The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson

Author:Naomi Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

PHAEDRA TURNED HER BACK to Jean and felt his fingers and measuring tape indent her skin. Jean was the darkest shade of chestnut; he had close-cropped hair, a lanky frame with arms that stretched almost to his knees, and thick, plum-colored lips. In another place, outside the hill, he might have been called beautiful, but here he was Buller Man Jean, and the son of his mother, Trixie, and neither allowed space for anything beyond a kind of grudging tolerance. To be the son of a whore, born into sin, was one thing. To be a homosexual, to choose a life of sin, was something else entirely, a way of sloughing off the obligations of common decency and flaunting the shame that was his birthright. The hill, like every place, had its deviants, and like other small places, what it demanded of them was sublimation. Phaedra could feel Jean’s sadness behind his tough exterior, and experienced it as a kind of gravitational pull. Phaedra didn’t complain about the rough, quick way that Jean calculated the length and width of her. She knew that, like her mother, beneath Jean’s sandpaper exterior lay a tender, bruised heart.

Before they left New York, Avril told Dionne and Phaedra to give her love to Jean. Once they were safely out of their mother’s earshot, Dionne said that she wasn’t giving any love to her mother’s faggot friend. But the cost of making fast friends with Jean’s cousin Saranne was that Dionne had to see Jean every day when she sought escape from the heat and Hyacinth’s rule in Trixie’s air-conditioned shop. Over time, Dionne’s initial iciness toward Jean, who she thought was eccentric in a way that reminded her of Avril, thawed. Dionne still believed that Jean’s problem, and Avril’s too, was that they held too tightly to their status as outsiders, which Dionne couldn’t understand, given how much she wanted a normal family, a normal life, and how little their being different had profited them.

Dionne and Saranne were usually the only people in the shop where Trixie sold detergent and other sundries; the hill women only patronized her when either rain or desperation forced them to produce something for her besides scorn, and even then they would make only the barest of greetings and point to the things they wanted with their mouths. Phaedra, on the other hand, visited Jean often, finding pleasure in his easy way, a respite from the demand for good behavior and idle chatter that she found everywhere else on the hill. While Jean took her measurements, Phaedra admired the bolts of fabric that lined the walls of Jean’s sewing studio, which was really just his bedroom, off to the side of his mother’s shop. Since Avril had died, Hyacinth’s house pulsed with reminders of her—her school pictures, the clothes Dionne unearthed from her closet and hung all over her room in a kind of tribute, the rocking chair where Phaedra liked to read and into which Avril had carved her initials, in every new crease and crag in her grandmother’s face.

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