The Given Day

  CHAPTER two

  Luther lost his job at the munitions factory in September. Came in to do a day’s work, found a yellow slip of paper taped to his workbench. It was a Wednesday, and as had become his habit during the week, he’d left his tool bag underneath the bench the night before, each tool tightly wrapped in oilcloth and placed one beside the other. They were his own tools, not the company’s, given to him by his Uncle Cornelius, the old man gone blind before his time. When Luther was a boy, Cornelius would sit on the porch and take a small bottle of oil from the overalls he wore whether it was a hundred in the shade or there was frost on the woodpile, and he’d wipe down his tool set, knowing each one by touch and explaining to Luther how that wasn’t no crescent wrench, boy, was a monkey wrench, get it straight, and how any man didn’t know the difference by touch alone ought just use the monkey wrench, ’cause a monkey what he be. He took to teaching Luther his tools the way he knew them himself. He’d blindfold the boy, Luther giggling on the hot porch, and then he’d hand him a bolt, make him match it to the box points of a socket, make him do it over and over until the blindfold wasn’t fun no more, was stinging Luther’s eyes with his own sweat. But over time, Luther’s hands began to see and smell and taste things to the point where he sometimes suspected his fingers saw colors before his eyes did. Probably why he’d never bobbled a baseball in his life.

  Never cut himself on the job neither. Never mashed no thumb working the drill press, never sliced his flesh on a propeller blade by gripping the wrong edge when he went to lift it. And all the while, his eyes remained somewhere else, looking at the tin walls, smelling the world on the other side, knowing someday he’d be out in it, way out in it, and it would be wide.

  The yellow slip of paper said “See Bill,” and that was all, but Luther felt something in those words that made him reach below his bench and pick up the beat-on leather tool bag and carry it with him as he crossed the work floor toward the shift supervisor’s office. He was holding it in his hand when he stood before Bill Hackman’s desk, and Bill, sad-eyed and sighing all the time, and not so bad for white folk, said, “Luther, we got to let you go.”

  Luther felt himself vanish, go so damn small inside of himself that he could feel himself as a needlepoint with no rest of the needle behind it, a dot of almost-air that hung far back in his skull, and him watching his own body stand in front of Bill’s desk, and he waited for that needlepoint to tell it to move again.

  It’s what you had to do with white folk when they talked to you directly, with their eyes on yours. Because they never did that unless they were pretending to ask you for something they planned to just take anyway or, like now, when they were delivering bad news.

  “All right,” Luther said.

  “Wasn’t my decision,” Bill explained. “All these boys are going to be coming back from the war soon, and they’ll need jobs.”

  “War’s still going on,” Luther said.

  Bill gave him a sad smile, the kind you’d give a dog you were fond of but couldn’t teach to sit or roll over. “War’s as good as over. Trust me, we know.”

  By “we,” Luther knew he meant the company, and Luther figured if anyone knew, it was the company, because they’d been giving Luther a steady paycheck for helping them make weapons since ’15, long before America was supposed to have anything to do with this war.

  “All right,” Luther said.

  “And, yeah, you did fine work here, and we sure tried to find you a place, a way you could stay on, but them boys’ll be coming back in buckets, and they fought hard over there, and Uncle Sam, he’ll want to say thanks.”

  “All right.”

  “Look,” Bill said, sounding a bit frustrated, as if Luther were pitching a fight, “you understand, don’t you? You wouldn’t want us to put those boys, those patriots, out on the street. I mean, how would that look, Luther? Wouldn’t look right, I’ll tell you right now. Why you yourself would be unable to hold your head high if you walked the street and saw one of them boys pass you by looking for work while you got a fat paycheck in your pocket.”

  Luther didn’t say anything. Didn’t mention that a lot of those patriotic boys who risked their lives for their country were colored boys, but he’d sure bet that wasn’t who was taking his job. Hell, he’d bet if he came back to the factory a year from now, the only colored faces he’d see would belong to the men working the cleanup shift, emptying the office wastebaskets and sweeping the metal shavings off the work floors. And he didn’t wonder aloud how many of those white boys who’d replace all these here coloreds had actually served overseas or got their ribbons for typing or some such in posts down in Georgia or around Kansas way.

  Luther didn’t open his mouth, just kept it as closed as the rest of him until Bill got tired of arguing with himself and told Luther where he’d need to go to collect his pay.

  So there was Luther, his ear to the ground, hearing there might, just might maybe be some work in Youngstown, and someone else had heard tell of hirings in a mine outside of Ravenswood, just over the other side of the river in West Virginia. Economy was getting tight again, though, they all said. White-tight.

  And then Lila start talking about an aunt she had in Greenwood.

  Luther said, “Never heard of that place.”

  “Ain’t in Ohio, baby. Ain’t in West Virginia or Kentucky neither.”

  “Then where’s it at?”

  “Tulsa.”

  “Oklahoma?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, her voice soft, like she’d been planning it for a while and wanted to be subtle about letting him think he made up his own mind.

  “Shit, woman.” Luther rubbed the outsides of her arms. “I ain’t going to no Oklahoma.”

  “Where you going to go then? Next door?”

  “What’s next door?” He looked over there.

  “Ain’t no jobs. That’s all I know about next door.”

  Luther gave that some thought, feeling her circling him, like she was more than a few steps ahead.

  “Baby,” she said, “Ohio ain’t done nothing for us but keep us poor.”

  “Didn’t make us poor.”

  “Ain’t going to make us rich.”

  They were sitting on the swing he’d built on what remained of the porch where Cornelius had taught him what amounted to his trade. Two-thirds of the porch had washed away in the floods of ’13, and Luther kept meaning to rebuild it, but there’d been so much baseball and so much work the last few years, he hadn’t found the time. And it occurred to him—he was flush. It wouldn’t last forever, Lord knows, but he did have some money put away for the first time in his life. Enough to make a move in any case.

  God, he liked Lila. Not so’s he was ready to see the preacher and sell all of his youth quite yet; hell, he was only twenty-three. But he sure liked smelling her and talking to her and he sure liked the way she fit into his bones as she curled alongside of him in the porch swing.

  “What’s in this Greenwood ’sides your aunt?”

  “Jobs. They got jobs all over the place. A big, hopping town with nothing but coloreds in it, and they all doing right well, baby. Got themselves doctors and lawyers, and the men own their own fine automobiles and the girls dress real nice on Sundays and everyone owns their own home.”

  He kissed the top of her head because he didn’t believe her but he loved that she wanted to think something should be so bad that half the time she convinced herself it could be.

  “Yeah, uh?” He chuckled. “They got themselves some white folk that work the land for them, too?”

  She reached back and slapped his forehead and then bit his wrist.

  “Damn, woman, that’s my throwing hand. Watch that shit.”

  She lifted his wrist and kissed it and then she laid it between her breasts and said, “Feel my tummy, baby.”

  “I can’t reach.”

  She slid up his body a bit, and then his hand was on her stomach and he tried to go lower but she gripped his wrist.
br />   “Feel it.”

  “I’m feeling it.”

  “That’s what else is going to be waiting in Greenwood.”

  “Your stomach?”

  She kissed his chin.

  “No, fool. Your child.”

  They took the train from Columbus on the first of October, crossed eight hundred miles of country where the summer fields had traded their gold for furrows of night frost that melted in the morning and dripped over the dirt like cake icing. The sky was the blue of metal that’d just come off the press. Blocks of hay sat in dun-colored fields, and Luther saw a pack of horses in Missouri run for a full mile, their bodies as gray as their breath. And the train streamed through it all, shaking the ground, screaming at the sky, and Luther huffed his breath into the glass and doodled with his finger, drew baseballs, drew bats, drew a child with a head too big for its body.

  Lila looked at it and laughed. “That’s what our boy gonna look like? Big old head like his daddy? Long skinny body?”

  “Nah,” Luther said, “gonna look like you.”

  And he gave the child breasts the size of circus balloons and Lila giggled and swatted his hand and rubbed the child off the window.

  The trip took two days and Luther lost some money in a card game with some porters the first night, and Lila stayed mad about that well into the next morning, but otherwise Luther was hard-pressed coming up with a time he’d cherished more in his life. There’d been a few plays here and there on the diamond, and he’d once gone to Memphis when he was seventeen with his cousin, Sweet George, and they’d had themselves a time on Beale Street that he’d never forget, but riding in that train car with Lila, knowing his child lived in her body—her body no longer a singular life, but more like a life-and-a-half—and that they were, as he’d so often dreamed, out in the world, drunk on the speed of their crossing, he felt a lessening of the anxious throb that had lived in his chest since he was a boy. He’d never known where that throb came from, only that it had always been there and he’d tried to work it away and play it away and drink it away and fuck it away and sleep it away his whole life. But now, sitting on a seat with his feet on a floor that was bolted to a steel underbelly that was strapped to wheels that locked onto rails and hurtled through time and distance as if time and distance weren’t nothing at all, he loved his life and he loved Lila and he loved their child and he knew, as he always had, that he loved speed, because things that possessed it could not be tethered, and so, they couldn’t be sold.

  They arrived in Tulsa at the Santa Fe rail yard at nine in the morning and were met by Lila’s Aunt Marta and her husband, James. James was as big as Marta was small, both of them dark as dark got, with skin stretched so tight across the bone Luther wondered how they breathed. Big as James was, and he was the height some men only reached on horseback, Marta was, no doubt, the dog who ate first.

  Four, maybe five, seconds into the introductions, Marta said, “James, honey, git them bags, would you? Let the poor girl stand there and faint from the weight?”

  Lila said, “It’s all right, Auntie, I—”

  “James?” Aunt Marta snapped her fingers at James’s hip and the man hopped to. Then she smiled, all pretty and small, and said, “Girl, you as beautiful as you ever was, praise the Lord.”

  Lila surrendered her bags to Uncle James and said, “Auntie, this is Luther Laurence, the young man I been writing you about.”

  Though he probably should have figured as much, it took Luther by surprise to realize his name had been placed to paper and sent across four state lines to land in Aunt Marta’s hand, the letters touched, however incidentally, by her tiny thumb.

  Aunt Marta gave him a smile that had a lot less warmth in it than the one she gave her niece. She took his hand in both of hers. She looked up into his eyes.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Luther Laurence. We’re churchgoers here in Greenwood. You a churchgoer?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Surely.”

  “Well, then,” she said and gave his hand a moist press and a slow shake, “we’re to get along fine, I ’spect.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Luther was prepared for a long walk out of the train station and up through town to Marta and James’s house, but James led them to an Olds Reo as red and shiny as an apple just pulled from a water bucket. Had wood spoke wheels and a black top that James rolled down and latched in the back. They piled the suitcases in the backseat with Marta and Lila, the two of them already talking a mile a minute, and Luther climbed up front with James and they pulled out of the lot, Luther thinking how a colored man driving a car like this in Columbus was just asking to get shot for a thief, but at the Tulsa train station, not even the white folk seemed to notice them.

  James explained the Olds had a flathead V8 engine in it, sixty horsepower, and he worked the shift up into third gear and smiled big.

  “What you do for work?” Luther asked.

  “Own two garages,” James said. “Got four men working under me. Would love to put you to work there, son, but I got all the help I can handle right now. But don’t you worry—one thing Tulsa’s got on either side of the tracks is jobs, plenty of jobs. You in oil country, son. Whole place just sprung up overnight ’cause of the black crude. Shoot. None of this was even here twenty-five years ago. Wasn’t nothing but a trading post back then. Believe that?”

  Luther looked out the window at downtown, saw buildings bigger than any he’d seen in Memphis, big as ones he’d seen only in pictures of Chicago and New York, and cars filling the streets, and people, too, and he thought how you would have figured a place like this would take a century to build, but this country just didn’t have time to wait no more, no interest in patience and no reason for it either.

  He looked forward as they drove into Greenwood, and James waved to some men building a house and they waved back and he tooted his horn and Marta explained how coming up here was the section of Greenwood Avenue known as the Black Wall Street, lookie here….

  And Luther saw a black bank and an ice cream parlor filled with black teenagers and a barbershop and a billiard parlor and a big old grocery store and a bigger department store and a law office and a doctor’s office and a newspaper, and all of it occupied by colored folk. And then they rolled past the movie theater, big bulbs surrounding a huge white marquee, and Luther looked above that marquee to see the name of the place—The Dreamland—and he thought, That’s where we’ve come. Because all this had to be just that indeed.

  By the time they drove up Detroit Avenue, where James and Marta Hollaway owned their own home, Luther’s stomach was starting to slide. The homes along Detroit Avenue were red brick or creamy chocolate stone and they were as big as the homes of white folk. And not white folk who were just getting by, but white folk who lived good. The lawns were trimmed to bright green stubble and several of the homes had wraparound porches and bright awnings.

  They pulled into the driveway of a dark brown Tudor and James stopped the car, which was good, because Luther was so dizzy he worried he might get sick.

  Lila said, “Oh, Luther, couldn’t you just die?”

  Yeah, Luther thought, that there is one possibility.

  The next morning Luther found himself getting married before he’d had breakfast. In the years that followed, when someone would ask how it was he came to be a married man, Luther always answered:

  “Hell if I know.”

  He woke that morning in the cellar. Marta had made it plenty clear the evening before that a man and a woman who were not husband and wife didn’t sleep on the same floor in her house, never mind the same room. So Lila got herself a nice pretty bed in a nice pretty room on the second floor and Luther got a sheet thrown over a broke-down couch in the cellar. The couch smelled of dog (they’d had one once; long since dead) and cigars. Uncle James was the culprit on that score. He took his after-dinner stogie in the basement every night because Aunt Marta wouldn’t allow it in her house.

  Lot of things Aunt Marta wouldn’t allo
w in her house—cussing, liquor, taking the Lord’s name in vain, card playing, people of low character, cats—and Luther had a feeling he’d just scratched the surface of the list.

  So he went to sleep in the cellar and woke up with a crick in his neck and the smells of long-dead dog and too-recent cigar in his nostrils. Right off, he heard raised voices coming from upstairs. Feminine voices. Luther’d grown up with his mother and one older sister, both of whom had passed on from the fever in ’14, and when he allowed himself to think of them it hurt enough to stop his breath because they’d been proud, strong women of loud laughter who’d loved him fiercely.

  But those two women had fought just as fierce. Nothing in the whole world, in Luther’s estimation, was worth entering a room where two women had their claws out.

  He crept up the stairs, though, so he could hear the words better and what he heard made him want to trade places with the Hollaway dog.

  “I’m just feeling under the weather, Auntie.”

  “Don’t you lie to me, girl. Don’t you lie! I know morning sickness when I see it. How long?”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  “Lila, you my baby sister’s child, yes. My goddaughter, yes. But, girl, I will strap the black straight offa your body from head to toe if you lie to me again. You hear?”

  Luther heard Lila break out in a fresh run of sobbing, and it shamed him to picture her.

  Marta shrieked, “James!” and Luther heard the large man’s footfalls coming toward the kitchen, and he wondered if the man had grabbed his shotgun for the occasion.

  “Git that boy up here.”

  Luther opened the door before James could and Marta’s eyes were flashing all over him before he crossed the threshold.

  “Well, lookit himself. Mr. Big Man. I done told you we are churchgoers here, did I not, Mr. Big Man?”

  Luther thought it best not to say a word.

  “Christians is what we are. And we don’t abide no sinning under this here roof. Ain’t that right, James?”