Part 38 (1/2)

So down to Lola's I went. And I met me somebody. A big, black, burly somebody. Six and a half feet tall. King was there taking pictures of the colored folks dancing and drinking and flirting with each other's wives. He'd snap awhile, then duck back in that room behind the bar awhile. It was crowded that Sat.u.r.day night, seemed like everybody wanted their picture took. King stuck his head out the door and hollered over where I was sitting drinking my soda pop, trying to make like it was something else.

”Come on in here and help me, girl.”

Turned out to be, King had a darkroom set up in there where he was printing up the pictures as quick as he could shoot them. I got a quick lesson and was left to develop film and print pictures for the rest of the evening. We were a good team from day one. Just like a key and lock when they're well greased and not rusty. One works the other.

King, he was a natural-born salesman. Loud and friendly, could tell a s.h.i.+ne joke to a church mother and have her laughing at the filthiest lines. People just took a liking to him. He'd jolly them into having their pictures took; sweet-talk the womens, buddy up the mens. We'd sometimes pull in two hundred dollars on a good night. We'd work Chicago, Gary, Milwaukee, Peoria, and every place in between. Lord, wasn't that the good life?

See, me-I was the quiet type. I was happy to be in the back in the dark, with the noise and the music and the laughter floating back to me. I never missed a thing. Anything I ain't overheard, the pictures told the story the minute they start coming to life in the fix.

And if they didn't have nothing to say, King sure would. When the night was over we'd go on back home, count up our money, and King would tell me which woman got drunk and danced the hootchie-kootchie on the bar, who beat whose b.u.t.t in what fight, what songs the band was singing that night.

King had him a good singing voice. He could croon just as good as that other man they called King who used to work the same juke joints we did before he went and got famous singing: ”Unforgettable, that's what you are.”

What went wrong with your daddy and me? The lock ran out of grease. The key wore down. Children started being born.

Maybe I should never have had kids. Lord knows I love you both. But when I had taken care of other people's babies it was so easy. When I had my own, it was hard as day-old biscuits. Hard as a pimp's heart. Hard as the sun-baked row you know you got to hoe. That's why I look after old folks now. Seems I'm better helping ease folks out of life than I am raising them up in it.

Your brother, Benny, wasn't right from the beginning. He wanted to go out of this life the minute he came in it. Maybe they should have let him. They worked on him a good twenty minutes to bring him back. But part of him stayed over on the other side. He always hung back. Slow to crawl, slow to walk, slow to talk. Took him ten years to get up to where most boys would be at two. And he ain't never went no further.

Big, lively King and his slow son, Benny. It broke his heart every time he looked at the boy. And it broke my heart when I saw him looking. He never laid blame, but I always felt to blame. Like I must have done something wrong to make a child that wasn't right. Maybe it was the smoke in the air of all them juke joints. Maybe it was the chemicals I always had my hands in.

When I got pregnant again King made me come off the road.

”You a mother now. Soon to be mother of two. These late nights and smoky taverns ain't the right life for a mother.”

You was a normal child, even though you came six weeks early. Black as a raisin and smart as a whip. But Lord, I ain't never seen such a colicky baby. Always wanted somebody to be holding you. If not, you cried. Girl, you could lay up there for an hour, flailing those little legs and wailing those little lungs. Once you got started good, Benny would join in. Sometimes I'd have to go out on the porch just to get away from the noise and have a minute to myself.

King was away working nights, sometimes overnight. And my mind would be working overtime. I'd be seeing him with some woman in the corner of a tavern somewhere. I'd hear his deep laugh mixed in with her soft one, while I sat up and listened to babies screaming.

Motherhood turned me into somebody I didn't like. A prying, jealous, hateful somebody. The kind of woman who goes through wallets and listens in on phone calls. A woman who boils water and sharpens knives. King was a traveling man. I knew that when I met him. One day he went out on the road and didn't come back.

Well, they say what goes around, comes around. And I lived to have a man who would do me like I did King. You know who I'm talking about. A man so jealous-hearted he couldn't stand to hear another man's name on my lips. A man who burned up my clothes on the barbecue grill because he said they showed too much of me. A man who wants to own every step I take, every thought I think, every breath I draw. I know you two never got along, but Otis ain't a bad man in his way. Sometimes I wish I had let him straight alone. It's too late to fret on that now.

And I don't hold hard feelings for King no more. He was a man who couldn't live with chains dragging at him. If I saw him today I would tell him that I lived to understand why he had to go.

Lola, Dennis, or King? Who do you think would make the best story? Or what would you say if I told you this? My most Unforgettable Character is me. Callie Mae Clemmons, forty-five years old. Born in Battle Creek, Michigan, raised up in Cairo, Illinois.

My daddy was a traveling man, too. He was an evangelist who went all up and down the country preaching revivals. He used to say that G.o.d got him up one morning and told him to spread the word far and wide. And he never stopped moving until a lightning bolt caught him while driving to a revival one night.

I never knew my mother. They say she used to go out on the road with him, singing gospel and pa.s.sing the plate. I was born on the road, halfway between a church anniversary in Chicago and a revival in Detroit. My mother died giving birth to me.

Maybe that's why I come up wanting to be a traveling woman. Like that train named the City of New Orleans that would come whistling through Cairo in the night. I wanted to c.o.c.k my hat to the side, jam my hands in my pockets, and jump aboard. Just move any which way the railroad would take me. I wanted to ride that train. I wanted to be that train.

But it took a while for the blood to take. Daddy stayed on the road, I stayed on the truck farm with Big Momma. Working the land, pulling at the roots of sweet potatoes, and feeling like I was growing roots that didn't belong in that place.

I just wanted to be out somewhere. Don't you remember being so little you couldn't even wipe your nose right, but always dreaming? Wanting to be out in the world with people who ain't known you since birth. People with things left to find out about them.

I ain't done too bad. I haven't traveled far, but I've been a lot of places. From Battle Creek to Cairo. Cairo to San Francisco and back again. Phoenix, Illinois. The night side of at least a dozen little cities in Illinois and Indiana. And Chicago, that's where it all ended up.

But don't a day pa.s.s when I don't wonder what I would have done and where I would have gone if I'd lived my whole life as a free woman. With no babies to keep me home, would I be laughing on King's arm right now in some other city? Ain't no telling.

Y'all kids are gone now. I'm as free as I'm ever going to be. I could go off tomorrow if I wanted to. But seems like once I got shed of one anchor, here come another one to weight me down. A piece of job to go to, a piece of house to pay on. A piece of man to keep me company as the years go by. Well, I guess my life wouldn't make no kind of story. I lived it long, but maybe not so well. But I tell you what.

I got me a daughter who is one Unforgettable Character. That's you, baby. Allie Mae Peeples. Still as black as a raisin and smart as a whip. I guess I give you a name something like mine because I thought you would be another one of me. But, honey, ain't no such thing as making yourself over in somebody else. You don't belong to n.o.body but yourself. Allie Mae ain't hardly Callie Mae. I guess you calling yourself Alma now.

It tickled me to death when you went and done like Cousin Lola did. Changed your name to suit yourself. What you say Alma Peeples means? ”Soul of a people”? It takes a writer to think up with something like that.

When I was coming up it wasn't no such thing as a colored girl making a living as no writer. But the only difference between ain't yet and could be is trying. You sure tried. Through no help of mine, Lord forgive me.

I tried to pa.s.s my ignorance on down to you. Tried as hard as I could to write can't on your soul. But I was writing with a white crayon that couldn't make a mark. So can't wasn't never a part of your makeup.

Remember when you started busing? You must have been about twelve years old. Livia was so happy when we got you and Clarisse in the white children's school. I wasn't sure about it at first, but Livia talked me into it. You girls was so smart, but that school you'd been going to wasn't for s.h.i.+t. To me and Livia, this was a chance to get our daughters a little piece of the future.

It wasn't nothing special we were dreaming of. You'd get to finish high school without having a baby. Go to college maybe. Get a job as a schoolteacher or nurse. Just the stingy little dreams of poor colored womens.

I knew it was going to be rough on you girls. But Livia said it like this. ”At least there'd be two of you.” White folks was going to make it hard, but at least you would have each other to lean on. And be getting that good education, couldn't n.o.body take it away. Y'all got an education alright.

I seen what you went through every night on TV. It was just as bad as Little Rock ten years before. Bunch of grown-a.s.s white womens, carrying signs and hollering at a busload of helpless children. Nothing I had ever taught could have got you ready to be called n.i.g.g.e.r by womens old enough to know better.

Livia didn't get nothing but grief for her dreaming. ”What did Clarisse die from?” you used to always ask me. I didn't think that knowing would help, young as you was then. I guess I might as well tell you now. You remember that last time they carried her to the hospital? Clarisse had the sickle cell, she died in the County after having the fit that day in school.

What did I get for my dreaming? It's hard to say. You met the lynch mob at the age of twelve, lost your best friend to it. You know, I wanted to pull you out but Livia wouldn't hear of it. Said her baby's death wasn't going for nothing. Maybe you can tell me now. Was it worth it?

You stayed. Got that good education. And gone on to do much more in life than the raggedy little dreams I dreamed for you. You grew up strong, learning early on that to keep from being a beggar you had to be a fighter. But was it because of, or in spite of, me? I guess I'll never know.

All I know is that I would come home from work so late most evenings, you was already done cooking dinner and putting Benny to bed. You'd be sitting up at the kitchen table, just writing. Sometimes so mad you couldn't even speak. But writing like the lessons on that paper would save your soul. And to tell you the truth, I don't begrudge you your anger. It helped you make a way for yourself in a world where most colored womens scared to walk.

I told you that I ran into Dennis the Menace again? I was on the ward one day, collecting my sheets for the laundry. And here comes this white man loping down the hall after me, hospital gown hanging all open in the back. Thirty years later and Dennis MacAvie still showing his behind.

The money his parents had and the gumption I gave him had made him a big shot in the business world. But he was still little snotty-nosed Dennis the Menace to me, just living high in filthy-rich Lake Forest instead of San Francisco. He couldn't believe that life hadn't taken me no further than the hospital laundry.

”If you'd just apply yourself, Callie Mae, you could conquer the world. h.e.l.l, you've got twice the b.a.l.l.s of the average corporate CEO out there.”

”n.i.g.g.e.r,” I said. Since the boy had been so interested in being colored, I felt free to call him by some of the worser names we're known by. ”Don't be telling me to apply myself. I taught you the ropes when you didn't know your a.s.s from a hole in the ground. You better be out there telling your corporate boys to apply themselves and get they feet off my peoples' necks.”

I ain't asked Dennis for but one thing. I figure he owed it to me for raising him. It wasn't nothing for him to get you that college scholars.h.i.+p. And you acted like it was nothing for you to get it, too.

”Payback,” I remember you saying when you was packing for the trip out east. ”Just paying back a few pennies of the millions they've made off us for the past four hundred years.”

I should have knowed that being a schoolteacher or nurse would never be my girl's speed. You been writing things up so long, I bet you still got ink stains on your fingers. I kept everything you wrote, too. Shoot, I still got s...o...b..xes in the closet, full of the lists and letters and stories you been writing since you was old enough to pick up a pen.

See, you're like your mama and your daddy and grandfolks before you; a traveling woman. You're going places in this life. You know how to go out, yet you know how to come home. You ain't a train, you a s.h.i.+p. Can pull those anchors up, and put them back down again.

Or being a woman of today, maybe I should say my Alma is a plane with wings spread wide. With the Lord beside you and the wind behind you, ain't no telling how far this life will take you.

Now I know what you going to say. ”Mama, you lived the life. So you write the story.” But I just don't have the experience. So you take it and fix it up, make it so it reads right. I guess since you turned out to be My Most Unforgettable Character, it's only right that I split the money with you. So finish it up just as fast as you can, do we get that little piece of pocket change.