Song of Solomon

Chapter 3

Life improved for Milkman enormously after he began working for Macon. Contrary to what his father hoped, there was more time to visit the wine house. Running errands for Macon’s rent houses gave him leave to be in Southside and get to know the people Guitar knew so well. Milkman was young and he was friendly—just the opposite of his father—and the tenants felt at ease enough with him to tease him, feed him, confide in him. But it was hard to see much of Guitar. Saturdays were the only days he was certain to find him. If Milkman got up early enough on Saturday morning, he could catch his friend before Guitar went roaming the streets and before he himself had to help Macon collect rents. But there were days in the week when they agreed to skip school and hang out, and on one of those days Guitar took him to Feather’s pool hall on Tenth Street, right in the middle of the Blood Bank area.

It was eleven o’clock in the morning when Guitar pushed open the door and shouted, “Hey, Feather! Give us a couple of Red Caps.”

Feather, a short squat man with sparse but curly hair, looked up at Guitar, then at Milkman, and frowned.

“Get him out of here.”

Guitar stopped short and followed the little man’s gaze to Milkman’s face and back again. The half-dozen men there playing pool turned around at the sound of Feather’s voice. Three of them were air force pilots, part of the 332nd Fighter Group. Their beautiful hats and gorgeous leather jackets were carefully arranged on chairs. Their hair was cut close to the skull; their shirt cuffs were turned neatly back on their forearms; their white scarves hung in snowy rectangles from their hip pockets. Silver chains glistened at their necks and they looked faintly amused as they worked chalk into the tips of their cues.

Guitar’s face shone with embarrassment. “He’s with me,” he said.

“I said get him outta here.”

“Come on, Feather, he’s my friend.”

“He’s Macon Dead’s boy, ain’t he?”

“So what”

“So get him outta here.”

“He can’t help who his daddy is.” Guitar had his voice under control.

“Neither can I. Out.”

“What his daddy do to you?”

“Nothing yet. That’s why I want him outta here.”

“He ain’t like his daddy.”

“He ain’t got to be like him—from him is enough.”

“I’ll be responsible for—”

“Stop messing with me, Guitar. Get him out. He ain’t old enough to have wet dreams.”

The pilots laughed and a man in a gray straw hat with a white band said, “Aw, let the boy stay, Feather.”

“You shut your mouth. I’m running this.”

“What harm can he do? A twelve-year-old kid.” He smiled at Milkman, who stopped himself from saying, No, thirteen.

“But it ain’t your problem, is it?” asked Feather. “His daddy ain’t your landlord, is he, and you ain’t got no operating license to hang on to either. You ain’t got nothing….”

Feather turned on the man with the white hatband the same acid manner he’d used with the boys. Guitar took the opportunity offered by Feather’s new target to shoot his hand out like a double-edged hatchet slamming into a tree, and shout, “Later for you, man. Come on. Let’s shake this place.” His voice now was loud and deep—loud enough and deep enough for two. Milkman slid his hands into his back pockets and followed his friend to the door. He stretched his neck a little to match the chilly height he hoped the soldiers had seen in his eyes.

Silently they ambled down Tenth Street until they reached a stone bench that jutted from the sidewalk near the curb. They stopped there and sat down, their backs to the eyes of two men in white smocks who were watching them. One of the men leaned in the doorway of a barbershop. The other sat in a chair tilted back to the plate-glass window of the shop. They were the owners of the barbershop, Railroad Tommy and Hospital Tommy. Neither boy spoke, not to the men nor to each other. They sat and watched the traffic go by.

“Have all the halls of academe crumbled, Guitar?” Hospital Tommy spoke from his chair. His eyes were milky, like those of very old people, but the rest of him was firm, lithe, and young-looking. His tone was casual but suggested authority nonetheless.

“No, sir.” Guitar answered him over his shoulder.

“Then what, pray, are you doing out here in the streets at this time of day?”

Guitar shrugged. “We just took a day off, Mr. Tommy.”

“And your companion? Is he on sabbatical too?”

Guitar nodded. Hospital Tommy talked like an encyclopedia and Guitar had to guess at most of his words. Milkman kept looking at the cars going by.

“Neither one of you appears to be having much fun on your holiday. You could have stayed in the halls of academe and looked evil.”

Guitar fished for a cigarette and offered one to Milkman. “Feather made me mad is all.”

“Feather?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t let us in. I go in there all the time. All the time and he don’t say nothing. But today he throws us out. Said my friend here is too young. Can you beat that? Feather? Worrying about somebody’s age?”

“I didn’t know Feather had so much as a brain cell to worry with.”

“He don’t. Just showing off is all. He wouldn’t even let me have a bottle of beer.”

Railroad Tommy laughed softly from the doorway. “Is that all? He wouldn’t let you have a beer?” He rubbed the back of his neck and then crooked a finger at Guitar. “Come over here, boy, and let me tell you about some other stuff you are not going to have. Come on over here.”

Reluctantly they stood up and sidled closer to the laughing man.

“You think that’s something? Not having a beer? Well, let me ask you something. You ever stood stock still in the galley of the Baltimore and Ohio dining car in the middle of the night when the kitchen closed down and everything’s neat and ready for the next day? And the engine’s highballing down the track and three of your buddies is waiting for you with a brand-new deck of cards?”

Guitar shook his head. “No, I never…”

“That’s right, you never. And you never going to. That’s one more thrill you not going to have, let alone a bottle of beer.”

Guitar smiled. “Mr. Tommy,” he began, but Tommy cut him off.

“You ever pull fourteen days straight and come home to a sweet woman, clean sheets, and a fifth of Wild Turkey? Eh?” He looked at Milkman. “Did you?”

Milkman smiled and said, “No, sir.”

“No? Well, don’t look forward to it, cause you not going to have that either.”

Hospital Tommy drew a pinfeather toothpick from under his smock. “Don’t tease the boy, Tommy.”

“Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ’em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ’em to. No. And you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and every day. That’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ‘29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.”

A few men passing by stopped to listen to Tommy’s lecture. “What’s going on?” they asked Hospital Tommy.

“Feather refused them a beer,” he said. The men laughed.

“And no baked Alaska!” Railroad Tommy went on. “None! You never going to have that.”

“No baked Alaska?” Guitar opened his eyes wide with horror and grabbed his throat. “You breaking my heart!”

“Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.”

“Mr. Tommy, suh,” Guitar sang in mock humility, “we just wanted a bottle of beer is all.”

“Yeah,” said Tommy. “Yeah, well, welcome aboard.”

“What’s a baked Alaska?” They left the Tommys just as they had found them and continued down Tenth Street.

“Something sweet,” answered Guitar. “A dessert.”

“Taste good?”

“I don’t know. I can’t eat sweets.”

“You can’t?” Milkman was amazed. “Why not?”

“Makes me sick.”

“You don’t like nothing sweet?”

“Fruit, but nothing with sugar. Candy, cake, stuff like that. I don’t even like to smell it. Makes me want to throw up.”

Milkman searched for a physical cause. He wasn’t sure he trusted anybody who didn’t like sweets. “You must have sugar diabetes.”

“You don’t get sugar diabetes from not eating sugar. You get it from eating too much sugar.”

“Then what is it, then?”

“I don’t know. It makes me think of dead people. And white people. And I start to puke.”

“Dead people?”

“Yeah. And white people.”

“I don’t get it.”

Guitar said nothing, so Milkman continued, “How long you been like that?”

“Since I was little. Since my father got sliced up in a sawmill and his boss came by and gave us kids some candy. Divinity. A big sack of divinity. His wife made it special for us. It’s sweet, divinity is. Sweeter than syrup. Real sweet. Sweeter than…” He stopped walking and wiped from his forehead the beads of sweat that were collecting there. His eyes paled and wavered. He spit on the sidewalk. “Ho—hold it,” he whispered, and stepped into a space between a fried-fish restaurant and Lilly’s Beauty Parlor.

Milkman waited on the sidewalk, staring at the curtained window of the beauty shop. Beauty shops always had curtains or shades up. Barbershops didn’t. The women didn’t want anybody on the street to be able to see them getting their hair done. They were ashamed.

When Guitar emerged, his eyes were teary from the effort of dry heaving. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get us some weed. That’s one thing I can have.”

By the time Milkman was fourteen he had noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other. When he stood barefoot and straight as a pole, his left foot was about half an inch off the floor. So he never stood straight; he slouched or leaned or stood with a hip thrown out, and he never told anybody about it—ever. When Lena said, “Mama, what is he walking like that for?” he said, “I’ll walk any way I want to, including over your ugly face.” Ruth said, “Be quiet, you two. It’s just growing pains, Lena.” Milkman knew better. It wasn’t a limp—not at all—just the suggestion of one, but it looked like an affected walk, the strut of a very young man trying to appear more sophisticated than he was. It bothered him and he acquired movements and habits to disguise what to him was a burning defect. He sat with his left ankle on his right knee, never the other way around. And he danced each new dance with a curious stiff-legged step that the girls loved and other boys eventually copied. The deformity was mostly in his mind. Mostly, but not completely, for he did have shooting pains in that leg after several hours on a basketball court. He favored it, believed it was polio, and felt secretly connected to the late President Roosevelt for that reason. Even when everybody was raving about Truman because he had set up a Committee on Civil Rights, Milkman secretly preferred FDR and felt very very close to him. Closer, in fact, to him than to his own father, for Macon had no imperfection and age seemed to strengthen him. Milkman feared his father, respected him, but knew, because of the leg, that he could never emulate him. So he differed from him as much as he dared. Macon was clean-shaven; Milkman was desperate for a mustache. Macon wore bow ties; Milkman wore four-in-hands. Macon didn’t part his hair; Milkman had a part shaved into his. Macon hated tobacco; Milkman tried to put a cigarette in his mouth every fifteen minutes. Macon hoarded his money; Milkman gave his away. But he couldn’t help sharing with Macon his love of good shoes and fine thin socks. And he did try, as his father’s employee, to do the work the way Macon wanted it done.

Macon was delighted. His son belonged to him now and not to Ruth, and he was relieved at not having to walk all over town like a peddler collecting rents. It made his business more dignified, and he had time to think, to plan, to visit the bank men, to read the public notices, auctions, to find out what plots were going for taxes, unclaimed heirs’ property, where roads were being built, what supermarkets, schools; and who was trying to sell what to the government for the housing projects that were going to be built. The quickie townlets that were springing up around war plants. He knew as a Negro he wasn’t going to get a big slice of the pie. But there were properties nobody wanted yet, or little edges of property somebody didn’t want Jews to have, or Catholics to have, or properties nobody knew were of any value yet. There was quite a bit of pie filling oozing around the edge of the crust in 1945. Filling that could be his. Everything had improved for Macon Dead during the war. Except Ruth. And years later when the war was over and that pie filling had spilled over into his very lap, had stickied his hands and weighed his stomach down into a sagging paunch, he still wished he had strangled her back in 1921. She hadn’t stopped spending occasional nights out of the house, but she was fifty years old now and what lover could she have kept so long? What lover could there be that even Freddie didn’t know about? Macon decided it was of no importance, and less often did he get angry enough to slap her. Particularly after the final time, which became final because his son jumped up and knocked him back into the radiator.

Milkman was twenty-two then and since he had been fucking for six years, some of them with the same woman, he’d begun to see his mother in a new light. She was no longer the person who worried him about galoshes and colds and food, who stood in the way of most of the little pleasures he could take at home because they all involved some form of dirt, noise, or disarray. Now he saw her as a frail woman content to do tiny things; to grow and cultivate small life that would not hurt her if it died: rhododendron, goldfish, dahlias, geraniums, imperial tulips. Because these little lives did die. The goldfish floated to the top of the water and when she tapped the side of the bowl with her fingernail they did not flash away in a lightning arc of terror. The rhododendron leaves grew wide and green and when their color was at its deepest and waxiest, they suddenly surrendered it and lapsed into limp yellow hearts. In a way she was jealous of death. Inside all that grief she felt when the doctor died, there had been a bit of pique too, as though he had chosen a more interesting subject than life—a more provocative companion than she was—and had deliberately followed death when it beckoned. She was fierce in the presence of death, heroic even, as she was at no other time. Its threat gave her direction, clarity, audacity. Regardless of what Macon had done, she’d always suspected that the doctor didn’t have to die if he hadn’t wanted to. And it may have been that suspicion of personal failure and rejection (plus a smidgen of revenge against Macon) that made her lead her husband down paths from which there was no exit save violence. Lena thought Macon’s rages unaccountable. But Corinthians began to see a plan. To see how her mother had learned to bring her husband to a point, not of power (a nine-year-old girl could slap Ruth and get away with it), but of helplessness. She would begin by describing some incident in which she was a sort of honest buffoon. It began as a piece of pleasant dinner conversation, harmless on the surface because no one at the table was required to share her embarrassment; but all were able to admire her honesty and to laugh at her ignorance.

She had gone to the wedding of Mrs. Djvorak’s granddaughter. Anna Djvorak was an old Hungarian woman who had been one of her father’s patients. He’d had many working-class white patients and some middle-class white women who thought he was handsome. Anna Djvorak was convinced that the doctor had miraculously saved her son’s life by not sending him to the tuberculosis sanatorium back in 1903. Almost everybody who did go to the “san,” as they called it, died in it. Anna didn’t know that the doctor had no practicing privileges there, just as he had none at Mercy. Nor did she know that the cure for tuberculosis in 1903 was precisely the one most detrimental to the patients. All she knew was that the doctor had prescribed a certain diet, hours of rest to be rigidly adhered to, and cod-liver oil twice a day. The boy survived. It was natural that she would want the miracle doctor’s daughter at the wedding of this son’s youngest daughter. Ruth went and when the congregation went to the altar to receive the host, she went also. Kneeling there with her head bowed, she was not aware that the priest was left with the choice of placing the wafer on her hat or skipping her. He knew immediately that she was not Catholic since she did not raise her head at his words and push out her tongue for the wafer to be carefully placed there.

“Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi,” said the priest, and then, to her, a sharp whisper: “Ssss. Raise your head!” She looked up, saw the wafer and the acolyte holding a little silver tray under it. “Corpus Domini Nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam…” The priest held the host toward her and she opened her mouth.

Later, at the reception, the priest asked her point-blank whether she was Catholic.

“No. I’m Methodist,” she said.

“I see,” he said. “Well, the sacraments of the Church are reserved for—” Just then old Mrs. Djvorak interrupted him.

“Father,” she said, “I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter. Her father saved Ricky’s life. Ricky wouldn’t be here today if…”

Father Padrew smiled and shook Ruth’s hand. “Very pleased to meet you, Miss Foster.”

It was a simple occurrence, elaborately told. Lena listened and experienced each phrase of her mother’s emotion from religious ecstasy to innocent confidence to embarrassment. Corinthians listened analytically, expectantly—wondering how her mother would develop this anecdote into a situation in which Macon would either lash out at her verbally or hit her. Milkman was only half listening.

“‘Are you Catholic?’ he asked me. Well, I was embarrassed for a minute, but then I said, ‘No. I’m Methodist.’ And he started to tell me that only Catholics could take communion in a Catholic church. Well, I never heard of that. Anybody can take communion, I thought. At our church anybody can come up on the first Sunday. Well, before he could get it out, Anna came up and said, ‘Father, I want you to meet one of my dearest friends. Dr. Foster’s daughter.’ Well, the priest was all smiles then. And shook my hand and said he was very pleased and honored to make my acquaintance. So it all turned out all right. But honestly, I didn’t know. I went up there as innocent as a lamb.”

“You didn’t know that only Catholics take communion in a Catholic church?” Macon Dead asked her, his tone making it clear that he didn’t believe her.

“No, Macon. How would I know?”

“You see them put up their own school, keep their kids out of public schools, and you still think their religious stuff is open to anybody who wants to drop in?”

“Communion is communion.”

“You’re a silly woman.”

“Father Padrew didn’t think so.”

“You made a fool of yourself.”

“Mrs. Djvorak didn’t think so.”

“She was just trying to keep the wedding going, keep you from fucking it up.”

“Macon, please don’t use that language in front of the children.”

“What goddam children? Everybody in here is old enough to vote.”

“There is no call for an argument.”

“You make a fool of yourself in a Catholic church, embarrass everybody at the reception, and come to the table to gloat about how wonderful you were?”

“Macon…”

“And sit there lying, saying you didn’t know any better?”

“Anna Djvorak wasn’t the least bit—”

“Anna Djvorak don’t even know your name! She called you Dr. Foster’s daughter! I bet you one hundred dollars she still don’t know your name! You by yourself ain’t nobody. You your daddy’s daughter!”

“That’s so,” said Ruth in a thin but steady voice. “I certainly am my daddy’s daughter.” She smiled.

Macon didn’t wait to put his fork down. He dropped it on the table while his hand was on its way across the bread plate becoming the fist he smashed into her jaw.

Milkman hadn’t planned any of it, but he had to know that one day, after Macon hit her, he’d see his mother’s hand cover her lips as she searched with her tongue for any broken teeth, and discovering none, tried to adjust the partial plate in her mouth without anyone noticing—and that on that day he would not be able to stand it. Before his father could draw his hand back, Milkman had yanked him by the back of his coat collar, up out of his chair, and knocked him into the radiator. The window shade flapped and rolled itself up.

“You touch her again, one more time, and I’ll kill you.”

Macon was so shocked at being assaulted he could not speak. He had come to believe, after years of creating respect and fear wherever he put his foot down, after years of being the tallest man in every gathering, that he was impregnable. Now he crept along the wall looking at a man who was as tall as he was—and forty years younger.

Just as the father brimmed with contradictory feelings as he crept along the wall—humiliation, anger, and a grudging feeling of pride in his son—so the son felt his own contradictions. There was the pain and shame of seeing his father crumple before any man—even himself. Sorrow in discovering that the pyramid was not a five-thousand-year wonder of the civilized world, mysteriously and permanently constructed by generation after generation of hardy men who had died in order to perfect it, but that it had been made in the back room at Sears, by a clever window dresser, of papier-mâché, guaranteed to last for a mere lifetime.

He also felt glee. A snorting, horse-galloping glee as old as desire. He had won something and lost something in the same instant. Infinite possibilities and enormous responsibilities stretched out before him, but he was not prepared to take advantage of the former, or accept the burden of the latter. So he cock-walked around the table and asked his mother, “Are you all right?”

She was looking at her fingernails. “Yes, I’m fine.”

Milkman looked at his sisters. He had never been able to really distinguish them (or their roles) from his mother. They were in their early teens when he was born; they were thirty-five and thirty-six now. But since Ruth was only sixteen years older than Lena, all three had always looked the same age to him. Now when he met his sisters’ eyes over the table, they returned him a look of hatred so fresh, so new, it startled him. Their pale eyes no longer appeared to blur into their even paler skin. It seemed to him as though charcoal lines had been drawn around their eyes; that two drag lines had been smudged down their cheeks, and their rosy lips were swollen in hatred so full it was about to burst through. Milkman had to blink twice before their faces returned to the vaguely alarmed blandness he was accustomed to. Quickly he left the room, realizing there was no one to thank him—or abuse him. His action was his alone. It would change nothing between his parents. It would change nothing inside them. He had knocked his father down and perhaps there were some new positions on the chessboard, but the game would go on.

Sleeping with Hagar had made him generous. Or so he thought. Wide-spirited. Or so he imagined. Wide-spirited and generous enough to defend his mother, whom he almost never thought about, and to deck his father, whom he both feared and loved.

Back in his bedroom, Milkman fiddled with things on his dresser. There was a pair of silver-backed brushes his mother had given him when he was sixteen, engraved with his initials, the abbreviated degree designation of a doctor. He and his mother had joked about it and she hinted strongly that he ought to consider going to medical school. He’d foisted her off with “How would that look? M.D., M.D. If you were sick, would you go see a man called Dr. Dead?”

She laughed but reminded him that his middle name was Foster. Couldn’t he use Foster as a last name? Dr. Macon Foster. Didn’t that sound fine? He had to admit that it did. The silver-backed brushes were a constant reminder of what her wishes for him were—that he not stop his education at high school, but go on to college and medical school. She had as little respect for her husband’s work as Macon had for college graduates. To Milkman’s father, college was time spent in idleness, far away from the business of life, which was learning to own things. He was eager for his daughters to go to college—where they could have found suitable husbands—and one, Corinthians, did go. But it was pointless for Milkman, particularly since his son’s presence was a real help to him in the office. So much so that he had been able to get his bank friends to speak to some of their friends and get his son moved out of I-A draft classification and into a “necessary to support family” status.

Milkman stood before his mirror and glanced, in the low light of the wall lamp, at his reflection. He was, as usual, unimpressed with what he saw. He had a fine enough face. Eyes women complimented him on, a firm jaw line, splendid teeth. Taken apart, it looked all right. Even better than all right. But it lacked coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self. It was all very tentative, the way he looked, like a man peeping around a corner of someplace he is not supposed to be, trying to make up his mind whether to go forward or to turn back. The decision he made would be extremely important, but the way in which he made the decision would be careless, haphazard, and uninformed.

Standing there in the lamplight, trying not to think of how his father had looked creeping along the wall, he heard a knock at his door. He didn’t want to see the face of Lena or Corinthians, nor to have any secret talk with his mother. But he was not any happier to see his father looming there in the hall. A line of blood was still visible in the thin cut at the corner of Macon’s mouth. But he stood straight, and his eyes were steady.

“Look, Daddy,” Milkman began, “I—”

“Don’t say anything,” Macon said, pushing past him. “Sit down.”

Milkman moved toward the bed. “Look here, let’s try to forget this. If you promise—”

“I told you to sit down. And down is what I mean.” Macon’s voice was low, but his face looked like Pilate’s. He closed the door. “You a big man now, but big ain’t nearly enough. You have to be a whole man. And if you want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth.”

“You don’t have to do any of this, you know. I don’t need to know everything between you and Mama.”

“I do have to do it and you do need to know it. If you’re in the business of raising your fist at your father, you better have some intelligence behind that fist the next time you throw it. Nothing I’m about to say is by way of apology or excuse. It’s just information.

“I married your mother in 1917. She was sixteen, living alone with her father. I can’t tell you I was in love with her. People didn’t require that as much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and—and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other way to survive. The important thing, when you took a wife, was that the two of you agreed on what was important.

“Your mother’s father never liked me and I have to say I was very disappointed in him. He was just about the biggest Negro in this city. Not the richest, but the most respected. But a bigger hypocrite never lived. Kept all his money in four different banks. Always calm and dignified. I thought he was naturally that way until I found out he sniffed ether. Negroes in this town worshipped him. He didn’t give a damn about them, though. Called them cannibals. He delivered both your sisters himself and each time all he was interested in was the color of their skin. He would have disowned you. I didn’t like the notion of his being his own daughter’s doctor, especially since she was also my wife. Mercy wouldn’t take colored then. Anyway, Ruth wouldn’t go to any other doctor. I tried to get a midwife for her, but the doctor said midwives were dirty. I told him a midwife delivered me, and if a midwife was good enough for my mother, a midwife was good enough for his daughter. Well, we had some words between us about it, and I ended up telling him that nothing could be nastier than a father delivering his own daughter’s baby. That stamped it. We had very little to say after that, but they did it anyway. Both Lena and Corinthians. They let me do the naming by picking a word blind, but that was all. Your sisters are just a little over a year apart, you know. And both times he was there. She had her legs wide open and he was there. I know he was a doctor and doctors not supposed to be bothered by things like that, but he was a man before he was a doctor. I knew then they’d ganged up on me forever—the both of them—and no matter what I did, they managed to have things their way. They made sure I remembered whose house I was in, where the china came from, how he sent to England for the Waterford bowl, and again for the table they put it on. That table was so big they had to take it apart to get it in the door. He was always bragging about how he was the second man in the city to have a two-horse carriage.

“Where I’d come from, the farm we had, that was nothing to them. And what I was trying to do—they didn’t have any interest in that. Buying shacks in shacktown, they called it. ‘How’s shacktown?’ That’s the way he’d greet me in the evenings.

“But it wasn’t that. I could put up with that, because I knew what I wanted, and pretty much how to get it. So I could put up with that. Did put up with it. It was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I tried to get him to spend some of that money out of those four banks once. Some track land was going for a lot of money—railroad money. Erie Lackawanna was buying. I had a good hunch where the track would be laid. I walked all around over there, the Shore Road, the docks, the fork in routes 6 and 2. I figured out just where the tracks would have to go. And found land I could have got cheap and sold back to the railroad agents. He wouldn’t lend me a dime. If he had, he would have died a rich man, instead of a fair-to-middling one. And I would have been way ahead. I asked your mother to talk him into it. I told her exactly where the Erie was headed. She said it had to be his decision; she couldn’t influence him. She told me, her husband, that. Then I began to wonder who she was married to—me or him.

“Well, he took sick.” Macon stopped, as though the mention of illness reminded him of his own frailty, and pulled a large white handkerchief out of his pocket. Gingerly he pressed it against the thin cut on his lip. He looked at the faint stain it made on his handkerchief. “All that ether,” he said, “must have got in his blood. They had another name for it, but I know it was that ether. He just lay down and started swelling up. His body did; his legs and arms just wasted away. He couldn’t see patients anymore, and for the first time in his life the pompous donkey found out what it was like to have to be sick and pay another donkey to make you well. One of them doctors, the one that was taking care of him—one of the same ones wouldn’t let him set foot in their hospital, and who, if he had delivered their daughter’s or wife’s baby, had even thought of it, would have run him out of here on a rail—one of them, the ones he thought worth his attention, well, he came in here with some magic potion, Radiathor, and told him it would cure him. Ruth was all excited. And for a few days he was better. Then he got sicker. Couldn’t move, holes were forming in his scalp. And he just lay there in that bed where your mother still sleeps and then he died there. Helpless, fat stomach, skinny arms and legs, looking like a white rat. He couldn’t digest his food, you know. Had to drink all his meals and swallow something after every meal. I believe to this day that was ether too.

“The night he died, I’d been over on the other side of town, fixing a porch that fell down. Mr. Bradlee’s house. Porch had been leaning for twenty years, and then just fell down, split clean away from the foundation. I got some men to help me and went over there to get it back up so the people wouldn’t have to jump to get out the house and climb up three feet to get in it. Somebody tiptoed up to me and said, ‘Doctor died.’ Ruth, they said, was upstairs with him. I figured she was upset and went up right away to comfort her. I didn’t have time to change clothes from working on the porch, but I went up anyway. She was sitting in a chair next to his bed, and the minute she saw me she jumped up and screamed at me, ‘You dare come in here like that? Clean yourself! Clean up before you come in here!’ It vexed me some, but I do respect the dead. I went and washed up. Took a bath, put on a clean shirt and collar, and went back in.” Macon paused again and touched his cut lip as though that were where the pain that showed in his eyes was coming from.

“In the bed,” he said, and stopped for so long Milkman was not sure he was going to continue. “In the bed. That’s where she was when I opened the door. Laying next to him. Naked as a yard dog, kissing him. Him dead and white and puffy and skinny, and she had his fingers in her mouth.

“Now, I want you to know I had a terrible time after that. I started thinking all sorts of things. If Lena and Corinthians were my children. I come to know pretty quick they were, cause it was clear that bastard couldn’t fuck nothing. Ether took care of whatever he had in that area long before I got there. And he wouldn’t have been so worried about what color skin they had unless they were coming from me. Then I thought about his delivering Ruth’s babies. I’m not saying that they had contact. But there’s lots of things a man can do to please a woman, even if he can’t fuck. Whether or not, the fact is she was in that bed sucking his fingers, and if she do that when he was dead, what’d she do when he was alive? Nothing to do but kill a woman like that. I swear, many’s the day I regret she talked me out of killing her. But I wasn’t looking forward to spending the rest of my days on some rock pile. But you see, Macon, sometimes I can’t catch hold of myself quick enough. It just gets out. Tonight, when she said, ‘Yes, I am my daddy’s daughter,’ and gave that little smirk…” Macon looked up at his son. The door of his face had opened; his skin looked iridescent. With only a minor break in his voice, he told him, “I am not a bad man. I want you to know that. Or believe it. No man ever took his responsibilities more seriously than I have. I’m not making claims to sainthood, but you have to know it all. I’m forty years older than you and I don’t have another forty in me. Next time you take it into your head to jump me, I want you to think about the man you think you whipping. And think about the fact that next time I might not let you. Old as I am, I might not let you.”

He stood up and pushed his handkerchief into his back pocket.

“Don’t say anything now. But think about everything I’ve said.”

Macon turned the doorknob, and without a backward glance, left the room.

Milkman sat on the edge of his bed; everything was still except for the light buzzing in his head. He felt curiously disassociated from all that he had heard. As though a stranger that he’d sat down next to on a park bench had turned to him and begun to relate some intimacy. He was entirely sympathetic to the stranger’s problems—understood perfectly his view of what had happened to him—but part of his sympathy came from the fact that he himself was not involved or in any way threatened by the stranger’s story. It was quite the opposite from the feeling he’d had an hour or less ago. The alien who had just walked out of his room was also the man he felt passionately enough about to strike with all the fervor he could summon up. Even now he could feel the tingle in his shoulder that had signaled the uncontrollable urge to smash his father’s face. On the way upstairs to his room he had felt isolated, but righteous. He was a man who saw another man hit a helpless person. And he had interfered. Wasn’t that the history of the world? Isn’t that what men did? Protected the frail and confronted the King of the Mountain? And the fact that the frail was his mother and the King of the Mountain his father made it more poignant, but did not change the essential facts. No. He would not pretend that it was love for his mother. She was too insubstantial, too shadowy for love. But it was her vaporishness that made her more needful of defense. She was not a maternal drudge, her mind pressed flat, her shoulders hunched under the burden of housework and care of others, brutalized by a bear of a man. Nor was she the acid-tongued shrew who defended herself with a vicious vocabulary and a fast lip. Ruth was a pale but complicated woman given to deviousness and ultra-fine manners. She seemed to know a lot and understand very little. It was an interesting train of thought, and new for him. Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a apart from allowing or interfering with his own.

Milkman put on his jacket and left the house. It was seven-thirty in the evening and not yet dark. He wanted to walk and breathe some other air. He wouldn’t know what to feel until he knew what to think. And it was difficult thinking in that room where the silver-backed brushes with the M.D. initials shone in the light and where the chair his father had just sat in still held the imprint of his buttocks in the cushion. As the stars made themselves visible, Milkman tried to figure what was true and what part of what was true had anything to do with him. What was he supposed to do with this new information his father had dumped on him? Was it an effort to cop a plea? How was he supposed to feel about the two of them now? Was it true, first of all? Did his mother…had his mother made it with her own father? Macon had said no. That the doctor was impotent. How did he know? Well, he must have known what he was talking about, because he was much too eager for it to be true to let it go if there were any possibility it could have taken place. Still, he had admitted there were “other things” a man could do to please a woman. “Goddam,” Milkman said aloud. “What the fuck did he tell me all that shit for?” He didn’t want to know any of it. There was nothing he could do about it. The doctor was dead. You can’t do the past over.

Milkman’s confusion was rapidly turning to anger. “Strange motherfuckers,” he whispered. “Strange.” If he wanted lay off, he thought, why didn’t he just say that? Just come to me like a man and say, Cool it. You cool it and I’ll cool it. We’ll both cool it. And I’d say, Okay, you got it. But no. He comes to me with some way-out tale about how come and why.

Milkman was heading toward Southside. Maybe he could find Guitar. A drink with Guitar would be just the thing. Or if he couldn’t find Guitar, he’d go see Hagar. No. He didn’t want to talk to Hagar, to any woman, just yet. Talk about strange. Now, that was a really strange bunch. His whole family was a bunch of crazies. Pilate singing all day and talking off the wall. Reba turning on for everything in pants. And Hagar…well, she was just fine, but still, she wasn’t regular. She had some queer ways. But at least they were fun and not full of secrets.

Where would Guitar be? Never anywhere when you really needed him. A real pop-up. Popped up anywhere, anytime, but never on time. Milkman realized he was whispering every now and then and that people on the street were looking at him. Suddenly it seemed to him that there were a lot of people out for that time of day. Where the hell was everybody going? He made an effort not to vocalize his thoughts.

“You want to be a whole man, you have to deal with the whole truth,” his father had said. Couldn’t I be a whole man without knowing all that? “You better have some intelligence behind that fist.” Okay. What intelligence? That my mama screwed her daddy. That my grandfather was a high-yellow nigger who loved ether and hated black skin. So what did he let you marry his daughter for? So he could screw her without the neighbors knowing it? Did you ever catch them doing it? No. You just felt something you couldn’t put your finger on. His money, probably. He wouldn’t let you put your finger on that, would he? And his daughter wouldn’t help you, would she? So you figured they must be gettin it on the operating table. If he’d given you those four bankbooks to do what you liked, to buy up the Erie Lackawanna Railroad, he could have had her all he liked, right? He could have come right in your bed, and the three of you could have had a ball. He’d get one tit and you’d get…the…other….

Milkman stopped dead in his tracks. Cold sweat broke out on his neck. People jostled him trying to get past the solitary man standing in their way. He had remembered something. Or believed he remembered something. Maybe he’d dreamed it and it was the dream he remembered. The picture was developing, of the two men in the bed with his mother, each nibbling on a breast, but the picture cracked and in the crack another picture emerged. There was this green room, a very small green room, and his mother was sitting in the green room and her breasts were uncovered and somebody was sucking them and the somebody was himself. So? So what? My mother nursed me. Mothers nurse babies. Why the sweat? He walked on, hardly noticing the people pushing past him, their annoyed, tight faces. He tried to see more of the picture, but couldn’t. Then he heard something that he knew was related to the picture. Laughter. Somebody he couldn’t see, in the room laughing…at him and at his mother is ashamed. She lowers her eyes and won’t look at him. “Look at me, Mama. Look at me.” But she doesn’t and the laughter is loud now. Everybody is laughing. Did he wet his pants? Is his mother ashamed because while he was nursing he wet his pants? What pants? He didn’t wear pants then. He wore diapers. Babies always wet their diapers. does he think he has pants on? Blue pants with elastic around the calf. Little blue corduroy knickers. Why is he dressed that way? Is that what the man is laughing at? Because he is a tiny baby dressed in blue knickers? He sees himself standing there. “Look at me, Mama,” is all he can think of to say. “Please look at me.” Standing? He is a tiny baby. Nursing in his mother’s arms. He can’t stand up.

“I couldn’t stand up,” he said aloud, and turned toward a shop window. There was his face leaning out of the upturned collar of his jacket, and he knew. “My mother nursed me when I was old enough to talk, stand up, and wear knickers, and somebody saw it and laughed and—and that is why they call me Milkman and that is why my father never does and that is why my mother never does, but everybody else does. And how did I forget that? And why? And if she did that to me when there was no reason for it, when I also drank milk and Ovaltine and everything else from a glass, then maybe she did other things with her father?”

Milkman closed his eyes and then opened them. The street was even more crowded with people, all going in the direction he was coming from. All walking hurriedly and bumping against him. After a while he realized that nobody was walking on the other side of the street. There were no cars and the street lights were on, now that darkness had come, but the sidewalk on the other side of the street was completely empty. He turned around to see where everybody was going, but there was nothing to see except their backs and hats pressing forward into the night. He looked again at the other side of Not Doctor Street. Not a soul.

He touched the arm of a man in a cap who was trying to get past him. “Why is everybody on this side of the street?” he asked him.

“Watch it, buddy,” the man snapped, and moved on with the crowd.

Milkman walked on, still headed toward Southside, never once wondering why he himself did not cross over to the other side of the street, where no one was walking at all.

He believed he was thinking coldly, clearly. He had never loved his mother, but had always known that she had loved him. And that had always seemed right to him, the way it should be. Her confirmed, eternal love of him, love that he didn’t even have to earn or deserve, seemed to him natural. And now it was decomposing. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone. His visits to the wine house seemed (before his talk with his father) an extension of the love he had come to expect from his mother. Not that Pilate or Reba felt the possessive love for him that his mother did, but they had accepted him without question and with all the ease in the world. They took him seriously too. Asked him questions and thought all his responses to things were important enough to laugh at or quarrel with him about. Everything he did at home was met with quiet understanding from his mother and his sisters (or indifference and criticism from his father). The women in the wine house were indifferent to nothing and understood nothing. Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch and interpret every sound in the universe. Now he questioned them. Questioned everybody. His father had crept along the wall and then come upstairs with a terrible piece of news. His mother had been portrayed not as a mother who simply adored her only son, but as an obscene child playing dirty games with whatever male was near—be it her father or her son. Even his sisters, the most tolerant and accommodating of all the women he knew, had changed their faces and rimmed their eyes with red and charcoal dust.

Where was Guitar? He needed to find the one person left whose clarity never failed him, and unless he was out of the state, Milkman was determined to find him.

His first stop, Tommy’s Barbershop, was fruitful. Guitar was there with several other men, leaning in various attitudes, but all listening to something.

As Milkman entered and spotted Guitar’s back, he was so relieved he shouted, “Hey, Guitar!”

“Sh!” said Railroad Tommy. Guitar turned around and motioned him to come in but to be quiet. They were listening to the radio and muttering and shaking their heads. It was some time before Milkman discovered what they were so tense about. A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him—his murderers had boasted freely—and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.

Railroad Tommy was trying to keep the noise down so he could hear the last syllable of the newscaster’s words. In a few seconds it was over, since the announcer had only a few speculations and even fewer facts. The minute he went on to another topic of news, the barbershop broke into loud conversation. Railroad Tommy, the one who had tried to maintain silence, was himself completely silent now. He moved to his razor strop while Hospital Tommy tried to keep his customer in the chair. Porter, Guitar, Freddie the janitor, and three or four other men were exploding, shouting angry epithets all over the room. Apart from Milkman, only Railroad Tommy and Empire State were quiet—Railroad Tommy because he was preoccupied with his razor and Empire State because he was simple, and probably mute, although nobody seemed sure about that. There was no question whatever about his being simple.

Milkman tried to focus on the crisscrossed conversations.

“It’ll be in the morning paper.”

“Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” said Porter.

“It was on the radio! Got to be in the paper!” said Freddie.

“They don’t put that kind of news in no white paper. Not unless he raped somebody.”

“What you bet? What you bet it’ll be in there?” said Freddie.

“Bet anything you can lose,” Porter answered.

“You on for five.”

“Wait a minute,” Porter shouted. “Say where.”

“What you mean, ‘where’? I got five says it’ll be in the morning paper.”

“On the sports page?” asked Hospital Tommy.

“Or the funny papers?” said Nero Brown.

“No, man. Front page. I bet five dollars on front page.”

“What the fuck is the difference?” shouted Guitar. “A kid is stomped and you standin round fussin about whether some cracker put it in the paper. He stomped, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.”

“What’d he do it for?” asked Freddie. “He knew he was in Mississippi. What he think that was? Tom Sawyer Land?”

“So he whistled! So what!” Guitar was steaming. “He supposed to die for that?”

“He from the North,” said Freddie. “Acting big down in Bilbo country. Who the hell he think he is?”

“Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy.

“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”

“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.

“Who?” asked Freddie.

“Till. That’s who.”

“He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.”

“A living coward ain’t a man either,” said Porter.

“Who you talking to?” Freddie was quick to get the personal insult.

“Calm down, you two,” said Hospital Tommy.

“You!” shouted Porter.

“You calling me a coward?” Freddie wanted to get the facts first.

“If the shoe fits, put your rusty foot in it.”

“You all gonna keep that up, you have to get out of my shop.”

“Tell that nigger somethin,” said Porter.

“I’m serious now,” Hospital Tommy went on. “There is no cause for all this. The boy’s dead. His mama’s screaming. Won’t let them bury him. That ought to be enough colored blood on the streets. You want to spill blood, spill the crackers’ blood that bashed his face in.”

“Oh, they’ll catch them,” said Walters.

“Catch ’em? Catch ’em?” Porter was astounded. “You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.”

“Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero.

“They got to catch ’em.”

“So they catch ’em. You think they’ll get any time? Not on your life!”

“How can they not give ’em time?” Walters’ voice was high and tight.

“How? Just don’t, that’s how.” Porter fidgeted with his watch chain.

“But everybody knows about it now. It’s all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.”

“You wanna bet? This is sure money!”

“You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar.

“They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said.

“They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.”

“I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” said Freddie.

“You should keep yours shut,” Guitar told him.

“Hey, man!” Again Freddie felt the threat.

“South’s bad,” Porter said. “Bad. Don’t nothing change in the good old U.S. of A. Bet his daddy got his balls busted off in the Pacific somewhere.”

“If they ain’t busted already, them crackers will see to it. Remember them soldiers in 1918?”

“Ooooo. Don’t bring all that up….”

The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness. All but Empire State, who stood, broom in hand and drop-lipped, with the expression of a very intelligent ten-year-old.

And Guitar. His animation had died down, leaving its traces in his eyes.

Milkman waited until he could get his attention. Then they both left, walking silently down the street.

“What is it? You looked pissed when you came in.”

“Nothing,” said Milkman. “Where can we get a drink?”

“Mary’s?”

“Naw. Too many broads hasslin you.”

“It’s just eight-thirty. Cedar Lounge don’t open till nine.”

“Shit. You think. I’m tired.”

“I got a taste at the pad,” Guitar offered.

“Solid. Your box working?”

“Uh uh. Still broke.”

“I need some music. Music and a taste.”

“Then it’ll have to be Miss Mary. I’ll keep the ladies working elsewhere.”

“Yeah? I want to see you tell those ladies what to do.”

“Come on, Milk. This ain’t New York; choices are limited.”

“Okay. Mary’s.”

They walked a few blocks to the corner of Rye and Tenth streets. When they passed a tiny bakery, Guitar swallowed hard and quickened his steps. Mary’s was the bar/lounge that did the best business in the Blood Bank—although each of the three other corners had a similar place—because of Mary herself, a pretty but overpainted barmaid/part-owner, who was sassy, funny, and good company for the customers. Whores worked her bar in safety; lonely drunks could drink there in peace; cruisers found chickens or hawks—whichever they preferred, even jailbait; restless housewives were flattered there and danced their heels off; teen-agers learned “life rules” there; and everybody found excitement there. For in Mary’s the lights made everybody beautiful, or if not beautiful, then fascinating. The music gave tone and texture to conversations that would put you to sleep anywhere else. And the food and drink provoked people into behavior that resembled nothing less than high drama.

But all that began around eleven o’clock. It was practically empty at eight-thirty in the evening, when Guitar and Milkman arrived. They slid into a booth and ordered Scotch and Milkman drank his up quickly and ordered another before asking Guitar, “How come they call me Milkman?”

“How the fuck would I know? That’s your name, ain’t it?”

“My name is Macon Dead.”

“You drag me all the way over here to tell me your name?”

“I need to know it.”

“Aw, drink up, man.”

“You know your name, don’t you?”

“Cut the shit. What’s on your mind?”

“I decked my old man.”

“Decked?”

“Yeah. Hit him. Knocked him into the fuckin radiator.”

“What’d he do to you?”

“Nothin.”

“Nothin? You just up and popped him?”

“Yeah.”

“For no reason?”

“He hit my mother.”

“Oh.”

“He hit her. I hit him.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.” Milkman sighed heavily. “I know.”

“Listen. I can understand how you feel.”

“Uh uh. You can’t understand. Unless it happens to you, you can’t understand.”

“Yes I can. You know I used to hunt a lot. When I was a kid down home—”

“Oh, shit, do we have to hear about Alabama again?”

“Not Alabama. Florida.”

“Whatever.”

“Just listen, Milkman. Listen to me. I used to hunt a lot. From the time I could walk almost and I was good at it. Everybody said I was a natural. I could hear anything, smell anything, and see like a cat. You know what I mean? A natural. And I was never scared—not of the dark or shadows or funny sounds, and I was never afraid to kill. Anything. Rabbit, bird, snakes, squirrels, deer. And I was little. It never bothered me. I’d take a shot at anything. The grown men used to laugh about it. Said I was a natural-born hunter. After we moved up here with my grandmother, that was the only thing about the South I missed. So when my grandmother used to send us kids back home in the summer, all I thought about was hunting again. They’d pile us on the bus and we’d spend the summer with my grandmother’s sister, Aunt Florence. Soon’s I got there I looked for my uncles, to go out in the woods. And one summer—I was about ten or eleven, I guess—we all went out and I went off on my own. I thought I saw deer tracks. It wasn’t the season for deer, but that didn’t bother me any. If I saw one I killed one. I was right about the tracks; it was a deer, but spaced funny—not wide apart like I thought they should be, but still a deer. You know they step in their own prints. If you never saw them before you’d think a two-legged creature was jumping. Anyway, I stayed on the trail until I saw some bushes. The light was good and all of a sudden I saw a rump between the branches. I dropped it with the first shot and finished it with the next. Now, I want to tell you I was feeling good. I saw myself showing my uncles what I’d caught. But when I got up to it—and I was going real slow because I thought I might have to shoot it again—I saw it was a doe. Not a young one; she was old, but she was still a doe. I felt…bad. You know what I mean? I killed a doe. A doe, man.”

Milkman was gazing at Guitar with the wide steady eyes of a man trying to look sober.

“So I know how you felt when you saw your father hit your mother. It’s like that doe. A man shouldn’t do that. You couldn’t help what you felt.”

Milkman nodded his head, but it was clear to Guitar that nothing he had said had made any difference. Chances were Milkman didn’t even know what a doe was, and whatever it was, it wasn’t his mother. Guitar ran his finger around the rim of his glass.

“What’d she do, Milk?”

“Nothin. Smiled. He didn’t like her smile.”

“You’re not making sense. Talk sense. And slow down. You know you can’t hold liquor.”

“What you mean, I can’t hold liquor?”

“’Scuse me. Help yourself.”

“I’m trying to have a serious conversation and you talking shit, Guitar.”

“I’m listening.”

“And I’m talking.”

“Yes, you talking, but what are you saying? Your papa clips your mama cause she smiles at him. You clip him cause he clipped her. Now, is that the way you all spend the evening in your house or is there something else you’re trying to say?”

“Came up to talk to me afterwards.”

“Who?”

“My old man.”

“What’d he say?”

“Said I had to be a whole man and know the whole thing.”

“Go on.”

“He was gonna buy the Erie Lackawanna, but my mother wouldn’t let him.”

“Oh, yeah? Maybe she needs beatin.”

“That’s very funny, man.”

“Why ain’t you laughing, then?”

“I am laughing. Inside.”

“Milk?”

“Yeah?”

“Your daddy slapped your mama, right?”

“Right. Right.”

“You hit him, right?”

“Right.”

“Nobody appreciates what you did. Right?”

“Hey, Guitar. You right again.”

“Not your mother, not your sisters, and your daddy appreciates it least of all.”

“Least of all. Right.”

“So he bawls you out.”

“Yep. No. No. He…”

“He talks quiet to you?”

“Right!”

“Explains things to you.”

“Yeah.”

“About why he hit her.”

“Uh huh.”

“And it’s all about something that happened a long time ago? Before you were born?”

“You got it! You are a very smart little colored boy. And I am going to tell Oxford University about you.”

“And you wish he’d kept it to himself because it don’t concern you and you can’t do nothin about it anyway.”

“You have just passed the course. Guitar Bains, Ph.D.”

“But it bothers you just the same?”

“Let me think.” Milkman closed his eyes and tried to prop his chin on his hand, but it was too difficult. He was trying to get as drunk as possible as rapidly as possible. “Yes. Well, it did bother me. Before I came in here it did. I don’t know, Guitar.” He became serious and his face had the still and steady look of a grown man trying not to vomit…or cry.

“Forget it, Milk. Whatever it is, forget it. It ain’t nothin. Whatever he told you, forget it.”

“I hope I can. I sure hope I can.”

“Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can’t help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don’t even know why. But look here, don’t carry it inside and don’t give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can’t, just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.”

“I don’t know, Guitar. Things seem to be getting to me, you know?”

“Don’t let ’em. Unless you got a plan. Look at Till. They got to him too. Now he’s just an item on WJR’s evening news.”

“He was crazy.”

“No. Not crazy. Young, but not crazy.”

“Who cares if he fucks a white girl? Anybody can do that. What’s he bragging for? Who cares?”

“Crackers care.”

“Then they’re crazier’n he is.”

“Of course. But they’re alive and crazy.”

“Yeah, well, fuck Till. I’m the one in trouble.”

“Did I hear you right, brother?”

“All right. I didn’t mean that. I…”

“What’s your trouble? You don’t like your name?”

“No.” Milkman let his head fall to the back of the booth. “No, I don’t like my name.”

“Let me tell you somethin, baby. Niggers get their names the way they get everything else—the best way they can. The best way they can.”

Milkman’s eyes were blurred now and so were his words. “Why can’t we get our stuff the right way?”

“The best way is the right way. Come on. I’ll take you home.”

“No, I can’t go back there.”

“No? Where then?”

“Let me stay in your pad.”

“Oh, man, you know my situation. One of us’ll have to sleep on the floor. Besides…”

“I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“Besides, I may have company.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. Come on, let’s go.”

“I ain’t going home, Guitar. Hear me?”

“Want me to take you over to Hagar’s?” Guitar motioned to the waitress for the check.

“Hagar’s. Yeah. Sweet Hagar. Wonder what her name is.”

“You just said it.”

“I mean her last name. Her daddy’s name.”

“Ask Reba.” Guitar paid their bar bill and helped Milkman negotiate to the door. The wind had risen and cooled. Guitar flapped his elbows against the cold.

“Ask anybody but Reba,” said Milkman. “Reba don’t know her own last name.”

“Ask Pilate.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask Pilate. Pilate knows. It’s in that dumb-ass box hanging from her ear. Her own name and everybody else’s. Bet mine’s in there too. I’m gonna ask her what my name is. Say, you know how my old man’s daddy got his name?”

“Uh uh. How?”

“Cracker gave it to him.”

“Sho’nough?”

“Yep. And he took it. Like a fuckin sheep. Somebody should have shot him.”

“What for? He was already Dead.”