Harvesting the Heart Read Free

I drew the motion, the hurry, and then when I drew his face I sketched it quickly.
    I pulled back to see the picture. Spread over the broad forehead of this man I had drawn the outline of a strong old woman, her shoulders stooped from work and from denial. She had skin the shade of bootleg coffee, and crossing her back were the memories of lashed scars, which turned and blended into the distinctive twisted scar of the man’s own face. I did not know this woman, and I didn’t understand why she had come out on the page. It wasn’t my best drawing, I knew that, but it was something to leave behind. I placed the paper on the counter and went just outside the door to wait.
    Even before I had the power to sketch people’s secrets, I had always believed I could draw well. I knew this the way some kids know they can catch pop flies and others can use felt and glitter to make the most creative covers for book reports. I always used to scribble. My father told me that when I was a toddler, I had taken a red crayon and drawn one continuous line around the walls of the house, at my eye level, skipping over the doorways and the bureaus and the stove. He said I did it just for the hell of it.
    When I was five, I found one of those contests in the TV Guide, the one where you sketch a cartoon turtle and send it in and they give you a scholarship to art school. I had just been doodling, but my mother saw my picture and said there was no time like the present for securing a college education. She was the one who mailed it in. When the letter came back congratulating me on my talent and offering me enrollment in the National Art School in a place called Vicksburg, my mother swept me off my feet and told me this was our lucky day. She said my talent was hereditary, obviously, and she made a big deal of showing off the letter to my dad at dinner. My father had smiled gently and said they sent a letter like that to anyone who they thought would put up the money for some phony school, and my mother had left the table and locked herself in the bathroom. Still, she hung the letter on the refrigerator, next to my damp finger painting and my noodle-glued collage. The letter disappeared the day she left, and I always wondered if it was something she’d taken because she knew she couldn’t take me.
    I had been thinking a lot about my mother, much more than I had for several years. Part of it was because of what I had done before I left home; part of it was because I had left home. I wondered what my father thought. I wondered if the God he had so much faith in could tell him why the women in his life were always running away.
    When, at six-ten, the black man appeared in the doorframe, filling it, really, I knew already what the outcome would be. He stared at me, openmouthed and bothered. He held my portrait in one hand and stretched his other hand out to help me up from the sidewalk. “The breakfast crowd starts coming in twenty minutes,” he told me. “And I expect you ain’t got no idea about waiting tables.”
    Lionel—that was the man’s name—took me into the kitchen and offered me a stack of French toast while he introduced me to the dishwashing machine, the grill, and his brother Leroy, the head cook. He did not ask me where I was from, and he did not discuss salary, as if we had had a previous arrangement. Out of the blue, he told me that Mercy was the name of his great-grandmother and that she had been a slave in Georgia before the Civil War. She was the woman I’d drawn across his mind. “But you must be a prophet,” he said, “ ‘cause I don’t tell people about her.” He said that most of those Harvard types thought the diner’s name was some kind of philosophical statement, and anyway, that kept them coming in. He wandered off, leaving me to wonder why white people named girl babies things like Hope and Faith and Patience—names they could never live