Capítulo 10: Chapter 2
When Bailey was six and I a year younger, we used to rattle off the times tables
with the speed I was later to see Chinese children in San Francisco employ on
their abacuses. Our summer-gray pot-bellied stove bloomed rosy red during
winter, and became a severe disciplinarian threat if we were so foolish as to
indulge in making mistakes.
Uncle Willie used to sit, like a giant black Z (he had been crippled as a child),
and hear us testify to the Lafayette County Training Schools' abilities. His face
pulled down on the left side, as if a pulley had been attached to his lower teeth,
and his left hand was only a mite bigger than Bailey's, but on the second mistake
or on the third hesitation his big overgrown right hand would catch one of us
behind the collar, and in the same moment would thrust the culprit toward the
dull red heater, which throbbed like a devil's toothache. We were never burned,
although once I might have been when I was so terrified I tried to jump onto the
stove to remove the possibility of its remaining a threat. Like most children, I
thought if I could face the worst danger voluntarily, and triumph, I would
forever have power over it. But in my case of sacrificial effort I was thwarted.
Uncle Willie held tight to my dress and I only got close enough to smell the
clean dry scent of hot iron. We learned the times tables without understanding
their grand principle, simply because we had the capacity and no alternative.
The tragedy of lameness seems so unfair to children that they are embarrassed
in its presence. And they, most recently off nature's mold, sense that they have
only narrowly missed being another of her jokes. In relief at the narrow escape,
they vent their emotions in impatience and criticism of the unlucky cripple.
Momma related times without end, and without any show of emotion, how
Uncle Willie had been dropped when he was three years old by a woman who
was minding him. She seemed to hold no rancor against the baby-sitter, nor for
her just God who allowed the accident. She felt it necessary to explain over and
over again to those who knew the story by heart that he wasn't "born that way."
In our society, where two-legged, two-armed strong Black men were able at
best to eke out only the necessities of life, Uncle Willie, with his starched shirts,
shined shoes and shelves full of food, was the whipping boy and butt of jokes of
the underemployed and underpaid. Fate not only disabled him but laid a doubletiered barrier in his path. He was also proud and sensitive. Therefore he couldn't
pretend that he wasn't crippled, nor could he deceive himself that people were
not repelled by his defect.
Only once in all the years of trying not to watch him, I saw him pretend to
himself and others that he wasn't lame.
Coming home from school one day, I saw a dark car in our front yard. I
rushed in to find a strange man and woman (Uncle Willie said later they were
schoolteachers from Little Rock) drinking Dr. Pepper in the cool of the Store. I
sensed a wrongness around me, like an alarm clock that had gone off without
being set.
I knew it couldn't be the strangers. Not frequently, but often enough, travelers
pulled off the main road to buy tobacco or soft drinks in the only Negro store in
Stamps. When I looked at Uncle Willie, I knew what was pulling my mind's
coattails. He was standing erect behind the counter, not leaning forward or
resting on the small shelf that had been built for him. Erect. His eyes seemed to
hold me with a mixture of threats and appeal.
I dutifully greeted the strangers and roamed my eyes around for his walking
stick. It was nowhere to be seen. He said, "Uh … this this … this … uh, my
niece. She's … uh … just come from school." Then to the couple—"You know
… how, uh, children are … th-th-these days … they play all d-d-day at school
and c-c-can't wait to get home and pl-play some more."
The people smiled, very friendly.
He added, "Go on out and pl-play, Sister."
The lady laughed in a soft Arkansas voice and said, "Well, you know, Mr.
Johnson, they say, you're only a child once. Have you children of your own?"
Uncle Willie looked at me with an impatience I hadn't seen in his face even
when he took thirty minutes to loop the laces over his high-topped shoes. "I … I
thought I told you to go … go outside and play."
Before I left I saw him lean back on the shelves of Garret Snuff, Prince Albert
and Spark Plug chewing tobacco.
"No, ma'am … no ch-children and no wife." He tried a laugh. "I have an old
m-m-mother and my brother's t-two children to l-look after."
I didn't mind his using us to make himself look good. In fact, I would have
pretended to be his daughter if he wanted me to. Not only did I not feel any
loyalty to my own father, I figured that if I had been Uncle Willie's child I
would have received much better treatment.
The couple left after a few minutes, and from the back of the house I watched
the red car scare chickens, raise dust and disappear toward Magnolia.
Uncle Willie was making his way down the long shadowed aisle between the
shelves and the counter—hand over hand, like a man climbing out of a dream. I
stayed quiet and watched him lurch from one side, bumping to the other, until he
reached the coal-oil tank. He put his hand behind that dark recess and took his
cane in the strong fist and shifted his weight on the wooden support. He thought
he had pulled it off.
I'll never know why it was important to him that the couple (he said later that
he'd never seen them before) would take a picture of a whole Mr. Johnson back
to Little Rock.
He must have tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and
the guilty tire of blame. The high-topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable
muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity
had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he
wanted no part of them.
I understood and felt closer to him at that moment than ever before or since.
During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare.
He was my first white love. Although I enjoyed and respected Kipling, Poe,
Butler, Thackeray and Henley, I saved my young and loyal passion for Paul
Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du
Bois' "Litany at Atlanta." But it was Shakespeare who said, "When in disgrace
with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state with which I felt myself most
familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had
been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.
Bailey and I decided to memorize a scene from The Merchant of Venice, but
we realized that Momma would question us about the author and that we'd have
to tell her that Shakespeare was white, and it wouldn't matter to her whether he
was dead or not. So we chose "The Creation" by James Weldon Johnson instead
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