Читать книгу The Book of Colors - Raymond Barfield - Страница 8

It hurts sometimes but it’s worth the trouble it causes looking sort of white to some black folks and sort of black to some white. I’ve learned some things being this way but there’ve been days I wished I was all one or the other.

The one time I don’t feel any color at all is when I go for a walk. Not toward the city but away from it to the north. Memphis drops right off into a few lots of junk then sticks. That’s the direction I walk.

I started doing this not long after I moved in with Rose and when I walked out there I looked out into the sticks and the mud and thought. On one tree settled back from the road was a crooked white sign with red letters painted on it that said, “Jesus is coming soon.” It looked like it’d been there a while so I wasn’t sure what it meant by “soon.” But the thought worried me some. For one thing, this was my first baby and I wanted to see what it looked like. The only child I’d spent any time around besides memories of myself was Ambrosia, but she was always either rocking looking at her little cardboard book or else she had lost her book again and she was rocking and screaming and pulling her hair. Layla went nuts sometimes looking for that book if Ambrosia was screaming. I could tell already that my baby wasn’t gonna be a screamer. Not that it mattered.

The other thing that bothered me was the sign being stuck out there in the middle of a bunch of dead sticks with nothing around but a few junkyards and some shacks. Maybe if it wasn’t crooked it would’ve helped. A message or a warning like that should have a better sign. I walked on out to it and then turned around and came back, but I couldn’t decide if all the mess and weeds and stacks of rubber tires ought to have made me feel glad or worried about Him coming.

Anyway, Rose seemed pretty set on Him coming, though if He didn’t come soon I was afraid she’d miss it all. Jimmy didn’t really care much one way or another I guess but that didn’t stop him from looking up all kinds of religious strangeness on the computer. You’d be amazed what some religions do. And I couldn’t talk to Layla about it, first because she did more staring than talking like she was always thinking about something other than what you were talking about and second because she was busy with one of the bums she was always bringing in off the train track.

Which was one of the strangest things about her, all the friends she made out of whatever or whoever happened to be wandering along the tracks. Not that she asked them. She could just be walking around the yard or even just leave her door open in the springtime like it was a sign saying come on in. When she had Ambrosia she bled a lot and they took out her womb. That was the other thing. My womb grew into a watermelon-sized thing any passing stranger could see and I sometimes felt funny talking to her knowing she didn’t have her womb anymore. Especially being so young. And the problem was that it was not like missing a leg or being bald where everyone can tell what you’re missing so that you go ahead and get used to it. It was missing something important that nobody sees or knows about unless you tell them, and then you always have to decide, do you tell them or do you not?

And body parts aren’t the only thing you can be missing. Other things that aren’t body parts can be taken away. But you still have the same problem about whether you tell somebody or not. And then you don’t know if they will still like you. If you are missing a leg a person can decide ahead of time whether they like people who are missing legs. But if you are missing a womb, or if one of those other things has been taken away, then they can’t decide if they still like you until you are already in the middle of it. Meet a couple of people who decide they don’t like you once they find out what’s missing, and sometimes you just stop wanting to let people get to know you.

So if Jesus was coming soon I wasn’t complaining, but He was sure to find a whole lot of folks who think a whole lot different than Him. The world’s just not the same as it was back then from what I hear in church. But I wasn’t worried about Him. In the meantime I kept tending Rose. She was good to me and I knew I’d miss her when she died and somehow I hoped my baby got here before she died so that at least the house wouldn’t be empty. When somebody dies you don’t want the house to be empty because it’s too much at once. Even a cat can help if it’s friendly and not the kind that disappears for days at a time, but a person is much better for this kind of thing.

And last, I wouldn’t say this to just anyone but I used to think of Jesus as a white man, even though in the churches I went to he was painted as a black man but with hair that was more like a white man’s or else pressed straight with hair softeners. When I think of Jesus coming it’s hard for me to think about him being so white, and just as hard thinking about him using hair softeners. But once I learned to think of him like a donkey in some ways, which I knew was probably not right, it helped since thinking that way I could see him walking around saying, “All right, folks, it’s time to go,” instead of coming with some big flash of light. When I think of Jesus as being sort of like a donkey I’m not so bothered by that sign being crooked or stuck in the sticks and muck or painted with big red letters. A man white or black might mind that. A donkey would just walk by and not care the least. Even if it’s wrong when I think of Jesus like a donkey, I can pray again.