Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

The Sutter family lives on Strivers Row.

This afternoon the Sepia Ladies are holding their weekly summit at Mrs. Mason’s house to set the procedures of the upcoming raffle in stone. Jennifer watches the atomizer, that deep purple gem, cajole liquid into essence. Mrs. Sutter checks to see how the sleeve of her yellow dress falls on her shoulder. She tweaks the shoulder pads. The dress is a slick yellow, her hat a satisfied gold that livens her face. Jennifer has always coveted her mother’s pearl earrings, she longs for holes in her earlobes. Once she slept with the earrings under her pillow, her fist around them driving the pins into her flesh. Two days later her mother asked, “Jennifer, have you been in my jewelry box?” and that was the end of that. Except for the twin scars in her palm. Her mother sees her watching and asks, “Jennifer, what are you going to do today while I’m at my meeting?”

“RoseEllen can’t play today,” Jennifer says. She tells her mother the story of RoseEllen’s sick grandmother in Maryland and how her family had to drive down there.

Her mother says, “That’s terrible,” and ponders her behind in the mirror and above that the oval of flesh on her back permitted to eyes by the cut of the dress, the brown pearl and its lone imperfection, a mole that required careful plucking by Dr. Sutter every fortnight. “This is a perfect opportunity to practice for your recital,” Mrs. Sutter says, inspecting.

Jennifer Sutter demurs and after a little back and forth, mostly forth from Mrs. Sutter, who has little time for discussion as her Sepia Ladies Club mission draws near, who has paid good money to acquire the services of the best music tutor in Harlem, who will not be embarrassed by her daughter at the recital in front of the other women of the Sepia Ladies Club, who has gone to great lengths to provide the best for her daughter, Jennifer is left with a brand-new dime in her hand for candy, but then it’s straight to the piano.

Jennifer pulls up her white socks and folds them over. She buckles her shoes.

They walk out into the neat hubbub of Strivers Row that afternoon together. The Strivers Row Property Association does not allow stickball on this street (they leave that to the other streets in the neighborhood, to Negroes who care less about noisy youth and their epithets, their window-smashing errant balls). Instead they dispatch their male sons with Mr. Harding to Morningside Heights for softball. Jennifer’s brother Andrew is there now with Jackie, Garvey and the rest of his friends. While Jennifer has to stay in their stuffy house and feel Mr. Fuller’s stare upon her even though he’s not there (he’s probably playing with that little rat mustache of his), feel his impatience at incorrectly-struck keys even when it’s not her fault, her fingers just slipped. Mr. Fuller always makes it out to be her fault. He has a list memorized of things a proper musician does and does not do, he has a thing about posture and a back like a lamppost. Her mother tells her to make sure to lock the door and they diverge on their clean stoop, the elder Sutter east and the younger Sutter west.

The Candy Store is only a block and a half from her house but she’s forbidden to enter the disreputable radius of the Tip Top Lounge so Jennifer has to cross the street, walk down the opposite side and then cross the street again like a good girl. This circuitousness a condition of her release. She looks over at the open door of the Tip Top but cannot see inside it. She passes four sewer grates on her journey and each time she glances down between their iron teeth but she does not see any musicians. Never has.

The store doesn’t have a name on a sign anywhere. Grown-ups call it The Polish and the kids call it the Candy Store. There was a time when the first thing Jennifer did when she entered the store was pivot left and head for the comics rack. Superman routing Nazis, Sub-Mariner crashing U-boats, occasional mayhem in the Pacific theater. Captain America was a normal GI until the medical experiments and then he became a fighting machine. But the war comics disappeared. First the Nazis, then the Japs, and then the conflict moved to the home shores: her mother realized that the four-color confections belonged to her little girl and not her young man, and that put an end to the comic books. It wouldn’t do for her baby girl to dirty her hands with that messy ink, the violent images. But Mr. Polaski still remembers those days, he has dossiers on his customers beneath the glass counter, and when she enters his establishment he says, “Just got the new Action Comics in.”

Jennifer mumbles quickly, “No thank you.” The avuncular proprietor, with his gray undomesticated thatch of hair and tidy red face, is a relieving sight. His wife, who works occasional shifts in the omnibus store (scissors, candy, newspapers and wrapping paper, round tins of tobacco for those taken with the habit, items every tenant has special drawers for, and dust) doesn’t like Jennifer, or children, or Negroes, and does not have a pleasant manner at all by any measure. Twice she shortchanged Jennifer, but grown-ups are so adamant and sure about being correct in all things that Jennifer never protested. The old lady has a shrunken face like a rat and little rat paw hands that curl around coins as if they were treasured crumbs. But she isn’t in the store today. Jennifer holds up her dime and says, “I’d like ten redhots and ten caramels, please.” Always say please. She likes to alternate the feeling on her tongue. First the rocky redhots burning red into her tongue until she’s able to smash them with her teeth, then the soothing gooey caramel that’s like sweet gum for a few chews before she dissolves it. On hot days like this the red from the redhots and the goo from the caramel sticks on her hands. She remembers that she’ll have to wash them before her mother gets home, but she doesn’t remember that each time she has that much candy she always feels sick afterward. Little wonder, how fast she eats it, but she never remembers that fact about her routine, just the nice contrast of the alternating flavors and textures that she makes in her mouth.

“I’m afraid I’m all out today, friend,” Mr. Polaski apologizes with smile. “Cleaned out by noon and I haven’t got my new shipment in. They don’t work on the Sabbath.”

Sabbath must be how they say Saturday in Polish. She looks up at the empty jars behind the counter. The jars are empty and her heart falls.

“Still have plenty of gum,” Mr. Polaski offers. “We have redhot gum and that’s almost the same thing.” His hand already dipping into the jar. But Jennifer’s not allowed to eat gum even though everyone else is. Her father is a doctor and has explained the situation to her. Eating gum will give her big lips. It is very important for her to keep her mouth shut when not talking or forking food into her mouth, or else she will get big lips like so many of their race. If the mouth is allowed to remain open, the muscles in the face relax, and after a time the lips slowly begin to curl outward, exposing the pink inside, until they remain like that. It is important to learn to always breathe through the nose, the nostrils. That’s why God put them there. When one chews gum, the natural urge is to chew with the mouth open, which in turn promotes lippus maximus. So gum was not allowed in the Sutter household on Strivers Row. Often when they walked in the neighborhood her father would point out those afflicted with lippus maximus and reiterate his professional advice.

No more suckers and only gum. RoseEllen, of course, can eat as much gum as she pleases. Chew it brazenly, blow bubbles, stick it on the undersides of furniture. Which was why Jennifer rued deeply her grandmother’s sudden illness. Mrs. Turner keeps a bowl of rainbow gumballs on the mantel in the living room and Jennifer can help herself to as many as she likes. She crushes them, sucks on the candy shell until its all gum, defenseless against her violence, blows bubbles that she snaps like firecrackers. RoseEllen might say, “You’re eating all my gum!” but only when she’s already mad at something else. Jennifer almost considers buying the redhot gum, which probably mixes the tartness of the redhot with the pliability of the caramel, but just two Saturdays ago she forgot to spit out her gum before she got home and was sent to her room without dinner. The redhot gum jar used to have a picture of a firecracker exploding on it, but after they dropped the bomb on the Japs they renamed it A-Bomb Gum and now a mushroom cloud unfurls itself in redhot taste.