Divorce is painful. Some who’ve experienced it say they danced with happiness. But that’s a lie some people tell themselves. At some level, it’s always difficult, painful, and life-changing. Divorce signifies an ending. The brutal severing of a relationship you thought would last forever. And though you may search for answers to questions like what happened and why, knowing the answers changes nothing.
Those thoughts filled my mind as I wandered the streets, my recent divorce decree and a white envelope containing a ticket in my sport coat’s inner pocket. Realizing my steps had led me back to my grandfather’s house, I stopped. The exterior of the three-story red brick building where I’d once lived when I was a child looked unchanged. But just as I’d spent much of my life masking my feelings, its seemingly serene facade hid historical and personal truths.
My grandfather, Otis, had inherited the building from his mother, my great-grandmother, Eugenia. Its original owner, a white man with no surviving kin, had left it to her in his will. She’d been his first tenant and served as the property’s pseudo rental manager for him until his death. Otis, who’d spent his life working aboard merchant ships, had never married and only settled down to live in the building permanently after he retired from the Merchant Marine.
Otis was tall, had woolly white hair, and skin as dark as coal. He walked with a limp and said his bum leg told him when it was going to rain. He lived on the first floor of the building, and we occupied the second. The fact that we could live there rent free was what I believe led my father to move our family to his childhood home in 1950 when I was six.
Our apartment’s furnishings only consisted of what my mother referred to as the necessities. Otis’ was bursting at the seams with overstuffed horsehair furniture in mismatched colors and patterns. None of it fit a single middle-aged man, but he hadn’t bothered making any changes after Eugenia’s death.
Otis and my father never seemed to have much to say to each other beyond a civil hello or good morning. I, however, constantly drawn to the first floor by the mouthwatering smell of whatever Otis was cooking, spent plenty of time there listening to tales of his life at the sea. Be it rice and beans, hog maws, collard greens, or what have you, his savory food always had the right touch of spices or hot sauce. In fact, the only thing Otis cooked that I could not abide was chitlins. The smell of them boiling in a pot was pure stink.
You’d think Otis would have kept the third floor rented since neither the first nor second floors provided any income. But that was not the case. The pension he received courtesy of the Merchant Marine provided him with enough financial security that the third-floor apartment was an unlived-in maze of forgotten furniture, books, knick-knacks, photos, all jumbled together. That’s why it became my own special place. While the adults considered all that stuff piled atop one another a teetering mess just waiting to crash down, to me it was a treasure trove awaiting discovery. That’s how I came across the old footlocker.
After dragging it from the dark corner where it had been stowed, I found an assortment of things inside it: handwritten letters, faded photographs, a folded and tattered green envelope-shaped cap, and what looked like a medal attached to a ribbon with red stripes. Thinking the cap and medal were official-looking, I put on the cap and pinned the medal to my shirt. Then I went to show Otis what I’d found.
“Look what I’ve got,” I announced, entering his apartment. “Ain’t they cool?”
Turning away from what he was stirring on the stove, he squinted at me and shrugged. “I guess.”
“Do you know whose medal this is or what it’s from?”
Frowning, he said, “Yeah. It’s called The Croix de Guerre. That stuff’s from a long time ago, from the war.”
“What war?”
“WWI. I was over in France with a group called the Harlem Hellfighters. Left here with two good legs. Came back with one and a half.”
“And a meda!.”
“Yeah, that too, I guess.”
“Did you fight the bad guys?”
“Well, when we first got there they assigned us to non-combat duties like we were to be butlers and servants. But finally, they had no other choice and involved us in the fighting. The U.S. troops were segregated back then, and Pershing and his boys didn’t want us black soldiers embedded in their units, so we ended up fighting under the command of the French.” He turned back to the stove and resumed stirring.
“Well, what...”
“C’mere and give this a try,” he said. Kitchen spoon in hand, he leaned down. I pressed the cap against my head, blew away the rising steam, and slurped down the spoon’s contents.
“Well?”
“Not bad,” I said. He smiled.
Being an only child, I had an inquisitive and imaginative mind. Over the next few days, I built my own “Fortress of Solitude” in the third-floor unit. I pretended it was in a faraway place covered in ice and snow like Superman’s and I was a superhero, the cap, and medal the sources of my superpowers.
One afternoon, as I was planning my next adventure, Otis’ face appeared in the fortress’ doorway.
“What you doing?” he asked. He’d squatted down, peering inside.
“Getting ready to fight the bad guys,” I replied.
“Well, the bad guys are gonna have to wait. Your mother’s calling you and mad as a hornet that you didn’t pick up your room.”
Standing up, I snatched off the cap and tossed it on the floor. Then I started unhooking the medal while Otis ran his hand over the outside of a wooden box.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A gramophone.”
“Don’t look like a phone to me,” I said. “Just looks like a wood box.”
Grasping the box’s sides, he lifted upward, opening its top. In the center was a disk. Surrounding that, on a velvet blue lining, lay what looked like a horn, some round thing with a pin sticking out of it, two tubes, and a handle like you’d see on a jack in the box.
Otis picked up the handle and inserted its narrower end into a hole in the box. Then he attached the larger tube to the side of the box and secured the horn atop it. Next, he screwed one end of the smaller thinner tube into the side of the large tube and pressed the round thing with the pin onto the small tube’s other end.
Flipping open a cardboard box, he quickly rifled through it and lifted out a thick black record. After looking it over, he placed it on the disk in the center of the box, cranked the handle, and lowered the pin thing onto the spinning record. Almost instantly, the sound of a woman singing came from the horn. With his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes closed, Otis sang along silently. When the song ended, he opened his eyes, and they were full of sadness.
“What was that lady singing about?” I asked, not understanding a word.
“It’s a French song.”
“You know French?”
“A bit,” he replied. He began disassembling the gramophone. “Not as well as your father.”
“He don’t know French.”
“Sure does.”
“Then how come I’ve never heard him say anything French?”
“That you’ll have to ask him,” said Otis. “I learned the little bit I know during the war.”
“Will you teach me?”
“Look. That’s enough questions for now. You best get downstairs and deal with that room of yours or your mother will give both of us hell.”
Though Otis said I should ask my father if he knew French, I thought it’d probably be better not to. Whenever I asked him about something he didn’t want to talk about, he’d tell me to mind my own business. So, I waited until the next time I was with Otis and asked him if the song he’d played was from the war.
“You know, they say curiosity killed the cat,” he said, turning from the stove. Seeing the determined look on my face, he sighed, pulled out a kitchen chair, and dropped onto it heavily, then pointed for me to take a seat.
“Near the end of the war,” he began, “I met a girl in Paris named Marguerite. That was her favorite song.”
“Does she still live there?”
“No. She’s been dead a long time now,” he answered, shaking his head.
“What happened to her?”
“I can’t exactly say. We wrote to each other for a while after I left, but then her letters stopped coming. I figured once I saved up enough money, I’d head back to Paris so we could make a life together. But when I went back, I couldn’t find her.”
“You wanted to live someplace they don’t speak English? Not me.”
“Well, the white folks over there treated us halfway decent. So, seeing as how we’d fought for America and all, we figured the white folks here would start treating us better. But when we got home, these white folks thought we’d gotten too uppity and needed to be put back in our place. And when we took exception to that, they started attacking black people and rioting. That was in the Red Summer of 1919. Homes, businesses, churches, hospitals, and schools in dozens of cities and towns were destroyed. Black people were terrorized, murdered, and not a single white person was arrested, nor was there any restitution.”
Stunned, I could only stare at Otis.
“I take it your father doesn’t mention his mother.”
“Nope.”
“Well, some people spend their entire lives hiding what they think is some big secret. I believe that’s just foolishness. Marguerite was your father’s mother.”
Otis waited, letting that sink in, before continuing. “I didn’t know Marguerite was pregnant when I left Paris. I learned that from one of her letters. When they stopped coming, I didn’t know what to think. Working for the Black Star Line, I’d gotten some merchant shipping experience, so I was away at sea when I got your great-grandmother Eugenia’s telegram. She said a woman had shown up with a little six-year-old boy and a note that said I was his father. It also said his mother was dead and his grandmother was ill and could no longer look after him.”
I was speechless.
“Even though he was little, I’m sure life here came as a shock to your father. One minute he was just another little French kid and the next…. well… one day you’ll realize that that the ‘one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all’ and ‘all men are created equal’ stuff they teach you in school doesn’t apply to us. It’s been like that from day one and even worse since the Civil War. Since then, the white folks who won give in to the losers’ every whim in a never-ending apology for fighting with them over us black folks.”
“See, those history books don’t come close to telling the complete story of America. There’s not a word about the over 5,000 falsely accused innocent black people hanged by white mobs. And I bet you didn’t know that between the Civil War and this very day there’s been more than 40 violent white riots resulting in 3,400 black people killed, over 15, 000 injured, and millions—if not billions—of dollars worth of Black-owned properties destroyed, most burned to the ground. Not one of those unprovoked riots was preceded by any sort of peaceful protest, and some lasted for days.”
“Now, you confront white folks with facts like these and the first thing they say is, ‘It wasn’t me.’ They just deny any personal responsibility while also refusing to condemn those that did it. You see, law and order, guilt, innocence, or justice never matters to them when they attack entire communities of people.”
“Ask yourself, why weren’t people of German descent rounded up and interned like the Japanese during WWII? After all, under Fritz Kuhn, in 1939 alone 50,000 American youths attired in youth league uniforms attended Nazi camps in this country in which they practiced shooting weapons, the Nazi salute, yelled ‘Heil Hitler,’ and paraded in goose step while surrounded by swastikas and Nazi flags. And I’ve always wondered if they would have dropped the bomb on Germany as easily as they did Japan.”
“People come here from all over the world nowadays. Be they Italian, Irish, Russian, whatever, the white folks already here always treat the first big wave of them like dirt. Like they’ve got to pass some initiation. But then, they get to become citizens, vote, and are treated as equals. Heck, even after killing Americans, our former German enemies can come here and be treated as equals. But us? We’ve been here longer than any of them. Built this country with our sweat and blood, protected, defended, and even died for it. And still, we ain’t never been treated as equals. Truth is, most white folks are hell-bent on seeing to it we never will be. They’d rather die first.”
“That’s why they teach the foreigners who immigrate here to hate us and believe having white skin makes them superior to us. Truth is, white people don’t know a thing about us. They’re always too full of themselves to hear a word we say. I’ve traveled most of this world and there’s no other place on earth where I’ve been treated as poorly as right here in my own country. In France, your father was just another French person. But here? Despite being half white, his skin color alone defines how he’ll be treated his entire life. That’s the America they don’t say a word about in those history books.”
Otis looked sad, angry, and just plain old and worn out. couldn’t recall ever hearing him go on so long and sound so frustrated about anything. The America he’d described didn’t seem like the one I thought I was growing up in.
But now, standing before that old red brick building and knowing what I’d experienced during my lifetime, I knew Otis had spoken the truth. Though divorce is painful, suffering mistreatment and hatred after so many centuries and generations, even to the present day, was something I could no longer do. As I raised my arm, hailing a cab, I checked that the white envelope over my heart inside my sport coat was still there. When the driver asked my destination, I told him the airport. My one-way ticket was to Paris.
About the author: J L Higgs' short stories typically focus on life from the perspective of a Black American. He has had over 50 publications and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Magazines publishing his work include Contrary Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Dime Show Review, Remington Review, The River, and Fiction on the Web.
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