Emancipation Day (12 page)

He would have his regular table in the corner, far from the door to the men’s room and the radio above the bar. Only he and Harlan and Benny would sit at this table, and Jackson if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t want to. Jackson would think he was too good to sit in a tavern with the likes of his father and brother and uncle. He would want to bring his white friends in. They would treat Fast Eddy like a servant. They would not like his insouciance, and Fast Eddy would not like their sass. And that would be the end of William Henry’s dream home.

The British-American was where William Henry had lived for the month after Jackson was born, in the tavern during the day and on the floor of Harlan’s room upstairs at night. He would sit here from opening to closing, drinking and nurturing his hatred for the world in general and for whoever had fathered Josie’s bastard son in particular. It could have been that fat Polack who lived behind them in the brown house on Windsor Avenue; he would check the wooden fence between their yards for a hidden gate or signs of scaling. Or it could have been the sheeny who drove his horse and cart up and down the alleys, collecting junk. Christ, it could have been anyone, any white son of a bitch who liked his meat dark. Josie was a beautiful woman, white bastards were always snooping around the Settlement like the whole six
blocks was their own private whorehouse. Not even Alvina was safe and she was only twelve years old.

At first he’d had to nurse his beers because he hadn’t brought any money with him, but gradually friends would drop in, Harlan would pick up his tab, or the hotel would hire him to do odd jobs around the building in exchange for room and board. Someone kicked in a wall upstairs, William Henry would fix it. A toilet started leaking, or a shingle blew off the roof, William Henry to the rescue. For the whole month he never ate anything but sausages and mashed potatoes or pickled eggs washed down with beer. He had his morning shave every day across the lobby, as usual, although sometimes it wouldn’t be until noon and only then because Harlan kept that bottle of Kentucky sour mash in his cupboard. Jack Daniel’s at first, but William Henry got him to switch to Jim Beam because the name Jack Daniel’s reminded him of Jackson. That was another thing, her naming him Jackson.

“You name that bastard after my father?” he said to her on one of her many attempts to get him to come home. She’d come down to the hotel with the baby wrapped up in a shawl so no one would see his shame, and Harlan let them have the barbershop to talk in while he invented some errand he had to run uptown.

“I named your son after his grandfather,” she said, a fire in her eye he hadn’t noticed before.

She sat and nursed the child in Andrew Jackson’s barber chair and he perched himself in the other one, staring at them in the mirror, mother and child, unable to avert his eyes or look directly at her. He wanted to believe the baby was his, he could
feel himself leaning towards it, but every time he laid eyes on the child sucking at her breast he shook his head. How could it be? How else could it be?

“How you gettin’ by?” he asked her reflection, putting as much meanness in the question as he could muster.

“We gettin’ by,” she said. “Alvina and Benny, they miss you. They keep askin’ when you comin’ home. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“Tell them they want to see me they can come down here. This where I live now.”

“They too young to understand that.”

“Then tell them any damn thing you want,” he said. “Tell them the truth.”

“I do tell them the truth. I tell them that you’re their daddy, and you’re Jackson’s daddy, too, and someday you’ll wake up and come home where you belong.”

William Henry never had nothing but trouble from white people, and now here he was with a white son. That was it in a nutshell. He’d heard tell of a coloured couple in Detroit had a white baby but it turned dark after a while, and by the time it was a year old it was the same colour as its mama, dark dark. William Henry kept his eye on Jackson for the whole month he lived in the British-American, every time Josie brought him down to tempt him, but he never saw any sign that the boy was turning colour. That baby stayed resolutely white. If anything it got whiter. Now Jackson was almost eighteen and he was still white as a Klansman’s bedsheet.

As a child Jackson never fit in. William Henry would watch him trying to play with other kids, coloured kids on the block, and they always kept away from him. They’d be in a circle playing marbles or something, and Jackson would want to join them, and they’d move aside to let him in, but they always moved a little too far, William Henry could see it from the house, how they’d shuffle over without actually letting him in. Jackson felt it, too, he wasn’t no dummy. He’d come back to the house, and the circle would close up again as if he’d never been in it, like water.

“What’s wrong with them?” he’d ask William Henry, tears filling his little eyes. But there wasn’t nothing wrong with them.

When he got older and started going to mixed schools, Jackson would steal coins from William Henry’s pants pockets to give to white kids so they’d let him into their gangs. William Henry caught him at it several times and whupped him pretty good for it, but it cut him to see his wife’s son so desperate to be liked. One day when Jackson was ten or eleven he got invited to a birthday party in another part of town, God only knew how much that cost William Henry. Alvina was supposed to pick him up when it was over, but William Henry had to go get him early for some reason, and when he got to the house and knocked on the front door, the woman who answered it stepped back like she’d been struck. William Henry was used to that, he barely noticed anymore.

“Hello, ma’am. Would you tell Jackson that his daddy come to take him home?”

The woman looked over William Henry’s shoulder, and he knew she was looking for Jackson’s white father sitting in the back seat of a big, shiny car, and he didn’t say nothing but just looked at the woman with that blank expression he’d learned to use, and when she finally caught on she sucked in her breath and her face set and she went and got Jackson and that was the last birthday party he was ever invited to outside the Settlement. So it wasn’t like William Henry didn’t
understand
Jackson.

Let him go, thought William Henry. Boy wants to go, let him go.

A month after Jackson was born, Harlan come into the tavern, sat down across from William Henry at this very table and give him a disgusted look.

“What wrong with you?” William Henry asked him.

“What wrong with
you
, is the question,” Harlan replied.

“You know what’s wrong with me.”

“I been watchin’ you drag yourself around this here hotel for a month now, wonderin’ when you was going to get down off your high horse and go home where you are wanted and needed.”

“Harlan, my wife had a child by another man. A white man. What you think I’m going to do? Get down on my knees and thank her?”

“Did Josie never tell you what happened?”

“No. What happened?”

“I don’t know what happened. But I know what you
think
happened.”

“I know how people make babies, if that’s what you’re talkin’ about.”

Harlan played with William Henry’s box of matches. He took out a match and snapped it in half, then took out another and snapped that in half. Barbering had given him strong fingers.

“You think Josie been seein’ some other fella. Some white fella,” he said.

William Henry snorted. “That’s how it’s done. You’d know that if you was married.”

Harlan shook his head. “This ain’t no joke, little brother,” he said, still toying with the matchbox. “Didn’t you ever consider that maybe she was forced?”

William Henry narrowed his eyes. “What you mean, forced?”

“I mean maybe she wasn’t seein’ some other man. Maybe some other man jump her. Maybe a car full of other men. It happens, Will, you know that.”

William Henry’s ears started ringing, like some new pressure building up in his head.

“History of our race,” said Harlan, taking out a third match, lighting it and blowing it out. William Henry never seen him so nervous. “Maybe you think too bad of your wife, and too good of other people.”

William Henry stared at his brother for a long time, waiting for the ringing to stop. All this time sitting here, and the thought had never crossed his mind. When the ringing didn’t stop, he pushed his chair back from the table and walked home. He went in the front door and saw Josie sitting in the rocking chair,
nursing her baby. When he told her what Harlan had said, she put the baby down in its crib and stood up to him.

“William Henry Lewis,” she said in his eye, “I wasn’t raped, and I wasn’t seein’ someone else. I never in my life been with any man but you, stupid-assed woman that I am. I told you, this is your child. Your flesh and blood.”

William Henry didn’t understand the woman. Here he was, trying to comfort her, trying to forgive her, trying to make up with her, and she was just getting madder and madder. There was no sense to it. But he made up his mind to come back to her, and when he made up his mind about a thing it was as good as done. He kissed her and told her he believed her and that their life could go back to normal. But deep down he never did bring himself to believe that Jackson was his, just like he never stopped thinking of the British-American as his real home. Maybe he was wrong on both counts and maybe he wasn’t, but that was what he believed. In his mind, even now, he and Benny lived at the hotel and occasionally visited the house where his wife and her son lived.

A few minutes later, Harlan came in and sat in the chair between William Henry and Benny, full of news. Harlan was always full of news about something bad. William Henry raised three fingers and Fast Eddy brought six beers. Then William Henry tapped the salt shaker on the tabletop, sprinkled salt into his beer and followed the grains as they dropped slowly to the bottom of
the glass like tiny white men sinking to the bottom of an ocean of piss.

“What’s all that commotion down by the ferry?” he asked Harlan. He’d know if anyone would.

“You didn’t hear what happened on Belle Isle?”

“No, I didn’t,” William Henry said. “Someone get ants in one of their chicken sandwiches?”

“Somebody got throwed off the Belle Isle Bridge.”

Benny leaned forward in his chair. “What’s that?”

William Henry looked up and saw Jackson coming in the lobby door.

“White woman and her baby,” Harlan said. “Crowd of coloured boys from Detroit chased her down and throwed them both off the bridge.”

“What they go and do that for?” Benny said.

When Jackson came over to the table William Henry asked him, “You finish that Walkerville job?”

“No,” said Jackson. “Couple more days, maybe.”

Then why was he here? “We done our part,” said William Henry, maybe a little sharper than he intended. “You need help?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Jackson said. “Anyway, he paid me.” And he tossed a white envelope onto the table.

“Give that to your mother. Whyn’t you sit down and have a beer first,” William Henry said, but Jackson was already headed back to the door. Goddamn, that boy was hard to figure out.

“Take the truck,” he called after him. “There’s gas coupons in the glovebox.”

But he was gone. William Henry looked after the boy for a moment, shaking his head, then Harlan’s voice came back to him. “Some coloured boys said they got throwed out of Eastwood Park and was gettin’ their own back.”

“On a white woman and her child?” William Henry was suddenly angry. “That’s just stupid.”

“Damn right it is. Whites in Detroit ain’t going to stand for that.”

“Shit,” said Benny, standing up. “I gotta get over there.”

“What for?” William Henry said.

“If there’s somethin’ goin’ on, I got friends over there,” Benny said.

“Finish your beer first,” William Henry said. “I better come with you, keep your dumb ass out of trouble.”

JACK

J
ack had just turned eighteen, the cut-off age for the Windsor Sea Cadet Marching Band, also known as the Windsor All-Whites. When the bandleader found that out, and that he had quit high school, he would tell Jack it was time to move on. Jack was waiting for the tap on the shoulder, and then what? Meanwhile, he concentrated on learning as much as he could, thinking he might join the Navy Band. When the All-Whites wheeled left, he marched in place for six paces, knees high, left foot turning fifteen points of the compass with each step. On right wheels he marched double time, twelve long paces, eyes right, keeping the line straight. Try doing that without moving the trombone or blowing air through the side of your
mouth. Try moving the slide out to seventh position without hitting the marcher in front of you. You had to concentrate. You couldn’t do it if you were thinking about being kicked out of the band, so he didn’t.

They were called the All-Whites because of their white uniforms: hats, tunics, trousers, even their shoes. Privately, they called themselves the All-Whites because there were no coloureds in the band, not exactly by design or decree, it just turned out that way, as everything always did in Windsor. No one blinked when Jack joined the band, which meant no one knew anything about him or his family. Another test passed.

The band practised drills in the Armouries on Saturdays and Thursdays, taking over the polished floor from the Army cadets, groups of sullen schoolboys in oversized woollen uniforms the colour of baby shit. The cadets would come up from the basement rifle range smelling of cordite and idle on the sidelines, drinking Cokes from the machine and, having just fired real rifles, eyeing the band in their white uniforms as though they were so many moving targets. They had that look of aggressive disdain in their eyes, the way all Army men eyed the other forces, which was also the way all whites looked at coloureds. Army cadets were the kind of smug assholes he’d quit Patterson Collegiate to get away from.

There’d been other tests, girlfriends, lunch-counter waitresses, the high-school baseball team, and so far he’d passed them all. His nonresident alien’s card for getting across the border said he was white. He’d hung around with white kids
all his life. They’d made him do things for them because he was younger, not because he wasn’t like them. He was. At the movie theatre, where coloureds had to sit in the balcony, he always sat downstairs, right up at the front, sometimes with a girl, sometimes with his buddies from school. If anyone had suspected anything, they’d have asked to see his card, they were always checking for stuff like that. Even the old man knew he was white. His father didn’t understand it any more than Jack did, and he didn’t like it, but he never stood in his way.