All-Bright Court (2 page)

One evening after everyone else was gone, Parker said, “Don't eat standing up. Food go right to your feet that way. Don't you know that?”

“Naw,” Samuel said, his mouth stuffed with mashed potatoes.

“I believe you don't. You act like a boy ain't got nobody to learn you nothing. You a boy ain't got nobody to learn you nothing?”

Samuel glared at him. “You the one don't know nothing. I know enough to leave here. You won't catch me standing in no kitchen when I'm a grown man.”

“Let me tell you something,” Parker said. “You don't know your ass from your elbow. I ain't got to cook for you, boy. But I see you come here, a raggedy-ass boy, raggedy as a bowl of sauerkraut. I see you boys coming in here. Dreaming. Dreaming. Them
my
dreams ya'll got in ya'll eyes. Ya'll daddy's dreams. Ya'll grandaddy's.

“We ain't made it. I ain't going to make it. Look 'round here,” Parker said, waving a spatula. “This my life, boy. This how big it's ever going be. And let me tell you something. I chastise you 'cause I'm trying to teach you something. Think ya'll got dreams men my age ain't never had.” Parker took off his apron and folded it.

A biscuit was swelling in Samuel's mouth. He watched Parker put on a thin cotton jacket.

“Put the light out when you finish, boy.”

Samuel forced himself to swallow the pasty biscuit. He scraped the food left on his plate into the garbage can and washed his plate and fork.

When he went home, the uncle was sitting in the living room in the dark, listening to the radio. “Your aunt sleeping at work tonight. She be back tomorrow night,” he said.

Samuel stood staring at him, his figure, the hole it punched in the darkness.

“What you looking at, boy?” the shadow asked.

“Nothing,” Samuel said, and he went to his room and wept.

The next evening at work Samuel stood over the sink trying to finish up rapidly. He had not been able to bring himself to look at Parker all day. But when he was getting down to the last few pots, a hand slid a plate of food onto the drain board.

“Thank you,” he said softly. He dried his hands on his apron, pulled up a stool, and sat down.

“That's better,” Parker said. “Since you know how to sit down and eat, I might can have you over to the house sometime.”

Parker invited him the next week, to church and Sunday dinner. Samuel had one suit of Sunday clothes, the one he had worn to his mother's funeral. When he tried it on, he discovered it had shrunk. The pants and jacket were both too short. The jacket was too tight across the chest, and he could not get the pants zipped. He had his own money, so he dipped into his savings to buy a pair of pants, a new shirt, a new pair of shoes, all of which were too big.

Parker waited until dinner to comment on Samuel's clothes. “Let me tell you something, Sam. A colored man in the South got to know how big he is.”

“That ain't right,” Parker's daughter said. Her name was Mary Kate. She was a girl with skin as shiny and black and purple as eggplant. “It ain't right,” she repeated, her voice rising. “We can't even try on clothes.”

Samuel sat staring at her. The gold in Parker's mouth was not his only wealth.

“In the North a colored man ain't got to know his size. In the North a man can be as big as he want,” Parker said.

“I hear you going north,” Parker's wife said.

“Yes, ma'am,” Samuel said.

“What your mama think? You still a young boy.”

“I don't have no mama. No daddy neither,” Samuel said flatly.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Parker's wife said.

“I'm going north too,” Mary Kate interjected. Samuel looked at her and smiled. He was picking at his food.

“What's wrong with the food?” Parker asked.

“Nothing. It's real good.”

“Well eat up, boy,” Parker said.

“Parker,” his wife said, “let the boy alone.”

Samuel was too nervous to eat. He would always believe that he had fallen in love with Mary Kate on this very first day.

“You ain't going nowhere till you finish high school,” Parker said to Mary Kate. “And you might not go then.”

“We could all go, Daddy,” she said, and then turned to Samuel. “My daddy got a cousin living in Cleveland, living real good.”

“Columbus,” her mother said. “And don't be bragging.”

“We could all go someday,” Mary Kate said.

“We'll see,” Parker said.

Samuel began coming over to Parker's every weekend. For nearly two years he would come by on Saturdays and take Mary Kate to the movies, and he would have little gifts for her that he'd bought at the five-and-dime, candy, nuts, satin flowers, perfume. He even brought her two goldfish once. Mary Kate placed them in a shallow bowl on her bedside table, but when she woke up the next morning they had disappeared. At first she thought maybe they had turned themselves into birds and flown away. But when her feet touched the ground she saw them lying on the floor looking wide-eyed and surprised.

On Sundays Samuel and Mary Kate would go to church with her parents, and then have dinner. He first kissed her on a Sunday. They were hidden in the canopy of a peach tree in her back yard, supposedly picking peaches. Surrounded by the dark greenness, he discovered the insides of her cheeks were like cantaloupe, wet and soft and slick.

Parker knew the time had come for Samuel to leave, and as they were finishing up work one evening he said, “You slowing up.”

“No, sir,” Samuel said. “I'm the fastest dishwasher in Tupelo.”

“Yeah, and if you keep it up, you can say that for a lifetime. I ain't talking 'bout your work, son. You sweet on my daughter, and she slowing you up.”

“She not slowing me up. I'm not slowing . . . What's wrong with me liking her?”

“Ain't a thing wrong with it. Let me tell you something. If I thought something was wrong with it, you wouldn't be seeing her.”

“You think I ain't going north,” Samuel said.

“Let me tell you something. There's another boy that like Mary Kate.”

“Who?” Samuel asked, his voice filled with anger. “She ain't never said nothing 'bout a boy.”

“Women don't never tell you they seeing somebody else. What, you crazy, boy? Women smart. But don't you get riled up. She ain't stutting him, and he got a college education. This boy went to Southern. You know Southern?”

“No,” Samuel said, disgusted. He wiped white suds from his hands and sat down.

“It's a Negro college in Baton Rouge. Boy got him a degree. And you know what he do?”

Samuel did not answer.

“I say, you know what he do?”

“No,” Samuel said.

“He a Pullman porter, riding the Crescent from New Orleans to Chicago. Up and down. Back and forth. Come here time to time talking big. He fenna move to Chicago. He fenna get him a job up in a skyscraper. Going to sit on top the world. Only thing, that he stuck on the train. I think the boy scared to get off up there.”

“You don't think I can make it up north,” Samuel said.

“I ain't say that.”

“You say this college boy ain't make it,” Samuel said.

“I say this college boy ain't make it. Get the potatoes out your ears, boy. I say he too scared to try. Don't get me wrong now. I ain't knocking a education. A education a good thing. I wish I had one, a piece of paper saying I was smart. But a piece of paper don't make you a man. That boy don't think he a man. You think you a man, I know that. Necking with my daughter.”

Samuel smiled, his eyes cast down.

“You think you a damn grown man. I'm telling you it's time to go. You letting your dreams slip through your fingers a nickel at a time. You got to go and do what you got to do. Mary Kate ain't going nowhere. You make good up north, and you can come back for her,” Parker said.

 

Samuel had made good. He'd gone to New York, upstate, where the steel mills were hiring. He had gotten a job at Capital Steel, saved his money, and two years later he married Mary Kate and brought her back to Lackawanna, a small city just south of Buffalo.

The day she arrived, he paraded her up and down the main street of the town, Ridge Road, as if the three blocks were the Great White Way. There was a five-and-dime, a cleaners, a laundry, churches, an A & P. The grocery store was huge—eight aisles, six check-out counters. The smell of freshly ground coffee filled the store. Sawdust was sprinkled on the polished wooden floor. A red-faced butcher stood behind the meat counter.

They went to the Jubilee Theatre and sat in the front row. They had ice cream sodas at the counter in the drugstore. They even went skating. But Mary Kate didn't want to go to Dulski's Diner. “I can cook at home,” Mary Kate would say. Home for them was 18 All-Bright Court.

 

Samuel sopped up the eggs that had dripped onto his plate with a piece of white bread, quickly finished his coffee, and put some change on the counter. The snow bit at his face as he left the steamy warmth of the diner and hurried back to All-Bright Court, his hand-me-down home.

Capital Steel had thrown the tenement together during World War I in an effort to bury the Germans, two hundred units of nameless temporary housing built in the shadow of the plant for the white workers—the Poles, the Italians, the Slavs, even the Germans—who showed up day after day like migrating birds. Even as the cinder blocks of the buildings were being set in place they were crumbling. It made no difference to the men who moved in with their families. They arrived with their bellies empty and their mouths full of lies. They showed up daily, lying in Polish, in Italian, in Russian, and even in German, saying they knew how to work steel, knew about coke ovens and blast furnaces, rolling mills. What great liars they were; they knew telling the truth was a guarantee of nothing. This was the first chance many of them had had to live on their own. They moved their families out of drafty boarding houses, out of a brother's, an in-law's, a cousin's, a friend's. It meant a front and back yard, a stone front porch that was shared with a neighbor, a back stoop of their own, an upstairs and downstairs. Thirteen rectangular buildings stood on one side of Hanna, a dead-end street; on the other were twelve. Each building contained eight two-story apartments, all facing west to east, their backs to the sun.

Day and night the men went to work from their temporary housing. The women stayed home and watched clouds of red, gray, and orange smoke scudding across the hazy sky. Their men made these clouds. Night and day. More than five thousand men worked at the plant, worked day and night. They were an army; it was they who buried the Germans.

Twenty-five years later they buried the Germans again. They were an even bigger army now. Ten thousand men descending into the mouth of hell, night and day.

The tenement was still there, falling apart, its cinders turning into ashes. Capital promised to build the men new homes. Some men didn't wait. They began building houses on the streets surrounding the tenement, staking claim to their futures with thirty-year mortgages.

It was not until 1955 that Capital built new houses for the workers, five hundred houses in Capital Park, a town just to the south of Lackawanna, and five hundred more in a section of Lackawanna across the tracks it named Capital Heights. These prefab houses, trucked in and assembled on half-acre lots, were built for the Poles, the Russians, the Serbs, the Czechs, the Yugoslavs, the Romanians, the English, the Irish, the Scots, the Danes, the Italians, and even the Germans.

No blacks were permitted to buy the houses. Capital was not being unfair, but the past could not be changed.

So the buildings of the tenement were painted to stop them from crumbling, and they were handed down to the black workers. The buildings were painted bright colors, blue, white, yellow, pink, green, and the tenement was given a name, All-Bright Court. That was what it was, a reflection of postwar optimism, bright and shining.

Like Samuel, most of the people in All-Bright Court had recently come from the South, seduced by the indoor plumbing, the gas stoves, the electric refrigerators, dazzled by the splendor, the brightness of it all. Just like the white men, the black workers had mouths full of lies, though some had really worked steel before, in Birmingham, Baltimore, Pittsburgh. What they saw in All-Bright Court was the dream they dreamed down south. They did not see the promise of a dream crumbling under a few layers of paint.

2

“T
HERE SOMETHING
wrong with old-man children. They slow or they crazy. Men always blame it on the women. Say old women have 'flicted kids. But old men be having them too. It's them old sperm.” This was what people said of Isaac's father. He was an old man, and Isaac looked like an old man's child.

Isaac's head was too big for his body. It was too long and thin. His hair was sparse and dry, and Dixie Peach added no sheen. The pomade made his head shine, but his hair stayed dull.

But the boy was not slow. Just as Miss Ophelia had predicted, the boy was crazy. Ten years ago, when Isaac wasn't quite two, Miss Ophelia heard him talking, talking in full sentences to his father, who was an old man even then.

“Daddy,” he said. “Daddy, I'm wet. Take me home and change my diaper.”

Miss Ophelia called Isaac and his father over to her porch. “That boy too little to be talking like that. He got too much sense. He using it all up now, and when he grow up he ain't going have none. You mark my words. He going to be crazy when he grow up.”

Isaac pulled on his father's hand as Miss Ophelia spoke. He wanted to move on, but his father stood and listened to the woman's words. He listened out of respect because, though he was an old man, she was even older than he. When his father didn't move, Isaac let go of his father's hand and dropped to the ground. He began spinning around on his back, and when his father did not respond, he got to his knees and began banging his head on the cement. With the first hit, the skin on his forehead cracked, and blood came. His father picked him up and rushed away with Isaac in his arms. Isaac would not let his father touch his wound, so his father rubbed his legs to calm him. He found trouble hiding in the boy's legs. It was in Isaac's bones, and his father began working it out of him.