Also Known as Cassius

Sometimes, as she sewed and rocked in shadows, listening to classical music on the radio, my mother would comment that appearances can be very deceiving. She particularly cautioned me against men who are not men and women who are not women--she called them "funny" people--and made me aware at an early age that things are rarely what they seem to be. So that by the time I was 12 years old, there was a running debate in my mind about things as they are and things as they seem to be.

We lived in a rambling old house on the outer rim of Glen Oaks, which had been an exclusive white neighborhood in Cousinsville until black people moved in and the whites fled farther out into the suburbs. The old house creaked and groaned as though it was in the last stages of some dreadful death, and I sometimes felt that eventually it would die indignantly down on our heads, white clapboards and all falling in a fury on top of our blackness.

Sometimes, too, I wondered about the white people who had lived there and left a smell behind them similar to that of warm, moist dogs penetrating a dozen large rooms on three floors. With just my mother and myself, we certainly didn't need such a large house; and we used only the first floor. But I suppose that such extravagance satisfied my mother as much as it did other black people who lived grandly in Glen Oaks now, where most of them had worked as maids and handy men before.

Glen Oaks had even been written up in Ebony, that's how important we were. Our streets were broad and well cared for, and the neighborhood was very quiet. Along with my mother, most of the black people there worked at the veterans' hospital in East Orange and earned very good salaries. A lot of us were lonely--I know that I was--but I imagine that all of us in Glen Oaks realized that loneliness was a small enough price to pay for the honor of being in Ebony magazine. And for the fact that we had been able not only to escape from Niggertown, which is what those of us in Glen Oaks called the black ghetto of Cousinsville, but to chase the white people from Glen Oaks as well.

As for my father, he had died in Vietnam while I was still a small child; but my mother talked to me about him every night to keep his memory alive. "Your father was a very brave man," she said, rocking in her chair beside the radio. We did not have television, because my mother thought that there were too many violent programs on television for a 12-year-old boy to watch. "I do hate violence, you know that ... considering the way your father died. He certainly was a brave man, one of the first black men to die in Vietnam fighting for his country. And he was a hero, make sure you remember that."

If she was in an especially good mood, she would bring a photograph of my father from her bedroom, where she kept it wrapped in cellophane and locked in a drawer. The photograph showed my father to be a young, handsome black man dressed in boxing trunks. His curly hair held a part in it. He assumed a fighting pose, his strong left arm jabbing slightly to the center of the photograph, his right arm cocked like a powerful snake, as though he was about to strike the enemies of America. Something about his unsmiling face reminded me of Cassius Clay; but when I mentioned this to my mother, she brushed the idea aside indignantly. "Honey, you only twelve years old, so you really don't know. But your father fought for his country, indeed he did. He was a great fighter, a great man and a great American." She wrapped the photograph back in the cellophane. "You go to bed now, darling. It's way past time for you to be sleeping." She kept the lights dimmed in the living room, and her face was a murky blur as I kissed her good night.

She was large and not a very attractive woman, which might have accounted for the fact that we had absolutely no friends at all in Glen Oaks, because my mother refused to mix with anyone and cautioned me to do the same. "People are so violent nowadays," she complained, moving her big shoulders in what seemed to be a shudder. "You've got to be careful of them, honey. Furthermore, I just can't stand the way they run their mouths all the time, telling their guts." Although she claimed to despise black, she wore black dresses, veils, hats, shoes and eyeglasses constantly, as though she were in mourning perpetually for some loss more urgent and immediate than the death of my father.

She rarely went anywhere except to work at the hospital. Sometimes she took me to a movie at night, but she would not allow me to go to the movies alone. "Them funny men just waiting for a tender young boy like you," she said, and she frowned disgustedly. There were other children in Glen Oaks that I might have gone out with, but all of us and our parents avoided one another as much as possible, as though we were afraid of contamination. But what it really amounted to was that we were trying to hide not from one another but from the occasional white traveler who drove through Glen Oaks to admire the fine old houses that dozed at a discreet distance from each other like desert sphinxes in the autumn sun. None of us wanted strange white people to know that Glen Oaks had finally become colored after more than three centuries of being white. And so we stayed indoors and kept our windows shuttered and tried to forget that only a plank fence separated Glen Oaks from Niggertown, where black people were probably closer and less lonely, but certainly less elegant as well.

Still, it would be a mistake to say that we were completely isolated from Niggertown. Occasionally, my mother claimed to be dying for some "down-home" food--which nobody cooked in Glen Oaks, as though the odor of neck bones or collard greens simmering there would further betray the presence of blacks. When those yearnings stirred my mother, then we crept out of Glen Oaks down to a greasy black restaurant in Niggertown called The Shangri-La and ate soul food at a rear table surreptitiously.

Shoveling corn bread and chitterlings into her mouth underneath her veil, my mother squealed with pleasure as she replenished herself. "Honey, my taste buds been tantalizing for some food like this, I'm telling you!" Then she ridiculed, in nasty little whispers, the niggers and the roaches that seemed to inhabit The Shangri-La in equal parts.

She had assured me many times that I had always lived in Glen Oaks. But somewhere at the back of my memory, there persisted an image as violent as a dark windstorm, where Niggertown spread its mass over me in a dream of noise and ruthless disorder as I luxuriated underneath its black weight. And on our last excursion into Niggertown for soul food, I looked at the black people there and felt confused, because it seemed that I belonged there with them, that, in fact, I had once been there with them--perhaps in the early days before my father died--and would someday be compelled to be there with them again.

My mother seemed to feel none of that. Wiping the grease from her lips and fingers with a large white handkerchief, she stared blankly through her veil at everything and everybody. When the bill finally did come, she paid it grandly and left an enormous tip. Everybody in The Shangri-La was looking at us and all the airs she was putting on. A toothless old black man sat in the kitchen doorway, peeling white potatoes from a sack between his legs; he giggled at us both. "Hurry up, honey ... we've got to get back to Glen Oaks before sundown," my mother said in her loudest voice as she barreled through the screen door and we left The Shangri-La. Taking long, manlike strides, she walked so fast that her feet barely seemed to touch the ground. Everything in Niggertown offended her now that she was flying back to Glen Oaks with her belly bloated with enough black food to last until the next time.

But Niggertown excited me, crammed so exotically with dogs and buildings and very black people, and jukeboxes all playing the same hit song: Revolution Revolution Revolution. Men as gaunt as mummies. Rubbery-legged children dancing the funky chicken up and down the filthy street. Women misshapen by the burden of too many children born alive. The militant young primping arrogant Afros. Revolution Revolution. Drug addicts crumpled in doorways. Winos talking to themselves, playing with themselves.... "Hurry up, boy!" my mother scolded. She had stopped way ahead of me and I took two or three fast steps to satisfy her enough for her to turn around and go on.

It would be dark in another hour or so; still, I heard a rooster crowing--twice, three times--and it sounded somehow ominous to hear a rooster crowing that late in the day. At the same time, I wondered how that bird had managed (continued on page 100)Also Known as Cassius(continued from page 74) to survive here in Niggertown, where even the buildings looked greedy and tragic and so unsatisfied. Yet, hanging over everything, there was a scorching, sulphurous smell that could only have been the smell of sex--I recognized it as the hot smell of my own flesh when I copulated with myself--as though special ventilating systems were pushing the funk of agitated male and female tail out of every door and window and through each alleyway, as though that raunchy, unfulfilled smell was the essence of Niggertown and the substance of what Niggertown was all about in the first place. I sucked in lungsful of the sex-drenched air--so funky and frustrated, yet so silky sweet--and stumbled on like a drunken child behind the black undulations of my mother's enormous, shelf-shaped butt. Revolution. It was the last I heard of the jukeboxes, for we went on into Glen Oaks, like taking an actual step up onto a green oasis where grass and flowers grew around our house, where delicate white birds floated like butterflies through the acacia trees that had already turned brown for the fall.

My mother went to the toilet as soon as we were home and came out fluffing her wig. Now that we were indoors, she seemed completely relaxed. "You do your homework," she said. She turned on the radio and a dim light in the living room and started to sew. "You hear me?"

"Yes, ma'am." Instead, I went to the kitchen and opened the curtains over the sink. I could see Niggertown and part of the vacant lot that was behind our house on the other side of the plank fence that separated us from it. The lot was strewn with bricks and cans, old shoes and tires and broken bits of furniture thrown there over the years by people in Niggertown where it touched the grassy elegance of Glen Oaks. As I looked, a young black boy came from Niggertown into the lot and started digging there with a shovel.

Just another nigger tramp, my mother would have said, tossing her head like a white woman at how dirty the boy was, his clothes too big for him and almost in rags. Now that I was back in Glen Oaks looking at Niggertown from this vantage point, I felt white myself--which is to say that I felt free of the chaos of being black, felt inflated with a superior sensation, of being on top, so to speak, and of looking down, with a kind of arch benevolence, at the cheapest kind of nigger dirt.

Still, I paid careful attention to the black boy as he sent dirt flying in all directions for several minutes. Then he dropped to his knees and sifted dirt through his fingers, only to spring to his feet once more and begin again with his shovel. It was clear to me that he must be searching for something, but I couldn't imagine what it might be.

Digging in the vacant lot that way--Niggertown on one side of him, Glen Oaks on the other--he reminded me of myself, searching, perhaps, for answers among a wilderness of disordered questions that had to do with my father as well as my mother ... about her detachment and solitude, about the smile that sometimes played on her lips as she was talking to me about my father ... as though she was trying to give me a clue to something deep and mysterious not only about my father but about herself as well. Smiling crookedly, touching her wig, she had often sent me to sleep with questions that I could not ask her and could not find the answers to in my dreams. For example, had my father really been a hero in Vietnam? And why weren't there any pictures of him in his Army uniform, instead of just that one photograph of him in boxing trunks? What was it that my mother was trying to keep me from finding out about my father?

I looked out the window at the black boy. He was looking for something, too. I felt compelled to talk to him and I left the kitchen and sneaked down the hall.

My mother had turned the radio off a few minutes before and the house was quiet now, as though listening, guarding its usual creaks and groans in suspenseful silence. My mother sewed in her rocking chair. She was always sewing. Always. Why sewing? And that chair, creaking and groaning as the house sometimes did, as though they shared the same pain, the chair and the tall white house that had been forced to adopt a new identity when we moved in.

Quietly, I went downstairs into the cellar and outside through that door. There was a red sky over the horizon and dark pieces of clouds, like the beaks and wings of bats and vultures going home. But twilight was still with us in Glen Oaks; as I ran around to the vacant lot, I remembered that I had once seen a flock of birds lost and confused in a twilight snow. They flew around and around in the swirling snowflakes until they fell in clusters to the ground, exhausted, to die. The leaves in Glen Oaks were dropping from the trees stealthily. Like spirals of red and brown and golden snow. Why does my mother always wear a veil? I ran on into Niggertown, where the boy was digging in the lot.

• • •

"What you looking at?" he said, standing wide-legged over a mound of garbage. I had the feeling that he was two or three years older than I was; but he sounded just like a girl, his voice did. Niggertown beyond him turned twilight purple and a thick haze settled over everything. "I'm not looking at much of anything," I told the boy, because it was getting darker by the minute and I really couldn't see him too well. Besides, I was far enough away from him to run before he could get to me.

But he just laughed. "You sure right about that," he said, pitching his voice like a spitball over the distance between us. "I ain't either one thing or the other. But I call myself Cassius," he said, arching his back so that his chest poked out some under the oversized jacket he wore. "You know that bit about 'float like a butterfly, sting like a bee'? Well, that's me, Daddy-Three. / I'm bad like Cassius, me."

He made me laugh. He was black, he was a nigger. He made me feel like a nigger, too. "Man, you don't sound bad to me. You sound like a girl to me."

He trotted halfway across the lot with his fists balled up. Then he stopped and grinned, showing a ridge of white teeth. "So I'm a girl, huh? You just trying to make me mad. But nobody look like you / Can make me mad like others do." Dancing and ducking, he sparred with an imaginary partner; then he went and picked up his shovel and started digging.

I went closer to him. "What you digging for?"

"A silver dime," he said.

"A what?"

"A silver dime. The ones they used to make before they took the silver out."

Man, I couldn't believe him. "You must be kidding! Man, I thought you were looking for something important!"

"It is important!" He sounded like a real girl now, his voice high with excitement. "Some of those silver dimes are worth big money. I know a boy who found one. He sold it to a coin collector for fifty dollars. Imagine that--fifty dollars just for a silver dime!"

I felt very disappointed. "Man, you can't tell me a thing," I said. And it was true. Whatever questions I had to ask somebody, I was sure that he would never be able to answer them. "I think you're crazy," I said and I almost felt like crying.

His voice cracked and became very ugly then. "Well, you just think on," he said. "But I know what's happening, where things are at. Look at you, dressed up like a little white fag." His voice was very shrill now. "Man, without money, you might as well be a fag, and that's the stone truth." He went back to his digging furiously, but he seemed drooped and tired at the same time, as though talking so much had taken the starch out of him. But all at once, he flung the shovel away and sat flat on the ground. "Shit, shit, shit! (continued on page 194)Also Known as Cassius(continued from page 100) Man, I want me some money, I need me some money. You look how I'm dressed ... you think I don't need me some money?" When I didn't say anything, he looked me up and down like a fox. "I bet you're one of them rich niggers from Glen Oaks. Ain't you?"

I half nodded, because he frightened me now, inspecting me with such dark calculation on his pointed little face. "Living in Glen Oaks," he said, "I bet you think I ain't shit. Well, I been in Youth House. You know what that is? That's where they put you when you commit a real bad crime."

He was clearly bragging. "What did you do?" I said. "I mean, what crime did you commit?"

"I stole something."

"What?"

"Just something."

"But what?"

"I stole this shovel," he said. "They got me for breaking and entering." His voice was as meek as a mouse's. "I couldn't dig for dimes with just my hands, could I?"

Man. I think I wanted to hug him. Maybe even kiss him. He'd stolen that shovel and went to jail just so he could dig for dimes that somebody might give him money for, so he could escape from Niggertown. Man. Maybe he could answer me some questions, after all. My whole heart sang inside me, and that's the truth.

"What do you know about white people?" I said.

"Huh?" He seemed surprised. "White people? Man, I don't know nothing about them. Except they got everything. I stay away from them as much as possible."

"And what do you know about black people?"

He shook his head. "There ain't nothing to know. We're sad, that's all."

It seemed a terrible condemnation, but I didn't see any way to deny it. Glen Oaks and Niggertown both seemed to be monuments to a massive kind of sadness.

Darkness fell then. Beyond us, in Niggertown, neon lights flared up like a hundred, a thousand, untrimmed candles. Night whooshed around us with a sound like bats' wings; and inside all the quiet commotion that comes with the end of evening, I heard my mother's voice raised discreetly but firmly, calling me, the way a white woman would call her son.

"Do you know anybody who wears a veil all the time?" I said.

He laughed. "No. Do you?"

I felt so foolish. "No." I didn't even know what to say. "My mother sews all the time."

Now his voice did sound ugly. "Mine fucks all the time," he said. "When she's not shooting drugs." Then neither of us said a thing. Niggertown seemed to be glowing red, as though someone had built a bonfire in the heart of the ghetto and was burning up niggers.

"I've got to go now," I said.

Cassius--if that was his name--picked up his shovel and leaned on it. "Is that your mother calling?"

"Yes."

"You live in that big white house there?"

"Yes."

There was disdain as well as envy in his voice. "I'd sure like to see the inside of a house like that," he said. He went back to his digging, looking for that stupid dime, although it was certainly too dark to see anything.

"You doing anything Saturday?" I said. "My mother works all day Saturday. I can show you the house then."

He was excited, although he tried not to show it. "Man, that's fine. Real fine. I'll be here Saturday morning, waiting for you. OK?"

"OK."

He swaggered away, then turned. "You bullshitting, man? / Tell the truth, if you can."

"I'm not bullshitting." That was the first time I had used that word in my life. "I'll be here Saturday morning."

He raised a clenched fist and said, "Right on, brother man!" Although it was too dark for me to see his face then, I knew that he was grinning. I ran home, grinning, too.

My mother had turned the radio back on and she was sewing again. "Is that you, boy? I was calling you. Where in the hell did you go?"

"I went out to get some air."

"You don't need no air," she said from the living room. "Now, do your homework and then go to bed. I'll be in to talk about your father before you go to sleep."

"Yes, ma'am."

I went to bed that night without doing my homework. My mother came in to talk about my father when I was half asleep. Talking in a deep, almost gruff voice, she was a hazy blur before my eyes. "Your father, he went to the Army and saved his money so we could buy this house, so we wouldn't have to live over yonder in Niggertown. Ain't you glad you don't have to live over yonder with all them niggers? Honey, when you say your prayers, you ask the good Lord to bless your father wherever he may be. You ask the good Lord to bless him...."

When I woke up the next morning, my mother had already gone to work. I fixed my own breakfast and went to school. All day long, I wondered if the black boy would come to the lot that evening. But he did not come then nor the two days following. When I saw him again, it was exactly Saturday morning, as he had promised, after my mother had gone to work.

The house was so lonely. I watched the boy awhile. From where I stood in our kitchen, he certainly did look funny. But I had promised to show him the inside of our house. Now I didn't feel like it. I didn't even want him inside my nice house, a black nigger like him. He sure did look funny.

But ... it was Saturday morning and that part of Niggertown was crawling with people then. A white policeman directed traffic only a block away from the empty lot; and it seemed safe at least to go and talk to the black boy, although my mother had told me to stay in the house until she came home. But the old house was so lonely and stank of white people. And my head was crammed with questions. She wears black all the time. She wears black glasses. I went to talk to the black boy.

• • •

"You think you look neat / Look at your feet," he said flippantly. But I was looking at him. I mean her. Because he was a girl now, a little cleaner, a lot more polished, but undeniably a girl. Sort of pretty, wearing an Afro. No breasts at all that I could see. And still dressed like a boy.

"Man, why you walk around dressed like a boy?"

"What's so wrong about that?" she blazed. "Don't you know about Flip Wilson? He dresses up like a woman."

"That's different. He's an entertainer. You're not an entertainer."

She did two or three rocking little steps. "That's what you think ... fink.... I'm a poet / My feet show it." She sounded sassy, but she looked like she was trying not to cry.

So I said, "You make a very pretty girl." Which was not exactly true. Her Afro was sort of seedy and her face was too pointed for her to be very pretty. She wore blue jeans and a denim jacket that was a size or two too large for her; but it was still easy to see how skinny she really was. And she was a girl, all right. Because the minute I paid her a compliment, she started primping.

"You want to know why I dress up like a boy? Well, you go over to Niggertown and be a girl. You know what I mean? I mean everybody tries to get their hands on you. Little boys, big boys, old men, young men." She frowned and spat. "Even some women. Some of those funny women. That's why I dress up like a boy. Besides, there must be something wrong with you if you can't tell the difference between a boy and a girl."

"I can now. But I couldn't that night. It was dark out here that night."

"Not that dark. Come on, now. Are you going to take me to your house like you promised?"

I didn't want to. But I didn't know how not to. "Come on," I said.

Glen Oaks was especially beautiful that morning, gleaming under the midmorning sun. It looked just like a rich neighborhood where white people lived. So peaceful and elegant, the heady odor of autumn in the air. The girl and I were the only people in the street. But she seemed not to notice that. She kept talking about herself.

"If you're a black girl," she said, "everybody tries to screw you. That's all people think black girls do is screw." She was clearly warning me not to try anything after we entered my house. Or was she? She didn't even appeal to me that way.

"What's your real name?" I said.

She rolled her eyes and laughed. "I bet you are working with the cops. Well, you can call me Cassandra, honey. Just call me Cassandra." And she smiled so sweetly that I didn't believe her for a second.

The acacia tree on our lawn was quietly dropping its leaves. In fact, all around us the leaves were falling silently. "This is where I live," I told the girl.

"Big deal," she said. "It looks like a white barn." But it was easy to see that she was impressed.

We went inside. The old house, so quiet and secretive this morning, smelled of decay and damp dogs. Farther along the hall, the knob to my mother's bedroom glittered under a ray of sun that sliced through the hall window. We stood there and watched the shaft of light for a minute. Then Cassandra grunted. "It's like a funeral parlor in here. You sure you live here?"

"I live here--with my mother. Don't you want to sit down? Don't you want to listen to the radio?"

"Jesus Christ! Don't you even have television? I mean--seriously--you strike me as being a real lame cat / That don't know where it's really at. There's a lot you can learn from television. Do you know who won the National League pennant last year?"

"No."

"Well, I know. And I'm a girl. Who won the all-star game?"

"I don't know. I don't like sports."

"Well, what about television? What's your favorite program on television?"

"We don't have television. I told you that."

"Well, do you like the movies, then?"

"Yes. I go to the movies sometime."

"What pictures?"

I was on very firm ground now. "Mary Poppins. Snow While and the Seven Dwarfs. The Sound of Music."

She slapped her thigh almost angrily. "They're for girls! White girls! Don't you know that? How come you go to so many movies for white girls?"

I knew it! "My mother takes me." I knew it!

"Your mother? Boy, she sounds like a real character, your mother does. But let's not get on that subject. I could tell you some things about my mother that would make your hair stand on end. What about your father? What does he do?"

"He's dead. He died in Vietnam. He was a boxing champion in the Army. He was a hero, too."

"I know all about boxers," she said. "From Cassius Clay and Joe Frazier right on down. What was your father's name?" When I told her, she shook her head. "Never heard of him, I'm sorry to say."

She seemed completely uninterested now and I was terrified that she would go. I asked her, "Were you really in Youth House for breaking and entering?"

"Sure I was."

"Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure." She looked at me very suspiciously. "Why you want to know so much about that? You working for the cops or something?"

"I just want to know, that's all. You tell me something about Youth House. What do they make you do there?"

Her lips curled. "They make you get up at five o'clock in the morning and eat cold oatmeal. They make you scrub floors. They make you play jacks."

"Play jacks? Even if you're a boy?"

"Especially if you're a black boy," she said. "They do their best to make a sissy out of you if you're a black boy."

"How do you know that, if you're a girl?"

"I talk to boys sometime," she said. She sounded very bored. "I'm talking to you, ain't I?"

"Yeah. Come on. Don't you want to go upstairs?"

"What?"

"Don't you want to go upstairs? There're rooms upstairs on the second and third floors."

"Just rooms?" She grunted. But she did follow me to the stairs and we went up to the second floor, then to the third. "They're just common, ordinary rooms," she said, after we'd inspected them. "I'd put some furniture in them if I lived here. Well, I've got to be going now."

I couldn't let her go then. I reached out and touched where her breasts should have been. She could have knocked me into the universe, but I couldn't let go. She was the first girl I'd ever touched in my life.

She just stood there, looking at me. But I couldn't stop. I ran my hands down between her legs, leaning toward her at the same time, so that my mouth was close to hers. "Kiss me," I said--I whimpered--"Kiss me, please." Her lips were swollen like two soiled bee stings. She was breathing like a bellows. Then, miraculously, she pivoted her head--I nearly peed in my pants--and swallowed all my mouth and half of me in a wild and greedy kiss. "I thought you were a sissy," she murmured. "I thought you'd never get down to business."

We got naked in the front room on the third floor and made love in the dust with the noon sun rubbing its bright hand over my back and butt and balls. Cassandra kept her eyes closed. "Sweet sweet sweet," she said. She'd done this before, but I hadn't. I closed my eyes and pretended that she was a larger and juicier and much more animated version of my right fist. And it worked beautifully, without my wrist even getting tired.

Between grunts, Cassandra said, "I'm ... only ... doing ... this ... because ... you're ... not ... like ... those ... dirty ... Niggertown ... boys.... You're ... clean ... you're ... sweet ... you're ... innocent...." I plugged her mouth with my tongue and she crushed me nearly to death with her thighs. I remember that I whimpered some more, that my heart stopped in mid-stroke for several seconds when the sperm reared up and slashed its way out of me, impaling her, exploding, driving her deeper into the sparse dust that danced around us in bright motes. "So ... sweet ... so ... sweet ... so ... innocent," she said. I felt sad. Then I felt good. Very good. I felt like shouting in that damned old house--how carefully and quietly it had listened all the while!--because I wasn't innocent. Not anymore.

My mother's bedroom was next to mine on the first floor. Many nights she opened and closed drawers, clumping about for hours, as though looking for something that she had lost or mislaid, until I fell asleep and left her still making noise. And she always kept the door to her bedroom locked. Whatever I was looking for had to be in there. "Come on," I told Cassandra. "Let's go break into my mother's bedroom."

And then I held my breath, because Cassandra's eyes became shrewd and disappointed all at once. She was lying flat on her back and her naked body was brown and smooth as a chestnut. She had no breasts at all. "What do you mean, break into your mother's bedroom?"

I pulled my sweater over my head to keep her from seeing my eyes. "She keeps it locked," I said.

"So that's why you brought me here," Cassandra said. "That's why you talked to me the first night in that lot. Why you asked all those questions about Youth House." Her hand trailed helplessly in the dust. "Why we did this."

"No. No. Don't say that." I had on just my shirt and sweater. The sun had left the window, but it was still warm there. I crawled between Cassandra's legs and kissed and licked her on the Hat of her belly, where hair was sprouting like the young stubble on a man's face. "Don't say that, Cassandra. I just thought about it, about going into my mother's bedroom. Don't say that." My tail was getting ready again; I rammed it inside her before she could say that again.

Then we went downstairs to my mother's bedroom. Cassandra seemed doubtful but resigned. "You just like all the other niggers I know. All you want to do is use me. You just wanted somebody to break into your mother's bedroom."

"No I didn't! No I didn't!" But she knew that I did; and I kept my hand on her butt to keep her inspired.

"Yes you do. Yes you do. How old are you, anyway?"

"I'm twelve." I was almost ashamed to admit it, because I felt so much older than that.

"Well, I'm fourteen," she said. "And if I have any more trouble with the police--if I even spit on the sidewalk, that's what the judge said--then they're going to send me to Jamesburg. You know what that is, don't you?"

She liked my hand on her butt. "This won't be no trouble. I mean, I'm asking you to do it. Right? I mean, you won't get into trouble, as long as my mother doesn't find out."

Her eyes grew greedy at once. "You all do have some very nice things here," she said. She moved about the living room, fingering a silver-plate set, a bronze African statue, a heavy crystal bowl. "Some very nice things," she said.

But I went down the hall to my mother's bedroom door. "There're better things in here," I said.

She hunched her shoulders and looked up and down the hall. Then she tried to open the bedroom door. "It's locked," I said. "My mother always keeps it locked."

That seemed to excite her even more. "Is that so?" She knelt and inspected the lock, then the keyhole. "Bring me a fork," she said. "An old one. I'm going to have to bend it."

We didn't have any old forks, so I gave her a new stainless-steel one from my mother's good set. She stuck a tine into the keyhole and twisted until it bent out of shape. Then she inserted the twisted tine into the keyhole and tinkered with it until I heard a solid click. Grinning, she stood and turned the doorknob. And the door to my mother's bedroom swung open on soft, oiled hinges.

"Whew!" Cassandra said. She whistled through her teeth. I just stood in the doorway and looked. It was the first time that I had ever been in my mother's bedroom.

It looked like a dress factory. There was a line of identical white dresses hanging on a large rack. And a long blonde wig on a stand. My mind reeled at the unexpected sight. The wig and all those dresses were obviously for some little white girl that my mother knew. Cassandra was riffling through them happily.

Aside from those dresses--who could that white girl be?--the room was an ordinary-looking one. There was a double bed set between the two windows that opened onto our front lawn. There were a night table, several chairs, a vanity and the dresser with locked drawers where my mother had told me she kept the picture of my father. "Here's the dresser," I told Cassandra. "Can you open it?"

She seemed puzzled by something as she worked the fork into the lock. "You see all them dresses?" she said. "Every one of them is sewed with great big stitches, like somebody who didn't know how to sew."

But I was interested in the drawer now. "Open it," I said. She jiggled the fork until the drawer sprang open.

There were two dimes in the drawer and Cassandra pounced on them with considerable excitement. "They're silver!" she cried. "They could be worth fifty dollars each!" I took them from her and dropped them into my pants pocket.

The picture of my father was there in the cellophane paper. "That's my father," I said. But Cassandra was looking now at the three or four rings there and a man's gold watch. I closed the drawer and handed her the photograph. "That's my father," I said.

"You must be kidding," she said. "That can't be your father."

"Why not?" I was almost deafened by the blood pounding in my temples.

"Because that's Joe Louis when he was heavyweight champion of the world. If you were his son, you'd be a lot older than you are now. And you wouldn't be living here, I assure you."

I had heard of Joe Louis, but I'd never seen a picture of him. At least not to recognize.

"How come you thought that was your father?" She looked frightened now. "Who told you that was your father? And did you look at those dresses yet?"

I looked at them. They were sewed in big awkward stitches. Every one of them. By somebody who didn't know how to sew.

By somebody sewing all the time in dim light so that she couldn't be seen too clearly.

Which is why she wore the veil.

And the dark glasses.

Cassandra was sniffing around the room like a dog. "Don't no woman live in this room," she said.

"What? What did you say?" My head was spinning. Something was trying to come to me, but I couldn't get it.

"Don't no woman live in this room," Cassandra said.

My God!

I dived for that drawer and yanked it open again.

And dug through it until I found what I must have been looking for.

It was another photograph. Of my mother dressed as a man.

• • •

I just stood there. I thought I would die. Cassandra was looking at me strangely. "You all right?" she said. "You look like you're going to kick off." She snaked her hand into my pocket. "Can I have those dimes, then?"

But I shoved her away. "You'd better go now," I said. My voice sounded hoarse, like an old man's.

"Hey, what is this?" Her pointed little face became as ugly as a rat's. "What kind of bullshit is this?"

"You get out of here!" I screamed. Her mouth flew wide open. "Get out before I call the cops! I'll tell them you broke in! I'll tell them...." I was getting ready to cry.

She ran to the door. "You're a sick son of a bitch," she said. "Fag / Drag / What's your bag?" She grinned uncertainly. But I pushed her down the hall and out the front door and locked it behind her.

Then I went back to the bedroom. I thought about hanging myself. Those dresses, that wig. They're for me. I tore the picture of Joe Louis into little shreds. Then I sat down in the middle of the floor and cried. Joe Louis wasn't my father at all, and I guess I had known it all along.

When I couldn't cry anymore, I got up and looked at those dresses again. And that wig. I nearly threw up.

And heard a key in the front door, a noise in the hallway.

Then he stood in the bedroom door, looking at me. My father. He took off the hat and veil, the dark glasses, the wig. His face was drawn and haggard. "So now you know," he said. "I wondered if you'd ever find out. Sometimes I was afraid you wouldn't find out, that you'd go through life as blind as a bat, not knowing a thing."

He looked like a circus freak, that black dress, that lipstick. "What happened to my mother?" I almost couldn't bear to look at him.

"You were three years old." He was crying and tears streaked the thick powder he wore. "We lived over in Niggertown. I couldn't get a job, because nobody wanted to hire a black man in those days. So I took your mother's place when she died."

"I bet you never even went to the Army," I said. I absolutely hated him.

And he couldn't even look at me. "They wouldn't have me. But I did save my money. I bought this house, didn't I? And we are living where white people used to live, which is more than most niggers can say." He had the nerve to sound proud, standing there in a dress and high-heeled shoes and lipstick.

"It was the violence that frightened me," he went on. "You don't remember those days. They were killing niggers left and right back in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Sometimes I'd get so scared that I'd nearly mess in my pants. Then they had that riot over in Niggertown and your mother accidentally got killed. I was standing there in the funeral parlor, looking down on her, when I decided to take her place. Do you understand that? It was like something flew from her body to mine and I took her place. Things went real good for me from then on. I got this job at the hospital. I saved me enough money to buy this house. We got out of Niggertown, thank the Lord. But I did it all for you, honey. All for you. There's certainly no percentage in being a black man, I found that out. So I brought you here to Glen Oaks and I tried to raise you right."

He tried to raise me like a white girl, that's what he meant. And it almost worked. Almost. But I certainly didn't feel white anymore. That was the last thing I felt.

"They had that riot in winter, in a snowstorm. Your mother died then because I couldn't support her as a man. They said she was trying to break into a food store. That's when I decided to take her place. They apologized afterward for shooting her; they said it was an accident. The world's a whole lot safer for a black woman than it is for a black man. A black woman has more opportunity, more respect. White people aren't afraid of her."

My mind felt as though it would crack open. Those goddamned dresses and the whole room seemed to be swirling in kaleidoscopic colors. And then stopped. I made them stop.

I had to get away from him. But he backed away in front of me, half whining. I could see madness crouching in both his eyes like small dark animals, waiting to spring. "Get out of my way," I said. I was so disgusted I felt like hitting him right in the face.

But he scooted to the clothes rack and pulled down a dress. "Don't you know that I love you? You just look what I been making for you. I just been waiting for you to grow up, honey. Wouldn't you like to try one on? Honey ...?" Somewhere over our heads, the old house sighed maliciously. One of us, at least, would be leaving.

I walked out of that house. He stood in the door, calling me, but I didn't even look back.

There were white birds flying through the acacia tree, like a reminder of the eternalness of sorrow, no matter how delicate and graceful they seemed to be. Caught in the light from street lamps, they sparkled like diamonds in a crazy kind of quiet dance, as though for my eyes alone, dancing so silently in the blackness around them. At the same time, I heard that rooster crowing over in Niggertown; and I felt really free. That's what birds are all about, the divinity of wings and free sky.

I walked out of Glen Oaks and around to the vacant lot. I threw the two silver dimes into the lot. Maybe Cassandra would find them there. Maybe not.

I walked on over into Niggertown and I knew what it smelled like now. It smelled like between a woman's legs after you've made love. The brightly colored jukeboxes thundered like cannons. Revolution Revolution. But over the jagged rooftops of the tall buildings, the rooster crowed more exuberantly than the jukeboxes. Right on, Jack! If he could survive and still sing in all the world's sorrow, evil and deception, then so could I. Shit.