she knew she had the right-a-way, and she balled up her high-yellow fist and punched him. The music stopped, because damned if he didn’t punch her back.
That was the first time she’d ever seen Mr. Genorette. She heard his footsteps first, and the crowd parted like Moses was coming down from the mountain with the Word. She and James stood there looking like they were children cut from the same cloth, and Mr. Genorette looking like a cleaned-up young Old Deddy. He didn’t stagger his movements when he walloped James on the back, knocking him to the floor. Then Mr. Genorette kicked him in the good pants seat of his good overalls, and the whole place laughed up to the rafters like they were watching a traveling buffoonery show, and that was that.
Mr. Generotte told Lottie, “You can come around here any time, honey, and I’ll make sure you treated right.” He said to James, “Tell ya Deddy, and I’ll kill ya ass,” which was the same as saying, “I’m the man of this house and yo house.”
The next morning, James packed up his Bible and shirts and overalls and was gone to St. Louis. Little Bennie looked at him as if somebody stole food right out of his mouth on his hungriest day. James looked back at Bennie, paused at the last sight of the round head of his baby brother, and put both booted feet out the window.
Lenard came into the light off Delmar Avenue with the whites of his eyes still white, seeking, and James imprinted the energies of his best efforts onto the one he saw first. Bennie stumbled in behind Lenard with his eyes yellowed, the way that the liver and kidneys stop up and hold the worst of the body’s truths. Yellowed, like Old Deddy’s eyes that had stayed anonymous in James’s memory until Bennie, looking more like Old Deddy than Lenard, crossed into James’s life like an unwelcome ghost.
Tuesday evening was James’s night off. He had planned to go to prayer meeting, pray on it, and have a plan for how he was going to handle the kin who would surely cross the threshold any day now and bring with them the chaos of Mississippi.
James wiped the bar down, poured a shot of bourbon into Bennie’s outstretched shot glass with the other hand, and did not allow emotions to enter in the place where he stood the owner of his life. James held the movement in the pit of his belly still at the memory of a sad-faced little brother and the thought of the hard-dead face of the father who was supposed to protect him, provide for him, but instead set him to craft survival out of a life of disciplined emotions.
“The first order of business is church.” Bennie had already taken to a flask in his pocket and drained the thing as he and Lenard walked up Delmar from Union Station to catch the bus that let them out at the door of Lee’s Wagon Wheel Tavern. Bennie had already turned up the one shot of bourbon offered him and filled the glass twice on his own. He smirked and then laughed out of sync with what his older brother said. His laughter sent a light spray of bourbon across the bar, and Lenard let out a stressed giggle.
“Quit being ignorant.” James had little patience for such country behavior and yelled for the barmaid, “Mary, fill the ice cooler. Yeah?” Every sentence ended in “Yeah,” and there was no guttural twist of a Mississippi accent in his voice. James was far removed from the fields, no dirt beneath his nails. He had slipped away from Mississippi and slipped through the eye of the needle of war.
Bennie slapped the bar in laughter that did not reflect the stress of their reunion or the maturity of his six-foot height and 180 pounds, his slender but muscular build. He was on his fourth bourbon when James took his glass from the bar and dropped it in the sudsy water.
“You’re not drinking any more in here today, but you two are welcome to help out.” Lenard straightened himself to follow the brother who was a stranger yet a familiar, longed-for reflection of his own emerging manhood.
The smells of the truck fumes backing up in the alley sent James, with Lenard following, beyond the dark swinging doors to the kitchen, and they emerged each carrying a box of Smirnoff bottles.
“I’m here for the women,” Bennie slurred and slapped the top of the box Lenard held.
“Man, stop!” Lenard stumbled and laughed as if they were still boys tossing mud wads at each other down at the pond.
Then, like a little boy realizing he had to pee, Bennie slurred, “Let me hit the head, man.”
When Bennie disappeared to the toilet, James put down the last box and pointed Lenard to a table. Lenard smiled and wiped his nose, “Can I have a drink, too?”—still in the clowning mood set by Bennie.
James looked at him stern. “Sit down, man.”
He pulled two chairs away from a table; the scooting sound brought Lenard into the mood of James’s urgency. “Look, man. Stop following Bennie’s lead. Where he’s at, he’s got to pull himself out of that hell after war, but you ain’t got to go to hell with him.” James repeated what the old preacher tried to teach him in the days before he left Mississippi with broken Bible quotes and front-porch wisdom: “Some men can turn themselves around when their life is shit, and some just cain’t.”
Lenard’s eyes flattened out from smiling. James leaned over and put his hand on Lenard’s shoulder to pull his brother out toward the light, though all around them was the dimness in the cave of the tavern. “Come with me to prayer meeting.” This was James’s solution for which one to save, and how.
That night James scolded Lenard, “Just read the words, man.” He pointed his thick finger in the hymnal for Lenard. Had told him on the way there not to write himself off as ignorant but to hold his eyes toward the best ways of entrepreneurship, education, and religion, and away from his brother who was still sitting at the bar while the two of them were at James’s regular Tuesday night prayer meeting. Lenard asked, “What about Bennie? Aren’t we gonna wait for him?”
“No, he’s at where he’s at.”
James had arrived in St. Louis eighteen years ahead of his brothers, in late spring 1935, after a long bus ride that took him through towns where he hoped to remain invisible on the back of the bus. It was a ride that offered a day of mountain passes where the road beneath the bus was not visible. He could see only the edge and the beautiful, deadly fall to the treetops in the valley below. Once they reached the flat expanse of Illinois, excitement and fear caused him to press his face to the smudged window. It didn’t matter that there was no more orange earth, that the smell of oil and the clanking of hammering and the sight of industrial cranes took away the memory of long-legged white Mississippi swamp cranes. He didn’t pay any of that any mind. He pinched his chin, thinking how he was ready to bring it, the way Bessie Smith said bring it, beg it, borrow it, steal it. When he got to Union Station, he had already listened to conversations on the back of the bus about where to get a good tripe sandwich. “Is that right, man? Can I come with y’all to get a bite and figure myself for a place to stay?”
“Sho nuf, man, but first thing you are going to have to do is get rid of that country talking from your gut and talk from the front of your mouth.” They giggled and said, “Man, man, you are going to love it up here.”
He ended up at the same place where the Black voices on the bus later sent Lenard and Bennie, to Sara Lou’s. Sara Lou’s mama, Big Sara, first owned the place. She had kicked the father out on his ass, opened up the three-family flat as a rooming house, and was cooking up a storm with little Sara Lou old enough to help fry and fetch. Her naps were braided and pinned down, stockings pulled up to keep her ten-year-old long legs from getting cold every time she climbed the back stairs, knocked, and sat a hot meal plate at a boarder’s door. James was one of those boarders, and he took Big Sara’s advice to go down to old Mr. Drake, who owned the best Black-folk tavern, for a job, then go down to the church on Sunday with everybody else to keep his soul straight with God and meet all the other folk who had come up from Mississippi.
