Song of Solomon

Chapter 2

Only Magdalene called Lena and First Corinthians were genuinely happy when the big Packard rolled evenly and silently out of the driveway. They alone had a sense of adventure and were flagrant in their enjoyment of the automobile’s plushness. Each had a window to herself and commanded an unobstructed view of the summer day flying past them. And each was both old enough and young enough to actually believe she was a princess riding in a regal chariot driven by a powerful coachman. In the back seat, away from the notice of Macon and Ruth, they slipped off their patent leather pumps, rolled their stockings down over their knees, and watched the men walking down the streets.

These rides that the family took on Sunday afternoons had become rituals and much too important for Macon to enjoy. For him it was a way to satisfy himself that he was indeed a successful man. It was a less ambitious ritual for Ruth, but a way, nevertheless, for her to display her family. For the little boy it was simply a burden. Pressed in the front seat between his parents, he could see only the winged woman careening off the nose of the car. He was not allowed to sit on his mother’s lap during the drive—not because she wouldn’t have it, but because his father objected to it. So it was only by kneeling on the dove gray seat and looking out the back window that he could see anything other than the laps, feet, and hands of his parents, the dashboard, or the silver winged woman poised at the tip of the Packard. But riding backward made him uneasy. It was like flying blind, and not knowing where he was going—just where he had been—troubled him. He did not want to see trees that he had passed, or houses and children slipping into the space the automobile had left behind.

Macon Dead’s Packard rolled slowly down Not Doctor Street, through the rough part of town (later known as the Blood Bank because blood flowed so freely there), over the bypass downtown, and headed for the wealthy white neighborhoods. Some of the black people who saw the car passing by sighed with good-humored envy at the classiness, the dignity of it. In 1936 there were very few among them who lived as well as Macon Dead. Others watched the family gliding by with a tiny bit of jealousy and a whole lot of amusement, for Macon’s wide green Packard belied what they thought a car was for. He never went over twenty miles an hour, never gunned his engine, never stayed in first gear for a block or two to give pedestrians a thrill. He never had a blown tire, never ran out of gas and needed twelve grinning raggle-tailed boys to help him push it up a hill or over to a curb. No rope ever held the door to its frame, and no teen-agers leaped on his running board for a lift down the street. He hailed no one and no one hailed him. There was never a sudden braking and backing up to shout or laugh with a friend. No beer bottles or ice cream cones poked from the open windows. Nor did a baby boy stand up to pee out of them. He never let rain fall on it if he could help it and he walked to Sonny’s Shop—taking the car out only on these occasions. What’s more, they doubted that he had ever taken a woman into the back seat, because rumor was that he went to “bad houses” or lay, sometimes, with a slack or lonely female tenant. Other than the bright and roving eyes of Magdalene called Lena and First Corinthians, the Packard had no real lived life at all. So they called it Macon Dead’s hearse.

First Corinthians pulled her fingers through her hair. It was long, lightweight hair, the color of wet sand. “Are you going anyplace special, or are we just driving around?” She kept her eyes on the street, watching the men and women walking by.

“Careful, Macon. You always take the wrong turn here.” Ruth spoke softly from the right side of the car.

“Do you want to drive?” Macon asked her.

“You know I don’t drive,” she answered.

“Then let me do it.”

“All right, but don’t blame me if…”

Macon pulled smoothly into the left fork of the road that led through downtown and into a residential area.

“Daddy? Are we going any special place?”

“Honoré,” Macon said.

Magdalene called Lena pushed her stockings farther down on her legs. “On the lake? What’s out there? There’s nothing out there, nobody.”

“There’s a beach community out there, Lena. Your father wants to look at it.” Ruth reasserted herself into the conversation.

“What for? Those are white people’s houses,” said Lena.

“All of it’s not white people’s houses. Some of it’s nothing. Just land. Way over on the other side. It could be a nice summer place for colored people. Beach houses. You understand what I mean?” Macon glanced at his daughter through the rear-view mirror.

“Who’s going to live in them? There’s no colored people who can afford to have two houses,” Lena said.

“Reverend Coles can, and Dr. Singleton,” Corinthians corrected her.

“And that lawyer—what’s his name?” Ruth looked around at Corinthians, who ignored her.

“And Mary, I suppose.” Lena laughed.

Corinthians stared coldly at her sister. “Daddy wouldn’t sell property to a barmaid. Daddy, would you let us live next to a barmaid?”

“She owns that place, Corinthians,” Ruth said.

“I don’t care what she owns. I care about what she is. Daddy?” Corinthians leaned toward her father for confirmation.

“You’re going too fast, Macon.” Ruth pressed the toe of her shoe against the floorboard.

“If you say one more thing to me about the way I drive, you’re going to walk back home. I mean it.”

Magdalene called Lena sat forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Ruth was quiet. The little boy kicked his feet against the underside of the dashboard.

“Stop that!” Macon told him.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” said his son.

Corinthians held her head. “Oh, Lord.”

“But you went before we left,” said Ruth.

“I have to go!” He was beginning to whine.

“Are you sure?” his mother asked him. He looked at her. “I guess we better stop,” Ruth said to nobody in particular. Her eyes grazed the countryside they were entering.

Macon didn’t alter his speed.

“Are we going to have a summer place, or are you just selling property?”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m thinking of buying and then renting,” Macon answered her.

“But are we—”

“I have to go,” said the little boy.

“—going to live there too?”

“Maybe.”

“By ourselves? Who else?” Corinthians was very interested.

“I can’t tell you that. But in a few years—five or ten—a whole lot of coloreds will have enough to afford it. A whole lot. Take my word for it.”

Magdalene called Lena took a deep breath. “Up ahead you could pull over, Daddy. He might mess up the seat.”

Macon glanced at her in the mirror and slowed down. “Who’s going to take him?” Ruth fiddled with the door handle. “Not you,” Macon said to her.

Ruth looked at her husband. She parted her lips but didn’t say anything.

“Not me,” said Corinthians. “I have on high heels.”

“Come on,” Lena sighed. They left the car, little boy and big sister, and disappeared into the trees that reared up off the shoulder of the road.

“You really think there’ll be enough colored people—I mean nice colored people—in this city to live there?”

“They don’t have to be from this city, Corinthians. People will drive to a summer house. White people do it all the time.” Macon drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, which trembled a little as the car idled.

“Negroes don’t like the water.” Corinthians giggled.

“They’ll like it if they own it,” said Macon. He looked out the window and saw Magdalene called Lena coming out of the trees. A large colorful bouquet of flowers was in her hand, but her face was crumpled in anger. Over her pale-blue dress dark wet stains spread like fingers.

“He wet on me,” she said. “He wet me, Mama.” She was close to tears.

Ruth clucked her tongue.

Corinthians laughed. “I told you Negroes didn’t like water.”

He didn’t mean it. It happened before he was through. She’d stepped away from him to pick flowers, returned, and at the sound of her footsteps behind him, he’d turned around before he was through. It was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him. Almost as though there were no future to be had.

But if the future did not arrive, the present did extend itself, and the uncomfortable little boy in the Packard went to school and at twelve met the boy who not only could liberate him, but could take him to the woman who had as much to do with his future as she had his past.

Guitar said he knew her. Had even been inside her house.

“What’s it like in there?” Milkman asked him.

“Shiny,” Guitar answered. “Shiny and brown. With a smell.”

“A bad smell?”

“I don’t know. Her smell. You’ll see.”

All those unbelievable but entirely possible stories about his father’s sister—the woman his father had forbidden him to go near—had both of them spellbound. Neither wished to live one more day without finding out the truth, and they believed they were the legitimate and natural ones to do so. After all, Guitar already knew her, and Milkman was her nephew.

They found her on the front steps sitting wide-legged in a long-sleeved, long-skirted black dress. Her hair was wrapped in black too, and from a distance, all they could really see beneath her face was the bright orange she was peeling. She was all angles, he remembered later, knees, mostly, and elbows. One foot pointed east and one pointed west.

As they came closer and saw the brass box dangling from her ear, Milkman knew that what with the earring, the orange, and the angled black cloth, nothing—not the wisdom of his father nor the caution of the world—could keep him from her.

Guitar, being older and already in high school, had none of the reluctance that his young buddy still struggled with, and was the first one to speak.

“Hi.”

The woman looked up. First at Guitar and then at Milkman.

“What kind of word is that?” Her voice was light but gravel-sprinkled. Milkman kept on staring at her fingers, manipulating the orange. Guitar grinned and shrugged. “It means hello.”

“Then say what you mean.”

“Okay. Hello.”

“That’s better. What you want?”

“Nothin. We just passin by.”

“Look like you standin by.”

“If you don’t want us here, Miss Pilate, we’ll go.” Guitar spoke softly.

“I ain’t the one with the wants. You the one want something.”

“We wanna ask you something.” Guitar stopped feigning indifference. She was too direct, and to keep up with her he had to pay careful attention to his language.

“Ask it.”

“Somebody said you ain’t got no navel.”

“That the question?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t sound like a question. Sound like an answer. Gimme the question.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you have a navel?”

“No.”

“What happened to it?”

“Beats me.” She dropped a bright peeling into her lap and separated an orange section slowly. “Now do I get to ask a question?”

“Sure.”

“Who’s your little friend?”

“This here’s Milkman.”

“Do he talk?” Pilate swallowed a piece of the fruit.

“Yeah. He talk. Say something.” Guitar shoved an elbow at Milkman without taking his eyes off Pilate.

Milkman took a breath, held it, and said, “Hi.”

Pilate laughed. “You all must be the dumbest unhung Negroes on earth. What they telling you in them schools? You say ‘Hi’ to pigs and sheep when you want ’em to move. When you tell a human being ‘Hi,’ he ought to get up and knock you down.”

Shame had flooded him. He had expected to feel it, but not that kind; to be embarrassed, yes, but not that way. She was the one who was ugly, dirty, poor, and drunk. The queer aunt whom his sixth-grade schoolmates teased him about and whom he hated because he felt personally responsible for her ugliness, her poverty, her dirt, and her wine.

Instead she was making fun of his school, of his teachers, of him. And while she looked as poor as everyone said she was, something was missing from her eyes that should have confirmed it. Nor was she dirty; unkempt, yes, but not dirty. The whites of her fingernails were like ivory. And unless he knew absolutely nothing, this woman was definitely not drunk. Of course she was anything but pretty, yet he knew he could have watched her all day: the fingers pulling thread veins from the orange sections, the berry-black lips that made her look as though she wore make-up, the earring…. And when she stood up, he all but gasped. She was as tall as his father, head and shoulders taller than himself. Her dress wasn’t as long as he had thought; it came to just below her calf and now he could see her unlaced men’s shoes and the silvery-brown skin of her ankles.

She held the peelings precisely as they had fallen in her lap, and as she walked up the steps she looked as though she were holding her crotch.

“Your daddy wouldn’t like that. He don’t like dumb peoples.” Then she looked right at Milkman, one hand holding the peelings, the other on the doorknob. “I know your daddy. I know you too.”

Again Guitar spoke up. “You his daddy’s sister?”

“The only one he got. Ain’t but three Deads alive.”

Milkman, who had been unable to get one word out of his mouth after the foolish “Hi,” heard himself shouting: “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead! My sisters. You and him ain’t the only ones!”

Even while he was screaming he wondered why he was suddenly so defensive—so possessive about his name. He had always hated that name, all of it, and until he and Guitar became friends, he had hated his nickname too. But in Guitar’s mouth it sounded clever, grown up. Now he was behaving with this strange woman as though having the name was a matter of deep personal pride, as though she had tried to expel him from a very special group, in which he not only belonged, but had exclusive rights.

In the heartbeat of silence that followed his shouts, Pilate laughed.

“You all want a soft-boiled egg?” she asked.

The boys looked at each other. She’d changed rhythm on them. They didn’t want an egg, but they did want to be with her, to go inside the wine house of this lady who had one earring, no navel, and looked like a tall black tree.

“No, thanks, but we’d like a drink of water.” Guitar smiled back at her.

“Well. Step right in.” She opened the door and they followed her into a large sunny room that looked both barren and cluttered. A moss-green sack hung from the ceiling. Candles were stuck in bottles everywhere; newspaper articles and magazine pictures were nailed to the walls. But other than a rocking chair, two straight-backed chairs, a large table, a sink and stove, there was no furniture. Pervading everything was the odor of pine and fermenting fruit.

“You ought to try one. I know how to do them just right. I don’t like my whites to move, you know. The yolk I want soft, but not runny. Want it like wet velvet. How come you don’t just try one?”

She had dumped the peelings in a large crock, which like most everything in the house had been made for some other purpose. Now she stood before the dry sink, pumping water into a blue-and-white wash basin which she used for a saucepan.

“Now, the water and the egg have to meet each other on a kind of equal standing. One can’t get the upper hand over the other. So the temperature has to be the same for both. I knock the chill off the water first. Just the chill. I don’t let it get warm because the egg is room temperature, you see. Now then, the real secret is right here in the boiling. When the tiny bubbles come to the surface, when they as big as peas and just before they get big as marbles. Well, right then you take the pot off the fire. You don’t just put the fire out; you take the pot off. Then you put a folded newspaper over the pot and do one small obligation. Like answering the door or emptying the bucket and bringing it in off the front porch. I generally go to the toilet. Not for a long stay, mind you. Just a short one. If you do all that, you got yourself a perfect soft-boiled egg.

“I remember the messes I used to make for my father when I cooked. Your father”—she directed a thumb at Milkman—“he couldn’t cook worth poot. Once I made a cherry pie for him, or tried to. Macon was a nice boy and awful good to me. Be nice if you could have known him then. He would have been a real good friend to you too, like he was to me.”

Her voice made Milkman think of pebbles. Little round pebbles that bumped up against each other. Maybe she was hoarse, or maybe it was the way she said her words, with both a drawl and a clip. The piny-winy smell was narcotic, and so was the sun streaming in, strong and unfettered because there were no curtains or shades at the windows that were all around the room, two in each of three walls, one on each side of the door, one on either side of the sink and the stove, and two on the farther wall. The fourth wall must back on the bedrooms, Milkman thought. The pebbly voice, the sun, and the narcotic wine smell weakened both the boys, and they sat in a pleasant semi-stupor, listening to her go on and on….

“Hadn’t been for your daddy, I wouldn’t be here today. I would have died in the womb. And died again in the woods. Those woods and the dark would have surely killed me. But he saved me and here I am boiling eggs. Our papa was dead, you see. They blew him five feet up into the air. He was sitting on his fence waiting for ‘em, and they snuck up from behind and blew him five feet into the air. So when we left Circe’s big house we didn’t have no place to go, so we just walked around and lived in them woods. Farm country. But Papa came back one day. We didn’t know it was him at first, cause we both saw him blowed five feet into the air. We were lost then. And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.

“Now, we lost and there was this wind and in front of us was the back of our daddy. We were some scared children. Macon kept telling me that the things we was scared of wasn’t real. What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? I remember doing laundry for a man and his wife once, down in Virginia. The husband came into the kitchen one afternoon shivering and saying did I have any coffee made. I asked him what was it that had grabbed hold of him, he looked so bad. He said he couldn’t figure it out, but he felt like he was about to fall off a cliff. Standing right there on that yellow and white and red linoleum, as level as a flatiron. He was holding on to the door first, then the chair, trying his best not to fall down. I opened my mouth to tell him wasn’t no cliff in that kitchen. Then I remembered how it was being in those woods. I felt it all over again. So I told the man did he want me to hold on to him so he couldn’t fall. He looked at me with the most grateful look in the world. ‘Would you?’ he said. I walked around back of him and locked my fingers in front of his chest and held on to him. His heart was kicking under his vest like a mule in heat. But little by little it calmed down.”

“You saved his life,” said Guitar.

“No such thing. His wife come in before it was time to let go. She asked me what I was doing and I told her.”

“Told her what? What’d you say?”

“The truth. That I was trying to keep him from falling off a cliff.”

“I bet he wished he had jumped off then. She believe you? Don’t tell me she believed you.”

“Not right away she didn’t. But soon’s I let go he fell dead-weight to the floor. Smashed his glasses and everything. Fell right on his face. And you know what? He went down so slow. I swear it took three minutes, three whole minutes to go from a standing upright position to when he mashed his face on the floor. I don’t know if the cliff was real or not, but it took him three minutes to fall down it.”

“Was he dead?” asked Guitar.

“Stone dead.”

“Who shot your daddy? Did you say somebody shot him?” Guitar was fascinated, his eyes glittering with lights.

“Five feet into the air…”

“Who?”

“I don’t know who and I don’t know why. I just know what I’m telling you: what, when, and where.”

“You didn’t say where.” He was insistent.

“I did too. Off a fence.”

“Where was the fence?”

“On our farm.”

Guitar laughed, but his eyes were too shiny to convey much humor. “Where was the farm?”

“Montour County.”

He gave up on “where.” “Well, when then?”

“When he sat there—on the fence.”

Guitar felt like a frustrated detective. “What year?”

“The year they shot them Irish people down in the streets. Was a good year for guns and gravediggers, I know that.” Pilate put a barrel lid on the table. Then she lifted the eggs from the wash basin and began to peel them. Her lips moved as she played an orange seed around in her mouth. Only after the eggs were split open, revealing moist reddish-yellow centers, did she return to her story. “One morning we woke up when the sun was nearly a quarter way cross the sky. Bright as anything. And blue. Blue like the ribbons on my mother’s bonnet. See that streak of sky?” She pointed out the window. “Right behind them hickories. See? Right over there.”

They looked and saw the sky stretching back behind the houses and the trees. “That’s the same color,” she said, as if she had discovered something important. “Same color as my mama’s ribbons. I’d know her ribbon color anywhere, but I don’t know her name. After she died Papa wouldn’t let anybody say it. Well, before we could get the sand rubbed out of our eyes and take a good look around, we saw him sitting there on a stump. Right in the sunlight. We started to call him but he looked on off, like he was lookin at us and not lookin at us at the same time. Something in his face scared us. It was like looking at a face under water. Papa got up after a while and moved out of the sun on back into the woods. We just stood there looking at the stump. Shaking like leaves.”

Pilate scraped the eggshells together into a little heap, her fingers fanning out over and over again in a gentle sweeping. The boys watched, afraid to say anything lest they ruin the next part of her story, and afraid to remain silent lest she not go on with its telling.

“Shaking like leaves,” she murmured, “just like leaves.”

Suddenly she lifted her head and made a sound like a hoot owl. “Ooo! Here I come!”

Neither Milkman nor Guitar saw or heard anyone approaching, but Pilate jumped up and ran toward the door. Before she reached it, a foot kicked it open and Milkman saw the bent back of a girl. She was dragging a large five-bushel basket of what looked like brambles, and a woman was pushing the other side of it, saying, “Watch the doorsill, baby.”

“I got it,” the girl answered. “Push.”

“About time,” said Pilate. “The light be gone before you know it.”

“Tommy’s truck broke down,” the girl said, panting. When the two had managed to get the basket into the room, the girl stretched her back and turned around, facing them. But Milkman had no need to see her face; he had already fallen in love with her behind.

“Hagar.” Pilate looked around the room. “This here’s your brother, Milkman. And this is his friend. What’s your name again, pretty?”

“Guitar.”

“Guitar? You play any?” she asked.

“That ain’t her brother, Mama. They cousins.” The older woman spoke.

“Same thing.”

“No it ain’t. Is it, baby?”

“No,” said Hagar. “It’s different.”

“See there. It’s different.”

“Well, what is the difference, Reba? You know so much.”

Reba looked at the ceiling. “A brother is a brother if you both got the same mother or if you both—”

Pilate interrupted her. “I mean what’s the difference in the way you act toward ’em? Don’t you have to act the same way to both?”

“That’s not the point, Mama.”

“Shut up, Reba. I’m talking to Hagar.”

“Yes, Mama. You treat them both the same.”

“Then why they got two words for it ‘stead of one, if they ain’t no difference?” Reba put her hands on her hips and opened her eyes wide.

“Pull that rocker over here,” said Pilate. “You boys have to give up your seats unless you gonna help.”

The women circled the basket, which was full of blackberries still on their short, thorny branches.

“What we have to do?” Guitar asked.

“Get them little berries off them hateful branches without popping’em. Reba, get that other crock.”

Hagar looked around, all eyes and hair. “Why don’t we pull a bed out the back room? Then we can all sit down.”

“Floor’s good enough for me,” said Pilate, and she squatted down on her haunches and lifted a branch gently from the basket. “This all you got?”

“No.” Reba was side-rolling a huge crock. “Two more outside.”

“Better bring them in. Draw too many flies out there.”

Hagar started for the door and motioned to Milkman. “Come on, brother. You can help.”

Milkman jumped up, knocking his chair backward, and trotted after Hagar. She was, it seemed to him, as pretty a girl as he’d ever seen. She was much much older than he was. She must be as old as Guitar, maybe even seventeen. He seemed to be floating. More alive than he’d ever been, and floating. Together he and Hagar dragged two baskets up the porch stairs and into the house. She was as strong and muscular as he was.

“Careful, Guitar. Go slow. You keep on busting ’em.”

“Leave him alone, Reba. He got to get the feel first. I asked you did you play any. That why they call you Guitar?”

“Not cause I do play. Because I wanted to. When I was real little. So they tell me.”

“Where’d you ever see a guitar?”

“It was a contest, in a store down home in Florida. I saw it when my mother took me downtown with her. I was just a baby. It was one of those things where you guess how many beans in the big glass jar and you win a guitar. I cried for it, they said. And always asked about it.”

“You should of called Reba. She’d get it for you.”

“No, you couldn’t buy it. You had to give the number of jellybeans.”

“I heard you. Reba would of known how many. Reba wins things. She ain’t never lost nothing.”

“Really?” Guitar smiled, but he was doubtful. “She lucky?”

“Sure I’m lucky.” Reba grinned. “People come from everywhere to get me to stand in for ’em at drawings and give them numbers to play. It works pretty well for them, and it always works for me. I win everything I try to win and lots of things I don’t even try to win.”

“Got to where won’t nobody sell her a raffle ticket. They just want her to hold theirs.”

“See this?” Reba put her hand down in the top of her dress and pulled out a diamond ring attached to a string. “I won this last year. I was the … what was it, Mama?”

“Five hundred thousandth.”

“Five hundred…no it wasn’t. That ain’t what they said.”

“Half a million is what they said.”

“That’s right. The half a millionth person to walk into Sears and Roebuck.” Her laughter was gay and proud.

“They didn’t want to give it to her,” said Hagar, “cause she looked so bad.”

Guitar was astonished. “I remember that contest, but I don’t remember hearing nothing ’bout no colored person winning it.” Guitar, a habitual street roamer, believed he knew every public thing going on in the city.

“Nobody did. They had picture-taking people and everything waiting for the next person to walk in the door. But they never did put my picture in the paper. Me and Mama looked, too, didn’t we?” She glanced at Pilate for confirmation and went on. “But they put the picture of the man who won second prize in. He won a war bond. He was white.”

“Second prize?” Guitar asked. “What kind of ‘second prize’? Either you the half-millionth person or you ain’t. Can’t be no next-to-the-half-millionth.”

“Can if the winner is Reba,” Hagar said. “The only reason they got a second was cause she was the first. And the only reason they gave it to her was because of them cameras.”

“Tell ’em why you was in Sears, Reba.”

“Looking for a toilet.” Reba threw her head back to let the laughter escape. Her hands were stained with blackberry juice, and when she wiped the tears from her eyes she streaked the purple from her nose to her cheekbone. Much lighter than Pilate or Hagar, Reba had the simple eyes of an infant. All of them had a guileless look about them, but complication and something more lurked behind Pilate’s and Hagar’s faces. Only Reba, with her light pimply skin and deferential manner, looked as though her simplicity might also be vacuousness.

“Ain’t but two toilets downtown they let colored in: Mayflower Restaurant and Sears. Sears was closer. Good thing nature wasn’t in a hurry. They kept me there fifteen minutes gettin my name and address to send the diamond over to me. But I wouldn’t let ’em send it to me. I kept asking them, Is this a real contest? I don’t believe you.”

“It was worth a diamond ring to get you out of there. Drawing a crowd and getting ready to draw flies,” said Hagar.

“What’re you going to do with the ring?” Milkman asked her.

“Wear it. Seldom I win something I like.”

“Everything she win, she give away,” Hagar said.

“To a man,” said Pilate.

“She don’t never keep none of it….”

“That’s what she want to win—a man….”

“Worse’n Santa Claus….”

“Funny kind of luck ain’t no luck at all….”

“He comes just once a year….”

Hagar and Pilate pulled the conversation apart, each yanking out some thread of comment more to herself than to Milkman or Guitar—or even Reba, who had dropped her ring back inside her dress and was smiling sweetly, and deftly separating the royal-purple berries from their twigs.

Milkman was five feet seven then but it was the first time in his life that he remembered being completely happy. He was with his friend, an older boy—wise and kind and fearless. He was sitting comfortably in the notorious wine house; he was surrounded by women who seemed to enjoy him and who laughed out loud. And he was in love. No wonder his father was afraid of them.

“When will this wine be ready?” he asked.

“This batch? Few weeks,” Pilate said.

“You gonna let us have some?” Guitar smiled.

“Sure. You want some now? Plenty wine in the cellar.”

“I don’t want that. I want some of this. Some of the wine I made.”

“You think you made this?” Pilate laughed at him. “You think this all there is to it? Picking a few berries?”

“Oh.” Guitar scratched his head. “I forgot. We got to mash them in our bare feet.”

“Feet? Feet?” Pilate was outraged. “Who makes wine with they feet?”

“Might taste good, Mama,” said Hagar.

“Couldn’t taste no worse,” Reba said.

“Your wine any good, Pilate?” asked Guitar.

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Never tasted it.”

Milkman laughed. “’t even taste?”

“Folks don’t buy it for the taste. Buy it to get drunk.”

Reba nodded. “Used to anyway. Ain’t buying nothing now.”

“Don’t nobody want no cheap home brew. The Depression’s over,” Hagar said. “Everybody got work now. They can afford to buy Four Roses.”

“Plenty still buy,” Pilate told her.

“Where you get the sugar for it?” Guitar asked.

“Black market,” said Reba.

“What ‘plenty’? Tell the truth, Mama. If Reba hadn’t won that hundred pounds of groceries, we’d have starved last winter.”

“Would not.” Pilate put a fresh piece of twig in her mouth.

“We would have.”

“Hagar, don’t contradict your mama,” Reba whispered.

“Who was gonna feed us?” Hagar was insistent. “Mama can go for months without food. Like a lizard.”

“Lizard live that long without food?” asked Reba.

“Girl, ain’t nobody gonna let you starve. You ever had a hungry day?” Pilate asked her granddaughter.

“Course she ain’t,” said her mother.

Hagar tossed a branch to the heap on the floor and rubbed her fingers. The tips were colored a deep red. “Some of my days were hungry ones.”

With the quickness of birds, the heads of Pilate and Reba shot up. They peered at Hagar, then exchanged looks.

“Baby?” Reba’s voice was soft. “You been hungry, baby? Why didn’t you say so?” Reba looked hurt. “We get you anything you want, baby. Anything. You been knowing that.”

Pilate spit her twig into the palm of her hand. Her face went still. Without those moving lips her face was like a mask. It seemed to Milkman that somebody had just clicked off a light. He looked at the faces of the women. Reba’s had crumpled. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Pilate’s face was still as death, but alert as though waiting for some signal. Hagar’s profile was hidden by her hair. She leaned forward, her elbows on her thighs, rubbing fingers that looked bloodstained in the lessening light. Her nails were very very long.

The quiet held. Even Guitar didn’t dare break it.

Then Pilate spoke. “Reba. She don’t mean food.”

Realization swept slowly across Reba’s face, but she didn’t answer. Pilate began to hum as she returned to plucking the berries. After a moment, Reba joined her, and they hummed together in perfect harmony until Pilate took the lead:

O Sugarman don’t leave me here

Cotton balls to choke me

O Sugarman don’t leave me here

Buckra’s arms to yoke me….

When the two women got to the chorus, Hagar raised her head and sang too.

Sugarman done fly away

Sugarman done gone

Sugarman cut across the sky

Sugarman gone home.

Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar’s voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own. When he thought he was going to faint from the weight of what he was feeling, he risked a glance at his friend and saw the setting sun gilding Guitar’s eyes, putting into shadow a slow smile of recognition.

Delicious as the day turned out to be for Milkman, it was even more so because it included secrecy and defiance, both of which dissipated within an hour of his father’s return. Freddie had let Macon Dead know that his son had spent the afternoon “drinking in the wine house.”

“He’s lying! We didn’t drink nothing. Nothing. Guitar didn’t even get the glass of water he asked for.”

“Freddie never lies. He misrepresents, but he never lies.”

“He lied to you.”

“About the wine-drinking? Maybe. But not about you being there, huh?”

“No, sir. Not about that.” Milkman softened his tone a bit, but succeeded in keeping the edge of defiance in his voice.

“Now, what were your instructions from me?”

“You told me to stay away from there. To stay away from Pilate.”

“Right.”

“But you never told me why. They’re our cousins. She’s your own sister.”

“And you’re my own son. And you will do what I tell you to do. With or without explanations. As long as your feet are under my table, you’ll do in this house what you are told.”

At fifty-two, Macon Dead was as imposing a man as he had been at forty-two, when Milkman thought he was the biggest thing in the world. Bigger even than the house they lived in. But today he had seen a woman who was just as tall and who had made him feel tall too.

“I know I’m the youngest one in this family, but I ain’t no baby. You treat me like I was a baby. You keep saying you don’t have to explain nothing to me. How do you think that makes me feel? Like a baby, that’s what. Like a twelve-year-old baby!”

“Don’t you raise your voice to me.”

“Is that the way your father treated you when you were twelve?”

“Watch your mouth!” Macon roared. He took his hands out of his pockets but didn’t know what to do with them. He was momentarily confused. His son’s question had shifted the scenery. He was seeing himself at twelve, standing in Milkman’s shoes and feeling what he himself had felt for his own father. The numbness that had settled on him when he saw the man he loved and admired fall off the fence; something wild ran through him when he watched the body twitching in the dirt. His father had sat for five nights on a split-rail fence cradling a shotgun and in the end died protecting his property. Was that what this boy felt for him? Maybe it was time to tell him things.

“Well, did he?”

“I worked right alongside my father. Right alongside him. From the time I was four or five we worked together. Just the two of us. Our mother was dead. Died when Pilate was born. Pilate was just a baby. She stayed over at another farm in the daytime. I carried her over there myself in my arms every morning. Then I’d go back across the fields and meet my father. We’d hitch President Lincoln to the plow and…That’s what we called her: President Lincoln. Papa said Lincoln was a good plow hand before he was President and you shouldn’t take a good plow hand away from his work. He called our farm Lincoln’s Heaven. It was a little bit a place. But it looked big to me then. I know now it must a been a little bit a place, maybe a hundred and fifty acres. We tilled fifty. About eighty of it was woods. Must of been a fortune in oak and pine; maybe that’s what they wanted—the lumber, the oak and the pine. We had a pond that was four acres. And a stream, full of fish. Right down in the heart of a valley. Prettiest mountain you ever saw, Montour Ridge. We lived in Montour County. Just north of the Susquehanna. We had a four-stall hog pen. The big barn was forty feet by a hundred and forty—hip-roofed too. And all around in the mountains was deer and wild turkey. You ain’t tasted nothing till you taste wild turkey the way Papa cooked it. He’d burn it real fast in the fire. Burn it black all over. That sealed it. Sealed the juices in. Then he’d let it roast on a spit for twenty-four hours. When you cut the black burnt part off, the meat underneath was tender, sweet, juicy. And we had fruit trees. Apple, cherry. Pilate tried to make me a cherry pie once.”

Macon paused and let the smile come on. He had not said any of this for years. Had not even reminisced much about it recently. When he was first married he used to talk about Lincoln’s Heaven to Ruth. Sitting on the porch swing in the dark, he would re-create the land that was to have been his. Or when he was just starting out in the business of buying houses, he would lounge around the barbershop and swap stories with the men there. But for years he hadn’t had that kind of time, or interest. But now he was doing it again, with his son, and every detail of that land was clear in his mind: the well, the apple orchard, President Lincoln; her foal, Mary Todd; Ulysses S. Grant, their cow; General Lee, their hog. That was the way he knew what history he remembered. His father couldn’t read, couldn’t write; knew only what he saw and heard tell of. But he had etched in Macon’s mind certain historical figures, and as a boy in school, Macon thought of the personalities of his horse, his hog, when he read about these people. His father may have called their plow horse President Lincoln as a joke, but Macon always thought of Lincoln with fondness since he had loved him first as a strong, steady, gentle, and obedient horse. He even liked General Lee, for one spring they slaughtered him and ate the best pork outside Virginia, “from the butt to the smoked ham to the ribs to the sausage to the jowl to the feet to the tail to the head cheese”—for eight months. And there was cracklin in November.

“General Lee was all right by me,” he told Milkman, smiling. “Finest general I ever knew. Even his balls was tasty. Circe made up the best pot of maws she ever cooked. Huh! I’d forgotten that woman’s name. That was it, Circe. Worked at a big farm some white people owned in Danville, Pennsylvania. Funny how things get away from you. For years you can’t remember nothing. Then just like that, it all comes back to you. Had a dog run, they did. That was the big sport back then. Dog races. White people did love their dogs. Kill a nigger and comb their hair at the same time. But I’ve seen grown white men cry about their dogs.”

His voice sounded different to Milkman. Less hard, and his speech was different. More southern and comfortable and soft. Milkman spoke softly too. “Pilate said somebody shot your father. Five feet into the air.”

“Took him sixteen years to get that farm to where it was paying. It’s all dairy country up there now. Then it wasn’t. Then it was…nice.”

“Who shot him, Daddy?”

Macon focused his eyes on his son. “Papa couldn’t read, couldn’t even sign his name. Had a mark he used. They tricked him. He signed something, I don’t know what, and they told him they owned his property. He never read nothing. I tried to teach him, but he said he couldn’t remember those little marks from one day to the next. Wrote one word in his life—Pilate’s name; copied it out of the Bible. That’s what she got folded up in that earring. He should have let me teach him. Everything bad that ever happened to him happened because he couldn’t read. Got his name messed up cause he couldn’t read.”

“His name? How?”

“When freedom came. All the colored people in the state had to register with the Freedmen’s Bureau.”

“Your father was a slave?”

“What kind of foolish question is that? Course he was. Who hadn’t been in 1869? They all had to register. Free and not free. Free and used-to-be-slaves. Papa was in his teens and went to sign up, but the man behind the desk was drunk. He asked Papa where he was born. Papa said Macon. Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said, ‘He’s dead.’ Asked him who owned him, Papa said, ‘I’m free.’ Well, the Yankee wrote it all down, but in the wrong spaces. Had him born in Dunfrie, wherever the hell that is, and in the space for his name the fool wrote, ‘Dead’ comma ‘Macon.’ But Papa couldn’t read so he never found out what he was registered as till Mama told him. They met on a wagon going North. Started talking about one thing and another, told her about being a freedman and showed off his papers to her. When she looked at his paper she read him out what it said.”

“He didn’t have to keep the name, did he? He could have used his real name, couldn’t he?”

“Mama liked it. Liked the name. Said it was new and would wipe out the past. Wipe it all out.”

“What was his real name?”

“I don’t remember my mother too well. She died when I was four. Light-skinned, pretty. Looked like a white woman to me. Me and Pilate don’t take nothing after her. If you ever have a doubt we from Africa, look at Pilate. She look just like Papa and he looked like all them pictures you ever see of Africans. A Pennsylvania African. Acted like one too. Close his face up like a door.”

“I saw Pilate’s face like that.” Milkman felt close and confidential now that his father had talked to him in a relaxed and intimate way.

“I haven’t changed my mind, Macon. I don’t want you over there.”

“Why? You still haven’t said why.”

“Just listen to what I say. That woman’s no good. She’s a snake, and can charm you like a snake, but still a snake.”

“You talking about your own sister, the one you carried in your arms to the fields every morning.”

“That was a long time ago. You seen her. What she look like to you? Somebody nice? Somebody normal?”

“Well, she…”

“Or somebody cut your throat?”

“She didn’t look like that, Daddy.”

“Well she is like that.”

“What’d she do?”

“It ain’t what she did; it’s what she is.”

“What is she?”

“A snake, I told you. Ever hear the story about the snake? The man who saw a little baby snake on the ground? Well, the man saw this baby snake bleeding and hurt. Lying there in the dirt. And the man felt sorry for it and picked it up and put it in his basket and took it home. And he fed it and took care of it till it was big and strong. Fed it the same thing he ate. Then one day, the snake turned on him and bit him. Stuck his poison tongue right in the man’s heart. And while he was laying there dying, he turned to the snake and asked him, ‘What’d you do that for?’ He said, ‘Didn’t I take good care of you? Didn’t I save your life?’ The snake said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Then what’d you do it for? What’d you kill me for?’ Know what the snake said? Said, ‘But you knew I was a snake, didn’t you?’ Now, I mean for you to stay out of that wine house and as far away from Pilate as you can.”

Milkman lowered his head. His father had explained nothing to him.

“Boy, you got better things to do with your time. Besides, it’s time you started learning how to work. You start Monday. After school come to my office; work a couple of hours there and learn what’s real. Pilate can’t teach you a thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one. Let me tell you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too. Starting Monday, I’m going to teach you how.”