All That I Am

OFF-SHOOTS AND SPINOFFS

If there is music then it’s not playing

When I sit around asking who I am, my inner spirit knows that I am more than these solar plexus connections. I am more than this skin tone, more than “you dogs,” the words mouthed by Mr. Gutter.

I see why we’re descended from bitches.

Mr. Gutter was found on a doorstep. The year was 1926. He was born in the spring. Lots of things happen in spring. Tings that have been sleeping suddenly find the strength to breathe, like the flowers and trees. Mr. Gutter was crying his lungs out, but the woman who is his real mother crept away. A mystery—his mystery. A little, yellow baby with fine features lay waiting for destiny.

He is now three months old and swaddled inside a basket. It’s July and hot. He knows he is someplace where angels mix with devils in a fateful struggle for balance.

July is the month to meet his new mama. Can’t say she is black folk. I really don’t know much about black folks. To me there are only hybrids, a diverse people. Who can say black people do this or that? I can’t know anything, because I am a descendant of hybrids. I speculate that it goes as deep as hybrid souls. I imagine the heavens full of creatures half-animal and half-human, where humans mix also with anything you can think of.

Miss Olivia is one of the folks I suppose I’m talking about. It’s not simplicity or her soft voice that she acquired when she was a little girl. Her mother said little colored girls with light skin should play up to people. Be all they want you to be and smile, always smile. Miss Olivia had to smile at men of all colors, and when she was little, men smiled back. Miss Olivia, like the rest of us, has become a compilation of what’s good and terrible about humanity. In the great spiral of this life she is inside me. More than a genetic bundle, she is the makeup of my very spirit. So I present her from the silent essence of me.

Miss Olivia stands in her doorway. She is young, twenty-nine years old. Her round cheeks, high forehead, and short legs fit well in her one-bedroom house across the street from her favorite bar. She wipes her hands on her house dress, making sure the dish soap is off . She picks up the basket with the yellow little boy and brings him inside. The boy looks like someone really loved him. He smells good, looks clean; someone had to give him up. She smells him for sickness. His skin is yellow like sunshine. Love that is hard to touch these days filters through.

“Poor baby boy. We know your daddy’s gots to be something other than colored, more like white.”

In Mississippi it’s not unnatural to find the men who spit at you in the day and long to hold you at night. How quickly life changes with a baby. Miss Olivia grows selfish in her love for Mr. Gutter. She never really wants him to know who his mama was. He never thinks much about needing to know who he might be. Mr. Gutter grows up thinking Miss Olivia is his real mother. It isn’t until his little brother is born that he realizes Miss Olivia had trouble getting pregnant. Mr. Gutter gets his name from a man Miss Olivia once fell in love with. His name was Howard Charles Gutter. Miss Olivia raises her boys to worship her. Her sweet voice and the way she calls everybody baby cakes melts away every fear. Seldom does she raise her voice; only when she has men over and is gambling and talking does she ever curse. Her high-brown skin and rosy cheeks make men scream to be with her. Some even pay.