Riverside Drive. Laura Wormer Van

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СКАЧАТЬ Poo!”) And again, Sam had been very, very proud of Althea. And of him and Harriet. How many blacks, he wondered, how many kids anywhere, were smart enough to get into an Ivy League school and had parents who could afford to send them there? (“The way I figure it,” Sam had said to Harriet as they sat down to plan out Althea’s tuition for the next four years, “we can send Althea through school, or we can buy Mexico.”)

      Althea, thus far in her freshman year, had done extremely well, but Sam was still nervous about her. Of all the different students, Althea still undeniably gravitated toward those affluent whites she had grown up with at Gregory. She did have some black friends, and her last boyfriend too (thank God) had been black, but still…

      It wasn’t that Althea disregarded her heritage. On the contrary, Althea made being black seem like an asset in the world. An asset because to know Althea Wyatt was to associate a young black woman with all the things all people everywhere coveted: brains, beauty and the brightest of futures. Did that bother Sam? No, not really. What gnawed at him was how self-centered Althea seemed to be. That everything Althea sought was for her own benefit, hers alone, with apparently no thought of rechanneling some of her good fortune back into the black community.

      Harriet did not worry about it as much as he did. But then, Harriet was forever clouding the issue (for Sam) by claiming that Althea, as a black woman, couldn’t afford to give anything away until she reached that almost nonexistent place called power. “For you it’s a white man’s world,” Harriet would storm on occasion. “But for me, Sam, for Althea, and for our little Samantha in there, it’s a man’s world first, Sam, and then it’s a white man’s world.” And then Harriet would burst into tears and Sam would feel terrible as Harriet would say, “You make me so furious sometimes. You always say you understand and you never have. You just don’t know, Sam, you just don’t.” Sniff. “And I’ll tell you something else, Sam Wyatt, why should our daughter do a darn thing for all those groups of yours? Look at them, Sam—they’re all men. And who do you men help? Young men. You have two daughters, Sam—don’t you think you could give one scholarship to one woman? Can’t you guys even pretend that women matter?” (Sam, incidentally, no longer participated in any group that did not include women.)

      But the issue of race and of sex and of Althea’s upbringing had another all-encompassing issue attached to it. It was the issue of addiction. From the day she was born, Althea had clearly been her father’s daughter. She looked like him, she talked like him, and her attitudes were just like his—in the old days, that is. Would Althea inherit it? they wondered. Had Althea been given it when she was little? What does one do when scared of the onslaught of it? It that has raged through half of your child’s heritage, it that is waiting out there, on every street corner, in every school-yard, in every place where people are—what could the Wyatts do about it? They could—and did—watch over their baby, try to safeguard her in ways that caused these other problems. Like the Gregory School. Had they really sent Althea there to educate her, or had they sent her there to keep her safe?

      Hmmm…

      No, it was true. They had sent her there to keep her safe.

      And Columbia? Living at home?

      They had kept her there to keep her safe.

      Safe from it?

      Yes, safe from getting sick like her father.

      Sam Wyatt was the youngest of six children. His father had been an “army man,” which sounded a good deal better than “a cook.” Private Wyatt and his family moved from camp to camp in the United States, living in the colored housing where all the other indentured servants in the guise of privates had lived in the late 1930s and early ‘40s.

      Sam was seven when his father went off on a drunken spree from which he never returned. They had been living in Texas then, at a camp that was frantically processing young men for shipment to the South Pacific. The army lost the trail of AWOL Private Wyatt in Nogales, Mexico, where he had apparently taken up with a barmaid named Juanita. Penniless, Sam’s mother Clowie had no choice but to parcel her children out to her siblings. Sam landed in Philadelphia at his aunt Jessima’s.

      Aunt Jessima had the fear of God in her and she did her best to instill it in Sam. Sam’s childhood and teenage years seemed like one long prayer meeting, with Aunt Jessima’s particular friend, Reverend Hope, officiating. Sam behaved, he did as he was told, and vowed that when he grew up he would never enter a church again.

      By the time Sam enlisted in the army in 1956 the Wyatt family was sadly depleted. His mother had died of pneumonia in Milwaukee; his brother John had died in a car crash in Arizona; his brother Matthew, in the army, had shot himself through the mouth in Germany; and Sam’s sister Bernice, only two years older than he, had been stabbed to death by her boyfriend in Los Angeles. His eldest sister, Ruth, had not been heard from in years; and his brother Isiah was preaching the gospel somewhere in the Everglades of Florida.

      Sam spent four years in the army, was honorably discharged as a sergeant and went to Howard University on the GI Bill. He was smart, he was cocky and he was known for his way with women and having a good time. With his business degree in hand, he landed in New York City in 1965 and was hired in the personnel department of Electronika International. He was very well paid to assist a Mr. Pratt in all phases of personnel operations, and since Mr. Pratt did nothing Sam assisted him in all phases of nothing and enjoyed a pretty footloose and fancy-free time of it.

      And then he met Penn graduate Harriet Morris, another Philadelphia expatriate, who was working as a secretary in the publicity department of Turner Lyman Publishers. Harriet was the first woman Sam had ever felt inclined to be faithful to. She was very pretty and very smart, and was the product of a middle-class Methodist family that was so happy it used to make Sam sick. In fact, if it had been anyone but Harriet, Sam wouldn’t have gone within ten miles of a person like her. Harriet was a devout churchgoer. Harriet read the Bible every night before going to sleep (she still did). Harriet didn’t drink. Harriet was forever saying things like, “Look on the bright side.” And Harriet was very critical, very hard on anyone she didn’t think was living up to his potential—namely, Sam.

      On their fifth date Harriet ventured to tell Sam that he was a fool to be in personnel. Sam, drinking a martini, dressed in a very expensive suit, asked her how much she made at Turner Lyman and, when she told him, he pointed out that he made five times what she did. So what the hell did she know?

      “Did you major in personnel at Howard?” Harriet asked him, smiling over her Coke.

      Of course he hadn’t.

      “Did you interview with Electronika to work in personnel?” she asked.

      No. He had interviewed for their training program.

      “And they offered you more money to go into personnel, didn’t they?”

      Well, yes, they had.

      “And you never wondered why?” she asked him.

      “Well—”

      “Sam,” she said, tapping a swizzle stick against her lower lip, “show me in the Wall Street Journal where it announces power changes in personnel.”

      “What?”

      “They’re putting you in the ghetto,” she said.

      Now just what the hell was she—

      “The government says, ‘Hire blacks.’ Okay, they say, we will. And where is the safest place to put them? Think, Sam. Where can СКАЧАТЬ