Percival Everett - I Am Not Sidney Poitier

Tornado. Rain. Bird calls. Spiraling. The blue uniform of the Union Army fit tight across my chest and loose in the trousers. The war was pretty much over. Growers like Bond and DeMarion were wanted for having burned their crops and had fled into hiding. The city of New Orleans was awash with blue uniforms like mine. The former town palace of Hamish Bond was empty, and I sat there in it, candles burning on the dining-room table, dusk turning to night outside. Samantha Moon walked into the room from the courtyard and was startled by my presence.

“Come in,” I said. “How does freedom taste? Oh, that’s right, you’ve already tasted freedom. Does it taste the same? Is it sweeter? More bitter? Does it go down easily? Like your master’s sperm?”

“You’re disgusting,” she hissed.

“I thought you might find me so.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to light the candles.” I stood and walked toward her at the other end of the table. I picked up the six-candle holder. Only five burned. Narrow candles with tall flames. I held the light close to her face. “Are you able to see yourself more clearly now? I think that I can see you more clearly. Now that you’re free. And now that I’m free.”

“Where is Hamish?”

“Hamish,” I said. “I don’t know where he is, but I will find him and I will kill him.” I pushed the candles closer to her face. “Can you feel the hot? The heat? The heat they say we darkies burn with? Can you feel my heat?” I moved my face closer to hers and spoke to her left ear, the ear on the side of her heart. “You do feel the heat, Samantha Moon. You’ve always felt the heat between us. It’s starting deep down, isn’t it, like a tickle someplace. You feel it because here I am, waiting to reconnect you to your blood, ready to infuse you with your history, sad and ugly though it may be.” My breath touched her face, and it seemed to me she found it sweet smelling, the way her eyelids fluttered. I whispered to her, “You long to be filled with the juice of lost fruit, don’t you? You need your denied tale, the one I hold between my legs. You feel the blood, don’t you, Samantha Moon?” Her breath was fractured, catching snags as it left her. “The heat, Samantha Moon, the heat.”

Her lips trembled as she leaned toward me, aching for my kiss.

“Sadly, I don’t feel the heat,” I said.

She began to weep.

Then Hamish Bond was in the room. He held a long sword and leaned on it like a cane, like a swashbuckler. “You’ve made the lady cry,” he said.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “It saves me the trouble of finding you.”

“You would kill me. After all I’ve done for you? I remember the village so vividly, so vividly. It was on the Rio Ponga in Africa. You think we white men are bad, but you should have seen those black pagans. I saw more than one whack off the top of a head and run his hand through some poor nigger’s warm brain while he could still feel it. I was sickened by them, sickened, I say. And there, under the body of a woman was a two-month-old tar baby. I put myself between one of Geezo’s men and caught a spear through my leg. I saved that little monkey and brought him home, treated him like a son, taught him to read, to move through the white man’s world.” He stared at me while moving closer to Samantha Moon. As he did, Samantha Moon’s skin grew darker. With each step her skin became more like mine. “I should have saved myself the wound and let the spear strike that little bastard dead.” He looked over at Samantha Moon and was startled.

I pulled out my service revolver and shot him in the chest.

The room became filled with hovering sullen, perhaps angry, perhaps relieved, black faces, and none of them sang.

Then I was in a brothel, plush red pillows soft and comfortable behind my naked back. My arm was slung over the back of a velvet davenport, my reddened and sore knuckles grazed the flocked wallpaper. A long-legged white woman with strawberry blond hair, pale blue and vacant eyes, crawled sensuously, yet awkwardly, toward me. I watched her over the distance, coming across the worn oriental rug, her deep red-painted nails like bloody claws. She came to me and kissed her way up my leg to my soft penis, then she took me into her mouth.

My penis was wet. I could feel that. I swam in the darkness of sleep, slowly remembering my pursuers, where I was. I opened my eyes to see the boy asleep across the room. I looked to my left and saw Patrice asleep on the cot. I looked down to find the top of the blind woman’s head in my lap. I scooted away and fastened up my trousers.

“Which one are you?” she asked.

“I’m the black one,” I said.

She spat. “I had me a notion.”

We sat in silence for a while, and then I asked, “Is it just you and your little brother?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He thinks Mama just went out to de stow. But she ain’t comin’ back.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“Over a year now. She run off with the scrap-metal man.”

“How long have you been blind?” I asked.

“How you know I ain’t been born thisaway?”

“I don’t. That’s why I asked.”

“I was ten year old when Mama threw a pail of lye in my face. You can see I’se all uglied up with burn scars.”

“Hardly noticeable,” I said. In fact it was difficult to see the scarring, though it was there, and it made me sad to see it.

“Mama said she couldn’t keep no man on account dey liked me, and one day she got mad and threw the lye onto me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Den she had Bobo and blamt everthin’ on him.” She seemed to look off into space, but of course she wasn’t. “How old you be?”

“I’m eighteen.”

“You young,” she said.

“I look older.”

“You sho sound older. I like the way you talk. You sound fancy.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well, you don’t sound like nobody from round chere.”

“I can well imagine.”

“What dey arrest you fer?”

“Being black,” I said.

“Hmmm. I heard tell that was illegal.”

“It is in Peckerwood County, anyway,” I added. “I just want to get to Atlanta so I can forget about this place.”

“I always wanted to go to Atlanta,” Sis said. “Doan know why. Cain’t see nothin’, that fer sho.”

“Did you go to school?” I asked.

“For a while. Den Mama threw that lye into my face and I never went back. She said I was ugly and the other chilluns would laugh at me. And I couldn’t see no board or books no way. I heard one of Mama’s beaus say she dint send me ’cause she was afraid she get charged wit buse.”

“Abuse,” I corrected her.

“Abuse.”

“You don’t have to be able to see a book to read it,” I said. “You could go to school. You still could.”

“Dat’s crazy talk.”

Those words hung in the air awhile. Patrice snorted, gagged a bit, then settled back into his snoring.

“Is yer friend a good-lookin’ feller?”

“First, he’s not my friend. I don’t know. Somebody might think he looks okay. He’s looks a little like that old move star, Tony Curtis.”

“I ain’t never seen no movie,” she said.

“You haven’t missed much.”

“You got family in Atlanta?” she asked.

I shook my head and then realized the uselessness of that. “No. Sort of. No, I don’t. I used to live there.”

We sat quietly for a while, listening to Bobo and Patrice snoring in the darkness. I could see a bit of the moon through the far window.

“You think we’ll make it to Atlanta?” I asked.

“I don’t see how,” she said. For once she didn’t sound stupid or out of it. “Not on foot anyway.”