“I’m sorry. I’ve got a headache. It’s got my tongue tangled. I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you all this, anyway.”
“Do you mind?”
“No. I don’t mind. I meant to say mother gave her a special plate. It was white, with delicate blue tracework woven all around the rim.” Odetta smiled a little. Eddie didn’t think it was an entirely comfortable smile. Something about this memory disturbed her, and the way its immediacy seemed to have taken precedence over the extremely strange situation she had found herself in, a situation which should be claiming all or most of her attention, disturbed him.
“I can see that plate as clearly as I can see you now, Eddie. My mother gave it to Aunt Blue and she cried and cried over it. I think she’d seen a plate like that once when she and my mother were children, only of course their parents could never have afforded such a thing. There was none of them who got anything forspecial as kids. After the reception Aunt Blue and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. They went on the train.” She looked at Eddie.
“In the Jim Crow car,” he said.
“That’s right! In the Crow car! In those days that’s what Negros rode in and where they ate. That’s what we’re trying to change in Oxford Town.”
She looked at him, almost surely expecting him to insist she was here, but he was caught in the webwork of his own memory again: wet diapers and those words. Oxford Town. Only suddenly other words came, just a single line, but he could remember Henry singing it over and over until his mother asked if he couldn’t please stop so she could hear Walter Cronkite.
Somebody better investigate soon. Those were the words. Sung over and over by Henry in a nasal monotone. He tried for more but couldn’t get it, and was that any real surprise? He could have been no more than three at the time. Somebody better investigate soon. The words gave him a chill.
“Eddie, are you all right?”
“Yes. Why?”
“You shivered.”
He smiled. “Donald Duck must have walked over my grave.”
She laughed. “Anyway, at least I didn’t spoil the wedding. It happened when we were walking back to the railway station. We stayed the night with a friend of Aunt Blue’s, and in the morning my father called a taxi. The taxi came almost right away, but when the driver saw we were colored, he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. Aunt Blue’s friend had already gone ahead to the depot with our luggage—there was a lot of it, because we were going to spend a week in New York. I remember my father saying he couldn’t wait to see my face light up when the clock in Central Park struck the hour and all the animals danced.
“My father said we might as well walk to the station. My mother agreed just as fast as lickety-split, saying that was a fine idea, it wasn’t but a mile and it would be nice to stretch our legs after three days on one train just behind us and half a day on another one just ahead of us. My father said yes, and it was gorgeous weather besides, but I think I knew even at five that he was mad and she was embarrassed and both of them were afraid to call another taxi-cab because the same thing might happen again.
“So we went walking down the street. I was on the inside because my mother was afraid of me getting too close to the traffic. I remember wondering if my daddy meant my face would actually start to glow or something when I saw that clock in Central Park, and if that might not hurt, and that was when the brick came down on my head. Everything went dark for a while. Then the dreams started. Vivid dreams.”
She smiled.
“Like this dream, Eddie.”
“Did the brick fall, or did someone bomb you?”
“They never found anyone. The police （my mother told me this long after, when I was sixteen or so） found the place where they thought the brick had been, but there were other bricks missing and more were loose. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room in an apartment building that had been condemned. But of course there were lots of people staying there just the same. Especially at night.”