“So it wasn’t a white man in the pines that you saw?”
Herman began to cry. His body shook and he grimaced in pain. Tears rolled down his gaunt cheeks.
“Are you scared of the black man in the pines?” Cornelius asked.
Herman could not answer. So Cornelius took out a copy of The Prince and began to read aloud. Within minutes his father was asleep.
Cornelius studied the medical charts at the foot of the bed then went off to work.
Next afternoon, in the apartment with Colette, he defeated her in a wrestling match for the first time, handcuffing her wrists to the foot of the sofa.
He pressed down on her, making love slowly while she struggled and moaned.
Afterward they sat on the couch and talked about Herman.
“I went to see him this morning,” CC said, “before I came here.”
“What about school?”
“Fuck school. They want to put my father in a nursing home.”
“Can they do that without permission?”
“If he’s out of his head and can’t walk. I have to have him on his feet in seven days or they’ll move him to a nursing home and I’ll never get him out.”
“I’ll do whatever you need, baby,” the detective said. “Just leave it up to me and we’ll get your father out of there.”
“How?”
“I don’t know but we will.”
CC took her hand and lowered his head.
“You know I went to the doctor the other day,” she said after a while.
“Uh-huh.”
“It was a fertility doctor. Harry and I are getting married but he has a low sperm count so I had a treatment that will help — you know?”
“You’re getting married?”
“I’m thirty-one, honey. I don’t have that much time.”
“But you could... what about us?”
Colette smiled and caressed his cheek. “You’re just a boy, CC. There’s a whole life out there for you to live. What would it look like me marrying a seventeen-year-old kid? They’d put me in jail for sure.”
A feeling of distance descended on Cornelius. It was as if Colette had been shifted a thousand miles and a thousand years away. He fondly remembered the love they had shared. But she was gone; also his school and job and the corpse he sat next to every evening at work. All in the distance, history.
“I guess,” Cornelius said. “Yeah. I got to go, Colette. My father needs me.”
She touched his arm and asked, “Do you want me to hold you?”
“Not right now.”
“The black man did not see me,” Herman said on the fourth day since the story began. “I followed him deep in the woods. He looked sneaky and me and your mother thought he might be a pimp.”
“But mom couldn’t be in Mississippi, dad,” Cornelius argued. “You didn’t meet her until she came to your projection room running from Jimmy Grimaldi.”
“Oh,” Herman said. “Oh yeah, I mean yes. Yes it was not your mother but my mother. Yes my mother...”
Every day Cornelius discussed and argued about the bearded white man dressed in black, or sometimes the black man, who he was following through the Mississippi pinewoods. He passed the scenes of lynchings and rapes, patches of strawberries and young Abraham Lincoln sitting by a brook. Once he came upon Thucydides. This, Cornelius knew, was a turning point for his father. In the journey through his mind he had come across the historian he loved most. The ancient Greek doctor-general was the signpost of Herman’s sanity.
Along the way child-Herman had gone by a bevy of naked white women dancing in a circle. When the black man (he was a Negro at that moment) moved on the women tried to stop Herman, but he shook them off following the trail of breadcrumbs the man had left to find his own way back home.
Herman ate the breadcrumbs. That’s how he stayed alive: eating breadcrumbs, trailing the white man in black, the black man.
“... yes it was my mother there with me. Your mother was not there. My mother said I should go home and I told her, ‘Later, mama. I got to find out where this man be goin’ to first.’
“And one day, instead of a breadcrumb he tore out a page from a dictionary, leaving that to mark his path. I picked it up and put it in my mouth because I knew paper was made from wood and a man could eat wood if he was hungry enough.”
“So you were following the man and eating pages from his dictionary?” Cornelius asked.
“I almost did,” Herman said. “I almost did but then, before I chewed, I took the page out from my mouth and looked at it. It was all chicken scratches, black marks on yellow paper. But the more I looked, the more it seemed to make sense. They closed all the black schools down around me. They said black folks would do better in the cotton fields and the fruit farms than they would in no classroom. You couldn’t read if you was black. Why read if there was cotton to be pult? Why read when you could slave?”
Herman’s eyes opened wide in amazement. He gazed at the ceiling trying to glean an answer from above.
By day six Cornelius had gotten Herman to sit up as he used to do at home. CC had deciphered the doctor’s scrawls on the medical charts, changing the morphine prescribed to ibuprofen and removing the Ritalin altogether.
He made these changes after the doctor’s rounds.
Every day Cornelius would remind his father where the story had left off. At first Herman claimed not to remember but Cornelius kept asking and after a while he’d have Herman back on the trail of the quarry in black.
“... the pages was from a dictionary at first but then they was from novels and history books and biographies. I strained so hard to understand. Some people along the way give me hints. There was a white woman on the other side of a river he crossed who told me what a ‘Q’ was. She told me that there was no ‘Q’ word that didn’t have a ‘U’ as the second letter. She was wrong but that didn’t matter because she was mostly right....”
“Why were you following that man, dad?”
“To find my way back home,” he said.
“But you were with your mother. Didn’t she know the way home?”
“Not home to Mississippi, ninny. I wanted to come home to you.”
“Who am I?”
“My son... Cornelius.”
And he was back in the world they both inhabited.
“We have to get you out of here, dad. They want to put you into a nursing home.”
“What do we do about it, son?”
Wednesday afternoon at three p.m. Herman Jones, using two bamboo canes, walked toward the nurses’ desk on the third floor of St. Francis Hospital in Brooklyn. Cornelius was by his side. The elder Jones was wearing blue jeans, a red T-shirt and hospital-supplied paper slippers. The day before they had practiced their trek. It was difficult at first but Herman was resolute and so was his son.
“Where you think you goin’?” a big black nurse with blond hair asked.
She rose up from behind the nurses’ station.
“Home,” Cornelius said.
“I don’t have authorization to discharge this patient. Come on now, Mr. Jones, let me take you back to your room.”
“No, Nurse, I am not going back there.”
“But Mr.—”
“Please,” Herman said. “I do not wish to be transferred to some nursing facility. I can move under my own power and I have the wherewithal to address your inquiries. That accepted, there is no reason for you to hinder my egress from this, this medical prison.”
“The doctor has to release you, Mr. Jones.”
“What is your name?” Herman asked the nurse.
“Jackie.”
“Jackie what?”
“Boughman.”
“Well, Ms. Boughman,” Herman said. “I take it you are a black woman in spite of your hair.”