CHRISTMAS EVE AND I REMEMBER WATCHING MY MAMA sit up in the bed; the light from the fireplace caught the oil on her high cheekbone. Papa’s place was still empty. Mama was going to look round now. Yes, she did. I saw the whites of her eyes move round, and I closed my eyes loosely, not screwed up tight like I did when I was five.
Was brother Alfie asleep? And Sis Margaret Rose and little Willy? Their knees were pulled up and they lay rounded and natural. The quilts were up to their ears. Would my big brother Charles come visit for Christmas? Mama walked barefooted to the fireplace. Her white soles flickered under her feet like she was walking on light. She picked up a lump of big coal and laid it down into the glow. The embers shifted, breathed, and poo-pooed ashes. Mama looked round mean, scowling, right at me. But I didn’t show any life.
She went back toward her bed and I thought, Where’s my Christmas roller skates? Gimme my skates. Mama! Mama! She lifted back the quilts and got into her hollow. She was pulling the covers over her shoulder and then she was turning over, facing the wall and the space where my daddy should have been. I exhorted her to get up and find my skates. And Margaret Rose’s white majorette boots. And Alfie—he’s old enough to know. Never mind about Willy. I didn’t ask for no bicycle. Nothing but roller skates. Bright and shining. When you hold a skate on its back and turn a wheel with your finger, click-click-click, it’s got tiny little balls inside.
I dreamed that my mama was an angel that Christmas Eve long ago, an angel walking on light, her feet glittering, and then I saw it was because she was riding my skates. She skated all night; sometimes I said, Watch out, Mama, watch out. White man’s gonna get you.
I was prescient in my dream, like a prophet of old.
Finally Mama fell, and her stumbling was like the little bells when you walk in the grocery store to buy a Moon Pie, like when you used to walk into Stoner’s store on Vanderbilt Road and could walk into now, if the store were still there, after all this time.
EARLY MORNING, AND the small coal was rolling out of the scuttle like little bells and my mama was saying, “Ain’t nobody in this house interested in Christmas?”
Then my pappie was climbing up the porch steps and he fell heavy against the door.
“Hey, woman, lemme in this house!”
In three mean steps Mama crossed the room. Alfie was sitting up, but Margaret Rose had sense enough just to hang her head over the side of the bed to watch. Because my big brother had already moved out, and my father didn’t count, I was the man of the house. Not him, me, I’m the man. I anointed myself, and prayed, “The Lord is my Shepherd; / I shall not want.”
“Whatcha mean come dragging in this house on Christmas morning?” Like a pan of dishwater, Mama’s wrath flung out the door on him.
“Now, I done bought a little tree.”
Mama cracked open the door.
“Why, sure enough.” My mama’s voice sung on open—wide and warm. And my sister whipped out of bed and ran calling, “Daddy’s got us a tree!” and so did Alfie, and Willy babbled, and finally I thought it was safe, and I raised up in bed.
Then I saw packages! On the breakfast table, after all. We shall not want. I zipped over the linoleum floor like it was hot. I lifted my box and it was heavy with metal heaviness. Then I walked on over to the rest of the family. Against the tree, I measured myself taller than Daddy’s little green tree.
THAT AFTERNOON ON CHRISTMAS Day, some of us skated backward and some danced and clapped. Some skated in a circle round the whole drove. For blocks and blocks and miles and miles. Our sound was big like airplanes. I could keep up good even if I was little, and they wouldn’t leave me up there alone on white folks’ streets anyway. Not on Christmas. Then, all at once, I found a dime. Perfect, slender, weightless, it slid into my pocket.
And that’s the happy part of a story that I hoped could start happy and end happy, but this world cannot be represented by the happiness of a poor boy finding a dime. I had much to learn of the ways of God and man before I found my calling, which was to follow Reverend Shuttlesworth, to become a minister as he was in the days of my boyhood and continues to this day. Not so long ago, I went to the trials in Birmingham (yes, Mama, there have been Trials as well as tribulations) of those who killed my little friends, and after the last aging white man was convicted, there was Reverend Shuttlesworth, age eighty himself, singing for all of us “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” And his picture on the front page of the Birmingham News, triumphant.
BUT CHRISTMAS, 1963,WAS the next to the last day that I ever saw my physical father.
On December 26, Pappie got up cussing and puking. After he’d stirred up the air, our whole cabin smelled like Christmas gift whiskey, spoiled and rotted and puked up. At the steel mill Pappie was grabbed up by Big Man—that’s what they called it then. I don’t know what piece of equipment in the foundry killed him. I guess he was hungover, drugged with booze, careless for the first and last day in his life. They said to me “Can’t nobody, not even the preacher, look in his box ’cause he don’t look like hisself no more.”
For a while, I didn’t much miss my father—I hate to say that, but it’s true. He was hardly ever in the cabin. That was Mama’s domain. And besides, I still had my big brother, Charles, and Reverend Shuttlesworth was my spiritual father. But sometimes at night I could hear Margaret Rose snuffling for our father. Twice Alfie cried out “Daddy” in his sleep. Willy was too young to have any sense.
Sometimes I tried to think of my paw. “Paw, he dead,” I would whisper to myself.
But I had a dream that spring, and it woke me up to reality.
It was starting to warm up and forsythia had already bloomed when I found my sister, Margaret Rose, talking to my school shoes on a crate beside my cot.
“You is a nigger and don’t you forget it.”
“Margaret Rose!” I said. “What you mean talking at them shoes like that for?”
She whirled around, very angry at me, and hissed that I was stuck-up. But I knew that wasn’t true, and I took up for myself. “You’re a lie.”
Then Margaret Rose said something that I knew immediately to be wicked. She said, “If I want to, when I get big, I can sleep with any white man I wants to. But you ain’t never gonna have a white woman, nigger boy.” She began to cry but she went right on talking. “I is glad I’m gonna be a woman and not no worthless man.”
“You’re a lie,” I repeated weakly.
“Ask Mama. If you know where she at. She gone off with Mr. Stoner.”
I said that his wife was sick and that Mama was helping to care for the sick, like the Bible said she ought.
“It ain’t in the Bible to take money. She takes his money.”
“For working in the grocery store. We paid to work.”
“For swelling?” she asked. “Ain’t you looked at her?”
And I wondered, was Mama swelling? Like before Willy and Alfie? Speech-less, my jaw dropped open and Margaret Rose walked out the door.
That night I dreamed President Kennedy, half his head missing, took my hand and led me up the mountain to look down an open hole in its peak. A long ladder led down there. At the bottom, a human-size metal Vulcan was making steel, and the cauldron was bubbling and spitting. I went down the ladder with the president, and there was my mutilated father tending the flames, his hands just raw flesh. Oh, he was dead! All at once the ladder was pulled up. Flames bubbled out of the melting pot and spilled on the floor and spread like water toward me, burned off my shoes and lapped up my legs. There wasn’t any leaving that place.
Till the rooster crowed, my father, the president, and I burned in the furnace, and the veins inside our bodies ran with molten steel.