Come a Stranger (11 page)

“A title's a kind of label. It's also a name, if you think about it.”

Mina thought about it. She could see what he meant.

“Your father, now, I could call him ‘reverend.' Though I've never met him, because he's always gone by the time I get here. I've met up with his work, over and over.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can't step into a man's shoes, into his job like I do, into his life, and not learn a lot about him.”

“I guess not,” Mina said, thinking about the dancing slippers she had packed away in her suitcase. She planned to throw all that away as soon as she got home.

“I envy him, I think. My people—”

“Up in Harlem?”

“Harlem—the Harlem I see—the ghetto I serve—is down,” he said. “Down from everywhere. Wherever else you might be, if you go to Harlem you're going down.”

He was being exact again. But he sounded tired when he said that, and his voice lost some of its richness. “I don't want to think about that right now,” he said.

“Sure, Mr. Shipp.”

“The kids I know, the kids I work with, all call me Tamer.”

“Even at home?”

“My home or your home?”

“Crisfield.”

“Yep.”

“Why?” Mina asked, before she thought to keep her mouth shut.

He didn't answer right away. Fields of corn, coming up green,
flowed past the car windows. The fields were edged by rows of trees, like high green fences. The sky, bleached white by summer heat, stretched out overhead. Mina figured, after a couple of minutes, that he wasn't going to answer her question.

But, “I can't think of why,” he said, sounding surprised. “I've never thought about it, and I don't know why I didn't. Because I tend to think about things,” he said.

“Oh,” Mina said, not knowing what else to say.

“Drives Alice crazy.” He turned to smile at her. There was something sure and strong in him, and his eyes, resting briefly on Mina, looked amused and interested and sympathetic. They looked knowing too, she thought, as if he knew a lot about her.

Mina was willing to bet that Momma had sent him up on purpose to meet her. But he said he'd had a job interview, so it couldn't have been that, and he said Momma was sitting with Miz Hunter, so she would have come with him if she could have. So it was just good luck he'd been the one, unless it was what her father called God's good time.

They had lunch in a little restaurant in the town of Easton, a couple of miles off of Route 50. They were the only ones eating lunch at that hour. Mr. Shipp thought Mina should order crab cakes, because she'd been away from crab country, but Mina explained about how when you were used to crab cakes as good as her mother's were, anything else wasn't worth the money. She had chicken instead. Mr. Shipp couldn't decide. “My mother could give your wife the recipe,” Mina said. “Or I could. They're easy.”

He shook his head. “TV dinners are what Alice thinks of as easy. Roast chicken counts as hard. I'm hoping one of my girls will turn out to be a cook. I guess I'll compromise with stuffed shrimp.” He smiled up at the waitress—who looked about thirty-five and worn out—who didn't smile back at him. “Baked
potato, house dressing, and a glass of iced tea,” Mr. Shipp said, before she had to ask him. She nodded to show she'd heard, but her blue eyes never left the ticket she was writing. Mina watched her walk away, noting her thick-soled shoes and the bend of her neck, and the way she put her shoulder not her hand on the swinging door into the kitchen, as if she needed her shoulder's strength for the task of getting through that door. Mina got just a glimpse into the kitchen—long stainless counter and two black men at work.

“Did you notice her ring?” Mr. Shipp asked her.

“She wasn't married.”

“That faint mark, where her finger wasn't tanned. Like a ghost of a wedding band,” he said. He took his water glass and drank it half down. “A woman her age, probably there are children. I think an unreasonably large tip is in order, don't you?”

“Because you feel sorry for her?” Mina guessed.

“Because I know about how she feels,” Mr. Shipp corrected her.

“But, Tamer,” Mina said, his name uncomfortable in her mouth, “you're not divorced, are you?”

He shook his head.

“Have you been a waiter?”

He shook his head again, smiling, teasing, waiting for her to work it out.

“And you're not a woman, and you're not white.”

He just waited.

“And I'm not going to call you Tamer, either; I'm going to call you Mr. Shipp,” Mina finished up.

He laughed then, and Mina joined in.

“You can't say I didn't try,” he said. “So, are you beginning to look forward to getting home?”

Mina realized that she was. It was going to be all right, she realized.

They didn't hurry over their meal. They didn't dawdle. Mina had a slice of pecan pie for dessert, while Mr. Shipp drank his coffee. They left almost ten dollars for a tip.

Back in the car, strapped in, back on the highway south, Mina asked him, “Did you get the job?”

“What job”

“The one you interviewed for.”

“Oh, that's right, I did have an interview. No, I don't think so.”

“Did you want to get it?”

“Only partly. I keep thinking about my family living in Harlem, my kids growing up there, where there's so little room to grow, and it's dangerous. . . . Then I keep thinking about my work, and the people who destroy themselves because they think they're being destroyed. And they are too.” It was anger she heard now. “I think about . . . what it is I'm meant to be doing. If that doesn't sound too conceited.”

“No, it doesn't.”

They traveled on without talking for some time. They went over the Choptank River, broad and blue at Cambridge. They crossed the little humped bridge at Vienna over the Nanticoke. The land flattened out around them and the air began to smell like home.

“Looks like there's been rain this summer,” Mina said, breaking the long silence.

“There's been some good rainy days. I like this part of the world,” Mr. Shipp said, his head moving to watch a chicken farm go by his window. “I always did like it. I lived around here for a couple of years when I was younger. For the last two years of high school,” he answered her unspoken question, “when we were first married, Alice and I.”

“It's really different from Connecticut,” Mina told him.

“Worse?”

“No, just really different. I liked the hills and the trees up there, especially the trees. Connecticut is up, isn't it?”

“Definitely up,” he answered. “You're finished with the grief then.”

Mina wasn't surprised that he was understanding her. “I guess so. I guess it wasn't all that serious.”

“Oh, I don't know.” She watched his face. His skin fitted smooth over his forehead and cheekbones. He had a good strong jaw. “Some grief is sharp and sudden, and some is slower and longer. Sounds to me like you had the first kind, which is the easier—once it's behind you.”

“Both would be pretty bad. Having both together.”

He didn't answer, just nodded his head. Mina didn't know if that was to say he agreed with her, or just that he'd heard her. She wondered why he didn't answer, since he seemed to have something to say about almost everything. She wondered what he was remembering and understood that he didn't want to talk about it, so she changed the subject.

“I like this country too.”

“Do you mean this country America? Or this country Dorchester County.”

“I mean Crisfield. I'm not too sure about America.”

“Really? Because of being black? Because of slavery?”

“I don't know,” Mina said, because she didn't. “I just don't feel comfortable, feel like I belong . . . I don't know.” She'd never thought of that before, but it was true.

“I used to think, to wonder—I used to complain too, to Him—why God didn't lead us out of America the same way He led the Jews out of Egypt. There was a lot the same in the situations,” Mr. Shipp said.

“I guess there was,” Mina said, thinking about it.

“I'd wonder why we didn't have any Moses. Then—if there
was a Moses coming along. Dr. King, I thought, might be the man to lead us back to our own country.”

“Except, of course, Moses wasn't black. The Jews weren't,” Mina explained.

“Neither am I,” Mr. Shipp said.

Mina almost laughed. It had to be a joke. Then she saw that it wasn't a joke.

She couldn't think of what to say. She wondered if he had a patch of craziness in him, that let him pretend to himself that he wasn't black. She thought she must have been wrong about him being strong and at peace, and that was depressing. She didn't know what she could possibly say to him now. Somehow, she knew that the one thing she felt like saying—“You are too”—was the one thing she couldn't say. She turned her face to the fields again.

“But I'm not, Mina, and neither are you. Look at me. Look at yourself. We're not black, are we?”

Mina looked at the skin of her hands. It looked black to her. She looked back out the window, embarrassed.

Between the rows of soybeans the earth showed brown, the dark brown that meant rich soil, but lightened by the clay characteristic of this low land. This soil was dark, but not really black-brown like the soil where the bay ate away at the marsh grasses.

“I'm brown, really,” Mr. Shipp said to her silence. “We are. Shades of brown. We call ourselves black because—the other words have been used and used derogatively. Negro—that's black too, in another language.”

“Spanish,” Mina mumbled, a little embarrassed at herself now.

“But I wouldn't like to be called brownie, would you?”

Mina giggled.

“Blacks, it's what we call ourselves, so that's all right.”

“What would you rather be called?” Mina wondered.

“I always liked colored,” Mr. Shipp said. “Because that covers just about everything.”

Mina was looking at him again, and she saw he was half teasing. She thought about that, about all the colors the blacks were. There was dark, like Mr. Shipp, dark, dark brown so that in certain lights you could see the purply black that went into it. Her skin was like a chocolate candy bar, a Hershey bar to be precise. Kat's had coppery tints in it. Some blacks were so light they were beige, almost, and some had golden tones and—She started to laugh, because he was exactly right about it.

“What's so funny?” he asked. But she was willing to bet he already knew the answer.

“I'm not surprised you didn't get the job,” she told him.

Mr. Shipp's dark eyebrows went up, surprised, and his surprised laughter poured out of him into the warm air. “I'm going to have to watch out for you, Mina Smiths,” he said. “You're—”

She waited.

He said what everybody had always been saying about her, all of her life, except at camp. “You are t-rou-ble.”

Mina wished he'd said something else. Something different from what everybody else always said.

Then he added, “I haven't known you but three hours, and already—”

“Already what?” she asked, when he didn't finish the sentence.

“Already you've got me talking with you like a friend,” he said.

She was glad to hear him say that.

“I've got a congregation, and people I work with. I've got a family and a wife. But friends are in short supply. Unless maybe you count God, but I can't make out if He's my friend or what.”

He didn't say that as if he minded not knowing, or even
minded feeling as if he didn't have what he'd call friends. Mina didn't mind him thinking she was trouble, if that was how he thought about it.

She looked across at Mr. Shipp, at his heavy, dark eyebrows and at his dark hands on the wheel of the car. There was a smile building up in her, of mischief and gladness and being free. They thought they were turning her out, turning their backs on her, but really they were sending her home.

M
omma was in Miz Hunter's bedroom, not waiting in their own kitchen, but that was the only thing different from the way Mina had imagined things. Momma wrapped her arms around Mina and Mina wrapped her arms around her mother. Even though she was almost as tall as her mother, the arms made her feel little again, and safe. She breathed in the faint odors of rubbing alcohol and hand lotion that Momma carried around with her. “I know it's selfish, but I'm glad you're home. I miss your company,” Momma's voice said in her ear. They drew apart, but Momma went on. “You look crumpled, you've got that travel look to you. You go right on home and take a bath, get your laundry sorted. It's fried chicken for dinner and you can imagine Belle is going to be glad you're here to help her out.”

Mina slipped back into summer, like slipping into a comfortable old bathrobe. She took her mother's place sitting with Miz Hunter for the last recovery days. Mina would go over to the old lady's house late in the morning and make her some lunch. Then, while Mina swept and dusted the three rooms, Miz Hunter would get washed up and dressed, with Mina nearby to help in case she fell or felt suddenly weak. They spent the afternoons sitting on the front porch, with Louis under orders to stay close. They talked sometimes, and they played Scrabble. Mr. Shipp usually dropped by, for a shorter or longer visit. Mina's
mother brought over a covered plate for Miz Hunter's supper before she went off to work. More and more Miz Hunter got well enough to look after herself.

It was a peaceful few days for Mina. She didn't see much of anybody, because nobody much knew she was home. Miz Hunter asked her, right off, if she'd gotten tired of living among strangers.