Three Days Before the Shooting ... (23 page)

I say “astonished” because of what I discovered about myself when facing the ordeal of confronting Laura’s mother. I delayed for days, rushing about like a man searching for a hidden time bomb. It was a sore, nerve-racking trial; for as the implications of our situation began to come home to me, I found myself torn between my love, my sense of honor, and the fierce new aspect which the future revealed, now that I would have a dark wife and child perhaps as dark. Frankly, I was frightened. The rose-tinted bloom of Laura’s brown complexion which had been until now an intriguing veil hiding a lovely human mystery, had suddenly become the very skin of terror itself. In my passion and joy I had never allowed the practical problems of our relationship to give me real concern; now the questions of where we would live and how my parents and employers would react to our marriage confronted me—and suddenly I was no longer courageous, nor avant-garde, nor even sure of my own mind and heart.

I told myself that I loved Laura just as much, perhaps even more, now, with the confluence of our bloods. And for herself alone, for she was a unique and lovely individual, a rare person. But now the questions of who I was, and who and what my parents and relatives were and had been, tore me apart. History, both past and future, haunted my mind. It was no longer merely an Hegelian abstraction, for I had been plunged into its bewildering interior. Now, for the first time since childhood, I felt need for the security symbolized by that thin chain of being personified by my parents, that lifeline of kinship which extended through time and space, from England and France to America, that I hoped would sustain me in my adventure into the dark interior of society. I visited the genealogical room of the Forty-second Street Library and brooded over the charts. I became obsessed with coats-of-arms, the signs and symbols of heraldry, the sounds and overtones of the name “McIntyre.” I burned to know by what chain of genes Laura was sustained, and knowing my own pressing need and being alerted to the existence
of gaps and mysteries, I surmised that Laura probably knew very little of whence she came, and this filled me with panic. Where, out of what past had she actually come to so dazzle me? Who and what stood back there in the dark behind her? How would they assume form, become repersonalized, now that they were linked with my future destiny? And what, I wondered—and here was the most embarrassing question of all—just what color would the baby’s bottom be?

I became so upset that I couldn’t eat. Nevertheless, I was determined to do the manly thing, although I couldn’t imagine that any pressure of outrage or revenge would be brought against me as might have been true had ours been a more orthodox relationship. Instead, I reassured myself that when the initial shock and unpleasantness were past, Laura’s parents might even find our marriage highly desirable. Given the shape and values of society, I saw no reason why they shouldn’t. After all, my prospects were, relatively, unlimited.

Nevertheless, I realized my inexperience in these matters; I knew that mothers were formidable—at least, my own could be—and thus I found myself numb before the prospect of meeting my girl’s parents. We’d never met because her father was always away on his job, her mother was never a participant in our activities, and because Laura had been shy about inviting me to her home (a circumstance that I had interpreted generously in my own direction—which was, I believed, the direction of the smooth and unhampered future). Since my own parents lived in another state, there had been no problem of introducing Laura to them. And this aside, I was on my own and, I thought, in absolute rebellion against the past, all ties of family. I would cross that bridge when and if I came to it.

But now, since I had the responsibility of informing a mother of her daughter’s unwed condition, it was necessary that I meet Mrs. Johnson. She would become aware sooner or later, since Laura was attending City College and living at home, and I hoped that, by informing her now, things would be made easier for all concerned. There would soon be doctor bills and special care for which, naturally, I would pay, and the time would soon arrive when she’d walk heavy with my love and then, by mid-July, be introduced to motherhood. So after a night of terror and a morning of indecision, I braced myself and took the elevated train up Columbus Avenue to Harlem….

Standing there numb in my pain and watching old Hickman squirm in his chair, it was as though he were sitting beside me on the heavy-hearted ride, high there above the street. Then in my mind’s eye I was looking out at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which loomed to our left, a flock of pigeons kiting lazily above its unfinished dome as the train climbed high above 110th Street, curving eastward. Then we were rumbling down to the dark of
Eighth Avenue and curving northward again with a noisy grinding of wheels and rails.

It was a chill, slate-gray wintry day when I climbed down to the street. Dirty snow lay over the ground and, though now late afternoon, cans spilling over with snow-drifted ashes and garbage still lined the walks. I moved beneath the thundering El for a few blocks, past small restaurants, barbershops with idle, slickheaded barbers, pink-and-blue-fronted beauty parlors and cheap law offices with windows prominently displaying red public notary seals, then turned into Laura’s windy side street, where a funeral cortege of black limousines with dark people in mourning dress, the women in crepe-covered hats, the men grim-faced and still, began creeping eastward behind a dark maroon hearse. Behind the ornately framed glass a gray coffin with a large military flag lay exposed beneath a wreath and a few sprays of white carnations. In the family car a light-skinned woman in widow’s weeds sat silently weeping.
A soldier
, I thought. I had forgotten that some were career army men. Then, keeping carefully to the deeper ruts of the ice-caked street, it was past, and a gang of ragged, snotty-nosed black children swept by, brushing my legs and jeering like a catastrophe of starlings. A short distance ahead I saw them sliding, arms and legs spread wide, over the icy walk to stop before a basement candy store, then, shouting like a band of Comanches taking a fort, they plunged inside. There was not a single mulatto among them….

At Laura’s building I began to feel like a man condemned to death row. My girl’s mother was an immigrant from the South. A short, large-breasted, matronly dark woman whom I’d seen only in photographs, she was quite religious and outspokenly hostile to many of the more interesting forms of Harlem life as well as to the world of social action in which Laura moved. Until now, I had thought of her as an amusing, old-fashioned, and probably superstitious Southern figure whose relation to most of Laura’s life was conveniently shadowy. But now, as I moved to meet her, it was as though to confront for the first time all of the darker complications of life, society, and history.

There were seven Johnson families living in the building, and the bell system was faulty, requiring that I try five doors before receiving the proper instruction. It was on the seventh floor, and I climbed the narrow stairs heavy with the odor of food and living.
It’s fish
, I thought, half humorously,
old fish. The ghosts of a school of dead fish swimming forever in the air of the stairs
. Then I was pressing the bell with shaking hand and hearing its watery ringing within.
Fish
, I thought,
the entire building must live on cabbage and fish
. Then the door was cracked and I saw her; a large woman with graying hair drawn back from a smooth brown high-cheekboned face. Her coloring was dark, with a blush of red showing through like that of certain Indians. Her eyes seemed
to look into me from behind a mask or a thicket of smooth leaves. She wore a shapeless black-and-white-checked dress.

“Yes, sir?” she said.

“If possible, I’d like to see Mrs. Johnson,” I said.

“You have the correct one,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Johnson.”

“Oh, good,” I said. I stared; the resemblance was unmistakable; she was a darker, older Laura, gone to plumpness, humility, and suspicion.

“Yes, sir, I’m Mrs. Johnson,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Ernestine Johnson, and Thomas Jonathan Johnson, he’s my husband. Just what is it you want to see me about?”

My stomach tightened and my mind took off, and I thought,
Would one have to call her “Mother,” this big black woman, and be part of her most likely classic matriarchy, and my boy baby grandson to a dining-car waiter always on the railroad destiny while Laura flew out of nest but still in net with fish and turnip greens Southern-style always, and my baby son her grandson and me her son-in-law to be … to be …
?

She had begun to frown. “Mister,” she said, “are you all right?”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Johnson; forgive me,” I said. “I have to talk with you. It’s urgent. May I come in?”

She looked at my hands, her eyes narrowing.

“Why can’t you just say it right here?” she said.

“I’d rather speak to you inside, if I may. It’s about Laura and our plans—”

“What! Laura Jean?” Her eyes widened as she took a step backwards, the door swinging wide. “Step right in here,” she said.

I hesitated, her face suddenly glistened with beads of perspiration. A sharp, sultry fog of deodorant pressed around me. Then I was brushing past the huge softness of her into a dark vestibule. The odor of spiced apples coming to me from somewhere down the hall was a breath of relief.

“Go on into the living room on your right,” she said behind me. “We can talk in there.”

I found myself in a medium-sized, high-ceilinged room, furnished with three modest upholstered chairs, a coffee table, and a sofa set on a blue rug. Against the opposite wall an upright piano stood with a row of framed photographs arranged on top, one of them of Laura in white cap and gown, flanked by her smiling parents. Across the room to my left there stood a small bookcase containing a few books and a group of childlike porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses in eighteenth-century dress and genteel postures. Two potted poinsettias, one of them with a natural bract of scarlet and the other a pale green, almost albino, sat on the window ledge. It was all quite neat and surprisingly clean.

“Take that comfortable chair over there,” Mrs. Johnson said. And I sat, facing the blue-draped window as she took a chair with her back to it, watching me nervously from the back-lighted shadow.

“Mrs. Johnson, my name is Welborn McIntyre,” I began.

“Oh!” she gasped, becoming quickly silent. I counted to ten in my mind, then, “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. McIntyre—though I must say that Laura didn’t tell me that you were white….”

“She didn’t?”

She shook her head. “That’s right, she didn’t.”

I tried to smile. “That was probably because between us it isn’t significant.”

“Well, it is to me, Mr. McIntyre….” Her voice was throaty with sudden emotion.

She sat back, folding her broad arms across her breasts, regarding me.

“And I’ll tell you something else, Mr. McIntyre: Something warns me that I’m not going to like whatever it is you come up here to tell me. So unless you’re sure that you just have to say it, maybe you better go back and think about it awhile….”

A smile fluttered up then died stillborn somewhere behind the stiff surface of my face. I wished urgently to take her advice and leave, but I could only sit there, looking with silent fascination into her eyes. She looked like many of the black women whom I had seen so often, moving about the streets of downtown residential areas, and now, although I had never been in a room alone with one before, I was bound to her through Laura. Then I was seized with a sense of the unreality of it all. And suddenly I was no longer simply looking into her own eyes but through a window onto a long-forgotten scene in which my mother was calling to me in her own sweet, coaxing voice….

And I was four and playing in the backyard with friends while mother’s club was meeting, and hearing her calling from the porch, “Welborn, darling, come here a minute.”

“But gee, Mother, I’m playing.”

“I know, darling, and I won’t keep you long. You just tell the children to wait.”

“But do I have to? We’re playing.”

“Now, Welborn, just tell them to hold the game. You won’t be long.”

“Oh, all right.”

“Hurry back, Wel,” Jimmy called, and I was running to where Mother waited, holding open the screen door
.

“This won’t take long, Welborn, darling,” she said. “There’s just something I want you to do for Mother. You’ll do it, won’t you, darling?”

“I guess so,” I said, and I was thinking
, She wants me to recite “Invictus” for those ladies but I’m tired of “Invictus.” “If” is better.
Then we were in the hall and she was looking me over, saying, “Wel, dear, you’d better run and wash your hands and face—especially your hands, they’re filthy—then you come into the parlor and we’ll only keep you a minute,” and I was running up the stairs to splash and hurry down again…
.

They were sitting about in their summer dresses, drinking from cups of tea and all talking at the same time, and there was a coconut cake on the coffee table and I hoped there’d be some left for me and the gang, then Mother was saying, “Oh, there he is, ladies,” and some of them said, “Hello, Welborn,” and I said hello and was running “In-victus” through my mind so as to remember the order of the words—
black pit pole pole unconquerable soul head bloody head unbowed
—and they were smiling and waiting and I said, “Mother, where do you want me to stand?” and she said “Come-over-darling. Come over where the ladies can see you better. And ladies, perhaps it would be better if you all gathered around….” And I thought
, Gather around for what?
“He’s a fine-looking boy, isn’t he?” one of them said. “He looks just like his mother.” “Yes, and that’s a sure sign of good luck,” and Mother got up and took me by the hand. “Welborn, darling,” Mother said, “the ladies have been listening to a very interesting and important and serious discussion but some of them are unfamiliar with the problem, so I told them that you wouldn’t mind giving them a hand. And I looked at my hands, and said, “But don’t you want me to recite ‘Invictus’?” and she smiled and said, “Invictus,’ darling? Oh, that’s not it at all.” “But what is it, then,” I said. “I don’t remember another one.” “Oh, it isn’t to recite, dear, it’s something much easier,” and she was smiling and they were watching and I said, “What is it, then?” And she said, “And now won’t you be surprised—Wel, dear, I only wanted you to be nice and show the ladies your recent operation.” And I was looking at her and shaking my head and feeling her grip tightening on my hand and my face burning. “Oh, no,” I said, thinking she was teasing. “Now, Welborn,” she said, “be nice, darling, all you have to do is allow the ladies to see what a nice neat operation the doctor performed.” “But I can’t do that.” “But why, Wel?” “Because Daddy wouldn’t like it and you told me never to—” “Oh, no, Wel, Daddy would be proud. So now be nice.” “But why?” “Because some of the ladies don’t have little boys of their own. So now you just show them and then you can go play.” And I tried to fall down but she held me up. “Aren’t men the darndest?” a large lady with a drawl said. “Always modest before our curiosity and spirit of inquiry, but you just let the wind blow and then watch them break their necks.” “Please darling,” Mother said, “or I won’t allow you to go outside; you’ll have to go up to your room instead….” “Oh, leave him alone, Agnes,” Mrs. Waters said. “He’s bashful and not at all the little man we thought he was….” “Is that true, Welborn?” Mother said, “Aren’t you my little man?” “Of course I am, but I don’t think men do what you want me to do. Daddy wouldn’t—”