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Article Excerpt
THE NIGHT I TOOK ABBY to meet my Atlanta family, we spent about three hours beforehand going over the rules. The dress sleeves had to cover her tattoo at all times. She couldn't say anything snarky about the casserole, even if it totally deserved it. Her analysis of Bill Clinton as reincarnation of Elvis was funny among our mutual friends, but wouldn't go over well with Oma Hauptmann. It would to be hard enough for the family to accept that I'd proposed to a Yankee girl without rubbing their noses in it. Abby's smile got more and more fixed, and her eyes started to get the glazed look of a deer facing a semi. When we pulled up at Aunt Mary's, I'd started to think the whole thing might have been a mistake.
Abby squeezed my hand hard as we walked up the drive.
"This is going to be all right," she said, as if she was telling me. And all through the meal, the announcement, and dessert, it was. Then the time came in the dance that was unspoken family tradition for the women to kick the men out onto the porch.
The late August heat had convinced Aunt Mary to pull out the wading pool and fill it with the garden hose. All the kid cousins between five years old and fifteen were shrieking and splashing and hopping in and out of the water in the darkening twilight. Inside, Mama and Aunt Mary led the rest of the family in singing hymns while Oma Hauptmann cleaned away the remains of the wrapping paper and snuck the last few squares of sheet cake. Between these two celebrations, one pagan and the other pious, was the back porch and Uncle Dab.
"So, boy. Engaged, are you?" he said with a wide grin. "Big news."
I craned my neck. The harmonies of Christian praise floated in the dim air like pollen. I could just make out Abby's voice, still finding its place within the music. The back window showed a small slice of the living room, but her lemon-creme meeting-the-family dress wasn't there. I hoped the tattoo hadn't slipped. Abby had a way of unconsciously pushing up her sleeves.
"Yeah," I said. "I s'pose it is."
Uncle Dab lit one of his little black cigars then leaned back, white hair haloed by smoke.
"I ever tell you about how I met Mary?" Uncle Dab asked.
"The grain boat that caught fire, and her father's truck," I said, nodding. It was one of Dab's favorite stories, but he'd told it more times than I could count. It was always full of comedy and romance and smart-mouthed remarks made at just the right time. I knew from my mother that it skipped over the fact that Mary had been pregnant by someone besides Dab at the time and had lost the baby.
He took being cut off with good grace, nodding and smiling as if he'd gone through the whole adventure. One of the older cousins--Paula or Stephanie-- laughed, the sound carrying over the piano. I wondered what questions Aunt Mary would ask Abby once the music stopped, and how Abby would answer. Dab drew on the cigar, the ember flaring, then considered me.
"So why don't you tell me about how you met the love of your life?" he said.
"There's not really much to tell," I said. "When I got back from Macon, I took a job at Paul Keneson's place. Abby worked there too, and one thing just led to another."
I shrugged. One of the older kid cousins shrieked, clutching her recent breasts with one arm and splashing a younger boy with the other. The droplets caught the gold of the sunset. Dab, settled in his chair, smacked his lips once, and nodded. I had the sense that I'd disappointed him.
"You know, there was this fella I knew back when I was working at the machine shop," Dab said. "We called him the Swede. Little fella, maybe five foot five. Five foot six on a good day. Blackest man I have ever known. You know how most folks we call 'em black, they're anything from dark brown to one of what Gram used to call high yaller? Well, not the Swede. He was black like a dog's nose. So black, he was damn near blue.
"He used to tell it that his people escaped as soon as the slave ships dropped anchor, headed up north until it got so cold they just froze in place. Could trace his family back seven generations without a single white person. He was the first one in his family to leave Minnesota. Nice fella. Good machinist, too. Anyway.
"He'd been down here about six years when I knew him. Had a girl he was seeing name of Corine. She was pretty. Had this line of dark little moles, just like pinpricks, all along her jaw. Made me think of the sort of bangles they put on women's veils out in Baghdad. She'd come by the shop sometimes, and we'd have to make him stop working until she went away for fear he'd get distracted and lose a finger.
"He'd been seeing her for maybe six months when Martin Luther King got killed. That was before you were born, so I don't expect you'd understand it. And, honest to God, I'd never say this outside the family, but the Blacks have got a whole different country they live in. Even someone like the Swede who worked with us and drank beer with us and all? Now I was sorry to hear about it when King died, and I'm not ashamed to say it. But it wasn't that much to me. For the Blacks, though...."
Dab shook his head.
"It was different for them. What with everything else that was going on back then, King's getting shot was like Kennedy in Dallas and the planes in New York all wrapped up in one. The Swede was living in one of them shotgun houses over by the bend in the river. Little place with five rooms all back to back in a line, and it always smelled like old cabbage. I never did know why. When it happened, he was in the front room drinking a beer and listening to the radio news. Corine was in the back, sleeping a little. He heard about it and just finished off his beer, went back, and told her. She didn't believe him at first, and then she did.
"Thing was, the Swede didn't talk much about it. He just nodded and sucked his teeth and had another beer. It was like he'd heard about a team losing a baseball game. He came into work next shift, you wouldn't have known a goddam thing had happened. I figured that he was just taking it like me. Sad to hear it, but you know how it is. Life goes on.
"It was Corine who saw different. She was spending nights with him. They weren't married or nothing, but there was an understanding between them. So anyway, she was seeing him in his altogether on a regular basis, and none of us sure as hell were, so she was the one that found the bumps.
"Now later on, I saw it a little myself, and I've seen my fair share of rashes and bites and whatnot. This was different. Looked like the Swede had marbles under his skin. Big, angry-looking lumps. And thing was, they moved. Each one of them shifted and kicked like a baby. Started right at the top of his plumber's crack like he was gonna grow a tail, and every week or two there'd be a little new one staring up. Climbed up his spine, one at a time, and out around his sides and down his legs. He said they didn't hurt or itch or nothing. They were just there.
"Corine didn't think much of that, I can tell you. She'd had a sister who died of cancer when she was young, and she looked at those bumps and knew that wasn't right. She'd hound him and pick at him and yell until the Swede went to see some doctor.
"Thing was, this was the end of the sixties, start of the seventies. We were all making pretty good money, but it wasn't great, and he was a Black. Maybe that doesn't mean now what it used to, but they didn't have a lot of trust for what you'd call the medical establishment. They hadn't found out about what those doctors were doing down in Tuskegee, but they weren't dumb. The Blacks knew that white doctors didn't care all that much about a Black fella's bumps. So the Swede went to a few, and they told him to rub grease on it before bed or to stop drinking liquor or whatever other easy advice they found to hand. Nothing ever came of it. The bumps just kept spreading out. As far as the Swede was concerned, it was just part of who he was.
"It didn't all come to a crisis, as you'd say, until just after Thanksgiving ... well, we'd just got Nixon out of the White House, so that'd make it seventy-four. Corine and the Swede were at his place one night, and they were curled up together in bed. It was cold that year, so they were laying right on top of one another, and the way it was, Corine had her ear right up against one of the...
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