So I had to be the one. Me, the least likely, the anyone-else-but: She finally sifted the grains down to me. Oh, she could be willful and blot Bob out without ever bothering to think that there was a body attached to his name and life in that body, she could do it and be beyond the consequences—but now her own belly said, Let the disgusting, foul-aired truth come clean, and it turned her wrong-side out. Or maybe right-side, because she must have had to have more than simple arrogant nerve to come there that night.
But to who else could she go, Hickman? Who but to the one who had suffered deep down to the bottom of the hole, down where there’s nothing to do but come floating up lifting you in his own arms into the air, or die? Oh, John the Baptist was a diver into those lonely depths, I do believe. I do believe.… In all that frenzied agitated searching she must have been like a man being chased West so hard and fast that he stumbles and falls into the ocean and has either got to swim or sink. Don’t tell me a human don’t live by instinct when he reaches bottom, because when he’s just about to go to pieces his instinct tries to guide him to where he can save himself. That’s when God shows you His face. That’s when in a split second you’re about to be nothing and you have a flash of a chance to be something. She must have been sore desperate, like backed into the corner of a red-hot oven. Hickman, that was when your heart stopped beating like a run-down clock. Oh, yes; and that’s when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road. All at once you were standing there smelling her sour, feverish white woman’s breath mixed up with that sweet soap they used to use and you were hearing the hellish yelling and tearing around and about of a million or so crazy folks. Ha, yes! That’s when the alphabet in your poor brain was so shaken up that the letters started to fall out and spell “hope,” “faith,” and “charity”—it would take time for them to fall all the way into place, so you could recognize it, but it was beginning to happen. Yes, it was happening even while you were saying:
So now you come to me. Out of all the rest you come to me. I guess you think that old lady who died doesn’t mean anything to me because she was only a black man’s old worn-out mother who was soon to die anyway. I guess I’m supposed to forget about her. So now here you come to me after all that to demand that I get you aid to perpetuate all that you have done without even thinking. So I’m to stand here on the spot and switch over from the animal you consider me to be to the human you’ve decided I could never be, so that I can be understanding and forgiving—Woman, do you think I’m Jesus Christ? Do you think a man like me is even interested in the idea of trying to be Christ-like? Hell, my papa was a preacher while I’m a horn-blowing gambler. Do you think that after being the son of a black preacher in this swamp of a country I’d let you put me in the position of trying to act like Christ? Make it easy for you to destroy mine and me without even the need to remember, and humiliate mine and me, and, dam’ you, expect me to understand and forgive you and then minister to your needs? Destroy me and mine so that you can cast me down into corruption and the grave and then dig me up next week so that I can serve you. Tell me, what kind of endless, bottomless, blind store of forgiveness and understanding am I supposed to have? Just tell me where I’m suppose to carry it. What kind of meat and bread am I suppose to eat in order to nourish it?
Hickman, you didn’t know it at the time but when you started talking she had shifted out of your hands and put you into hers. She really had you then. You were talking so fast you were foaming at the mouth, but that instinct and life inside her had reached out and tagged you and you were It. A pair of purple smears sagging shuteyed in my hands and me standing there holding her and unable to let her fall.… If we ever learn to feel real revulsion of the flesh—any flesh—that’s when hell will truly erupt down here and the whole unhappy history become an insane waste; if we ever learn to hate the mere rind in the same way we ignore the spirit and the heart and the hopeful possibility underneath.… And there I stood—me, cursing her for using a woman’s weakness as a club to kill me there and to deny me anger and hate because I was my mother’s boy child and my father’s son whom they had brought up on the ideas and standards that made any human beings bearable one to the other.… That woman, coming there using my very black manhood to deny me grief and to deny me love and to deny me thirst and hunger and weakness and hope and joy—denying me even denial and rejection and contempt and vindictiveness against any claim her kind had upon mine … denying me even the need for anger or life. There she’d been feeding two for all those months and now sagging in my hands like the shadow of some little ole frightened bird about to take off and fly.
And then it really started, and me still cursing but helpless before the rhythm of those pains that started pulsing from him to her to me, as though some coked-up drummer was beating his snares inside her belly and I was being forced against my will to play or dance, and dance or play, even if I had nothing left but bleeding stumps for arms and legs. Me, a full-grown man crying, “Mamma, Mamma,” with tears running down my face, while I was getting her to bed. Me, crying helpless at a time like that, as though my body had somehow to register a protest against what I was being forced to do, and getting her into Mamma’s bed and starting to uncover all that that Bob had died for not even thinking about uncovering: white and blue-veined and bulging like that boa constrictor I saw back there during my days with the circus band after it had swallowed a lamb. Yes, and went about dressing her just the same in one of Mamma’s gowns. Then going on to tear Mamma’s sheets, and pouring the water I’d heated for my own last bath in case the men had come.… Yes, almost convinced that I was in a dream. Too mad and outraged now to be afraid that she had been followed and still determined to make small-town history in blood. Determined, after letting out the life that bulged her belly, to let out the life that had drained me dry of love.
Oh, ashamed too; shamed and too outraged with myself to call a woman to come do the midwife’s work. Asking myself, Man, where’s your dignity, where’s your pride? Where, at what point is my hate spilling out between my hands and my determination? What do you call this situation? Who’s doing this to me? Who’s got me hypnotized? And all the while doing the whole thing myself in spite of myself: Holding the damp cloth to her brow and placing the pillow beneath her quivering backside to ease and aid the flesh in its quaking and quickening, and holding firm to her weaving hands while she gave birth to that bawling, boiled-red and glistening baby flesh. Watching my own big black hands going in and out of those forbidden places, ha! into the rushing fluids, and despising it all. No mercy in my heart, Lord, no! Only the choking strangulation of some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood, hate or heartbreak. And stopped from killing the two of us only by the third that was coming screaming in all his innocent-evil bewilderment into that death house.… Ho! if anyone passing in the night had heard him cry.… They had me battling against myself, but I went all the way, I suppose by then to prove to myself, even to the Lord, that I was mean enough to play the cards that life had dealt me and still stick to my will. They say a doctor is a butcher underneath, it’s a wonder I didn’t try to use those pistol barrels for forceps—No, but I took Papa’s old straight-edged razor and boiled the blade to sterilize it and divided the fruit from the tree. Yes, and tied up his navel cord with Mamma’s embroidery thread, fixed his first belly band. Him, Bliss. Wiped his unseeing eyes and anointed his body with oil. You, Bliss. I wrapped you in the sheet around and placed you in the crook of her sleeping arm and saw her try after all of that to smile. Her face all beaded over with sweat and I wiped that too away; then sat way back in Mamma’s rocking chair, just looking at them, dazed and defiant.
I was too tired to sleep or rest and my mind wouldn’t stop. There she was, relieved of her burden and sleeping like a peaceful child, and him beside her with his little fists already balled up for the fight of life. I couldn’t look at him too steady either. There was that one b
right drop of blood on the white sheet and I watched it growing dark, thinking: Now there’s two, one to accuse me and the other to hang me; one to point the finger and the other to rise up and shoot me down, or pull the rope to break my neck. Yes, and because of these there is no one of my own to come cut me down. There they are in Mamma’s own bed, outraged and outrageous. I started thinking about those old Hebrew soldiers who use to leave their prisoners castrated on the battlefield—but for what Jehovah could I even play Abraham to that little Isaac? Lord, my eyes must’ve been bloodshot with my thoughts and frustrations. And there Bliss was, puckered up and so new he looked like if you were to drop him he would bounce like a rubber ball….
How long did I sit there? Nobody would come to mark the passage of time and I had long ago drawn the shades and let the clock run down and she’d made me a pariah even to my own. Pariah and midwife too, and raped me of my will and my manhood. Dehumanized my human needs. Told myself, it won’t stop here. When she gets her strength she’ll scream again. Yes, but now the life is out of there and she’d beat me with a little child.… Hickman, you were crazy. Yes, but I was sane too; because what I thought there was true, though it took time to learn it in. She had torn me out of my heathen freedom so she could save herself, that was the truth. And all with that baby. With just that little seven-pound rabbit. Not even a few minutes of pleasure or relief either. Which was the last thing I would have thought about. She wasn’t even good-looking, with that thin nose and high forehead; with just that ugly-sounding way of talking through her lips and nostrils. I knew her before her skirts went down, gangle-legging along the street like a newborn foal, trying to walk with class. And him not even brown so that I could have made some sensible meaning out of her coming here to me; just nothing definite, just baby-mouse-red and wrinkled up like a monkey with a strawberry rash. And me such a slave to what a human is supposed to be that I couldn’t refuse to help him into the world. Helped him when I should, according to the way I felt then, have left him stranded and choking with the cord wrapped around his neck when her mammy-waters burst.
Now she’s sleeping, I thought. Now she’s in her woman’s exhaustion, resting out of time like a stranger to both good and evil—while here I am, tired and feeling with no relief or rest inside me or outside me. She, resting up so she can scream again and they’ll hear it all the way to the State House. Yes, but now the life is out I’m going to put us all to sleep. I mean to clear the earth of just this one bit of corruption. Which is all one can do, just clean up his own mess or that which is dumped on top of him when he has the chance.… Just look at them sleeping there, fruit of all this old cancerous wrong. Why isn’t he brown or black or kinky, so that I could see some logic in her coming here? At least allow me to see the logic of a mare neighing help from a groom who happened to be passing her stall during her foaling time. Oh no, but coming here to me … Easy, Hickman, don’t fight old battles. Maybe it was the way the sacred decided to show Himself. Would you at this age still criticize God?
Lord, O Lord, you must have been preparing me all those twenty-six years for that ordeal; giving me this great tub of guts and muscle and deep, windy lungs and this big keg-sized head and all that animal strength I used to have and which I thought was simply meant for holding all the food and drink I loved so well and to contain all the wind necessary to blow my horn and to sing all night long, sure; and for the enjoyment of women and the pleasures of sin.… Ah, but right then and there I learned that you had really given me all that simply so I could contain and survive all I was to feel sitting there through those awful hours.
Just sitting there and hating. Just sitting there looking at the two generations of them in the ease of their sleeping, and thinking back three generations more of my people’s tribulations and trying to solve the puzzle of that long-drawn-out continuation of abuse. That and why the three of us were thrown together in my house of shame and sorrow. It was a brain-breaker and a caustic in the naked eye all right, and the longer I sat there the stranger it seemed. I guess it couldn’t have been stranger than if one of Job’s boils had started addressing him, saying, “Look here now, Job; this here is your head-chief boil speaking to you. You just tell me my name and I’ll jump off your neck and take all the rest of the boils along with me.” Yes, and ole Job too used to trouble and straitjacketed in misery by then to even be surprised to learn that a boil could talk—even one of his boils—only wondering why his kin or hair or toenails or something didn’t speak up and tell the boil to be silent in the presence of the Lord. Because, Master, you must have been there with me at the time, and probably with a sad smile on your face. Even after Mamma and Robert it was like waking up on mornings in some Territory town like Guthrie in the old days and discovering that my trombone mouthpiece had grown to my lips and my good right arm changed into a slide, but with no bell anywhere to let out the sound.… Hickman, you were in a fix. You and those two strangers in the most unlikely place in the world and you the strangest of all.
Yes, with the baby mewling and raising the dickens and me having to put him to that thin, white, blue-veined tit to suck. Yes, having to guide his red little gums to that blighted raspberry of a nipple so I wouldn’t have to listen to him crying for a while. And my having to be gentle, not like a nursemaid who loves a child enough to give it a good hard pinch in the side when it vexes her too much, but just because of the murder in my heart having to be gentlest of the gentle. Just because he was a baby and me a man full of hate; and gentle with her because aside from everything else, she was a mother lying in the bed where my own mother had once lain. It was like the Lord had said, “Hickman, I’m starting you out right here—with the flesh and with Eden and Christmas squeezed together. Never mind the spirit and justice and right and wrong—or time—just now you’re outside all that because this is a beginning. So, starting right here, what will you do about the flesh? That’s what you have to wrestle with.” He had called me and I had nothing in the hole and was in too far to pass and still couldn’t take the trick by using the baby’s life as my ace, no matter whether he were dealt in spades or in hearts.
So now I had to cook for her. Go out and get that little boy, Raymond, to go bring me milk and bread and meat from the store, pretending it was for his mamma, and me picking the vegetables that Robert had planted for Mamma’s needs and then stand over the stove and prepare the meal and then feed it to her spoon by spoon. Yeah, and remembering … A little bit of poison helped her along, that old slave-time line, and coming as close to breaking out of my despair and grinning as I ever did for a long, long time. But still granting nothing to the facts. So all right, I told myself, you’re just fattening her for the time she can understand what she did and pay for it. You just be patient, just count the rest until your solo comes up. This rhythm won’t stop until you take your break; just keep counting the one-two-three-fours, the two-two-three-fours, the three-two-three-fours….
So I didn’t eat, only took water and a few sips of whiskey, never leaving the house, knocking on the windowpane in the afternoons to get little Raymond to go to the store, or to stand out on the back porch in the dark to get some fresh air. And with all that feeding and clumsy, grudging ministering to them I wouldn’t let myself think a second about life and living, only about dying. About how to kill and the way our bodies would look when they found us. And the quickest way to get it over with, how the flames would announce the news in the night. Whether to just let them find us or to have little Raymond take a note to Mamma’s pastor to tell the folks to keep off the streets …
Everything, but never whether I could save myself because that would have meant to run and I didn’t believe I had anything left to run for.
Ah, but Hickman, you were caught deaf and blind. With eyes that saw not, and ears that heard nothing but the drums of revenge. And there was that baby growing more human every second nudging his way into your awareness and making his claim upon you, and her crying all the time—in fact more than the baby did. You had fal
len into the great hole and they’d dropped the shuck in on you. There was simply too much building up inside of you for clear vision. I guess if I could have played I might have found some relief, but I couldn’t play, even if I hadn’t left my horn in Dallas when I got the word. And I couldn’t sing and if I had after all she’d done to me I’d probably sung falsetto. Then came the day …
Poor Bliss, the terrible thing is that even if I told you all this, I still couldn’t tell who your daddy was, or even if you have any of our blood in your veins.… Like when I was a boy and guessed the number of all those beans in that jar they had in that grocery window and they wouldn’t give me the prize because one wasn’t a bean, they said, but a rock! What a bunch of rascals. Ha! Ha! So outrageous that I just grinned and they had to laugh at their own bogusness. Gave me a candy bar … No, I’d still have to tell him as I told myself in the days that were to come: that who the man was was made beside the point by all that happened. Bliss started right there in that pain-filled room—or back when the fish grew lungs and left the sea. You don’t reject Jesus because somebody calls Joseph a confidence man or Mary a whore; the spears and the cross and the crime were real and so was the pain.… So then came the day when I started in from the kitchen to find her sitting on the side of the bed, her bare bony feet on the bare boards of the floor as she sat there all heavy-breasted in Mamma’s flannel nightgown; her hair swinging over her shoulder in one big braid and with eyes all pale in her sallow skin; and all weak-voiced, saying—