—PLATO, Critias
I sometimes had pleasant nightmares in which I fancied that New York was being destroyed by an earthquake: its towers snapped like pine trees in a storm, a tidal wave poured through its streets . . .
—MALCOLM COWLEY, Exiles Return
On the top (third) floor, Hubert’s was around the corner from Mount Morris Park.
“I got to wash up.” Sam put the suitcase on the rug’s foot-faded red, looking around the first of the two small rooms.
“Sure.” With his shoe, Hubert pushed the wicker trunk under what would be Sam’s bed. “Unless you want to wait till later when we get over to Elsie and Corey’s. They got hot water.”
“That’s all right. I want to do it now. And change my clothes.”
“All right.” Hubert took the wash basin out from under the corner sink. “Here you go. But you got to hurry up, before Clarice gets here.”
Using Hubert’s yellow bar of kitchen soap, lathering his arms, his buttocks, his knees, hopping now on one foot, hopping now on the other, Sam washed in cold water. Sometimes he glanced at Hubert, who sat in the wing chair: Hubert’s forehead furrowed above his glasses, as, in the corner, he paged through a book. Views of . . . something.
Hubert was one of three colored teachers recently hired to teach first grade in the colored all-boys public school, only six blocks from here, Hubert had explained to Sam. That tall body had cut tobacco in Connecticut; that strong body sat so straight when he studied. And there’d been “. . . Miss Hutchinson told me about a trick she used when she taught those rough boys in the colored schools outside Cincinnati. She said if it would work for a woman, it would certainly work for me. Just as she told me to do, before classes began I procured an old, cracked baseball bat, and on the first school day I brought it with me before any of the scholars arrived. Before going in, I hit it on the curb outside, till it cracked more. I then took it into my classroom and leaned it in the corner by my desk. When the boys came in—they were loud and lively and full of high spirits—within five minutes, while some of them were still taking their coats off and playing tag around the room, one of them asked me, ‘What’s that for?’ Sitting at my desk, I looked over my folded hands and said, in a firm and resonant voice: ‘I had some trouble with one of the boys in my last class—and I’m afraid I broke my bat on his backside. And by the way, you must learn to call me “Sir.” ’ They all turned around, eyes about to bulge out of their brown, round faces. And when I called them to order and they rushed to sit, you could see them squirming on their benches, each attached to the desk behind. Their eyes kept going to the bat in the corner, their little behinds stinging in anticipation. You knew they were wondering how it felt.” About the bony wreckage of the Thanksgiving carcass, everyone was laughing too loudly for Papa to go on—as, here, he put down the letter a moment to touch his clerical collar. Mama took her wire-framed glasses off and dabbed her eyes with her napkin.
Sam hopped, and shook quickly from his mind another memory (“. . . an animal . . . !” The crate’s slats smithereened across Hubert’s shoulder, and dragging the chain across the gravel where the grass had worn from around the pump, Hubert cowered back: “Papa! No . . .!” He remembered his father’s grunts, precise and ugly), hopped again and scrubbed at his groin—finally to squat among the splatters over the dark floorboards and maul the balled rag first over, then under, his out-sized toes. “Hubert, did you really do that thing with the baseball bat?”
“Hmm?” Hubert asked, over his book. “What—oh, sure. Only I don’t think I really had to. Miss Hutchinson, when she did it, she was teaching big, rough, country boys—field hands right in from pickin’ cotton. They were all field niggers—wasn’t a house nigger among them, she told me. A lot of them were too old for high school anyway—she said some of them were older than she was. And there were a few who just didn’t want to take no guff off a woman. But my boys are just children—and city children, too.” He dropped his eyes to the book, raised it a bit from his lap: Views of Italy.
Sam wiped the splatters up and, still squatting naked, turned to pull the wicker from under the daybed. “You mind if I smoke me a cigarette?”
“Go ahead if you want. But like I say—finish up before Clarice gets here. She don’t approve of smoking.”
Only on opening it and pushing aside shirts and underwear (which he didn’t really wear, unless Mama insisted) did Sam see the folded paper bag with Jules’ soap. “Hubert, don’t let me forget this when we go over to Elsie and Corey’s.” Taking a bar from the bag to leave Hubert, Sam put bag and bar up on the pink quilting. Translucent as isinglass, the bar’s paper immediately unfolded, like a thing volitional.
With a notable amount of white moneys—but a treasured portion of black—by his astonishing energy (that, even now he was over sixty, awed Sam), Papa and several of his friends had helped develop the small Negro college. Papa was now Vice-Chancellor. Mama was Dean of Women. That same energy had already pushed Sam’s slave-born father to learn Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Two years ago it had gotten him elected Bishop of the Archdiocese of North and South Carolina—this prodigy of black learning, this learned black prodigy, this prodigious black learner. Black and white ministers both had elected him. Papa was a voyager on the ocean of theology and ancient languages. Sharp-tongued Corey had seemed, for a while, the one likely to follow Papa into that sea. Then she had turned from its waters—sharply—with the realization there was little enough a black man could do with Greek and Aramaic. (Though Mama always insisted it was more than well-deserved, the suffrage bishopric was after all an anomaly.) Still less, a black woman. She had followed her younger brother, Hap, first to New York, then into dental school.
Cigarette still fuming between his teeth, Sam was just buttoning his shirt when, outside in the hall, someone twisted the doorbell key.
Clarice came in.
Hubert’s girlfriend was—like last time—another pale-complected creature, who looked, really, whiter than Hubert. (This one’s name was Clarice!) “This is your little brother? He’s not so little at all! How come all you boys in this family are so good looking?” Within moments Sam learned, now from Clarice, now from enthusiastic Hubert—when Clarice suddenly remembered to be modest—that she wrote poems that got published in newspapers and sometimes in small magazines (Hubert brought some out to show him) with titles like Broom and Spark. Their ragged-edged pages were thick as fabric as you turned them. Passionate about the Negro Question (as was Hubert), she read The Messenger and Opportunity and knew writers and artists, black and white—Wally and Richard and Bruce and Jean and Angelina and Waldo and talked about them at length and a woman named Lola at whose house on Ninth Street she had met a number of them—from Washington to New York, from Harlem to Gay Street, the block-long colored enclave in Greenwich Village, she explained. Greenwich Village was where Hubert went, in the evenings, to his law classes at New York University Law School.
And they were all expected at Elsie and Corey’s at four o’clock for Saturday dinner—Elsie and Corey were his and Hubert’s oldest sisters; and Saturday dinner, Hubert said now, was easier for them than Sunday, because of Elsie’s studying for School on Monday—not to mention Hubert’s.
The surprise, that evening, was that Hap—another brother—and his wife came too.
“Sam, how’s everybody down at the college?” Dr. Corey wanted to know. Calling her “Doctor Corey” was something of a joke, because she was a woman. (They didn’t call Hap “Doctor Hap”—or Lemuel, his oldest brother who was a real doctor, not just a dentist, “Doctor Lem.”) But Corey had decided it was her due. She’d tell you in a moment, if you asked: “Filling teeth and getting paid for it is a lot better than teaching Greek to a bunch of hands, straight out the field, who couldn’t care less about the difference between a first and a second aorist!”
Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine, they all laughed over that long Thanksgiving letter Hubert wrote—Sam repeated.
“Oh, yes,” Elsie said. ??
?Hubert came and read it to us before he sent it. I thought that would tickle Mama.”
Corey sent him to the bathroom to wash his hands.
As Sam stood, caressive water falling warm over his fingers from the verdigrised faucet, in the alley outside someone called, again and again, sounding now like, “Dandelion . . . !” now like, “Handle-iron . . . !” The voice was shrill—the shrillness of a man who was going to call for a long time and wanted folks to hear. Sam tried to imagine the body with that voice: brown face under a squashed-down hat, hard hands, bony hips in loose pants, sharp shoulders in an old vest . . .
More because he was tired than because he had to go, Sam dropped his pants and sat on the commode’s wood ring. (At Hubert’s the commode was behind a door out in the hall.) Newspapers lay on the two-tiered stool beside him. Lifting up the first few, he saw a green-covered magazine and slipped it out, certain it was one with Clarice’s poems. He read the title: Mnemosyne. Flipping through a few pages, however, he realized a good deal of it was in Latin. Turning back to the cover, he caught the date—1918: no, it was one of Corey’s journals from the time of her language pursuits. Again he opened it, to page through—132, 133, 134—where a passage Corey had marked caught him. The article explained the lines were from a Chorus closing the second act of Seneca’s Medea.
Venient annis, saecula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
Nec sit terris ultima Thule.
In careful pencil, at a gray slant, Corey had inscribed her marginal translation (five days ago? in distant 1918? sometime in between?):
An age will come, in distant times,
When Ocean will release the chains ’round things
And the whole broad earth—as well
as Tethys’s new world’s end, Thule,
Not as the limit of lands—will be revealed.
The article explained how Christopher Columbus’s son and biographer, Fernando, had marked just this passage in his own copy of Seneca, jotting down in the margin:
Haec propheteia expleta est per patrem meum
Christopher Colon almirantem ano 1492.
Corey’s marginal gloss:
This prophecy was fulfilled by my father
Christopher Colon _________ in the year 1492.
Beside that, she had written: “almirantem? Ask Papa. C.C.’s place of birth? Elmira? But it’s not capitalized.”
When Corey and Elsie had first visited New York, almost ten years ago now, with Mama as chaperone, they’d taken the boat up from Norfolk. But Sam had been mad to take the train—nearly as eager over that as he’d been about the skyscrapers. All that water . . . ? He closed Mnemosyne, put it down on the newspapers—then, in afterthought, pulled up two or three papers and put them back on top.
Outside, the shrill cry was blotted up by silence.
He’d often thought he’d have liked to follow Papa and Corey in their linguistic explorations. But (said Papa) he was too mercurial for such diligence. Sam stood, reached up and pulled the wooden handle on the flush chain. As the water roared from the wooden tank above, he bent, pulled his pants up, buttoned them, and buckled his belt.
After washing his hands once more, he opened the bathroom door—to be startled by the mirror in the hall right between the glass-chimneyed gas lamps, where his surprised double surprised him, pausing, bewildered in the frame, Sam the Stranger, unknowingly about to walk in on him.
In the living room, where the table had been moved in from the kitchen, he gave out Jules’ soap; and Hap, who was the first dentist in the family (and had got his nickname—Hap—because he was so happy), said: “Well, I’ll get my teeth real clean with this!”
“Now you don’t use that on your teeth,” Elsie said, “more than but once a week!”
“For the rest of the time, you just use tooth powder, like everybody else,” Dr. Corey said. “Why you have to tell a dentist what to brush his teeth with, I’ll never know!” Since her graduation from Dental College at Columbia, she’d shared an office with Hap.
They all laughed. “Tell us about Thanksgiving,” which had been only last week. “How was it this year?”
So he did—about the turkey and the dancing to the records, which Papa had allowed because it wasn’t Sunday, even though they made two trips to chapel, once in the morning and once at sunset. Right after his election, Papa had decided not to get a Victrola but a more expensive Edison Player. The medallion beside the flocked turntable said: “Diamond Disc Official Laboratory Model.” The song Sam and Lewy and John all liked and had played over and over to the point of exhaustive hilarity was the quarter-inch-thick record of Billy Rose and Ernest Hare singing Harry Von Tilzer’s “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” with its infectious refrain: “Old King Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut . . .” though Jules and Laura preferred the other side: “Barney Google.” The other record Sam and Papa loved to play was the late Enrico Caruso and Mario Ancona singing the duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. In his study, Papa slipped the crank back into its metal clip on the dark wood and asked: “Do you want to ask Batouta the Moor to come in with us and listen?” (This month Batouta the Moor was Papa’s nickname for Lewy.) “But then, he’s probably out somewhere exploring.” (He was.) So they sat by themselves and listened to the cascading male voices, each rippling down over the other; and Sam would imagine weedy waters and flickering tidelights over submarine grottoes—not that that had much to do with Thanksgiving nor, really, was there much to say about it.
So he told them instead about Lewy and the poetry book with the gold star in it for excellence Lewy’d won in Mrs. Fitzgarn’s and what Reverend Fitzgarn had said about Papa’s sermon and about how John had brought the mule into Mama’s yard and had fallen off it and how it ate Mama’s flowers and she’d just about skinned him alive and—again—about the laughter at Hubert’s letter, when, after Thanksgiving dinner, Papa had read it out.
Once, when he paused, Elsie smiled: “I think we can let him stop now.”
Hap’s wife said: “It’s so good to hear how things are going. And it’s so good to have you up here, Sam.”
Then they talked about other things and laughed lots more and all said how much he’d grown.
Sam was, in fact (it had taken most of the day to register), as tall as Hubert now.
On the way back to Hubert’s rooms Sam saw his first skyscrapers—late that evening, when it was already dark. They’d stopped to stroll in Mount Morris. (Hubert had already given Sam the key and was going to walk Clarice home to her aunt and uncle’s at a Hundred-twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue.) In the November’s-end dark, the three of them climbed the stone steps to the high rocks. Then Hubert and Sam left Clarice, to climb up the rocks themselves. “Those lights over there, like pearls—that you can just see?—” Hubert explained—“those are skyscrapers . . . mostly.”
Far away, specular and portentous, they glimmered behind haze-hung night. (It felt as if it might rain any moment.) Sam seemed to be looking across some black and insubstantial river to another city altogether—a city come apart from New York, drifting in fog, in air, in darkness, and wholly ephemeral: the idea of a city—with no more substance than his memory of his memories on the train.
When they climbed down, Clarice was leaning against a low boulder. The park lamp behind her threw her into silhouette. “Now doesn’t she look older than the rocks among which she sits?” Hubert asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clarice asked, her hands in her coat pockets, legs crossed under her skirt.
“My rag, my bone, my hank of hair; and she doesn’t care—”
“Hu-bert—!” Clarice objected.
“I’m teasing you,” he said.
She stood. “Now what Sam—Eshu!” Clarice pulled her coat around her—“Sam should do, if he wants to see skyscrapers, is take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s the way really to see New York.” (Sam had
already realized Clarice was a person who said “really to see” and “truly to think.” She had declared, loudly and insistently at dinner, that she thought it particularly important Negroes speak with proper grammar. “After all, we’ve been here longer than most of these crackers!” It was practically an echo of Mama, down on the campus. “And that’s why you will not hear me split my infinitives!” “Or hear her say, even jokingly,” Hubert added, “a girl like I.’ ” That made Clarice laugh too. Still, those unified verbs sounded even stranger than her clipped, northern accent.) In the damp night, Clarice said, “That’s the city at its best—Eshu!” A second time she sneezed.
Hubert moved toward her. “We better get you home.”
Distant in the night-haze, the lights burned with soft, pearl-like fires—so different from what burned in Sam.
On their way down, wrapped ’round in shadow, Sam tried to remember Clarice’s body beneath the dress, beneath the coat she pulled even more tightly to her throat. That body had all sorts of lines, gentle, pleasant, that became clear under the fall of her skirt or sleeve when she’d leaned to pass this, sat back with an embarrassed smile, turned in her seat to hear what Hubert said. (Did Hubert ever kiss her? he wondered.) Under a park lamp, he saw her raise a lace-edged handkerchief, pulled over one knuckle, to her nose. Over Hubert’s arm around her shoulder, her breath added its own lace to the fog already wreathing her dark hair. Completing the thought begun minutes ago, she added: “Over the bridge—Eshu! That’s what I’d want to do.”
Sam’s first job in the city was washing walls for three guys who knew Hubert and were painters. He was fired loudly and ignominiously after a week. He just wasn’t fast enough. Perez—the loud, bony one—said, consolingly afterwards, that Sam was a smart boy and shouldn’t be doing stuff like that anyway. And Louis, the fat fellow (who spelled his name completely differently from Lewy down home), said Sam damned well ought to learn how to do stuff like that; smart or not, it didn’t hurt nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked—whose name was Prince, followed by something Caribbean, Marquez? Cinquez?—had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they’d worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and Perez bawled him out.