Chapter 80
Dr. Carter was in the bedroom with Harlan for nearly two hours. When he came out, his toffee-colored face was clouded with concern. “He’s very dehydrated. Don’t worry about his appetite; it’ll get better over time. Give him lots of milk, that’ll open it up. He needs vitamins too. Iron.”
The doctor paused, looked at Emma and then down at his hands. Her pulse quickened.
Meeting her anxious gaze, he blurted, “What happened to him? I asked, but he wouldn’t say. What he tell you?”
Emma shrugged her shoulders. “We didn’t ask. It seems too soon, and he ain’t say. So for now, all we know is what the State Department’s letter said.”
“What was that?”
“That he was found in a German prison.”
The doctor shook his head. “Prison?” He glanced at Harlan’s closed door. “Have you seen him? I mean, under his clothes?”
Emma wrung her hands. “N-no. Why?”
Dr. Carter sighed. “He’s all scarred up. I ain’t seen nothing like it since I was in Virginia, treating them old slaves.”
Emma’s eyes bulged. “W-what?”
He removed the stethoscope from his neck and threw it angrily into his black satchel. “I think he was in one them camps.”
“Camps?”
“Yeah, them camps they killed all them Jews in.”
Emma shook her head. “Nah, Dr. Carter, I don’t think so. Harlan ain’t no Jew, why would they put him in one of those?”
Dr. Carter’s eyes darkened. “Y’all music people. Do you know Valaida?”
“Valaida Snow? Sure, I know her some. Not well, but we get along okay.”
“So you know what happened to her over in Europe, right?”
“I read something in the paper, heard talk.”
“She was in Denmark and them Nazis snatched her right off the street and threw her into one of them camps—them concentration camps. Kept her there for over a year and nearly beat the pretty off her.”
Emma shot a nervous glance at Harlan’s door.
“White folks,” the doctor mumbled disgustedly, “they just ain’t no good, no matter where they are. By the time they let her go, she was damn near dead. Skinnier than your boy in there. Just seventy pounds. Now you know that ain’t no kinda weight for a black woman.”
Emma folded her arms over her breasts. A dull thud beat at her temples. “But they say she lied,” she uttered, so unwilling to believe the unbelievable. “The Daily News claimed she was over there smoking dope. That’s why they put her in jail. Only the black papers said otherwise.”
Dr. Carter shot her a sickened look. “I ain’t take you for a woman who swallowed white lies.”
Embarrassed, Emma lowered her eyes.
Dr. Carter pressed: “Why would she tell a story like that?”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t know, people lie.”
The doctor snatched his bag up and started toward the door. “Well, I believe her,” he said, reaching for the doorknob. “And I say Harlan was in the same sort of place.”
* * *
After Dr. Carter left, Emma made a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table to fret.
What if what the doctor said was true? She’d read about what the Jews had gone through in those camps; she’d seen the devastation for herself in a black-and-white newsreel that screened before the main feature of a movie she could no longer recall.
She didn’t remember seeing any black people in the footage, so Dr. Carter must be mistaken. It was just Jews who were interned and murdered in those camps. Wasn’t it? She hadn’t heard any different. Every time the news reported on the Holocaust, they talked about the Jews and no one else. There was certainly no mention of Negroes—she would have remembered that. Yes, Dr. Carter must have his facts wrong.
Emma finished her tea, went to the cabinet, removed a glass from the shelf, and filled it with milk. She carried it down the hall to Harlan’s bedroom, knocked once, and pushed the door open before he could answer.
Even though it was late May and people had already started running their fans, Harlan’s bedroom windows were closed and he was buried beneath two blankets.
“I brought you some milk.” She set the glass on the nightstand, tiptoed to the window, and pulled it open. “Harlan, you awake?”
“Yeah.”
Emma didn’t miss the annoyance in his muffled response. “I said I brought you milk. Dr. Carter said it’ll open up your appetite.”
“Okay.”
Emma grabbed her elbows. “He also said that you need to take vitamins, ’specially iron. I’m going to go to the pharmacy in a few. You wanna come along and get some fresh air?”
“No thanks.”
She cleared her throat. “Um. Dr. Carter also said that . . . well, you got some scars on your body that look . . . well, he said they look real bad.”
Harlan didn’t say a word.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
Emma moved her hands from her elbows to her shoulders.
“Well, maybe you’d prefer to talk to your father about what . . . um . . . happened to you over there?”
She waited for Harlan to respond. When he said nothing, she sat down on the corner of the bed and rested her hand on his leg.
“For God’s sake, won’t you even look at me?” Looking at her was the least he could do; after all, she was his mother, a mother who had spent five years in turmoil. Five years of praying, crying, and writing letters to the president, not to mention the small fortune she’d spent on overseas phone calls.
After the city bought the house, Emma had gone there every day and sat on the stoop for hours, just in case by some miracle Harlan showed up. Even after the city raised the entire area, she still went and waited in the vast nothingness.
Emma had done everything short of going to Europe to find him herself. And if she could have done that, she would have. So why couldn’t he just give her the little bit she was asking for?
Harlan pushed back the blankets. The corners of his eyes were crusty; his breath was rank. “Mama,” he breathed tiredly, “no sense in both of us walking around with broken hearts.”
Emma gazed at him. Moments later, she rose quietly from the bed and left the room.