Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 40

When I got my first blood, my mother told me I was a woman. There was something false about her happiness. Her joy came with conditions that must be followed.

"Don't let boys touch you." Anthony was a man.

"Be a sweet girl." I was hard candy.

My father pushed me off his lap and my mother seemed blind to me. Aunt Vic was my salvation.

"Being a woman is a cross we women must bear," she said.

"When I go to Paris I will leave behind the little orphan girl and all I will take with me is her body and some of her clothes. I'll make maps so other people can get there too, adventurers like me."

This was my little-girl dream.

Before Paris, at university, I studied English literature, and all it was good for in the end was a job as a librarian.

I wanted to hold on to old things, but I wanted new things to make me forget. When I was twenty-five I found a job in the house of dead things. Villa Luisa, known locally as the Dimple Mansion, built by the richest black man born into slavery. The house recalled an Italian villa and had become a museum and a memorial to a family of successful African American entrepreneurs. I was hired by the museum's director to a.s.sist him in giving tours and cataloging the collection. The director, Dr. Edgar Bernard, was a serious, scholarly gentleman and looked the part. He was tall, gray-haired, and elegant. His old-fas.h.i.+oned wire-rimmed gla.s.ses accented wide eyes that popped from his head like lightbulbs. He wore the same dark gray suit and a crisp white s.h.i.+rt every day. His silk ties looked like pieces of stained-gla.s.s windows. The director was a lonely man. He spoke quietly and quickly as if afraid I would lose interest or he would forget to tell me something important as he veered into heated dissertations on obscure areas of Greek and African civilization. I was fascinated and listened to him with my whole body as if to memorize his knowledge.

When Dr. Bernard spoke there were secrets in his voice. I knew because I had secrets of my own. Dead things locked in a box I kept out of sight. I listened to his lonely, his hurt, and his misunderstood. He had dedicated his life to preserving a dignified memory of his mentor.

Dr. Bernard was a young man when he met Mason Dimple and became his secretary. Dimple sent him to Yale. They traveled the world together.

"Mr. Dimple gave me my first job. I worked in his garden every summer from the time I was fourteen years old. He sent me to school. I studied anthropology, receiving my doctorate just a few months before Mr. Dimple died.

"'Edgar,' he said, 'You have worked very hard and I've had to work hardly at all. I hope that you will make of your life something beautiful.' Mason was very good to me." Dr. Bernard's eyes got misty and his voice softened even more when he talked about Mr. Dimple, whom he sometimes, slipping, called Mason.

Now Dr. Bernard was married to a large woman who wore too much makeup and laughed too loudly. They were childless. The few times I saw her at holiday parties Mrs. Bernard's sadness and disappointment were clear as the champagne gla.s.ses she kept filled to the top.

Everything in the Villa was dead or old except me. The offices were in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Mason Dimple's yellow brick mansion. The house was surrounded by a meticulously manicured landscape of pink and white dogwoods, red and orange azalea bushes, and wine-colored j.a.panese maples. Inside, the furnis.h.i.+ngs were opulent, each of the twenty-six rooms decorated in a different period. On the ceiling of each room were painted re-creations of religious scenes by Michelangelo from the Sistine Chapel. Angels floated above our heads all day. The Dimples were not religious, but they had wanted to impress their guests with their culture acquired from trips abroad. The house had marble bathrooms with gold fixtures and bronze-and-crystal chandeliers. The floors were inlaid with rare wood or covered in rare Oriental carpets. English antiques in the living room, French baroque velvet sofas in the sitting room.

A white marble statue of a naked muscled Greek G.o.d stood in the foyer, a replica of a famous sculpture in the Louvre. The director had placed a discreet bronze ivy leaf over its private parts after several church groups complained that the statue disturbed the children on tours.

Mason Dimple's bedroom was not included on the tour. Dr. Bernard said that Mason Dimple was so consumed with grief when his parents died in a train wreck when he was almost twenty-one that he stayed in his room for seven days staring into the flame of a candle, trying to pray them back to life. Then he painted his bedroom walls black. When I opened the door to his bedroom I could feel his suffering like cold fingers on the back of my neck. It was like standing in an opulent prison cell.

The Villa held a large collection of European art, English silver, and Greek sculpture. Most museum patrons expected to see a collection of African art because of Mason Dimple's race. But there was nothing African here except a wooden mask from Nigeria half eaten by termites and a few Moroccan tapestries. Mason Dimple hated anything too black or too African. At one time he had wanted to be a part of local white society. He thought his money and barely brown skin would allow him access, but he soon realized that he was not welcome. He made do with occasional contact with the black bourgeoisie that mirrored white society with its b.a.l.l.s and charity events.

Dr. Bernard took me on a tour of the house and gave me facts I memorized. The questions from our guests were always the same.

When was the house built? Who was the architect?

How did the family make its fortune?

How did they die?

Why did Mason Dimple never marry or have children?

What are the naked wrestlers on the Greek vase in the study doing?

These were the things Dr. Bernard instructed me to say to the busloads of curious foreign tourists and rowdy school children and locals who had always wondered what went on inside the yellow brick mansion on Dimple Court.

In 1933 Mason's father, Simon Dimple, was the richest black man in the state of Georgia. He had spent his youth as a house slave on a plantation owned by his white father. He had been taught to cook by his mother, who was the plantation cook. He ran away from home when he was thirteen years old and earned his way in the world as a cook for rich white Northern college students. He met his future wife, Daisy, an octoroon girl from Louisiana, on a train in New York. They both were pa.s.sing for white. He fell in love with her, and they returned to Georgia. He used Daisy and her brothers, who also pa.s.sed for white, to purchase land and hire labor to build a restaurant on the outskirts of a growing town. They quietly ran the business behind the scenes and joined the local elite black community. Neither Daisy nor Simon could eat in the dining room of their own restaurant because it was for whites only. It was very popular and enabled Simon to invest in other businesses and real estate and make a fortune. The Dimples' firstborn child, Mason, they sent away to boarding school in Switzerland from the time he was a small boy to shelter him from the pain of racism. He spent summers with his family and eventually went to Yale, graduating with a degree in business.

At Simon Dimples' Plantation Restaurant, black women, dressed like Aunt Jemima in red-and-white checkered head kerchiefs, voluminous skirts, and white ap.r.o.ns, served the white patrons with a grin and a shuffle. The entire kitchen staff was made up of black men in white uniforms. The food was old-fas.h.i.+oned Southern cooking. Fried chicken, collard greens, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, chicken and dumplings, lemon cheesecakes, blackberry cobblers, rice puddings, barbecued ribs, biscuits and cornbread. As good as the food was, that was not why the restaurant was so popular. It was the novelty of whites being served in the manner of their ancestors by a wait staff that reminded them of the good old days. The Dimples were members of the NAACP even though many members protested that the Dimples' restaurant perpetuated the stereotype of a slave plantation, where the white masters were still being served by happy blacks.

The Dimples considered themselves good and patriotic Americans. They raised the flag on holidays, bought war bonds, and wanted the world to see them as they saw themselves-successful, sophisticated citizens who contributed to their community. The Dimples were generous philanthropists, donating large sums of money to their church and black colleges and medical facilities all over the South. They were good businessmen and, after his parents died, Mason Dimple sold the offensive restaurant and most of the other properties. He set up a foundation to ensure the preservation of his home as a memorial to his parents after his own death.

A year after Mason Dimple himself died, the board of directors he had set up was ready to hire someone to organize the home's collection. My first job was to catalog everything in the house and develop a system for marking. First I looked through the photographs. Mason seemed to have been a happy child, in short velvet pants, white ruffled s.h.i.+rts, and high b.u.t.toned boots. As he grew older his smiles faded to a hard line and he wore pressed tailored suits and posed stiffly for the camera's eye. He still looked like a boy even after his hair had thinned and his small rimless gla.s.ses sat on his nose like little windows.

Under the stairs in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the dead man's house there were several boxes of books Dr. Bernard didn't seem to know existed. One rainy afternoon when tours were slow and Dr. Bernard was attending a conference at a downtown hotel, I opened one of the boxes and flipped through the pages of historical novels and murder mysteries that Mason was so fond of. Behind the boxes was a small trunk half hidden by a large, brightly patterned rug. I dragged the trunk into my office and opened it. Inside were a packet of letters and several photographs. In the photographs Mason Dimple's eyes seemed happy only once. In one photograph he was walking through a flock of birds in a square in Venice. He was smiling at a young man who faintly resembled Dr. Bernard and who seemed to be flapping his arms to make the birds fly. There was a well-dressed young woman in the picture. She was wearing a tall hat and stood nearby watching both men with a weary, tight little smile.

The tiny black leather notebook fit in the palm of my hand. I found it sewn inside a linen bag in a secret compartment in Mason Dimple's traveling office trunk designed by Louis Vuitton in the mid 1800s. It was slender, the leather was smooth to touch, and inside, each page overflowed with tiny black lines like marching ants. The words were crowded together carefully as if they had been written in a small, dark place by someone with plenty of time, lots to say, and no one to listen. My hands were trembling as I cut open the neat st.i.tches with my pocket knife. As archivist for the house museum where Mason Dimple was born and died I had access to every silver spoon and faded photograph that made up his life. Mason Dimple was a complicated man, there was no doubt about that. He had wanted to be a poet and so he went where poets went, tried to live as they did, but his money got in the way. He died a bachelor with no heirs and left a substantial fortune in a trust that would preserve the family home and the Dimple name forever.

I wanted to be a poet and I knew early on, but it was not practical for a girl born into a poor family to be a poet. At first I studied biology in preparation for life as a nurse. This was to ease my parents' minds that I would be able to take care of myself, but I became fascinated with history and poetry and the lives of artists. I was never a practical girl. Five years out of college I found myself working in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a dead man's house, sorting through intimate details of his life, discovering common ground.

The letters were faded, but I could read the words, which told a story different from the one I recited to visitors to the house. It was in his handwriting. I knew it from the dull entries in the diaries I had cataloged. Places visited, foods eaten, and the prices in local currency of gifts purchased.

There were love letters: My tongue is wasted on words when you would be of better use in my mouth.

There were rooms full of secrets: The Great Hall, where the family received guests and gave lovely parties.

Mother made me scrub the floors on my hands and knees this morning as she recited prayers for my sinful soul.

The music room, where the family entertained their guests.

Mother tied me to the piano bench until I could play perfectly. Finally my fingers behaved. What a bad boy to make Mother unhappy. She speaks French when she is unhappy.

The master bedroom, where the father slept.

It is curious how Father never sleeps alone at night, nor does he sleep with Mother.

The pink bedroom, where the mother slept.

She cries at night. Her weeping is my lullaby.

Mason Dimple's bedroom, closed to visitors.

He is my first love and will be my last. I would be lost without him.

Mason Dimple had many secrets. Secrets I did not tell visitors to the house. Sometimes when it was quiet in the house I could hear a young woman singing and a grown man weeping. I could feel the cold, sad suffering of a mother's love. Some nights I dreamed, some nights I didn't sleep at all. My dreams s.h.i.+ft my thinking: I am in Paris. I climb a spiral staircase seven flights up. I enter a room made entirely of books, the walls, the fireplace, and the ceiling. The floor is a soft carpet of words. Leatherbound books with SECRETS etched in gold leaf along their spines are displayed in elaborate boxes set in the walls behind gla.s.s. The smell is haunting, dried ink and musty memories. I lie on the floor and words beneath me whisper in my ear, water words, the names of trees and flowers, parts of the body, parts of the eye. I leave the room and enter a dark hallway heading toward the light. I see my father in the distance, he waves me back toward the living. I whisper good-bye and turn my back on him.

My father died of a heart attack the summer before I went to Paris. All of us who knew him almost died from shock. A pious deacon of the church. A kind neighbor. A loving husband and father. Simply put: a good man gone to glory. "Prior Walker, dearly beloved" was carved in stone. Daddy was st.i.tched onto the tender parts of my heart. My body folded and water fell from my eyes like rain.

The weight of all those dead things pulled me down.

One afternoon shortly after my father died, I had a revelation and a sign. The streets outside were steaming as if little teapots were brewing beneath the city, but I was cool underground. I was working at my desk in the windowless bas.e.m.e.nt office. That morning the princ.i.p.al from a local boy's school called to cancel their one o'clock tour, and I was afraid I would cry all afternoon. A man I'd been dating had called me at noon to tell me he was returning to Detroit. He'd been looking for a job as a radio news journalist the whole year I knew him, but he had been unlucky and he felt that it was time for us both to face facts. For me the reality was more jarring, that he hadn't even asked me to go with him, let alone marry him. I couldn't say I was in love with him. I was just sad to be by myself again. I wanted to run away from so much loss all at once.

I was not allowed to be with my sadness for long. At one-fifteen the front doorbell rang. I went up the stairs, crossed the foyer, and opened the front door. Standing there were a regal-looking, well-dressed older black woman wearing heavy gold jewelry and too much powder on her face and a younger man in a conservative dark suit who I guessed by their resemblance was her son. I invited them in and noticed that they spoke with soft West Indian accents. The son seemed more interested in the house than the mother. Sometimes he would whisper to her in what sounded like French. I gave them the standard tour and the son asked the standard questions. At the end of the tour the son looked around with a puzzled expression.

"I presume that Mr. Dimple was an educated man."

"Yes, he graduated from Yale."

"That is not what I mean. His collection seems incomplete. He traveled to Africa in the Fifties?"

"Yes, but he wasn't much interested in African art. He brought back several tapestries from Morocco, and you saw the Ibo mask?"

The man made a noise in his throat and pitched his eyes around the room once more. "You can tell so much about a man by what he keeps in his house."

"Thank you very much for the tour. It was lovely," the mother said, signing the guest book. I noticed she wrote down Paris as her address.

"How did you hear about the museum?" I asked, curious.

"The concierge at the hotel recommended it."

"Are you West Indian?"

"We are French," the mother said, as if I'd insulted her.

The son looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. His eyes a.s.sessed me quickly, lingering on my b.r.e.a.s.t.s before returning to my face. He seemed to want to continue talking with me.

"There are many black Americans living in Paris, many artists," the son said. "I believe the black American writer James Baldwin makes his home in France. Do you know him?" he asked, as if it were possible for me to know someone famous.

"I know his work. I've been listening to my aunt go on about France since I was a little girl. I'd love to go there someday."

The son warmed to me when I said I wanted to be a writer. He said there were many bohemian artists living in Paris.

"There are certainly enough entertainers," the mother said, dabbing at her perspiring nose with a delicate lace handkerchief.

For the next half hour the son, Maxime Bazille, and his mother, Madame Marie-Lise Bazille, convinced me that Paris was the last red apple on the highest branches of a tree well worth climbing. I thanked them, and for the first time Paris became a real destination, with real places to eat, museums to see, and wide boulevards to stroll. A list of inexpensive hotels, bakeries and cafes, clothing shops and museums neatly printed in Maxime Bazille's elegant hand was folded in my pocket.

By six o'clock that evening the security guard hadn't shown up. I called Dr. Bernard and offered to lock up the house and set the alarm. He agreed, and I began clearing up my desk. I called a local copy shop to find out how much they charged for pa.s.sport photos. Before setting the alarm I went into the library, and my eyes fell on several books by James Baldwin. I'd seen them every day, but that evening it was as if a laser beam pointed them out to me and I was drawn to them. Each of the books was a signed first edition. Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Go Tell It on the Mountain, n.o.body Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time. Each book was signed, "Affectionately, Jimmy." I sat in Mason Dimple's reading chair and read into the night, from one book to the next. The most brilliantly illuminating pa.s.sages were underlined with blue ink. By the time the sun came up, my eyes were red and tired and an overwhelming sadness had clouded the room. When Dr. Bernard arrived he thought I was sleeping. He touched my shoulder and called my name.

His eyes fell on the bundle of love letters on the table next to me.

"I found them behind the stairs."

Dr. Bernard sat facing me in a leather wing chair, wearily, as if it were the end of a long day and not the beginning.

"After Mason read a book he liked or hated or was moved by, he would buy another and underline words and sometimes whole pa.s.sages. Then he gave them to me. We went to Paris after he read Giovanni's Room. It was the happiest time of my life. I love him still." Dr. Bernard began to weep. I reached out and touched his hand.

"Don't take only what life gives you, reach out and take what you want," he said.

We sat quietly in the room thick with memories and desire. Reading my own copy of Giovanni's Room a few days later lit a fire in me. The main character, David, a white American living in Paris, begins a pa.s.sionate affair with an Italian bartender, Giovanni, but because David is ashamed and scared of his desire, his love for Giovanni destroys them both. I was determined to have no such regrets, no such fears. I was still young and thought anything was possible.

I was awake, but I was dreaming about Paris, reading Baldwin, planning a new life. I made a reservation on a flight to Paris. I gave Dr. Bernard one month's notice, he gave me his blessings and a gold pen. When I told Aunt Vic I wanted to go to Paris, she didn't laugh or ask me if I was crazy; she sat down on her sofa, leaned over, and peeled back the carpet. She counted eighteen twenty-dollar bills into my hand and promised to send me more if I needed money to come home.

"I wish I had the b.a.l.l.s to do it." She hugged me hard.

"Aunt Vic, that's some salty talk."

My mother was still deep in her grief over losing my father. She let her sadness at my leaving roll over her like a fog.

"Child, I wish I could see you married, but I know that's a long ways off. You still restless." She stroked my hair and kissed my third eye.

"Aren't you glad I didn't marry Leo just to ease your mind?"

"He was too handsome to be a husband anyway," she said, trying to comfort me. I had already put him in a box and shoveled dirt on top.

I had saved three hundred dollars, and I figured after selling everything I couldn't carry to France I'd have about five hundred more. I watched ten French videos in fourteen days to prepare my ear for my new language. Four weeks later I had a ticket to Paris.

The day after I arrived in Paris a bomb was found on a train headed toward Lyon. I wondered if my new friend Delphine had noticed a plain package underneath a seat near her. Had she panicked? Did she call the conductor and save the lives of dozens of pa.s.sengers and her own life as well?

In another country, reading the words "two men kissed" makes it possible for me to kiss any lips my heart desires. In another country, the sound of music breathes.

In another country, love means this moment, now.

It means remembering your mother's face

when you told her you were leaving,

your lover's smell on that last day.

Good-bye is so final,

say: til then.