1922.
It was too cool for ice cream. A hill wind was blowing dust and empty Camels wrappers about their ankles. It pushed their dresses into the creases of their behinds, then lifted the hems to peek at their cotton underwear. They were on their way to Edna Finch"s Mellow House, an ice-cream parlor catering to nice folks-where even children would feel comfortable, you know, even though it was right next to Reba"s Grill and just one block down from the Time and a Half Pool Hall. It sat in the curve of Carpenter"s Road, which, in four blocks, made up all the sporting life available in the Bottom. Old men and young ones draped themselves in front of the Elmira Theater, Irene"s Palace of Cosmetology, the pool hall, the grill and the other sagging business enterprises that lined the street. On sills, on stoops, on crates and broken chairs they sat tasting their teeth and waiting for something to distract them. Every pa.s.serby, every motorcar, every alteration in stance caught their attention and was commented on. Particularly they watched women. When a woman approached, the older men tipped their hats; the younger ones opened and closed their thighs. But all of them, whatever their age, watched her retreating view with interest.
Nel and Sula walked through this valley of eyes chilled by the wind and heated by the embarra.s.sment of appraising stares. The old men looked at their stalklike legs, dwelled on the cords in the backs of their knees and remembered old dance steps they had not done in twenty years. In their l.u.s.t, which age had turned to kindness, they moved their lips as though to stir up the taste of young sweat on tight skin.
Pig meat. The words were in all their minds. And one of them, one of the young ones, said it aloud. Softly but definitively and there was no mistaking the compliment. His name was Ajax, a twenty-one-year-old pool haunt of sinister beauty. Graceful and economical in every movement, he held a place of envy with men of all ages for his magnificently foul mouth. In fact he seldom cursed, and the epithets he chose were dull, even harmless. His reputation was derived from the way he handled the words. When he said "h.e.l.l" he hit the h h with his lungs and the impact was greater than the achievement of the most imaginative foul mouth in the town. He could say "s.h.i.t" with a nastiness impossible to imitate. So, when he said "pig meat" as Nel and Sula pa.s.sed, they guarded their eyes lest someone see their delight. with his lungs and the impact was greater than the achievement of the most imaginative foul mouth in the town. He could say "s.h.i.t" with a nastiness impossible to imitate. So, when he said "pig meat" as Nel and Sula pa.s.sed, they guarded their eyes lest someone see their delight.
It was not really Edna Finch"s ice cream that made them brave the stretch of those panther eyes. Years later their own eyes would glaze as they cupped their chins in remembrance of the inchworm smiles, the squatting haunches, the track-rail legs straddling broken chairs. The cream-colored trousers marking with a mere seam the place where the mystery curled. Those smooth vanilla crotches invited them; those lemon-yellow gabardines beckoned to them.
They moved toward the ice-cream parlor like tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance. The least sideways glance, the merest toe stub, could pitch them into those creamy haunches spread wide with welcome. Somewhere beneath all of that daintiness, chambered in all that neatness, lay the thing that clotted their dreams.
Which was only fitting, for it was in dreams that the two girls had first met. Long before Edna Finch"s Mellow House opened, even before they marched through the chocolate halls of Garfield Primary School out onto the playground and stood facing each other through the ropes of the one vacant swing ("Go on." "No. You go."), they had already made each other"s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream. When Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother"s incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs.
Similarly, Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of doors, spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of a someone who shared both the taste and the speed.
So when they met, first in those chocolate halls and next through the ropes of the swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula"s because he was dead; Nel"s because he wasn"t), they found in each other"s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.
Nel Wright and Sula Peace were both twelve in 1922, wishbone thin and easy-a.s.sed. Nel was the color of wet sandpaper-just dark enough to escape the blows of the pitch-black truebloods and the contempt of old women who worried about such things as bad blood mixtures and knew that the origins of a mule and a mulatto were one and the same. Had she been any lighter-skinned she would have needed either her mother"s protection on the way to school or a streak of mean to defend herself. Sula was a heavy brown with large quiet eyes, one of which featured a birthmark that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a stemmed rose. It gave her otherwise plain face a broken excitement and blue-blade threat like the keloid scar of the razored man who sometimes played checkers with her grandmother. The birthmark was to grow darker as the years pa.s.sed, but now it was the same shade as her gold-flecked eyes, which, to the end, were as steady and clean as rain.
Their friendship was as intense as it was sudden. They found relief in each other"s personality. Although both were unshaped, formless things, Nel seemed stronger and more consistent than Sula, who could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes. Yet there was one time when that was not true, when she held on to a mood for weeks, but even that was in defense of Nel.
Four white boys in their early teens, sons of some newly arrived Irish people, occasionally entertained themselves in the afternoon by hara.s.sing black schoolchildren. With shoes that pinched and woolen knickers that made red rings on their calves, they had come to this valley with their parents believing as they did that it was a promised land-green and shimmering with welcome. What they found was a strange accent, a pervasive fear of their religion and firm resistance to their attempts to find work. With one exception the older residents of Medallion scorned them. The one exception was the black community. Although some of the Negroes had been in Medallion before the Civil War (the town didn"t even have a name then), if they had any hatred for these newcomers it didn"t matter because it didn"t show. As a matter of fact, baiting them was the one activity that the white Protestant residents concurred in. In part their place in this world was secured only when they echoed the old residents" att.i.tude toward blacks.
These particular boys caught Nel once, and pushed her from hand to hand until they grew tired of the frightened helpless face. Because of that incident, Nel"s route home from school became elaborate. She, and then Sula, managed to duck them for weeks until a chilly day in November when Sula said, "Let"s us go on home the shortest way."
Nel blinked, but acquiesced. They walked up the street until they got to the bend of Carpenter"s Road where the boys lounged on a disused well. Spotting their prey, the boys sauntered forward as though there were nothing in the world on their minds but the gray sky. Hardly able to control their grins, they stood like a gate blocking the path. When the girls were three feet in front of the boys, Sula reached into her coat pocket and pulled out Eva"s paring knife. The boys stopped short, exchanged looks and dropped all pretense of innocence. This was going to be better than they thought. They were going to try and fight back, and with a knife. Maybe they could get an arm around one of their waists, or tear...
Sula squatted down in the dirt road and put everything down on the ground: her lunchpail, her reader, her mittens, her slate. Holding the knife in her right hand, she pulled the slate toward her and pressed her left forefinger down hard on its edge. Her aim was determined but inaccurate. She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the sc.r.a.p of flesh, like a b.u.t.ton mushroom, curling in the cherry blood that ran into the corners of the slate.
Sula raised her eyes to them. Her voice was quiet. "If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I"ll do to you?"
The shifting dirt was the only way Nel knew that they were moving away; she was looking at Sula"s face, which seemed miles and miles away.
But toughness was not their quality-adventuresomeness was-and a mean determination to explore everything that interested them, from one-eyed chickens high-stepping in their penned yards to Mr. Buckland Reed"s gold teeth, from the sound of sheets flapping in the wind to the labels on Tar Baby"s wine bottles. And they had no priorities. They could be distracted from watching a fight with mean razors by the glorious smell of hot tar being poured by roadmen two hundred yards away.
In the safe harbor of each other"s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things. When Mrs. Wright reminded Nel to pull her nose, she would do it enthusiastically but without the least hope in the world.
"While you sittin" there, honey, go "head and pull your nose."
"It hurts, Mamma."
"Don"t you want a nice nose when you grow up?"
After she met Sula, Nel slid the clothespin under the blanket as soon as she got in the bed. And although there was still the hateful hot comb to suffer through each Sat.u.r.day evening, its consequences-smooth hair-no longer interested her.
Joined in mutual admiration they watched each day as though it were a movie arranged for their amus.e.m.e.nt. The new theme they were now discovering was men. So they met regularly, without even planning it, to walk down the road to Edna Finch"s Mellow House, even though it was too cool for ice cream.
Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. And the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. Even their footsteps left a smell of smoke behind.
It was in that summer, the summer of their twelfth year, the summer of the beautiful black boys, that they became skittish, frightened and bold-all at the same time.
In that mercury mood in July, Sula and Nel wandered about the Bottom barefoot looking for mischief. They decided to go down by the river where the boys sometimes swam. Nel waited on the porch of 7 Carpenter"s Road while Sula ran into the house to go to the toilet. On the way up the stairs, she pa.s.sed the kitchen where Hannah sat with two friends, Patsy and Valentine. The two women were fanning themselves and watching Hannah put down some dough, all talking casually about one thing and another, and had gotten around, when Sula pa.s.sed by, to the problems of child rearing.
"They a pain."
"Yeh. Wish I"d listened to mamma. She told me not to have "em too soon."
"Any time atall is too soon for me."
"Oh, I don"t know. My Rudy minds his daddy. He just wild with me. Be glad when he growed and gone."
Hannah smiled and said, "Shut your mouth. You love the ground he pee on."
"Sure I do. But he still a pain. Can"t help loving your own child. No matter what they do."
"Well, Hester grown now and I can"t say love is exactly what I feel."
"Sure you do. You love her, like I love Sula. I just don"t like her. That"s the difference."
"Guess so. Likin" them is another thing."
"Sure. They different people, you know..."
She only heard Hannah"s words, and the p.r.o.nouncement sent her flying up the stairs. In bewilderment, she stood at the window fingering the curtain edge, aware of a sting in her eye. Nel"s call floated up and into the window, pulling her away from dark thoughts back into the bright, hot daylight.
They ran most of the way.
Heading toward the wide part of the river where trees grouped themselves in families darkening the earth below. They pa.s.sed some boys swimming and clowning in the water, shrouding their words in laughter.
They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze, which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four leaf-locked trees which promised cooling, they flung themselves into the four-cornered shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly. They lay in the gra.s.s, their foreheads almost touching, their bodies stretched away from each other at a 180-degree angle. Sula"s head rested on her arm, an undone braid coiled around her wrist. Nel leaned on her elbows and worried long blades of gra.s.s with her fingers. Underneath their dresses flesh tightened and shivered in the high coolness, their small b.r.e.a.s.t.s just now beginning to create some pleasant discomfort when they were lying on their stomachs.
Sula lifted her head and joined Nel in the gra.s.s play. In concert, without ever meeting each other"s eyes, they stroked the blades up and down, up and down. Nel found a thick twig and, with her thumbnail, pulled away its bark until it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence. Sula looked about and found one too. When both twigs were undressed Nel moved easily to the next stage and began tearing up rooted gra.s.s to make a bare spot of earth. When a generous clearing was made, Sula traced intricate patterns in it with her twig. At first Nel was content to do the same. But soon she grew impatient and poked her twig rhythmically and intensely into the earth, making a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig. Sula copied her, and soon each had a hole the size of a cup. Nel began a more strenuous digging and, rising to her knee, was careful to scoop out the dirt as she made her hole deeper. Together they worked until the two holes were one and the same. When the depression was the size of a small dishpan, Nel"s twig broke. With a gesture of disgust she threw the pieces into the hole they had made. Sula threw hers in too. Nel saw a bottle cap and tossed it in as well. Each then looked around for more debris to throw into the hole: paper, bits of gla.s.s, b.u.t.ts of cigarettes, until all of the small defiling things they could find were collected there. Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted gra.s.s.
Neither one had spoken a word.
They stood up, stretched, then gazed out over the swift dull water as an unspeakable restlessness and agitation held them. At the same instant each girl heard footsteps in the gra.s.s. A little boy in too big knickers was coming up from the lower bank of the river. He stopped when he saw them and picked his nose.
"Your mamma tole you to stop eatin" snot, Chicken," Nel hollered at him through cupped hands.
"Shut up," he said, still picking.
"Come up here and say that."
"Leave him "lone, Nel. Come here, Chicken. Lemme show you something."
"Naw."
"You scared we gone take your b.u.g.g.e.r away?"
"Leave him "lone, I said. Come on, Chicken. Look. I"ll help you climb a tree."
Chicken looked at the tree Sula was pointing to-a big double beech with low branches and lots of bends for sitting.
He moved slowly toward her.
"Come on, Chicken, I"ll help you up."
Still picking his nose, his eyes wide, he came to where they were standing. Sula took him by the hand and coaxed him along. When they reached the base of the beech, she lifted him to the first branch, saying, "Go on. Go on. I got you." She followed the boy, steadying him, when he needed it, with her hand and her rea.s.suring voice. When they were as high as they could go, Sula pointed to the far side of the river.
"See? Bet you never saw that far before, did you?"
"Uh uh."
"Now look down there." They both leaned a little and peered through the leaves at Nel standing below, squinting up at them. From their height she looked small and foreshortened.
Chicken Little laughed.
"Y"all better come on down before you break your neck," Nel hollered.
"I ain"t never coming down," the boy hollered back.
"Yeah. We better. Come on, Chicken."
"Naw. Lemme go."
"Yeah, Chicken. Come on, now."
Sula pulled his leg gently.
"Lemme go."
"OK, I"m leavin" you." She started on.
"Wait!" he screamed.
Sula stopped and together they slowly worked their way down.
Chicken was still elated. "I was way up there, wasn"t I? Wasn"t I? I"m a tell my brovver."
Sula and Nel began to mimic him: "I"m a tell my brovver; I"m a tell my brovver."
Sula picked him up by his hands and swung him outward then around and around. His knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and the fat gra.s.shoppers. When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter.
The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank. The pressure of his hard and tight little fingers was still in Sula"s palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing. Both girls stared at the water.
Nel spoke first. "Somebody saw." A figure appeared briefly on the opposite sh.o.r.e.
The only house over there was Shadrack"s. Sula glanced at Nel. Terror widened her nostrils. Had he seen?
The water was so peaceful now. There was nothing but the baking sun and something newly missing. Sula cupped her face for an instant, then turned and ran up to the little plank bridge that crossed the river to Shadrack"s house. There was no path. It was as though neither Shadrack nor anyone else ever came this way.
Her running was swift and determined, but when she was close to the three little steps that led to his porch, fear crawled into her stomach and only the something newly missing back there in the river made it possible for her to walk up the three steps and knock at the door.
No one answered. She started back, but thought again of the peace of the river. Shadrack would be inside, just behind the door ready to pounce on her. Still she could not go back. Ever so gently she pushed the door with the tips of her fingers and heard only the hinges weep. More. And then she was inside. Alone. The neatness, the order startled her, but more surprising was the restfulness. Everything was so tiny, so common, so unthreatening. Perhaps this was not the house of the Shad. The terrible Shad who walked about with his p.e.n.i.s out, who peed in front of ladies and girl-children, the only black who could curse white people and get away with it, who drank in the road from the mouth of the bottle, who shouted and shook in the streets. This cottage? This sweet old cottage? With its made-up bed? With its rag rug and wooden table? Sula stood in the middle of the little room and in her wonder forgot what she had come for until a sound at the door made her jump. He was there in the doorway looking at her. She had not heard his coming and now he was looking at her.
More in embarra.s.sment than terror she averted her glance. When she called up enough courage to look back at him, she saw his hand resting upon the door frame. His fingers, barely touching the wood, were arranged in a graceful arc. Relieved and encouraged (no one with hands like that, no one with fingers that curved around wood so tenderly could kill her), she walked past him out of the door, feeling his gaze turning, turning with her.
At the edge of the porch, gathering the wisps of courage that were fast leaving her, she turned once more to look at him, to ask him...had he...?
He was smiling, a great smile, heavy with l.u.s.t and time to come. He nodded his head as though answering a question, and said, in a pleasant conversational tone, a tone of cooled b.u.t.ter, "Always."
Sula fled down the steps, and shot through the greenness and the baking sun back to Nel and the dark closed place in the water. There she collapsed in tears.
Nel quieted her. "Sh, sh. Don"t, don"t. You didn"t mean it. It ain"t your fault. Sh. Sh. Come on, le"s go, Sula. Come on, now. Was he there? Did he see? Where"s the belt to your dress?"
Sula shook her head while she searched her waist for the belt.
Finally she stood up and allowed Nel to lead her away. "He said, "Always. Always.""
"What?"
Sula covered her mouth as they walked down the hill. Always. He had answered a question she had not asked, and its promise licked at her feet.
A bargeman, poling away from the sh.o.r.e, found Chicken late that afternoon stuck in some rocks and weeds, his knickers ballooning about his legs. He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it and hauled it aboard. He shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children. When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing but subst.i.tutes for mules, only mules didn"t kill each other the way n.i.g.g.e.rs did. He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth. Later, sitting down to smoke on an empty lard tin, still bemused by G.o.d"s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham"s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth. He dragged the sack away and hooked it over the side, so that the Chicken"s body was half in and half out of the water.
Wiping the sweat from his neck, he reported his find to the sheriff at Porter"s Landing, who said they didn"t have no n.i.g.g.e.rs in their county, but that some lived in those hills "cross the river, up above Medallion. The bargeman said he couldn"t go all the way back there, it was every bit of two miles. The sheriff said whyn"t he throw it on back into the water. The bargeman said he never shoulda taken it out in the first place. Finally they got the man who ran the ferry twice a day to agree to take it over in the morning.
That was why Chicken Little was missing for three days and didn"t get to the embalmer"s until the fourth day, by which time he was unrecognizable to almost everybody who once knew him, and even his mother wasn"t deep down sure, except that it just had to be him since n.o.body could find him. When she saw his clothes lying on the table in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the mortuary, her mouth snapped shut, and when she saw his body her mouth flew wide open again and it was seven hours before she was able to close it and make the first sound.
So the coffin was closed.
The Junior Choir, dressed in white, sang "Nearer My G.o.d to Thee" and "Precious Memories," their eyes fastened on the songbooks they did not need, for this was the first time their voices had presided at a real-life event.
Nel and Sula did not touch hands or look at each other during the funeral. There was a s.p.a.ce, a separateness, between them. Nel"s legs had turned to granite and she expected the sheriff or Reverend Deal"s pointing finger at any moment. Although she knew she had "done nothing," she felt convicted and hanged right there in the pew-two rows down from her parents in the children"s section.
Sula simply cried. Soundlessly and with no heaving and gasping for breath, she let the tears roll into her mouth and slide down her chin to dot the front of her dress.
As Reverend Deal moved into his sermon, the hands of the women unfolded like pairs of raven"s wings and flew high above their hats in the air. They did not hear all of what he said; they heard the one word, or phrase, or inflection that was for them the connection between the event and themselves. For some it was the term "Sweet Jesus." And they saw the Lamb"s eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves. They acknowledged the innocent child hiding in the corner of their hearts, holding a sugar-and-b.u.t.ter sandwich. That one. The one who lodged deep in their fat, thin, old, young skin, and was the one the world had hurt. Or they thought of their son newly killed and remembered his legs in short pants and wondered where the bullet went in. Or they remembered how dirty the room looked when their father left home and wondered if that is the way the slim, young Jew felt, he who for them was both son and lover and in whose downy face they could see the sugar-and-b.u.t.ter sandwiches and feel the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood, but the remembrance of it.
Then they left their pews. For with some emotions one has to stand. They spoke, for they were full and needed to say. They swayed, for the rivulets of grief or of ecstasy must be rocked. And when they thought of all that life and death locked into that little closed coffin they danced and screamed, not to protest G.o.d"s will but to acknowledge it and confirm once more their conviction that the only way to avoid the Hand of G.o.d is to get in it.
In the colored part of the cemetery, they sank Chicken Little in between his grandfather and an aunt. b.u.t.terflies flew in and out of the bunches of field flowers now loosened from the top of the bier and lying in a small heap at the edge of the grave. The heat had gone, but there was still no breeze to lift the hair of the willows.
Nel and Sula stood some distance away from the grave, the s.p.a.ce that had sat between them in the pews had dissolved. They held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever. At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to b.u.t.terflies in the winter.