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.