Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,136
finest were about as ordinary as they come—playing hopscotch on the slab of broken concrete, following my brothers through the cornfields, trailing my schoolbag through the dust. My older brothers and I read a lot of books back then—a bookmobile came around our street once every few months, staying fifteen minutes. When the sun bubbled yellow on the broken fence we ran out from the house, down towards the back of Chaucer’s grocery store, to play in a stream that strikes me now as paltry, but back then was a waterway to contend with. We’d sail steamships down that mighty creek, and we’d have Nigger Jim whopping on Tom Sawyer for all he was worth. Huck Finn was not one we knew quite what to do with, and we mostly left him out of our adventures. The paper boats went around the corner and away.
My father was a house painter most of the time, but the thing he loved to do was hand-paint signs on the doorways of businesses in town. The names of important men on frosted glass. Gold-leaf lettering and careful silver curlicues. He got occasional work with the trading companies, the mills, and the small-town detective agencies. Every now and then a museum or an evangelical church wanted its welcome signs touched up. His business was nearly all in the white part of town, but when he worked on our side of the river we would go along with him and hold his ladder, hand him brushes and cloths. He painted wooden signs that swung in the wind for real estate and riverbed clams and sandwiches that cost a nickel. He was a short man who dressed impeccably for every job, no matter where it was. He wore a creased shirt with a starched collar and a silver tie pin. His trousers were cuffed at the bottom and he was happy to say that if he looked hard enough he could see the reflection of his work in his shoes. He never mentioned a single thing to us about money, or the lack of it, and when the Depression really kicked in, he simply went around to all of his old jobs and touched up the paint in the hope that the business would stay alive, and they might slip him a dollar or two when times were good.
The lack of money didn’t bother my mother too much—she was a woman who had known the worst of times and best of times: she was old enough to have heard all the slave stories firsthand, and wise enough to see the value of getting out from under its yoke, or at least as far as anyone could get out from it in southern Missouri in those days.
She had been given, as a memento, the exchange slip from when my grandmother had been sold, and it was something she carried to remind her of where she came from, but when she finally got a chance to sell it, she did—to a museum curator who came from New York. She used the money to buy herself a secondhand sewing machine. She had other jobs too, but mostly she worked as a cleaner in the newspaper office in the center of town. She came home with papers from all over the country and at night read us the stories she considered the good ones, stories that opened up the windows of our house, simple tales about climbing a tree for cats, or boy scouts helping the fire brigade, or colored men fighting for what was good and right, what our mother called justful.
She wasn’t from the Marcus Garvey choir: she held no rancor nor any desire to go back, but she wasn’t averse to thinking that a colored woman could get herself a better place in the world.
My mother had the most beautiful face I knew, perhaps the most beautiful one I’ve ever known: dark as darkness, full, perfectly oval, with eyes that looked like my father had painted them, and a mouth that had a slight downturn of sadness, and the brightest teeth, so that when she smiled, it threw her whole face into another relief. She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we’d never seen.
Up until the age of eight I was allowed to sleep alongside my brothers, and, even after that, our mother would still