The Bay at Midnight

CHAPTER 13

Julie
1962
Grandpop and I were in competition. We stood a few yards from each other behind the fence in our backyard, the morning sun in our eyes and our fishing poles in our hands as we waited to see which of us could catch the biggest edible fish. I was wearing my purple one-piece bathing suit and after spending a few weeks in the summer sun, my skin was as dark as my grandmother’s. Grandpop was still pretty pale. He never seemed to tan. He wore his usual brown pants—he must have had six pairs of them—and a white short-sleeved shirt and sandals. I’d never seen him go barefoot.
By the time we’d been out there for half an hour, I’d caught absolutely nothing, while Grandpop had reeled in two blowfish, which we considered less than nothing because they were too dangerous to eat. Their organs contained a deadly toxin, and after Grandpop tossed the second blowfish back into the canal, I came up with a plot for an intriguing mystery: The colored fishermen on the other side of the canal would begin dying, collapsing right there in the reeds, and it would turn out they’d been poisoned by the Rooster Man, who had fed them fried blowfish livers. I loved the idea and nursed the story along in my mind as we fished.
After what seemed like a very long time, I felt something good and strong tug at my line. I reeled it in, only to discover a hideous sea robin on my hook. Grandpop couldn’t stop himself from laughing. There was nothing uglier in the universe than a sea robin, with its long bony fins poking out all over its body. I grimaced, watching the fish sway back and forth on my line. I was not squeamish, but the thought of holding on to that spiny creature while taking it off the hook was not pleasant.
“I bet Ethan would like that sea robin,” Grandpop said, nodding toward the Chapmans’ yard.
I looked over to see Ethan sitting in the sand, a huge pile of mussels in front of him. I had not even realized he was outside.
“Hey, Ethan,” I called.
He looked up, the sun reflecting off his glasses so that I couldn’t see his eyes.
“You want this sea robin?” I held my pole in the air, the fish flapping its tail and winglike fins.
“Keen!” Ethan said. He picked up a blue bucket from the sand and walked over to where Grandpop and I were standing.
“You have to take it off the hook,” I said.
“Okay.” Ethan seemed undeterred. He took the rag I’d stuck in the chain-link fence, grasped the fish with it, and extracted the hook with an ease I couldn’t help but admire. He looked at me, grinning as though I’d given him a chocolate bar. “Thanks,” he said. He dropped the fish in his bucket and walked back to his yard.
Grandpop and I began fishing again. We were tired of standing, though, so we pulled two of the Adirondack chairs close to the fence and sat down. I put my bare feet against the fence and slumped down into the chair, feeling very comfortable and at peace with the world.
“Looks like we’re on the wrong side of the canal,” Grandpop said after a while.
“What do you mean?” I followed his focus across the canal to where the colored people were fishing.
“I’ve seen them reel in a few keepers over there,” he said.
“Oh, they’re probably just catching blowfish, too,” I said. “Daddy said colored people eat them ’cause they don’t know any better.”
My grandfather stared straight ahead, not speaking for a minute. “Charles said that, huh?” he asked finally.
I nodded. “He said they’re not as smart as us. And they’re poor, so they have to eat whatever they can.”
There was a long silence that I didn’t recognize as anything out of the ordinary until Grandpop spoke again.
“Did it ever occur to you that, if they do eat blowfish, which I doubt, it might be because they’re actually smarter than we are? Maybe they know how to avoid the poisonous part. Maybe we’re the stupid, wasteful ones.”
There was a serious tone in his voice that was rare for my grandfather. “I don’t think Daddy would agree with that,” I said.
“Did you know that I lived in Mississippi until I was your age?” Grandpop asked me.
“I thought you grew up in Westfield,” I said.
“I didn’t move to New Jersey until I was fourteen,” he said. “When I was a boy, we lived with my mother’s family in Mississippi. We had a housekeeper and she had a son my age. He was my best friend. Willie was his name, and he was colored.”
“Your best friend?” I said, amazed. I couldn’t imagine it. I had never even spoken to a colored person.
Grandpop nodded, smiling. “Willie and I had some good times together,” he said. “We lived near a lake and we’d fish and swim and explore. But he couldn’t go to my school because of segregation.”
I nodded. I knew what segregation was, even though it was easy not to think about it in Westfield, since every single person I knew there was white.
“His school was far inferior to mine,” Grandpop said. “Willie was just as smart as me—smarter in some things—but he didn’t have a chance. And here’s the worst thing.” He shook his head and I leaned closer to his chair, wanting to catch every word of the “worst thing.”
“One time he and I went into the town near our houses. We were only eight or nine and we decided we wanted to buy some candy. But coloreds weren’t allowed in the store.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said.
“Of course it’s not fair,” Grandpop agreed. “So I went in the store—it was a general store, I guess you’d call it. And I bought a bag of candy for a few cents and took it outside and Willie and I sat on the curb and ate it. Then he had to go to the bathroom really bad. The store had a privy behind it. An outhouse. But there was a sign on it that said No Coloreds, so Willie couldn’t use it. So, I went into the store and asked the lady at the counter if she would make an exception, since he was just a kid and had to go real bad, but she wouldn’t allow it. We went to another store, and they wouldn’t let him use their privy either. He ended up wetting his pants.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling sorry for Grandpop’s little friend.
“And then a man came and started smacking Willie around, calling him names, saying that’s why…” Grandpop hesitated a moment and I had the feeling he was going to clean up the man’s language for my ears. “He said that’s why Negroes weren’t allowed in nice places, because they soiled themselves and such.You can just imagine how humiliating that experience was for Willie.”
It was an awful tale. I thought about how it would feel to be prohibited from entering the little corner store where I rode my bike to buy penny candy. I imagined a sign on the door that read No White Children Allowed. I imagined feeling desperate to pee and not being allowed in.
But I felt uncomfortable about the conversation, because Grandpop was telling me—not straight out, but he was telling me just the same—that my father was wrong. That he was prejudiced. My father was such a good and admirable person. It was hard for me to reconcile the man I loved and respected with a bigot.
“Dad wouldn’t ever…you know, tell a little boy who needed to use the bathroom that he couldn’t,” I said, desperately wanting my grandfather to agree with me.
Grandpop smiled at me. “You’re right about that,” he said. “Your daddy’s a fair man. But he’s really had no experience with colored people, so he just doesn’t know any better than to say what he said. People are prejudiced mostly because they don’t know any better.”
I felt relieved. For a minute, I’d been afraid that Grandpop didn’t like my father.
“Do you know that a lot of people thought your grandmother wasn’t as good as they were when she was growing up here in New Jersey?” he asked. “They thought she was stupid.”
“Why?” I asked, perplexed. “She’s not colored.”
“She’s Italian. She didn’t speak perfect English. To some people, that’s considered even worse than being colored.”
I thought I was lucky to have an Italian grandmother. She was sweet to my friends and she cooked fantastic lasagna and made cookies at Christmastime with almond flavoring or rose water. It was hard to imagine anyone not loving her.
I suddenly got another tug on my line, this one nearly pulling the pole out of my hands. Grandpop tucked his pole beneath his chair to hold it in place and came over to help me.
“You’ve got a good one this time, Julie,” he said.
He held the pole as steady as he could while I reeled in the biggest fluke I had ever seen come out of the canal. I was whooping and hollering, jumping up and down as the fish sprang out of the water and we pulled it over the fence and onto the sand. It flopped from its flat, brown, two-eyed side to its white side and back again, and Grandma and Mom came out of the house to see what the fuss was all about. Lucy came out, too, but hung back near the porch door, afraid of the fish or the hook or the water. It was anyone’s guess.
Mom and Grandma watched as Grandpop held the fluke and I carefully extracted the hook.
“He’s a beaut,” my mother said.
“You win, Julie,” Grandpop said, as I dropped the fish into our bucket. It was nearly too big to fit. “I’m going to go clean it right this minute.” That was the loser’s task, to clean the catch.
I felt satisfied with myself as I watched my grandparents and mother walk back toward the house, but all of a sudden, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned and there stood Ethan, just a few feet away from me.
“That’s the most gargantuan fluke I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Can I have its guts?”
The next morning, I was sitting on the bulkhead, using binoculars to watch the boats bobbing and weaving in the rough water beneath the Lovelandtown Bridge. Grandpop had not only cleaned what he continually referred to as the “biggest fluke ever caught in the Intercoastal Waterway,” but he gave me a pair of binoculars, as well.
“I’ve been saving them to give you for a special occasion,” he said. “But I think catching that fish was pretty special.”
I guessed it was my conversation with Grandpop that made me turn the binoculars on the colored fishermen across the canal. That’s when I saw the girl. She was standing close to the dock that separated the fishing area from the Rooster Man’s shack, and she was bending over, doing something with her pole, baiting the hook, perhaps. How old was she? I studied her hard, turning the little dial on the binoculars to try to bring her into better focus. I couldn’t see what she looked like very well, but she was my age, I felt sure of it.
I went into the garage and grabbed my fishing pole and bait knife, took one of the boxes of squid out of the refrigerator, hopped in the runabout and motored across the canal before I had a chance to think about what I was doing. I pulled into the dock near the girl. I felt nervous, but a little excited, too. Maybe she would have a sense of adventure. Maybe she could become my friend, the way Willie had been my grandfather’s friend. I was so tired of being by myself.
I tied the runabout to the ladder at the side of the dock, then climbed up to the bulkhead with my pole and my bucket, the binoculars still around my neck. There were six people all together. Near me were my hoped-for future friend, an older boy, a woman—probably their mother—and a distance away, three men. Every one of them turned to stare at me. All those black faces. I felt like I’d gotten out of my boat in Africa. I had never felt so white and out of place in all my life.
I had to force my legs to take the few steps to where the girl was standing.
“Hi!” I said to her, my voice far too loud and cheery. “What’s biting?”
The girl stared at me blankly as though she didn’t understand English. Her skin was very dark and she had large eyes in the same deep shade of brown. Her hair had a bunch of plastic barrettes in it, all of them shaped like little bows in different colors. She was shorter than me and maybe a little younger than I’d guessed. I thought she was cute, but she sure didn’t seem to have much to say and my greeting just hung there in the hot July air.
The older boy standing next to the girl narrowed his eyes at me.
“What you doin’ over here?” he asked.
“I just wanted to fish on this side of canal for a change,” I said with a nervous smile.
“We got enough trouble catchin’ fish for ourselves without you taking up space,” the boy said.
“Hush, George,” the woman said, moving closer and resting her hand on the boy’s muscular forearm. “I’m Salena,” she said. “What’s your name, sugar?”
“Nancy,” I lied. I looked at the girl who was close to my age. “What’s your name?”
“Wanda,” the girl said. Her voice was high and it rose up a little on the second syllable of her name.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Eleven,” she said. I could barely remember being eleven, but I guessed it was close enough.
“I’m twelve,” I said. “Could I fish here next to you for a while?”
“’Spose,” she said.
“What you using for bait, Nancy?” Salena asked.
“Squid,” I said, reaching into my bucket. I cut off a bit of bait with my knife and ran my hook through it, my hands shaking the whole time. “What do you use?” I directed my question to Wanda.
“Bloodworms,” she said.
“I use them sometimes, too.” I baited my hook and cast carefully, not wanting to catch the hook in any of their heads and have them madder at me than they already seemed to be. Their hair was really different from mine. Salena and Wanda had stiff-looking hair even blacker than Isabel’s. Wanda’s stuck out from her barrettes in little pigtails all over her head. I couldn’t see the men very well because they were quite a distance from me, but George’s hair was extremely wiry and tight to his head. He was wearing a white T-shirt and baggy tan pants and he looked like he played a lot of sports, every bit of him thick and shiny with perspiration.
“Can you read?” I asked Wanda.
“’Course she can read.” George scowled. “You think we pick cotton all day or something?”
“Shut up,” Wanda said to George. Then to me, she said, “Sure I can read.”
“Have you read any Nancy Drew books?” I asked.
“Some,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I believed her. “Do you have a favorite?” I was testing her, unable to picture a colored girl reading Nancy Drew. I wondered what it was like to be colored and read a book entirely filled with white people. For that matter, what was it like for Wanda to read just about any book or watch any TV show? The only one I could think of with a colored person in it was Jack Benny’s show with Rochester, the butler, or whatever he was.
“Ain’t got no favorite,” Wanda said, reeling in her line, which was tangled up in a mass of seaweed. “I like them all.”
I was quite convinced she was lying now. How could she not have a favorite? “Well, my favorite is The Clue of the Dancing Puppet,” I said. “It’s new.”
“I ain’t read that one.” Wanda set the bottom of her pole in the sand and worked the seaweed loose. “I liked the one where she joined the circus.”
My mouth dropped open. “The Ringmaster’s Secret?” I asked.
“Yeah, with that—” she pointed to her wrist “—that horse charm.”
“Right,” I said. She actually had read it and I felt terrible for thinking otherwise. “My name’s not really Nancy,” I said to her, wanting to reward her honesty with my own. “It’s Julie.”
“Why’d you tell me it was Nancy?”
“’Cause I like solving mysteries, just like she did.”
“Ain’t no mysteries here,” George said. “So you can go back over your side of this here canal.”
“Shut up,” Wanda said to her brother again. She rolled her eyes at me. “You got any brothers?”
I shook my head, smiling.
“You lucky,” she said. Her worm was still on her hook, and with a forward motion, she cast the line into the canal again.
“You got a sister, though,” George said.
“I have two,” I said. “Lucy and Isabel.”
“Which one wears that bikini?” he asked.
“Neither,” I said, but I knew he meant Isabel, even though her bathing suit was not actually a bikini, since the bottom was big enough to cover her belly button. Pam Durant was the only girl I knew who wore an actual, navel-revealing bikini.
“You lie,” he said. “There’s one who wears that two-piece bathing suit. She sits out on the bulkhead sometimes, talking to boys in their boats.”
“That’s Isabel,” I said. “She’s seventeen.”
“She a fine-lookin’ woman,” George said, and the way he said it made me uncomfortable.
“Don’t talk about my sister that way,” I said.
“What way’s that?” he asked, grinning. He had the most perfect set of white teeth I’d ever seen.
“You know what way,” I said.
I thought I heard something, and I cocked my head, listening. There it was—the clucking sound of chickens. I looked over my shoulder toward the Rooster Man’s shack. It was barely visible for all the grasses and reeds surrounding it.
“Have you met the Rooster Man?” I asked Wanda and George.
“Who’s the Rooster Man?” Wanda asked.
There was a tug on my line. I pulled back, reeled it in a bit, but whatever had been there was gone. Most likely, my bait was gone as well, but I really didn’t care about fishing. I was making new friends.
“He lives in that shack.” I pointed to the ramshackle little building on the other side of the dock.
“I seen him,” Wanda said. “George and me went over there to fish one time and he chased us away.”
“I think he’s hiding something,” I said.
George laughed. “You just lookin’ for trouble, ain’t you, girl?” he said.
“He has a rooster and some chickens he just lets run all over his house,” I said.
Salena walked over with a big bowl of raspberries and offered me some.
“Thanks,” I said, taking a couple of the berries and popping them in my mouth.
“Your mama know you’re over here, sugar?” Salena asked me.
I shook my head. “No, but I’m allowed to go anywhere on this end of the canal,” I said, telling what I hoped was the truth. I knew I was allowed to take the boat anywhere on this end of the canal. No one had ever addressed my getting off the boat and visiting someone.
“Well, you ask next time, hear?” Salena said.
I nodded.
“Yeah, you say, ‘Hey, Mama, can I fish with dem niggahs?’” George said.
I was shocked he used that word. He looked at my stunned face, then broke into a laugh.
“Hey, girl,” he said. “I’m just razzin’ ya.”
Salena laughed, too, but Wanda looked at her brother with disgust. “You so retarded,” she said to him. Then to me, “He turned eighteen yesterday and now he’s more retarded than ever.”
So, I had some new friends. They were different from anyone else I knew, but that only intrigued me. I went across the canal a couple more times that week. I liked being over there. Salena turned out to be their cousin, not their mother, as I’d originally thought. I learned that all of them—including the men, who stuck pretty much to themselves—were cousins. Wanda and George had no father and their mother was sick, so this bunch of older relatives took them in.
There was always a lot of “razzin’” going on, as George would say, and it took me a while to realize it was a sign of affection between them. I gave them any fish I caught and discovered that they, too, released the blowfish and sea robins. I shared my binoculars with them, letting them take turns looking through them. I picked a bowlful of berries from the semicircle of blueberry bushes that grew in the sandy lot across from our house and shared them with the Lewises. I brought over The Clue of the Dancing Puppet, sat on an overturned bucket, and read it out loud to Wanda. She never offered to do the reading, and I didn’t ask her, afraid she couldn’t read as well as me and might be embarrassed. I put a lot of drama into the reading, and even George and Salena listened after a while.
I took Wanda for a ride in the boat, making sure I’d brought an extra life preserver with me that day. I wanted to take her across the canal to meet my family but instinctively knew I’d better not. I’d told no one where I was spending my mornings. All they needed to do was look hard across the canal to see me, but they were so used to ignoring the colored fishermen that I guess they never did.
One day, though, I was standing next to Wanda, starting to bait my hook with a killie, when a white man suddenly emerged from the path cut through the tall grass. We all turned to look at him, and my thoughts were so removed from my family that it wasn’t until I noticed his limp that I realized it was my father.
“Daddy!” I said. “What are you doing here?”
I noticed some gray in my father’s brown hair as he walked toward to me. He skirted a fish bucket and gave George an even wider berth. George cut his eyes at my father, looking as though he would happily stick a knife in his side if given a chance. It was a side of George I hadn’t seen before.
“You need to come home,” Daddy said. His voice was very calm, but I knew the calmness masked his anger. My father was not a hitter, not even a yeller, but quiet anger could sometimes be even harder to endure.
“Why?” I asked, knowing perfectly well why. I was holding the killie in one hand, the hook in another, and both my arms felt paralyzed.
“We were looking for you,” he said. “You know you’re supposed to let us know where you are. Throw that killie in the canal and come with me,” he said.
Feeling self-conscious, I tossed the killie over the fence. “This is Wanda Lewis, Daddy,” I said. “And her brother George. And her cousin, Salena.”
“You got a nice girl,” Salena said. “She’s welcome to fish with us anytime she like.”
Daddy nodded to her. “Thank you,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and I tried to measure the anger in his touch: Nine on a scale of one to ten. I was afraid to go with him. My hands shook as I gathered my up my gear.
“What about the boat?” I asked him.
“Grandpop can come over later to get it,” he said.
“Bye,” I said to the Lewises, then turned to follow my father. He was already halfway down the path on his way to the small sand lot where he’d parked the car.
He didn’t speak until we were both in the car and he’d turned the key in the ignition. Then he looked at me, shaking his head slowly as though he couldn’t believe I was his child.
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing on this side of the canal?” he asked, a cold, hard edge to his voice.
“Fishing,” I said.
“You think they’ve got different fish over here than on our side?”
Actually, I did, but I took a different tack.
“Grandpop said I should try to make friends with them,” I said, then cringed. I was a terrible person for pinning the blame on my grandfather. Daddy didn’t believe me, anyway.
“You’re starting to lie way too much, Julie,” he said as he drove the car from the lot onto the road. “You have a good imagination, and that’s fine. But you have to remember there’s a difference between making up stories that are harmless—that don’t hurt anybody, including yourself—and telling lies.”
“There’s no girls my age near us, Daddy,” I said, and I suddenly thought I was going to cry.
“You can play with Lucy,” he said.
“I would, except she never wants to do anything.”
Daddy suddenly looked sad. He reached across and stroked his hand over my hair, his touch gentle, the anger gone and worry in its place, which was almost worse. “Honey,” he said, “I know you’re lonely this summer. But don’t try to mix with the Negroes. No good can come of it.”
“Wanda reads Nancy Drew,” I said.
“I don’t care if she reads Dostoyevsky,” he said, his voice remaining calm. I had no idea who Dostoyevsky was. “I don’t want you to go over there again. Understood?”
“If Izzy was doing it, you wouldn’t care,” I said.
“If Izzy was doing it, I’d lock her in the house for a year,” he said. He turned the steering wheel to take us onto the road leading to the Lovelandtown Bridge, then glanced at me. “You think I favor Isabel?” he asked.
“I know you do.”
He said nothing as we drove over the bridge, the steel grating rumbling beneath the car’s tires.
“Isabel was my first child,” Daddy said quietly, once we’d crossed the bridge. “She’ll always have a special place in my heart, but I love all three of you equally. I’m sorry if I ever let you think otherwise.”
Although I hadn’t meant to manipulate my father with my accusation, it definitely seemed to have worked to my advantage. Daddy hugged me when we got out of the car in our driveway and said he thought his lecture had been punishment enough. I cried then for real, because I loved him with all my heart—and because I knew I was incapable of being the obedient girl he wanted me to be.
That afternoon, I sat on the bulkhead, dangling my feet above the water, looking over at the Lewis family as they packed up to go home. George and Wanda waved to me, and I waved back.
“Your dad went over and got you, huh?”
I recognized the voice without even turning around.
“Flake off, Ethan,” I said.
“I think it was neat that you went over there,” he said.
I turned to look at him, surprised. He was leaning on the fence. He had on sunglasses that were as thick as his regular glasses.
“My father had a big fight with your father,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I swiveled on the bulkhead, drawing my legs up so that I was facing him.
“Your father was looking for you, and my father was out here and your father said, ‘Have you seen Julie,’ and my father said, ‘She’s where she is every day, on the other side of the canal, fishing.’”
“Your father finked on me?” I asked.
“Your father said he was going over to get you, and my father told him that, somehow, you ended up with an open mind and your father was trying to close it. And your father called mine a liberal a*shole, and said that what happens in his family is none of my father’s business.” Ethan grinned. “It was pretty keen.”
Pretty keen if you’re not the subject of the dispute, I thought. I had to admit, though, that the argument sounded like the most excitement we’d had down the shore in weeks. I couldn’t believe my father had used the word a*shole.
I did not fish with Wanda and George for a full nine days, but then I returned. I told Salena I had Daddy’s permission. I brought more blueberries and ate their raspberries and big hunks of corn bread Salena had made. I shared my binoculars with them and read to Wanda. I would only go when my father was in Westfield.
And I practiced the line I would use in confession: “I disobeyed my parents just about every single day of the week.”