Yeah, Dallas said, some chump change.
I’m gon get me a real piece of money.
ONE SUNDAY AFTER church, John and Lucifer — surely by then they had stopped attending service, had become the service, running missions with Reverend Tower to the dens of sin on Church Street, his bodyguards, Lucifer pulls down the pimps’ gold draws for the hard paddle of the reverend’s Bible, and John heaves them back up—decided to take Gracie and Sheila to visit their parents, Inez and George. The sisters understood the importance of the invitation, for such an invitation precedes proposition. Imagine Gracie’s surprise, Sheila waiting beside her on the trimmed lawn in front of the church and them chatting, small talk about the sermons and the new generation of young devils in Bible class, and John and Lucifer pulling up in the red Eldorado, then the gravity lifting from Sheila’s face, her mouth brightening, and Gracie thinking it was because Sheila felt she had Gracie in a trap, the woman had backslid right into Sheila’s righteous arms, then Sheila opening the back door of the car (Lucifer never was much on manners, chivalry) and getting in, Gracie thinking that Sheila would chaperon her, put her Beulah-like nose where it didn’t belong into Gracie’s dirty business jus because she had made that one mistake when she first came to the city, the Jack mistake, the Cookie mistake, made it cause she was young and naive and country — there’s always someone to point the finger of blame, old folks say; Never let yo right hand know what yo left hand is doing — Gracie thinking this, but seeing different, and finally knowing different, awakened at the sound of their noisy kiss.
Look at them two lovebirds, John said. He motioned to Lucifer and Sheila, brown eyes delighted. Gracie, come on here.
Gracie’s feet wouldn’t move.
Kiss done, Sheila kept her face turned, forward, staring directly out the windshield as if she could steer the car with her gaze alone. Gracie slid onto the front seat beside John. He clicked the engine and aimed the long nose of the car into the street. The car whirred along. Gracie spied on Sheila in the rearview mirror, hoping to catch some indication of emotion. Sheila’s face was expressionless, smooth stone. The entire trip, no one said anything, a curtain of silence falling before each of their faces, a block of silence—cause you felt it—heavy inside the car.
They parked in the shadows of the trees in Morgan Park, and walked over the dusty cobblestones that horse-hooved the sound of their clicking heels. John used his key to enter the house through the patio. George sat bent over the table before the Daily Chronicle—he never read the Defender, the black newspaper; its numerous spelling errors were an embarrassment to intelligent black readers and a boon to white — magnifying glass to eye. He looked up at her, eyes two marvelous globes, red-flecked and weakened by all the places he (and Inez) had traveled. (Travel is seeing, sharpness of notice.) They’d had a good life together. He was a retired blueprint worker for the Evanston Railroad, who had started out as a railroad dick right after the war. Nothing serious, he said, jus chasing turnstile jumpers, kicking off drunk white men from the suburbs, nothing serious like these cutthroat hoodlums today who slice you open just to see if your blood will run.
Inez sat at the table across from him. Junior, she said.
Gracie didn’t know if the pet name was meant for Lucifer or John.
Mamma, this Sheila.
Mamma, this Gracie.
How yall doin?
Fine.
Just fine, Gracie said.
Glad to meet yall. So these the girls yall been talkin bout?
I heard a lot bout you too, Gracie said. John get his good looks from you.
Inez laughed. Oh, boy. Junior was the blackest baby I ever seen.
How could this be true? Inez and John had the same light tight skin, the same compact physique, though he was wider.
Lucifer came out light then got dark, Inez said, like a yam toasted in the oven, then went light again.
Later, in the privacy of the car:
I like yo Mamma.
Yeah, John said. Mamma. She been a woman all her life.
Gracie pondered this for a moment. Let it pass. I like George too. Yo stepfather.
Step? He ain’t step nothing to me.
But, he seems like a nice man.
Gracie, you jus don’t know. I seen it. John spoke, anger in his face. He got land. Oil wells. All sorts of stuff. And …
John, you ain’t—
He got a long way to go befo he be my step anything.
Inez had met George right before the war — or right after; this she always forgets — when Lucifer (born when the war began) was learning his first sentences and John was still wrapped in swaddling clothes (no, he was born when the war ended; two years apart, they are two years apart) — John, a fine package dropped in the lap of Pappa Simmons and Georgiana. Georgiana was dead now, and George and Inez cared for Pappa Simmons in the basement of their house, dodging their neighbor’s complaints about the whooping hound-dog baying of the Indian (as he thought of himself). Pappa Simmons had collected a set of bitter memories, stored them like preserves in his pantry, and put ice in his voice when he told you about them.
Lots of folks had already come up, he said.
You took a path that led over the hill so that you could reach the station without having to pass through the streets of the town. You forced your way through the brambles that crowded the narrow path, your head bent sharp-angled to the road. The hill was steep. You breathed deeply.
They lived in places lot worse than the one yall live in, he said. Inez, member that first apartment over on Peoria?
Pappa, don’t drudge up the past, Inez said.
We had to walk to the market and buy coal fo heat.
And it were six of us in one room. Me, Pappa, and Mamma and this other family. You had to be very private cause it was always somebody else in the room.
Hell, but that ain’t nothing. There were this one town where everybody jus packed up and leave. Even took the church. Put the Bibles and benches and rafters and doors and floors in they suitcase and got the first train fo North. And when they got here, all them down-home country spooks crowded into one flat. Pappa Simmons caught his breath. When the depression kicked in good, you shoulda seen us niggas shuttlin from street to street, from house to house, tryin to find some place to rest a heavy head.
That’s the truth, George said.
Gracie would learn (because the four of them visited the two of them — or three, if she counted Pappa Simmons — every Sunday) that George spent most of his time on the patio (summer heat or winter cold), where he enjoyed his ball games on the radio (never on TV, not the little black-and-white portable one he and Inez owned then, or the large, heavy color one they purchased later). The radio also carried him country music. The only colored person she knew loved country music. I think it relaxes him.
See, George said, it’s all about the military-industrial complex.
George?
He lifted his face from the paper, faced her, one eye bulging, swollen planet-big behind the magnifying glass. He lowered the glass. He wore a pair of glasses—five eyes — turtleshell, the kind you had to keep pushing with your index finger to keep them on your face. He removed them quietly to the glass table.