15.
“Do you remember seeing Illium at the funeral?” I asked.
“No,” Leonard said, “but I wasn’t looking for him. He could have been there.”
“I don’t think so, and if he and your uncle were as close as MeMaw claims, he oughta been, don’t you think?”
I shifted gears on my old Dodge pickup and we climbed a hill full of potholes and crumbling slabs of weather-heaved blacktop. The sun was near midsky, and it shone on the faded gray hood of my truck and made me squint, and the hot wind blowing through the open windows made me sweat as if I were in a sauna. I reminded myself that in another couple of hours it would really be hot.
I had brought my truck back with me when we returned to Uncle Chester’s house from our three days in the country, and I was glad to have it, old and uncomfortable as it was. When I first moved in with Leonard, he had picked me up and brought me here and left my truck back home because it was giving me trouble. Turned out the trouble was burned-out rings and cheap gas and no money to fix it.
But on our return to Uncle Chester’s, Leonard needed a way to haul lumber, so he paid for me to get a ring job and real gas. Now, I was no longer polluting half of East Texas, and felt better about that, and without my telltale cloud of black smoke following me I was less embarrassed to be seen driving it.
We were following MeMaw’s directions, looking for the First Primitive Baptist Church, and along the way I got a good look at the East Section, saw parts of it I had never seen before, realized just how truly isolated I was from the way of life here. Along with decent houses, there were houses next to them without electric wires, houses broke down and sagging, their sides actually held up with posts, and out back were outdoor toilets and rusted-out appliances in which garbage had been burned and not collected because the garbage trucks didn’t always come down here.
Black children with blacker eyes wearing dirty clothes sat in yards of sun-bleached sand and struggling grass burrs and looked at us without enthusiasm as we drove past.
It was near midday and grown men of working ages were wandering the streets like dogs looking for bones, and some congregated at storefronts and looked lonesome and hopeless and watched with the same lack of enthusiasm as the children as we drove past.
“Man, I hate seeing that,” Leonard said. “You’d think some of these sonofabitches would want to work.”
“You got to have jobs to work,” I said.
“You got to want jobs too,” Leonard said.
“You saying they don’t?”
“I’m saying too many of them don’t. Whitey still has them on his farm, only they ain’t doing nothing there and they’re getting tidbits tossed to them like dogs, and they take it and keep on keeping on and wanting Whitey to do more.”
“Maybe Whitey owes them.”
“Maybe he does, but you can be a cur or you get up off your ass and start seeing yourself as a person instead of an underdog that’s got to take those scraps. I’ve always worked, Hap. Be it in the rose fields or as a handyman laborer or raising hunting dogs, and you ain’t never known me to take handout checks because I’m black, and my uncle didn’t either.”
“Most of the people taking handout checks are white, Leonard.”
“That’s true, and I ain’t got nothing for those sonofabitches either. Unless you can’t walk or you’re in temporary straits, there ain’t no excuse for it.”
“One minute it’s things are bad here because it’s the black section of town, and next time you open your mouth you’re saying it’s the blacks’ fault. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Yes, you can. Ain’t nothing one way, Hap. Everything’s got two sides and sometimes the same problem’s got two different answers. It’s the ambition and pride these folks are missing. They don’t want nothing but to exist. They think God owes ’em a living.”
“And some of them just haven’t got jobs, Leonard, and it’s as simple as that.”
“Some of them,” Leonard said. “Some gonna tell you too they got to sell drugs to survive ’cause things are bad, and I say you can rationalize anything. ‘I got to sell drugs, I got to sell myself, I got to eat shit with flies on it.’ You don’t got to do nothin’ like that. You grew up poor, Hap. You ever want to sell drugs or hire out to get your dick sucked or maybe lay back and take a check?”
“Government could mail me a check, they wanted to. But I’d want someone to go out to the mailbox and bring it to me. Maybe getting my dick sucked wouldn’t be so bad either, especially someone wanted to pay me for it.”
“Bullshit. I know you. You got pride.”
“Not everyone has had the chance to have pride, Captain Know-It-All. You don’t come with it built in. Like new cars, there are some options got to be installed.”
“Yeah, but there’s them that go out and get the options, use their own tools to put them in. Like your dad and my uncle. From what you’ve told me, your dad didn’t have it so easy.”
He hadn’t. His mother had died when he was eight, and his father had put him to work in the cottonfields, and when Dad didn’t pick the same cotton as a grown man, his father had put the horsewhip to him. I remember as a child seeing my father without his shirt, lying on the floor in front of the TV after a hard day’s work at his garage, and there were thin white lines across his back, scars from the whip. My father could neither read nor write. He never missed a day’s work. He never complained. He died with mechanic’s grease on his face and hands. I’m glad I never met my grandfather. I’m glad he was dead before I was born.
“I had advantages still, Leonard. I’m white. Even the worst of the whites, the white trash, have had it better than minorities.”
“Minorities are one thing. Choice is another. Check and see how many Orientals are on the welfare rolls. You ain’t gonna find many.”
“Check and see how many of those Orientals have ancestors were owned by white folks and sold on slave blocks. Frankly, Leonard, I think a Bible quotation is in order here. ‘Judge not least ye be judged.’ That’s close, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, I got one too. ‘Decide to be a fuckup, you’re gonna be a fuckup.’”
“What bible’s that in?”
“Leonard’s Bible.”
I shut my mouth and brooded. There was some truth in what Leonard said, but ultimately, in my mind, there’s no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.
Leonard told me to take a right and I did and we rolled off the ravaged blacktop and onto a smooth cement street with beautiful sweet gum trees and broad-limbed pecans skirting it on either side. The sunlight made bruise-blue shadows out of the trees and laid them on the street and behind the trees on either side were nice, inexpensive houses with clean side-walks leading up to them.
Leonard looked at the house and said, “See, ain’t everybody down here got to live in the garbage and walk the streets.”
“They got jobs, Leonard.”
“My point exactly.”
“Remind me to kill you in your sleep,” I said.
Soon the street gave up its trees, and there was just the blistering sunlight and on the right a couple acres of land and on it a parking lot and a whitewash church with a plain black-and-white sign out front that read FIRST PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH. REVEREND HAMIL FITZGERALD OFFICIATING.
Behind the church was a simple blue frame house with a well-tended lawn with a sprinkler spitting on it and onto a number of circular, brick-enclosed flower beds. In the driveway was a recently washed last year’s blue Chevy and parked nearby was a small blue-and-white bus with FIRST PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHURCH painted on the side. The bus looked fairly old, and a few of the back windows had been replaced with plyboard. I figured if you scratched the blue-and-white paint deep enough, you’d find a yellow school bus underneath – one of those they used to call the short bus, the one the retarded kids rode to school.
I pulled up in the lot and parked.
Leonard said, “I see a church and I get to thinking how black folks are mostly taught how to accept their
