Black Cherry Blues Read Free Page A

hand-rolled cigarettes constantly, and bossed me around in my own home, but she could work harder than anyone I had ever known, and she had been fiercely loyal to my family since I was a child.

    My boat dock was in full sunlight now, and I could see Batist, the other black person who worked for me, loading an ice chest for two white men in their outboard. He was shirtless and bald, and the weight of the ice chest made his wide back and shoulders ridge with muscle. He broke up kindling for my barbecue pit with his bare hands, and once I saw him jerk a six-foot alligator out of the water by its tail and throw it up on a sandbar.

    I stepped around the puddles in the yard to the gallery.

    “What you gonna do this coon?” Clarise, the mulatto woman, said.

    She had put my three-legged raccoon, Tripod, on his chain, which was attached to a wire clothesline so he could run up and down in the side yard. She pulled him up in the air by the chain. His body danced and curled as though he were being garroted.

    “Clarise, don’t do that.”

    “Ax him what he done, him,” she said.

    “Go look my wash basket. Go look your shirts. They blue yesterday. They brown now. Go smell, you.”

    “I’ll take him down to the dock.”

    “Tell Batist not to bring him back, no.” She dropped Tripod, half strangled, to the ground.

    “He come in my house again, you gonna see him cooking with the sweet potato.”

    I unsnapped his chain from the clothesline and walked him down to the bait shop and cafe on the dock. I was always amazed at the illusion of white supremacy in southern society, since more often than not our homes were dominated and run by people of color.

    Batist and I bailed the rainwater from the previous night’s storm out of my rental boats, filled the cigarette and candy machines, seined dead shiners out of the live-bait tanks, drained the water out of the ice bins and put fresh ice on top of the soda pop and beer, and started the barbecue fire for the lunch that we prepared for midday fishermen. Then I opened up the beach umbrellas that were set in the holes of the huge wooden telephone spools that I used as tables, and went back up to the house.
     
    It had turned out to be a beautiful morning. The sky was blue, the grass in the fields a deeper green from the rain; the wind was cool on the gallery, the backyard still deep in shadow under the mimosa tree, and my redwood flower boxes were streaked with water and thick with petunias and Indian paintbrush. Alafair was at the kitchen table in her pajama bottoms, coloring in the Mickey Mouse book I had bought her the day before. Her black hair was cut in bangs; her eyes were big and brown, her face as round as a pie plate, and her skin had already started to grow darker with tan. If there was any physical imperfection in her, it was her wide-set front teeth, which only made her smile look larger than it actually was. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago I had pulled her from a downed plane out at Southwest Pass just off the Gulf, a drowning little girl whose bones had felt hollow as a bird’s, whose gasping mouth had looked like a guppy’s in my wife’s lap.

    I brushed her fine black hair under my palm.

    “How you doing, little guy?” I said.

    “Where you went, Dave?”

    “I got caught in the storm and had to stay in Baton Rouge.”

    “Oh.”

    Her hand went back to coloring. Then she stopped and grinned at me, full of glee.

    “Tripod went ca-ca in Clarise basket,” she said.

    “I heard about it. Look, don’t say ‘ca-ca.’ Say ‘He went to the bathroom.’ ”

    “No ca-ca?”

    “That’s right. ‘He went to the bathroom.’ ” She repeated it after me, both of our heads nodding up and down.

    She was in the first grade at the Catholic school in New Iberia, but she seemed to learn more English from Clarise and Batist and his wife than she did from me and the nuns. (A few lines you might hear from those three on any particular day: