LITMIR.BIZ

      I hear my mother ringing the bronze bell my father brought back from Czechoslovakia in 1946. In the morning when she awakened, she called for Lucille to bring her breakfast in bed. I still see the little peeing boy and hear the tinkling sound of the bell, a “bronze replica,” my father said, “of the main fountain in the center of Prague.”

      Taking photos satisfied my father’s sense of control, photos of the peeing boy and my smiling mother, of a beggar on the curb in the Bowery and women bending down as they scrubbed their clothes on the rocks in Mexico.

      Lucille stood up to him. Lucille gave me joy. She walked around the house humming. Outside on a late spring afternoon, she spoke out loud the names of bushes, flowers, trees, and vines. We talked about lightning bugs, black widow spiders, daddy long legs, dried-out shells of June bugs left on trees, the difference between crickets and cicadas. She taught me the kind of dread that was also desire: the longing to go out of this world and know what can’t be seen. She brought ghosts into my bedroom, the dead man in the closet, the white woman who appeared trying to get her hand through the screen of my window. When the trains passed, she told me to listen to them and behave, “‘cause they were carrying the souls of orphans who cried out in the night.”

      Out back, Lucille conjured up love songs that only I could hear. When she wasn’t crooning, she taught me how to recognize the ghosts that mattered most to her: little girls bit by spiders, husbands whose legs were torn off by scythes in the field or lost in the wheels of cotton mills, white women whom lust had worn down like the heels of her shoes.

      One spring morning in 1960 Lucille heard about the students from Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, and Clark colleges. They were still sitting in protest against segregation at 10 lunch counters and cafeterias throughout the city of Atlanta. My father came home, mad “as a two-legged bat,” Lucille said, after he couldn’t have lunch at Leb’s Restaurant downtown because of the sit-ins. Lucille stayed in the kitchen and refused to speak to anyone for three hours. She cursed those “pig-eyed juveniles” making trouble. Thomas called her a “house slave, who’d die with nothing in her hands but her white lies.” She took her lighter, flicked it on and chased him, flame glinting, out of the house and down Plymouth Road.

      A few months later, I heard Lucille tell him: “I don’t want you round here, go on and get your fool self to Birmingham,” which for her meant dynamite, blood, and riots. But Thomas never kept quiet. “You can fall in a ditch and stay there till I go,” he said. He wanted me to know about South Georgia, where he used to make 25 cents a day at a sawmill in 1939. Before that, he worked as a sharecropper, but said he had decided not long after he’d been whipped, “cut till the blood stopped dripping,” that he’d never work on a farm again. “I wouldn’t tell a mule good morning,” he used to repeat. Years later, I understood that this was his response to the dubious gift to freed slaves of “40 acres and a mule.” At 82, not long after Lucille had died, he remembered: “You couldn’t tip your hat to a white woman. You’d get the chair. They’d break your neck. You wouldn’t raise your head. Did, you wouldn’t take it down.”