Five generations of Malveaux had graduated St. Augustine’s in New Orleans. Five generations of Malveaux had set the pace for the best of the race througout Louisiana. Why, through some parts of East Texas and western Mississippi folks would recount, with great seriousness, the accomplishments and achievements of this Creole phenomenon, the Malveaux, who could have turned their backs on their darker brothers, but did not, never had, and sposed ta never woulda, but Sawyer Malveaux III musta come from some extraordinarily recessive DNA combine. St. Emma’s, the by-the-rules-for-you-rich-colored-boys-what-act-the-fool school, didn’t even want him. This was not true for any girl named Emma, Raelene, Raelette, Nancy, Eugenia, Alexandria, Beth, Ann, Annie, Annabelle, or Liliane. That’s me.
St. Louis in the spring break was a giant ball for young well-to-do Midwestern and Southeastern children of the Talented Tenth. Every other child I met was going to see me at Wellesley or Fisk. The young boys won cross-country and tennis scholarships to Yale and Princeton or Tennessee A&T. It depended on how one’s parents felt about uplifting the race. Some would die before you went to Harvard. Some would die if you didn’t. But that wasn’t really the point. The issue was this issue: that we should crossbreed or intrafertilize and become the Beyond Belief Brood (offspring) of the Talented Tenth.
I knew I was part of this process. I’d yearned for what Papa had promised: a courageous colored man with enough niggah in him to make any niggah at ease and enough class to make them wonder about theirs. And this Sawyer Malveaux III could do without so much as lifting his pinkie, which he would sometimes do to make sure we knew his nails were manicured regularly. They were.
They were long, delicate fingers that arched and contracted. There was a spiderlike quality to his movements: practiced, intricate, manipulative, and beautiful. He liked that he was actually prettier than most of us; the one he chose, the one he let know he had decided against, and the poor creatures he didn’t even see. He always walked into a party or strode the deck of someone’s yacht as if Hannibal and his elephants in the Alps wasn’t nothin’, Foxes of Harrow and lil Inches’s Mother he coulda written in his sleep one night and Jackie Wilson on the same stage as Chuck Jackson and Smokey Robinson singin’ the Paragons and the Jester’s greatest hits wasn’t nothin’. Sawyer Malveaux III was an irredeemable hoodlum.
This rich colored boy who’d been thrown outta Morehouse, Tufts, Fisk, and finally St. Louis University, who’d wrecked a TR 6, a hard-top Ford, and a vintage Jag, all replaced by Daddy. This faun in the thick and thin silk socks, who wiped his brow with silk handkerchiefs and would arrange for an abortion for anybody for $1,500, even had a process. No, I don’t mean anything respectable-looking like Duke Ellington or Ray Robinson, but some wildass colored-looking “do” that challenged Brook Benton and Lil Richard. The boy had nerve.
It was his birthright.
I believed he was my destiny. We weren’t like the others. I’d been raised round hoodlums, that’s why I was farmed out on holidays: to see how the other half lived; broaden my horizons, you know. But truthfully, there was a ruffian in me that wasn’t scared of him. Sawyer wasn’t gonna be no failure or good-for-nothin’. He was what Daddy said. Someone we hadn’t imagined and he knew it. He knew I knew it when he cruised by my cousin Lolly’s porch and honked his horn. I was sposed to be beside myself and run-jump into the red Thunderbird and zoom…niggahs on Eastern Boulevard at twilight. Sure. So I called into the house, “Lolly, somebody out here needs directions, or is lost or something.”
Lolly gave me the look of Maggie thinkin’ of those no-necked children.
“Why, you know that’s Sawyer Malveaux.”
“Yes, I do.”
“He’s not here to see me. He’s known me all my life.”
“Umhummn, but if he’s here to see me, he’s gonna haveta talk. I don’t understand car horn language.”
And I sat there in the wrought-iron love seat staring at this incredibly brazen thing who was gonna have to come get me.
Of course he double-parked and left the radio blaring something by the Olympics. When I think about this, I make believe the Olympics were in the middle of Wabada Street in their lamé suits and those terrible-looking patent leather shoes justa jumpin’ and posin’ and singin’, “Mine exclusively, mine exclusively,” while Sawyer came up to ask me if I’d like to go for a ride.
I swear ’fore God my whole body was trembling with unmitigated delight.
“Why, Sawyer, surely you don’t think I can just leave the front porch and go off on a ride with you. I’m not from here and you know how people talk.”
“Awright, Liliane. It is Liliane, isn’t it?”
“Umhummn.”
“Where would you like to go?”
“I wanta go everywhere you like to go in East St. Louis…when you go by yourself.”
“Oh, well. I’m not sure that…”
“But you asked me. It’s not like you to refuse a lady, now is it, Mr. Malveaux.”
He grabbed my hand and we almost ran—no, we did run down the lawn—to the curb. We were panting by the time we reached the car. When he opened my door for me, he asked, “They call you anything besides Liliane?” Stretching out the “aaannne.”
“No, they do not.”
“Well, today you’re Lili, spelt just like that. Today, mind you, just for today, whenever I say, ‘That’s Lili, she’s my new girl,’ you smile.”
“Every time?”
“Every time, or we sit here. You understand?”
“Umhummn, let’s go.”
So I am grinnin’—“Yes, that’s Lili, she’s my girl”—through all these games of pool. To help entertain myself, Sawyer showed me how to drink shots of tequila, lick salt off my hand or his, and chase it with some beer. He laughs at me. He thinks, Lili feelin’ no pain is funny. Sawyer’s fingers around the cue stick are so beautiful, I think I am goin’ to start cryin’. He calls his sweet stick “Lili.” I am gettin’ confused. But before I can scream, “Do somethin’ with me,” Sawyer had spirited me to a room, a corner behind a floating crap game, some poker players, and a bevy of women with very long eyelashes.
I am still floatin’. Now I hover over the end of a long, long bar. I must be restin’ in the palm of Sawyer’s hands, where else is this possible? Sawyer talks dirty to me. He must be talkin’ dirty to me cause my face is so red my body’s caught fire. He laughs at me: his tongue sweeps the giggles from behind my lower lip. I gasp for air every time he shifts me in his palms. My mouth falls open if any one of his fingers caresses my temple.
I didn’t want to laugh cause guys take sex so seriously, you know what I mean? But the top was down as we rode home; all the stars kissin’ my face and neck and shoulders. The wind coaxed peculiar hummin’ sounds from my mouth, while Sawyer’s very beautiful fingers alternately strummed Bo Diddley licks. Chuck Jackson hollers from my pussy. I was in such a state. I’ve no idea how Sawyer got my panties off. No idea at all. I do know that he had them cause with his free hand, the one that wasn’t playin’ with my clit, he brushed them by his lips and mustache. “Good they’re wet. I like that. I really like that, Lili.” I knew I was goin’ to faint, but I managed to sneak in the back of Aunt Aurelia’s without stopping every time my pussy throbbed. It took me a long, long time to reach the door, though.
Somebody from East St. Louis shot Sawyer Malveaux III four times in the head a few years later. Everybody went to the funeral in Kansas City, even girls who’d been afraid to look him in the eye and their parents who prayed he’d straighten up and marry their girl, or just go to hell.
Sawyer was born into hell. Sawyer was the sixth generation of Creoles who decided not to turn their backs on their darker brothers. Sawyer was a brother. And Sawyer died.
While the other rich lil colored boys were hippies, Panthers, or in Canada, Sawyer died just like the little hoodlum boys I grew up with who lost all they sense or all they bones in Vietnam or Oakland. Sawyer wasn’t all he coulda been, maybe. But like Papa used to say, he was definitely one of us. At the wake, his hair was done up like Sly Stone. The Malveaux family had his sister committed when she returned from Cornell one summer with a twelve-inch Creole Afro. She was never pretty. She didn’t know Sawyer was a being more beautiful than she could hope. She didn’t know Sawyer’s rush was to be stunning. To stun any living thing. Pauvre Hyacinthe, delicate, mongrel-blooded, tragic mulatto didn’t claim her birthright. She was a sixth-generation Malveaux. In our incestuous milieu the world was hers, but she let something or somebody define the territory. So, the lesson is Sawyer’s dead and she’s alive, if you can call tending Sawyer’s mausoleum, all marble and pink granite, living. Hyacinthe (French pronunciation) lives on her trust and defiantly plants orchids in Missouri soil. There is no need for this. My drawings of Sawyer reveal such splendor, such irrepressible fervor to burst open, shower the planet with his scent. Hyacinthe never understood her name. But she does live in Kansas City, I guess. That’s where Sawyer lives now, too.
Goin’ to Kansas City
Kansas City here I come
I’m going to Kansas City
Kansas City here I come
They got some crazy lil
Women there and I’m
Gonna get me one
—WILBERT HARRISON