Grandpa’s words sounded sad and feeble. Jerome wanted him to stop talking like this. He slid off the windowsill and went to the door leading outside.
‘I pray to God those white devils don’t break him,’ he heard Grandpa mumble to himself.
Jerome may not have talked out loud, but there were plenty of words in his head. But as soon as he tried to get the words and sentences to come out, it was as if his tongue was too short and too thick, his throat cramped. All that came out were strange, harsh noises. So he kept quiet.
Sometimes Larry teased him. ‘Baby. You’re just a baby.’
Jerome let him do it. Even though he was smaller than his brother, he felt like the oldest. Larry never saw what happened to Mama. How Grandma treated her. Grandma acted as though Mama was invisible, and it made Mama look so sad. So he would climb onto her lap, which cheered her up right away.
‘Larry’s a real Huling,’ Grandma Elizabeth said. ‘Look how tall he is. Not so round and fat as Jerome. Jerome’s a Fuller.’ Grandma had it in for his mother’s family. She thought the Fullers were hicks. That they made too many children. Grandma never paid his little brother Chris or baby Billy any attention. Grandma said it was shameful that Mama had a fat belly again.
He tried to see Daddy’s face. He closed his eyes tight but all he saw was the outline of his hair, a thick round wreath; the face remained blank. Jerome lay on his back in bed. It was already late, everyone was asleep and the house was quiet. He could hear the wood creaking. He wanted to get up and go into the next room where Mama and the little ones slept, but he didn’t dare. He tried again. He didn’t see anything. He didn’t hear anything. His raw throat felt like it was burning. His head was hot, and it pounded. He opened his mouth. ‘Dhh,’ he tried. Larry turned in his sleep. ‘Dhh,’ he groaned as quietly as possible. If he could say Daddy’s name, maybe he’d be able to visualize him. He pulled the covers over his head. ‘Dhh.’ He nearly suffocated. From the creaking of the iron bed he could tell that Larry was rolling over. He had to quit now, otherwise he’d wake his brother. He pushed off the covers and heaved a deep sigh. His father evaporated.
-
AKRON, OHIO, 1955
North Street
Behind the house on North Street was a rocky creek. It was so narrow that Jerome could easily jump over it into a meadow, and beyond that to the woods. When the kitchen window was open he could hear the water gurgling. A nice frothy sound that never stopped.
The house on North Street was a paradise. It was a reddish-brown brick house with four bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, and a small living room. Everything was different than at Grandma and Grandpa Huling’s. They had lots of neighbors. And Mama didn’t mind if the other kids in the street came over to play. Mama had had another baby. Sandra. Jerome shared a bedroom with Chris and Billy. Larry stayed behind at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Grandma said she could raise her eldest grandchild better than Mama could.
So now he really was the oldest.
He still didn’t talk, but Mama said not to worry, now that they had their own house in the Elizabeth Park projects it would come. Sometimes he closed his eyes and the words would reverberate in his head. Creek, kitchen, Daddy, grass, sun, stones, Billy, baby, Mama, house, tree, woods. It drove him crazy. They zoomed around inside him but he couldn’t catch them, couldn’t grab hold of them. The words became colors and sounds. Creek was translucent white, tree was brown, kitchen was yellow, stones were white, baby was purple, sun was red, and Daddy was white, the white of his eyes and teeth. The colors sparkled in his mind. Daddy was the sound of the trumpet. A thin, humming stammer that rose up from under the house, from the basement. Soft, dark-red sounds that seeped up through the cracks in the floorboards. He could see them, the notes: they were round and glistened like velvet. They looked warm. The highest notes were yellow and jagged, like sunlight at the hottest part of the day. Like crying and screaming. As though Daddy was trying something, trying to get somewhere with his trumpet. He pushed and pushed, higher and higher, and then suddenly out came a muffled, fat, discordant note. Then nothing. Jerome opened his eyes. It was quiet in his head now. He went outside, to the creek, pulled stones out of the ground and threw them in the water. His stones clattered against the rocks beneath the surface.
‘You want to see deer?’ Daddy asked.
Jerome nodded.
‘Say it then.’
He nodded again.
‘Go on.’
He forced the words against his throat. Thought he would throw up.
‘Easy does it.’
‘De … de … ’ His tongue was in the way.
Sonny Huling squatted down in front of him. Now they were just as tall. ‘Deer. You want to see deer.’
‘De—er,’ Jerome panted. He was out of breath.
‘Deer. Y’see?’
Sometimes Jerome followed his father.
His hands against the cool window of Jackson’s barber shop on Howard Street. The glass is half steamed up, which makes everything inside look all misty. He sees his father. A tall, slender man. His fingers thin and elegant. He sweeps up the hair with a soft broom. Minuscule curls and wisps that together form a small black heap. He opens a hatch in the floor and pushes the heap down it with the broom. Jackson and Daddy chat, they laugh. There’s a man in the barber chair, his head hanging back helplessly. Jackson lays a hot white towel on the man’s face. Steam wafts off it. Jackson leaves the towel on the man’s face while he sharpens his blade on a leather strap, talking to Daddy all the while.
His father’s hair is soft and high, it frames his narrow face like a woolly wreath. He likes it that way. He doesn’t want to get it cut, even though Mama says a Negro shouldn’t wear his hair like that. Not in Akron. Nobody will give him a job this way.
Mama pulled him onto her lap. They were in the kitchen, and a magazine lay open on the flowered plastic tablecloth.
‘We’re going to read,’ Mama said, pulling the magazine closer.
‘I’m going to teach you the letters, and if you want you can repeat their name. This is a B.’ She circled a B with a pencil. ‘Say “B”.’
‘Bh,’ Jerome sighed. He looked at the strange symbols on the paper. If you looked at them long enough they became black stripes.
‘A,’ his mother said. ‘This is an A. You see?’
He nodded. He pressed up against her breast. He smelled soap and flowers.
‘An L,’ she said. ‘And another one.’ She wrote the four letters one after the other. ‘Ball,’ she said, ‘this says “ball”. Ball.’
She didn’t make him talk. He only had to look and listen to how she wrote down and pronounced each word. ‘I want you to be able to read when you go to school,’ she said.
He listened to her warm, languid voice.
‘I throw the ball.’
‘The ball is round.’
‘I am going home.’
‘I am walking down the street.’
He heard the soft smacking sound her tongue made in her mouth. The sentences sounded like a melody. He started singing to himself. I-am-going-home. I-am-walking-down-the-street. I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
‘Jerome?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Tell Chris to take off that red sweater. I don’t want no red in my house.’
Daddy