This Side of Brightness

chapter 6. 1932–45

Rhubarb Vannucci and Sean Power set up a pigeon coop on the roof of Vannucci’s Lower East Side tenement building, a wooden coop with two sliding doors and a chicken-wire roof. There have been some recent robberies, so Vannucci has dipped his pigeons in vats of bright dye bought from a clothing factory. He soaks every part of the pigeons except their heads. Even the underside of the wings sucks up the dye. The birds flap, rudely orange, through the sky. Anyone in the neighborhood can instantly point out a Vannucci pigeon. They look like winging orange peels breaking the skies of Manhattan.

Sean Power decides to paint his birds bright blue. The shed feathers make a fabulous collage on the rooftop.

On a July morning the two men challenge each other to a pigeon race. They make a bet of a dollar each.

Nathan Walker and Eleanor O’Leary have agreed to carry the pigeons over the Brooklyn Bridge and release them on the far side of the river. They weave along on bicycles. Eleanor’s hair flows in a stream behind her. Walker balances the pigeon cases on his bicycle basket. They move in strange tandem; there is a quality of waltz to the journey. Whenever she can, Eleanor directs her bicycle along a length of shadow, keeping the tires within its width. Walker plays the game of avoiding the same shadows. He watches as she takes both hands off the bars and stretches her arms wide, tottering slightly but still keeping her bicycle true to the long lines of dark.

When they reach the far side of the bridge, Eleanor leans her bike against Walker’s. They spread a blanket on the concrete to share a picnic before they release the birds: a bottle of Coca-Cola, a bar of chocolate, some bread with cheddar cheese.

Eleanor touches Walker’s wrist, points at the pigeons in the cages — one orange and one blue — and they both laugh.

Halfway through the picnic, a passing pedestrian spits in Walker’s face and shouts at Eleanor, “Nigger lover!”

She thumbs her nose at the pedestrian and Walker wipes the spit away with a handkerchief. He drops the handkerchief off the bridge toward the water. They watch it spiral away. He says nothing, but they pack the last of the picnic back into the basket, take out two jars of paint, and later they release the pigeons into the air.

The couple pedal furiously back across the bridge, watching the pigeons vying for the lead.

Walker is way out in front, the empty cages still balanced on the front of the bike. “Wait for me!” shouts Eleanor. The pigeons disappear in the sky.

When the two cyclists arrive back at Vannucci’s home, both of the gambling men are furious. In their hands each holds a pigeon that has been newly painted, half orange, half blue.

They are fighting over which one belongs to whom and who is the rightful owner of the two dollars. Walker and Eleanor stand on the tenement rooftop, doubled over with laughter.

The two men give the couple strange glances, then tuck the multicolored pigeons back into the coop.

“Frig me,” says Power.

“What is frig?” asks Vannucci.

“A frig is…”

And then Power, too, starts to chuckle.

“A frig,” he says, winking at Walker, “a frig is somewheres ya keep things cool.”

* * *

Eleanor places a picture of her mother and father on her bedside table. It was taken at a summer carnival in Brooklyn in the early years of the century, a Ferris wheel in the background static against the sky like a cheap bracelet. Con O’Leary has the beginnings of a mustache smudged above his lip. Maura’s dress is buttoned high at her neck, but the third and fourth buttons have popped open, unnoticed, revealing cleavage. They are standing by the strong-arm machine. The bell on the machine is at the very top — where it says STRONGMAN EXTRAORDINARY! — and Eleanor is sure that her father is the one who has just slammed down the hammer. He is smiling, his belly is full and proud, and his cheeks are puffed out. Eleanor likes to think of him in that same position when she takes the subway out on weekday mornings to the Brooklyn Heights haberdashery where she works. She salutes her father’s sleeping form as she travels back and forth underneath the river. She doesn’t think of him as agonized or frozen in a strange ascension — rather, he is upright, proud, standing by some muck-bed strong-arm machine, held in tableau, grinning.

* * *

Familiar and trembling, they meet in darkness. One evening on a park bench she asks Walker to comb her hair. He steps behind the bench. Her hair is heavy, pendant. When he is finished, she turns and kneels on the wooden slats and leans toward him. In his hands he can still feel the weight of her hair. She says his name out loud: Nathan. He looks at her, and it seems to him that her voice bends back the nearby grasses.

* * *

Eighteen years after the blowout, Nathan Walker emerges from a railway freight tunnel on the West Side of Manhattan.

Quick clouds cast shadows, and the streets are thatched with ribbons of sunlight. There is a spring in his step, although he has been digging all day. Working the railway tunnel is easier than working underwater, although just as dangerous, men dying when boxes of dynamite explode in their fingers, their bodies ripped apart and their thumbs blown so high they could be hitching a lift to heaven. At the age of thirty-seven Walker’s body has changed a little, just a slight slide out at the waist and a new scar above his left eye from a Great Depression riot when a policemen mashed a billy club into his head. He’d emerged from a diner one night into a dark sea of faces. The protesters carried placards. They were shouting about job losses and low wages. Walker had gone alongside the protesters silently and stoically. His wages had been cut too — the tunnels were full of desperate men ready to work, and he kept his job only because Sean Power was head of the union. He had moved with the flow of eyes. Screaming was heard further down the street, and then the billy club came from behind. It landed first in the soft part of his skull and then whipped around to his forehead, smashing against his eye. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the cop before he went down, and then there were horse hooves all around him. A hoof landed on his groin. Pain shot through him. Winded, Walker crawled across the street and lay under the awning of a cigar shop, feeling the blood run past his lips. At the hospital he had to wait five hours for the stitches — the doctor pried open the scab with brusque fingers — and the suture was done drunkenly, leaving a wormlike wiggle through Walker’s eyebrow.

He strolls way uptown, along the landfill by Riverside Drive, past the shanties, then east toward a shop full of tuxedos.

A bell sounds at the shop door and a small black man with granite-colored hair comes from behind a curtain, a pencil at his ear. He looks down at the mud on Walker’s boots, gives a derisory eye-flick at his filthy overalls and the red hat strung under his chin, and goes immediately to a row of cheap rentals, but Walker directs the clerk to the expensive rack. Under a faint yellow light he tries on a large black jacket with a shiny velvet collar. It is so long unused there is a mothball in the pocket, but it’s the only one left in his size, since there’s a dance in Harlem that night and a skein of men has been in and out of the shop all day. Walker counts out money for the suit rental and a new shirt.

At home he washes his body in the porcelain sink and tries on the frilly white shirt. The buttons seem tiny and foreign. Arthritis has already begun to nibble at his hands. Walker can predict a rainy day by the pain in his fingertips. He doesn’t button the neck of his shirt but lets the bow tie cover the gap.

He can’t help chuckling at the way the shirt frills rumple at his chin, at how exceedingly white the cloth is. “You are so goddamn handsome, Nathan Walker!” he says to the dusty mirror, and then he leaps across the room in delight and nervousness, swinging around a broken stovepipe, his knees protesting at the sudden violence of dance, a silver cross bouncing at his neck.

The cross was bought for two dollars from a woman downstairs, a fortune-teller who always wears a long red dress and two feathers in her hair. She tells the future by the pattern of spit that tobacco makes in a spittoon. Men, and women too, lean across the metal cup and spit into it, the men in big gobs, the women in shy dribbles. She stares down into the tobacco grains and prescribes remedies for future despair. Everybody is due despair in their lives, she says, and therefore everybody needs a remedy — it’s a fact of life and it only costs two dollars to cure, a guaranteed bargain.

The cross, she has told Walker, will keep his heart from ferrying its way into his mouth when he is nervous. He must wear it against his skin all day long, no matter what.

Walker stands by the piano that has been given to him as a gift. A white ribbon has been tied around the instrument, so he doesn’t open the lid. He touches the smooth ribbon, and then he rubs his fingers along the piano lid, drags a stool across, and sits — in underpants and white shirt and silver cross — pretending to play, running his fingers through the air, inventing ragtime, until he gets so sweaty he takes off the shirt. He rubs his lips together for a tune and his music grows louder and louder until he hears a foot stomping on the ceiling above him and a roar: “Shut up already, down there!”

The following day he and Eleanor are turned away from four restaurants and refused admittance to a cinema despite their clothes. On the streets people mutter about them. Cars slow down and taunts are hurled. At home, in the apartment on 131st Street, Walker must bend his body to duck under the doorframe. Eleanor puts her hand in his jacket pocket as he carries her over the threshold.

Her waist is wren-thin and adolescent, and he whispers that he could carry ten of her and she says, “Don’t you even think about it, I’m the only one of me you’re ever going to get.”

She takes the mothball from his pocket and shakes her head in amusement, thumping him playfully on the chest. The long white taffeta of her wedding dress swishes as she walks down the corridor to the common bathroom. She flushes the mothball down the toilet.

“Get ready for me,” she shouts along the corridor over the gurgle of water.

“I’m ready, hon.”

Back in the room, she latches the door. She has translated her face by removing her makeup. Just seventeen, she looks even younger. Walker is out of the jacket and standing by the piano, motioning for her to play. She shakes her head, no, and drags him away from it, onto the single bed, where they fall in a rehearsal of many nights of dreams.

“Ready my foot,” she says, and her hands disappear inside his shirt, around to his back, and she pulls him very close.

They move like two chiaroscurists above the covers, black and white, white and black, then sleep under foreheads wet with sweat. They lie on their sides, arms around each other, one hip a hill of bony pink, the other muscular brown. Eleanor wakes and kisses the scar above Nathan’s eye. The clock on the wall cuckoos for eight o’clock in the evening. Desire lies on her tongue like morning breath, and she wakes him with a playful jab to the stomach.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” he grunts.

“Don’t fall back asleep.”

He opens his eyes. “Did y’all ever see a crane dance?”

“No.”

“One foot first, then the other.”

“Show me.”

“Sandhill cranes,” he says. “Like this. I saw them all the time in Georgia.”

She laughs as he rises from the bed and dances on the mattress.

Later, there is a loud knock at the door. Walker, in his underpants, ritually bends his head at the doorframe. He scratches his belly as his eyes adjust.

Vannucci, Power, and the fortune-teller stand, grinning, with four bottles of champagne in their hands. The fortune-teller breezes in, clicking across the floor in gold lamé heels, her butterfly sleeves hanging down. Power limps after her, his teeth already pulling at the champagne cork.

Vannucci’s balding head peeps around the open frame, then backs away, embarrassed.

But the fortune-teller sits on the bed beside Eleanor and pulls back the covers to reveal the girl’s white toes. Eleanor flushes and draws her foot back. The fortune-teller chuckles and grabs again.

Walker, leaning against the piano, struggles his way into a pair of trousers, one foot in the air, while Power tries to push him over and spray champagne down his underwear.

Only Vannucci waits outside the door until the couple is fully dressed, and then the party begins, the handle on the Victrola wound up ferociously by the red-faced Italian. He stands above the machine as the needle travels over the grooves. It gives out solitary, beautiful notes. He smiles at the rhythm, clicks his fingers, drains a glass. Power puts an empty bottle to his lips and imitates a trumpet with it. The fortune-teller lifts her dress way up high to reveal two very red garters and seamed stockings. She scissor-kicks toward the ceiling, singing with the music, the songs slowly dropping down from her throat toward her hips, where they swivel.

“You’re a classy dame,” says Power.

“Thank you, sugar. You been at the laudanum, then?”

“Why’s that?”

“Either that or you’re drunk.”

“No I ain’t.”

“Then why ain’t you dancin’?”

“You just said the word.”

“He’s drunk as a stewbum!”

“No I ain’t!”

A hush descends when Maura O’Leary appears at the door. Still in mourning black, hair in a bun, lace at her neck, she says she hasn’t come to stay. She sighs and looks around the room, sees the piano in the corner topped with bottles and a lit cigar propped over the edge, smoke curling up from it.

“Well, well, well,” she says.

“Ma’am?”

“No more ma’am. No need to call me ma’am.”

“Yessum,” says Walker.

“Maura is easiest. Call me Maura.”

“Yessum. Yes.”

She sighs. “I never thought I’d see a day like this, never thought I’d see anything like it.”

“Me neither.”

“I’m not saying it’s the best thing.”

From the far side of the room Sean Power belches and says, “Nothing wrong with it.”

“I didn’t ask you,” says Maura.

“And ya didn’t not ask me, neither.”

“I mean,” she says, “in some places it’s not legal.”

“Not New York,” says Power.

Maura touches the lace at her neck, fingers it for a long time. “In some places you go to jail. In some places they’ll kill you.”

“Illegal don’t mean it’s not right.”

“Well, that’s true,” says Maura.

“So we agree?” says Power.

“Perhaps we’ll agree to disagree.”

“I knew we’d agree on something,” mutters Power.

“Shut up, Sean!” says Walker. “Let the lady say what she has to say.”

A silence permeates the room. Power slugs at the bottle of champagne and passes it to Vannucci, who doesn’t drink. The fortune-teller goes to the window, looks out.

“We love each other, Mom,” says Eleanor eventually.

“It’s not always enough.”

“It’s enough for us.”

“You’re young.”

“Walker here ain’t exactly sprung chicken!” says Power.

Looking around again, Maura says, “And I don’t know how Con would feel about this either, but I guess I’ll just have to wait for heaven and see then. I’m not so sure he’d be happy. I’m not so sure I’m happy. I’m not so sure anybody’s happy.”

“I’m happy!” shouts Power.

Walker darts a look at his friend, then shifts his stance. “We ain’t out to make you unhappy, ma’am.”

“You gotta remember,” she says, “it’ll be hard times for you even when it’s good times.”

“We know that. Thank you, ma’am. Maura.”

“Well. I said what I wanted.”

“Thank you.”

“Now I’d like a little drink, please.”

“Forgetting my manners,” says Walker.

Maura wets her lips at the edge of a glass of champagne. “Good luck to you both, I suppose.” Putting down the glass, she turns to leave, but at the door she hangs her head and says, “Maybe you’ll be good together. Maybe you’ll be okay.”

“You think she means it?” asks Walker, when the door is closed.

“Of course she does,” says Eleanor. “She gave us the piano, didn’t she?”

“She’s a fine woman. The finest of fine women.”

“All right, then,” says Power, swinging his cane. “Let’s dance!”

“You the dancingest cripple I ever seen!” says the fortuneteller, moving away from the window, swirling her hips.

“You bet ya.”

And then Power roars, “Let the jelly hit the fan, boys!”

The group raises a toast to long life and happiness, and, to the beat of Sean Power’s imaginary trumpet, the newly married couple flaps a crazy dance, all arms and legs, on top of the piano late into the night. Walker winks at Eleanor as he stands on one foot and stretches out his arms.

* * *

A series of bricks greet them through the bedroom window, leaving shards of glass on the floor and a hole in the frame until they simply just tape up a sheet of plastic to slap in the wind. One of the bricks is wrapped in a note that reads NO PENGUINS ALLOWED. Another says SILKS OUT. Another says, simply, NO.

Walker pays for the damage to the windows and rents an apartment higher up, unreachable from the street by stone or rock. He knows it would be much worse elsewhere; in other parts of the city they would end up dead. He feels as if he has exiled himself to the air, but he knows there is safety for Eleanor in the exile.

Marriage has brought to him the things that it marries: temperance and bitterness, love and disaffection, fecundity and bareness, longitude and its own startling finality. So he leaves the stone throwers alone and drags everything upstairs to the new apartment, even the piano.

It is a larger room, the sunlight exposing gaps in the wooden floorboards, yellow wallpaper peeling off the walls, iron-colored water stains around the kitchen sink. They still share a toilet with other tenants. The floorboards of the corridor creak when they walk toward it.

Eleanor throws her toothbrush out one morning when she leaves it at the sink by mistake. She has seen legions of cockroaches crawling around the bathroom.

Next door to them lives a cornet player, and his deep notes sound out at all hours of the night. He plays with a truncated rhythm, waking up at the weirdest times. And in the morning when they walk past his room he hisses at them through the gap under the door: Penguins, he says, fucking penguins. Eleanor has developed a special walk through the apartment — she calls it the Antarctic Shuffle — and she laughs when she does it: her feet flatfooted and her ass sticking out, her elbows tucked in by her waist, and her hands flapping out at her side. But late at night she curls up in bed and cries at the thought of slices of glass landing on their bed, ripping open their naked flesh. And so Walker tells her things that help her sleep, things he invents and remembers and, by remembering, invents.

* * *

“I weren’t much more than a shirttail, see, and I wanted to make myself a gator-skin wallet. I’d seen lots of boys at school with wallets from gators. So I told my momma. She had herself a shotgun and I asked her for a loan of it. I said I was gonna shoot myself a gator so’s I could make that wallet. And she said, Y’all can’t shoot a gator, I done told you that before, Nathan; it ain’t right to hurt nothing.

And I says, Momma, it’s no different’n a cow. So she looks at me all Momma-like and smiles. No different’n a cow! she says.

Big ol’ voice. She had a big ol’ voice right up till she died.

Anyways. Next day she takes me out in the canoe, and I’m the one paddling. Right over near a place called Cow Island. We wait a long time by the swamp, her and me, and all I could see was gator eyes. And this one gator, he’s lying in the mud, all quiet like. Then this heron flies low over the water and lands nearby. The gator just ups and swishes his tail and knocks the heron clean dead. Eats it up. And so Momma, she turns to me and says, Well then, son, y’all ever seen a cow do that?”

* * *

On Sunday mornings they walk together to a Southern Baptist service in a basement by Saint Nicholas Square. If the streets are quiet they walk hand in hand. But if they hear a car come behind them, or a window opening, or voices around a corner, they unclasp and part like two rivers. Eleanor likes to arrive at the service a little late so the great lift of gospel music greets her when she pushes open the door. She feels comfortable here. The preacher’s voice goes up and down, a wild landscape of vowels and consonants. Sometimes he punches his hands toward the ceiling, and after services he kisses all the women on the cheek, even Eleanor.

On a late spring morning she is baptized in a tub of cold water near the basement stairs. The choir, in white tunics trimmed with gold, stands around and sings. The preacher rolls up his sleeves. A chorus of hallelujahs is raised when he dunks Eleanor in the bath. Embarrassed by the white dress against her skin — the wetness exposes her girdle — she folds her arms across her breasts, but the preacher whispers, “You look like an angel, pull back them wings.” She sits up in the tub and laughs. The choir rings out in song again, and afterward the congregation munches on potato salad and well-cut sandwiches.

She and Walker stroll home in the heat, and her dress is almost dry by the time she turns the key in the door.

In the Catholic church downtown where she used to go there were dark mutterings from the white people in the pews, even though Walker never went there with her. The priest grew red-faced and shook his finger at her, all resentment and narrow eyes and acrimony. He banned her from the services when Eleanor suggested to him that Jesus was, more likely than not, much darker than He was ever allowed to look on the cross.

* * *

She sits on the fire escape, hidden from view. She pulls down one shoulder strap of her summer dress and holds her face up to the sun in the vainest of hopes for something near equivalence with her husband. Earlier, at a shop on 125th Street, the owner wouldn’t allow her to try on a hat. He curled up his lip in disgust. He said he’d heard about her, that anyone who lived with niggers became a nigger themselves. He said he didn’t want any nigger hair in his hats. Bad for business. The words foamed at the edge of his mouth, and he tightened his eyes. “You can buy one,” he said, “but you can’t try it on.”

Eleanor placed the hat on the counter silently and went home to sit on the fire escape.

Now, turning her face to the hot sun, she drops the second strap on her dress. Below the fire escape, rows of boys sit on crates and shine shoes as the summer sun hammers down.

Walker can only chuckle at the sight of her burnt skin. “It won’t do no good for what’s in your belly,” he tells her.

He rubs cream on her chafed back and across her neck.

“Bet it’s a boy,” he says.

“What makes you think that, hon?”

“The fortune-teller told me.”

Eleanor laughs. “A boy by tobacco spit.”

“And a good load of it, too!”

“You really think it’s a boy?”

“It don’t matter to me none,” says Walker. “It can be a kangaroo for all I care.”

“Hopping all over Harlem.”

“Hopping and skipping and dancing.”

“Y’ever get that feeling?” she asks as he rubs her shoulders. “That feeling that when you walk down the street their eyes are ripping you up? You know? When you walk past and you feel like they’ve just sliced you? Like they’ve got these razor blades in their eyes.”

“Welcome to the real world, hon.”

“All of us are supposed to be created in the image of God.”

“Maybe so, hon, but even God’s gotta take a shit every now and then. Even God’s gotta wipe His ass like the rest of us.”

“Nathan! That’s sacrilege.”

“No less true, sacrilegious or not.”

“You know what?” she says, after a moment. “That man in the shop wouldn’t let me try on a hat.”

“Holy Name! That’s only the tip of the iceberg. It gets worse. It gets to be a routine. It gets so’s you think it’s normal. It gets so you think God is just shittin’ on down every minute of the day. Like He’s gone and got Himself a bad case of diarrhea. Like it’s just raining on down from His ass.”

“Nathan!”

“Well, it’s just the truth. Y’all ever heard that song? Bill Broonzy.”

And he sings: Lord, I’m so lowdown, baby, I declare I’m looking up at down.

He stops. “That’s us, baby, looking up at down.”

She unwinds a thread from the bottom of her dress, wraps it around her finger, and then snaps it off. “I want my child to be able to buy hats,” she says.

“He can buy all the hats he wants. He can even borrow mine.”

“Come here,” she says.

“What?”

“Kiss me.”

Walker leans to kiss her, and with her forefinger, she smudges some of the cream on his nose. “No son of mine is gonna wear that thing,” she whispers. “No daughter neither. It’s horrendous.”

“I believe even God Hisself got one of these hats.”

“Listen to you!”

Two months later Clarence Walker is born at home, greeted by a string of rosary beads. Eleanor allows the Catholic ritual for her mother’s sake.

Maura O’Leary is the midwife. Lately she has allowed the gray hair to amass on her head. She is fifty-one years old and has only three months left to live; already her lungs seem to have migrated from her chest, weighted down with so much phlegm. She carries a number of large handkerchiefs and, embarrassed, she drops the phlegm into them, closing the cloth as if sealing a vital letter. Almost blind, her eyeglasses have acrobatic twists of plastic at the edges and thick lenses between them. Yet Maura’s sickness has given her a strength and a quiet tolerance — she will die in a fit of coughing in a hospital bed, screaming at the nurses that her son-in-law should be allowed to come to the bedside. The nurses will say no, they cannot fathom a Negro at any white woman’s dying bed. She will rant and rave in the immaculate bedsheets, and she will die with a whispered curse on her lips for the nurses.

But, right now, she wipes a washcloth across her daughter’s brow and says, “He’s a fine strap of a child, girl, a fine young strap.”

Ancestry steps through Clarence in colorful swaths — he has light cinnamon-colored skin and tufts of rude red hair on his head.

The women take turns holding him until Nathan Walker comes into the room. Walker winks at his wife as he places the red hat on the boy’s head.

“Don’t do that!” says Eleanor, sitting up in bed.

“What?”

“Take that thing off his head!”

Laughing, he removes the hat, wraps the baby in a sweater, and bears him proudly down the street in his arms — past vendors of pig’s knuckles and rice, past women eating tania roots on doorsteps, past boys playing stickball in a vacant gray lot, past bored men in caps leaning against light poles. On a corner he waves to some well-dressed men who are signing up soldiers for the struggle in Ethiopia. Nearby, four men look up from their game of dominoes, and Walker grins at them. They smile back. On an outside stoop of a brownstone he nods to a young girl whose voice is in mourning for the fields of Alabama.

“Sing on,” he tells her.

Further along the street a yellow Cadillac overtakes a low-slung Packard. A man leans out the Packard window and stares as Walker goes by. Walker is aware of all the whispers but he swings his body, big and threatening in the sunlight, all the way down to the corner shop, where he browses in the aisles for a long time, buys two bunches of nasturtiums to bring home for the ladies. A five-dollar bill is pulled crinkled from his overalls. The shopowner, Ration Rollins, tugs at a shirtsleeve garter and doesn’t even look in Walker’s eyes. He lays the change down on the counter and turns away, blowing air from his bottom lip up to his gray hair. With his back turned, Rollins starts arranging cigarettes that need no arrangement.

“And a block of ice,” says Walker. He throws the change on the counter and adds, “To cool yourself down.”

He tucks the flowers under one arm, the baby in the other, and leaves the shop with his head thrown back in laughter. He whispers to the baby, “Clarence Walker, you are so goddamn handsome!”

But behind some conspiratorial windows he is indicted for carrying something that doesn’t rightly belong to him: most red-haired nigger child I’ve ever seen.

* * *

Two more children follow in ’36 and ’37, both girls, Deirdre and Maxine. Eleanor fits the girls in a pram, and the boy walks beside her, holding her hand. They go to the park: soiled swans on a small brown lake; a seller of chestnuts; a man in a bow tie proclaiming the love and scholarship of Marcus Garvey; a row of schoolgirls, amazed, bent over the baby carriage; other mothers smiling at Eleanor, coming over to ruffle the strange texture of the children’s hair. But Eleanor sometimes feels uncomfortable. Mostly it is the whites — the cops and the shopowners — who stare at her. At times she finds shade, sits under a tree in the park for hours. Or decides to walk with the kids late in the evening, in the approaching darkness, a head scarf on. She is most fully at ease in these moments of aloneness.

As night falls on Harlem, she closes the curtains and climbs into bed beside Walker while their children sleep. She runs her fingers along his tired shoulder blades.

Two nights a month the fortune-teller looks after the babies and Eleanor joins Walker at Loews Seventh Avenue theater, a cinema for Coloreds. Her husband arrives early — after clocking off from the tunnels — and Eleanor tiptoes down the steps to find him. When she gets to Walker’s row of seats, she puts her finger to the lips of an old black man, who stares at her, astonished, as she moves past. The old man touches her hand and smiles. “Go on ahead, ma’am.”

She returns his smile, shoves her way along the row toward her husband.

Darkness hides them, an illicit love affair being made out of their own marriage.

They sit rigidly until the lights are turned off and the music sounds out. Then they drape their jackets over the seats and melt down into the soft red velvet. Walker rubs his wife’s wedding ring finger, lifts her hand, tongues along her knuckles. The titles flash away from the screen; it is 1939 and Don Ameche is stepping out in the film Swanee River. Walker whispers that one day he will take his four-year-old son down there, to the country of his own youth. He wants the boy to know what it feels like to take a boat through swamp water, to skim under trees of hanging moss, to turn a corner and avoid a sleeping alligator, to come, amazed, upon a flock of dancing cranes. When he speaks of Georgia, Walker sounds as if he has swallowed its rivers and mud in gulps. Eleanor lets the dream seep out of him. She’s aware that if the child was taken south, both father and son might just end up like the Spanish moss, swinging from the limb of a tree. In Tennessee recently they lynched a man by hammering nails between the bones in his wrists and feet, nailed him to a bough of a tree, just like Jesus, except Jesus at least had the dignity of a solar eclipse and there probably weren’t any buzzards in Jerusalem to eat the swinging carcass.

“You should go,” she says, not meaning it, saying it only for the sake of his brief pleasure.

“Georgia,” he says, as if it’s her name.

Eleanor takes the head scarf off and her hair falls and she lets Walker’s breath caress her ear, his tongue against her lobe, and she closes her eyes to the images on the screen: Howilovya, howilovya, my dear ol’ Swanee.

They sink down in their seats and, instead of their bodies, they send their minds out to roam.

* * *

“We had a canoe, see. And the swamp had all these tall cypress trees what y’all never see in New York. They blocked out most of the light. And I went out looking for Spanish moss. Paddling away. It was nice out there. Quiet. Dark. Lots of water lilies and tree stumps and all. Sometimes I’d be paddling along and I’d turn that paddle and it was like some hand just came out of the water and turned me. Front end swinging and back staying the same. And sometimes you’d be feeling like you was spinning in the center of the world. Flipping the paddle sideways and pushing against the flow.

Anyways, I weren’t much beyond ten years of age. I stood in the center of that boat, feet even spaced, and reached up to take the moss from the trees. Filled the back of the canoe. Then the boat’d drift past the tree and I’d kneel down on the wooden slats, take the canoe in a circle. I had good arms for a kid. I coulda stood under the same cypress all day long and grabbed all the moss I wanted, but I liked that game. Return. Collection. Return. Collection. I’d go home at night and lumber that moss up the road in sacks. Y’all’s grandmomma, she’d dry the plants for weeks in the sun, hang them from the top of our porch. Then she’d take old shirts and make pillowcases from them, stuff the cases with moss.

When I lied awake at night I could put my nose to the pillow and smell the swamp and, Lord, if it didn’t move with me in my dreams.

That summer I found myself the skull of a gator shored up between two fallen logs. It musta died and been washed downriver. In that part of the swamp, there was all these trees been shattered by lightning and wild muscadines and vultures sitting on the branches, flapping they wings and getting rid of lice and insects like they do. Now don’t be scared, ’cause it wasn’t scary. The boat rocked in the water. The sun was going down. I made a circle and went on back, leaned over the side of the boat, picked up that skull, poked it a few times to see if there be any cottonmouths sleeping in it. Then I grabbed that skull and threw it to the back of the boat, where it landed and looked like it was grinning. Then I paddled like hell. The skitters were out and they was biting. I lit a branch with lots of resin at the top, went through the swamp, holding the branch. Lord, it was beautiful. But when I got home, was your grandmomma ever mad! She was waiting on the porch, a switch in her hand. I tried to go on past her, but she went grabbed me by the back of my shirt, told me to bend over, and then whupped me good. At the dinner table she told me to wipe the grin off my face, that a boy when he’s whupped should act like a whupped boy. But ya see, while I was in my boat, I’d gone shoved moss in the back of my pants. So I didn’t feel a thing!

That night, she came into my bedroom. The skull of the gator was sat on my bed. She stood looking at it. She smiled her big smile. And then she reached underneath her apron and took out some moss.

Y’all left this in the outhouse, she said to me.

And then she just left me there, with that big load of moss, scratching my head. That was your grandmomma; she was a fine woman.

Now y’all’s grandpa, I didn’t know him much — he went to heaven when I was a little boy — but, story is, he could go underwater and hypnotize a gator. The gator’d be just lying there in the sun. And he’d swim underneath the water and stroke the belly of the gator, and that gator would get sleepy like the sleepiest little boy. And sometimes he put his hat on the sleepy gator’s head, and soon everyone’d go off to sleep together all hush hush hush, right off to sleep like the sleepiest little boy.”

* * *

Walker carves his children’s initials on his shovel and carries it down to Riverside Park with him. He doesn’t dig anymore, just puts the finishing touches on the grouting of the railway tunnel — a high, wide tunnel meant for freight trains — but he keeps the shovel with him as a reminder of the ability of miracles.

Eleanor gets an afternoon shift in a defense plant. Sometimes she brings home a couple of bullets for Walker’s favorite trick. He tells the children the history of the trick, and the history of it exaggerates itself. But, when Walker demonstrates, he is too slim and the bullets keep falling out of his navel, delighting the kids.

Three years older than the century — too old to fight — Walker collects rubber tires and scrap steel for the war effort. He goes around the neighborhood and roars, “Victory scrap! Victory scrap!” He hangs a homemade flag for the 369th Regiment out his window and tells stories to his son about the first Colored pilots to wing their way over the beachheads in Anzio. His hands, though bitten by rheumatism, make great sweeping motions in the air as he talks of the airmen and their fabulous planes. When the 369th returns there is a party in Harlem, and bunting flaps with bravado over the streets. Trumpets are blown. Ticker tape whitens the pavements and shouts ring loud. Walker leans out of his window and sees his son dance through the collected tires, feet stepping quickly, pure motion. He remains at the window for much of the evening, watching his son, all love, all pride, all fatherly envy for his youth.