Makeda Read Free

just become interested in girls. Claudette Benson, two months younger than me, went to our church and came from a good family. She was very sweet and my grandmother liked her very much.
    During one of my visits, my grandmother asked me, “How do you like the Benson girl?”
    “She’s nice, Grandma.”
    “But I mean how do you like her?”
    “You mean like a girlfriend?”
    My grandmother smiled as if she were teasing me.
    “She’s not too pretty, Grandma.”
    “Hmm. Well you know, boy, pretty is as pretty does. Look beyond what you can see with your eyes. Do you understand, Gray?”
    “Yes, Grandma.” By the age of thirteen, despite not always following her cryptic advice, I had come to believe most of what she told me.
    Somehow, I could never imagine my grandmother in the waitress-like costume she’d worn to work, leaving home in the early light to catch the number 27 bus and then the number 43 bus that would get her to the first of her day’s washing stops by seven. She’d worked every day save Thursdays and Sundays. She’d refused to work on Thursdays and had gotten away with it. Why Thursday was so important to her I would wait to learn many years later.
    Whenever I’d tried to picture her in a washerwoman’s role, I would have to rive her into two completely and incongruously different people: the transcendent pillar of vision that I knew as no one else did, and the subservient menial who answered to an impersonal bell on a big house laundry room wall. I knew a lot of people who’d had to live like this for all of their working lives. But only in my grandmother’s case had I gotten to see with my own eyes the higher face of a double persona.
    Mr. George C. Crump, for instance, was chairman of the deacons board at our church, First African Baptist. On Sundays, in his three-piece black serge suit and stormy style, he would cut a figure of considerable notice, second in line only to the Reverend C.C. Boynton whose greatgrandfather had founded the big church on St. Peter Street. Everybody knew that on weekdays, Mr. Crump, who was light-skinned enough to be mistaken for white, wore a barber’s tunic and cut white folk’s hair in a way-off neighborhood that no one else in the church had ever seen. Though such was hard to visualize, much the same sort of duality would have described well enough the existence of most of the members of the church.
    Still, with my grandmother it was different. The space between what she was and what she had done for a living was a thousand-fold larger than it was with Mr. Crump or anybody else that I knew.
    I am twenty-five as I write this and have scarcely begun to understand my relationship with my father. We have been estranged a good while. There is more. He himself had suffered a rough draw of fathers. His natural father, he believed, had abandoned him in his infancy, although the truth was a bit more complicated than that. Or so it seemed to me. I couldn’t really be sure, inasmuch as my father never talked about his childhood, and what little I came to know of it I’d had to extract from my mother who was chronically phobic about conveying the smallest information that may have seemed unpleasant. My father, when he did speak, spoke forth opinions that often landed like boulders on new grass. He was indeed something of a categorical man who erred with his certainties usually toward the general good and away from the varietal risks of gray. His childhood had been very nearly too complicated for him to survive. To do so, he’d had to simplify the world. To flatten out or make uncomplicated those against whom he had too few resources to spend in routine defense. Thus, he deemed people good or bad. Done. This worked quite well enough for him.
    My mother, however, was smarter, and in some interior way more secure, but otherwise less brave than my father. She liked peace and always looked for it somewhere in the middle of all disagreements, real and theoretical.
    “Your