Axeman's Jazz

4

UNCLE BITTER wakes me, midmorning, tapping the door with his foot. “Got breakfast, Seam. You dress?”

“Hold on.” I scramble from under the sheets, pull on a fresh pair of underwear, some jeans, and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. “Come in.”

With crusty old oven mitts he’s carrying a steaming bowl. He sets it on the floor, returns to the house, and comes back with a teapot and a cookie sheet brimming with soft brown rolls. “Made us some molasses bread and some oatmeal. You girls used to love this stuff, remember?”

I do: slow summer mornings, Ariyeh and I would beg to eat breakfast in the backyard — it was usually cooler outside, early in the day, than it was in the house. Uncle Bitter served us on the lawn.

“You ain’t gonna win no popularity contests wearing that,” he says, pointing with one hand at my shirt, stirring the oatmeal with the other.

“I don’t figure I’m going to be very popular around here, anyway,” I say, smiling. “A coworker of mine was a finalist for the Cowboys cheerleading squad. She got a handful of promotional clothing and passed it out at work.”

“Pretty blonde?”

“No. She was black, as a matter of fact.” Black like me. Day-black.

“Hm. I only seen pretty blondes when I watch the games on the tee-vee.” As he stirs, he watches me comb my hair with my hands. It’s shoulder length, straight, and seems to intrigue and appall him, equally.

“I used to get up early in the morning, ‘fore you girls was awake, chop the walnuts and the apricots, flake a little coconut, sift the good brown sugar into the oats …”

“Where was Mama?”

“Your mama slept in a lot, them days.” He pours us some weak red tea. “That where you want to start wit’ your questions?”

The oatmeal’s earthy smell joins grass and oak bark in the air, mint from Bitter’s garden, and the sweet scent of apples from a neighbor’s tree. Sunlight pokes through an open knothole in the shed’s east wall, lands, parchment colored, on the red flannel nailed above the pillow.

“No. I do have lots of questions about Mama — and my dad,” I say. “But let’s start at the start.”

He hands me a roll along with a bowl of oats. We sit cross-legged on the mattress, facing each other. Sparrows are wild in the trees. I notice an empty cicada shell in a corner, brittle as spun sugar.

“All the way back? What you know?”

“Mama never told me a thing. Beyond the rape story, I mean.”

“I’da told you, when you’s of an age to truly take it in. But you never come back.”

“Mama didn’t want — ”

“When you reach a certain point, it ain’t your mama no more. It was you. You decided we wasn’t no part of your life.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

He rubs his chest.

“I missed you so much, and Ariyeh, in junior high and high school. When Mama married Mr. Licht, I knew she intended for me to become a good suburban kid. White bread. Well-to-do. I rebelled for a while, claiming my heritage. Reading Maya Angelou.” I laugh. “But by the time I got to college — I don’t know, maybe it took, finally. Mama’s pressure. Or maybe I got tired of fighting. Not fitting in. Maybe I opted for the easy way out. I figured, ‘I look white. Why not take advantage of that? It’s the way to get ahead.’ So that’s what I did.”

“I always worried for you. At war with yourself. It showed in your body, your play. You and Ariyeh be drawing, she churning out one finished picture after another, you rubbing everything out, starting over all the time.”

“Start me again, Uncle Bitter. With the gallows. Please.”

He sets his bowl on the ground, wipes his mouth with his wide, callused palm. “All right. You know the name Cletus Hayes?”

“Yes sir.” I tell him I learned the official story from the trial transcripts. I tell him about C’s letter and the Crisis.

He grins. “So she kept that stuff, did she?”

“Piecing it together, then … I figure it wasn’t rape. Right? Or not exactly. Maybe he forced himself on her that night, flushed from the riot, but … I figure Cletus Hayes and Sarah Morgan had a relationship — ”

“Fancy talk. They’s in love.”

I brush bread crumbs from my fingers. “How do you know this?”

“Sahry told me.”

“You knew Sarah Morgan?”

He nods.

“And Mama? Her blood? Cletus Hayes?”

“In part. From messing with Cletus, Sahry birthed your grandma Jean — ”

“Wait wait wait, Uncle, please. Before begetting and begetting, like the Bible — ”

Bitter raises his hands. “Let me start again. I’s working the oil rigs just outside Texas City. This was ‘43, ‘44. Place was booming ‘cause of the war. Oil. Cotton. Chemicals. Lotsa black famblies living there, hiring out for labor. Me and my old lady, Maeve, we move into this tinkery old building downtown, near dockside.”

I’m startled by the mention of his “old lady”; ever since I’ve known him he’s been on his own. I never even wondered where Ariyeh came from: a consequence of being plucked too soon from this world. As for Bitter’s own origins, I remember him saying once he grew up in a “hoodoo alley in the Vieux Carré” before his family moved to Texas.

“At home, I mostly kept to myself after work,” he says. “I smelt like a damn gusher all the time, oil and shit on my hands. I’d scrub and scrub and seem like I never could shuck that jelly-smell. But Maeve, she’s a real go-getter in them days, friendlied-up with everyone in the building. She’s especially close to this pair of comely ladies upstairs. Didn’t have no menfolk around. Both waitressed or something. They’s raising this little eight-year-old girly — whirlwind. I’d hear her clomping up and down the stairs after supper, screaming to go play in the park.” He sips his tea. “The parks in Texas City was more like abandoned refineries. ‘Stead of a jungle gym, you know, you’d have a cat cracker to climb on.”

I watch spiders weave their webs; I’m impatient for him to return to the garden. But I learned a long time ago, Bitter has his own pace, spinning stories.

“Wellsir, the day come when the Grandcamp caught afire. It was a French Liberty ship, pretty thing; just pulled into port, hauling cotton, tobacco, peanuts, twine, guns, and a shitload of ammonium nitrate fertilizer — ’bout two thousand tons of it, someone told me later. One of the crewmen noticed a plume of smoke in the hold early one morning, went down and tried to douse it with a jug of drinking water, but no go. The captain ordered the hatch covers sealed, figuring to smother the fire, you know. But the pressure blew the damn covers off. By that time, the volunteer firemen had come, but the poor boat was so het up now, it vaporized the water.

“I ‘member I’s already manning a rig, edge of town — it’s about nine o’clock in the morning — when I heard the ker-boom, looked up and saw this smoky ol’ mushroom rolling over the port, saw wood and ship’s rigging sailing through the air, raining like brimstone on the Monsanto plant and the dockside housing where Maeve was still in bed. I dropped everything, went running right home. Maevey was okay, but the blast had tore off part of the roof, shattered all the pipes. Water spraying like high tide. Real hairy. I stayed home rest of the day, helping famblies rescue their pictures and stuff, cleaning up. The ladies and their eight-year-old scrambled down to our place, ‘cause their ‘partment was puredee flooded. All day we’s patching pipes, clearing wood, and we heard rumors ‘bout dockside. Fellas said forty firemen had disintegrated. A hunnert and fifty workers missing at Monsanto. Terrible, terrible. Little girly crying — you could hear her up and down the stairwell, ‘long with the shush of busted toilets.

“Middle of this unholy mess, no one cottoned to the fact that the High Flyer, another Liberty ship docked in port, was also stocked with nitrate. And sulfur. It had come through the blast all right — or so everyone figured. We was wrong.

“Long story short: middle of the night, Texas City become an inferno. Flames, wood, steel rushing our way from the water like a windstorm from Hell. Oil tanks popping all over town and up and down the coast. Quarter of the city perished that night. Ashes and bone.

“Maeve and I scurried out the building, rubbing sleep from our eyes, stairs tumbling right behind us. She’s squeezing the girly to her chest. But them other two ladies, who’d sacked out on our floor, bless them, we never saw them again.”

He stops, presses his chest with his fingertips like a man playing accordion, then spoons more oatmeal for himself.

“So that’s when we move into Freedmen’s Town,” he says. “I went to work for a carpentry shop, Maevey kept our home till the cancer got her in ‘59. She raised the girly, which weren’t easy, let me tell you. Fire put the fear of Hell into that poor little soul. She’d wake middle of the night, screaming like she’s scorched.”

He sticks his spoon into his mouth and holds it there. The shed is getting hotter as the sun lifts. My patience is melting away. I get up, open the door, pull the towels back from the windows. “I’m confused, Uncle Bitter. What does all this have to do with — ”

“Your mama,” he says, placing the spoon in his bowl, fanning his fingers over his heart. His shirt is so thin, I can see his darkness beneath it. “That little flame-frightened girly.”

I stand, staring down at him. Bees flit against the windows.

“Them ladies that perished. Sahry Morgan and your grandma Jean. I didn’t know them well as Maevey did, but I’d sit with them sometimes on the stairs, drinking lemonade late in the evening, you know. I’s embarrassed around them, smelling so bad like I did all the time, but they’s easy enough with me, eventually, to tell me a thing or two.” He straightens his legs. “Now, I don’t know the particulars, you understand, but I can tell you Sahry was on the outs with her fambly ‘cause she decided to go ahead and keep the baby.”

“Cletus Hayes’s baby?”

“That’s right. Jean.”

“Did she talk about Cletus?”

“Not much. I cain’t tell you whether she got knocked up, riot night, or whether she’s already carrying. She’d been seeing Cletus on the sly since the soldiers first come to town.”

“She told you this?”

“She did.”

I slide back onto the mattress, rumpling the sheet. A spider catches a ladybug, just above the door. In my research into Cletus’s background, I’d discovered in the archives of the Texas Freedman’s Bureau a claim by an ex-slave named Leticia Hayes. Her boy, Cletus, had been taken from her by a wealthy white man, a cotton baron north of Houston. The Freedman’s Bureau was established after the Civil War so sundered families could locate one another. Mostly, it tried to help women find their kids. Leticia Hayes’s claim is dated August 1868—an earlier Cletus. But there’s more. She swears her son was stolen and whisked away to an East Texas cotton plantation while she was forced to remain in the city as a domestic aide.

The bureau did locate him and issued a written order for the boy’s release. The very next day, however, it authorized his holder to keep Cletus in return for the “young man’s continuing care, culture, and education.” I found no reason for the reversal and no further mention of Leticia Hayes. The state of Texas denied her fifteen hundred dollar reparation claim. I’m guessing she died of grief. Or hunger, if she couldn’t provide for her boy. Could this Cletus be the soldier’s father? Most members of the Twenty-fourth Infantry were recruited up north, but Private Hayes was a Houston native. Riot trial transcripts confirm this, though they say nothing else about his background.

Another thing: Leticia Hayes’s son was bound over to a man named Morgan. Son of a slave, then? At home in the old stomping grounds? Feeling his oats? This is the figure I’d patched together, my Cletus: a badly made quilt.

I ask Bitter, “Was Cletus’s father a slave on the Morgan farm, before they moved to town?”

He shakes his head. “I know squat about Cletus ‘cept he didn’t rape nobody. That was Sahry’s fambly, embarrassed by their daughter, looking for someone to blame. She told me Cletus was trying to leave her, and she was pissed about it.”

“Why did he want to break things off?”

“Cain’t answer that.”

“Why did she decide to keep the baby?”

“Don’t know that, neither, Seam.”

My forehead is sweating. “And my grandma? Jean?”

“Jean struck me as a lost young lady, tell you the god’s honest truth. She had that light skin, like your mama and you. Flirted with all the boys in the building — found her exotic, I guess.”

I grip my knees.

“Well. Lord knows who your mama’s father was. Some roughneck in the oil fields.”

“Black?”

“We didn’t mix with no whites. ‘Cept Sahry. Poor ol’ misfit, shoved out on her own.” He reaches for the teapot and winces. His hand shakes, and he sits back, wheezing.

“Are you all right, Uncle Bitter?”

“Getting old, that’s all.”

“What is it?”

“Damn chest squeezing me lately.” He rubs his elbow.

“Is the pain in your arm, too?”

“I don’t need no nurse.”

“Uncle, those are heart symptoms — ”

“On’iest thing wrong with my goddam heart is it’s broke, way your mama run from us.” He reaches again for the pot, pours himself some tea, and sips it sullenly. I’m ashamed that, along with concern for him, I feel a spike of resentment: after caring so long for Mama, then coming all this way, now I’ve got to care for Bitter too? He’s supposed to watch after me. Another shameful thought: like the “uncle” routine, pain is expected of him, so of course he displays it. He’s always provided what’s called for. And to an extent, that’s really what’s paining him now, I think — the confines of a ready-made identity. Watching his fingers and the gnarled veins in the backs of his hands, I realize for the first time I’ve never seen him as a man, or as a worker, a father. He’s always been just “Uncle” to me, always one of the “old ones.” I’ve taken him for granted, yes; on the other hand, as a child, I thought certain old men, like Bitter, were the only men of feeling. They were the only people I trusted. Unlike the boys I saw, most of them didn’t drink in the middle of the day (Bitter was an exception). They actually listened and talked. They carried hankies in their pockets and were quick to offer one if you cried. They went to church. They knew amazing skills: carpentry, plumbing.

He looks better now.

“Do you want to stop?” I say.

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“You’re sure?”

“Seam — ”

“Not if you’re — ”

“Goddammit, girl — ”

“Okay, okay. Mama.”

“What about her?”

“She ran because of my father? Something to do with a man?” I watch the rhythm of his breathing.

“That’s what we figgered. She never did say directly.” He’s still wheezing. “She’s awful unhappy here. Missed Maevey something fierce. I married again for a short spell — Ariyeh’s ma — woman name Cass. You ‘member her?”

“No.”

“Neither does Ariyeh, much. Both too young when she left. Your mama and Cass never did square with each other.”

“And my dad?”

He sits up on his knees, kneading his calves. His joints creak. “You want it all at once, do you?”

“Your answers just leave me with more questions.”

“It’s always gonna be that way. You know that.”

“Please.”

“It’s hard for me to talk about your dad.”

“Why’s that?”

He scratches his head. “Jim Clay Washington was his name.” Simple. Flat. The awful secret all these years. Just a pair of words, Jim Clay, a couple of lost buttons in the dust beneath a bed. Damn it, Mama, what was so hard about two words? “Worked as a wildcatter, played the juke joints at night. I didn’t like him when he first come sniffing around Helen. Real arrogant manner. I come to see, later, he’s mostly bluff. Scared puppy, like the rest of us. Scared of the Man. Scared of being poor. He had some greatness in him as a singer. Frittered it all away. Booze and such. You know. The old story.”

“Did he play at Etta’s?”

“Sometime.”

“He met Mama there?”

“Might have.”

“They never married?”

“No.”

“And I was just a mistake. A bottle baby.”

Bitter squeezes my hand. “He run off about the time Cass did. I wish I had more to tell you.”

“Why don’t you like to talk about him?”

“It’s just painful for us all. ‘Specially Helen. She stuck around awhile, helping me raise Ariyeh and you. Then she up and took you north.”

I snort. “She was going to better herself.”

“No. Well, sure. But she wasn’t like the others who left once they got a little money or once the white-owned businesses started moving in and taking over. You know”—a rueful laugh — “we used to have high standards around here. You could ‘better yourself ‘thout leaving home. But since the integration and such, that’s all been lost. Pride in the neighborhood been lost. Anyways, your mama, she was running sad, like she knew no ‘betterment’ could save her. At first, I talked her into visits — mostly for you kids, pining for each other so. Then: nothing. Till you show up two days ago.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle Bitter.” I pause. “Can I still call you Uncle?”

“We fambly, Seam. Not by blood, maybe, but by circumstance. I don’t know about you, but I look around, all I see is circumstance.”

I smile. “Thank you for breakfast.”

“You get what you come for?”

“Like you said, there’ll always be more questions.” I pull my damp T-shirt away from my skin. “And I don’t really know what I came for. A break in my routine, maybe.” Running sad, I think. Damn straight.

“How’d you start trailing Cletus?”

“In college, I tried to study the Houston riot. There wasn’t much on it anywhere. Finally, from a federal records center, I got hold of the trial transcripts… all I knew from Mama — her version of things — was that a black soldier had raped my great-grandma. I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. I figured that incident, whatever its truth, had to be the beginning of me. The black and the white.” My head spins from the heat — and the news Bitter has brought me. Suddenly, I need to go. To be on my own for a while. “I have a lot to chew on, Uncle.”

“That you do.”

“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a drive. Then I’ll stop by and see Ariyeh.”

“You okay, Seam?”

“Yeah. You? Your chest?”

“Healthy as a radish. How long you got here? Your Sabbath-leave?”

I stand and reach for my purse. “I don’t really know. I took a month off from work, but I hadn’t given it much thought … why?”

“I’s just thinking it’s good to see you.”

I nod. Opening the door, I catch a red flash. “Uncle, what’s that flannel for? Nailed to the wall?”

“Wards off hurt. My buddies who sleep here — fellas at Etta’s — they feeling, you know, pretty hurt most the time.”

“I thought maybe you were trying to get rid of me.” I grin at him.

“Hell, I already been rid of you, girl. You’d think I’d throwed a black chicken over your head. That’s how you chase folks off.” He laughs, wheezing. “When I’s a boy, to make the cats come home, we used to spoon sugar into they mouths every morning, then make ‘em look in the mirror. They’s back at sunset, never fail. I gotta do that to you?”

I bend and kiss his forehead. “I’ll be home this evening. I’ll go shopping and bring us some supper, okay?”

“I be jinks swing!” He kisses my hand. “Might be I could get used to you being here, Chere.”

Noon sun, reflecting off law firms and banks, ripples past power lines. I adjust my visor. The skyscrapers’ windows are magnifying lenses focusing heat onto tiny rental homes. I pass a landfill — “Mount Trash-more,” Uncle used to call it, “one of Houston’s few hills”—seething with flies next to an elderly woman’s house. She’s rocking in a porch swing as if meditating on rotting paper, food, clothes.

A city bus chuffs past the cemetery. Its roundness reminds me of a barbecue grill, passengers sizzling like ribs inside. The buses in Dallas seem bigger, nicer, cleaner than these, and I think, I’m back in the South now, where a bus is not just a bus, but a ghost of the old social order.

And I think of Bitter’s patter, his stories and jokes: if it was all a mask at first — now hardened into flesh — who could blame him for hiding behind it? Whites didn’t feel threatened by an “uncle”; in our own community, old men and uncle types were second only to babies in the amount of affection they received from the women.

As for his “hoo-raw,” his tale of my family, twisted and murky as the bayou, the more I ponder it, the more I lose it. Bitter used to take me to the water, hold my hand on the bank, grab a stick and point out catfish and carp, wriggling among algae, paper cups, hubcaps, and broken toasters dumped into the stream. I’d glimpse the fish then lose them, never sure if I’d seen or imagined them.

It’s like that now, with my family.

In this part of town, weeds, moisture, and heat gnaw concrete and wood, and you can see the hellish swamp this really is without motors and steel, pulleys, glass, and Our Blessed Lord and Savior, central air-conditioning. Uncle once told me Mexicans and Negroes cleared the land because whites couldn’t have survived the mosquitoes, malaria, snake bites, and dirty water involved in erecting the city.

Now, billboards and buildings form flimsy, elaborate masks covering the chaos, ready to suck us down if we stand too still — a precariousness I’ve known all my life. Bitter may have adopted a safe routine; I’ve stayed camouflaged too. In college, freshman and sophomore years, I masked myself as wealthy, white, partying on the weekends, studying on the run. I’d received an academic scholarship to Southern Methodist in Dallas, one of the state’s most expensive private schools, pleasing Mama no end (if the Affirmative Action officers, whose files listed me as African American, had ever seen me, they would have accused me of running a scam). Classes were easy and boring, until one term in English the teacher assigned us Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. “Ellison once wrote, ‘Whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.’ What did he mean by that?” the instructor, a young Bostonian with an Irish accent, asked.

A limber blonde, who always annoyed me, preening in the back row, drawled, “‘Cause we’re all human beings, okay, when you get right down to it. We’re not all that different. We all, like, fall in love and stuff.”

“Bullshit,” said Keshawn Jackson, the only obvious black pupil in the class, one of the few minority males on campus not riding an athletic scholarship. “What’s the most you ever suffered, dear? When your mama snatched away your charge card?”

Both these answers were lazy, too easy, mired in stereotypes, but they had the effect on me of sniper fire. I sank in my seat. Keshawn reminded me of my old crush, Troy, intense, argumentative, rough around the edges. He’d shaved his head — before M.J. had popularized the style — and he looked exotic, sleek, a little dangerous. Was his baldness a slap at the fat afros of the seventies? A logical next step for someone seeking distinction?

“Anyway, Ellison’s just a house nigger,” Keshawn growled. He enjoyed tweaking the ofays. “He wants to be part of the American tradition, right? Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, James, T. S. Eliot, for Christ’s sake — he’s sucking Jim Crow’s dick. ‘Yessir. Okay, sir. I’ll write it the way you say’ It’s bullshit. A black novelist, if he’s going to tell us anything new about ourselves, has got to tear down the tradition, blow it up and start over from a fresh perspective.”

“So then … what? You’ll have anarchy? That doesn’t help anybody,” said a usually quiet kid up front.

“Gotta start somewhere, pal.”

“Maybe we live closer to anarchy than we think,” the teacher said, trying to focus the talk. “Listen. Ellison also wrote, ‘The Civil War is still in the balance, and only our enchantment by the spell of the possible, our endless optimism, has led us to assume that it ever really ended.’”

By now, I had learned to read ideologically, as Troy had asked me to do, but I was no longer seeking my heritage. I was after acceptance and success — a quick, easy out, away from Mama toward independence and peace of mind. That meant White Lane, right down the middle. It meant rejecting Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni. It meant masking myself, which was simple for me. Keshawn had no idea that, behind my rouged sorority face, I knew exactly what Ellison was up to. I’d caught the blues pacing in his sentences, the serious mockery. Still, I got Bs on the two short papers I wrote on the book; I wasn’t about to give myself away, a peasant here in Paradise. Like my classmates, I tried just hard enough to get through the course.

At first, the sororities on campus weren’t interested in me, not because they suspected my race, but because I was quiet, shy, not a quick joiner. My short hair and angularity gave me a “bit of a masculine thing”—several dorm-mates told me this, trying to “help” me. Finally, a girl whose ass I’d saved once or twice, aiding her with her calculus homework, invited me to the Tri Delt house. I wound up pledging, declaring myself a business major with a minor in marketing: the Yellow Brick Road to America’s soul.

I wasn’t the only one compromising for purely pragmatic reasons. One day, in one of my marketing classes, a pretty black girl told us she’d had a rib removed so she could be thinner; she was “going the beauty pageant route” so she could parley her winnings and attention into a career as a TV personality, maybe as a news anchor or a talk show host. “This isn’t vanity,” she insisted. “It’s a business decision. Being beautiful is the only way a woman can make it in television — especially a black woman.” Fiercely, the class debated her strategy, the selling of her beauty, her skin. “What’s the difference between what you’re doing and what a stripper does or a hooker?” a shocked boy asked. The girl just smiled, and I thought, She’s tougher than I am. I was too intimidated to approach her after that, though initially I’d hoped we might be friends.

Surviving as a Tri Delt took tremendous energy, a cynical edge cloaked as wit about trivial matters (in the house, concern over anything serious was “way not cool”). I hated my sisters’ records — Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd — plodding, dippy music, overly earnest without a whiff of irony or self-awareness, dead water compared with the rush of the blues (though in those days, Mama’s good little girl, I didn’t allow Uncle Bitter to muddy my thoughts).

By junior year I was exhausted, maintaining the act. One day, after physics class, I found a quiet corner of the Meadows Museum on campus, a dimly lit gallery full of Goya’s Caprichos, wild pen-and-ink drawings of twisted creatures. The sketches were too disturbing to lure many viewers; the room was almost always deserted, and I started going there each afternoon, sitting and reading, hiding out, the way I used to escape to the junior high restroom.

The museum catalog said that Goya, when he made the Caprichos, was fascinated by a Swiss theorist named Johann Kaspar Lavater, who insisted that an individual’s moral nature is shaped by his physical features. A “degenerate” lower jaw was a sign of “brutal corruption”; a “slavish devotion to pure reason” could lead to a “warped and bony forehead.” In this, I heard echoes of Bitter’s bayou superstitions, as well as more sinister strains of genetic engineering and racial typing. Still, for all their horror, Goya’s sketches were madly funny. My favorite was a drawing of two stumbling sleepwalkers hoisting braying asses — I get it! I thought. Mans donkeylike behavior! I know this stuff!

In a history class that year, I learned that Spain, where Goya lived, was a blend of both European and African influences, a bastard mix, a slumgullion. Maybe that’s where Goya’s turmoil came from — why I was so attracted to his work. I liked history classes so much, I switched majors. This didn’t please Mama or my stepdad, who disdained the “impractical” liberal arts. By this time, tired of the Tri Delt house, bored with three-chord rock and roll — bored with myself — I began, at last, to think once more of the past, to smell, in memory, the bayou’s sweet, compelling rot. I pressed Mama again about our flight from Houston, her aversion to blacks, the blackness in herself. I wanted to know about Sarah Morgan. One day her husband Dale yelled at me to “leave your poor mother alone, can’t you? Christ, you’d think you’d want to live in Queen City”—a poor, inner-city neighborhood — “instead of enjoying the good things here. Your daddy couldn’t have given you a life like this. You know that, don’t you?”

Aggravated by Mama’s silence, I sought my answers at school. Sarah Morgan. Insubordinate soldiers. Eventually, these threads led me to the Houston race riot. I became obsessed with it and would have remained a history major if the professors hadn’t discouraged me. Women weren’t really welcome in the profession. I saw this in subtle games of intellectual one-upsmanship at socials. Men competed for the big prizes — the American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal — animals fighting over meat. African American history barely surfaced on campus — the field’s few black scholars had earned their degrees at obscure institutions and were forced to spend most of their careers overworked in the classroom, woefully underpaid.

When I proposed writing on Houston history for my favorite teacher, he looked at me skeptically. “There’s no collective memory in that city,” he said finally. “It’s been in such a hurry to grow, ever since its founding, it hasn’t bothered to retain its past. It only cares about Tomorrow. I’m afraid ‘Houston history’ is an oxymoron.”

He was right. Records from Houston’s past had often been sloppily kept, misplaced, eaten by bugs, burned up, thrown out. The city’s heat and humidity were natural enemies of paper, where much of history resides. In researching the place, I kept running into silence. It was eerily like talking to Mama.

In the end, I stuck with business and marketing, reading history on my own in the Goya room, surrounded not by short-ribbed TV beauties, but by humpbacks, birdmen, cannibals eating angels, children with hoary, feathered bodies. Slumgullions, all. I felt at ease with them. Happy. Since my freshman English class, Ralph Ellison’s blues-prose had spun, flashing, in my head, and I returned to him now, this time studying his essays, his concern that “practically missing from America …since Huckleberry Finn” was a “search for images of black and white fraternity.”

One day I ran across this phrase: “The American Negro [has an] impulse toward self-annihilation and ‘going-under-ground.’” The words brought tears to my eyes, unexpectedly. I looked up at one of Goya’s grotesques, a tortured creature writhing on the earth, and this time, instead of seeing myself, I recognized poor Mama, running, frightened, stumbling from her past.

On our visits back to Freedmen’s Town, she walked with me down magnolia-shaded roads or past pecan trees on the far side of the cemetery. She didn’t talk much but seemed content to be with me. Web-worms spun silk, patterned like musical staves, among the leaves. On the hottest days, worms dropped, shriveled, from the limbs: old lady fingers. People crushed them underfoot, accidentally, until the walks were slick with chili-like paste. I didn’t mind. I loved being with Mama.

Silk waves in the oaks today in front of Ariyeh’s school. The neighborhood has been bulldozed and burned to near-extinction. An old man in a hooded jacket — he must be broiling! — pushes an empty shopping cart past the campus. On the playground, three girls stop to whisper about him, staring and laughing, then resume their game. Closer, I see they’re using TV cable as a jump rope. Garbage bags flap in broken windows on the building’s second floor. An inspection sheet taped to the wall near a boarded-up basement door says, “NO ACCESS TO BUILDING HERE,” and the remaining safety form is blank. A third- or fourth-grade boy saunters past me, puffing on a plastic inhaler, wrestling a backpack almost as big as he is. As they skip rope, the girls chant, “SSI, SSI / Give it to Granny / So Granny won’t die!” I’m astonished. SSI is a federal program for the sick and disabled, and just about everybody — including these laughing girls, it seems — knows it’s worthless. Last month, a woman who mistook my office for one of the social service outlets burst in, yelling, “How sick you gotta be to get on SSI? I’ve had AIDS for six months now, and the bastards still won’t cut me a check!”

The school’s main door gives me trouble. It’s metal, painted green, and sticks near the uppermost hinge. I tug hard, imagining how difficult it must be for a child to budge this thing. What would happen in a fire? Fungus, old paper in the halls. Kids shuffle through them, quieter than I would have anticipated, gloomy even. This morning, before I left the shed, Uncle Bitter told me, “Three kids disappeared there lately, over a span of six weeks. Ain’t been found. Folks worried the Needle Men is back.”

In the sweltering front office I ask for Ariyeh. A big woman fanning her face with a Newsweek (“George W.’s Run for the White House”) points out a cracked, dirty window to a concrete courtyard about the size of a doctor’s waiting room. “There she is, eating her sandwich.” The woman she means is slender, long-armed, in a red dress. Dark as bookprint. I don’t recognize my cousin until … yes, yes. Oval mouth. Small nose, like a thread spool. Talk about a remake!

At the courtyard entrance, a sign on the wall says NO SKATEBOARDING. Below it, someone has scribbled No Guns.

Ariyeh’s surprising appearance, along with Bitter’s information about my family, has made me shy. We’re strangers now, really. Not even real cousins. I’m slow to approach. “Excuse me,” I say. “Ariyeh?”

She looks up, startled, and knows me immediately. A pleasure-twitch crosses her lips, tamped down instantly by anger, hurt, resentment? Who has she become in the last fifteen years? What burdens does she carry? “T,” she says softly, looking away, setting her cheese sandwich on a square of wax paper in her lap.

“Look at you. You’re beautiful,” I say.

Wry smile. “Not fat, you mean. I hit a growth spurt around fourteen, sprouted like a dandelion. No more Ugly Duckling.”

“You were never an Ugly Duckling.”

“You haven’t changed.” A sting. A Needle Man prick. Maybe some brown shoe polish on your cheekbones, little bit there, would help.

“Uncle Bitter told me I could find you here. Can I sit for a minute?” She moves over, making room on the wobbly concrete bench. Her sweat smells like sage. “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch.”

“What brings you back after all this time?” She’s playing it cool, the way Uncle did two nights ago when I showed up on his porch.

“My mama died.”

“Yeah, Daddy told me. I guess he got a funeral notice.”

“I had them send him one. She left me, you know, with a lot of questions. I needed to be here to study up on them. So …” A quiet minute. She nibbles her sandwich. “How long have you been teaching?” I ask.

“Six years.”

“You like it?”

“Pays the rent.”

“I figured you’d be married with a passel of kids by the time you were twenty. Playing house was always your favorite.”

“I’m not married.” Another minute. “Got a boyfriend. You?”

“No.”

She stamps a cockroach at her feet. Crushed, it keeps crawling away, trailing what looks like sticky coconut. “Your hair’s still naturally straight like that?” she says, a little shyly.

“Mostly. In my teens, it thickened up some. Now, it seems to be relaxing again.”

“Lucky. ‘Round the time I lost my fat, I started going to the hairdresser to get pressed — two, two-and-a-half hours — forty dollars a pop. Daddy wasn’t happy about that, let me tell you. I tried the snatch-back look for a while, but finally the chemicals turned everything into, like, these gnarly old plaits, so I gave up.”

“It looks lovely.”

She pats her short curls. “You’re one of those women who, late at night in the clubs, makes the rest of us crazy,” she says. “In the heat, when all our ‘dos have wilted and fallen flat, you’re still just perfect.”

A tall girl in overalls comes running up to us. In her hair, a plump yellow scrunchie. She eyes me suspiciously, then whispers to Ariyeh, but not so softly I can’t hear, “I be having my periot now, and the koteck thingy in the bat’room is broke.”

Ariyeh reaches into her big leather bag, produces a tampon with an applicator. The girl grabs it, greedily, then hurries off. “Fourth grader,” Ariyeh says.

“You’re kidding. How old is she?”

“Thirteen. We stopped social promotions here a few years ago, so some of these kids stay stuck.”

A grackle lands in the courtyard, plucks at the gooey bug. In its throat, the bird makes a leaky air hose sound.

“Uncle told me you’ve lost some kids lately.”

“Three. All boys. Ten-year-olds.” She bites into an apple, talks as she chews. “Police checked all the unguarded construction sites in the area, the crack houses, vacant lots. Nothing.”

“Needle Men?” I smile, though as soon as I’ve said it, I know it’s in bad taste.

Of course she won’t share the humor. Or memories of our childhood on Bitter’s lap. “If Reggie — my boyfriend — ever heard Bitter spinning that tale, he’d hit the roof. He doesn’t have any patience for superstition or folklore. I guess I don’t either, anymore.”

I decide not to tell her I passed the Flower Man’s house last night and thought of us. A man in a gray custodian’s uniform fast-walks through the courtyard, scolding a boy for apparently setting fire to paper in a trash can. “Send you to boot camp, boy, how you like that?”

Ariyeh balls up her lunch bag. “I need to get back.”

“Ariyeh.”

She stands, then turns to me, waits.

“Ariyeh, I’m sorry I didn’t stay in better touch. I know Bitter thinks I was being a snob. Maybe you do, too. I was just … my mama didn’t want me to … anyway, anyway, I missed you. I thought about you a lot.”

She taps the bag against her thigh. It sounds like a torn tambourine. “I didn’t think you were being a snob,” she says softly. “I just thought you were being white.”

I look at my hands. My very pink palms. Then Ariyeh starts to laugh. I stand, smile nervously. I laugh with her, slowly at first, finally in great, sobbing waves of relief. I want to hug her, but she doesn’t look ready for that. She is beautiful. And dignified. “How long are you going to be here?” she asks.

“A few days, at least. Right now I’m staying with Uncle, but I may give him a break and move to a motel.”

“I’ll stop by. Maybe you can meet Reggie.”

“I’d like that.” She squeezes my arm. “Ariyeh,” I say, grasping her hand. “How well do you remember my mama? If you don’t mind me asking?”

She chews her lower lip. “Pretty well. I remember she always seemed sad to me.”

“She never talked to you about my daddy, did she?”

“No.”

“What do you remember about your own mother?”

“Cass? I remember her yelling all the time. That’s all.”

“What about?”

“Anything. Everything.”

I nod and let her go. She disappears behind a big metal door, catty-corner to the one I came through, in a wall scored by scorch marks. Green fungus mottles a window frame next to the door; with nail polish, someone has painted on the glass “Uh-Huh.” Two boys, about ten, with sneakers as big as banana floats, pass through the courtyard, glancing at me, snickering.

In the Safeway parking lot, as I’m loading my trunk with grocery bags, a car passes palpitating to a rap beat. I turn, expecting black teenagers. Instead, two white boys in a brand-new BMW cruise with the windows down, thrashed by the tune in their speakers.

Bitter isn’t home, so I unload our supper supplies, snatch a beer, and walk across the street to the cemetery. Sunflowers, snapdragons, and hollyhocks curl around headstones of mothers, fathers, children, baseball players, street singers, salesmen. The snapdragons smell like ashtrays. I remember picking flowers for Mama as a girl. She never thanked me for them; she’d take them from my hands with a seriousness that indicated she deserved this lovely tribute. Maybe some brown shoe polish on your cheekbones, little bit there… the day Ariyeh suggested this to me (some boys, passing Bitter’s yard, had laughed at me), I bawled fiercely. Mama, stirring chicken soup on the stove, said, “Go pick me some flowers. Hurry up now.” When I came back, she arranged the roses, lilies, and violets in a jar, poured me a glass of milk, and sat with me at the kitchen table. “Aren’t they pretty?” she said, turning the jar around and around. “And they’re all different, each attractive in its own unique way.”

I knew what she was trying to tell me. “Mama, don’t you wish you had darker skin?”

“I most certainly do not.”

“Why?”

“Honey, you can spend your life wishing you were someone you’re not, and it won’t do you a lick of good. Look at Ariyeh. Don’t you think she wishes she were as thin as you are?”

“I guess.”

“But she’s beautiful, too. With her own style, right?”

“But — ”

“Sweetie, you don’t know how lucky you are. One day you’ll recognize the advantages in looking like you do.”

Her face sagged. She’d been up at dawn, as she was every day, making hotcakes for Bitter, Ariyeh, and me. Was my daddy ever there? Cass? I don’t remember them. Lunch and supper, she was at the stove again. Her straightened hair straggled into her eyes. She was thin as well — probably too thin, I think now.

Another evening (just after we’d moved and had returned to Houston for a visit), she was walking home from the store carrying two big bags of food. Fresh vegetables had moistened one of the bags; when she reached the yard, a neighbor dog, a little schnauzer, bounded over to her, startling her. She swung away from him and the bag ripped. She fell to her knees in the dead grass, sobbing — from exhaustion, I realize now. I approached her quietly from where I’d been playing. She didn’t ask me to help her. She tried to smile through her tears. “Hello, honey,” was all she said. I felt scared, seeing her vulnerable, unhappy. I picked up a cabbage, a carton of eggs (only two had cracked), a spaghetti package. “You’re a sweet girl,” she said. “That quality’s going to get you anything you want in life.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you won’t have to live in a ratty old neighborhood like this when you grow up.”

“I like it here. More than Dallas,” I admitted.

“You’ll do better than this, believe me.” She tucked a banana bunch under her arm.

“Ariyeh and me — ”

“Ariyeh and I.”

“—we’re going to live in a tent with our husbands and children and be famous.”

“For what?”

“Just for having our pictures on magazines.”

She frowned at me, balanced a jam jar on her hip. “When’s the last time you saw someone who looked like Ariyeh on a magazine cover?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s right. Remember that.”

I didn’t know what she meant, and I don’t know now where her self-hatred started, or how. The fall from the garden. Shame at her own naked self, leading to her long rest, too soon, under a headstone just like one of these.

And my own shame? Recalling the girl today who needed a tampon, I remember sitting in my Dallas bedroom, cramping, trying to read the Modess box while Aretha sang on the radio, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.…” I longed for Ariyeh then. Was the same thing happening to her? This messy flow … it wasn’t just another fault of mine, was it, a flaw in the package, like my off-kilter skin?

I rise, brush leaves and dirt from my pants, and pick a sunflower for the supper table.

Bitter sucks a beer while I sauté onions and garlic in a crusted old pan, maybe the pan Mama used at this very same stove. Robins chortle in the trees, and I miss my parrots; dogs bark, children shout. The garlic quashes the old-bathrobe smell floating through the house. Bitter’s put jazz on the phonograph, slow, sad piano, something I don’t recognize. Sunset, filtered through bumps and flaws in the kitchen’s thick window, is a pink-purple patch on the dirty yellow wall.

“So. You give Ariyeh a heart attack, showing up out the blue?”

I smile, drain the vegetable oil, add soy sauce and a teaspoon of sesame oil to the pan. “She’s looking good. Tough job, though.”

“‘Bout all she can do with them kids is keep them off the streets a while — which they’re gonna end up there, anyways. Some of them pretty smart, I guess. But they ain’t going nowhere — less’n their mamas just up and move them out.”

I let that pass. “Still, you must be proud of her.”

“I am.” He picks at the label on his bottle. “That Northern mayor of yours. He put any money in the colored schools? You know, we hear y’all enlightened up North.”

“I hate to tell you, Uncle, but Dallas isn’t far from here. In spirit, as well as space.”

He laughs. “Tell you the truth, sad as it made me, I didn’t blame Helen for sneaking you out of here. Look what she done for you. You a educated girl. Self-possess. Good job. Nice car. Hell, she done the right thing. Shoulda takened Ariyeh with her.”

“Ariyeh’s done just fine.” I slice a catfish fillet into checkerboard squares, then lay the squares in the marinade. I boil water for frozen peas, start the rice.

Groaning, Uncle Bitter rises from his chair, walks to a scarred oak hutch. From a shelf he plucks an object, then comes and puts an arm around my shoulder. He shows me a red card, old, softened now almost to the texture of paper. Its corners have crumbled away. Faded, typed letters say, “Nigger — stay away from the polls.” “Nineteen forty-eight,” Bitter says. “Our second year here in Freedmen’s Town. One morning a prop plane come buzzing over our streets, dropping these cards by the thousands. Bloody snow. You best believe I didn’t vote that election. None of us did. We knew what it took to keep a roof over our heads, in peace. So Henry Wallace had to do without us.” He taps the card on his fingernails. “Things improve some over the years, little by little, but by the time you and Ariyeh born, we still didn’t have no library in this area, other than Buck Jackson, the barber’s, paperback collection, which he lent out to folks from the back of his shop. What I mean is, yeah. Ariyeh done well, all right. She a hard-working gal, smart as a whip. But it’s all been in spite of. You know what I’m say’n? What you got, when your mama move you north, Ariyeh got in spite of.”

“I know,” I say. I pour vegetable oil into a fresh pan, slide the fish in, and cook it over high heat. “But I lost something, too, Uncle Bitter. You and Ariyeh. After a certain point, yes, it was my choice — okay, I admit that — but by that time I’d been taught I was someone else, not the little girl who’d started to grow up here. It was hard to keep thinking independently. I didn’t know how to act around black people anymore — not that I ever learned how to act around whites. Can you grab us a couple of forks? We’re ready here.”

We settle at the table and I light a candle. “I lost whatever chance I might have had to find my daddy while I could.”

Bitter nods. He says, “This sure is nice, Seam. I ain’t et this fancy since Maevey died,” and we eat our meal quietly, awkward at first, then relaxed. He chews in a rapture. As we’re finishing up, I ask him about his childhood in the French Quarter. “Is that where you first learned to appreciate good food — and gris-gris?”

“Sure enough.” He swipes a napkin across his lips. “We lived in a little oyster-shell alley back of St. Ann Street, where the ol’ hoodoo queen Marie Laveau used to live. My mama said she ‘membered rich white folks pulling up in their carriages middle of the night, asking Marie for love potions.” He leans back and picks his teeth with a finger. “First job I ever had was hanging outside the produce warehouses down by the river, stealing spoilt ‘taters and onions. The shippers threw them away, see. I’d cut off the spoilt parts and sell them to restaurants for a nickel apiece or to the old ladies in the neighborhood, who always had ‘em some incense burning on an altar. I learnt a lotta spells making my rounds.” He laughs. “Back then, I thought the height of success was to be a street crier. I ‘member the watermelon man coming ‘round early in the morning, shouting,

“When I’s a little older, I graduated to selling coal off a wagon. We’d go to Storyville — all the red-light ladies slinking ‘round the doorways, freezing they asses, wearing them teddies, you know. Needed coal for they cribs, burn it down to ash. Lots of them practiced the hoodoo, too. And we’d sell to the gin joints. The Funky Butt Club, where Buddy Bolden played. And I ‘member hearing Satchmo for the first time when he’s just a pup — lots of good hot air. You know Satchmo?”

“Sure. Axeman’s Jazz?”

He grins. “We called him Dippermouth them days, he had such a wide ol’ smile.”

“So you really believe in those spells?”

He looks confused or offended. Or both. “‘Course I do, Seam. I seen ‘em work. There used to be a ghost on St. Ann Street. I swear. I seen her — hollow eyes, snowy hair. She’d hang out on the steps of the old opera house and, at night, disappear into a rooming place over to St. Ann and Royal. One of the ladies I sold ‘taters to told me this particular haint was a woman who’d kilt herself after finding her man with a lover. She rose from the grave one night, snuck into the lovers’ room, and turned on the gas, phyxiating ‘em both. The lady who told me this, I went with her one afternoon, right into the haunted room. She had her some goofer dust and sprinkled it all over the place. None of us ever saw that ol’ ghost again.”

I pour him another beer. He sits quietly now. Whether or not his tales are even remotely true, he has a past he can call on, I think. Maybe that’s what Cletus Hayes means to me. Whatever the reality of his relations with Sarah Morgan, whatever his connection to me, I can make him my personal ghost, a badge here in a community haunted by tragic luck. I squeeze Bitter’s hand.

After rinsing the dishes we sit in the yard near the mud-dauber shack, splitting another beer. Stars spackle the sky. “If you’re thinking of staying awhile, maybe it’s time you move inside,” he says. So. My probation’s over. “Shack’s good for a night or two, but it ain’t no long-term deal.”

“I was considering a motel — ”

“Hush. I got a big, fat couch in there.”

It’s not all that big, but I thank him anyway.

“If you black, stay back; if you brown, stick around; if you white, you right,” Bitter says. “That’s a saying we used to have here, kind of a joke on how the honkies saw us. Your mama knew it. O’niest explanation she ever give me for why she move.” He massages his chest, just below his collarbone. “I think she thought she was gonna save you. And maybe she did, who knows?”

“Well — ”

“It took bravery for her to change her whole life, Seam.”

“I suppose.”

“And maybe you ain’t lost all that much, after all. You here now, right? Something I didn’t ‘member this morning, come to me later. There’s a fella knew your daddy real well, name of Elias Woods. Used to hang out at Etta’s ‘fore he move south of town. I got his address ‘cause I done some carpentry work for him once upon a time. Don’t have no phone, I know of, but you might want to go see him. Might be he could tell you more’n I can ‘bout your pa.”

“Wonderful. What’s his story?”

“Cain’t rightly say. Ain’t seen him in years.”

I rub my eyes. “While I’m down this way, I’d also like to see the field where Cletus Hayes was hanged. Seems like it’s part of my story, somehow. Something I ought to witness.”

“Pretty grim vacation. You know where it is?”

“I’ve got a vague idea — though for years the army tried to hide it. A few intrepid historians have managed to pinpoint it, generally.”

“Well now, you start using them fancy words, it’s time for me to go inside and get that couch ready for you.”

I nearly tell him Enough of the “uncle” routine; you understand my “fancy” words perfectly well, but I’d only upset him, and I’m not sure it’s just a routine, after all. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Not everyone wears a mask.

He sprinkles out our beer dregs. Frogs chirp in the bayou a few miles away. Crickets treak. He bends down, pressing his chest, then picks something loose from the lawn: a mistletoe sprig, dropped from a tree. He dangles it over my head, leans close, pecks my cheek. “Glad you here, Seam.”

I take his hand. Lord, he’s frail. It occurs to me I’ve returned to Houston too late — when the most tangible link to my past may be about to collapse. “Me too, Uncle Bitter. Thanks.”