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