Even the Stars Look Lonesome Read online

  Thus art made by all can be enjoyed by all. The African saying is proved true: Sea never dry.

  After creating the universe, all the stars, each grain of sand, the humpback whale and the soft-shell crab, even God tired and took a day off.

  There’s no argument that we humans, who at our best can only create opportunities and at our worst create havoc, need time to rest.

  I am not suggesting that vacations are a sacred right on a par with the right to vote, hold political office or to subscribe to one hundred magazines in order to compete for a $10 million lottery prize. No, I am merely observing that paltry creatures such as ourselves, who labor two-thirds of our lives to oppose gravity and remain erect, require some time to laze on sofas, relax before fireplaces, to recline on white beaches under a benevolent sun.

  One would think those are not inordinate desires. We labor day and night to fill two small sacks in our chests with that which is everywhere available. We hold a torrent of blood inside our bodies, which are covered with tissue so thin that if we snag on a nail and do not close the aperture, the precious fluid would run out, leaving husks dry and lifeless.

  All that is to say we work even when we are unaware of our efforts. So, we do need rest periods. However, there is that about us so perverse that even on a much-needed and hard-won holiday, we feel the irresistible need to spin and to toil.

  On a beach in Mexico I sat near an artisan who had made some objects for sale. There were ash-colored birds, vases and other knickknacks, along with brushes in jars and bottles of paint.

  I settled down comfortably, expecting to watch him turn the clay-colored objects into gay souvenirs. However, the man did not take up the brushes, nor did he touch the paint.

  In moments a line formed before his table and buyers began to bargain. At each sale, the buyer was given a seat, which was taken eagerly. One woman noticed that I was watching. She smiled at me, a cat-with-bird-in-mouth smile.

  “Here we get to paint them ourselves.” Then I noticed the seller’s sign, THINGS, HAND PAINTED.

  I almost laughed aloud. These were tourists who had paid good money to come to Mexico to relax and here they were, working at something that if they had been asked to do, they would have declined without even thinking about it.

  I was amazed at how they were squandering their free time, so what did I do? I rushed to my room, unpacked my yellow pads, got out my pen, dictionary and thesaurus, and sat down and took three days of my vacation to write this essay.

  My husband was a man, my son a boy, so I accepted that it was my husbands right and responsibility to speak to our five-year-old son about sex. However, it didn’t happen that way.

  Guy came home from school one afternoon and asked me if I knew where babies come from. I admitted I did know. There was an “I bet you don’t” look on his face and a “Got you this time” cockiness in his stance.

  “Well, from where, then?” he asked.

  This was not the moment to fudge or hesitate, and certainly not the time to say “Your father will tell you when he comes home.”

  I said, “Babies come from the mother’s body.”

  He was crestfallen.

  “How long have you known that?”

  “For a long time.”

  “Well, why didn’t somebody tell me?”

  “I guess because you never asked before.”

  His interest seemed to ebb, and I offered him a glass of milk. I breathed deeply in relief as he drank.

  He put the glass down on the counter and asked, “Do you know how the baby got in the mothers stomach?”

  I had relaxed too soon. There was no slyness on his face. This time he was just a genuinely curious five-year-old. Again time had caught me in its clutch. I decided to be very matter-of-fact about the matter.

  I reminded him of the names of his private parts.

  He nodded.

  I said, “Well, when a couple wants a baby the man puts his penis into the woman’s vagina and he deposits a sperm and the sperm meets the mother’s egg and they grow together and after nine months the baby comes out.”

  Guy’s face was scrambled into a mask of distaste. “Dad did that to you? Wow. You really must have wanted a baby bad.”

  “I wanted you.”

  “Wow. I’m glad you didn’t want any more … or he’d be doing that all the time. Wow!”

  Disgust took him out of the room, his small head wagging in puzzlement.

  Alas, I have seen that same revulsion on children’s faces when there is the slightest hint that their parents might be having sex. The extraordinary element in this account is that the children are in their thirties, forties and fifties.

  An African American woman I know had parents who were married for forty years. The father had a lingering and painful illness during which the mother was his devoted and usually cheerful attendant. The father died. Three years later my acquaintance severed relations with her mother. The mother had dared to take up with a gentleman friend. The daughter, who is thirty-five years old and twice divorced, was repelled by the thought that her mother was being intimate with a man, and displeasure stretched beyond her control.

  A group of friends and acquaintances met after church at a hotel for Sunday brunch. The unhappy woman let her horror over her mother’s friend take control of the conversation.

  “What could they possibly be doing together? She’s nearly sixty and he’s got to be sixty-five. Can you imagine them naked together? All that wrinkled skin rubbing against the other?”

  Her face was an ugly mask. She puckered and pouted and sulked.

  “Old people shouldn’t have sex. Just thinking about that turns my stomach.”

  Sitting at the table were black women whose ages ranged from seventy to seventeen. There was silence for a moment after the tirade, then almost everyone began to speak at once.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Old folks don’t have sex? Who told you that lie?”

  One woman waited until the clamor had subsided and asked sweetly, “What do you think your momma and daddy did after you were born? They stopped doing the do?”

  The whiner answered petulantly, “You don’t have to be nasty.” The statement brought howls of derision.

  “Girl, you are sick.”

  “Get a grip.”

  And the oldest lady in the room said, “Honey, tired don’t mean lazy, and every good-bye ain’t gone.”

  I was reminded of my mother when she was seventy-four. She lived in California with my fourth stepfather, her great love, who was recovering from a mild stroke. Her telephone voice clearly told me how upset she was. “Baby. Baby, I’ve waited as long as I could before bothering you. But things have gone on too long. Much too long.”

  I made my voice as soft as hers had been hard. “Mom, what’s the matter? I’ll take care of it.” Although I lived in North Carolina, I felt as close as the telephone, airlines and credit cards allowed me to be.

  “It’s your poppa. If you don’t talk to him, I’m going to put his butt out. Out of this house. I’ll put his butt on the street.”

  This last husband of Mom’s was my favorite. We were made for each other. He had never had a daughter and I had not known a father’s care, advice and protection since my teens.

  “What did Poppa do, Mom? What is he doing?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. That’s it. He’s not doing a damn thing.”

  “But, Mom, his stroke.”

  “I know. He thinks that if he has sex, he’ll bring on another stroke. The doctor already told him that isn’t true. And I got so mad when he said he might die having sex, that I told him there’s no better way to go.”

  That was funny, but I knew better than to laugh.

  “What can I do, Mom? Really, I mean there is nothing I can do.”

  “Yes, you can. You talk to him. He’ll listen to you. Either you talk to him or I’ll put him out on the street. I’m a woman, I’m not a damn rock.”r />
  I knew that voice very well. I knew that she had reached her level of frustration. She was ready to act.

  I said, “OK, Mom. I don’t know what I will say, but I’ll talk to Poppa.”

  “You’d better do it soon, then.”

  “Mom, you leave the house at five-thirty this evening, and I’ll telephone Poppa after you leave. Calm your heart, Mom, I’ll do my best.”

  “OK, baby, ’bye. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  She was not happy, but at least she had calmed down. I pondered throughout the day and at six o’clock California time I telephoned.

  “Hi, Poppa. How are you?”

  “Hey, baby. How you doing?” He was happy to hear my voice.

  “Fine, Poppa. Please let me speak to Mom.”

  “Oh, baby, she left here ’bout a half hour ago. Gone over to her cousin’s.”

  “Well, Poppa, I’m worried about her and her appetite. She didn’t eat today, did she?”

  “Yes, she did. Cooked crab cakes and a slaw and asparagus. We ate it all.”

  “Well, she’s not drinking, is she?”

  “She had a beer with me, and you can bet she’s got a Dewar’s White Label in her hand right now.”

  “But, Poppa, something must be wrong. I mean, is she playing music and cards and things?”

  “We played Take 6 all day on this music system you sent us, and I know she’s playing dominoes over there with your cousin Mary.”

  “Well, Poppa, you seem to think her appetite is strong.”

  “Oh, yeah, baby, your momma got a good appetite.”

  “That’s true, Poppa.” I lowered my voice. “All her appetites are strong. Poppa, please excuse me—but I’m the only one to speak to you—but it’s true her love appetite is strong, too, and, Poppa, please excuse me, but if you don’t take care of her in that department, she will starve to death, Poppa.” I heard him cough, sputter and clear his throat.

  “Please excuse me, Poppa, but someone is at my door. I love you, Poppa.”

  There was a very weak “Bye, baby.”

  My face was burning. I made a drink for myself. I had done the best I could, and I hoped it would work.

  The next morning, about 7:00 A.M. California time, my mother’s voice gave me the result.

  “Hi, darling, Mother’s baby. You are the sweetest girl in the world. Mother just adores you.” She cooed and crooned, and I laughed for her pleasure.

  Parents who tell their offspring that sex is an act performed only for procreation do everyone a serious disservice. With absolute distress, I must say that my mom died four years after that incident, but she remains my ideal. Now in my sixties, I plan to continue to be like her when I reach my seventies, and beyond, if I’m lucky.

  Fast cars on four-lane highways and shiny crowded airports notwithstanding, there is a somnolent sense of literary connections in the state of Louisiana.

  Along any late-night New Orleans street one might easily meet a Tennessee Williams character soliciting the kindness of strangers. Shreveport’s old high houses, gabled and still, hold the other rooms and other places of Truman Capote’s torturous childhood. Baton Rouge, eighty miles north of New Orleans, along Highway I-10, incongruously is Graham Greene country. When I went visiting the city, it was having its normal early-summer weather: steamy heat and the occasional shower that increased the humidity without lowering the feverish temperature.

  I had come from my home in North Carolina to Baton Rouge to look at an outdoor folk museum that exhibits, among other things, slave cabins. Since I am a descendant of African slaves, my baggage was frightfully overweighted with trepidation, anger, fear and a morbid curiosity about the cabins. How did the slaves really live? How did they sleep after sunset and rise before daybreak? What and where did they eat? And, most crucially, I wondered if I would be able to survive this journey into my own hellish history.

  The first inkling that I was traveling in a Graham Greene convoy in search of a character came when I talked with a bell captain at my hotel. Neat and proud of his efficiency, the young black man deposited my luggage, hung up the light bag, turned on lamps, tested the television and brought a bucket of ice.

  I asked him, “How far are we from the Rural Life Museum?”

  His face went blank as he turned the question over in his mind and chewed it on his lips. “The Rural Life Museum? Rural Life Museum …”

  I said, “I was told it was quite near this hotel.”

  He reiterated, “The Rural Life Museum.” He shook his head and almost immediately made what must have been for him a typically decisive gesture. “I’ll find out, madam.”

  Later in the lobby he handed me a hotel pad. On the first page, written in decisive script, were clear directions to the location only five minutes away by car.

  “Did you know that there are restored slave cabins on the place?” I asked.

  His face again went blank, but this time there was no interest in the subject. “Slave cabins? Well, I’m sure you’ll find them if you follow those directions, madam.”

  The boundaries of his world had been drawn so recently, were so modern and personal, that so far as he was consciously concerned, slavery and the Civil War, the invention of the cotton gin and the advent of talking pictures were equally sterile history.

  Following the instruction “Turn first right after the exit,” I passed the museum at first because the little gate looked like an entrance to a private residence. I succeeded on my second attempt and was rewarded with a 1.2-mile drive through the agricultural research experiment station given to Louisiana State University by Steele Burden and Miss lone Burden. It is possible that I came between seasons, but the farms that yawned into the distance on either side of the road lay like abandoned Christmas wrappings after the precious contents had been removed.

  I made myself imagine the plantation as it had been in the nineteenth century, when cotton was king and its favored subjects lived lives of exquisite luxury, while their minions existed under humiliating and painful circumstances. Looking out of my rental-car window, I placed the bent backs of five hundred slaves and saw the callused black fingers snatching desperately at the compliant white cotton. This was certainly one aspect of the plantation character. Harry Belafonte’s voice came to me from a score of years earlier:

  “You got to jump down

  turn around

  to pick a bale of cotton.

  Jump down

  turn around

  to pick a bale a day.”

  I drove through the suffocating racial memories to the entrance of the actual museum. There in a small park all its own, surrounded by blooming flowers and dark green ponds, was the bronze figure of Uncle Jack. The sculpture is effective and telling. I once spent a good part of a vacation admiring Michelangelo’s David in Florence. Despite diligent and constant examination, I am still not able to define where the statue best exemplifies the truth of the human form. Not in the legs alone, or the buttocks. Not in the hard-muscled cylindrical neck, nor in the tapered fingers, dropping with natural ease. But it is the figure in its entirety that renders the seldom-encountered realization of human physical perfection. Hans Schuller, the sculptor of Uncle Jack, was also startlingly successful in realizing his intent. Uncle Jack is the quintessential obsequious Negro servant. His head is cocked to the side and bowed deferentially. The droop of his shoulders bears witness not only to his years but more specifically to his own understanding of his place as a poor black in a rich white world. His hand-me-down clothes, a few sizes too large, hang from his body with a sad finality. His right hand swings away from his body, appearing to offer the visitor a welcome greeting, but to me it seemed to say, You may have anything you see, me included.

  I continued to the museum’s office, housed in the barn. My reflections on the drive through the now sparsely attended farms had saddened me, but viewing the statue of Uncle Jack had wrought a great depression in my spirit. I paid the two-dollar entrance fee and carefully examined nineteenth
-century surreys and sulkies that were being polished by a twentieth-century black man who I thought might well be a descendant of the slave who gave the carriages their first gloss. Still the figure of Uncle Jack imposed itself between the nineteenth-century vehicles and me.

  The sculptor of Uncle Jack had employed the slavocracy’s wishful romance that cast all blacks as congenitally subservient and only too happy to devote their lives to looking after their white folks. Neither the display of nineteenth-century farm implements nor a wooden slave collar fashioned to keep the slave confined but still ambulatory could erase my image of Uncle Jack caught for all time in his gruesome grin.

  The rain was soft but persistent, and I, hatless, started for the slave cabins, but stopped at the overseer’s house. That innocent-looking neat structure sat behind an equally innocent-looking and neat weathered fence and looked out upon the slave cabins with an avuncular if not paternal regard. The picture was so beneficent, I hurried over the water-soaked grass to the first cabin. Painted on the open door was a pretty and dignified black young woman standing protectively close to her small child. The interior of the abode revealed wooden chairs where the slave could go to rest after a day of honorable toil. There was also a colorfully blanketed bed, where he could stretch comfortably through a peaceful night until the bright morning.

  At the museum I stood looking at the romance of slavery—gone were the humiliations and brutalities. But according to the narrative of Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in Maryland, slave quarters were little more than pigsties. Ten or more crowded together in hovels, often sleeping on packed-dirt floors. Winter and summer weather had their way in the cabins. Children were often fed at troughs like hogs. Here in this modern rendering of the past there was no evidence of the dread that slave families felt at the prospect of separation, nor the weariness of lives lived under the bludgeonings of a violent society. In the imagined old world created at Louisiana State University’s Rural Life Museum, a group of assenting adults those centuries ago had worked the land in cooperative spirit for the common good.