Those Bones Are Not My Child (98 page)

Miss Butler had stuck a bookmark in at Luke,
chapter 4
, verse 18. But that was about Christ coming to the world to bring good news to the poor, Bernie’s lesson for Sunday school. Kenti had asked to do a play for the young people while the grown people did their program upstairs. She flipped to Luke,
chapter 15
. The bookmark told her that
what she wanted was in red print from verse 11 to verse 31. Kenti had already cast the Prodigal Son play. All she had to do now was write out the speaking parts for the father, the two sons, and the people the Prodigal met when he was away “wasting his substance with riotous living.” There didn’t have to be anybody onstage to send him to feed the swine when the famine came. As the storyteller, she could just say it, and Jimmy Crow would act it out. The best part was what the jealous son had to say when he saw the fatted calf being roasted. She would have to write a good last scene, though, so the two brothers, the foolish one and the jealous one, could make up at the end. She put her pencil down and scanned the story again. There was no mother in the Bible story. But there had to be a mother in the play, because Kenti had good lines for the mother to say.

A daddy longlegs was crawling over the piece of paper Kofi had used to hide the firecrackers he’d found in the basement closet. It was a big insect. Its head was like a crinkly leather drum. On the end of each bent leg was an orange shoe. They were supposed to bring good luck. She knew a family that needed some. There hadn’t been many good times since they left their Rawls relatives. They could make anything fun, even going to a graveyard. One of her girl cousins pulled moss down from the tree and wore it for a boa to prance around with. Kenti had been taken with the decorated graves. Kofi and Sonny too thought they were interesting. Their dead grandfather’s grave was covered in seashells. Pliers and a beat-up coffee kettle were stuck in the dirt of his grave. Other graves had favorite things the dead people liked. There were baskets made out of marsh grass half-buried in some. She didn’t go and look in because lids were on the baskets. She had the feeling, though, that Sonny had snuck a look. One grave had a saw stuck in it. But the dead man hadn’t been a fix-it man like Mama’s daddy; he’d played the saw for music.

Sometimes at breakfast, somebody would say something and they’d talk friendly awhile. One time Mama put aside her books and helped her stick almonds and raisins in the gingerbread boys she was making for Marva’s birthday. Daddy was balling up socks from the wash and Kofi was pulling strips of bacon apart, licking the salt from his fingers while he told about the latest danger Captain Singh was in. That was the first Sunday they’d spent in the new house, Aunt Paulette’s house, Mama getting up to stretch and say how good it felt to have space. The
second floor even had its own sunporch. Then Kofi asked who’d go if a spaceship landed and let down the ramp. Right away Mama said she would, which made Kenti feel bad. But she didn’t even know she felt bad, because they were all talking at once about
E.T
. and the adventure of being out beyond the moon seeing things they never saw. Then Sonny said to Mama, “You sure didn’t have to think long about running away from home, did you?” Things went back to like before then.

From the other side of the sliding doors, Sonny could be heard explaining to Kofi’s group what the grown-ups’ sermon had been about. Jacob at Jabbok. Miss Butler had a bookmark for that too. Genesis, chapter 32, verses 22 through 32. Kenti followed, liking Sonny’s version better. Jacob was getting ready to cross the river Jabbok one night when somebody jumped him. According to Miss Butler’s bookmark, the man in the dark was an angel from God, but Sonny said “mugger.” They rassled all over the riverbank, and Jacob was winning. But he wouldn’t turn the man loose until the man blessed him. And that didn’t mean “bless him out,” Sonny had to say to one of the boys who interrupted. Jacob was crippled because the man wrenched his thigh out of joint, but Jacob wouldn’t turn him loose till he got that blessing. Then they took it to a verbal level, Sonny was saying, and got into the naming business. Jacob, who used to be a cheat and a hustler, got the new name “Israel,” meaning “God-ruled.” When Jacob got his blessing and limped away, he named the Jabbok neighborhood “Peniel.” Kofi and them had to haul the dictionary open to find out that the word had something to do with “penance,” or doing good deeds to show you’re sorry for doing dirty before.

When Sonny left the room, Kofi’s group had to figure out on their own the so-what of the story. On the back of the bookmark Miss Butler had scribbled the answer, more for herself than for the children. As far as Kenti could make out, the lesson was that people who struggled in the dark and got scared should keep on with the struggling and then they’ll be blessed and can change. She wanted to tell Kofi’s group that, ’cause they were in there talking about Jacob Israel’s broken leg instead of talking about how people can change things if they keep fighting. But she had her own work to do.

She heard Sonny on the first flight up, going out the side door, it sounded like. He was supposed to stay around for the program after church because he was a tuning fork. That’s what she heard Mrs. Grier
and Miss Em saying on the steps the day they moved and Miss Em had gone to the old door. Put Michael, Sonny, and all the other boys together in a room, strike one and the others would sound. Miss Em might bring the boys to the program. So Kenti carefully wrote out the speaking parts for the play she’d put on at the end. Once again, she ran her finger up and down the red print looking for the mother. If the father wanted to make merry, and the jealous son had an attitude, surely the mother wanted to ask the foolish son for the name of the harlot so she could go and slap her face for making him “waste his substance in riotous living.”

From the side door, Sonny watched the tables get set up in the vestibule. Two times
DEFEND THE RIGHT TO ORGANIZE
was taped to the wall and fell down. Then he saw his mother come out of the minister’s office. She went out the front door without stopping to shake Reverend Thomas’s hand. He was holding on to each hand an extra long time, telling people to be sure to come right back for the special program. Sonny went up the four steps to see what was being put on the tables. Nothing much—some newspapers, a few pamphlets, and the petition people were being asked to sign. He stepped out onto the portico and hid behind one of the pillars.

His mother was helping a woman out of a car. It wasn’t the woman he’d been on the watch for. This was just an old lady his mother was helping. She had on heavy brown stockings, the veins lumping through. Over her homemade dress she wore a vest that looked like a man’s. He’d seen Granny Lovey do that sometimes: take the husband to church, dead or not. He moved around the pillars when his mother went up the street. He was half hoping she’d turn and see him. He had the feeling lately that she could read his thoughts. He’d be fixing a sandwich and thinking about places on his body to hide a few sticks of dynamite, and she’d come into the room quickly as if he had called, or she’d close her book and look up at him like she knew his mind.

“Let’s go watch Kenti’s play,” Kofi said from the far end of the portico. He was pulling leaves off the high hedges. “She wants us to be there.”

When Sonny made a face and turned back to what he was doing, spying on Mama, Kofi made up his mind not to talk to his brother anymore.

He’d tried, he’d really tried, but Dr. Perry didn’t know what she was talking about. And he wasn’t going there anymore with them either. If Sonny could stay later for therapy, he could stay too. He went back into the shady, cool vestibule, sorry he’d bothered to leave the cool basement in the first place.

One of the men who sometimes came to the house was clicking a counter down till it read zeros straight across in the little windows. Some of the people who’d been in church for the service weren’t leaving. They were standing around the information table talking about Wayne Williams’s parents. They were suing the police and the city for wrecking their house and tapping their phone. Kofi went down the steps thinking of the time his mama had pleaded and hollered to have their phone tapped. But these people were talking about an illegal tap and other kinds of violations of privacy. He continued down to the basement without stopping to look through the side door to see if Sonny was following Mama. It would have been great if Sonny had stayed on with Uncle Thaddeus and them on the island, he was thinking. Tiptoeing into the room where he’d stashed the firecrackers, Kofi was muttering that it would have been even better if Sonny had never come home at all. But that wasn’t true, ’cause he’d loved him and missed him when he was away. Down at the shore with the cousins, he could just be missed.

Spence glanced into the room where Kofi was muttering and kicking the table leg. He went down the corridor and looked in on Kenti. She was ordering boys and girls about dressed in odds and ends from holiday pageants from the past. She warned them that this was their last chance to get it right before the curtain went up. Spence went up the stairs. Cars were pulling up in the side lot. He went out to shake hands with the brothers from the mosque. They’d not met since the winter of ’80/’81, when they’d opened self-defense classes. The media had referred to the First of the Nation as “gestapo squad.” Spence salaamed and kept moving.

Like at other meetings that had been going on since the fall, there were groups between parked cars in the lot holding caucuses before-hand. There was usually a group reliving the sixties, whether they’d been in it or not, the nostalgia ridiculous, the glorifications ludicrous. Legend making was the impulse to exempt the ordinary self from responsible
action. And always at the pre-meetings and at the meetings themselves there was someone who stood apart, usually Spence himself, while Mason charged through the circles, saying to one group what he never failed to say to McClintock, that it was naive, stupid, and dangerous to seek psychiatric solutions to political problems, then charging through to the next. The elite and would-be-elite types taking up as armor against him and others like him the argument that what Black leadership said was good, was good for the grass roots who’d put them in office. And reps from the gay quarter against any analysis that included child porn as a pattern because it was too much like the official version that claimed homosexuality as a motive.

What had been striking Spence lately about the meetings was that even the radicals, white and Black alike, did little more than react to the authorities’ agenda, as if there were no alternative way to organize or to think. They appealed to the same fear and hatred the “enemy” did to promote a version of reality that didn’t match any other in the room, including each other’s, though their main tactic was the same—to provoke the authorities and keep the leadership in a bad light, and then appoint themselves as saviors of the people. Spence had stood apart. So had an actor-model friend of Sue Ellen’s, who kept turning the television down when the Falklands or the World’s Fair in Knoxville appeared, then turning it up for the commercials, as though a new and improved detergent could clean up the ideological and intellectual confusion that reigned at the meetings.

It was Dowell this time who stood apart and alone. Grinding on a cigar in his back teeth, he glowered at the ground. The dusty patina was so even on both his black shoes that they looked brown. He stood apart because the parents planned to sue local, state, and federal authorities for obstructing justice, while at the same time they were going to petition the feds to re-examine the case, plans that seemed contradictory to him. He stood alone because nobody wanted to hear that, and especially not from a cop. Spence walked around Mason and Vernon discussing the possibility of escorting the parents to D.C. Some top brass were trying to prevent the Vietnam War Memorial dedication ceremony on Veterans Day. Groups of volunteers were guarding the site where the memorial stone, engraved with 57,939 names of the dead and missing, would be set.

Up the street, approaching, were the usual shark-nosed snoops who
always turned up for the meetings. Usually quiet, they occasionally broke discipline to praise actions taken by various law-enforcement agencies committed to the protection of the community. Spence hoped there were groups forming that were committed to the liberation of the community. He scanned the streets for signs of his wife.

Zala headed toward Gordon Road looking for a pay phone. Reverend Thomas’s office had been jammed with helpers calling the shutins and others running off extra copies of the program. Several cars were double-parked on the street. She cut through a yard for the quick route to the Jiffy Mart. Dowell had given Leah and Gaston a beeper, but no one had called them to see if it worked. She hurried past a school that would not be opening in the fall. Not three months before, school-children closer to home had been at the community center selling cooking-class fudge from the middle school that was also being closed down. The children hadn’t raised funds to save it, but to buy new pompoms for the pep squad. She hadn’t heard of any PTA activities to save the schools in either neighborhood. She went past a driveway where a couple were taking in pole lamps, a clothes rack, and other remnants of a Saturday yard sale. Two houses up, a real-estate sign was stuck in the lawn. Soon there’d be a stampede, and those left behind would have to fight harder than ever to make sure garbage collection was kept up and the block didn’t go down. But how the hell did people think they could let their schools close and still maintain viable neighborhoods?”

People were parking their cars as far away as Gordon and taking the long way to the church. Among familiar STOP members were two unfamiliar couples, one dressed up as though they were heading for a dinner dance, the other down as though for a picnic outing. Just in case they were spotted by parishioners from their own church, they wanted it clear that they didn’t usually worship at Seven Hills Congregational and hadn’t defected, like all those people from every denomination attending services at Reverend Barbara King’s church of late.