3
One day he took a walk across town to the house where he was born, the canted little shabby place where an old woman whose name he could never keep straight until she spelled it—B-e-a-u-c-h-a-m-p, pronounced Beecham—told him the story of that day, his birth day. (He had already heard it from old Mr. Heberson down at the store.) As the woman spoke he pulled a new penny notebook from his pocket and began to take notes. She said fresh out in the air he’d made sounds like he was talking to himself in an unknown language. Said the day was hot and still, all the leaves in the big poplar tree hanging straight down. Said the big old black rooster over at Hemley’s crowed and wouldn’t stop. Said, “You could smell the birth from out de alley.” She looked hard at him. “You not going to put that in the paper is you?”
“No mam, I just want to keep up with my story.”
The house—shanty, owned by Mr. Odel Dupee, an oldtime Red Row colored landlord, with rusty broken windowsills hanging like a drunkard’s lip and leaning shiplap walls—was temporarily empty due to the flight of its most recent occupants after a homebrewed liquor bust two days before. Delvin thought of moving back in himself, but he enjoyed living at the funeral home. He thought it would probably be too hard on his feelings if he did. On the porch floor were little cone-shaped piles of sawdust from where the boring bugs had been at the wood. The shabbiness of the place bothered him, humiliated him a little; he didn’t want to have to try to fix up the house. The smell he remembered of it (and occasionally ran into out in the world) made him recall the wood as oiled-down, smooth and dark, but in life that wasn’t so. The floors, walls—every part—were scabby and dry and smelled of faded and stalled living. He shied from the place.
He walked the neighborhood, stopping at various spots to ask questions about his mother. She had never been apprehended, never heard from again after her flight. Many thought she was dead. At the Emporium she was remembered by a few—forgotten by most—as a quick-spirited woman without guile but fast to anger—if he really wanted to know, real hotheaded. A fat woman in yellow stockings remembered that she liked to tear cloth into strips and try to weave something out of it but was unable to come up with anything much. She had tried to read books, too, but she couldn’t do it well enough to make it fun. Tried to play the ukulele, but couldn’t master that either.
“She was good at talking to men,” the woman said, pursing her large mouth and making a puffing sound, “good at telling funny stories.”
The room they sat in that afternoon had yellow-and-purple-striped wallpaper.
“You looking for a tryout?” she asked Delvin and he wasn’t sure what she meant and said, no, he didn’t think so.
A man in a checked yellow suit came in through a door to the right and he had a pistol butt poking out of his coat pocket. The pistol gave Delvin an exhilarated feeling and he had to press himself not to jump up and run. The man grinned at him. Bunny Boy Williams—everybody knew he lived there. He had two large steel teeth in front. He rubbed the teeth with the side of his left forefinger and grinned again at Delvin and propped himself against the striped wall.
Sweating, Delvin asked the fat woman if his mother had left anything there.
“I don’t know about that,” the woman said. She was primping a curly bronze wig on a stand as she talked. “You don’t have to be worried about that gentleman,” she said indicating Williams. “He’s all show like a green fly.”
“Would somebody else know about Mama’s things?”
“You don’t have to be afraid to look at him neither,” the fat woman said and laughed.
Delvin could feel his face burning. The woman patted his arm.
“Go ask Miss Ellereen,” she said. “She’ll know.”
Miss Ellereen, the proprietress, gave him an ivory letter opener with a broken tip that, so she said, had belonged to his mother. Chinese characters were stamped on the yellowed blade and the handle was shaded in swirls and stripes and looked as if it had once been painted gold; it was a faded blood color. Miss Ellereen said his mother was light on her feet in a way men noticed. “She had a bounce to her,” she said. “A quick mouth too.”
“You think she’s still alive?”
The woman cocked her head to the side and stared at him. A smell of anise and soapy sweat gusted from her. She wore an oversized man’s green silk robe.
“I expect she’s off in some other swell town, carrying on like she knows how to do.”
“She said my daddy’s from out west.”
“Yes, child, they all are, all them daddies.”
His love-pimping for Mr. Oliver had led to his being banished to the yard where he lived for a week in a tent made from an old quilt strung between two trees, and he wondered if word of the humiliation had gotten this far over into Red Row. The thought made him sweat some more. He said something about this and Miss Ellereen laughed outloud.
“You too nervous to know what to talk about, aint you?”
“I know, I’m just too nervous to say it.”
“Well sometimes that’s a good thing.”
She waved her fan in a way that made him know his time was up.
He found himself back at the sporting house two days later sitting on the back porch writing in his notebook as Kattie, one of the cook’s helpers, peeled baked sweet potatoes and mashed them in a pot for a soufflé. The Emporium was a world of smells. Compounded and contentious loamy perfumes hung in the air like remnants of a gas attack mixed with the rooty odors of female sweat and excretion and drippage and exfoliations and discharge—the blood and the brew, as Portia, a lanky pale-skinned woman from Florida called it—added to the multiple odors from the kitchen of pork-flavored vegetables and chops and hams and frying bacon as well as beef roasts and skillet-fried catfish from the depths of the Tennessee river and the sugary smells of yams and cakes and the sharp odor of turnips and mustard greens and rutabagas and the earthy aroma of grits and hominy and the stinks of lye and the perfumy savors of soaps to drown the lye out.
None of these stinks and perfumes completely masked the early morning stench of sour and near to rot sexualization, the grease and juice of high-velocity cell work, sexwork. The odor trailed behind the women like a beaten puppy as they came down the unpainted back stairs into the kitchen and rear parlor where on two cotton-batting-extruding couches pulled from the main parlor they threw themselves down in various stages of exhaustion or satiety for a last break or breakfast before going off to bed. These were the smells that were the most exotic to Delvin. Each woman had a slightly different odor. Each was in its own way interesting. Loquaty, orangey, musty, green grape sour, smell of rotten tomatoes and smells of the backhouse and the sour smells of loneliness and shame, bitter, sugary, burnt, plummy, cidery smells of pulverized bone and of blood mixed with mucosal parts, sweetly piercing, crossmixed with house perfumes and the faint scents of mold, crapulous, orotund, sleek, conjur smells of van-van and angel’s turnip, smells of screech liquor—he aimed his nose at them, face uplifted, sniffing like a hunter as the women passed. Some smells even of the grave, hints, brief passing traces familiar in the funeral home.
Sitting against the porch post with his stretched-out feet as close to Kattie’s hip as he thought he could get away with—thrillingly close as she sat on the top step—he jotted this material into his folding notebook. The rich musty smell of the sweet potatoes excited him. Kattie offered him a piece and he pulled it in two and offered half back to her.
“I don’t care to eat what I’m cooking,” she said.
The red skins lay clumped at her feet. He picked one up, flopped it over his fingers and back and licked it. “I could eat these things all day,” he said.
“You’d bloat up like a pig.”
“A happy one though.”
He always felt as if he didn’t get quite enough of whatever it was he wanted. He mentioned this to Kattie. “Why you reckon that is?”
“For you? I couldn’t say.”
“But I mean don’t a lot of people think that? For instance, yall had a duck supper the other night. You saved me out a leg that was very tasty. I wanted some more, but there wadn’t any. And then several of the ladies”—he always called them ladies—“said they wished they could have more too.”
“Maybe that was just a problem of the number against the duck.”
“But look at this whole place. All these gentlemen keep coming back.”
“That’s just appetite; they get filled up every time.”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of instances of what I’m talking about. I for one never get enough summer. Or enough of gardenias or lilacs or pe-ony flowers. I like the smell of horses so much sometimes I wish I lived in the stable.”
“Sometimes you smell like you do.”
“Ah.” He shifted his approach. “And Othello.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s a play. Mr. William Shakespeare wrote it.”
“That’s a funny name.”
“He’s the best of them all.”
“Them all who?”
“Playwriters.”
“Sometimes we put on skits right here.”
“I know. I watched that one about the Queen of Sheba night before last.”
“Was that you hiding behind the curtain?”
“Somebody close to it.”
“Was that like Mr. Shakebutt?”
He barked a quick laugh and she blushed, ashamed that she would say such a thing but delighted too.
“No. His plays are put on on big stages. In New York and Chicago, New Orleans. Paris even.”
“He’s from France?”
“No. He’s a Englishman. Was.”
“Then how do they understand him in Paris?”
“I expect they have to listen pretty hard.”
“Well, what about O-thella?”
“I wish there was more of it.”
“Does it quit before the end?”
“No, it gets there just right.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about this colored general.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“There was back then.”
“When?”
“I don’t know—centuries ago. Five hundred years maybe.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Sure is. Back in Venice.”
“Where’s that?”
“Over in Italy I think.”
“Does O-thella speak italian?”
“No. He speaks english.”
“How about the other people?”
“In the play? They speak english too.”
She lay a skin flat in her palm, scraped with her fingernail the stringy remnant of orange meat and licked it off her fingertip. Her palms were the faintest brown, hardly any color at all.
She said, “Sounds like a lot of folks who don’t understand a word of what each other’s saying. I’m familiar with that problem.”
Orange flesh between her teeth made her white teeth even prettier. He was about to tell how the Venice big shots mocked Othello and Iago hated him because he was a negro (but more important than that because he was powerful and Iago had nothing but the black emptiness of the powerless to stare into, and that terrified and ruined your mind, he would think) and Desdemona’s father and relatives and Iago’s friends and the riffraff and common white trash of Venice all hated him too. About how they tricked him into thinking his wife was running around with another man and how this—along with all the other badmouthing—drove Othello so crazy that he wound up strangling Desdemona with his own bare hands. It was pitiful.
He started to say something but he couldn’t. It shamed him too much. He wished he hadn’t brought it up.
This girl.
He sneaked a glance at her. It wasn’t that he wanted to fool or comfort this ginger-colored girl with her bunchy hair pressed down under a green cotton scarf but that she would look up from mashing sweet potatoes and talking to him of speeches and speechifiers and find him dear. (He was this way with every girl, every woman too. He wanted to tell her this, confess it, but he thought this would be a bad idea and so he kept his mouth shut.) Under a mixed cloudy afternoon sky he yearned.
Just then came a shout from the helpboy John Day over to the side of the Emporium—which was actually several smallish houses linked together by closed-in catwalks around the central three-story house—yelling at somebody in big trouble. He stood up as Kattie said, “What’s that?” and he put his hand on her arm to steady her if she needed steadying—and himself, because the shout scared him too—and then he could see John Day down on his knees looking under the big house that in most places—the undercarriage—was covered over with a wooden trellis planted in yellow jasmine but not where John Day was looking and poking up into it with a section of broom handle. He ran out and found John Day poking hard, jabbing at something, and squatting behind him was Bunny Boy holding up the skirts of his shiny yellow suit coat and peering sideways over his shoulder as John Day gave a vicious poke to whatever it was stuck up under the house.
“Come out of there, you crazy fool,” cried John Day.
“Go get him,” Bunny Boy said.
Delvin jumped down from the porch and ran over to the scene. “What is it?” he said. He trembled with excitement.
“Can you see him?” Bunny Boy said to John Day who was swishing the broom handle back and forth under the house, raising red dust. “Come over here, Joe,” he yelled at one of the other factotums, a heavyset man pulling sheets off a long washline over near the board back fence. “And you,” he said to Delvin, “get down there and help this boy pull that nonscrip out of there.”
“It’s a somebody?” Delvin said.
“It’s a nobody, who’s going to wind up even less,” Bunny sneered, ducking his head to peer into the gloom. “Stick yo hand up there,” he said to John Day. “Come here, Joe.”
Joe came up bringing a shovel. “You want me to dig ’im out, Mr. Bunny?”
“In a minute,” Bunny Boy said. “Hey,” he said to John Day, “move over let Joe stick his arm up in there. Joe, get down there and grab that rascal.”
“What is it?” Joe said. “A possum? I don’t want to stick my hand up after no possum.”
Bunny Boy smirked. “Some ’ud say that. Not me. It’s a lost ’un though.”
Joe, a blocky, fidgety man with a small square face, got down on his hands and knees in the powdery red dirt and, shoving John Day aside, crammed himself into the opening and skinnied up under the house. “Grab my feet,” he said to nobody in particular, or to everybody.
Bunny Boy indicated to Delvin that this should be his role.
But even with Delvin and John Day holding the man’s thick, knobby ankles, Joe was unable to get far up under the house.
“You do it,” Bunny Boy said to Delvin. “Joe, get out of there.”
It took the three of them to pull Joe out. He came forth covered in red dust, a mummery of himself. Delvin laughed, but the laugh was squelched—Bunny made a flicking motion with his right hand, indicating that is was Delvin’s turn at the enterprise.
“What was it?” he said to Joe. “A person?”
“Hard to say,” Joe said. “It had human form, but that might not be the telling thing.”
Delvin’s stomach turned over. He wanted to run away but he was afraid to have these people see how scared he was. A couple of children stood on the picnic table Miss Ellereen kept in the backyard. One of the children—a boy a few years younger than him—was standing on one leg. It was a clearing day. The sky looked painted on.
He lowered himself into the dust, wanting to hold his nose for the stink he feared was in it and for the germs he’d read about swirling in such places but he didn’t and as he slithered into the opening he smelled not a stink but an odor of cleanness and a clayey sweetness that made him want to come back at another time and lie there a while. It was cool and quiet. At first he couldn’t make out anyone, but then as his eyes adjusted he saw a form scrunched up against the brick chimney that was a central feature of that part of the Emporium. This is the music room, Delvin thought; he hadn’t realized it. He pictured the ladies sitting up there listening to Punky Wills play the piano. He could hear someone faintly striking the keys, an idler or some lady dreaming of another life far from such houses. He thought of knocking on the floor to scare whoever it was, but he didn’t. The form, the dark figure—small, the figure of a boy like him—lay drawn up against the chimney. Delvin could see his shape but he couldn’t make out his face.
“You got to come out,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you? So you probably better just come on. After me they’re gon send somebody a whole lot meaner.” Little puffs of dust like thin smoke in the half light twirled up where he placed his hands. “Come on now,” he said, his voice quiet in the soft dust.
The man or boy let out a low moan.
“You hurt?” Delvin said. The figure didn’t answer. “You’re scared, aint you? I would be too. But you got to come on. They’ll go get the police directly.”
Delvin looked back toward the opening. Bunny Boy and Joe peered at him from either side of the torn-away trellis. Bunny Boy waved him on. “Go,” he mouthed. There were doodlebug holes in the dust, little cone-shaped depressions. A strand of spiderweb like a wide white ribbon hung from a floor joist. Delvin shuddered. He turned back to the cowering form.
“If you don’t come on,” he said, “I’m going to have to gather you.”
He crawled up closer. The figure didn’t move.
“Come on now.”
The figure kicked at him hard, the sole of his bare foot flashing in the caliginous murk, a kick that would have hurt if it caught him.
“Damn.”