There was something heretical about what was happening. Liliane, blushing and blurting, “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?” while five young men, all of whom had been her suitors, tried to preen and puff what was mussed, while the one cousin she was actually seeing kept kissing her. Later in life, Liliane would learn that that many young men who knew each other and you were probably a football team or a frat rush line engaged in a collegiate frivolity known as gang banging, then a misunderstanding, then she wanted it and finally date rape or wilding. If it took only one man to undo your dress and vertebral attachments during “rough sex” (a.k.a. rape), your hymen, labia, and vulva were considered more pristine and vulnerable than if you unfortunately had spent the night with some varsity team or other. Liliane wondered if the boys boasting about all the letters on their sweaters and pre-punk motorcycle jackets had ever thought of poor Hester Prynne. She had a letter too. A big red one. Probably sinny and silky, and did the cricket team have a yen for a girl with a scarlet A. Straight As, as well as attentive, approachable, anxious to be somebody. Now that’s an odd idea.
Anyway, this is not at all what was happening to Liliane the night her father arrived on Spring Street in Trenton to take her back to Bellmawr. Even then, everyone didn’t go to the Bluffs or Bimini. Yes, Liliane’s daddy poked the Mack truck of an El Dorado past the dignified row houses with porches and tended plants, past the women high in the last blush of their forties headin’ for Klotz’s, The Tuxedo Club. Some would even venture to The Candlelight or that one cross the wooden bridge over by Seward Street was just “the Bucket of Blood”—not a Bucket of Blood, but “the” Bucket. So here comes Liliane’s daddy waving to everyone who might possibly see him on a stank dark Friday night looking like he was or hadta be the town’s colored undertaker, colored tavern owner, colored dentist, colored lawyer, or colored doctor. Yeah, when Garnett Mimms was on every colored girl’s mind and jolting every colored boy’s body, the Negro’s options were fairly limited. Liliane’s options at that moment were particularly limited.
Liliane was a virgin. Liliane in a classical Catholic sense “belonged to no man” and was, therefore, bereft of sin. Liliane was a Daddy’s girl.
And Daddy’s girl was sprawled and hugged up, all at once mind you, sprawled and hugged up with Danny Stuyvesant, who was the more upwardly mobile among his cousins who had also courted Liliane since puberty. But this was getting to be almost grown-up and her panties were wet and her legs had thrown off her crinoline petticoat so that Danny Stuyvesant’s leg could get between hers. Liliane’s lips ached. She imagined she must be smiling too much, but that was impossible cause Danny’s tongue was always somewhere in her mouth and his hands were everywhere, like hers, discovering all kinds of new rhythms. And Garnett Mimms sang on and Liliane’s daddy strode on down Spring Street in the Twee-twee-tweedlie-dee of a Friday night, pausing here and there to chat and flirt. Some men feel women’s looking at them a certain way demands at least a casual response: you know, sorta like noblesse oblige. Tickling little girls’ necks while you talkin’ up they mamas, blowing on a grown-lookin’ sixteen’s shoulder cause that’s where your mouth happened to be leanin’, smellin’ on it the perfume of youth.
Liliane smelled herself and this was not dirt. This was more like she imagined first blood smelled if it had no color and capillaries fused from your lover’s body to yours. This was the smell of fusion. Liliane exceled in physics, but was a dramatically pathetic biology student. Fusion, she knew. Biology, well, Danny’s hands were explaining hers to her, how no one had ever even so much as touched. And cause it was dark in the cousin’s aunt’s bedroom, still no one had seen.
Liliane’s head swirled. Her hips cried with every wail of Garnett Mimms on automatic downstairs where the rest writhed on two feet. Here in the dark with the one boy she’d gotten past Papa, Liliane saw the flowers from the hushed, just-bout-made-it wallpaper wandering her body like Danny’s hands or thighs. When his mouth pounded on that muscle in her throat where every general practitioner in the world swore was a goiter, Liliane thought Danny was sucking her up the way the canal by Bellevue Avenue sucked up little ashy black boys in a flood. Liliane was floating. She was fallin’. Her dress was gettin’ in the way of her tongue’s trips cross Danny’s cherry bronze cheeks. And Daddy kept movin’ up Spring Street, ever so genteel.
There was still an earnest snobbery about doings on Spring Street. There were so many who lived two, three blocks east or west who’d have to wait another generation before they could say, “Well, you know, my daughter stays over there, you know, by Spring Street.” Now, even though Liliane’s papa, as she was wont to say sometime, was the only criminal court judge, colored, in the state, didn’t nobody want to live out there where she did: ’mong a bunch of crackers thought Princeton was Mecca, reformed Jews who celebrated Easter, and them real colored over to “The Crossing.” Now The Crossing had a name, but nobody used it. Wasn’t no need. All you have to do is go straight on out Princeton Avenue, past Five Points, can’t miss that. Big ol’ pillar with George Washington standing a top of it and a pile of colored men dealin’, talkin’, drinkin’, gamin’, and eatin’ fresh fried porgies from the shrimp boat cross the way. Well, go on by that and you’ll see some projects. Now there’s Negroes in there and a street callt Calhoun, but it had nothing to do with Calhoun the lawyer, who was a friend of Amos and Andy’s. Well, past the projects you hit Rigidity Village. I mean, little prefab rowhouses puttin theyselves forward like make-believe white folks who worked in factories didn’t live there. Everybody knew better than that. There’s no signs for homemade kielbasa in Kingston, New Jersey. Anyway, all these make-believe white folks’ names ended with vowels and quite often were assembled from a dumbfounding sequence of consonants, like Bryzinski, Scalia, etc. Once you got past this little feat of desperation, you’ll hit Harney’s Corner. It’ll say that. Bear to your left and when you hit a sign that says there’s traffic coming out from your left, but not from your right, then you turn left and you’re at The Crossing. You’ll know that cause no matter how often you drive down this little old unself-conscious street, you won’t see any more Negroes, unless you run across Liliane and them. All the rest the way out there, past the Lawrenceville Prep School, the Toddy Shop and Bentley’s Market, the Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church and cemetery, there’s real white people with pedigrees from wars and ships, and Episcopalian Bible Date of Birth entries. Anyway, nobody wanted to live out there by The Crossing, though there was two bars that was a hoppin’ and a boppin’ over that way. Oh and if ya had decided to bear right at Harney’s Corner, you’d have missed The Crossing, but you’d have gone by a house that freed Negroes have owned with their own land too, since before the War. Around here when they say “before the War,” you really gotta catch yourself, cause they are referring to the Revolutionary War and not hardly all the colored or the make-believe white folks had set foot on this side of the earth yet. So, be vigilant in your dealings with these folks. Especially if you are Negro and don’t know the differences tween the real white people and the make-believe ones. See, they may be imaginin’ that cause they speak English as best they can, that they are real white people. That doesn’t even hold water. But, lemme tell ya, brass knuckles, swingin’ chains, zip guns, and tire irons done swayed many an arrogant young Negro’s head about who be white and how and when he be it and if he be it good. Now, that’s enough of that.
But this is where Liliane crafted a delicate social structure, penetrable only by her, and contrived for her desires and her protection. It was akin to Impressionism, Liliane believed. See, you pick up what gleams and stands out lovely from hardness and hushing up. You pull these startling elements onto a canvas of your own, and that’s your life.
And Danny Stuyvesant was changing Liliane’s universe. Daddy’s presence had meandered solemnly and with a certain I-know-something-he-don’t-know from one porch to another, til somebody who knew one of the cousins who knew which cousin Liliane was losing her mind with could tell somebody to go past the mass of grindin’, wanderin’ hands, sepia adagios, to get Liliane outta whatever she was in and wherever that was so she could look at herself before the Judge sauntered up the steps, tapping his foot, enjoying the niggahness of the music, and the much more significant appearance of his daughter, looking how she should, almost sculptured, sensually supple and innocent.
Liliane thought it was marauders pullin’ at her, pullin’ her way from Danny Stuyvesant’s fascinating biceps. This is biology. “Oh, no. Not now,” this is Liliane screaming and kicking at Danny’s cousins, Matthew and Luke. Then, even Johnnie Boy came to help her help herself get together cause Papa was only two doors down the street. Liliane shot up straight like she knew something about male ritual. All she knew was her daddy was a hop, step, and a jump away. And all these young men who’d had no sisters—so they had never dressed a girl—they were hopping round Liliane, pullin’ and tuggin’. Matthew dried her face with his handkerchief. Johnnie Boy was fixin’ her slip. Luke was straightenin’ out her bra and Danny Stuvyesant with no sense kept puttin’ his tongue in her ear and runnin’ his hands thru her hair till Johnnie Boy asked him how eager was he to go to Annondale Reformatory. “Remember, fool, her father’s the Judge.”
“Cry, Cry, Baby, Cry Baby” was all Liliane could hear. She didn’t hear Danny saying he was coming out to the shore on Tuesday. She didn’t hear herself giggle, sayin’ what a good time she’d had and thankin’ all the cousins for invitin’ her; she didn’t hear herself kiss her papa on his cheek and ask if he’d had a hard day. She heard her heart breakin’ and some new place in her wishin’ nobody had ever come in that room of flowers and Friday night temptation, wishin’ there’d be no dawn, wishin’ Danny had left the stars all up and down her thighs.
Judge Lincoln Parnell liked the drive thru Mercer County out Route 33 toward Freehold, the Circle, easing on to Asbury Park and finally Bellmawr Beach. As a boy, he’d “whupped” all those farm boys and factory workers’ sons in any sport they could think up. Plus, now, he also sat in judgment on them, their ways, their snide superiority and dreams. Why, he’d been accepted at Yale with a full football scholarship until they saw him on the first day of practice. No colored quarterback. Impossible.
Princeton was the same, but meaner. They wondered did Lincoln Parnell realize that Robeson had gone to Rutgers, the state school. Now, had Lincoln Parnell ever lost a game or a woman? Didn’t Lincoln Parnell graduate from everything before his older brothers had figured out they had to finish something? Hadn’t Lincoln Parnell’s own pa tied him to a tree with a harness cause he wouldn’t mind?
But Lincoln Parnell minded a lot of things. He minded the word “niggah.” He minded the Scottsboro Boys, Emmett Till, Sam Cooke, and them constantly chasin’ Chuck Berry. He minded Robeson’s persecution; he minded we didn’t own land, couldn’t vote, could hardly talk and killed each other off whenever the white folks let up for a second. Lincoln Parnell minded and he kept score.
Liliane was counting, too. He kissed me 439 times, at least. He licked my eyebrows had to be five times. He pulled my dress down, oh, well, three times. He unbuttoned—let me see, how many buttons do I have—and she counted.
“Liliane.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Looked like you all were having what we used to call a helluva good time.”
“Sure did, Daddy. Why, I danced every dance and even did ole Ruthie whatshername, ya know the one who’s dad is always up for disturbing the peace, well, I even did that little tramp out of the dance contest. I won, Daddy. Can you imagine, Papa? I won outta all the other girls there.”
“No, Liliane. I’m not surprised. Sweetheart, you were always so light on your feet and could follow turns to any rhythm our people concocted from wherever. No, that’s just my little girl. Too hot to handle, too smart to let go.”
“Daddy.”
“Yes?”
“Is this near where you and Mama drove into the cornfields when you were young and before…you know, before I came?”
“Uh-uh. No. Was Route One-thirty, not Thirty-three.”
“Oh.”
Liliane was beginning to think that the clouds sinking toward the road were Danny’s arms searchin’ for her. She let the window down, so she could smell him. Her cloud-man.
She smiled, thanking the wind for bringing him so close to her, and the night was black and Judge Parnell loved to speed. Liliane started singing some, probably the Shirelles. Oh, it had to be “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Judge Parnell watched his child, his little girl, making it with the wind and fog, singin’ and grinnin’. A grin he’d seen many times before on the faces of young girls in love with young hoodlums he sent away from them. They never really believed til too late that their heartthrob, the being and reason for taking time to breathe, could just be outta reach for real, arbitrarily, or forever.
“You know, darlin’, nothin’s ever going to come of those boys in town there, where you were, I mean.”
Liliane’s jaws tightened. She refused to sit up quite straight, but she knew she couldn’t make love to the wind.
“Well, Papa, you brought yourself up outta much worse.”
“That’s exactly what I mean, Liliane. Those boys have no fight in them, and with no fight a Negro man has no chance.”
“That’s ridiculous, Daddy. Why, you know every fella in there belonged to one of them gangs from the East Ward or the South Ward. Even the ones from The Crossing got a name of their own.”
Judge Parnell sighed. He looked absently out the window. How was he gonna say what he said.
“Liliane, those fellas only got sense enough to fight for what little they know about. They don’t have the backbone to fight for what’s never happened, or for dreams.”
“And what’s dreaming gotta do with being called a niggah whore, or not being able to go to the Chapin School.”
“Dreaming’s got a whole goddamn sight to do with it. Look at DuBois, or even Dr. King, Nkrumah, or Charlie Parker. Those are men who never happened before and the world hasn’t been the same since.”
“Oh, Daddy, you already told me a courageous colored man is one with death on his heels.”
“Right.”
“What d’ya mean, ‘right’?”
“Well, a man like that needs the kinda woman you’re gonna be one of these days, if ya don’t spoil yourself.”
“Spoil myself?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Okay. Okay. So where are they? These rich little colored boys?”
“At the Bluffs, Kentucky Lakes, Rehoboth Beach, and McLean, Virginia.”
“So why’re you taking me to Bellmawr, then?”
“Oh, Liliane, you’re still Daddy’s secret.”
Cry Baby, Cry Baby, Cry Baby
Welcome back home
—GARNETT MIMMS