Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

“Quieres una Coca-Cola? Una Cerveza?”

Valiant Josefina. Before answering she lifts her eyes—eyes with all the subtle fascination of jungle and reef and incorrigible poverty—and for the first time looks directly at her partner. And—most amazing of all—the face of this American is quite ordinary. The face of a professor, an accountant—or a father-in-law like mine. Someone who pays his taxes and worries about dry rot. A little drunk, a little stupid, a little horny and confused, like all the rest of us. Gray hair, a sunburnt nose with a few broken veins, and a blue gaze as limpid as a child’s. Impossible to hate.

“No, gracias.” Said gently. For a fraction of a second, as the next song begins, I link eyes with him. You know me, I say silently. I’m not an exotic dream, not a victim; and with me you can’t hide behind a foreign mask. My name isn’t Josefina, it’s Rachel Moore, and I may have gone to school with your daughter. I married someone who could be your son. I know who you are. Recognize me: it’s the only hope you have.

“No, thank you,” I repeat in calm, clearly enunciated English, as the music gets louder. “It was fun, but I have to go now.”

And since I’m suddenly not interested in observing his confusion, I turn and push my way deep into the surging crowd. There, in the press of overheated bodies, my feet at last grab the rhythm, and for a few delirious minutes Josefina and I dance all on our own.

The Golden Chariot

A musical comedy, or traveling minstrel show, starring a middle-class American Negro family and their brand-new 1962 metallicized Rambler Classic. All of them headed on an epic summer vacation trip across America, from Philadelphia to the Seattle World’s Fair.

Time: August 3–24, 1962

Cast:

EARL B. HARMON, Ed.D., a high school principal

GRACE HARMON, his wife, elementary school teacher

WALKER HARMON, their son, a college freshman

RICHARD HARMON, their second son, age fourteen

MAUD HARMON, their daughter, age ten

The gold Rambler Classic

Music:

No gospel, Dixieland, bebop, doo-wop, ragtime, Delta blues, rhythm and blues, Memphis sound, Philly Soul, or Motown. Just 1962 summer AM middle-of-the-dial radio. Especially three songs: “Portrait of My Love,” by Steve Lawrence; “Things (We Used to Do),” by Bobby Darin; and “Sealed with a Kiss,” by Brian Hyland. These songs play over and over again, fading in and out of the pebbly roar of static that joins cities and towns, ranchland and mountains. The static is the real music.

S

CENE I

(Sunrise. Somewhere heading away from Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. DR. EARL HARMON is driving the Rambler while the rest of the family sleeps around him. The roadsides in the burgeoning light are dense with Virginia creeper, and the speeding car shines like molten gold. The peaceful hills are dotted with black-and-white Mennonite cows.)

DR. HARMON: Oh, it’s the AAA that gives us the bedrock of security, the courage to take this leap. American Automobile Association. The name inspires confidence. All those A’s, like the NAACP. The opposite of the KKK. The AAA guidebook tells us that it includes only hotels, motels, inns, TraveLodges, campsites, and guesthouses where, and I quote, no discrimination is made according to race, color, or creed. And there you are, there’s the whole country open to us, like one big guesthouse. They can’t slam the door in your face if they’re in the guide.

Avoiding humiliation, that’s been the thing. I’m roughly the color of Gandhi, but I would never go around in sandals and a diaper or flop down and let some Mississippi cracker spit on me. Oh, I went down to Birmingham because it was the right thing to do, but I kept well in the middle of the ranks as we marched along down streets lined with what looked like zoo animals to me. It was really just Southern white folks, offering their famous hospitality. They were howling for nigger blood, but it wasn’t going to be mine. I made sure I was protected by a solid wall of share-croppers, and then later I headed up a first aid station where we treated the minor wounds of confrontation, my smooth brown hands on my simpler brothers’ work-roughened skin. Ebony published a photo of me wearing a Red Cross armband, my brilliantined hair rippling back like Desi Arnaz’s, an old black Alabama church deacon staring at me like I was the savior of the world.

Not everyone has to confront. I swallowed enough humiliation for a lifetime in Philadelphia when Mordecai Jackson and I were the first colored students at Central High, and they used to take fresh shit, I suppose it was their own, and put it in our lockers, in our desks, in our lunch bags, in our gym suits. Months of shit. There were some white boys with prolific intestines in that school, or maybe they bought it by the pound.

Now I live in a suburb where I don’t have to smell shit unless they’re spreading it on a lawn, in a five-bedroom fieldstone Colonial that the slick Irish realtor who was busy changing the neighborhood gave away to me for eighteen thousand the way he gave houses away to Hobell Butler and Melvin Durant and all the other Negro dentists and judges and preachers and doctors who left the old Philadelphia row house neighborhoods to the poor niggers from the South. We’re in a greener ghetto, and we like the walls. My oldest boy is in a good Quaker college, and the other two are on scholarship in private school, and my wife doesn’t have to work if she doesn’t want to. Education and integration are the keys to the future, as I tell the seniors at my school; and my kids have the future unlocked, with ushers handing them in.

It’s time to give them the biggest present: the country. Not the South, where the air stinks of barbecued black flesh, but the West, the direction the covered wagons rolled. And