I was dressed like an heiress: the old women who had shaken our household into the proper symbolic order had produced from somewhere a slim black wool dress, a matching black coat with a fur collar, sleek leather shoes, and a lace mantilla, all of these things of an uncompromising luxurious quality that dazzled me a bit. Sometimes at school I had played at dressing up, but I had never had clothes like these, nor had I ever ridden in a limousine. When I saw how expensive and beautiful I looked, I was filled with a surge of self-congratulatory excitement, and with the feeling of assuming a glamorous new character with the clothes. Once seated in the gray interior of the big black car, I leaned my head against the window glass in an affected manner, hoping that passers-by in the March night would see and admire me as a tragic heroine.
As we entered the church, Mama supported by Uncle Freddy and old Deacon Cronin, the organ was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze.” Through the music came the breathless feeling of pressure, the vast rustling murmur of a packed crowd. There were more people than I had ever seen at New African before, squeezed even into the upstairs balconies that I had seen filled only during Daddy’s great Easter and Christmas ceremonies. They stood up to see us come in, and the force of that mass concentration on our small group caused a blush of heat over my body, as if I were under the lens of a burning glass. The light in the church was dim, almost amber, giving the gilt-and-blue ceiling, the massive oak altar, and the red-curtained baptismal pool the look of an old-fashioned hand-colored photograph. The rustling rows of somberly dressed people made me think of a stand of dark grain or bamboo. When I entered, I looked automatically for my father in the pulpit; he wasn’t there, but in an instant I saw his face down below, lying in what seemed to be a bassinet of flowers. For a minute I felt absurdly pleased that he should be, as usual, at the center of things at the church, but then the sight of his face among the flowers began to puzzle and disturb me. It was an image that I was to return to many times in the months and years that followed, but I could never decide what to think about it.
There were three speakers at the funeral: Dr. Shelton Granger, a white minister who had worked with Daddy in civil-rights election campaigns in Alabama; Father Gerald Ramsay, an Episcopal minister and neighbor of ours, whose kind, lopsided brown face had been a familiar sight at our dinner table; and Stuart Penn, who had grown up with Daddy at New African and had flown in from Washington, where he headed a commission for poor people and had his name constantly in the papers. Penn had a sallow, angular face, a bit like my father’s, and a forceful, blunt, magnetic way of speaking. He called my father “Jimmy,” as no one else but my mother did, and at one point in his eulogy he turned suddenly in the pulpit and spoke directly to Matthew and me. “I would like to request, for Jimmy’s sake, that you two kids try to do something out of the ordinary with your lives,” he said, in a voice that sounded harsh and peremptory, as if he were giving an order.
I knew Penn only as one of the men in suits who had filled the living room with cigarette smoke and argument throughout my childhood; but when his bulging, rather cold brown eyes brushed across mine as I sat in the pew, I had the sensation—for the first time in many days—of connecting with my father. At the same time, I was aware of the desire to say something: a word, even a syllable, of explanation or assent. The moment came and passed almost instantaneously, and I had no idea what I might have said. Again I was aware only of the amber light, the great bank of flowers that half hid my father’s face, and the massed, inquisitive gaze of the crowd on my black lace and fur. It was much the easiest to pretend to be a heroine.
7
The next day at about noon I went for a walk, grabbing out of an upstairs closet an old purple ski jacket that I had bought back in ninth grade. When the jacket was new, it had been puffy and stylish, with a crisp white lining printed with tiny purple pines; now it was dirty and deflated-looking, with a rip in the left arm where my mother, who wore it to hang out clothes, had caught it on a branch. In one pocket I found a wadded-up school lunch ticket with two meals still unpunched, and in the other I found an ancient stick of chewing gum, its wrapper faded to a yellowish gray. I put the gum in my mouth as I went out the door, and it immediately dissolved into a thousand tiny crumbs, each with a wisp of flavor that was like a memory of spearmint.
Outside it was gray and chilly and windless, one of the absolutely nondescript March days that nevertheless have about them a sense of secret excitement, a silent, fulminating sense of preparation for the coming change of season. Patches of dirty snow still lay on lawns and in
