evaporated.
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AKRON, OHIO, 1955
North Street
Behind the house on North Street was a rocky creek. It was so narrow that Jerome could easily jump over it into a meadow, and beyond that to the woods. When the kitchen window was open he could hear the water gurgling. A nice frothy sound that never stopped.
The house on North Street was a paradise. It was a reddish-brown brick house with four bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, and a small living room. Everything was different than at Grandma and Grandpa Huling’s. They had lots of neighbors. And Mama didn’t mind if the other kids in the street came over to play. Mama had had another baby. Sandra. Jerome shared a bedroom with Chris and Billy. Larry stayed behind at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Grandma said she could raise her eldest grandchild better than Mama could.
So now he really was the oldest.
He still didn’t talk, but Mama said not to worry, now that they had their own house in the Elizabeth Park projects it would come. Sometimes he closed his eyes and the words would reverberate in his head. Creek, kitchen, Daddy, grass, sun, stones, Billy, baby, Mama, house, tree, woods. It drove him crazy. They zoomed around inside him but he couldn’t catch them, couldn’t grab hold of them. The words became colors and sounds. Creek was translucent white, tree was brown, kitchen was yellow, stones were white, baby was purple, sun was red, and Daddy was white, the white of his eyes and teeth. The colors sparkled in his mind. Daddy was the sound of the trumpet. A thin, humming stammer that rose up from under the house, from the basement. Soft, dark-red sounds that seeped up through the cracks in the floorboards. He could see them, the notes: they were round and glistened like velvet. They looked warm. The highest notes were yellow and jagged, like sunlight at the hottest part of the day. Like crying and screaming. As though Daddy was trying something, trying to get somewhere with his trumpet. He pushed and pushed, higher and higher, and then suddenly out came a muffled, fat, discordant note. Then nothing. Jerome opened his eyes. It was quiet in his head now. He went outside, to the creek, pulled stones out of the ground and threw them in the water. His stones clattered against the rocks beneath the surface.
‘You want to see deer?’ Daddy asked.
Jerome nodded.
‘Say it then.’
He nodded again.
‘Go on.’
He forced the words against his throat. Thought he would throw up.
‘Easy does it.’
‘De … de … ’ His tongue was in the way.
Sonny Huling squatted down in front of him. Now they were just as tall. ‘Deer. You want to see deer.’
‘De—er,’ Jerome panted. He was out of breath.
‘Deer. Y’see?’
Sometimes Jerome followed his father.
His hands against the cool window of Jackson’s barber shop on Howard Street. The glass is half steamed up, which makes everything inside look all misty. He sees his father. A tall, slender man. His fingers thin and elegant. He sweeps up the hair with a soft broom. Minuscule curls and wisps that together form a small black heap. He opens a hatch in the floor and pushes the heap down it with the broom. Jackson and Daddy chat, they laugh. There’s a man in the barber chair, his head hanging back helplessly. Jackson lays a hot white towel on the man’s face. Steam wafts off it. Jackson leaves the towel on the man’s face while he sharpens his blade on a leather strap, talking to Daddy all the while.
His father’s hair is soft and high, it frames his narrow face like a woolly wreath. He likes it that way. He doesn’t want to get it cut, even though Mama says a Negro shouldn’t wear his hair like that. Not in Akron. Nobody will give him a job this way.
Mama pulled him onto her lap. They were in the kitchen, and a magazine lay open on the flowered plastic tablecloth.
‘We’re going to read,’ Mama said, pulling the magazine closer.
‘I’m going to teach you the letters, and if you want you can repeat their name. This is a B.’ She circled a B with a pencil. ‘Say “B”.’
‘Bh,’ Jerome sighed. He looked at the strange symbols on the paper. If you looked at them long enough they became black stripes.
‘A,’ his mother said. ‘This is an A. You see?’
He nodded. He pressed up against her breast. He smelled soap and flowers.
‘An L,’ she said. ‘And another one.’ She wrote the four letters one after the other. ‘Ball,’ she said, ‘this says “ball”. Ball.’
She didn’t make him talk. He only had to look and listen to how she wrote down and pronounced each word. ‘I want you to be able to read when you go to school,’ she said.
He listened to her warm, languid voice.
‘I throw the ball.’
‘The ball is round.’
‘I am going home.’
‘I am walking down the street.’
He heard the soft smacking sound her tongue made in her mouth. The sentences sounded like a melody. He started singing to himself. I-am-going-home. I-am-walking-down-the-street. I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
I-am-going-to-learn-how-to-talk.
‘Jerome?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Tell Chris to take off that red sweater. I don’t want no red in my house.’
Daddy stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips.
‘How come?’ Jerome sputtered.
‘You heard me. I don’t want to see that commie color here.’
Jerome looked at Chris, who had heard what his father said. They both shrugged their shoulders and Chris took off the sweater that his mother had bought for him a few days earlier.
Daddy just stood there. As though he was waiting for something. They hardly dared to resume their playing.
‘Can we go get ice cream?’
Daddy appeared not to hear.
‘Please, Dad?’
‘What?’
‘Ice cream. It’s hot as anything. Can we go get ice cream?’
Jerome looked at his father. It was as though he didn’t understand what they said. He gazed past them with a skittish look in his eye. Jerome went up to him and tugged on his arm. ‘Daddy.’
‘Sure thing, kiddo.’ He dug in his jeans pocket
