“I first started in real estate in San Leandro. I was called by a party who wished to see a home that was in San Leandro. It was listed by another broker and I requested to show the party the home. I made an appointment, and it was a black family. Before I got back to my office, my broker knew about it from the listing broker, and I was told, I was certainly new in the business and I should wise up.”
—Rex Hayes, Hayward, California, Realtor, November, 1971
It was late as I dragged myself down the street toward the apartment complex. I had stayed after school to help Mrs. Carrion grade math quizzes. I loved her. She took me to Foster’s Freeze for a root beer float when we were done. If there is anything better than root beer, it’s root beer with ice cream. She offered me a ride home but I felt like walking. I had some stuff to think about.
The trial was just a day away and it was bothering me. I was having shortness of breath. My stomach hurt frequently and I was getting dizzy spells. I’d also been having bad dreams. I dreamt I was in court and I said the wrong thing and was dragged off to jail. I didn’t want to tell Mom about it. I didn’t want her to worry about me. I was the man of the house. My butcher knife escapade had solidified that position once and for all.
As I rounded the corner a half mile from home I heard the familiar drawl.
“Hey theah!”
I looked over to see Mr. Wilkins mowing his lawn. He was wearing his “uniform,” as always: Clean white shirt and dirty blue overalls. Did he ever wash those things?
“Hey, Mr. Wilkins,” I shouted.
“Come on over here and get some candy.”
He always did that to us. Yelled for us to come and get some candy. He never asked us if we wanted any candy. My sisters and I were simply ordered to come and get some candy. He always had Brach’s hard candies. Brachs. I didn’t really like them. They were like sugar-coated stones.
“I say, come on and git some candy,” he shouted again.
“Sure, Mr. Wilkins. Thank you.”
Why fight him?
I ambled across the street as he pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his sweaty brow. The man was always working. A lot of it was hard physical work: digging, carting wheelbarrows, shoveling. What was he, seventy? Eighty?
“Come on in the workshop while I go get it,” he said, turning toward the house.
I followed him into the workshop. It was clean today. He had swept up the sawdust. I noticed these things now because I had become a regular visitor. Tracie and Delisa frequented his place, too. We couldn’t walk by the house without being beckoned by him. He was gruff and pushy, but he was a nice man. I’d grown to like him. So had the girls.
A moment later, he emerged from the house with a clenched fist.
“Hold out your hands,” he commanded.
I complied and he dropped the little boulders into my palms. I stuffed them into my pockets. They’d be in the apartment complex’s Dumpster within the hour.
“Ain’t you gonna have none?”
“It’s pretty close to dinner. I’ll save them for dessert.”
I was getting to be a better liar. Survival skills.
“Your grandmamma still using the cutting board I sent her?”
“Yep. She uses it all the time. She cut a roast into steaks on it last night.”
That part was true. Grandma loved the cutting board. She brought Mr. Wilkins some of her home-baked rolls in appreciation. Whenever she needed something fixed that was made of wood, she brought it down the street to his house. He cheerfully made the repairs and refused to accept a penny for his work.
“I enjoy it,” he always said. “It gives me something to do.”
It’s so strange. Here we had all of these people being so mean to us, the kids, the Wentworths, the police, even the nuns at school—yet this old white man from Tennessee couldn’t do enough nice things for us. Go figure.
“I got something for you to take home,” he said.
“You don’t have to do that, Mr. Wilkins.”
“Hush now. It ain’t for you; it’s for your grandmamma.”
He opened a drawer on his workbench and pulled out a tubular-shaped wad of tissue paper. He unwrapped the paper to reveal a smoothly sanded rolling pin.
“You know what this is?” he asked.
“Yeah. It’s one of those things that the wives in cartoons are always hitting their husbands in the head with. I don’t think Grandma can use it. She doesn’t have a husband.”
He chuckled at first; soon the chuckle evolved into a hearty, husky laugh.
“It’s a rolling pin. I know your grandmamma bakes. She can use this to roll out her dough.”
“Did you make this?”
“Of course,” he smiled.
The man was amazing.
“I got those slides back. Sit down and I’ll show ’em to you.”
One of his many talents was photography. At least once a week he corralled the girls and me on the walk to or from school and made us pose while he snapped a roll of film. He was pretty good. The shots came out well. He never got pictures done though. Only slides.
I sat on a stool at his workbench as he went to one of the wooden desks he had made and opened a drawer. He sorted through several small, yellow Kodak boxes before selecting the one he was looking for. He pulled a stool alongside mine and placed the box in front of me. Written on the box in a shaky blue-inked scrawl were the words, negro children — 1975.
Mr. Wilkins removed a small viewer from his coverall pocket, opened the box, removed a slide, and inserted it.
“Look at this,” he said proudly.
I peered through the viewer to see Tracie, Delisa, and myself, dressed neatly in our St. Felicitas uniforms (blue cords, white cotton shirt, and bright red sweater for me; the same red sweater with white blouses and ugly plaid, Catholic school skirts for the girls). We were arm in arm. Delisa was laughing and I was smiling. Tracie was showing teeth, but I wouldn’t really call her expression a smile. It looked more like she had something crawling up her leg.
“This is very nice, Mr. Wilkins.”
He smiled.
“Heah, look at some more.”
One at a time, he cycled a dozen more slides through the viewer. They were all variations on the first shot. As the slides progressed, Tracie loosened up. By the time I got to the last one, she actually looked like she was enjoying herself.
“You know,” he said, “if your mama or grandmamma want any of these, I can get some pictures made.”
“That would be nice. I’ll ask them,” I said as he put the slides back into the box and replaced the lid.
I studied the inscription again. negro children — 1975.
Mr. Wilkins notice my intense interest.
“What’s the matter?”
“Um . . .” I paused.
“What?” he barked.
“My mom says we’re not negroes anymore. We’re black.”
He looked wounded. I had hurt his feelings.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wilkins. It’s no big deal.”
“No,” he said, pulling a ballpoint pen from a pocket in his overalls. My God, does he have everything in there? “Folks should be called whatever it is they want to be called.”
He scratched out the word “negro” and replaced it with “black.”
“How’s that?” he said, holding the box up for my approval.
I smiled. The smile faded as I thought about something.
“What now?” he said.
“Mr. Wilkins . . . what did you call black people when you were in Tennessee?”
He cast his eyes downward and didn’t speak for a long time.
“Tennessee is a different place,” he said. His tone was apologetic. “When I lived there it was a different time.”
“Oh,” I said, sorry that I brought it up.
“Not that it makes things that was wrong, right. It being a different time, I mean.”
He got up and put the box of slides back in the drawer.
“Sometimes,” he said, fiddling with the contents of the drawer, avoiding eye contact with me, “sometimes when you get older, you notice that things you thought was okay, things you thought was ‘just the way it’s supposed to be,’ ain’t okay. It ain’t how they supposed to be at all.”
“Do people ever change?” I asked.
“Some people do. Others . . . ” He shook his head. “Some folks are too ‘right’ to realize they wrong.”
“Were you ever wrong, Mr. Wilkins?”
He shut the drawer. His gaze still avoided mine.
“Let’s just say there are things that I would change if I could. Things I might’ve done different.” He finally looked at me. “We all got to take some kind of responsibility,” he said.
He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow.
“But, there’s no sense in talkin’ about that now. What’s done is done. Alls you can do is what you can do today. You can’t ever do nothing about yesterday.”
I nodded.
“How’s your mama’s court case?”
“You know about that?”
“Your grandmamma told me. It’s soon, ain’t it?”
I nodded again.
“Tomorrow. I have to testify.”
“You okay ’bout that?”
I paused. My turn to avoid eye contact now.
“I just don’t want to say the wrong thing.” He nodded.
“I think I should go. It’s getting late,” I said,
I got up and walked toward the door of the workshop, Mr. Wilkins at my side. As I opened the door, he put his hand on my shoulder.
“I think it’s a brave thing your mama’s doing.”
“Yeah.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You forgot the rolling pin.”
He walked back to the workbench, rewrapped the pin in the paper, and handed it to me.
“I don’t want to hear you been hitting your sisters in the head with this,” he smiled.
I smiled back.
“You’ll be okay. In court I mean. Folks got to speak up when things ain’t right. I know that there are times I wish that I’d . . . ” His voice trailed off. “You head on home. I’ll see ya. Don’t forget to ask your people if they want me to get some pictures made from the slides.”
I nodded as I walked out the door and headed toward home. As I walked, I tried to picture Mr. Wilkins as a young man. Was he good with wood then? Did he take pictures? Would he have been nice to me? Or would he have been one of those folks driving by yelling, “nigger”? Then, I stopped myself. I remembered what he said about yesterday. Nothing can be done. You have to think about today.
I always wondered about Mr. Wilkins. I wondered what was in his past. Had he been a part of the white mobs I’d seen in old Civil Rights-era footage? Had he done something he wasn’t proud of? Or worse yet, seen something he could have stopped but didn’t? Were all of those rolling pins, pictures, and hard candies some kind of atonement for the things from yesterday that he couldn’t (or didn’t) do anything about?
“We all got to take some kind of responsibility,” he had said. Responsibility for what?
I’d never find out. Not too long after the trial, he was gone. He just disappeared. Word in the neighborhood was that he had some family members who thought he was too old to take care of himself. That was, at least in my opinion, ridiculous. Every time I ever saw the man, he was performing some type of labor. It was always hard physical labor: digging, hauling dirt in his wheelbarrow, sawing, hammering, sanding, and painting. To say that this man with the constitution of a bull was somehow unable to care for himself was laughable. I can’t do most of the things he did now, and I’m probably less than half the age he was at that time. Regardless, his family apparently moved him back to Tennessee. I never saw Josiah Wilkins again.
I had lied to Mr. Wilkins. I didn’t really have to rush home. In fact, I was in no real hurry to get home. I just didn’t want to talk about the trial. I didn’t even want to think about it. I knew that once I got home, Grandma would have me laying out my suit and polishing my shoes. Mom would be telling me for the umpteenth time what to expect when we got into court. I didn’t want to do this, but I had responsibilities. The man of the house. I had fought for the title and I had to take what came with it.
Because I was still not ready to go home I took a short detour to Jon’s house. I had been meaning to talk to him anyway. The last couple of days he’d seemed down. Once he even looked like he’d been crying. I didn’t know what the problem was, but I could certainly understand his wanting to keep it to himself. I hadn’t told him about the trial. Not a word. Not about the lawsuit or the Wentworths or the busted sewer pipe or anything.
As I approached Jon’s big yellow tract house, I realized that I’d walked right past the “cop spot” and I hadn’t given it a second thought. I guess I went to Jon’s house so often, and I walked that path so frequently, that it didn’t bother me anymore. Jon had been more of a friend than he even knew.
Jon stood in his front yard, his eyes cast downward as he forced a manual lawnmower over a clump of crabgrass. Despite my allergies and the fact that I didn’t have a yard, I had gotten pretty good with gardening tools. Jon and I sometimes took his mom’s stuff and went from house to house offering to cut his neighbors’ grass. We would cut the grass, pull the weeds, and clip the hedges, then we’d bag and haul away the yard trimmings—all for a dollar. If they wanted both the front and the back yards done, we charged two dollars. It was hard work, but it kept us in comic book money.
Jon didn’t see me as he pushed the mower over the crab-grass, watched it get stuck, backed it up, and then pushed it again—only to watch it stick in the same place. He repeated this procedure three or four times, his face getting redder each time. Suddenly he threw the mower to the ground and started to cry.
“Hey,” I said.
He wiped his eyes and noticed me for the first time.
“Hey,” he said.
“The blades probably need sharpening. I noticed it when we cut the lawn next door the other day.”
“Yeah,” he said, still wiping at his eyes.
“Where do you get that done? Are there guys who do that?”
“Do what?”
“Sharpen lawnmower blades.”
“I think so. I’ll have to ask my mom.”
“You know what we should do, Jon? We should save up and get a power mower. It would make it a lot faster to cut grass and we could do a lot more lawns. What do you think?”
“That’s a good idea,” he said, barely composed.
“We should find out how much they cost.”
“They have them at Gemco,” he said. “We can go look if you want.”
“Yeah,” I said after a brief pause. I hadn’t told him about that incident either. Maybe it would be different if he was with me. “You want to go Saturday?”
He put his left arm over his eyes and began to sob.
“It doesn’t have to be Saturday. Sunday’s okay, too. After I get back from mass,” I blurted out, not knowing what else to say. I have never been good with sadness, not my own and certainly not other people’s.
“My parents are getting a divorce.”
“Oh. Wow.” Now my eyes cast downward to the patch of crabgrass.
I had seen Jon’s dad on quite a few occasions up to that time. He was (and is) a nice guy. He played basketball with us and took us for ice cream sometimes. I never really thought about how he didn’t live at Jon’s house. It suddenly occured to me that he hadn’t been at Jon’s birthday party. Funny, it didn’t seem odd to me, then. Sylvester had never been around on any of my birthdays. I was so used to what the rest of the world would consider abnormal that it seemed perfectly normal to me.
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
He nodded, crying harder.
I walked over and I hugged him. I had never hugged another boy before. I had hugged my sisters when they fell down and scraped a knee or when they cried because they had broken one of their toys, but this was different. Still, it felt natural. My brother was in pain and I hugged him.
“I know how you feel. My parents are divorced, too.”
I knew that this wasn’t exactly true, but it wasn’t that far off the mark. As far as I was concerned, they might as well have been divorced. I wanted them to be divorced. Jon’s situation was different. As far as I knew, he never had to fend off his dad with a butcher knife. Every time I ever saw his dad touch him, it was with kindness. The sort of subtle contact; a pat on the back, using an index finger to push his blond hair out of his eyes, fingertips laid gently upon Jon’s cheek, all gestures saying, “I love you.” I envied Jon a little bit for that. When I thought of Sylvester’s touch, I thought of how rough the skin on his palms felt when his hands were clamped around my throat.
“Hey, your dad will still be around, right?”
Jon sniffed.
“That’s what he said. But he won’t live with us.”
I nodded. He was the man of the house now, too.
Once again, he had shown me that I wasn’t the only one. I guess every family has its stuff.
Mom always said, “We all have our crosses to bear.”
Perspective is a funny thing. As with most issues, Jon helped me find mine.
“I better get back to this,” Jon said. “Mom wants it done by the time she gets home from work.”
He wiped his eyes with his arm again. They were red, but dry.
I walked over and picked up the mower. I positioned it in front of the patch of crabgrass and placed both of my hands on the right side of the handle. Jon looked at me, then at the mower. He grabbed the left side. Together we pushed and pulled until the patch was a memory. As I wiped the sweat from my forehead, Jon smiled.