“Nope. Can’t be no egg. It ain’t in him. Something about his genes. His genes won’t let him be no egg no matter how hard he tries. Nature says no. ‘No, you can’t be no egg, nigger. Now, you can be a crow if you wanna. Or a big baboon. But not no egg. Eggs is difficult, complicated. Fragile too. And white.’”
“They got brown eggs.”
“Miscegenation. Besides, don’t nobody want ’em.”
“French people do.”
“In France, yeah. But not in the Congo. Frenchman in the Congo won’t touch a brown egg.”
“Why won’t he?”
“Scared of ’em. Might do something to his skin. Like the sun.”
“French people love the sun. They’re always trying to get in the sun. On the Riviera—”
“They try to get in the French sun, but not the Congo sun. In the Congo they hate the sun.”
“Well, I got a right to be what I want to be, and I want to be a egg.”
“Fried?”
“Fried.”
“Then somebody got to bust your shell.”
Quicker than a pulse beat, Guitar had changed the air. Milkman wiped his mouth, avoiding Guitar’s eyes because he knew the phosphorus was back in them. The little room stood at attention in the quiet. It was a second-story porch walled in to make a room-for-rent so the landlady could get an income from it and have a watchman too. Its outside stairway made it perfect for a bachelor. Especially a secretive one like Guitar Bains.
“Can I have the pad tonight?” Milkman asked him. He examined his fingernails.
“To cop?”
Milkman shook his head.
Guitar didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe his friend really wanted to be alone the night before the day of his own murder. “That’s scary, man. Very scary.”
Milkman didn’t answer.
“You’re not obliged to go through no number, you know. Not for me. Everybody knows you’re brave when you want to be.”
Milkman looked up but still did not answer.
“Still and all,” Guitar went on carefully, “you might get your heart cut out. Then you’ll be just another brave nigger what got wasted.”
Milkman reached for the Pall Mall package. It was empty, so he pulled a longish butt from the Planter’s peanut butter jar top that was Guitar’s ashtray for the day. He stretched out on the bed, letting his long fingers rub the pocket places in his clothes where matches might be. “Everything’s cool,” he said.
“Shit,” said Guitar. “Ain’t nothing cool. Nothing, nowhere. Even the North Pole ain’t cool. You think so, go on up there and watch them fuckin glaciers ice your ass. And what the glaciers don’t get the polar bears will.” Guitar stood up, his head almost touching the ceiling. Annoyed by Milkman’s indifference, he relieved his agitation by straightening up the room. He pulled an empty crate from underneath the straight-backed chair leaning in the corner, and started dumping trash into the box: dead matches from the window sill, pork bones from the barbecue he had eaten the day before. He crumpled the pleated paper cups that had been overflowing with cole slaw and fired them into the crate. “Every nigger I know wants to be cool. There’s nothing wrong with controlling yourself, but can’t nobody control other people.” He looked sideways at Milkman’s face, alert for any sign, any opening. This kind of silence was new. Something must have happened. Guitar was genuinely worried about his friend, but he also didn’t want anything to happen in his room that would bring the police there. He picked up the peanut-butter-top ashtray.
“Wait. There’s still some good butts in there.” Milkman spoke softly.
Guitar dumped the whole ashtray into the box.
“What’d you do that for? You know we don’t have no cigarettes.”
“Then move your ass and go get some.”
“Come on, Guitar. Cut the shit.” Milkman rose from the bed and reached for the crate. He would have gotten it except Guitar stepped back and flung it all the way across the room, letting the mess settle right back where it came from. Graceful and economical as a cat, he arced his arm out of the swing and slammed his fist up against the wall, forming a barrier to any move Milkman might make.
“Pay attention.” Guitar’s voice was low. “Pay attention when I’m trying to tell you something.”
Head to head, toe to toe they stood. Milkman’s left foot hovered above the floor, and Guitar’s eyes with their phosphorous lights singed his heart a little, but he took the stare. “And if I don’t? What then, man? You gonna do me in? My name is Macon, remember? I’m already Dead.”
Guitar didn’t smile at the familiar joke, but there was enough recognition of it in his face to soften the glare in his eyes.
“Somebody ought to tell your murderer that,” said Guitar.
Milkman gave a short laugh and moved back toward the bed. “You worry too much, Guitar.”
“I worry just enough. But right now I need to know how come you ain’t worried at all. You come up here knowing it’s the thirtieth day. Knowing if anybody wants to find you they come here if not first then last. And you ask me to leave you by yourself. Just tell me what you doing.”
“Look,” Milkman said. “Out of all those times, I was scared just twice: the first time and the third. I’ve been handling it ever since, right?”
“Yeah, but something’s funny this time.”
“Ain’t nothing funny.”
“Yeah, it is. You. You funny.”
“No I’m not. Just tired. Tired of dodging crazy people, tired of this jive town, of running up and down these streets getting nowhere….”
“Well, you’re home free if tired is all you are. Soon you’ll have all the rest you ever need. Can’t promise you the bed’s comfortable, but morticians don’t make mattresses.”
“Maybe she won’t come this time.”
“She ain’t missed in six months. You countin on her taking a holiday or something?”
“I can’t hide from that bitch no more. I got to stop it. I don’t want to go through this again a month from now.”
“Why don’t you get her people to do something?”
“I am her people.”
“Listen, Milk, I’ll split if you say so. But just listen to me a minute. That broad had a Carlson skinning knife last time. You know how sharp a Carlson skinning knife is? Cut you like a laser, man.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know. You was up under the bar when me and Moon grabbed her.”
“I know what she had.”
“Won’t be no Moon in this room tomorrow. And no Guitar either, if I listen to you. This time she might have a pistol.”
“What fool is gonna give a colored woman a pistol?”
“Same fool that gave Porter a shotgun.”
“That was years ago.”
“It ain’t even that that bothers me. It’s the way you acting. Like you want it. Like you looking forward to it.”
“Where’d you think that up?”
“Look at you. You all dressed up.”
“I had to work in Sonny’s Shop. You know my old man makes me dress up like this when I’m behind the desk.”
“You had time to change. It’s past midnight.”
“Okay. So I’m clean. So I’m looking forward to it. I just got through telling you I don’t want to hide no more….”
“It’s a secret, ain’t it? You got yourself a secret.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Two? You and her?”
“No. You and me. You’ve been making some funny smoke screens lately.” Milkman looked up at Guitar and smiled. “Just so you don’t think I ain’t noticed.”
Guitar grinned back. Now that he knew there was a secret, he settled down into the groove of their relationship.
“Okay, Mr. Dead, sir. You on your own. Would you ask your visitor to kind of neaten things up a little before she goes? I don’t want to come back and have to look through a pile of cigarette butts for your head. Be nice if it was laying somewhe
re I could spot it right off. And if it’s her head that’s left behind, well, there’s some towels in the closet on the shelf in the back.”
“Rest your mind, boy. Ain’t nobody giving up no head.”
They laughed then at the suitableness of the unintended pun, and it was in the sound of this laughter that Guitar picked up his brown leather jacket and started out the door.
“Cigarettes!” Milkman called after him. “Bring me some cigarettes before you disappear.”
“Gotcha!” Guitar was halfway down the stairs. Already his thoughts had left Milkman and had flown ahead to the house where six old men waited for him.
He didn’t come back that night.
Milkman lay quietly in the sunlight, his mind a blank, his lungs craving smoke. Gradually his fear of and eagerness for death returned. Above all he wanted to escape what he knew, escape the implications of what he had been told. And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him. He felt like a garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people. He himself did nothing. Except for the one time he had hit his father, he had never acted independently, and that act, his only one, had brought unwanted knowledge too, as well as some responsibility for that knowledge. When his father told him about Ruth, he joined him in despising her, but he felt put upon; felt as though some burden had been given to him and that he didn’t deserve it. None of that was his fault, and he didn’t want to have to think or be or do something about any of it.
In that mood of lazy righteousness he wallowed in Guitar’s bed, the same righteousness that had made him tail his mother like a secret agent when she left the house a week or so ago.
Returning home from a party, he had hardly pulled Macon’s Buick up to the curb and turned off the car lights when he saw his mother walking a little ahead of him down Not Doctor Street. It was one-thirty in the morning, but in spite of the hour and her turned-up coat collar, there was no air of furtiveness about her at all. She was walking in what seemed to him a determined manner. Neither hurried nor aimless. Just the even-paced walk of a woman on her way to some modest but respectable work.
When Ruth turned the corner, Milkman waited a minute and started up the car. Creeping, not letting the engine slide into high gear, he drove around the corner. She was standing at the bus stop, so Milkman waited in the shadows until the bus came and she boarded it.
Surely this was no meeting of lovers. The man would have picked her up nearby somewhere. No man would allow a woman he had any affection for to come to him on public transportation in the middle of the night, especially a woman as old as Ruth. And what man wanted a woman over sixty anyway?
Following the bus was a nightmare; it stopped too often, too long, and it was difficult to tail it, hide, and watch to see if she got off. Milkman turned on the car radio, but the music, which he hoped would coat his nerve ends, only splayed them. He was very nervous and thought seriously about turning back.
Finally the bus pulled up at the intracounty train station. Its last stop. There, among the few remaining passengers, he saw her go into the lobby of the station. He believed he’d lost her. He’d never find out what train she was taking. He thought again of going back home. It was late, he was exhausted, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more about his mother. But having come this far, he realized it was foolish to turn back now and leave things forever up in the air. He parked in the lot and walked slowly toward the station. Maybe she’s not taking a train, he thought. Maybe he meets her in the station.
He looked around carefully before pushing open the doors. There was no sign of her inside. It was a small, plain building. Old but well lit. Looming over the modest waiting room was the Great Seal of Michigan, in vivid Technicolor, painted, probably, by some high school art class. Two pink deer reared up on their hind legs, facing each other, and an eagle perched at eye level between them. The eagle’s wings were open and looked like raised shoulders. Its head was turned to the left; one fierce eye bored into that of a deer. Purple Latin words stretched in a long ribbon beneath the seal: Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice. Milkman didn’t understand the Latin and he didn’t understand why the wolverine state had a buck painted on the seal. Or were they does? He remembered Guitar’s story about killing one. “A man shouldn’t do that.” Milkman felt a quick beat of something like remorse, but he shook it off and resumed his search for his mother. He walked to the back of the station. Still no sight of her. Then he noticed that there was an upper platform, stairs leading to it, and an arrow with the words FAIR FIELD AND NORTHEASTERN SUBURBS painted on it. Perhaps she was up there. He moved cautiously toward the stairs, glancing up and all around lest he see her or miss her. A loudspeaker broke the silence, announcing the arrival of the two-fifteen train to Fairfield Heights, leaving from the upper platform. He dashed up the stairs then just in time to see Ruth step into a car, and to jump into another car himself.
The train made ten stops at about ten-minute intervals. He leaned out between the cars at each stop to see if she was getting off. After the sixth stop, he asked the conductor when the next train returned to the city. “Five forty-five a.m.,” he said.
Milkman looked at his watch. It was already three o’clock. When the conductor called out, “Fairfield Heights. Last stop,” a half hour later, Milkman looked out again and this time he saw her disembark. He darted behind the three-sided wooden structure that sheltered waiting passengers from the wind until he heard her wide rubber heels padding down the steps.
Beyond the shelter along the street below were stores—all closed now: newsstands, coffee shops, stationery shops, but no houses. The wealthy people of Fairfield did not live near a train station and very few of their houses could even be seen from the road. Nevertheless, Ruth walked in her even-paced way down the street and in just a few minutes was at the wide winding lane that led into Fairfield Cemetery.
As Milkman stared at the ironwork arched over the entrance, he remembered snatches of his mother’s chatter about having looked so very carefully for a cemetery for the doctor’s body—someplace other than the one where Negroes were all laid together in one area. And forty years ago Fairfield was farm country with a county cemetery too tiny for anybody to care whether its dead were white or black.
Milkman leaned against a tree and waited at the entrance. Now he knew, if he’d had any doubts, that all his father had told him was true. She was a silly, selfish, queer, faintly obscene woman. Again he felt abused. Why couldn’t anybody in his whole family just be normal?
He waited for an hour before she came out.
“Hello, Mama,” he said. He tried to make his voice sound as coolly cruel as he felt; just as he tried to frighten her by stepping out suddenly from behind the tree.
He succeeded. She stumbled in alarm and took a great gulp of air into her mouth.
“Macon! Is that you? You’re here? Oh, my goodness. I…” She tried desperately to normalize the situation, smiling wanly and blinking her eyes, searching for words and manners and civilization.
Milkman stopped her. “You come to lay down on your father’s grave? Is that what you’ve been doing all these years? Spending a night every now and then with your father?”
Ruth’s shoulders seemed to slump, but she said in a surprisingly steady voice, “Let’s walk toward the train stop.”
Neither said a word during the forty-five minutes they waited in the little shelter for the train back to the city. The sun came up and pointed out the names of young lovers painted on the wall. A few men were walking up the stairs to the platform.
When the train backed in from its siding they still had not spoken. Only when the wheels were actually turning and the engine had cleared its throat did Ruth begin, and she began in the middle of a sentence as though she had been thinking it all through since she and her son left the entrance to Fairfield Cemetery.
“…because the fact is that I am a small woman. I don’t mean little; I mean small, and I’m small because I was pressed small.
I lived in a great big house that pressed me into a small package. I had no friends, only schoolmates who wanted to touch my dresses and my white silk stockings. But I didn’t think I’d ever need a friend because I had him. I was small, but he was big. The only person who ever really cared whether I lived or died. Lots of people were interested in whether I lived or died, but he cared. He was not a good man, Macon. Certainly he was an arrogant man, and often a foolish and destructive one. But he cared whether and he cared how I lived, and there was, and is, no one else in the world who ever did. And for that I would do anything. It was important for me to be in his presence, among his things, the things he used, had touched. Later it was just important for me to know that he was in the world. When he left it, I kept on reigniting that cared-for feeling that I got from him.
“I am not a strange woman. I am a small one.
“I don’t know what all your father has told you about me down in that shop you all stay in. But I know, as well as I know my own name, that he told you only what was flattering to him. I know he never told you that he killed my father and that he tried to kill you. Because both of you took my attention away from him. I know he never told you that. And I know he never told you that he threw my father’s medicine away, but it’s true. And I couldn’t save my father. Macon took away his medicine and I just didn’t know it, and I wouldn’t have been able to save you except for Pilate. Pilate was the one brought you here in the first place.”
“Pilate?” Milkman was coming awake. He had begun listening to his mother with the dulled ear of someone who was about to be conned and knew it.
“Pilate. Old, crazy, sweet Pilate. Your father and I hadn’t had physical relations since my father died, when Lena and Corinthians were just toddlers. We had a terrible quarrel. He threatened to kill me. I threatened to go to the police about what he had done to my father. We did neither. I guess my father’s money was more important to him than the satisfaction of killing me. And I would have happily died except for my babies. But he did move into another room and that’s the way things stayed until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Until I thought I’d really die if I had to live that way. With nobody touching me, or even looking as though they’d like to touch me. That’s when I started coming to Fairfield. To talk. To talk to somebody who wanted to listen and not laugh at me. Somebody I could trust. Somebody who trusted me. Somebody who was…interested in me. For my own self. I didn’t care if that somebody was under the ground. You know, I was twenty years old when your father stopped sleeping in the bed with me. That’s hard, Macon. Very hard. By the time I was thirty think I was just afraid I’d die that way.