Those Bones Are Not My Child (13 page)

Zala clicked off the lamp and held Reverend Mattie’s wrists down on the towel so her nails would dry. At least Mac and the VA, after six months of hit-and-miss, had found a medication that didn’t have Spence drooling and tiptoeing on eggshells one minute, raging around incoherently the next, though he would look chronically haggard from troubled sleep for nearly a year.

Zala looked up and signaled the heavyset man that she was ready, but he was absorbed in the discussion between the reverend and the barber.

“While I don’t agree with the provocative sign,” Reverend Mattie was saying, waving her nails in Zala’s face to enlist her support, “I do think the time is long past due for people to stop confusing Atlanta’s PR with Atlanta.”

“Oughta be a law. That sign’s messing with city revenue, scaring the tourists. It’s in restraint of trade.” Pleased with the phrase, Simmons repeated it. “It’s operating in restraint of trade.”

“… serious unemployment, cutthroat competition, mindless ambition, and the wholesale abandonment of the family dinner tradition in favor of fast food on the run,” Reverend Mattie concluded.

“A regular rat race,” the winning checker player said.

“Which reminds me of an experiment we set up once in the lab.” Reverend Mattie had cut into Simmons’s remarks, her voice full of story. She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again while Simmons
retreated to the counter. The woman had everyone’s attention. “We wondered if humans behaved any better in a maze than rats do.”

“You work with rats?” Simmons let it be known that he was still in the game.

“Tell it,” both checker players said at once.

“Well.…” Reverend Mattie slapped one hand down for a second coat of sealer. “We positioned six human volunteers in a large-scale maze that was an exact replica of the one we use with laboratory rats. But instead of cheese—” she eyed the men in turn—“we placed, at intervals along the maze, dollar bills.”

“I heard that.”

“Don’t forget about dee-greeze.”

“And trophies and shit. You know how we folks in Atlanta go for awards and plaques.”

“But this is a true story I’m relating, gentlemen. An actual scientific experiment.”

“Sho nuff. Tell it.”

“Well, as you might expect, the human volunteers scored higher. They were faster at the money than the rats were at the cheese. The humans made more judicious use of memory, induction, deduction, and hunch. They absolutely showed up those rats and then—.” For two beats she watched Zala’s quick, sure strokes. She blew on her nails.

Simmons couldn’t help himself. “So then what happened?”

“Well, it was like this. When the cheese and the money were removed from the two mazes, the researchers observed an odd thing. The rats ignored the maze. They would not run if there were no cheese rewards. And they would not respond to electric goads or other kinds of punishments, either. Nor would they budge when cheese was reintroduced. Because, you see, gentlemen, during the interim they’d discovered better things to do with their time, such as reviving old courtship rituals, dinner dances, loving, raising families. You know, gentlemen—” she blew on her nails—“living.”

Suspicious that the Reverend Mattie, Reader & Advisor, was actually cracking on men, Black men, men like himself who were trying to get ahead, Simmons shot Zala a hot look, as though she were responsible for her customer’s derisive tale. He pushed the broom toward the chrome-and-vinyl chairs to marshal his cohorts. Their eyes were riveted on the woman’s legs, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Only Golf Cap
seemed to be holding his applause till the real butt of the joke was revealed.

“And the humans?” Golf Cap asked.

“Well, gentlemen, the human subjects continued running the maze. Though the money had been removed, they ran. They could not be threatened or cajoled out of it. We called in loved ones, old grammar-school teachers, even their mothers to plead with them. But still they ran. We called in psychiatrists, hypnotists, professional bounders.…” She waited for the men to vocalize encouragement. “They would break into the lab at night in Adidas and jogging suits and—” Even Golf Cap got caught up in the call and response. “We put on extra guards, brought in attack dogs, and electrified the fence. But—” She winked at Zala when she intercepted a scowl relayed from the barber to the manicurist. “Gentlemen, we finally had to resort to tear gas. But do you know, from that day till this those men are still running.”

Barber Simmons coughed a low, gruff cough of disapproval. Zala refused to look up. She slid her tip cup toward Reverend Mattie and shook out the towel. The men were slapping five and naming names. Simmons looked sternly at each of the men in turn. Didn’t they realize that the woman had squired off of them? If not on them per se, then on those fine men and women framed above the ledge of his mirror? People with get-up-and-go, pioneers who’d founded Atlanta Life, Paschal’s, the Yates-Milton Pharmacy, construction companies, undertaking establishments, banks, credit unions, colleges, law offices, and all such as that, all of which had helped make Atlanta what it was, the Black Mecca of the South?

“I don’t hold with tales that disrecognize achievement,” he said. He let the men see his eyes roving over the split dowel that framed the mirror. For over the mirror, lined up from the wall adjacent to the telephone to the alcove leading to the mini-kitchen in back, were the photos, old and new, that spelled out the history. There among the scions of the old Atlanta aristocracy at the opera, hundreds come to see Roland Hayes himself at the Civic Center, were the Colored 400, filling up as many box seats as the whites. And there at the groundbreaking ceremonies of Clark Normal were the members of the Negro Women’s League, the Knights of Pythias, educators, solid citizens, his greatgrandfather among them. There was history marching across the aquamarine
wall, clean, cultured, levelheaded pioneers and their offspring, heirs to good fortunes not built from slavery, convict labor, red-light districts, or legerdemain with the public coffers, but from hard work and clean living, give or take a peccadillo here and there.

“Black Mecca of the South,” he said when his private musings threatened to trip him up. “And the thing we got to appreciate about our accomplishments here in Atlanta is that nobody else, nowhere else did it. Know why?” He beamed an angry eye on Reverend Mattie. “ ’Cause we ain’t sitting around playing crabs-in-the-basket. We all pull together here, that’s what. Our ministers, our businessmen, our politicians, our educators—” he waved a sweeping arc in the direction of the photos—“all pulling together. Where else you got the … ah … the er—how you say it, Otis?—the economic floorboards to support a leadership like we boast here in Atlanta?”

“But there are problems,” Reverend Mattie said, her voice so cool, so mellifluous, Simmons wanted to strike her with the dirty part of the broom. “And we’re always so busy patting ourselves on the back about our achievements, we totally ignore those who can’t get ahead.”

“Anybody can get ahead,” Simmons interrupted. “Don’t hand me no alibi stuff about race prejudice and all such as that, ’cause I’m a living witness to that lie.”

“Can you guarantee full employment, Mr. Simmons? Do you know what ‘full employment’ means to the government? Millions and millions out of work but business well oiled and running smoothly. I don’t see any photos up there of the garbage workers who were out on strike. And where’s a photo of those thousands of unemployed people who mobbed City Hall when a couple of jobs were announced? Don’t you have any photos of the homeless who live under the bridges in boxes, Mr. Simmons? …”

Her voice nettled and her “Mr. Simmons” stung. Simmons counted to thirty-five and listened courteously, lest he lose advantage with the men for riding roughshod on a lady.

“You may be right,” he said, when she came to a period at last. “Perhaps all that depressing stuff you’re talking about is telling it like it is. Sure, there’s been too much PR-type frosting and not enough … er, uh … not enough solid cake, so to speak. But if you ask me, the main problem is this city is growing too big, too fast.”

“Amen,” Zala said, surprising him. But it wasn’t the city she was thinking of. “Too big, too fast,” she said, and for a minute Simmons bobbed his head up and down to encourage her further.

Zala was grateful that the phone rang. She pressed a finger to her outer ear. Delia’s secretary relayed the message to Zala, which took all of three seconds to say: Nate Spencer was scheduled to be at J. C. Penney’s out at Perimeter Mall at four. She held on, listening to the dial tone, and waited to see if she had any more customers. None. She could leave to pick up Sonny right away. Spence delivering him. The men were rocking back on their heels and examining their shoes while Simmons talked on, as though they’d only dropped in to see if Lincoln would return, Lincoln the Leather Illuminator, as his business card read, who’d walked off in high dudgeon, leaving his stand and supplies behind, when Simmons allowed his wife to interfere and redefine the barbershop’s function. That function was not to give haircuts and shaves and provide loitering space for men to dog-ear magazines, but rather to provide the kind of forum Simmons’s father had had in mind, gent that he was, a place where intelligent men could run nations with their mouths, discuss the state of the race, and analyze the mysterious ways of female folk—who understood not to cross the threshold unless accompanied by a boy for Saturday specials.

Barber Simmons beat the floor with the push broom while everyone filed out, including his manicurist, leaving him alone with the cigarette smoke, the nail-polish fumes, and a mountain of debris being blown around like tumbleweed.

It was an impressive skyline, Zala supposed—the glass towers, the skyscraper hotels, the banks, the revolving club lounges on the top floors of buildings. “Battlestar Galactica,” Kofi always said when he gazed around at satellite discs and radio towers. Too literal, she decided—too literal a statement about its intention to be a major city. Hulking machinery and building equipment halted traffic in the outer lanes. There was enough cable lying about to wrap up the whole world. She shot up a side street, giving a cable spool a thoughtful look. It would make a good table. She wondered if Spence would deign to appreciate the worthy looks of that obscene machine and haul the spool back to her house.

Zala had always prided herself on her knowledge of the city; its back roads, parks, and campuses; its architecture and monuments, the various ways brickworks had of signing their buildings; the iron mongers who kept African motifs alive without knowing it; the county borders; the voting districts that kept shifting their lines since the day Primus King cast the first Black ballot down in Columbus, Georgia. Her first training had come from her dad, tickled to death with the dollbaby born to him and Mama Lovey late, in their middle-age years. He would ride her all over the city in the old Ford truck as he replaced downspouts, flushed dormers, cleaned gutters, talked history, and shared his professional secrets with her as though the five-year-old Zala would grow up to be a carpenter, a glazier, a handywoman, or all three.

“The way to match raw new shingles with the old,” Dad would say, fastening the safety belt around her so she could sit in an attic vent and keep him company on the roof, “is, you mix marsh and sea water together.” She got to shake up one of the many crocks they hauled back and forth from Jekyll Island, where they spent summers and holidays with his folks. “You brush it on just so with a boar-bristle brush.” He would demonstrate and she would watch.

Driving through the city, Dad spoke of their roots, tracing the blood through Africans, through Seminoles, to way in the past, taking every opportunity to pass by the Blackstone Apartments on Peachtree and Fourth where his father had been a janitor and one of the first Black Atlantans to drive his own car. Traveling further out, he would point out the site of the drugstore long gone where his father’s father had been on the scene in 1886 when Coca-Cola was first concocted as a headache remedy. Later, they’d open the lunch pail and unscrew the thermos in the old cemetery yard and he would point out family headstones. One uncle’s epitaph read:
DIED FOR HIS COUNTRY
. She understood by her dad’s gargling of the lemonade and the spit-out that this uncle had been a first-class dud. Another relative’s tombstone read:
LIVED FOR GOD AND AFRICA
. Her dad would always linger there, pulling up weeds, making neat the plastic bouquet.

When the name changed from Marthasville to Terminus and then to Atlanta, her dad never tired of telling, as they’d cruise by Five Points on the way back home, her people had been there too, at the lamplighting ceremonies. Even now, swinging around a bumblebee-striped barrier to detour around Central City Park, Zala could still imagine the
buggies, the train sheds, the loading platforms as they must have been. Somewhere in the wooden keg behind her front door at home, somewhere under the poster roll from SNCC’s Freedom School, was one of the original city flags bearing the phoenix emblem and the motto “Resurgens,” a flag her Dad had once soldered to the side mirror of the truck—not to be confused, he took great pains to make clear, with the Confederate flags waving from the sides of cars and trucks that tried to shove them off the road when they went as far as Roswell.

Putting his finger on the tip of her nose to rivet her attention, he made certain that she understood that the Atlanta they had a stake in was not the mythical one drummed up in the guidebooks, the billboards, the newspaper ads, the novels, the glossy brochures with tables of figures and graphs and maps showing gray areas slated for “demographic changes and redevelopment.” Atlanta, the real one, was documented in the sketchbooks, the scrapbooks, the photo albums, the deeds, family Bibles, in the memories and mouths of the elders, those who had stayed and those long since moved to Brunswick, Georgia, when their summer stints on Jekyll Island, servicing the Goulds, the Astors, and other wealthy families that playgrounded there in white linen and panamas, georgette and Milan-straw sundowners, played out.