Jack (Gilead #4)(81)

This would be the time to say something about understanding entirely if she decided to go back to her family, about how he would completely respect that decision. Then again, if she did stay in Memphis, he might be less miserable if he didn’t remember helping her find the words, didn’t see them in the letter she would surely send him. She stopped where she was, and he put his arm around her. He said, “You know, I plan to try to find a real job. That might make things better.”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t believe in marriage between the races. I probably don’t either.”

“Is that a fact! Then I have a confession to make.”

“You’re white? That’s one of the first things I noticed about you!” She laughed. “I thought, If that man is ever hit by a sunbeam, somebody better call an ambulance.”

“Nocturnal habits.”

“You really could use a little color. If you’re ever out in daylight, you might take off your hat.”

“You don’t know what you are asking.”

She laughed. “I have a general idea.” She said, “Let’s go to that studio of yours. We could still have the place to ourselves for an hour or so.”

“All right. Be warned. It’s a void, a sepulcher.”

“I fell in love with you in a cemetery.”

“Is that true? I fell in love with you when you asked me in for tea.”

“That memorable day.”

“I suppose you’re thinking about those books I stole. You know, that was a kind of confession, a clarification. You thought too well of me.”

“You took care of that.”

“I’m not sure I did. I mean, here you are.”

“True.”

As they walked, Jack kept an eye on doorways, the mouths of alleys. The few black men they saw on the street paid them no particular mind. They watched them, of course, and one of them roused himself to step toward them and say, “Where you taking that girl?” But he was small and old and too drunk to be threatening, only trying to threaten because he was drunk. Jack realized he had imagined the impact of his harmless fist against an elderly jaw. Well, of course he was vigilant. Della was on his arm.

She had fallen silent. The two of them walked on like any unoffending couple, but faster, a little less inclined to look up at the people they passed than a couple would be who could actually be sure they would give no offense. They passed quite abruptly into the other side of town, where there were more streetlights to expose them, where those dreadful encounters always happened that sometimes inclined him to drink so that the pain would be dulled in anticipation and he could feel that in fact he had humiliated himself, their laughter and hard fists and taunting thieveries being purely adventitious. What a life.

It is impossible to walk naturally when you really want to run, but they walked quickly and quietly to the corner where the building stood, huddled in the dark of the entryway while he put the right key into the lock the right way, hurried up the stairs to the door of the studio, closed that door and locked it. And then they embraced, and what an embrace it was, as if they two had survived flood and fire, as if they had solved loneliness. Such an embrace.

After a while, Della said, “We have to think about some things.”

“Yes. We do. I agree.”

They were quiet. Then Della said, “There’s something my father made us say. Whenever we quarreled with each other or told a lie or cried over something that didn’t matter, or got a bad grade, my father made us say, ‘I’m a Negro, because my God created me to be what I am, and as I am, so will I return to my God, for He knows just why He created me as he did.’ Marcus Garvey, of course. Teaching us to respect ourselves. To live up to ourselves. I will say it to my children, and they will say it to their children and their grandchildren. They’ll be Negroes and they’ll live Negro lives. And you won’t have any effect on that at all. Does that bother you?”

“No. A little. I haven’t given it much thought, really.” This was probably not true. When he walked through black St. Louis, he felt conspicuous and awkward. He felt no less conspicuous and awkward when he walked through white St. Louis. But he had begun to imagine a child walking with him, to whom he could tell things, which would seem impressive enough until the child, the boy, began to realize that the fragments of world his father had shown him or told him about failed to cohere. Eads’s great bridge and its fossils, Gilead and its forgotten heroics, baseball. How to catch a fish or sew on a button. Psalms and sonnets.

A child is like anyone else. It needs food, clothes, a hand to hold, a place to be out of the dark and the weather. Jack might sometime try his luck with another cat. The child would be six or seven, and they would go out hunting together for a gray kitten with gray stripes, tins of sardines in their pockets. They could sneak into Mount Zion to play chopsticks if the place was somehow still standing. Hutchins would laugh if he caught them at it. Jack had often noticed that children are very ready to laugh. Merriment would be a pleasant addition to his life. He was an unserious man, but that is no fault at all in the eyes of a child. There were two reasons why his thinking on the subject of fatherhood did not go any further than this. It brought to mind that other one, whose laughter entered the world and left it while he tried out cynicism in the big city. His pleasure in the thought of a possible child felt like a slight on the actual, lost child, though it was not clear to him how this could be true, that is, how that child or her mother could feel the slight. And then there was the fact that Della’s child would be colored, and if the two of them went anywhere as father and son, there would be no more to say. Dead to rights. What a phrase. The country had set up this whole crude order to thwart the creation of sons like his. He would see the boy when he saw his mother, by stealth, under cover of night. He would always be half a stranger to him, a puzzle to the child, an embarrassment to the boy, then an object of resentment to the man, very likely. His mother had unaccountably taken up with some old white bum. What gifts could he bring them, what comfort could he give them that would make him remember that man, if not fondly, at least kindly? Jack might try to pass himself off as casually interested, his mind on worldly things, his time spent on a shadowy, masculine elsewhere, except maybe on Christmas Eve, when he’d come by late with some trifle. Slick. The defense of his pride would be a thing he owed his son, however shabby the pretense involved. Ah, Jesus, the loneliness of it all.