“No, actually, I’m looking for this address.”
He studies the runny numbers. “Sunk,” he says.
“What happened?”
“Hurrican’. Blew through here two, three year ago, just about drownded us all. City promising to drain and rebuild, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“Where did people go?”
“God knows. Wherever they could. Grabbed up whatever was left and skeedaddled.”
“Did you know a man named Elias Woods?”
He scratches his head with the chalk, etching a blue line in his hair above his right ear. “Seem kindly familiar but I ain’t rightly sure. Tell you what, there’s a man might could he’p you, down this road a ways. Junkyard-looking place on the right, ‘bout three mile.”
I thank him and leave him coloring the concrete. The road narrows between fields of green reeds and some kind of cane. It winds beneath a freeway then turns into gravel and dirt. Huge apple trees, tangled in dewberry vines, lean as if weary to the ground. Rusty barrels (fertilizer? oil?). Gardens gone to seed. An ad for SERPENTS, THREE MI. EAST. Someone’s hung a sign in an oak: JESUS IS COMING. Someone else has changed it; now it reads JESUS HAS COME. On the right, another wooden sign, painted white: ANTIQUES AND INFORMAL MULTICULTURAL MUSEUM, and below that, KWAKO DOBIE-BEDICHECK JONES, PROP. I park beneath the leafy fans of a fat banana tree.
Wooden Coke bottle boxes lie scattered among collard greens in the yard. Sculptures welded from car parts, boat motors, and plumbing supplies line a white, broken-shell path toward a small wooden house. Seagulls trot contentedly in the high grass. Saxophone jazz swells inside the house. In the doorway, a small woman in a red scarf and light blue muumuu hammers a loose picture frame. She’s light-skinned but darker than I am, the color of pine bark. Rounded cheeks, narrow eyes. She looks up and smiles at me, but keeps her arms in, close to her body, a defensive posture. “Hello. You’re here for a tour?” she asks. Before I can answer, she’s pointing to a gate west of the house. “Museum grounds are that way. It’s a dollar donation — you can stick it in the coffee can nailed to the fence over there. I’ll be here when you’re done.” She resumes her hammering.
I’m not sure what to do, but then I think, It’s only a dollar. What does an “Informal Multicultural Museum” look like? I can wait fifteen minutes to ask my questions.
So I slip a bill into the can, step past the gate and into an overgrown pasture filled with junk. Bathtubs, sinks with drains the color of sunset; hubcaps and tires; an old phone booth, glass shattered, bell insignia painted on its side; dishes, martini glasses, garlic stalks; street signs in Spanish and English; garden tools, rusty rifles, flagpoles, plastic toy swords; a toilet bowl turned into a planter, African violets spilling over its sides. I’ve been scammed out of a buck. I glance back at the house, a shack really, barely upright in a jungle of vines, salt air, refinery fumes, and hurricane threats. What’s a dollar? Good luck to these folks. I watch the woman hammer the frame. She’s like the Flower Man, saving it all, especially the ugly, stupid stuff … finding beauty in it. If you live in a wasteland — a poor neighborhood, soon to be extinct — what choice but to celebrate the trash? Shoring fragments against the ruin …
A bird statue, tall as I am, made of table legs and fenders, with two umbrellas for wings, greets me at the end of my tour. Multicultural, I don’t know. Multitextured, certainly. The sax spits fire at the sky. Them that ain’t jazzing, beware! I approach the house. “See anything you want?” the woman asks, setting aside the frame. I notice, now, a scrap bag of blue and white cotton slung across her shoulder. My mama used to own a bag just like it, to keep her piecework in.
“Oh … no. But it’s all very interesting.”
“I’m Barbara. My husband, Kwako, he’s the artist, the sculptor. There’s more inside.” She nods at the house.
“Actually, I’d like to ask you … do you know a man named Elias Woods?” She turns rigid, suspicious of me, so I spill it all fast. “I think he knew my daddy, who I never met. My uncle gave me his name. I’d like to ask him some questions.”
“Hm. Let’s go see Kwako,” she says, still stiff. She leads me, past rain barrels, wooden TV cable spools, and carburetor parts, to the back of the house. There, beneath a green canvas awning on the porch, surrounded by glass wind chimes, a man in a steel mask welds an S-shaped pipe to a tiny freezer. He’s tall and thin, wearing gray overalls. Barbara calls to him over the flame’s howling breath. He looks up, snuffs the torch. A last burst of sparks jitters into the yard: a lightning bug swarm. An adobe-colored quilt hangs across a porch rail behind him. He ditches the mask, smiles. Sparse, crooked teeth. A gray goatee, hair dense and matted, like transistor radio wiring. “Welcome, sister,” he says. “You’re a lover of our culture’s great diversity, are you?”
I don’t know what to say. “Sure.”
“It’s okay, sister, no call to be scared. You know, our whole society, it’s based on fear,” he says aggressively, as though I’ve asked him the Secret of Life. He wipes his hands on a rag. “They sell you threats and illusions, lies about each other, all the different races and such, keep us separate. But here at the Multicultural Museum, we strip away the lies, celebrate God’s bounty as it is.” God’s bounty being castoffs, broken plumbing, old axles and tires, I guess. “This freeway over here?” He points past drooping banana leaves. “S’posed to been built forty years ago, ever since I’s a boy. They still ain’t finished it. So you think politicians gon’ take care your future? No ma’am.” His verbal shifts rattle me. Barbara’s heard it all before, I can tell — part sermon, part stump speech, part sales pitch. She stands patiently, a bored, polite smile on her face. Bees flit through a willow behind her. The sax sputters, feints, jabs.
“Now me, I ain’t had no schooling,” Kwako continues, “but I made up for that with travel and with comparative thinking. I seen the way things are, see, I seen past the lies. I freed myself. Now, I don’t want to step on your heart, sister, as a Caucasian woman and all, but I know it’s the truth: Caucasians need to ask themselves, ‘Am I willing to let go some of that sneak-gotten wealth?’—see, you didn’t oppose African Americans, maybe, but your ancestors did, and you benefited from that.” As he talks, he pulls on a pair of gloves, picks up a brush, and begins slathering black wax on his sculpture. “Now me, as a man of color, I know my responsibility is to prepare myself to understand my brothers and sisters worldwide. English, Spanish, French, Creole, Garifuna — I gots to learn these tongues so I ain’t, you know, alienated from the others. We’re all influenced with the African DNA. That makes us kin. Global communication, it’s the key to mankind’s unity.”
I’m spinning with heat and the speed of his talk. His sentences mirror his art, I think: fragments from here and there, stuck wildly together to form … God knows. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the whole point is just to form something. Is this the way my daddy sang his songs? Lived his life? Improvising, shifting place to place, from family to family, maybe, leaving behind all his messes, his women …
Barbara maintains her patient expression. It must be exhausting to be married to a self-styled visionary. She’s still gripping the hammer. Crazy white woman, no business here, who knows what she’ll do? “She wants to know, do we know Elias Woods?” she says when Kwako stops to clean his brush.
He cocks his head at me. “Why’s that?”
“He might be a friend of my daddy’s,” I say.
“Who she never met,” Barbara adds.