If Beale Street Could Talk, Page 4

  At his house, there was always fighting. Mrs. Hunt couldn’t stand Fonny, or Fonny’s ways, and the two sisters sided with Mrs. Hunt—especially because, now, they were in terrible trouble. They had been raised to be married but there wasn’t anybody around them good enough for them. They were really just ordinary Harlem girls, even though they’d made it as far as City College. But absolutely nothing was happening for them at City College—nothing: the brothers with degrees didn’t want them; those who wanted their women black wanted them black; and those who wanted their women white wanted them white. So, there they were, and they blamed it all on Fonny. Between the mother’s prayers, which were more like curses, and the sisters’ tears, which were more like orgasms, Fonny didn’t stand a chance. Neither was Frank a match for these three hags. He just got angry, and you can just about imagine the shouting that went on in that house. And Frank had started drinking. I couldn’t blame him. And sometimes he came to our house, too, pretending that he was looking for Fonny. It was much worse for him than it was for Fonny; and he had lost the tailor shop and was working in the garment center. He had started to depend on Fonny now, the way Fonny had once depended on him. Neither of them, anyway, as you can see, had any other house they could go to. Frank went to bars, but Fonny didn’t like bars.

  That same passion which saved Fonny got him into trouble, and put him in jail. For, you see, he had found his center, his own center, inside him: and it showed. He wasn’t anybody’s nigger. And that’s a crime, in this fucking free country. You’re suppose to be somebody’s nigger. And if you’re nobody’s nigger, you’re a bad nigger: and that’s what the cops decided when Fonny moved downtown.

  Ernestine has come in, with her bony self. I can hear her teasing Daddy.

  She works with kids in a settlement house way downtown—kids up to the age of fourteen or so, all colors, boys and girls. It’s very hard work, but she digs it—I guess if she didn’t dig it, she couldn’t do it. It’s funny about people. When Ernestine was little she was as vain as vain could be. She always had her hair curled and her dresses were always clean and she was always in front of that damn mirror, like she just could not believe how beautiful she was. I hated her. Since she was nearly four years older than me, she considered me beneath her notice. We fought like cats and dogs, or maybe it was more like two bitches.

  Mama tried not to worry too much about it. She figured that Sis—I called her Sis as a way of calling her out of her name and also, maybe, as a way of claiming her—was probably cut out for show business, and would end up on the stage. This thought did not fill her heart with joy: but she had to remember, my mother, Sharon, that she had once tried to be a singer.

  All of a sudden, it almost seemed like from one day to the next, all that changed. Sis got tall, for one thing, tall and skinny. She took to wearing slacks and tying up her hair and she started reading books like books were going out of style. Whenever I’d come home from school and she was there, she’d be curled up on something, or lying on the floor, reading. She stopped reading newspapers. She stopped going to the movies. “I don’t need no more of the white man’s lying shit,” she said. “He’s fucked with my mind enough already.” At the same time, she didn’t become rigid or unpleasant and she didn’t talk, not for a long time anyway, about what she read. She got to be much nicer to me. And her face began to change. It became bonier and more private, much more beautiful. Her long narrow eyes darkened with whatever it was they were beginning to see.

  She gave up her plans for going to college, and worked for a while in a hospital. She met a little girl in that hospital, the little girl was dying, and, at the age of twelve, she was already a junkie. And this wasn’t a black girl. She was Puerto Rican. And then Ernestine started working with children.

  “Where’s Jezebel?”

  Sis started calling me Jezebel after I got my job at the perfume center of the department store where I work now. The store thought that it was very daring, very progressive, to give this job to a colored girl. I stand behind that damn counter all day long, smiling till my back teeth ache, letting tired old ladies smell the back of my hand. Sis claimed that I came home smelling like a Louisiana whore.

  “She’s home. She’s lying down.”

  “She all right?”

  “She’s tired. She went to see Fonny.”

  “How’s Fonny taking it?” “Taking it.”

  “Lord. Let me make myself a drink. You want me to cook?”

  “No. I’ll get into the pots in a minute.”

  “She see Mr. Hayward?”

  Arnold Hayward is the lawyer. Sis found him for me through the settlement house, which has beeen forced, after all, to have some dealings with lawyers.

  “No. She’s seeing him on Monday, after work.”

  “You going with her?”

  “I think I better.”

  “Yeah. I think so, too—Daddy, you better stop putting down that beer, you getting to be as big as a house.—And I’ll call him from work, before you all get there.—You want a shot of gin in that beer, old man?”

  “Just put it on the side, daughter dear, before I stand up.”

  “Stand up!—Here!”

  “And tan your hide. You better listen to Aretha when she sings ‘Respect.’—You know, Tish says she thinks that lawyer wants more money.”

  “Daddy, we paid him his retainer, that’s why ain’t none of us got no clothes. And I know we got to pay expenses. But he ain’t supposed to get no more money until he brings Fonny to trial.”

  “He says it’s a tough case.”

  “Shit. What’s a lawyer for?”

  “To make money,” Mama said.

  “Well. Anybody talk to the Hunts lately?”

  “They don’t want to know nothing about it, you know that. Mrs. Hunt and them two camellias is just in disgrace. And poor Frank ain’t got no money.”

  “Well. Let’s not talk too much about it in front of Tish. We’ll work it out somehow.”

  “Shit. We got to work it out. Fonny’s like one of us.”

  “He is one of us,” said Mama.

  I turned on the lights in Mama’s bedroom, so they’d know I was up, and I looked at myself in the mirror. I kind of patted my hair and I walked into the kitchen.

  “Well,” said Sis, “although I cannot say that your beauty rest did you a hell of a lot of good, I do admire the way you persevere.”

  Mama said that if we wanted to eat, we’d better get our behinds out of her kitchen, and so we went into the living room.

  I sat on the hassock, leaning on Daddy’s knee. Now, it was seven o’clock and the streets were full of noises. I felt very quiet after my long day, and my baby began to be real to me. I don’t mean that it hadn’t been real before; but, now, in a way, I was alone with it. Sis had left the lights very low. She put on a Ray Charles record and sat down on the sofa.

  I listened to the music and the sounds from the streets and Daddy’s hand rested lightly on my hair. And everything seemed connected—the street sounds, and Ray’s voice and his piano and my Daddy’s hand and my sister’s silhouette and the sounds and the lights coming from the kitchen. It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues. And it was as though, out of these elements, this patience, my Daddy’s touch, the sounds of my mother in the kitchen, the way the light fell, the way the music continued beneath everything, the movement of Ernestine’s head as she lit a cigarette, the movement of her hand as she dropped the match into the ashtray, the blurred human voices rising from the street, out of this rage and a steady, somehow triumphant sorrow, my baby was slowly being formed. I wondered if it would have Fonny’s eyes. As someone had wondered, not, after all, so very long ago, about the eyes of Joseph, my father, whose hand rested on my head. What struck me suddenly, more than anything else, was something I knew but hadn’t looked at: this was Fonny’s baby and mine, we had made it together, it wa
s both of us. I didn’t know either of us very well. What would both of us be like? But this, somehow, made me think of Fonny and made me smile. My father rubbed his hand over my forehead. I thought of Fonny’s touch, of Fonny, in my arms, his breath, his touch, his odor, his weight, that terrible and beautiful presence riding into me and his breath being snarled, as if by a golden thread, deeper and deeper in his throat as he rode—as he rode deeper and deeper not so much into me as into a kingdom which lay just behind his eyes. He worked on wood that way. He worked on stone that way. If I had never seen him work, I might never have known he loved me.

  It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.

  “Tish?”

  Ernestine, gesturing with her cigarette.

  “Yes.”

  “What time you seeing the lawyer on Monday?”

  “After the six o’clock visit. I’ll be there about seven. He says he’s got to work late, anyway.”

  “If he says anything about more money, you tell him to call me, you hear?”

  “I don’t know what good that’s going to do, if he wants more money, he wants more money——”

  “You do like your sister tells you,” Daddy said.

  “He won’t talk to you,” Ernestine said, “the way he’ll talk to me, can you dig it?”

  “Yes,” I said, finally, “I can dig it.” But, for reasons I couldn’t explain, something in her voice frightened me to death. I felt the way I’d felt all day, alone with my trouble. Nobody could help me, not even Sis. Because she was certainly determined to help me, I knew that. But maybe I realized that she was frightened, too, although she was trying to sound calm and tough. I realized that she knew a whole lot about it because of the kids downtown. I wanted to ask her how it worked. I wanted to ask her if it worked.

  When there’s nobody but us we eat in the kitchen, which is maybe the most important room in our house, the room where everything happens, where things begin and take their shape and end. Now, when supper was over that night, Mama went to the cupboard and came back with an old bottle, a bottle she’s had for years, of very old French brandy. They came from her days as a singer, her days with the drummer. This was the last bottle, it hadn’t been opened yet. She put the bottle on the table, in front of Joseph, and she said, “Open it.” She got four glasses and then she stood there while he opened it. Ernestine and Joseph looked like they just couldn’t guess what had got into Mama: but I knew what she was doing, and my heart jumped up.

  Daddy got the bottle open. Mama said, “You the man of the house, Joe. Start pouring.”

  It’s funny about people. Just before something happens, you almost know what it is. You do know what it is, I believe. You just haven’t had the time—and now you won’t have the time—to say it to yourself. Daddy’s face changed in a way I can’t describe. His face became as definite as stone, every line and angle suddenly seemed chiseled, and his eyes turned a blacker black. He was waiting—suddenly, helplessly—for what was already known to be translated, to enter reality, to be born.

  Sis watched Mama with her eyes very calm, her eyes very long and narrow, smiling a little.

  No one looked at me. I was there, then, for them, in a way that had nothing to do with me. I was there, then, for them, like Fonny was present, like my baby, just beginning now, out of a long, long sleep, to turn, to listen, to awaken, somewhere beneath my heart.

  Daddy poured and Mama gave us each a glass. She looked at Joseph, then at Ernestine, then at me—she smiled at me.

  “This is sacrament,” she said, “and, no, I ain’t gone crazy. We’re drinking to a new life. Tish is going to have Fonny’s baby.” She touched Joseph. “Drink,” she said.

  Daddy wet his lips, staring at me. It was like no one could speak before he spoke. I stared at him. I didn’t know what he was going to say. Joseph put his glass down. Then he picked it up again. He was trying to speak; he wanted to speak; but he couldn’t. And he looked at me as if he was trying to find out something, something my face would tell him. A strange smile wavered just around his face, not yet in his face, and he seemed to be traveling backward and forward at once, in time. He said, “That’s a hell of a note.” Then he drank some more brandy, and he said, “Ain’t you going to drink to the little one, Tish?” I swallowed a little brandy, and I coughed and Ernestine patted me on the back. Then, she took me in her arms. She had tears on her face. She smiled down at me—but she didn’t say anything.

  “How long this been going on?” Daddy asked.

  “About three months,” Mama said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I figured,” said Ernestine, surprising me.

  “Three months!” Daddy said: as though five months or two months would have made some kind of difference and made more sense.

  “Since March,” I said. Fonny had been arrested in March.

  “While you two was running around looking at places, so you could get married,” Daddy said. His face was full of questions, and he would have been able to ask these questions of his son—or, at least, I think that a black man can: but he couldn’t ask these questions of his daughter. For a moment, I was almost angry, then I wasn’t. Fathers and sons are one thing. Fathers and daughters are another.

  It doesn’t do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don’t know enough about ourselves. I think it’s better to know that you don’t know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are so lost.

  But I wondered how Frank would take the news that his son, Fonny, was about to be a father. Then I realized that the first thing everybody thought was, But Fonny’s in jail! Frank would think that: that would be his first thought. Frank would think, if anything happens, my boy won’t never see his baby. And Joseph thought, If anything happens, my little girl’s baby won’t have no father. Yes. That was the thought, unspoken, which stiffened the air in our kitchen. And I felt that I should say something. But I was too tired. I leaned against Ernestine’s shoulder. I had nothing to say.

  “You sure you want this baby, Tish?” my father asked me.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “and Fonny wants it, too! It’s our baby,” I said. “Don’t you see? And it’s not Fonny’s fault that he is in jail, it’s not as though he ran away, or anything. And—” this was the only way I could answer the questions he hadn’t asked—“we’ve always been best friends, ever since we were little, you know that. And we’d be married now, if—if—!”

  “Your father know that,” Mama said. “He’s only worried about you.”

  “Don’t you go thinking I think you a bad girl, or any foolishness like that,” Daddy said. “I just asked you that because you so young, that’s all, and——”

  “It’s rough, but we’ll make it,” Ernestine said.

  She knows Daddy better than I do. I think it’s because she’s felt since we were children that our Daddy maybe loved me more than he loves her. This isn’t true, and she knows that now—people love different people in different ways—but it must have seemed that way to her when we were little. I look as though I just can’t make it, she looks like can’t nothing stop her. If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don’t see what they see, this can be very painful. I think that’s maybe why Sis was always in front of that damn mirror all the time, when we were kids. She was saying, I don’t care. I got me. Of course, this only made her come on stronger than ever, which was the last effect she desired: but that’s the way we are and that’s how we can sometimes get so fucked up. Anyway, she’s past all that. She knows who she is, or, at least, she knows who she damn well isn’t; and since she’s no longer terrified of uprisings in those forces which she lives with and has learned how to use and subdue, she can walk straight ahead into anything; and so she can cut Daddy off when he’s talking—which I can’t do.
She moved away from me a little and put my glass in my hand. “Unbow your head, sister,” she said, and raised her glass and touched mine. “Save the children,” she said, very quietly, and drained her glass.

  Mama said, “To the newborn,” and Daddy said, “I hope it’s a boy. That’d tickle old Frank to pieces, I bet.” Then he looked at me. “Do you mind,” he asked me, “if I’m the one to tell him, Tish?”

  I said, “No. I don’t mind.”

  “Well, then!” he said, grinning, “maybe I’ll go on over there now.”

  “Maybe you better phone first,” Mama said. “He don’t stay home a whole lot, you know.”

  “I sure would like to be the one to tell them sisters,” said Ernestine.

  Mama laughed, and said, “Joe, why don’t you just call up and ask them all over here? Hell, it’s Saturday night and it ain’t late and we still got a lot of brandy in the bottle. And, now that I think about it, it’s really the best way to do it.”

  “That’s all right with you, Tish?” Daddy asked me.

  “It’s got to be done,” I said.

  So, Daddy stood up, after watching me for a moment, and walked into the living room, to the phone. He could have used the wall phone in the kitchen but he had that kind of grim smile on his face which he has when he knows he’s got business to take care of and when he wants to make sure you know enough to stay out of it.