Blanche on the Lam

He gave Blanche the cheeky “Hey, girl” greeting that teenage white boys working up to being full-fledged rednecks give grown black women in the South. Blanche hissed some broken Swahili and Yoruba phrases she'd picked up at the Freedom Library in Harlem and told the boy it was a curse that would render his penis as slim and sticky as a lizard's tongue. The look on his face and the way he clutched his crotch lifted her spirits considerably.

A family couldn’t have domestic help and secrets.

She knew from other places she'd worked that rich people liked owning things made by different kinds of people--Africans, Eskimos, Native Americans. It didn't seem to matter what the object looked like, or to what gory purpose it might have been put, as long as it had belonged to some other people first, and as long ago as possible.

Maybe his stuff was so good it made her think she could fly!

Southern law enforcement people were even worse: the descendants of the paddyrollers and overseers who’d made their living grinding her kind into fertilizer in the cotton fields of slavery.

Cousin Murphy was responsible for Blanche’s becoming Night Girl, when Cousin Murphy found eight-year-old Blanche crying because some kids had teased her about being so black. “Course they tease you!” Cousin Murphy had told Blanche. She’d leaned over the crouching child as she spoke. Blanche could still smell her Midnight Blue perfume and see her breasts hanging long and lean from her tall, thin frame. “Them kids is just as jealous of you as they can be! That’s why they tease you,” Cousin Murphy had told her. “They jealous ’cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in ’em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it’s only them that’s got night can become invisible. People what got night in ’em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not. Shoot, girl, no wonder them kids teasing you. I’m a grown woman and I’m jealous, too!” Cousin Murphy’s explanation hadn’t stopped kids from calling her Ink Spot and Tar Baby. But Cousin Murphy and Night Girl gave Blanche a sense of herself as special, as wondrous, and as powerful, all because of the part of her so many people despised, a part of her that she’d always known was directly connected to the heart of who she was.

There are no fools out here, she thought, only a whole lot of ways of getting to the same place.

For many years, Blanche worried that it was fear which sometimes made her reluctant to meet white people's eyes, particularly on days when she had the loneliest or the unspecified blues. She'd come to understand that her desire was to avoid pain, a pain so old, so deep, its memory was carried not in her mind, but in her bones. Some days she simply didn't want to look into the eyes of people likely raised to hate, disdain, or fear anyone who looked like her. It was not always useful to be in touch with race memory. The thought of her losses sometimes sucked the joy from her life for days at a time.

Mammy-savers regularly peeped out at her from the faces of some white women for whom she worked, and lately, in this age of the touchy-feely model of manhood, an occasional white man. It happened when an employer was struck by family disaster or grew too compulsive about owning everything, too overwrought, or downright frightened by who and what they were. She never ceased to be amazed at how many people longed for Aunt Jemima.

She remembered the wanted posters for Joanne Little, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur. She blushed at putting herself in such important company, then wondered if the sheriff’s office appreciated the distinction.

Nowadays, people wanted to tell you class didn't exist and color didn't matter anymore. Look at Miss America and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Miss America and the chairman were no more black people than Mother Teresa was white people. Men like Nate and women like her were the people, the folks, the mud from which the rest were made. It was their hands and blood and sweat that had built everything, from the North Carolina governor's mansion to the first stoplight.

Blanche stared at Emmeline’s door for a few moments, bristling with the desire to knock and trying to conquer her natural inclination to defy the voice of authority. It was one of the reasons she had not lasted in the waitressing, telephone sales, clerking, and typing jobs she’d tried over the years.

The story might sound like common gossip when told by another person, but in the mouth of a storyteller, gossip was art.

They jealous ’cause you got the night in you. Some people got night in ’em, some got morning, others, like me and your mama, got dusk. But it’s only them that’s got night can become invisible. People what got night in ’em can step into the dark and poof—disappear! Go any old where they want. Do anything. Ride them stars up there, like as not.

If a way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, surely the way to a mother’s heart was through her children.