“Bring your best game!” Michael taunts his pal beneath the basket. “Come on, G, show me something! Bring it on!” Tires squeal in the distance; I hurry back to the silence and safety of my car. Reggie joins the boys: a grinning, lanky charmer. Is that how my daddy struck my mama? An irresistible force? Burnished and glowing? Did she feel like a whore, maybe taking him from some other woman? My chest tightens as Reggie spins, laughing, graceful, and I think of Ariyeh. I slip on my shades, turn the key.
As if to affirm Reggie’s judgment of him, Bitter is wearing a poultice on his neck: six strips of raw bacon sprinkled with cayenne pepper wrapped in a lemon-drizzled towel. He’s sitting on his porch when I arrive, sipping tea, staring at the boneyard. I’ve brought us some KFC for dinner. I sit on the top step, dizzied by the late-season honeysuckle scent in the air. A choir practices in the church down the street. Coming home, Lord, coming home. “What happened?” I ask.
“‘Nother chest-squeeze. I’s cleaning out the mud-dauber shack — Grady, one of my buddies, got sick in there this afternoon — and it feel like the fist of some ghost reach right into me, past my ribs, and crush my poor ol’ heart. Had to sit a spell, catch my breath. So I got me this poultice, open up my arteries some.”
“You need to see a doctor, Uncle Bitter.”
He shoos away my words. I feel flesh-heavy, sniffing chicken, smelling rolls. Paint is peeling off the front door, the potch sags. It occurs to me to ask, “Do you have medical insurance?”
“I don’t need no doctor. Hush now.”
I can’t afford to get stuck with his bills. The thought shames me; immediately, I assure myself: Of course I’ll do what I can. And so will Ariyeh. Still, this doesn’t kill my panic. We sit and listen to cicadas thrum and throb.
Bitter rubs his chest. “I been thinking all day bout Elias, the news you brung me. Hard to credit. I didn’t know the man too good, but he seemed harmless enough to me. Guess you never know. Sorry it didn’t work out for you.”
“I was thinking of driving to Huntsville. See if I can visit him in prison.”
“Got to get your name on a list. The waiting takes a month or so, I hear. When he scheduled to die?”
“Don’t know.”
Bitter shrugs. “Sorry, Seam. Tell me. What brung you here now? Was it your mama dying?”
“Yes, in part. Going through her stuff Cletus’s letter to Sarah Morgan.”
“Stubborn woman, your mama. Never even told me she was sick.”
I almost say, Who’s stubborn now? Instead I ask, “When’s the last time you heard from her?”
“Years ago. We was dead to her.”
“She was dead to herself. I mean”—do I really want to say this? do I believe it? — “she wasn’t happy in that white man’s house. I don’t think so, anyway. It was just a path out for her, a way to find physical comfort and to secure a life of advantage for me, which I didn’t really want. Or I did and didn’t.” My throat’s parched and I reach for Uncle’s tea. I remember an afternoon, about a year ago, dropping by for tea with Mama and finding her in tears. I asked her, “What’s the matter?” but she only shook her head. I wonder, now, if she felt the cancer’s first grip that day. She looked as weary as she did those early mornings in Houston, cooking for us all. We sat in her living room, on her white couch, in white sunlight, sinking our feet into a plush beige carpet. Even the air smelled vanilla. I wanted to laugh, but my mama was weeping. Finally she said, “Have you had a good life, Telisha? Have I given you a good life?” “Of course, Mama.” I held her hands; they were cold. An ice cream truck passed in the street, tinkling, through a speaker on its roof, “Pop Goes the Weasel.” “I just wanted you to be happy,” Mama said. “That’s all.” “I’m happy, Mama. Really.”
But that day I’d been in tears myself. The night before, my coworker Dwayne had asked me out. He was a research aide; we’d been friendly and flirty in the office in the three months he’d been there. He was arrogant and handsome, off-putting and charming all at once. Even his idle stares looked smart-ass and fierce. One day we were poring over maps, gathering data on inner-city neighborhoods. “Ever notice the word ghetto has disappeared from our language?” he asked me. “When’s the last time you saw that word in the paper? Nowadays it’s ‘inner-city’ this, ‘inner-city’ that. Ghetto’s too racially charged, so we got to bury it.” We talked a while longer, and I don’t know why — maybe because he was so passionate, like cocky, ninth-grade Troy — I admitted to him my messy family stew. He looked at me differently, then, as though I were a genie just risen from a run-of-the-mill bottle. A week later he asked me to dinner and drinks.
The evening began pleasantly, with Mexican food at a new place on Greenville — “Yuppie Row,” Dwayne called the avenue, pointing out the chic new cars in front of glittering restaurants. “I’ll bet, at some of these places, you could hear the best watered-down blues in Dallas.”
“If you don’t like it, why are we here?”
“Oh, I like it. Who said I’m not a yuppie?”
I laughed. I liked it, too. I hadn’t worn a dress in months, and I felt good in my blue pullover.
“The real blues is in Deep Ellum — what’s left of it, undeveloped. Ever been there?”
“Nope.”
“I think you need to see it.” He dropped his voice: an exaggerated Darth Vader. “Get in touch with your dark side.”
I laughed again but uncomfortably this time. Later, on our third round of drinks at our second bar of the night, he pushed the dark side. “See, I’ve got you figured this way,” he slurred. He’d been drinking martinis. “For you — as for everyone else, really — white is linked to goodness and purity. Black with the nasty.” He pushed his dreads out of his face.
“The nasty?”
“Anything nasty.” He reached over and rubbed my belly. “But you got it inside you, girl.” I scooched back on my stool, away from his hand. What had I done to make him think he could touch me this way? My skin tingled.
I wouldn’t let him take me to Deep Ellum so late. “All right, then. A compromise,” he said. “Let me show you a spot I know. It’s a white joint, but the music’s real.”
We wound up at the Strictly Tabu Room on Lemmon Avenue, a smoky little bar stuffed with yuppies, but Dwayne was right about the music. An old Negro — Negro seemed the proper word for him; he’d stepped out of another era, with a long barber shirt, gray cotton pants with cuffs, and white-spatted shoes — played the vibes, all by himself in a corner. Gentle Lionel Hampton riffs, melodies folding into one another, water over pebbles. I ordered a chardonnay and relaxed into his loose improvisations.
Dwayne wouldn’t let it go. The dark side. The nasty. Like a chant, one of Bitter’s old spells. It had a hypnotic effect on me. Sex had been missing from my life for a couple of years. Uneasy in my own skin, I avoided touch. For a long time I’d known this about myself. Some of my sorority sisters in college had even called me “lezzie” (after I’d told them I wasn’t like them and begun to withdraw) because I didn’t go on many dates, because I looked “like a boy.” Dwayne nibbled my ear. “Please stop,” I said. “My place,” he said. “No,” I said, shivering. “I’d like you to take me home now.”
In the car, in front of my apartment, he dropped all pretense. He wouldn’t let me loose. “The dark part of you wants it,” he panted, pulling my dress up over my knees. I would have laughed at him if I hadn’t been so frightened — and unsure, thinking, Maybe it’s true, maybe the old neighborhood got into my blood, a bayou fever, those crickety nights I’d sneak out of bed — a bad, bad girl — and tickle myself down below, sitting in the culvert, dreaming of the shut-in boy. Maybe none of Mama’s efforts made a difference. I hadn’t bettered myself at all. Despite a shiny surface and years of education, I was still at bottom a dark, nasty child. A bubbling, boggy slough.