Percival Everett - I Am Not Sidney Poitier

“I really believe you misunderstood him,” I said. “I don’t know how to build anything, not even a doghouse.”

“We don’t need a doghouse. We don’t have a dog. We need a church, and you have been sent to build it.”

I moved her away and out of the car and followed her into the chill of the morning. Whether it was the previous day’s hard work on the roof, I do not know, but I felt stiff, creaky, considerably older. I did not have on a shirt and my dark skin glistened; I could feel it glistening, and I became aware of my partial nakedness. I leaned back into the car and grabbed a T-shirt, pulled it on while she pointed with an open hand past the chicken coop.

“It will be built over there,” she said.

Sister Irenaeus led me across the yard, past the chicken coop where Sisters Eusebius and Firmilian were trying to stretch and staple wire netting about twenty yards on to a large clearing. “Here,” she said. “You will build it here, and we will help you.”

I laughed. “Sister, I told you, I don’t know how to build anything, much less a building. No, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll fix my car and get back on the road before you ask me to turn water into wine.”

The other sisters had formed in a huddle behind us. They said nothing, neither to me nor to each other. I smiled weakly as I stepped by them and back toward the chicken coop. Sister Irenaeus and the others followed me back to my car where they hovered like bees making no sound, and yet I could feel them buzzing.

As suggested in my trusty car-service manual, tightening the belts was not so difficult. I used my lug wrench as a pry bar and stuck it between the alternator and the water pump. While I was tightening the bolt on the alternator bracket, contorting my body to keep sufficient pressure on the bar to keep the belt taut, I noticed the faces of the sisters under the hood with me, staring at my progress. I managed to get the bolt tight, and they all said, “ahhhh,” as I pulled away.

“You are good with tools,” Sister Irenaeus said.

“Nice try, Sister,” I said.

I tossed my tools in the trunk and shut it, then fell in behind the wheel. I turned the key and the engine started and ran smoothly, at least as smoothly as it ever had. I decided that it was best to say good-bye from inside the car, that I might feel less guilt if I were already rolling away, as opposed to a more formal standing, hand-shaking farewell. Even then I laughed at myself, wondering why I should feel guilt at all. For what? Refusing to perform a task I was incapable of doing? I drove away. I leaned out the window and waved as I approached the bend in the dirt drive. They did not wave, but looked to the sky. The mere thought of them praying should have been enough to keep me driving and yet their faces were so innocent, so open, so, so stupid. I got to the highway and drove back toward Smuteye.

My stomach was twisted with hunger, and so I stopped at the sadly, but no doubt aptly, named Smuteye Diner. It was not a railcar, not even a large Airstream trailer, but a sad rectangle of a mobile home, set up on cinder blocks with a bent set of prefab metal stairs. I entered and sat at the counter.

A large woman turned to me and smiled. “Food?” she asked.

“Please,” I said.

She pointed over her broad shoulder at the menu hand printed with a marker on a poster board.

“What’s good?” I asked.

“It’s all good,” she said. “At least it’s all the same.”

“I’ll have two scrambled eggs.”

“Bacon or sausage?”

“Bacon, I guess.”

“We’re out of bacon,” she said.

“Then why did you … ”

“I was just joking,” she laughed. “We got bacon, lots of it.”

I was relieved and relaxed by her sense of humor.

“Why are you here?” she asked. “It’s hard to get here and here ain’t on the way to no place else. Believe me, I know. So, you’re family to somebody here, which I doubt, or you’re lost.”

“I was lost. I think I know where I am now.”

“You think so, you do?” she said. “You want coffee?” She was already breaking eggs one-handed into a bowl.

I didn’t want to stop her. “Maybe later.”

“Got lost in the night?”

“Late yesterday. I ended up fixing a roof for some crazy nuns or something. I guess they couldn’t be nuns.”

“Pentecostals,” she said.

I nodded. The sound of the bacon on the griddle and the smell of it were making me hungrier.

“Those poor sisters,” she said. “They come here from Montana or someplace because somebody left some land to their church.”

“North Dakota,” I said.

“What?”

“They came from North Dakota.”

“What did I say?”

“Montana.”

“Well, it don’t make no difference no way. It might as well be Russia, it’s so far away. Anyway, I suppose they’ll be hitchhiking back there soon enough. You can’t eat dirt.”

“They want to build a church,” I said.

The woman laughed a big laugh. She had a big laugh and it went with her big hair. It was a mountain of black hair with red streaks and big loop earrings stuck out of it.

“They might do it.”

She smiled at me. “You liked them, huh?” She slid the paper plate of eggs and bacon in front of me. I studied the plate as the grease stained the paper around the edges of the food. “Toast will be right up.”

“Thanks.” I took a bite. “Good.”

“If them sisters build anything, it’ll be a miracle.”

“I think they’ll do it.”

“You’re as crazy as they are. What’s your name, crazy man?”

“Poitier,” I said. “Sidney Poitier.”

“You do look just like him. But what’s your name?”

“Sadly, that is my name.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. What’s your name?”

“Diana Ross,” she said. “Got you!”

“That was good.”

“You name’s not Sidney Poitier, is it?”

What a question she had put to me without even knowing what she was doing, and so I answered truthfully the question she didn’t know she was asking. “It is.”

“Must be rough,” she said. She scraped the griddle with a wide spatula. “Having the same name and looking so much like him.”

“Not so rough. I’m better looking.”

She laughed. “I like you. Where you on your way to?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Sidney Poitier would be.” She put a plate of toast in front of me.

“So, what’s your name?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not as pretty a name as yours. My name is Diana, but it’s Diana Frump.”

“Frump?”

“Frump.”

“I like Poitier better,” I said.

“Thought you might.”

“Diana is a pretty name.”

“Thanks for saying so.” She poured ketchup from a big plastic bottle into smaller plastic bottles.

“Tell me what you know about the sisters.”

“Oh, they come around here every so often. That bossy one gets on my nerves a little, to tell the truth. What’s her name?”

“Irenaeus,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever. And that’s another thing, who the hell can say those names, much less remember them? There’s Oxygen and Firmament and then the others. Anyway, they come round here looking for donations. I don’t get many customers in the first place, and I don’t want them bothered for handouts.”

I nodded.

“They even asked me for money. Want to build a church. I ain’t got nothing extra. Nobody around here does. I say, ‘Why don’t you get it from your main church office, whatever you call it?’ and that Sister Iranus gives me this dumbass look like she’ll pray for me. I don’t say nothing. I’m a good Christian. I’m a Baptist. I should be the one praying for her. Hell, we got us a church.”