In her black dress suit, she was small and motionless. Sunlight draped a shawl over her shoulders. She had closed her eyes, eased her head back, and told the story. Concluded thus:
Men should sow their oats, she said.
Yes, ma’am.
Then marry at thirty.
Yes, ma’am.
But men are heathens.
Lincoln had thought for a moment, sincere. Jesus was a man, he said.
Glory shot her eyes open. Brought her head forward and looked at Lincoln for a full minute, her face as still as a rock. Then she slapped him, hard. Water cascaded from his eyes. (Until the day before his death, he never cried again, not even in jest.) Glory went over to the sink and washed her hands, as if she had been dealing with something unclean. You don’t fuck with Jesus.
Glory loved Jesus, the only man she ever cooked for, in a greasy ritual she performed once a year, on his birthday. Turkey and dressing, ham, fried gizzards, chitlins, hog head cheese, black-eyed peas, butter beans, neck bones, corn bread, buttermilk and side meats, candied yams, smothered chicken, collard greens, eggnog, and pecan pie. They would sit down to a table overgrown with a smoky jungle of plates.
Taste and see, Glory would say. Jesus is good.
They would eat their supper and afterward spend the evening before the fireplace in the living room, Glory singing: Come by here Lord, come by here.
Lincoln grew, so that by the time he was ten, Glory barely reached his shoulder. Whenever some thought thickened his mind, he would walk around the house wide-eyed like a baby. He could never do right for doing wrong, and Glory always found something suspicious in his look, so Lincoln began to develop the habit of beaming a golden smile at her, a ritual meant to comfort and ease but that over time altered the muscles in his face to such a degree that the corners of his mouth hurt. One day, as she sat tall in her high chair in the kitchen, and he in his chair, giving her his aching smile, he decided to question her about the central mystery in her life.
Mamma?
Yes?
Where my daddy?
I done told you a thousand times where your daddy at.
I know, but—
She jerked him up by the collar. You ain’t been listen?
No, ma’am. He looked down into her face but avoided her eyes.
You must just be hardheaded?
His heart tightened at the hard threat of her question. No, ma’am.
What yo problem, then?
He framed his words. Where is my daddy Jesus?
The fire in Glory’s cheeks cooled, but Lincoln could feel the heat from her smoldering eyes. Boy.
Yes, ma’am.
Listen carefully.
Yes, ma’am.
Jesus can see into the heart.
Yes, ma’am.
God gave me children as a token of his own suffering and love, and for my devotion to him.
Yes, ma’am.
His son saw into my heart.
Yes, ma’am.
Never close your heart to Jesus.
Yes, ma’am.
Glory was a woman of mean understanding. Burns covered her forearms, the blackest part of her body, and her fingernails were so black and her fingers so flat (old pone-pan hands, Lincoln called them in the full force of his anger) that she always wore gloves in public (and sometimes even when she ate) and long full dresses — even the sleeves long — that revealed no flesh. She walked slowly and carefully, like one just learning. Lincoln studied her through the keyhole of her bedroom door, observed that she slept with her eyes open, her body trembling at scenes of destruction and devastation, projected onto the ceiling and walls, that her eyes alone could see. Eyes that saw in clouds the shapes of disaster. Saw spirits wrestling in the sky and swift-winged angels zooming over the world. For her, ordinary language was an undecipherable hieroglyphics, and Lincoln had to sit before the warmth of the fireplace, where she knitted the same quilt she would finish only moments before her death, and read her the mail, or her favorite black newspaper, the Black Star, and magazine, Mirror of Liberty, or the printed labels on foodstuffs, tin cans, and cardboard boxes.
She would spend most of the day in the kitchen, reading the only written words she understood: those of the Bible. Then she would summon Lincoln to her company for conversation. Lincoln forever on hand at the pointed moment of memory and reflection, for how can progress be measured unless we reconstruct and reanimate the past? She said her say, Lincoln hearing but not always listening, until she circled back to the present, depleted, it would seem, from the telling. She would spend the remainder of the day knitting and humming before the fireplace.
One day, she called Lincoln into the kitchen. Boy.
Yes, ma’am.
Yellow niggers darken with age.
Ma’am?
But she left him with that piece of fact-threat-advice and went to bed singing:
Jesus loves me
Yes I know
Cause the Bible
Tells me so.
The baby was hunched into a heap, legs crooked, head touching knees. It’s too damn hot in here, he thought. These days, you can’t find peace anywhere.
Lincoln always rose at dawn, had done so for as long as he could remember. So too this day. It was warm and black and close under the covers. He raised himself slowly out of bed, fingered his penis (limp), moved over to the black drapes fronting the windows, and drew them open to a flood of light. Blinking, he stood looking out onto the city’s skyline, a view he took pride in, his thirty-six-story-high penthouse perch scanning across the very heart of the city. Sunlight flamed about the roofs of buildings — tall brick and steel boxes blaring many-glassed reflections. He looked down onto the Eisenhower Expressway and saw cars moving on a sea of blacktop, wheels and engines silent. He could hear nothing of the outside. Somewhere behind him wood popped and hissed; he turned to see his bed, as high and thick as a mausoleum, glowing as if on fire, black sheets bright under the light, like the moonlit surface of water, spotted with two drops of semen, fallen stars on the rippling satin. His sight looped back to the window and skyline, and he gazed on in silence and kept looking, sunlight stroking his back in anxious anticipation. Blind fingers sought his penis and examined it. Erect.
Moving on, the next juncture of his morning routine required preparation of his bath — foam and bubbles, plenty of bubbles and foam. He lowered his body into the tub, enjoying the warm water and the clean soap smell. Some thirty minutes later — time formed and held in foam, time bouncing and echoing in every bubble — he stepped free of the tub and toweled his body dry, then made his way to the full-length mirror, leaving behind a soapy trail. He was tall, but of average build, since he never exercised. He believed that independence and hard work should be rewarded. If he sweated, he wanted to be paid.
Jesus fixed it so we won’t never have to work, Glory said.
Yes, ma’am.
You ain’t no slave.
Yes, ma’am.
Niggers shouldn’t work for the white man. She mailed out anonymous donations to black businesses and instructed Lincoln in the art of writing chain letters — words are dreams — (a dollar enclosed in the envelope), which read: Praise Jesus, you lucky so and so. Cast down your bucket where you are. Pass it on. Pass it on.
Lincoln back-combed his fine curly hair into one thick pomaded wave. Polished his teeth and took time to evaluate the possibilities of his appearance. His eyes were his best feature: large, wet, and full of — his women believed — the tears of a sensitive masculinity. Sensitive teeth, sensitive stomach, he made his way to the kitchen — cool air playing over his naked body — where he breakfasted on powdered foods, the stuff of astronauts, then slipped into a white linen shirt and slacks fitted with a thin black leather belt. He removed a photograph that he had received several weeks earlier, from an Emmanuel Lead, who had written a letter on the back of the photograph in thick-tipped lasting black marker, from the black file cabinet next to his bed.