Sitting against the porch post with his stretched-out feet as close to Kattie’s hip as he thought he could get away with — thrillingly close as she sat on the top step — he jotted this material into his folding notebook. The rich musty smell of the sweet potatoes excited him. Kattie offered him a piece and he pulled it in two and offered half back to her.
“I don’t care to eat what I’m cooking,” she said.
The red skins lay clumped at her feet. He picked one up, flopped it over his fingers and back and licked it. “I could eat these things all day,” he said.
“You’d bloat up like a pig.”
“A happy one though.”
He always felt as if he didn’t get quite enough of whatever it was he wanted. He mentioned this to Kattie. “Why you reckon that is?”
“For you? I couldn’t say.”
“But I mean don’t a lot of people think that? For instance, yall had a duck supper the other night. You saved me out a leg that was very tasty. I wanted some more, but there wadn’t any. And then several of the ladies”—he always called them ladies—“said they wished they could have more too.”
“Maybe that was just a problem of the number against the duck.”
“But look at this whole place. All these gentlemen keep coming back.”
“That’s just appetite; they get filled up every time.”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of instances of what I’m talking about. I for one never get enough summer. Or enough of gardenias or lilacs or pe-ony flowers. I like the smell of horses so much sometimes I wish I lived in the stable.”
“Sometimes you smell like you do.”
“Ah.” He shifted his approach. “And Othello.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s a play. Mr. William Shakespeare wrote it.”
“That’s a funny name.”
“He’s the best of them all.”
“Them all who?”
“Playwriters.”
“Sometimes we put on skits right here.”
“I know. I watched that one about the Queen of Sheba night before last.”
“Was that you hiding behind the curtain?”
“Somebody close to it.”
“Was that like Mr. Shakebutt?”
He barked a quick laugh and she blushed, ashamed that she would say such a thing but delighted too.
“No. His plays are put on on big stages. In New York and Chicago, New Orleans. Paris even.”
“He’s from France?”
“No. He’s a Englishman. Was.”
“Then how do they understand him in Paris?”
“I expect they have to listen pretty hard.”
“Well, what about O-thella?”
“I wish there was more of it.”
“Does it quit before the end?”
“No, it gets there just right.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about this colored general.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“There was back then.”
“When?”
“I don’t know — centuries ago. Five hundred years maybe.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Sure is. Back in Venice.”
“Where’s that?”
“Over in Italy I think.”
“Does O-thella speak italian?”
“No. He speaks english.”
“How about the other people?”
“In the play? They speak english too.”
She lay a skin flat in her palm, scraped with her fingernail the stringy remnant of orange meat and licked it off her fingertip. Her palms were the faintest brown, hardly any color at all.
She said, “Sounds like a lot of folks who don’t understand a word of what each other’s saying. I’m familiar with that problem.”
Orange flesh between her teeth made her white teeth even prettier. He was about to tell how the Venice big shots mocked Othello and Iago hated him because he was a negro (but more important than that because he was powerful and Iago had nothing but the black emptiness of the powerless to stare into, and that terrified and ruined your mind, he would think) and Desdemona’s father and relatives and Iago’s friends and the riffraff and common white trash of Venice all hated him too. About how they tricked him into thinking his wife was running around with another man and how this — along with all the other badmouthing — drove Othello so crazy that he wound up strangling Desdemona with his own bare hands. It was pitiful.
He started to say something but he couldn’t. It shamed him too much. He wished he hadn’t brought it up.
This girl.
He sneaked a glance at her. It wasn’t that he wanted to fool or comfort this ginger-colored girl with her bunchy hair pressed down under a green cotton scarf but that she would look up from mashing sweet potatoes and talking to him of speeches and speechifiers and find him dear. (He was this way with every girl, every woman too. He wanted to tell her this, confess it, but he thought this would be a bad idea and so he kept his mouth shut.) Under a mixed cloudy afternoon sky he yearned.
Just then came a shout from the helpboy John Day over to the side of the Emporium — which was actually several smallish houses linked together by closed-in catwalks around the central three-story house — yelling at somebody in big trouble. He stood up as Kattie said, “What’s that?” and he put his hand on her arm to steady her if she needed steadying — and himself, because the shout scared him too — and then he could see John Day down on his knees looking under the big house that in most places — the undercarriage — was covered over with a wooden trellis planted in yellow jasmine but not where John Day was looking and poking up into it with a section of broom handle. He ran out and found John Day poking hard, jabbing at something, and squatting behind him was Bunny Boy holding up the skirts of his shiny yellow suit coat and peering sideways over his shoulder as John Day gave a vicious poke to whatever it was stuck up under the house.
“Come out of there, you crazy fool,” cried John Day.
“Go get him,” Bunny Boy said.
Delvin jumped down from the porch and ran over to the scene. “What is it?” he said. He trembled with excitement.
“Can you see him?” Bunny Boy said to John Day who was swishing the broom handle back and forth under the house, raising red dust. “Come over here, Joe,” he yelled at one of the other factotums, a heavyset man pulling sheets off a long washline over near the board back fence. “And you,” he said to Delvin, “get down there and help this boy pull that nonscrip out of there.”
“It’s a somebody?” Delvin said.
“It’s a nobody, who’s going to wind up even less,” Bunny sneered, ducking his head to peer into the gloom. “Stick yo hand up there,” he said to John Day. “Come here, Joe.”
Joe came up bringing a shovel. “You want me to dig ’im out, Mr. Bunny?”
“In a minute,” Bunny Boy said. “Hey,” he said to John Day, “move over let Joe stick his arm up in there. Joe, get down there and grab that rascal.”
“What is it?” Joe said. “A possum? I don’t want to stick my hand up after no possum.”
Bunny Boy smirked. “Some ’ud say that. Not me. It’s a lost ’un though.”
Joe, a blocky, fidgety man with a small square face, got down on his hands and knees in the powdery red dirt and, shoving John Day aside, crammed himself into the opening and skinnied up under the house. “Grab my feet,” he said to nobody in particular, or to everybody.
Bunny Boy indicated to Delvin that this should be his role.
But even with Delvin and John Day holding the man’s thick, knobby ankles, Joe was unable to get far up under the house.