Grandmother, Mother, Brother
1978, 2009, 2006
Lunch in a Jim Crow Car
Get out the lunch-box of your dreams.
Bite into the sandwich of your heart, And ride the Jim Crow car until it screams Then—like an atom bomb—it bursts apart.
—Langston Hughes
Cast of Characters
Cleveland
Bobby
Ricky, Bobby’s older brother
Marion, their mother
Grandma, their grandmother
Atlanta
Louisa Thomas (Weeza)
Jacob Thomas, Louisa’s younger brother, age nine
Hershel Thomas, Louisa’s husband
Ruth Vann, Hershel and Frank’s mother
Ellis Vann, Hershel’s stepfather
James and Jimmy Sharp, residents of the city
Dalton
Frank Thomas, Hershel’s brother
Olivia Thomas, Frank’s wife
Cora Baker, Olivia’s younger sister, age fifteen
Irene and Albert Baker, Olivia and Cora’s parents
One of the men began to hum, then hum with his mouth open, then sing.
Contents
Cast of Characters
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Author’s Note
Thursday, June 11, 1959
One
Bobby
They called them chocolate men, Bobby and his brother.
You didn’t see them on the East Side, high over Euclid, except once or twice a week and only early in the morning.
Where did they come from? There were no chocolate boys and girls in his school or at church. There were no chocolate ladies living in his neighborhood. There were no chocolate families at the park or the outdoor theater or the ball field. And yet the men came every week to his house.
That morning, as he lay on the grass by the sidewalk, Bobby heard them coming again.
First there was the roar and squeal of the big truck. That was far up the street. It was early, the time when the sun edged over the rooftops, but warm for the middle of June. Bobby was sharpening Popsicle sticks into little knives while his brother watched.
“Hurry up,” Ricky said.
Or not, thought Bobby. You have to do this properly. To sharpen a stick correctly you scraped it slantways against the sidewalk seams, and it took a while. With each stroke, you drew the stick toward you or pushed it away from you in a curving motion, like a barber stropping his razor in a Western movie.
Bobby wanted a thin blade, and his cheek was right down there above the sidewalk, with one eye squeezed shut to focus on the motion of his hand. The concrete scratched his knuckles, whited his skin, but you had to do it that way. You needed to scrape the stick nearly flat against the sidewalk to give you the thinnest blade.
Bobby would use the knife for little things. It could be a tool, or a weapon in a soldier game; it might be used to carve modeling clay, or as a casually found stick that on the utterance of a secret phrase became a lost cutlass of legend; or as a makeshift sidearm for defense on the schoolyard; or as nothing much, a thing to stab trees with or to jab into the ground to unearth bugs and roots or to press against your pocketed palm as you walked through stores downtown.
If his mother found one, she tossed it away.
Or he suspected she did. He had seen his sticks snapped in half in the wastebasket and he didn’t think his brother threw them there. It was Ricky who had taught him how to shape the knives, though he didn’t make them himself anymore. And it wasn’t their father, because he was hardly home these days.
“Hurry up,” Ricky said.
“This one will be good,” said Bobby, taking his time to get the sharpest edge. “Maybe my best.”
The truck moved, then stopped, then moved and stopped closer. The boys looked up. They watched the chocolate men jump off the sides of the truck. The ash cans were loud when they scraped them over the sidewalk and into the street, dragging them with leathery hands. Their yelling was not like the sound of the brown men and women who sang and played pianos on television. They approached, crisscrossing the sidewalk.
“That’s it,” said Ricky. “I don’t want to be here when they come. I’m going in.”
Bobby scooped up his knives, and the two boys ran inside. Ricky, a year older, was faster. They pulled the living room drapes aside and through the big window saw their cans being scraped and lifted.
“That one guy’s huge.”
“Did you see that? He took both Downings’ cans at the same time.”
Thick bare brown arms raised and shook the cans, the truck swallowed the trash, the cans were swung back and set down, and the men were on to the next house and the next. The boys watched from the picture window until the men disappeared down Cliffview to wherever they had come from.
“Let’s go out back,” said Ricky.
“I want to watch TV,” Bobby said.
“No, let’s go out back. I have a tennis ball.”
“Bring the cans into the carport, please,” said their mother. “Then breakfast. I have something to tell you.”
“In a minute, Mom,” Ricky called. To Bobby he said: “Let’s go out back first.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Two
“We’re going to drive Grandma home,” their mother said after she found them in the backyard and shooed them into the kitchen.
Ricky looked up from his plate of French toast. He pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose and blinked. “What, where?”
“Grandma. Home,” she said.
Their mother was tall and slim, still young, and wore a print summer dress and sandals. As she spoke, she leaned back against the counter with the sink behind her. She smelled of lotion and egg batter and cinnamon, and her face was strained.
“We’re going to drive Grandma home to Florida.”
Bobby glanced over at his grandmother. She was sitting at the table between him and his brother, but talk often floated around her as if she wasn’t there. She was Hungarian. Her accent was heavy and her English was slow and odd. She had come over from Hungary in the 1920s and said “vindshield vipers.”
“Drive?” Bobby said, licking his fork and wondering what lay behind his mother’s expression. Was it something he had done? Not coming in when she first called? Or hadn’t he heard her on the phone that morning? Had his father said something to upset her? “Will our car even make it all the way?” he asked. “It stalls a lot. And smells when it rains—”
“No, not Suzabelle,” she said. “Not our car. We’re driving Grandma’s car. She wants it down there with her.”
Bobby looked at Grandma longer this time. Her eyes were trained on his mother. Grandma’s face was pouchy, wrinkled, hollowed since he
’d last seen her months ago, and strange to kiss, like kissing a soft cloth bag, as he had to do every bedtime. Her skin was olive like the circles he noticed under his mother’s eyes. Was that a Hungarian thing? Would he get them, too?
“It’s good on the road,” his mother said. “The Chrysler.”
Bobby had nearly forgotten about the big green car. It had been parked around the corner for three weeks doing nothing because no one drove it. They called it Grandma’s car, but Grandma didn’t really drive it. She didn’t know how to drive.
“All the way?” said Ricky. He sat back in his chair, away from the table, as if ready to talk in place of their father. “It’s a thousand miles, you know. A thousand miles from here to Florida by car.”
Chuckling, Bobby thought to himself: It’s a thousand miles by buses and trains, too! Or maybe not, he thought. Ricky studied maps and knew distances, so maybe not.
“Probably close to thirteen hundred miles, depending on your route…” Ricky added, so Bobby guessed he really did know how far it was.
“Yes, I know,” said their mother, pulling a narrow spiral-bound notebook out of a stack of papers on the counter, “but we’re going to make a vacation of it. And on the way…”—she let her eyes float from Ricky to Bobby and back—“…we’re going to stop at battlefields. The Civil War battlefields in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia—”
“Battlefields?” Ricky dropped his fork on his plate and roared. “Are you kidding? Battlefields? Yes! Mom! Yes!” He jumped from the table and stomped up and down loudly on the kitchen floor. “Georgia? The Atlanta Campaign! Chickamauga! Yes! And yes! And yes!”
“Richie—” said his grandmother. “Please—”
Battlefields, thought Bobby. He wondered if his grandmother knew what they were. What did she know about the Civil War? He looked at her face now that it was turned toward his brother. She was old, but he didn’t know how old. Seventy? Eighty? Then he remembered his mother had told him she was born in the first year of the century. So she was fifty-nine. Was that still old?
Grandma had arrived three weeks ago, after being driven by a friend from Florida to visit Grandpa’s grave in Youngstown. They had then continued on to Cleveland, leaving Grandma and her car with them at their house on Cliffview Road. Grandpa had died four months before.
It was Bobby’s first death.
That was something.
Three
The story was that Grandpa had a heart attack trying to lift his car out of a sandbank. It happened in Florida on a newly opened bridge, which he had wanted to see because he was an engineer and had designed bridges when he was younger.
Bobby had been told that during the Depression his grandfather was paid with canned fruit instead of money, and he wondered what kind of bridge you built if you only got peaches for it.
Grandpa was sixty-six years old and had retired with Grandma to Florida the previous July, had enjoyed his house for seven months, had visited bridges, had not even gotten around to changing his Ohio license plates, and then was dead.
Bobby had glimpsed him, briefly, in his coffin at the family service in Youngstown. His sharp white nose, straight lips, and colorless, unmoving hands. His thin-rimmed spectacles over closed eyes.
“Richie, sit,” Grandma said, patting the straw place mat next to her. “Finish your French toast. Come and sit, please.”
Ricky didn’t. Not wanting to see her face as Ricky went on dancing, Bobby bent his head to the plate and dug into his toast.
As he ate, he remembered his mother telling him that a gravestone had been cut with the names and birth dates of both his grandparents, and his grandfather’s death date, but that it hadn’t been finished before Grandma needed to return home.
Last month his mother had told him: “This summer is the first time Grandma can arrange for someone to drive with her from Florida to Youngstown to see the finished stone on the grave.”
“But he’s in there, right?” asked Bobby.
“In there…?”
“He’s been in the grave since he died, right?”
“Of course! It’s just that it took time to carve the stone, and Grandma couldn’t wait for it.” She had paused, frowning, then added, “Bobby, of course he’s there.”
He now imagined two or three men jabbing at the dirt hard as iron, their shovel blades pinging a few times, then looking up to meet the eyes of the man whose job it was to see they did the work right.
Did chocolate men dig graves? Did they dig the holes for everyone, no matter what color they were, because other people wouldn’t do it? Bare brown arms shoveling. Or no. It was February in Youngstown. Coats and gloves.
“We’re going to take the long way around,” his mother continued, flapping the notebook in her hand. “I already know how we’ll drive. They made up a TripTik for me at the Triple-A—”
“Can I see it?” asked Ricky.
She handed him the notebook bound at the top with a coil of black plastic. “Five, maybe six days driving down. Through Kentucky and Tennessee and Georgia, then a day or two in St. Pete, then back—”
“But wait,” said Bobby. “How will we get home? How will we come back if we leave the car with Grandma?” He had just thought of this. “We’re not taking the bus home, are we? There are always chocolate people on the bus when we go downtown. And they…Is it really a thousand miles? On the bus? Not on the bus—”
Her smile tightened, and she shook her head.
“No. And I don’t like to hear you call them that, Bobby. After we leave the car with Grandma we’ll fly home from Tampa. Your first airplane, boys. How would that be?”
“Yes! Yes!” said Ricky, twirling on his heels again, up and down the floor. “This is so neat!”
“Richie, please sit.”
“Fly home?” said Bobby, barely able to keep in his chair, either, and smiling at his mother now to show he was sorry for calling them that. “We’ll fly home? Really, Mom? A plane? You promise?”
Taking her eyes off Ricky, his mother smiled warmly at him. Everything was all right now. She wasn’t mad anymore. “In a plane, absolutely,” she said. “That okay, Bobby?”
If they had to be mushed together in the car, all four of them for a week, in order to fly on an airplane, it might be okay.
“I think so!” he said.
Four
Every second since, Bobby had to hear his brother sing the strange music of those names.
“Chickamauga!” Ricky said, accentuating the “mawwww” of the word. “Shiloh, Chattanooga, Allatoona Pass, Kennesaw Mountain, Missionary Ridge!”
To Bobby the names sounded of the deep past.
Something dark lived in them, like the blurry old photographs in Ricky’s books, and he certainly wouldn’t go around saying the names as if they were cereal brands or car makes. The words might conjure ghosts out of ditches, from rutted paths, or the long roads that browned away into the distance in those old pictures. He imagined sunken folds in the earth, culverts, Ricky called them, that you tumbled into after nightfall when your pistol misfired and you lost your soul and your friends forgot they ever knew you.
“The year after next will be the really big year,” Ricky said, flopping onto his bed with his Civil War atlas. They were alone now, their mother stepping out to drive the car up into the driveway to “air out,” while their grandmother slid off to the den where she slept with the door open. “The centenary is still two years away,” he said, “but I know they’re restoring the battlefields for tourists already. The newspapers are full of stuff. They have to be ready. Two years is nothing.”
Ricky stacked three large books in the suitcase sprawled open on his bed and kept one to look through. It was a book of photographs and prints of the Atlanta Campaign.
“We’ll drive right here,” he said, turning the book around and holding it up so Bobby could see the page, then tapping his finger on a scratchy brown photograph of ruined buildings. “Right here,” he said, as the same finger slid across the photo
to what looked like a mound of bodies rolling by in a blurry wagon. “Can you believe it? Right where it happened.” He twisted the book back to himself. “It’s so neat.”
“Yeah,” said Bobby.
When he had turned seven, Ricky had asked for an atlas. Their father had bought it happily; their father, who was now at college in Washington, studying to be a history teacher—professor, it turned out, when Bobby understood it. Since receiving the atlas, Ricky had spent hours redrawing many county and state borders with his collection of colored pencils. He had sketched in the lines of opposing armies, great curved arrows converging with other-colored arrows on some miserable landmark. Once, Bobby pulled the atlas from the bookcase when Ricky was in the backyard and saw where his brother had recast the standard outlines of states with dotted lines of permanent ink. Circles appeared around minor towns; these represented the sites of imaginary battles. Casualty counts were scribbled in pencil up and down the margins of the pages. Horrific numbers, under the headings CSA and USA. Thousands upon thousands. Bobby couldn’t imagine how high the numbers were. Was this how many men died in war?
“Okay,” said Bobby. “But how long has it been? Since the Civil War?”
“In years, months, or days?”
“You dope,” said Bobby.
Ricky snickered. “The war started in 1861. I keep telling you that. What do you think ‘centenary’ means? The Rebels shelled Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.”