Juneteenth

  “I didn’t mean to do it, mam….”

  She sighed sleepily. “Do? What’d you do, honey?”

  He held his breath, hearing dododododododododododo!

  And again, “Revern’ Bliss?” … dododo …

  She stirred and he saw her arm go over as she started to turn only to halt with a deep intake of breath which suddenly stopped and he realized that he had trapped himself. It’s happening and it will be like Daddy Hickman says Torment is, forever and forever and ever…. Then, as though the other Bliss had spoken in an undertone, he thought, You’re It this time for sure but you must never be caught again. Not like this again—move. When they come toward you, move. Be somewhere else, move. Move!

  But he couldn’t move. He was watching her hand reaching out searchingly, patting the spot where he had lain. And he thought, She thinks I wet the bed and I didn’t and now her fingers are telling her that it’s dry and if I only had, like the Jaybirds spying on you and telling the ants and telling the Devil, and she’s raising up and her eyes growing wide and I shall be punished for what I can’t even see. Please Lady God Sister Mother.

  “Oh!” Sister Georgia said, sitting up with a creaking of the bed-springs, and he felt the sheet swing across his leg and up around her body so swiftly that it was as though she or I’d never been exposed. He could see his upraised thumb and finger making an “O” of the darkness and she was saying, “Oh, oh, oh,” very fast and the night seemed to rush backwards like a worm sliding back into its hole. And he told himself, It was only a dream I am in the other room lying on the sofa where I went to bed and that woman with the veil is coming toward me and I know who she is and I’m overjoyed to see her save her and now dodging waterspout offish and falling and screaming and now this one will come in a second and lift me from the floor, save me from—

  “No!” she said. “OH NO! Revern’ Bliss, Revern’ Bliss! YOU WERE LOOKING AT MY NAKEDNESS! YOU WERE EXPOSING MY NAKEDNESS!”

  He was mute, shrinking within himself, his head turning from side to side as he thought, If I could fall off the bed it would go away. If I had wings I could—

  But her words were calling up dreadful shapes in his mind. A black horse with buzzards tearing at its dripping entrails went galloping across a burning field, making no sound.… A naked, roaring-drunk Noah stumbled up waving a jug of corn whiskey and cursing in vehement silence while two younger men fought with another trying to cover his head with a quilt of many-colored cloth and he could feel her words still sounding. All the darkness seemed to leave the room. Nearby the cats which had hurtled across the night like a swirling wheel of knives had cornered now, filling the air with an agony of howling.

  “You were, weren’t you, Revern’ Bliss?” she said. “Tell me, what was you doing!” And the minor note of doubt in her voice warned him that there was still time to lie, to erase it all with words and he seemed to be running, trying to catch up but he wasn’t fast enough and felt the chance slipping through his hand like a silver minnow. He seemed to hear his voice sounding unreal even before he spoke.

  “I didn’t mean to do it, mam, honestly, I didn’t….”

  “But you did!” she said in a fierce whisper. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, peeping at my nakedness and me asleep. Sneaking up on me like a thief in the night, trying to steal me in my sleep! You, who’s supposed to be Revern’ Bliss, the young preacher!”

  “Please, mam, please mam. I really didn’t mean to do it. Forgive me. Please, forgive me….”

  She shook her head sadly, sitting higher and clutching the sheet around her.

  “Oh you really ought to be ashamed,” she said. “That’s the least you can do. Acting like that, like an old rounder or something that’s had no training or anything. What I want to know is ain’t there any of you men a God-fearing woman can trust! I thought you was a real genuine preacher of the gospel and I was proud to have you staying in my house. You never would’ve had to sleep in any hay around here. But now just look what you done. I guess I been offering my hospitality to an old jackleg. A midnight creeper. I guess you just another one of these old no-good jacklegs. You’re not good and sanctified like Revern’ Hickman at all and it’ll probably break his heart to hear what you done.”

  He cried soundlessly now, wanting to go to her, his whole body, even his guilty fingers crying Mother me, forgive me. He felt cast into the blackest darkness, the world being transformed swiftly into iron.

  “Please,” he cried, touching her arm, but she pulled away, refusing to touch him as he reached out to her.

  “No,” she said, “oh no. You get out of my bed. Get on out!”

  “Please, Sister Georgia.”

  “I said, get!”

  “Yes, mam,” he said. He dragged himself from the bed now and found his way back to the sofa and lay sobbing in the dark.

  “Sister Georgia,” he called to the other room. “Sister Georgia …”

  “What is it, ole jackleg?”

  “Sister Georgia, please don’t call me that. Pleeease …”

  “Then you oughtn’t to act like one. What is it you want?”

  “Sister Georgia,” he said, “are you a lady or a girl?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you a lady or a girl?” he said.

  She was silent; then: “After what you done you shouldn’t have to ask.”

  “But I have to know,” he said.

  “I’m a woman,” she said. “What difference does it make, ole jackleg preacher?”

  “Because … maybe if you’re a girl what I did isn’t really so bad….”

  She was silent and he lay straining to hear. Finally, she said, “You go to sleep. It won’t be long before day and I have to have my sleep.”

  She won’t tell me, he thought, she won’t say.

  His tears were gone now and he lay face downward, thinking, I don’t care, the other one is the one for a mother….

  CHAPTER 10

  He, Bliss, sat at the kitchen table drinking the ice-cold lemonade and listening to the tinkle the chunk of ice made when he stirred it with his finger. The others were sitting quietly in the room with Daddy Hickman and he could see Sister Wilhite nodding in her chair over near the window. Sister Wilhite’s tired, he thought. She’s been up all night and Deacon has too. He looked at the cooking stove, dull black with shining nickel parts around the bottom made in the shape of scrolls. They’re the same shape as the scrolls on the lid of my coffin, he thought. Why do they put scrolls on everything? Sister Wilhite’s sewing machine has scrolls made into the iron part where her feet go to pedal and it has scrolls painted in gold in the long shining block that holds the shiny wheel and the needle. Scrolls on everything. People don’t have scrolls though. But maybe you just can’t see them. Sister Georgia.… Scroll, Scroll Jellyroll.… That’s a good rhyme—but sinful.… Jellyroll.

  The stovepipe rose straight up and then curved and went out through a hole up near the ceiling. The wallpaper up there was black where the smoke had leaked through. The stove was cold. No fire was showing through the airholes in the door where the wood and coal went, and he thought, It’s sleeping too. It’s resting, taking a summer vacation. It works hard in the winter though, it goes all day long eating up wood and coal and making ashes. From early in the morning till late at night and sometimes they stoke it and it burns all night too. It’s just coasting then though, but it’s working. Summertime is easy except for Sunday when a lot of folks have to eat string beans, turnip greens, cabbage and salt pork, sweet potato pie, ham hocks and collards, egg-cornbread and dandelion greens is good for you. Make you big and strong. Summer is easy except for those good things so the stove can take a rest. It wakes up for oatmeal for breakfast and eggs and grits and coffee but then it goes out. Not a stick of wood in the corner or bucket of coal. No heat for lemonade but it’s good. In the fall is the busy time. In the fall they’ll be killing the hogs and taking the chitterlins and the members will be bringing a whole pig to Daddy Hickman all scalde
d and scrubbed clean, then he’ll give it to Deacon Wilhite and Deacon’ll give it to Sister Wilhite and that’s when the stove will really have to work. The door where the fire goes’ll be cherry red and the stovepipe too.

  That big pot on the back there will be puffing like a steam engine. Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego and I like black-eyed peas and curly pigtails and collards, hogshead hopping John—Pa don’t raise no cotton or corn and neither no potatoes, but Lord God, the tomatoes. I like candied yams, spare ribs and Sister Wilhite’s apple brown Betty with that good hard sauce. Sister Lucy, Daddy Hickman said that time, don’t let the you-know-who’s learn how good you can cook, because they’re liable to chain you to a kitchen stove for ninety-nine years and a day. Chained? she said. I already been chained for fifteen years. I wouldn’t want to be chained to any stove but Sister Lucy just laughed about it and looked at Deacon. He looked at Sister Wilhite sleeping in the chair. She’s really getting it, that sleep, he thought. She’s making up for lost time….

  Then he must have dreamed because Sister Georgia was there in the kitchen and she was leading him over to the red-hot stove and asking him about Meshach, Shadrach and old big-headed Abernathy and shaking him—

  But it wasn’t Sister Georgia, it was Sister Wilhite.

  “Wake up, Revern’ Bliss,” she said, “Revern’ is calling you,” And he got up sleepily and yawned and she guided him into the bedroom. The others were still there, sitting around and talking quietly. Then he was at the bed looking once more at the bandaged face. Daddy Hickman’s eye was closed, hidden beneath the bandages and he thought, He’s asleep when Sister Wilhite spoke up.

  “Here’s Revern’ Bliss, Brother A.Z.” And there was Daddy Hickman’s eye, looking into his own.

  “Well, there you are, Bliss,” Daddy Hickman said. “Did you have enough lemonade?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s fine. That’s very good. So what have you been doing?”

  “I had a nap and I’ve been wondering …”

  “Wondering, Bliss? What about?”

  He hesitated, looking at Deacon Wilhite who sat with his legs crossed smoking. He was sorry he had said it, but it had come out.

  “About that lady,” he said.

  “No, Revern’ Bliss,” Sister Wilhite said from behind him. “Let’s forget about that. Now let Revern’ rest….”

  “It’s all right,” Daddy Hickman said. Then the eye bored into his face. “She frightened you, didn’t she, boy?”

  He bowed his head. “Yes, sir, she sure did.”

  Then he tried to stop the rest from coming out, but it was too late. “She said she was my mama….”

  Daddy Hickman lifted his hands quickly and lowered them back to the sheet. “Poor Bliss, poor baby boy,” he said, “you really had yourself a time….”

  “Revern’,” Sister Wilhite said, “don’t you think you should rest?”

  Daddy Hickman waved his hand toward Sister Wilhite.

  “Is she, Daddy Hickman?” he said.

  “Is she what, Bliss?”

  “My mother?”

  “That crazy woman? Oh no, Bliss,” Daddy Hickman said. “You took her seriously, didn’t you? Well, I guess I might as well tell you the story, Bliss. Sit here on the bed.”

  He sat, aware that the others were listening as he watched Daddy Hickman’s eye. Daddy Hickman was making a cage of his big long fingers.

  “No, Bliss,” he said. “The first thing you have to understand is that this is a strange country. There’s no logic to it or to its ways. In fact, it’s been half-crazy from the beginning and it’s got so many crazy crooks and turns and blind alleys in it, that half the time a man can’t tell where he is or who he is. To tell the truth, Bliss, he can’t tell reason from unreason and it’s so mixed up and confused that if we tried to straighten it out right this minute, half the folks out there running around would have to be locked up. You following me, Bliss?”

  “You mean everybody is crazy?”

  “In a way of speaking, Bliss. Because the only logic and sanity is the logic and sanity of God, and down here it’s been turned wrong-side out and upside down. You have to watch yourself, Bliss, in a situation like this. Otherwise you won’t know what’s sense and what’s foolishness. Or what’s to be laughed at and what’s to be cried over. Or if you’re yourself or what somebody else says you are. Now you take that woman, she yelled some wild words during our services and got everybody upset and now you don’t know what to think about her and when you see me all wrapped up like the Mummy or old King Tut or somebody like that, you think that what she said has to have some truth in it. So that’s where the confusion and the craziness comes in, Bliss. We have to feel pity for her, Bliss, that’s what we have to feel. No anger or fear—even though she upset the meeting and got a few lumps knocked on my head. And we can’t afford to believe in what she says, not that woman. Nor in what she does either. She’s a sad woman, Bliss, and she’s dangerous too; but when you step away and look at her calmly you have to admit that whatever she did or does or whoever she is, the poor woman’s crazy as a coot.”

  “She’s crazy, all right,” Sister Lucy said. “Now you said something I can understand.”

  “Oh, you can understand, all right, Sister Lucy,” Daddy Hickman said, “but you don’t want to let yourself understand. You want something you can be angry about; something you can hold on to with ease and no need to trouble yourself with the nature of the true situation. You don’t want to worry your humanity.”

  “Maybe so,” Sister Lucy said. “But I see that frightened child and I see you all wrapped in bandages and I can still see that woman dressed in red interrupting in the House of God, claiming that child—And I’m supposed to feel sorry for—”

  “Yes,” Daddy Hickman said. “Yes, you are. Job’s God didn’t promise him any easy time, remember.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Sister Lucy said. “But I never been rich or had all the blessings Job had neither.”

  “We’ll talk about that some other time,” Daddy Hickman said. “You have your own riches. You just have to recognize what they are. So Bliss, not only is that woman sad, she’s crazy as a coot. That woman has wilder dreams than a hop fiend.”

  “What’s ‘hop,’ Daddy Hickman?”

  “It’s dope, Bliss, drugs, and worse than gin and whiskey….”

  “Oh! Has she been taking some?”

  “I don’t know, Bliss; it’s just a way of speaking. The point is that the woman has wild ideas and does wild things. But because she’s from a rich family she can go around acting out any notion that comes into her mind.”

  “Now that’s something I can understand,” Sister Lucy said.

  “They taught that they own the world,” Sister Wilhite said.

  “Just like they got it in a jug, Revern’ Bliss,” another sister said.

  “Here,” Sister Lucy said, and she held out a licorice cigar.

  “Thank you, Sister Lucy.”

  “So listen,” Daddy Hickman said. “Let me tell Revern’ Bliss a bit about that woman. A few years back she was supposed to get married. She was going to have a big wedding and everything, but then the fellow who she was supposed to marry was killed when his buggy was struck by the Southern at the crossroads and the poor woman seemed to strip her gears….”

  “So that’s what started it,” Sister Wilhite said.

  “That’s the story anyway,” Daddy Hickman said. “For a while the poor woman couldn’t leave her room, just lay in the bed eating ambrosia and chocolate eclairs day and night.”

  A new tone had come into Daddy Hickman’s voice now. He looked at the eye set in the cloth, searching for a joke. “Eating what?” he said, removing his cigar.

  “That’s right, Revern’ Bliss. Ambrosia and chocolate eclairs.”

  “Day and night?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “But didn’t it make her sick?”

  “Oh, she was already sick,” Daddy Hickman said. “An
yway, when she finally could leave her room she came up with some strange notions….”

  “What kind of notions?”

  “Well, she thought she was some kind of queen.”

  “Did she have a crown?”

  “Come to think about it, she did, Revern’ Bliss, and she had a great big Hamilton watch set right in the middle of it and she used to walk around the streets wearing a long white robe and stopping everybody and asking them if they knew what time it was. It wasn’t a bad idea either, Bliss—except for the fact that her watch was always slow. Folks who didn’t want to set their watches according to her time was in for some trouble. She’d start to screaming right there in the street and charging them with all sorts of crimes. You have no idea how relieved folks were when she misplaced that watch and crown and went off to Europe with her auntie on her father’s side.”

  Daddy Hickman’s voice stopped and Bliss could see the eye looking from deep within the cloth.

  “Then what happened?” he said.

  “Oh she stayed over there about a year, taking the baths and drinking that sulfur water and mineral water and consorting with the crowned heads of Europe. And I heard she was at a place called Wiesbaden where she enjoyed herself losing a lot of money. Then I went up north to Detroit and worked in the Ford plant for a while and I didn’t hear any more about her. Then I came back and I heard she had come home again and how she had a new mind and a new notion….”

  “What kind of new mind and notion?”

  “Well, now she not only insisted she was a queen but she had the notion that all the young children belonged to her. She had the notion she was the Mary Madonna. Bliss, pretty soon she was making off with other folks’ children like a pack rat preparing for hard times. The story is that she grabbed a little Chinee baby and took him off to New Orleans and named him Uncle Yen Sen, or something like that….”

  “She really stole him?”

  “Yes she did, Bliss. And she rented a room and opened up what she called a Chinese laundry in one of those old houses with the iron lace around the front. It was on a street where a bunch of first-class washerwomen lived too and she had that poor little baby lying up there on the counter in a big clothes basket wearing a diaper made out of the United States flag….”