some butter cookies with you, Mr. Macon?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’ll be happy to have them later.” The woman was wearing him down. He smiled, though, and said, “If you like.”
“I’ll fix a little package for you. Okay, Susan?” She fled from the room.
Susan managed a small smile. “Wish you could stay and visit with us awhile.” Her words were as mechanical as her smile.
“So do I,” he said, “but, well, maybe I’ll be back.”
“That’d be nice. Sorry I couldn’t be of any help to you.”
“You have been.”
“Have I?”
“Oh, sure. You have to know what’s wrong before you can find what’s right.”
She smiled a genuine smile then. “It’s important to you, is it, to find your people?”
Milkman thought about it. “No. Not really. I was just passing through, and it was just—just an idea. It’s not important.”
Grace returned with a little parcel wrapped in white paper napkins. “Here you are,” she said. “You’ll appreciate this later on.”
“Thank you. Thank you both.”
“Nice meeting you.”
“And you.”
He left the house feeling tired and off center. I’ll spend one more night here and then leave, he thought. The car should be fixed by now. There’s nothing here to know, no gold or any traces of it. Pilate lived in Virginia, but not in this part of the state. Nobody at all has heard of her. And the Sing that lived here went to Boston, not Danville, Pennsylvania, and passed for white. His grandmother would have been “too dark to pass.” She had actually blushed. As though she’d discovered something shameful about him. He was both angry and amused and wondered what Omar and Sweet and Vernell thought of Miss Susan Byrd.
He was curious about these people. He didn’t feel close to them, but he did feel connected, as though there was some cord or pulse or information they shared. Back home he had never felt that way, as though he belonged to anyplace or anybody. He’d always considered himself the outsider in his family, only vaguely involved with his friends, and except for Guitar, there was no one whose opinion of himself he cared about. Once, long ago, he had cared what Pilate and Hagar thought of him, but having conquered Hagar and having disregarded Pilate enough to steal from her, all that was gone. But there was something he felt now—here in Shalimar, and earlier in Danville— that reminded him of how he used to feel in Pilate’s house. Sitting in Susan Byrd’s living room, lying with Sweet, eating with those men at Vernell’s table, he didn’t have to get over, to turn on, or up, or even out.
And there was something more. It wasn’t true what he’d said to Susan Byrd: that it wasn’t important to find his people. Ever since Danville, his interest in his own people, not just the ones he met, had been growing. Macon Dead, also known as Jake somebody. Sing. Who were they, and what were they like? The man who sat for five nights on a fence with a gun, waiting. Who named his baby girl Pilate, who tore a farm out of a wilderness. The man who ate pecans on a wagon going North. Did he have brothers or sisters whom he left behind? Who was his mother, his father? And his wife. Was she the Boston Sing? If so, what was she doing on a wagon? Why would she go off to a northern private school on a wagon? Not a carriage or a train, but a wagon—full of ex-slaves. Maybe she never got to Boston. Maybe she didn’t pass. She could have changed her mind about school and run off with the boy she ate pecans with. And whoever she was, why did she want her husband to keep that awful name? To wipe out the past? What past? Slavery? She was never a slave.
Milkman opened the parcel Grace had fixed for him and took out a cookie. A little piece of paper fluttered to the ground. He picked it up and read: “Grace Long 40 Route 2 three houses down from the Normal School.” He smiled. That’s why it took her so long to wrap up four cookies. He bit into one of them and sauntered along, crumpling the napkins and Grace’s invitation into a wad. The questions about his family still knocked around in his head like billiard balls. If his grandfather, this Jake, was born in the same place his wife was, in Shalimar, why did he tell the Yankee he was born in Macon, thereby providing him with the raw material for the misnaming? And if he and his wife were born in the same place, why did Pilate and his father and Circe all say they “met” on that wagon? And why did the ghost tell Pilate to sing? Milkman chuckled to himself. That wasn’t what he was telling her at all; maybe the ghost was just repeating his wife’s name, Sing, and Pilate didn’t know it because she never knew her mother’s name. After she died Macon Dead wouldn’t let anybody say it aloud. That was funny. He wouldn’t speak it after she died, and after he died that’s all he ever said—her name.
Jesus! Here he was walking around in the middle of the twentieth century trying to explain what a ghost had done. But why not? he thought. One fact was certain: Pilate did not have a navel. Since that was true, anything could be, and why not ghosts as well?
He was near the road leading to the town now, and it was getting dark. He lifted his wrist to look at his watch and remembered that Grace had not given it back to him. “Damn,” he murmured aloud. “I’m losing everything.” He stood still, trying to make up his mind whether to go back for it now or later. If he went now, he’d be forced to return in deep darkness. Totally defenseless before a hit from Guitar. But it would be a real bother to have to come all the way back here—where no car could make it—tomorrow when he was going to leave. But Guitar might be—
“I can’t let him direct and determine what I do, where I go or when. If I do that now I’ll do it all my life and he’ll run me off the earth.”
He didn’t know what to do, but decided finally that a watch was not worth worrying about. All it could do was tell him the time of day and he really wasn’t interested. Wiping cookie crumbs from his mustache, he turned into the main road, and there, outlined in cobalt blue, stood Guitar. Leaned, rather, against a persimmon tree. Milkman stopped, surprised at the calm, steady beat of his heart—the complete absence of fear. But then, Guitar was cleaning his fingernails with a harmless match stick. Any weapon he had would have to be hidden in his denim jacket or pants.
They looked at each other for a minute. No, less. Just long enough for the heart of each man to adjust its throb
