The old lady said, “You don’t remember me, do you, Lenny?”
Leonard closed up the oven and looked at her for a long moment, then shook his head. “No, ma’am. Guess I don’t. Haven’t been back here in a time. I came to visit my uncle, it was the Browns lived here. Mr. Brown, he worked for the railroad or somethin’.”
“Browns are all dead and buried,” she said. “They call me MeMaw.”
“MeMaw?” Leonard said. “MeMaw Carter. You used to live over on Sheraton. I used to go over to the park there. My uncle brung me. Y’all visited while I played.”
“That was just for a couple of years,” she said. “So I ain’t surprised you don’t remember me. You was practically a baby. I don’t never forget nothing, though. You know there ain’t no park there now? None you can use, anyway.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Drug niggers took it over. Kids with them beepers and needles and pistols in their pants. Ain’t no place to do nothing ’round here anymore but get killed. My youngest son, Clarence, moved me here ten year ago. Thought it was a better place than Sheraton Street. Was, then. Old house was falling apart and all them drug niggers around. Now I got them ’cross the street and this old house ain’t much.”
“You used to tell me stories about Br’er Rabbit and such,” Leonard said.
“And you ate my cookin’ when you come with your uncle. You liked pies and vanilla cookies. Any kind of vanilla cookie.”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s me. I oughta remembered you right off.”
She showed Leonard an acre of dentures and some of her wrinkles straightened out. “I’ve changed a little, Lenny. You know how old I am?”
“No, ma’am. I’m no good guessing ages.”
“Don’t guess no woman’s age,” she said. “That’ll just cause you trouble. ’Course, you get old as me, it don’t matter no more. One day to the next couldn’t make me look no older. ’Foe long I’ll be bakin’ pies for Jesus. . . . I’m ninety-five years old.”
“You don’t look it,” Leonard said.
She made a noise in her throat that sounded like crisp crackers being crumbled. “You don’t start lyin’ to MeMaw now. I look a hundred and ninety-five. You boys, help me sit down.”
We got hold of her arms, which felt like sweaty sticks covered in foam rubber, and helped her away from the walker and onto a hard-backed chair at the kitchen table.
She sighed and said, “Thank you. That sittin’ part and gettin’ up by myself tuckers me. Turn the fan on me.”
I twisted the fan around so that the rotation stayed mostly in her direction. I said, “You like a drink of water?”
“No,” she said, “I’m OK, but I’d like you boys to help me eat some of that pie.”
* * *
Leonard sliced us pie and poured us milk and we ate. The pie was good. It made me nostalgic for home and my mother, but my mother was long gone and so was the home where I had been raised.
I turned and looked at the photographs. They were of all manner of folks. People black and white and brown. The clothes and hairstyles and backgrounds revealed just how long ago this whole photographic display had begun, though a lot of the photos appeared to have been taken in recent years on MeMaw’s front porch, or in her yard, or right here in the kitchen. A healthy number of them showed people eating at her table.
“Quite a collection of photographs you have there, MeMaw,” I said.
She turned her head toward the wall and looked at them. “Got a whole nuther room of ’em. I always take pictures of folks. Cheers me, all them I’ve met. I look at them walls, I got memories.”
“Who are they all?” Leonard asked.
“Some family,” MeMaw said. “Most ain’t, though. There’s people come by to check the gas meter or the water or bring the mail, and they’re nice enough, I’ll take their picture and put it up there, try and remember what we talked about that day. This here,” she waved her finger at a row of photos, “is all my family.”
Some of the photos she was pointing to were old and some were new, and some had been taken by someone other than MeMaw, because she was in a number of the photos with her children. In the earlier ones she didn’t look a lot different than she did now until you got to the oldest black and whites, and even then she looked elderly, but with darker hair and more of it, less wrinkles maybe, and a few of her own teeth.
She pointed out and named her children, and there were eight of them, five girls and three boys. The first seven close together, the last, a boy, born when she was forty-five, way past the time she thought she’d have another child.
“Ain’t one more loved than the other,” MeMaw said, “but Hiram, he’s the baby. A surprise. Lives in Tyler, but travels a lot. He’s a salesman.”
I looked at her baby. In the most recent picture she had of Hiram he looked my age and size, but with thicker shoulders. He had a personable face.
The latest photograph of her eldest child, Pleasant, showed a woman who looked seventy-five if she was a day. MeMaw said she was retired and had a little check, but was in business for herself, selling leather-stitched white Bibles.
We got a look at all the grandkids and great-grandkids, and she told us their names and stories about each one.
“How come you started doing this, MeMaw?” Leonard asked. “Taking all these pictures? Puttin’ ’em on the wall?”
“All my family done gone ’cept one boy, Cletus. Moved off tryin’ to get somethin’ decent for themselves. I wanted somethin’ to do, and after my husband, Mr. Carter, died, I took to takin’ even more pictures. Anyone I liked, I took their picture and taped it to the wall. Bet I’ve gone through half-dozen of them Polaroids. Every time I wear one out, my children buy me another. There’s pictures of your Uncle Chester in the other room, and an old one of you. I took it when you was just a child.”
“No joke?” Leonard said. “Be all right I see them?”
“Have to look for them,” she said. “I ain’t aimin’ to get up right now. They’ll be in the other room.”
I went in there with Leonard, and it was stuffy and hot and all the walls were full of photographs, some relatively fresh, some wrinkling from age and heat and turning green. It made me feel a little lonely somehow.
On one wall near the floorboard Leonard found a black-and-white picture of his uncle and himself sitting on a merry-go-round in a park, most likely the park Leonard talked about over on Sheraton Street. Leonard was probably about ten years old and his uncle was our age.
The photograph wasn’t too good, and Leonard’s features faded into his black skin. His teeth showed white in his face and he looked happy. His uncle had caught a ray of sunlight and was more defined. He looked a lot like Leonard looked now. I took a minute to make fun of Leonard, just so he knew I loved him, and he showed me his middle finger to show he cared about me too.
We checked around for a long, hot time and found more photos of his uncle at different ages, and finally, on the way out, we came across one near the door. The Uncle Chester there looked a lot like the Uncle Chester I had seen in his coffin, only a little less puffy and a lot less dead. He was standing next to a tall angular black man about his age, and he had his arm around him. They weren’t exactly smiling. They looked self-conscious, as if preparing for a hemorrhoid operation but bound to make the best of it.
“Who’s that with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Leonard said.
MeMaw heard us. “I’m pretty sure that’s Illium,” she said. “Take it off the wall and let me see it.”
Leonard freed the photo and took it into the kitchen and gave it to MeMaw. She said, “That’s who it is. Illium Moon.”
“Who is he?” Leonard asked.
“He and your uncle was near growed together at the hip,” she said. “You seen one, you near saw the other. Illium moved here from San Antonio. He’d been a policemans or somethin’ like that. He and your uncle met at the domino shack up by the highway.”
“Illium sti
ll around?” Leonard asked.
She studied on that for a moment. “I ain’t seen him for a bit. Couple weeks, I reckon. Hadn’t really thought about it. Your uncle not around, I ain’t expected to see him. Got so you couldn’t think of one without the other.”
“You know where he lives?” Leonard asked. “Being a friend of Uncle Chester’s, I thought I might like to talk to him.”
“No, I don’t,” MeMaw said, “but he works over to the colored Baptist church sometimes. I know that much. He used to drive the bookmobile too.”
“For the library?” I asked.
“It wasn’t the real library, the one downtown,” she said. “Illium, he was like your uncle. He wanted to do good by folks, so he got this bus . . . or what do they call them now?”
“Van?” I asked.
“That’s it,” she said. “He had him a van fixed up with his own books, and he went around and loaned books here in the East Side, like a library. I never did take none of ’em, ten year ago I quit reading anything ’sides the good book since I couldn’t get around good enough to go to church. I figured God would let me slide on that, I kept knowledge of His word. But I thought Illium was a good man. Sometimes your uncle helped him out, rode around with him.”
“Can you tell us where this church is where Illium works?” Leonard asked.
“I can,” MeMaw said. “But first, Lenny, you go over there and open that cabinet.”
Leonard went over to the cabinet she was indicating with a cadaverous finger and opened it. There was a snapshot camera inside.
“Bring me that camera,” she said.
Leonard did.
MeMaw looked at me, said, “What’s your name now, son?”
“Hap Collins,” I said.
“Hap, you and Lenny sit together at the table.”
We sat and pulled our chairs close and leaned our heads together.
“Ya’ll’d make good salt and pepper shakers,” she said, raised the camera to her face, grinned, said, “Now, boys, say cheese.”
15.
“Do you remember seeing Illium at the funeral?” I asked.
“No,” Leonard said, “but I wasn’t looking for him. He could have been there.”
“I don’t think so, and if he and your uncle were as close as MeMaw claims, he oughta been, don’t you think?”
I shifted gears on my old Dodge pickup and we climbed a hill full of potholes and crumbling slabs of weather-heaved blacktop. The sun was near midsky, and it shone on the faded gray hood of my truck and made me squint, and the hot wind blowing through the open windows made me sweat as if I were in a sauna. I reminded myself that in another couple of hours it would really be hot.
I had brought my truck back with me when we returned to Uncle Chester’s house from our three days in the country, and I was glad to have it, old and uncomfortable as it was. When I first moved in with Leonard, he had picked me up and brought me here and left my truck back home because it was giving me trouble. Turned out the trouble was burned-out rings and cheap gas and no money to fix it.
But on our return to Uncle Chester’s, Leonard needed a way to haul lumber, so he paid for me to get a ring job and real gas. Now, I was no longer polluting half of East Texas, and felt better about that, and without my telltale cloud of black smoke following me I was less embarrassed to be seen driving it.
We were following MeMaw’s directions, looking for the First Primitive Baptist Church, and along the way I got a good look at the East Section, saw parts of it I had never seen before, realized just how truly isolated I was from the way of life here. Along with decent houses, there were houses next to them without electric wires, houses broke down and sagging, their sides actually held up with posts, and out back were outdoor toilets and rusted-out appliances in which garbage had been burned and not collected because the garbage trucks didn’t always come down here.
Black children with blacker eyes wearing dirty clothes sat in yards of sun-bleached sand and struggling grass burrs and looked at us without enthusiasm as we drove past.
It was near midday and grown men of working ages were wandering the streets like dogs looking for bones, and some congregated at storefronts and looked lonesome and hopeless and watched with the same lack of enthusiasm as the children as we drove past.
“Man, I hate seeing that,” Leonard said. “You’d think some of these sonofabitches would want to work.”
“You got to have jobs to work,” I said.
“You got to want jobs too,” Leonard said.
“You saying they don’t?”
“I’m saying too many of them don’t. Whitey still has them on his farm, only they ain’t doing nothing there and they’re getting tidbits tossed to them like dogs, and they take it and keep on keeping on and wanting Whitey to do more.”
“Maybe Whitey owes them.”
“Maybe he does, but you can be a cur or you get up off your ass and start seeing yourself as a person instead of an underdog that’s got to take those scraps. I’ve always worked, Hap. Be it in the rose fields or as a handyman laborer or raising hunting dogs, and you ain’t never known me to take handout checks because I’m black, and my uncle didn’t either.”
“Most of the people taking handout checks are white, Leonard.”
“That’s true, and I ain’t got nothing for those sonofabitches either. Unless you can’t walk or you’re in temporary straits, there ain’t no excuse for it.”
“One minute it’s things are bad here because it’s the black section of town, and next time you open your mouth you’re saying it’s the blacks’ fault. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Yes, you can. Ain’t nothing one way, Hap. Everything’s got two sides and sometimes the same problem’s got two different answers. It’s the ambition and pride these folks are missing. They don’t want nothing but to exist. They think God owes ’em a living.”
“And some of them just haven’t got jobs, Leonard, and it’s as simple as that.”
“Some of them,” Leonard said. “Some gonna tell you too they got to sell drugs to survive ’cause things are bad, and I say you can rationalize anything. ‘I got to sell drugs, I got to sell myself, I got to eat shit with flies on it.’ You don’t got to do nothin’ like that. You grew up poor, Hap. You ever want to sell drugs or hire out to get your dick sucked or maybe lay back and take a check?”
“Government could mail me a check, they wanted to. But I’d want someone to go out to the mailbox and bring it to me. Maybe getting my dick sucked wouldn’t be so bad either, especially someone wanted to pay me for it.”
“Bullshit. I know you. You got pride.”
“Not everyone has had the chance to have pride, Captain Know-It-All. You don’t come with it built in. Like new cars, there are some options got to be installed.”
“Yeah, but there’s them that go out and get the options, use their own tools to put them in. Like your dad and my uncle. From what you’ve told me, your dad didn’t have it so easy.”
He hadn’t. His mother had died when he was eight, and his father had put him to work in the cottonfields, and when Dad didn’t pick the same cotton as a grown man, his father had put the horsewhip to him. I remember as a child seeing my father without his shirt, lying on the floor in front of the TV after a hard day’s work at his garage, and there were thin white lines across his back, scars from the whip. My father could neither read nor write. He never missed a day’s work. He never complained. He died with mechanic’s grease on his face and hands. I’m glad I never met my grandfather. I’m glad he was dead before I was born.
“I had advantages still, Leonard. I’m white. Even the worst of the whites, the white trash, have had it better than minorities.”
“Minorities are one thing. Choice is another. Check and see how many Orientals are on the welfare rolls. You ain’t gonna find many.”
“Check and see how many of those Orientals have ancestors were owned by white folks and sold on slave blocks. Frankly, Leonard, I think a Bible q
uotation is in order here. ‘Judge not least ye be judged.’ That’s close, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, I got one too. ‘Decide to be a fuckup, you’re gonna be a fuckup.’”
“What bible’s that in?”
“Leonard’s Bible.”
I shut my mouth and brooded. There was some truth in what Leonard said, but ultimately, in my mind, there’s no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.
Leonard told me to take a right and I did and we rolled off the ravaged blacktop and onto a smooth cement street with beautiful sweet gum trees and broad-limbed pecans skirting it on either side. The sunlight made bruise-blue shadows out of the trees and laid them on the street and behind the trees on either side were nice, inexpensive houses with clean side-walks leading up to them.
Leonard looked at the house and said, “See, ain’t everybody down here got to live in the garbage and walk the streets.”
“They got jobs, Leonard.”
“My point exactly.”
“Remind me to kill you in your sleep,” I said.
Soon the street gave up its trees, and there was just the blistering sunlight and on the right a couple acres of land and on it a parking lot and a whitewash church with a plain black-and-white sign out front that read FIRST PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH. REVEREND HAMIL FITZGERALD OFFICIATING.
Behind the church was a simple blue frame house with a well-tended lawn with a sprinkler spitting on it and onto a number of circular, brick-enclosed flower beds. In the driveway was a recently washed last year’s blue Chevy and parked nearby was a small blue-and-white bus with FIRST PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH painted on the side. The bus looked fairly old, and a few of the back windows had been replaced with plyboard. I figured if you scratched the blue-and-white paint deep enough, you’d find a yellow school bus underneath—one of those they used to call the short bus, the one the retarded kids rode to school.