Boy, Snow, Bird(35)

I sat down with Bird, who wailed because she preferred me to stand. Olivia sat down too, on the same couch, but leaving a large space between us. Now that I knew about her it was incredible that I hadn’t seen it before. Or had I? Tea with her and Agnes and Vivian had made me think of Sidonie; it hadn’t just been my mind wandering.

“The last person who threatened to slap me was a white woman. Blonde, like you. No Southern belle, either. Just trash.”

“I guess that’s how we operate.”

I told myself, Stop it. Whatever else she says, don’t rise to it. I wanted a grandmother for Bird. Olivia wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but she was a generous grandmother to Snow and if she put her mind to it, she could do it again. Bird was beautiful too, with her close curls and her bottomless eyes, and she was only just getting started.

“I was working at a grocery store,” Olivia said. “And I didn’t fetch a box of soap flakes down fast enough for that woman’s liking, so she said: ‘I’ll slap you, girl.’ ‘I’ll slap you, girl’ to a grown woman. And I knew I’d lose my job if I went at her, so I just said: ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot of things to do, ma’am, and I’m as stupid as they come. Please be patient with me.’ That was standard, that kind of cringing and crawling. I didn’t want it to be. She was not my better, I don’t care what anyone says, she wasn’t. None of them were. I thought: If I have a daughter, I don’t want anyone talking to her like that. I don’t ever want to hear my daughter wheedling at anyone the way I do every working day. I thought: If I do, if I ever hear that in the voice of a child of mine, I’ll make her sorry all right. I’ll wring her damn neck. Couldn’t very well wring my own neck, could I?”

Olivia’s voice was very calm, but her hands trembled. I backed up, moved farther away so that Bird and I were pressed against the arm of the sofa. I didn’t think she was going to lash out. No, I wanted to keep us from catching what was in her, what was there in her voice and her eyes. But babies have some unfathomable criteria for what they consider attractive. Bird was wriggling like crazy. Her intuition should’ve told her that Olivia was terrible, just the worst, but I was having trouble keeping the kid from stretching her hands out in Olivia’s direction. I don’t know, maybe she already had expensive tastes and liked the scent Olivia was wearing.

“What you don’t understand is that we’re being kept down out there. All the way down. In my town you couldn’t vote unless you passed a literacy test. How does that stop colored folks from voting, you ask? You didn’t see what the colored school was like, how big the classes were. The teachers did what they could, but half my male cousins could hardly read. They lost patience before the girls did. No matter how literate a colored man was, there was always some excuse to whip him. There were other things too. Little things. You’d save up and go out for a nice night at a nice place, all right, fine. All the high-class places we were allowed to go to, they were imitations of the places we were kept out of—not mawkish copies, most of it was done with perfect taste, but sitting at the bar or at the candlelit table you’d try to imagine what dinnertime remarks the real people were making . . . yes, the real people at the restaurant two blocks away, the white folks we were shadows of, and you’d try to talk about whatever you imagined they were talking about, and your food turned to sawdust in your mouth. What was it like in those other establishments? What was it that was so sacred about them, what was it that our being there would destroy? I had to know. I broke the law because I had to know. Oh, only in the most minor way. Gas station restrooms when Gerald would drive me cross-state on vacation—one day I used the White Only restroom and nobody noticed me. Gerald begged me not to, but I just got my compact out, repowdered my face, and walked in. I felt like laughing in all their faces. The rest room experience is more or less the same, in case you were wondering.”

“Olivia,” I said. “Look at Bird. Look at her.” I drew the baby blanket down a little so that Olivia could really see her. But the woman just wouldn’t look, and it broke my heart.

“Every now and then there’d be a colored cleaning lady in there, in the White Only restroom, I mean, scrubbing a washbasin that nobody was using right then. And she’d look at me and know, and I’d look at her. They didn’t do anything or say anything, those cleaning ladies, but for hours and hours afterward I’d just want to pull all my skin right off my body. So I said to Gerald: We’ve got to go north, let people take us how they take us, then we won’t feel like we’re betraying anybody. But it’s the same thing over here. Same thing, only no signs. The places you go to, do you see colored people there? Let me answer that for you. You see them rarely, if at all. You’re trying to remember, but the truth is they don’t exist for you. You go to the opera house and the only colored person you see is the stagehand, scattering sawdust or rice powder or whatever it is that stops the dancers slipping . . . folks would look at him pretty hard if he was sitting in the audience, they’d wonder what he was up to, what he was trying to be, but being there to keep the dancers from slipping is a better reason for him to be there, he’s working, so nobody notices him but me. Listen, I love that Grand Theater down in Worcester and I love all that dancing I see there, been there at least once a year for the past . . . oh, how old is that son of mine . . . for the past thirty-seven years or so. Almost forty years! But sometimes right in the middle of the second act my vision darkens just like a lantern shade’s been thrown over it, and the dancers are colored, every shade, from bronze to tar, and every hand touching strings in the orchestra is colored too, and the tops of their heads are woollier than sheep, and the roses in my lap, the ones I throw to the prima ballerina at the end, even the petals of those roses are black, burnt black. And then I think, Well, it’s out, the truth is out . . .”