The Wedding (15 page)

Before he was two he could be drawn from his play by Preacher’s Bible as if it were a magnet. He sat entranced when his father made the book talk. He tried, his mind receptive and ready, but the book wouldn’t put the words in his mouth. The words were too big: holyfication, revelation, glorimostest, believering. A Bible book was for preacher people
like his father who could start it to sprouting whenever he opened it, whether he held it upside or down. His father’s face could listen out even when the Bible book was a far piece away. By a riverbank, where he and his father sat filling their pail with fish for a fish fry, or in the deepening woods, he on his father’s heels hunting a possum for supper, the words would come on the wind, whispering so softly that only his father knew the right moment to cock his ear. Then his father would tell what the words told him, with the fishes leaping up to listen or the trees bending low to hear and himself trying to catch the words in his mouth, but even one word was too much of a mouthful.

At three he asked for a book, a little bitty book. His hands outlined the size of book that would have the kind of words that a little bitty boy could fit his palate to. Preacher bought him an introductory reader, not because he knew that that was a suitable beginning but because it was the only book that matched the shape that Isaac had described. Isaac loved that book like he had given birth to it. He never let it out of his sight, as if he were waiting for it to say its first word. He carried it when he went with his mother to deliver a wash. More often than not a show-off child of the house would descend upon him while he waited for his mother to be paid and to gather up the next batch of cleaning, snatching the book from him and making it talk, knowing that this said
c
and this said
a
and this said
t
and together they said c-a-t, cat. Repeating it once was enough to latch it tightly in Isaac’s mind.

By the time he was four he could spell his way through his book with only occasional pauses for breath. He had
learned to make a book talk. Fine, but now he was hell-bent to acquire even more power in a place called school. He couldn’t be persuaded to wait until he was six. He had to go see what school was about. It was a learning place, that much he knew, and there was nothing else he needed to know to make his mouth water. He said he could walk those five miles to and five miles back without getting lost or feeling tired. He was big for his age and no mama’s boy.

Preacher prepared him for disappointment, but he could have saved his speeches. Isaac didn’t know his alphabet in its orderly progression from
a
to
z
, but he knew the name of every letter. He didn’t know what counting was, either, but he knew by rote every numbered page of his book. There was no symbol in that book that he couldn’t recite. His mind was so clearly a sponge that the examining teacher had no conscientious choice but to admit him. She just prayed that his mother had him toilet-trained, or at least instructed to say “when.”

The small academy was private, of course: the “public” in “public school” did not encompass members of Isaac’s race. The teachers, though women of good education, were not trained in their field. They were Northern spinsters of means, steeped in the New England tradition of noblesse oblige and passionate in their belief that man is not sustained by bread alone, but by bread and books. With the cause of Southern people of color still close to their abolitionist hearts, they and others of their kind and conditioning set up little private schools in many rural areas. These brave women forced the issue of public education, of teaching the children who would someday be leaders of their race how to speak for
themselves, articulately and with dignity. The token fee tied in the corner of Isaac’s handkerchief and pinned to his shirt for safekeeping was not enough to cover what it cost for him to attend. Its purpose was to make him feel prideful, to impose an obligation to work for what his parents were paying for, to encourage perfect attendance if he really wanted his money’s worth.

Isaac blossomed at the small school, and all of his hard work came to fruition his final year there, when his unrelenting instructor was a woman named Miss Amy Norton Norton—twice blessed with that revered name through the marriage of third cousins. This was to be her last year in the South, and she was determined to squeeze every ounce of potential out of her pupils. Isaac was eager to take what she had to give; he was eleven going on twelve but old for his age, and smart enough to know what was good for him. When Miss Amy Norton Norton asked him toward the end of the school year how he felt about going to school up North, he tripped on his tongue telling her how good it felt. It meant learning. It meant leaving Mama, but that hadn’t bothered him at first—not because he didn’t love Mama, but because he loved learning more.

Preacher took him to the train. His mother stayed home, not knowing if she could stand to let him go by himself onto that big scary machine. Miss Amy Norton Norton was up in the front of the train in the compartment where the white passengers rode, and Preacher and Isaac stood outside of the colored coach, at the edge of the moment of saying good-bye. “May the Lord watch between me and thee, while we are absent one from another,” Preacher said softly. And then he
put the words into a soft song, sweet and sad as chiming bells. Then the train dispatcher sang “All aboard,” harsh white singing, but contagious with promise. Isaac gathered his things to step aboard, too excited to feel the wrench in his heart. Eleven years old and big for his age, he still looked a long way from grown. As he climbed into the train, Preacher’s hand pressed hard into his shoulder. The loving pressure of that hand would stay with Isaac forever.

Preacher sang louder to cover his crying. Over and over he sang, “May the Lord watch between me and thee, while we are absent one from another. Go with my blessing. Go with God.” Isaac’s waving hand trailed out the window, and Preacher followed it with his eye until he could see only a trail of smoke.

Their parting was not unique. All over the South such sacrificial scenes were taking place, the giving of gifted colored children to the North where their mettle could be tested, their potential realized. Most of them would always be exiles. No free man returns to the yoke, but the South that was in them was in them to stay. What lingered was not the harshness of its whites, or the hovels of its blacks, but the beauty of its land, the abundance of its beauty. That remembered child, waking to the morning of the South, and rushing out to fling his arms around its rich scents, its rustling wood, its tapestry of color—that child, now man grown, spends the rest of his life pretending that he prefers the memory of some other place. For his children, yes, for his ambition, yes, for his self-respect, yes, but for his remembering there is no sweeter memory than the South.

Preacher lingered on the platform, sad but not sorrowful.
His son had given him much joy, and the tears in his eyes were tears of loss, but they were also tears of pride and hope. He finally turned away from the empty tracks. He had given much of his life to the healing of souls, and now he had given up his only son so that someday he could learn how to heal with a different science.

When the train got to Washington, Miss Amy fetched Isaac, buying him a ticket for her parlor car. He brought his paper sack of food with him. He’d saved the best pickings for Miss Amy, who had got on board the train back home with no sign of a parcel that looked like food. Miss Amy thanked him for his thoughtfulness but explained that they would eat hot meals in the dining car. She gave his greasy sack to a porter to dispose of, sensing that a colored porter would prefer this delicate cover of disparagement to her telling him right out from her fancy seat in the parlor car to take her white folks trash to some poor mother in the coach.

Isaac entered the Chestnut Hill home of Miss Amy and her father as her protégé. He ate his meals with them, and learned his manners from them, and served as a servant of sorts. He slept on a separate floor with the colored servants, old retainers who were set in their duties and jealous of sharing them. They relinquished such a meager portion of chores to Isaac that it was child’s play to complete them, but Miss Amy was satisfied that he was improving his character by working his way through school, if only nominally.

Miss Amy sent Isaac to the day school that her married brother had attended as a boy, convinced that his mind would rot in public school. She remained militant about the
right of colored children to free education, but she believed that in Boston public schools, crowded as they were with children of Irish immigrants, the level of excellence expected would fall far beneath the high-water mark she set for Isaac.

When Isaac’s spring term ended, he found himself going with Miss Amy and her father to a distant island. It was an impossibly grand adventure for a backwoods boy whose only experience of islands was as places for shipwrecks in stories. That they were going on a
vacation
made the journey even more of an unknown adventure. He knew about visits—they were trips you took to see somebody sick or bury somebody dead. But a vacation was going someplace just to be going someplace, and having a place to live in once you got there. And the place! It was a sprawling four-story affair, blue with white shutters, with a big porch for sitting; the idea that a house this size would sit empty for eight months out of the year was beyond Isaac’s ken.

They had only been on the island a day when they had to take the carriage down to the dock to fetch Miss Amy’s brother and his family, who had come for their annual reunion with Miss Amy’s father. Miss Amy’s brother had moved to California some years ago, his sensibilities never having quite adjusted to New England’s aridity, nor his temperament to the prudishness of the Boston well to do. The cross-country trek with four children, trunks, pets, a nurse, a personal maid, and a wife who would have preferred to flaunt her Parisian dresses in a more fashionable locale was long, tedious, and hardly worth it, except that Miss Amy’s father was old enough to change his will on a whim.

Isaac slept alone, in a bedroom on the top floor. In this
way he lived at a remove from the other children, and also in that Miss Amy made sure that he had sufficient chores to keep his character from succumbing to summer wilt. Her brother was more lax, as was his nature, and Miss Amy regretted that his brood fell outside of her jurisdiction. But Isaac ate with the other children, learned to swim with them, and spent as much time as he could riding beside them in their pony cart. Though they knew that he was colored, they were still too young to know that they should care. His copper skin was scarcely darker than their own summer-tanned faces, his manners had certainly been more strictly supervised, and his accent was well on its way to being indistinguishable from the speech he was exposed to at school and at home.

Isaac loved the island, which in the 1880s showed no advance signs of the coming century of cars and cocktail parties and colored people above the servant class. The carriages and pony carts enhanced the island’s charm without really increasing its pace. City ways were left behind. Innocence walked barefoot down every dirt road. There were hay rides and boating, lawn croquet and lemonade, days spent picking in the woods when the blueberries ripened, clambakes and the fire company’s band serenading the summer night. Where the Norton children went, Isaac went too, and the Norton children went everywhere, with their pony cart, their sailboat, their secret tree house, their lemonade parties (held on the glassed-in porch when it rained). Wherever they were, it was lonesome someplace else.

The strong will of many a determined New England mother was sooner or later dissolved by the sight of her
deserted child scuffing the dirt in front of his door, ordered to stay behind while the rest of the lively herd went off on some adventure with the Norton children and “a boy whose ancestors ate each other.” The trouble was that Isaac never showed his cannibal side. There was nothing about him to make children shy away. A little boy born with copper skin set down amid a swarm of little boys with copper skin on summer loan was almost impossible to single out unless some overcurious mother were to make the ridiculous request, “Will the real copper boy go home.”

Isaac was part of it all until the year he turned fourteen. In the winter of that year Miss Amy’s father died, and in the summer of that year the Norton children were taken to Europe. Their island visits were over, their father no longer bound by his own greed to make an annual pilgrimage to the keeper of the purse. There was no need, for he had won: the family textile mills were all his. With them he bought an ambassadorship. Now a member of the really rich, he wanted something outside the reach of the merely rich, who only stay rich by never touching their principal. For the really rich, who can buy anything, and have already bought it, an ambassador’s title—with no cash required but the profuse spending of it implied—was life’s
ne plus ultra
.

The will left Miss Amy some coupons to clip and the family houses as legacy, which was no more and no less than her spinsterhood expected. She could keep herself in comfort in the only two places where she felt at home. She wanted the familiar; her brother wanted the foreign. He wanted more, and he got it, but what is the measure of contentment?

That summer, Isaac and Miss Amy made the passage to
Martha’s Vineyard as they always had. The rambling summer house felt empty, though, and somehow foreboding. Other things had changed on the island as well. Without the Norton children, and their pony cart and sailboat—both sold because neither Miss Amy nor Isaac could think of a sensible reason why a poor boy working his way through school should be saddled with their upkeep—Isaac was without the ballast that heretofore had kept him afloat in a sea of maternal misgivings. Now the island’s mothers threatened dire punishment, the loss of precious privileges and worse, to any whiny gutless child who had no stomach for snubbing Isaac. There was no time to let him down lightly. He was taller by a head than he had been the previous summer, and his voice had lost its limp innocence. Over the winter this playful dog had grown wolf-sized, his nature unpredictable. The children’s safe world was now imperiled, and the protective instinct of a mother compelled her to keep her charge at a distance.