you know all about us. If you find anything contrary, remove it, cover us in Your blood. Stir up some boy before it’s everlastingly too late.”
She just wanted to get back at me because Aunt Clara said in front of everyone that Nida Lee had once thought of wearing sequins before five o’clock. “They would have thought you didn’t know any better.”
I would have told on Nida Lee, but I didn’t want to worsen my punishment for having gone over the fence. Arnez brought lemonade and a selection from Aunt Clara’s collection of benign picture books. I haunted the third floor, counted the days until G.C. could huff and sweat to show my mother how heavy our luggage was.
After Opelika was once again where it belonged, down there somewhere in the Old Country, where they boiled clothes in big, black smoking pots, it got harder to get away, to winnow back into my sack. Television added tear gas, gasoline bombs, University of Mississippi at Oxford—I thought James Meredith had tried to register at Oxford University—to my vocabulary.
And the South, as a landscape, would be, for me, always, a
series of interiors, living rooms where I braced myself when I heard something crash in another room. An aging mother would explain that her daughter was sick and hurry off to see what had been broken. Before the visit was over, the daughter would appear—not as the popular, pretty thing her mother couldn’t stop talking about, but as a woman toothless as a turtle who had been drinking all day, teetering to the kitchen, which was why she kept herself hidden, covered like a mirror after a death in the old days.
The Old Country became a sort of generalized stuffy room, no matter how many reunions of old-timers I attended. It wasn’t safe to explore the South. The old-timers themselves discouraged too much curiosity about what lay beyond the gate. It was a place of secrets, of what black people knew and what white people didn’t. No old-timer said openly that Rosa Parks had been secretary of her NAACP branch and a student of interstate commerce rulings and the Equal Accommodations Law of 1948 before she decided she was too tired to move.
The old-timers fell silent whenever I entered the room, paused like someone in a hurry but too polite not to give directions, and then went back to the possibility that Roy Wilkins of the NAACP hated Martin Luther King of the SCLC because there was not enough real estate in the social-studies textbooks to house them both. Meanwhile, television passed on its pictures, the connecting tissue. The representations survived the subject and eventually overtook my own images, which were less durable than waxwork figures in an exhibition of Black Life at the Smithsonian.
Aunt Clara hushed up and died in the middle of one of those undreamed-of summers, when Birmingham turned out to be like Johannesburg, the mental concertina wire between her and all manner of neighbor unmolested. That was the end of her careful
packages, her many parcels of Little Women, Little Men , Nancy Drew mysteries, P. L. Travers, Hans Christian Andersen, puzzles, painted-tongue seeds, stoles, suits with the wrong lapels, chafing dishes, Uncle Eugene’s pajamas, and lavender cards that said, “I wanted you to have these ere I go.”
Moving-van loads of things were set free by her own fingers, which had turned orange-ish from sickness and had never voted. She deeded their cabin over to Arnez and her sister until their deaths, at which time it would revert to her estate, and told Nida Lee from her colored-only hospital bed that if she came to her homegoing services not to wear any shouting shoes. An undertaker bought the house.
3 /
B lack and B lue
T he Great Society seemed to blossom with Voting Rights acts, but dread of the meantime mixed with the pollen. John Birch Society billboards attested to an allergic reaction and for several days I thought my parents knew the lady named Selma who’d been killed on a highway in
She just wanted to get back at me because Aunt Clara said in front of everyone that Nida Lee had once thought of wearing sequins before five o’clock. “They would have thought you didn’t know any better.”
I would have told on Nida Lee, but I didn’t want to worsen my punishment for having gone over the fence. Arnez brought lemonade and a selection from Aunt Clara’s collection of benign picture books. I haunted the third floor, counted the days until G.C. could huff and sweat to show my mother how heavy our luggage was.
After Opelika was once again where it belonged, down there somewhere in the Old Country, where they boiled clothes in big, black smoking pots, it got harder to get away, to winnow back into my sack. Television added tear gas, gasoline bombs, University of Mississippi at Oxford—I thought James Meredith had tried to register at Oxford University—to my vocabulary.
And the South, as a landscape, would be, for me, always, a
series of interiors, living rooms where I braced myself when I heard something crash in another room. An aging mother would explain that her daughter was sick and hurry off to see what had been broken. Before the visit was over, the daughter would appear—not as the popular, pretty thing her mother couldn’t stop talking about, but as a woman toothless as a turtle who had been drinking all day, teetering to the kitchen, which was why she kept herself hidden, covered like a mirror after a death in the old days.
The Old Country became a sort of generalized stuffy room, no matter how many reunions of old-timers I attended. It wasn’t safe to explore the South. The old-timers themselves discouraged too much curiosity about what lay beyond the gate. It was a place of secrets, of what black people knew and what white people didn’t. No old-timer said openly that Rosa Parks had been secretary of her NAACP branch and a student of interstate commerce rulings and the Equal Accommodations Law of 1948 before she decided she was too tired to move.
The old-timers fell silent whenever I entered the room, paused like someone in a hurry but too polite not to give directions, and then went back to the possibility that Roy Wilkins of the NAACP hated Martin Luther King of the SCLC because there was not enough real estate in the social-studies textbooks to house them both. Meanwhile, television passed on its pictures, the connecting tissue. The representations survived the subject and eventually overtook my own images, which were less durable than waxwork figures in an exhibition of Black Life at the Smithsonian.
Aunt Clara hushed up and died in the middle of one of those undreamed-of summers, when Birmingham turned out to be like Johannesburg, the mental concertina wire between her and all manner of neighbor unmolested. That was the end of her careful
packages, her many parcels of Little Women, Little Men , Nancy Drew mysteries, P. L. Travers, Hans Christian Andersen, puzzles, painted-tongue seeds, stoles, suits with the wrong lapels, chafing dishes, Uncle Eugene’s pajamas, and lavender cards that said, “I wanted you to have these ere I go.”
Moving-van loads of things were set free by her own fingers, which had turned orange-ish from sickness and had never voted. She deeded their cabin over to Arnez and her sister until their deaths, at which time it would revert to her estate, and told Nida Lee from her colored-only hospital bed that if she came to her homegoing services not to wear any shouting shoes. An undertaker bought the house.
3 /
B lack and B lue
T he Great Society seemed to blossom with Voting Rights acts, but dread of the meantime mixed with the pollen. John Birch Society billboards attested to an allergic reaction and for several days I thought my parents knew the lady named Selma who’d been killed on a highway in
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