What He's Poised to Do

She flew back to Miami on Labor Day weekend, leaving Hebert’s book in the small apartment off the rue Beauregard. Still humiliated, she met a man named James at a party in a friend’s backyard. He was large and dark and told her, soon after they met, that he thought of her as his girlfriend. “Oh?” she said. She was secretly pleased that someone was making this decision. On their fourth date he took her away for the weekend to a house he had bought with his ex-wife. “I always thought it needed a birdhouse,” he said. He fashioned the birdhouse carefully, and it was a testament to his skills as a carpenter. He made a frame. He added a round front door and a window as decoration. He shingled the roof with tiny shingles and hammered in a perch just beneath the door. She watched him from the porch.

James stood back and looked at what he had made. Deborah called to him. Her voice turned him. Just then an untimely gust of wind arrived. It knocked down the umbrella post, which bumped against the table, which tilted downward. The birdhouse slid into the creek. “Well, hell,” he said. “There it goes.” And there it went. It floated down the creek until the creek fed the river and continued on down the river, turning as if with purpose whenever the river turned. People on the opposite bank saw the floating birdhouse and laughed at it, amazed. James came back inside the house, his face darkened by his failure. Deborah was sitting in a love seat rereading the magazine that Boatman had given her. The piece about Hebert quoted one of his famous statements, that music was a superior substitute for time itself: “What is not remembered in a song is kept nonetheless,” he wrote, “because the next notes collect those that came before them.” She looked at the picture that accompanied the article. That was exactly how he had looked when he had taken her to bed, or was it? James kicked the wall next to her chair. “I want that birdhouse to roast in hell,” he said. She knew she would remember everything she was hearing. As she told Boatman on the phone that night, it wasn’t so much what James said as the way he was saying it. “Hey,” Boatman said. “That’s exactly why I’m going to remember what you’re saying now.”

TO KILL THE PINK (Harlem, 1964)

I’M GOING TO MALAWI. I’M WRITING THAT DOWN ON A SINGLE sheet of paper, folding it into thirds, putting it into an envelope, and leaving it on the kitchen table leaning up against the sugar bowl. When I go, I don’t want you to have any outstanding questions about where I’ve gone. Though most of your questions are outstanding. Pause. Get it? Remember when I used to do that, make a joke and then wait a minute before announcing it back to you like you were blind or deaf or dumb? I’ve been doing that to you ever since we were kids, ever since I nicknamed you Tails on account of your pigtails and it stuck. Fifteen years later you are a grown woman with a fine shape, top-shelf and bottom-drawer both, and it’s that bottom drawer that lets the nickname live, even though I had to take off the s. I call you Tail sometimes because it makes you laugh and sometimes also makes you hot, but usually not in public, where you’re Angie.

Last year I made a mistake in this regard, and I apologize. We were out for a walk, talking, and Lee Johnson who joined the seminary overheard our conversation and told me he thought the name was disrespectful to one of our beautiful sisters. I explained to him that it wasn’t at all, that I was honoring one of the most divine aspects of you or any other sister, the woman’s form, and that he could see how it was intended if he watched me when I bent down in the morning to kiss you good-bye before I went off to the radio station for my shift. You are a beautiful sleeper. You are beautiful awake, too, except when you try to be funny, which is why you shouldn’t try to be. You look good, like I said. You’re morally certain. You notice things about people and comment upon them in a manner that almost always leads to improvement. You’re full of more love than hate. Why bother with funny? Leave that to me. You can come visit me in Malawi.