If Beale Street Could Talk, Page 2

  He pressed the presser down again. “She don’t know what kind of trouble he like to get in down there.” Then he looked up at me and he smiled. When I got to know Fonny and I got to know Mr. Hunt better, I realized that Fonny has his smile. “Oh, I’ll tell him you come by,” he said.

  I said, “Say hello to the family for me, Mr. Hunt,” and I ran across the street.

  Geneva was on my stoop and she told me I looked like a fool and that I’d almost got run over.

  I stopped and said, “You a liar, Geneva Braithwaite. Fonny ain’t got the lockjaw and he ain’t going to die. And I ain’t going to jail. Now, you just go and ask his Daddy.” And then Geneva gave me such a funny look that I ran up my stoop and up the stairs and I sat down on the fire escape, but sort of in the window, where she couldn’t see me.

  Fonny came back, about four or five days later, and he came over to my stoop. He didn’t have a scar on him. He had two doughnuts. He sat down on my stoop. He said, “I’m sorry I spit in your face.” And he gave me one of his doughnuts.

  I said, “I’m sorry I hit you.” And then we didn’t say anything. He ate his doughnut and I ate mine.

  People don’t believe it about boys and girls that age—people don’t believe much and I’m beginning to know why—but, then, we got to be friends. Or, maybe, and it’s really the same thing—something else people don’t want to know—I got to be his little sister and he got to be my big brother. He didn’t like his sisters and I didn’t have any brothers. And so we got to be, for each other, what the other missed.

  Geneva got mad at me and she stopped being my friend; though, maybe, now that I think about it, without even knowing it, I stopped being her friend; because, now—and without knowing what that meant—I had Fonny. Daniel got mad at Fonny, he called him a sissy for fooling around with girls, and he stopped being Fonny’s friend—for a long time; they even had a fight and Fonny lost another tooth. I think that anyone watching Fonny then was sure that he’d grow up without a single tooth in his head. I remember telling Fonny that I’d get my mother’s scissors from upstairs and go and kill Daniel, but Fonny said I wasn’t nothing but a girl and didn’t have nothing to do with it.

  Fonny had to go to church on Sundays—and I mean, he had to go: though he managed to outwit his mother more often than she knew, or cared to know. His mother—I got to know her better, too, later on, and we’re going to talk about her in a minute—was, as I’ve said, a Sanctified woman and if she couldn’t save her husband, she was damn sure going to save her child. Because it was her child; it wasn’t their child.

  I think that’s why Fonny was so bad. And I think that’s why he was, when you got to know him, so nice, a really nice person, a really sweet man, with something very sad in him: when you got to know him. Mr. Hunt, Frank, didn’t try to claim him but he loved him—loves him. The two older sisters weren’t Sanctified exactly, but they might as well have been, and they certainly took after their mother. So that left just Frank and Fonny. In a way, Frank had Fonny all week long, Fonny had Frank all week long. They both knew this and that was why Frank could give Fonny to his mother on Sundays. What Fonny was doing in the street was just exactly what Frank was doing in the tailor shop and in the house. He was being bad. That’s why he hold on to that tailor shop as long as he could. That’s why, when Fonny came home bleeding, Frank could tend to him; that’s why they could, both the father and the son, love me. It’s not really a mystery except it’s always a mystery about people. I used to wonder, later, if Fonny’s mother and father ever made love together. I asked Fonny. And Fonny said:

  “Yeah. But not like you and me. I used to hear them. She’d come home from church, wringing wet and funky. She’d act like she was so tired she could hardly move and she’d just fall across the bed with her clothes on—she’d maybe had enough strength to take off her shoes. And her hat. And she’d always lay her handbag down someplace. I can still hear that sound, like something heavy, with silver inside it, dropping heavy wherever she laid it down. I’d hear her say, The Lord sure blessed my soul this evening. Honey, when you going to give your life to the Lord? And, baby, he’d say, and I swear to you he was lying there with his dick getting hard, and, excuse me, baby, but her condition weren’t no better, because this, you dig? was like the game you hear two alley cats playing in the alley. Shit. She going to whelp and mee-e-ow till times get better, she going to get that cat, she going to run him all over the alley, she going run him till he bite her by the neck—by this time he just want to get some sleep really, but she got her chorus going, he’s got to stop the music and ain’t but one way to do it—he going to bite her by the neck and then she got him. So, my Daddy just lay there, didn’t have no clothes on, with his dick getting harder and harder, and my Daddy would say, About the time, I reckon, that the Lord gives his life to me. And she’d say, Oh, Frank, let me bring you to the Lord. And he’d say, Shit, woman, I’m going to bring the Lord to you. I’m the Lord. And she’d start to crying, and she’d moan, Lord, help me help this man. You give him to me. I can’t do nothing about it. Oh, Lord, help me. And he’d say, The Lord’s going to help you, sugar, just as soon as you get to be a little child again, naked, like a little child. Come on, come to the Lord. And she’d start to crying and calling on Jesus while he started taking all her clothes off—I could hear them kind of rustling and whistling and tearing and falling to the floor and sometimes I’d get my foot caught in one of them things when I was coming through their room in the morning on my way to school—and when he got her naked and got on top of her and she was still crying, Jesus! help me, Lord! my Daddy would say, You got the Lord now, right here. Where you want your blessing? Where do it hurt? Where you want the Lord’s hands to touch you? here? here? or here? Where you want his tongue? Where you want the Lord to enter you, you dirty, dumb black bitch? you bitch. You bitch. You bitch. And he’d slap her, hard, loud. And she’d say, Oh, Lord, help me to bear my burden. And he’d say, Here it is, baby, you going to bear it all right, I know it. You got a friend in Jesus, and I’m going to tell you when he comes. The first time. We don’t know nothing about the second coming. Yet. And the bed would shake and she would moan and moan and moan. And, in the morning, was just like nothing never happened. She was just like she had been. She still belonged to Jesus and he went off down the street, to the shop.”

  And then Fonny said, “Hadn’t been for me, I believe the cat would have split the scene. I’ll always love my Daddy because he didn’t leave me.” I’ll always remember Fonny’s face when he talked about his Daddy.

  Then, Fonny would turn to me and take me in his arms and laugh and say, “You remind me a lot of my mother, you know that? Come on, now, and let’s sing together, Sinner, do you love my Lord?—And if I don’t hear no moaning, I’ll know you ain’t been saved.”

  I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

  Fonny asked me, one Saturday, if I could come to church with him in the morning and I said, Yes, though we were Baptists and weren’t supposed to go to a Sanctified church. But, by this time, everybody knew that Fonny and I were friends, it was just simply a fact. At school, and all up and down the block, they called us Romeo and Juliet, though this, was not because they’d read the play, and here Fonny came, looking absolutely miserable, with his hair all slicked and shining, with the part in his hair so cruel that it looked like it had been put there with a tomahawk or a razor, wearing his blue suit and Sis had got me dressed and so we went. It was like, when you think about it, our first date. His mother was waiting downstairs.

  It was just before Easter, so it wasn’t cold but it wasn’t hot.

  Now, although we were little and I certainly couldn’t be dreaming of taking Fonny from her or anything like that, and although she didn’t really love Fonny, only thought that she was supposed to because she had spasmed
him into this world, already, Fonny’s mother didn’t like me. I could tell from lots of things, such as, for example, I hardly ever went to Fonny’s house but Fonny was always at mine; and this wasn’t because Fonny and Frank didn’t want me in their house. It was because the mother and them two sisters didn’t want me. In one way, as I realized later, they didn’t think that I was good enough for Fonny—which really means that they didn’t think that I was good enough for them—and in another way, they felt that I was maybe just exactly what Fonny deserved. Well, I’m dark and my hair is just plain hair and there is nothing very outstanding about me and not even Fonny bothers to pretend I’m pretty, he just says that pretty girls are a terrible drag.

  When he says this, I know that he’s thinking about his mother—that’s why, when he wants to tease me, he tells me I remind him of his mother. I don’t remind him of his mother at all, and he knows that, but he also knows that I know how much he loved her: how much he wanted to love her, to be allowed to love her, to have that translation read.

  Mrs. Hunt and the girls are fair; and you could see that Mrs. Hunt had been a very beautiful girl down there in Atlanta, where she comes from. And she still had—has—that look, that don’t-you-touch-me look, that women who were beautiful carry with them to the grave. The sisters weren’t as beautiful as the mother and, of course, they’d never been young, in Atlanta, but they were fair skinned—and their hair was long. Fonny is lighter than me but much darker than they, his hair is just plain nappy and all the grease his mother put into it every Sunday couldn’t take out the naps.

  Fonny really takes after his father: so, Mrs. Hunt gave me a real sweet patient smile as Fonny brought me out the house that Sunday morning.

  “I’m mighty pleased you coming to the house of the Lord this morning, Tish,” she said. “My, you look pretty this morning!”

  The way she said it made me know what I have must looked like other mornings: it made me know what I looked like.

  I said, “Good-morning, Mrs. Hunt,” and we started down the street.

  It was the Sunday morning street. Our streets have days, and even hours. Where I was born, and where my baby will be born, you look down the street and you can almost see what’s happening in the house: like, say, Saturday, at three in the afternoon, is a very bad hour. The kids are home from school. The men are home from work. You’d think that this might be a very happy get together, but it isn’t. The kids see the men. The men see the kids. And this drives the women, who are cooking and cleaning and straightening hair and who see what men won’t see, almost crazy. You can see it in the streets, you can hear it in the way the women yell for their children. You can see it in the way they come down out of the house—in a rush, like a storm—and slap the children and drag them upstairs, you can hear it in the child, you can see it in the way the men, ignoring all this, stand together in front of a railing, sit together in the barbershop pass a bottle between them, walk to the corner to the bar, tease the girl behind the bar, fight with each other, and get very busy, later, with their vines. Saturday afternoon is like a cloud hanging over, it’s like waiting for a storm to break.

  But, on Sunday mornings the clouds have lifted, the storm has done its damage and gone. No matter what the damage was, everybody’s clean now. The women have somehow managed to get it all together, to hold everything together. So, here everybody is, cleaned, scrubbed, brushed, and greased. Later, they’re going to eat ham hocks or chitterlings or fried or roasted chicken, with yams and rice and greens or cornbread or biscuits. They’re going to come home and fall out and be friendly: and some men wash their cars, on Sundays, more carefully than they wash their foreskins. Walking down the street that Sunday morning, with Fonny walking beside me like a prisoner and Mrs. Hunt on the other side of me, like a queen making great strides into the kingdom, was like walking through a fair. But now I think that it was only Fonny—who didn’t say a word—that made it seem like a fair.

  We heard the church tambourines from a block away.

  “Sure wish we could get your father to come out to the Lord’s house one of these mornings,” said Mrs. Hunt. Then she looked at me. “What church do you usually go to, Tish?”

  Well, as I’ve said, we were Baptists. But we didn’t go to church very often—maybe Christmas or Easter, days like that. Mama didn’t dig the church sisters, who didn’t dig her, and Sis kind of takes after Mama, and Daddy didn’t see any point in running after the Lord and he didn’t seem to have very much respect for him.

  I said, “We go to Abyssinia Baptist,” and looked at the cracks in the sidewalk.

  “That’s a very handsome church,” said Mrs. Hunt—as though that was the best thing that could possibly be said about it and that that certainly wasn’t much.

  It was eleven in the morning. Service had just begun. Actually, Sunday school had begun at nine and Fonny was usually supposed to be in church for that; but on this Sunday morning he had been given a special dispensation because of me. And the truth is, too, that Mrs. Hunt was kind of lazy and didn’t really like getting up that early to make sure Fonny was in Sunday school. In Sunday school, there wasn’t anybody to admire her—her carefully washed and covered body and her snow-white soul. Frank was not about to get up and take Fonny off to Sunday school and the sisters didn’t want to dirty their hands on their nappyheaded brother. So, Mrs. Hunt, sighing deeply and praising the Lord, would have to get up and get Fonny dressed. But, of course, if she didn’t take him to Sunday school by the hand, he didn’t usually get there. And, many times, that woman fell out happy in church without knowing the whereabouts of her only son: “Whatever Alice don’t feel like being bothered with,” Frank was to say to me, much later, “she leaves in the hands of Lord.”

  The church had been a post office. I don’t know how come the building had had to be sold, or why, come to that, anybody had wanted to buy it, because it still looked like a post office, long and dark and low. They had knocked down some walls and put in some benches and put up the church signs and the church schedules; but the ceiling was that awful kind of wrinkled tin, and they had either painted it brown or they had left it unpainted. When you came in, the pulpit looked a mighty long ways off. To tell the truth, I think the people in the church were just proud that their church was so big and that they had somehow got their hands on it. Of course I was (more or less) used to Abyssinia. It was brighter, and had a balcony. I used to sit in that balcony, on Mama’s knees. Every time I think of a certain song, “Uncloudy Day,” I’m back in that balcony again, on Mama’s knees. Every time I hear “Blessed Quietness,” I think of Fonny’s church and Fonny’s mother. I don’t mean that either the song or the church was quiet. But I don’t remember ever hearing that song in our church. I’ll always associate that song with Fonny’s church because when they sang it on that Sunday morning, Fonny’s mother got happy.

  Watching people get happy and fall out under the Power is always something to see, even if you see it all the time. But people didn’t often get happy in our church: we were more respectable, more civilized, than sanctified. I still find something in it very frightening: but I think this is because Fonny hated it.

  That church was so wide, it had three aisles. Now, just to the contrary of what you might think, it’s much harder to find the central aisle than it is when there’s just one aisle down the middle. You have to have an instinct for it. We entered that church and Mrs. Hunt led us straight down the aisle which was farthest to the left, so that everybody from two aisles over had to turn and watch us. And—frankly—we were something to watch. There was black, long-legged me, in a blue dress, with my hair straightened and with a blue ribbon in it. There was Fonny, who held me by the hand, in a kind of agony, in his white shirt, blue suit, and blue tie, his hair grimly, despairingly shining not so much from the Vaseline in his hair as from the sweat in his scalp; and there was Mrs. Hunt, who, somehow, I don’t know how, from the moment we walked through the church doors, became filled with a stern love for her two little he
athens and marched us before her to the mercy seat. She was wearing something pink or beige, I’m not quite sure now, but in all that gloom, it showed. And she was wearing one of those awful hats women used to wear which have a veil on them which stops at about the level of the eyebrow or the nose and which always makes you look like you have some disease. And she wore high heels, too, which made a certain sound, something like pistols, and she carried her head very high and noble. She was saved the moment she entered the church, she was Sanctified holy, and I even remember until today how much she made me tremble, all of a sudden, deep inside. It was like there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you. The mercy seat: she led us to the front row and sat us down before it. She made us sit but she knelt, on her knees, I mean, in front of her seat, and bowed her head and covered her eyes, making sure she didn’t fuck with that veil. I stole a look at Fonny, but Fonny wouldn’t look at me. Mrs. Hunt rose, she faced the entire congregation for a moment and then she, modestly, sat down.

  Somebody was testifying, a young man with kind of reddish hair, he was talking about the Lord and how the Lord had dyed all the spots out of his soul and taken all the lust out of his flesh. When I got older, I used to see him around. His name was George: I used to see him nodding on the stoop or on the curb, and he died of an overdose. The congregation amened him to death, a big sister, in the pulpit, in her long white robe, jumped up and did a little shout; they cried, Help him, Lord Jesus, help him! and the moment he sat down, another sister, her name was Rose and not much later she was going to disappear from the church and have a baby—and I still remember the last time I saw her, when I was about fourteen, walking the streets in the snow with her face all marked and her hands all swollen and a rag around her head and her stockings falling down, singing to herself—stood up and started singing, How did you feel when you come out the wilderness, leaning on the Lord? Then Fonny did look at me, just for a second. Mrs. Hunt was singing and clapping her hands. And a kind of fire in the congregation mounted.