The neighborhood was now filled with people who had no political influence; people who were dark haired and mellow-skinned—Mediterraneans—who spoke to each other in rounded guttural sounds and who bought strange foods to the neighborhood stores [. . .] So the wall came up and Brewster Place became a dead-end street.
Mattie saw that the wall reached just above the second-floor apartments, which meant the northern light would be blocked from her plants. All the beautiful plants that once had an entire sun porch for themselves in the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for would now have to fight for light on a crowded windowsill. The sigh turned into a knot of pity for the ones she knew would die. She pitied them because she refused to pity herself and to think that she, too, would have to die here on this crowded street because there just wasn’t enough life left for her to do it all again.
“You see,” he said, cutting off a slice of the stiff, yellow fiber, “eating cane is like living life. You gotta know when to stop chewing—when to stop trying to wrench every last bit of sweetness out of a wedge—or you find yourself with a jawful of coarse straw that irritates your gums and the roof of your mouth.”
[…]
“Here,” he said, holding out a piece of the cane wedge of her, “try it the way I told you.”
And she did.
It licked around the baby’s chin and lips, and when there was nothing left, it sought more and sank its fangs into the soft flesh.
“Ya know, ya can’t keep him runnin’ away from things that hurt him. Sometimes, you just gotta stay there and teach him how to go through the bad and good of whatever comes.”
“You sure it’s Basil who don’t want to sleep alone?”
The gentle pity in the faded blue eyes robbed Mattie of the angry accusations she wanted to fling at the old woman for making her feel ashamed. Shame for what? For loving her son, wanting to protect him from his invisible phantoms that lay crouching in the dark? No, those pitying eyes had slid into her unconscious like a blue laser and exposed secrets that Mattie had buried from her own self.
Whatever was lacking within him that made it impossible to confront the difficulties of life could not be supplied with words. She saw it now. There was a void in his being that had been padded and cushioned over the years, and now that covering had grown impregnable. She bit on her bottom lip and swallowed back a sob. God had given her what she prayed for—a little boy who would always need her.
Here she had no choice but to be herself. The carefully erected decoys she was constantly shuffling and changing to fit the situation were of no use here. Etta and Mattie went way back, a singular term that claimed co-knowledge of all the important events in their lives and almost all of the unimportant ones. And by rights of this possession, it tolerated no secrets.
Canaan’s congregation, the poor who lived in a thirty-block area around Brewster Place, still worshiped God loudly. They could not afford the refined, muted benediction of the more prosperous blacks who went to Sinai Baptist on the northern end of the city, and because each of their requests for comfort was so pressing, they took no chances that He did not hear them.
“About throwing away temptation to preserve the soul. That was a mighty fine point.”
Now it crouched there in the thin predawn light, like a pulsating mouth awaiting her arrival. She shook her head sharply to rid herself of the illusion, but an uncanny fear gripped her, and her legs felt like lead. If I walk into this street, she thought, I’ll never come back. I’ll never get out.
When Etta got to the stoop, she noticed there was a light under the shade at Mattie’s window […] Etta laughed softly to herself as she climbed the steps toward the light and the love and the comfort that awaited her.
“At least I’m here in day-to-day contact with the problems of my people. What good would I be after four or five years of a lot of white brainwashing in some phony, prestige institution, huh? I’d be like you and Daddy and those other educated blacks sitting over there in Linden Hills with a terminal case of middle-class amnesia.”
I’ll be damned, the young woman thought, feeling her whole face tingle. Daddy’s into feet! And she looked at the blushing woman on her couch and suddenly realized that her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling.
“It was my kid, too, ya know. But Mattie, that fat, black bitch, just standin’ in the hospital hall sayin’ to me—to me, now, ‘Whatcha what?’ Like I was a fuckin’ germ or something. Man, I just turned and left. You gotta be treated with respect, ya know?”
Serena gave a cry of delight and attempted to catch her lost playmate, but it was too quick and darted back into the wall. She tried once again to poke her finger into the slit. Then a bright slender object, lying dropped and forgotten, came into her view. Picking up the fork, Serena finally managed to fit the thin flattened prongs into the electric socket.
She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.
He silently turned from the anger that his seeming unreasonableness fixed on his wife’s face, because there were no words for the shudder that went through his mind at the memory of the dead brown plastic resting on his daughter’s protruding breasts.
“Mama,” Sammy pulled on her arm, “Shakespeare’s black?”
“Not yet,” she said softly, remembering she had beaten him for writing the rhymes on her bathroom walls.
[S]he turned and firmly folded her evening like gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams, and let her clothes drop to the floor.
“The Good Book says them things is an abomination against the Lord. We shouldn’t be havin’ that here on Brewster and the association should do something about it.”
“My Bible also says in First Peter not to be a busybody in other people’s matters, Sophie. And the way I see it, if they ain’t bothering what goes on in my place, why should I bother ‘bout what goes on in theirs?”
“They love each other like you’d love a man or a man would love you—I guess.”
“But I’ve loved some women deeper than I ever loved any man,” Mattie was pondering. “And there been some women who loved me more and did more for me than any man ever did.”
So Lorraine found herself, on her knees, surrounded by the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.
“Oh, I don’t know, one of those crazy things that get all mixed up in your head. Something about that wall and Ben. And there was a woman who was supposed to be me, I guess. She didn’t look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me. You know how silly dreams are.”
“Woman, you still in bed? Don’t you know what day it is? We’re gonna have a party.”
