Sylvia had the children set the table. Children needed chores and obligations. Otherwise they were never family, just pampered guests. The cloth place mats, not plastic, one fork on the left, one spoon at the right at each place. Four places set around the small kitchen table. Sylvia fried chicken and mashed potatoes, made cabbage and black-eyed peas, banana pudding for dessert. She never could make passable biscuits or anything baked for that matter so those were store bought, but the rest was all from her own hands.
JJ ate until he hurt a little and still considered eating more. They’d waited as long as they could for Ava, but this was her training night at the bank and she might not join them for an hour or two yet. The children had been sent upstairs to clean their rooms. “Clean your room and you can watch SpongeBob,” she’d said. Sylvia had never bribed her own children. She’d threatened them sure, but negotiating was for lax parents, parents who wanted friends not children to raise. But the story is different for each generation, reimagined every time, and new times require new rules. Who wanted the only people in the world you threaten to be the people you love the most?
Decades ago, some of their people, close relatives, had packed their few belongings, closed up their shacks or gave away what they couldn’t carry, and set off for a northern state. They got as far as Washington, D.C., where the word was that jobs were plentiful there, even for a black body. The way they told it, a grown person could breathe, have a home, grow a family with a kind of independence and dignity only imagined in the South. Sylvia’s Aunt Dee and Uncle Fred had gone with their children to find out what they’d all been hearing. At first they got no word from them, but as the weeks progressed, the months, word trickled down that the family was living like kings, walking on gold-paved streets, frequenting clubs, shows, and restaurants, like high society, right there along with the bourgeoisie black people in fur coats and high-buttoned shoes, haughty expressions on their own faces just like the Negroes they’d rubbed shoulders with. Sylvia had ached to be one of them and had listened with rapt attention when they came home to visit every year with their stories of affluence and triumph.
Years would pass before her cousins revealed to them the particulars of their real lives in the city and the scrum of too many people in too little space. Living in thin-walled slums with a backbeat of constant angry noise and on the streets of seeker after seeker, fresher and newer black immigrants hell-bent on conquering another hostile world. Aunt Dee had cleaned for rich women, Paul had bowed and scraped. And on good days, they watched the final drops of amber liquor slide out of one bottle then another bottle. They, with their fellow displaced southern friends that they had glommed onto like life rafts, sat together in somebody’s too hot or too cold room and cried woeful tears about the vicious shithole of home they foolishly missed that they could not come back to without the permanent stain of defeat.
All of that came to Sylvia’s mind as she watched JJ eat, as they finished the dishes, as they talked only enough to be polite and moved in and out of each other’s orbits. She wanted him to know that he could come home, even if he was running. There was no shame in it. Twenty years ago JJ had been sprawled out on her couch, the sole object of the yellow light from the window streaming on his face, the dingy couch a canvas. He had not heard her enter the room that day or his feet would not have been up on her coffee table. Ava had been in the bathroom maybe, and Sylvia had time to look intently at JJ. In that light, she had thought she saw his face the way it was supposed to be, young, unknowing, relaxed, even the crease he wore between his eyes smoothed out. She had wanted to put her hand on the smoothness of the forehead, lie to him and declare that everything would be fine someday.
“One time some of us integrated the Liberty Theater in town. Did I ever tell you that?” Jay shook his head no, though he was sure he’d heard Sylvia’s story before.
“I must have told you.” Sylvia laughed. “I walked into that theater with a crowd. We were all supposed to get there while the lights were still on and we would walk in together. I was scared—more than I’ve ever been. But we did it. It was an Elvis movie and it was packed in there. The only seats left were on the very first row. You should have seen us. Scared rabbits. But we did it. Not one person got harmed.” Sylvia laughed at herself. “Listen to me. Let me say this, not one person got hit. You think you can’t make it, but you do.”
“Maybe you do, Mrs. Sylvia.”
Sylvia had not wanted to talk to JJ about her difficult past. She wanted to tell him that he was no longer a boy. She would tell him now that he was living in a sweet time of his life, the best time. He was a grown-up but not yet old. He was too young for the past to be most of his conversation, the condition of the elderly or the hopeless. She wanted to say that amidst the chaos of days, the great detritus of living was your actual life. She wanted to say stop looking for it, honey, this is it. What she did say was, “You’ve got a house here, JJ. Live in it.”
But JJ was not going to live in the house for good. He would never buy furniture for it or plant a single tree or azalea bush. Plenty of people are interested, he’d said. It will sell, he’d said. He said he might go to the West Coast again or overseas. He said there were all kinds of opportunities for a youngish single man. Was he disappointed? To say he was disappointed is an understatement and also a lie. He was a gambler. He had known he was going to lose. Ava had asked him if he was lucky. Luck had nothing to do with it. Luck was beside the point when the outcome was determined.
“I still got some fight in me. I’ll let you know when I’m coming back. Don’t look at me like that. I will.”