“Oh, no!” Soupspoon’s lips mouthed the words, but he never made a sound. He let the poisons into his body but his eyes seemed to be stronger than the pain.
On his third visit Randy noticed a change in his feelings toward Kiki’s friend. He’d brought a book to read but it lay unopened while he gazed into Soupspoon’s sightless eyes. He felt like looking away but couldn’t; he felt like going down to the rest room but he didn’t have to go. When he finally went outside the room a nurse smiled at him and he turned away quickly so that she couldn’t see him cry. It was then that he knew the feeling that had come over him — it was; shame. He was ashamed of how naked the pain was.
“Yo’ daddy’s dead?” Soupspoon asked during his ninth six-hour transfusion.
“Yes, sir. Died when I was two — shipwrecked.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It was a long time ago. I guess I’m used to it by now.”
Soupspoon took pleasure in watching the young man.
Randy brought textbooks to read when Soupspoon was dozing. Books like In the Street and Investment Strategies for the Eighties. He also brought the Wall Street Journal. He’d read the national and international news items from page one to Soupspoon when the sound didn’t jangle the sick man’s nerves.
Sometimes the needles and poisons and fluorescent lights got to be too much for Soupspoon. He’d start shaking from weakness and the nearness of death. Randy would put down his book and hold the dry old hands in an attempt to stop the tremors. Once Soupspoon shook so terribly that Randy got scared and so upset that he actually kissed the older man’s forehead.
A kiss.
Soupspoon looked up into the worried face of the youngster, still feeling where the lips had touched him. He tried to remember the last time someone had loved him so much that they wanted to kiss him. Not some love partner, not sex, but when was the last time someone saw his pain and wanted to kiss it away? Maybe Ruby and Inez did it, he didn’t remember. He’d been kissed before. Kissed and licked and sucked dry. Kicked and shoved too. He’d been in love with Mavis and other women. But none of them had ever tried to kiss his pain. He’d been in love with the whole world, everything, when the music was right. But Randy’s kiss was something special. Something he’d missed.
That day Soupspoon got his sickest. A fever took him over and he fell into nightmare. Sometimes he was having chills on the transfusion table and other times he was in a plantation barn, surrounded by corpses that had known his name.
“Where’s your family from?” Soupspoon asked. He and Randy were at Kiki’s apartment the day after they’d sent him home. It was two weeks after his final “keemo” injection so his ears were only buzzing slightly.
“North Africa — that is, Morocco — and Brazil.” He looked away as he spoke.
“I guess we everywhere, huh?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Colored people, Negroes, niggahs. We everywhere.”
“Oh, I see,’ Randy said, looking down at his own brown hand. “No sir, you’re wrong about me. I’m not a Negro. My father was pure Arab and my mother was from Brazil. A lot of people think I’m black but I’m not. Not at all.”
Soupspoon just stared, dumbfounded by Randy’s claim.
“That’s why I have such light eyes,” Randy went on.
“That’s from the Arab or the South American?”
“Some Arabs have blue eyes, it’s considered a blessing to have them. There was a whole blue-eyed Semitic tribe in the eleventh century. They were great warriors and scientists.”
“Yo’ momma come down from them?”
“My father. He was a tradesman.”
Soupspoon had known many Negroes who’d passed for being white. Some would just get dressed up and go out to white restaurants and white churches for a hoot. Some, who couldn’t bear being what they were, moved into white neighborhoods and lived like they really were white. They’d marry, raise children and explain their curly hair as coming down from Greece or Ireland or some other exotic Caucasian land. They belonged to the Junior League and the Ku Klux Klan, voted for conservatives, some even ran for office. They spoke the white man’s language better than he did, because nobody knows white people better than blacks. A black man knows the white man inside out. And why not? They took old clothes, old cars, old books, and old food from white people. They lived in a world where they had to be better than white. White men never had to worry about how they talked or walked or laughed. They took being white for granted. Anything a white man did was okay because it was a white man doing it. But a black man was different. No matter how hard he studied or how righteous he was, a black man still had the mark of Cain on him. All you had to do was look.
But if your skin was light and your hair was good then you were treated better. Whites liked light-skinned Negroes more, and a light-skinned lover was the dream of many a dark heart. Light-skinned Negroes had better jobs. The lighter the better. And if you were light enough you might even slip through a crack and make it into heaven.
Soupspoon knew them. Sometimes he’d catch one sitting down in a hotel lobby. By his profile or the way he folded his hands Soupspoon suspected their common roots. He’d be certain when the man would catch his glance and look quickly away. That man would have bad dreams for a month over that look. But he didn’t need to worry, because Soupspoon wasn’t going to tell. Nobody had to tell him why colored brothers and sisters passed. There wasn’t a thing of value to being black in America back then. You didn’t have a damn thing and anything you might get could be taken away. Maybe white people had it hard too, but you couldn’t convince a black man of that. His porridge was so hard he’d put rocks in it to help him chew.
It was a hard life that made people want to pass, but, Soupspoon thought, Randy had it harder than anybody.
At least the people Soupspoon had known knew where they came from. They were passing — making it in the white man’s world the way all colored people do: looking the man in the face and lying about what you feel and what you know — what you were inside. Everybody did that. Lying to the white man was both sport and survival.
The people Soupspoon had known lied to the white man, but Randy lied to himself. Look at him and you saw what he was — a gray-eyed Negro. But when he looked in the mirror he saw a white man. He imagined himself in the white man’s history books and as the star of TV shows. Maybe he loved opera.
Soupspoon used to laugh about people like Randy, made up funny songs about them. But not anymore.
“Well,” the old man said, “I guess we all just folks makin’ it any way we can.”
As Soupspoon’s strength returned he felt the tide of cancer receding. And in forgiving Randy he felt cured of the disease that made black men want to be white. All of his dreams and memories about the Delta and the pathways of the blues became sharper in his mind.
The memory of Robert Johnson was so strong in him that he sometimes felt that he could actually talk to the guitar man. He’d walk around Kiki’s studio apartment, while she was at work, imagining RL was at his side talking about women he’d known and how many records he could play from memory.
It all came in one big rush; too much for him to make sense of. He tried to write it down but the words were flat and toneless. He turned on the cassette recorder that Kiki brought home from Radio Shack and tried to talk out his stories. But when he played the tape back he was reminded of a hapless baby-sitter trying to tell a fairy tale that he couldn’t remember.