Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

* * *

She sits on the fire escape, hidden from view. She pulls down one shoulder strap of her summer dress and holds her face up to the sun in the vainest of hopes for something near equivalence with her husband. Earlier, at a shop on 125th Street, the owner wouldn’t allow her to try on a hat. He curled up his lip in disgust. He said he’d heard about her, that anyone who lived with niggers became a nigger themselves. He said he didn’t want any nigger hair in his hats. Bad for business. The words foamed at the edge of his mouth, and he tightened his eyes. “You can buy one,” he said, “but you can’t try it on.”

Eleanor placed the hat on the counter silently and went home to sit on the fire escape.

Now, turning her face to the hot sun, she drops the second strap on her dress. Below the fire escape, rows of boys sit on crates and shine shoes as the summer sun hammers down.

Walker can only chuckle at the sight of her burnt skin. “It won’t do no good for what’s in your belly,” he tells her.

He rubs cream on her chafed back and across her neck.

“Bet it’s a boy,” he says.

“What makes you think that, hon?”

“The fortune-teller told me.”

Eleanor laughs. “A boy by tobacco spit.”

“And a good load of it, too!”

“You really think it’s a boy?”

“It don’t matter to me none,” says Walker. “It can be a kangaroo for all I care.”

“Hopping all over Harlem.”

“Hopping and skipping and dancing.”

“Y’ever get that feeling?” she asks as he rubs her shoulders. “That feeling that when you walk down the street their eyes are ripping you up? You know? When you walk past and you feel like they’ve just sliced you? Like they’ve got these razor blades in their eyes.”

“Welcome to the real world, hon.”

“All of us are supposed to be created in the image of God.”

“Maybe so, hon, but even God’s gotta take a shit every now and then. Even God’s gotta wipe His ass like the rest of us.”

“Nathan! That’s sacrilege.”

“No less true, sacrilegious or not.”

“You know what?” she says, after a moment. “That man in the shop wouldn’t let me try on a hat.”

“Holy Name! That’s only the tip of the iceberg. It gets worse. It gets to be a routine. It gets so’s you think it’s normal. It gets so you think God is just shittin’ on down every minute of the day. Like He’s gone and got Himself a bad case of diarrhea. Like it’s just raining on down from His ass.”

“Nathan!”

“Well, it’s just the truth. Y’all ever heard that song? Bill Broonzy.”

And he sings: Lord, I’m so lowdown, baby, I declare I’m looking up at down.

He stops. “That’s us, baby, looking up at down.”

She unwinds a thread from the bottom of her dress, wraps it around her finger, and then snaps it off. “I want my child to be able to buy hats,” she says.

“He can buy all the hats he wants. He can even borrow mine.”

“Come here,” she says.

“What?”

“Kiss me.”

Walker leans to kiss her, and with her forefinger, she smudges some of the cream on his nose. “No son of mine is gonna wear that thing,” she whispers. “No daughter neither. It’s horrendous.”

“I believe even God Hisself got one of these hats.”

“Listen to you!”

Two months later Clarence Walker is born at home, greeted by a string of rosary beads. Eleanor allows the Catholic ritual for her mother’s sake.

Maura O’Leary is the midwife. Lately she has allowed the gray hair to amass on her head. She is fifty-one years old and has only three months left to live; already her lungs seem to have migrated from her chest, weighted down with so much phlegm. She carries a number of large handkerchiefs and, embarrassed, she drops the phlegm into them, closing the cloth as if sealing a vital letter. Almost blind, her eyeglasses have acrobatic twists of plastic at the edges and thick lenses between them. Yet Maura’s sickness has given her a strength and a quiet tolerance — she will die in a fit of coughing in a hospital bed, screaming at the nurses that her son-in-law should be allowed to come to the bedside. The nurses will say no, they cannot fathom a Negro at any white woman’s dying bed. She will rant and rave in the immaculate bedsheets, and she will die with a whispered curse on her lips for the nurses.

But, right now, she wipes a washcloth across her daughter’s brow and says, “He’s a fine strap of a child, girl, a fine young strap.”

Ancestry steps through Clarence in colorful swaths — he has light cinnamon-colored skin and tufts of rude red hair on his head.

The women take turns holding him until Nathan Walker comes into the room. Walker winks at his wife as he places the red hat on the boy’s head.

“Don’t do that!” says Eleanor, sitting up in bed.

“What?”

“Take that thing off his head!”

Laughing, he removes the hat, wraps the baby in a sweater, and bears him proudly down the street in his arms — past vendors of pig’s knuckles and rice, past women eating tania roots on doorsteps, past boys playing stickball in a vacant gray lot, past bored men in caps leaning against light poles. On a corner he waves to some well-dressed men who are signing up soldiers for the struggle in Ethiopia. Nearby, four men look up from their game of dominoes, and Walker grins at them. They smile back. On an outside stoop of a brownstone he nods to a young girl whose voice is in mourning for the fields of Alabama.

“Sing on,” he tells her.

Further along the street a yellow Cadillac overtakes a low-slung Packard. A man leans out the Packard window and stares as Walker goes by. Walker is aware of all the whispers but he swings his body, big and threatening in the sunlight, all the way down to the corner shop, where he browses in the aisles for a long time, buys two bunches of nasturtiums to bring home for the ladies. A five-dollar bill is pulled crinkled from his overalls. The shopowner, Ration Rollins, tugs at a shirtsleeve garter and doesn’t even look in Walker’s eyes. He lays the change down on the counter and turns away, blowing air from his bottom lip up to his gray hair. With his back turned, Rollins starts arranging cigarettes that need no arrangement.

“And a block of ice,” says Walker. He throws the change on the counter and adds, “To cool yourself down.”

He tucks the flowers under one arm, the baby in the other, and leaves the shop with his head thrown back in laughter. He whispers to the baby, “Clarence Walker, you are so goddamn handsome!”

But behind some conspiratorial windows he is indicted for carrying something that doesn’t rightly belong to him: most red-haired nigger child I’ve ever seen.

* * *

Two more children follow in ’36 and ’37, both girls, Deirdre and Maxine. Eleanor fits the girls in a pram, and the boy walks beside her, holding her hand. They go to the park: soiled swans on a small brown lake; a seller of chestnuts; a man in a bow tie proclaiming the love and scholarship of Marcus Garvey; a row of schoolgirls, amazed, bent over the baby carriage; other mothers smiling at Eleanor, coming over to ruffle the strange texture of the children’s hair. But Eleanor sometimes feels uncomfortable. Mostly it is the whites — the cops and the shopowners — who stare at her. At times she finds shade, sits under a tree in the park for hours. Or decides to walk with the kids late in the evening, in the approaching darkness, a head scarf on. She is most fully at ease in these moments of aloneness.

As night falls on Harlem, she closes the curtains and climbs into bed beside Walker while their children sleep. She runs her fingers along his tired shoulder blades.

Two nights a month the fortune-teller looks after the babies and Eleanor joins Walker at Loews Seventh Avenue theater, a cinema for Coloreds. Her husband arrives early — after clocking off from the tunnels — and Eleanor tiptoes down the steps to find him. When she gets to Walker’s row of seats, she puts her finger to the lips of an old black man, who stares at her, astonished, as she moves past. The old man touches her hand and smiles. “Go on ahead, ma’am.”