All-Bright Court by Connie Rose Porter

Author:Connie Rose Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

14

Jesús

JESÚS WAS a black man with nappy hair. Around his eyes there was a hint of something. Around his tiny black eyes, somewhere in the curve of his brow, were the lies of white men. Inside his eyes, lost somewhere in the well of their blackness, were the promises made to an Indian woman. All the blacks called him Jesus, just like it was meant to be.

They could not figure out Puerto Ricans anyway. They didn’t know what category to put them in. They were not quite black and not quite white, but exactly what they were was not clear. But Jesús ruined things. It was clear that he was black, even if around his eyes there were whispers of other worlds. Around many of the blacks’ eyes the same thing whispered.

You could knock on almost any door in All-Bright Court and find someone to repeat it. “Yeah, my grandma was a Crow.” “My great-grandaddy was Cherokee.” True or not, it was something to brag on, a place to locate the wave in someone’s hair, a place that held the origin of the blush of redness in one’s skin, a place to touch the hardness and highness of a cheekbone. Even if it was a white man they saw in the flame of their faces, even if it was the whisper of a lie some white man had breathed into their grandmother’s breasts, still caught up in the tangles of their hair, it was easier to believe they were seeing an Indian. It was exotic, untraceable, a way of putting down roots, of pushing their toes right through the slabs of stone under their feet and staking claim to an entire continent. They were the doubly dispossessed.

But the Puerto Ricans could also lay claim to dispossession. Their wealth amounted to no more than a handful of dried beans. If their lives had meant more to white men, if the copper in their skin could have been spun into gold, they would not have been living in All-Bright Court.

Jesús’s family was like the other families coming from Puerto Rico, only he was different. He was nothing like his brother César or his sister Gloria or his parents.

Mrs. Taylor had said to her neighbor Billie Hines, “Maybe Jesús the milkman son.”

“Naw. They ain’t got no coloreds down there. You seen any of them that was colored?” Billie asked.

“No,” Mrs. Taylor said. “But girl, they some good-looking people, got that pretty hair and smooth skin. There more and more of them. Every time you turn around, another bunch of them moving in.”

Billie said, “I tell you this. I don’t like them. How can you stand a whole family living in back of you?”

“They don’t bother nobody. Isaac be over there in that house.”

“That figure, though, that he would be with them. Them people stink. They loud and nasty, they do nothing but bring roaches. And they taking away jobs in the plant, jobs from our men,” Billie said.

“They just trying to live,” Mrs. Taylor said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.