She could hear other things now. Fard’s footsteps as he paced the stage. The squeaking of chairs as his listeners bent forward, hanging on his every word.
“IN HIS LABORATORIES ON PELAN, YACUB KEPT ALL ORIGINAL BLACK PEOPLE FROM REPRODUCING. IF A BLACK WOMAN GAVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, THAT CHILD WAS KILLED. YACUB ONLY LET BROWN BABIES LIVE. HE ONLY LET BROWN-SKINNED PEOPLE MATE.”
“Terrible,” Desdemona said, up on the third floor. “Terrible, this Yacub person.”
“YOU HAVE HEARD OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION? THIS WAS UNNATURAL SELECTION. BY HIS SCIENTIFIC GRAFTING YACUB PRODUCED THE FIRST YELLOW AND RED PEOPLE. BUT HE DIDN’T STOP THERE. HE WENT ON MATING THE LIGHT-SKINNED OFFSPRING OF THOSE PEOPLE. OVER MANY, MANY YEARS HE GENETICALLY CHANGED THE BLACK MAN, ONE GENERATION AT A TIME, MAKING HIM PALER AND WEAKER, DILUTING HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS AND MORALITY, TURNING HIM INTO THE PATHS OF EVIL. AND THEN, MY BROTHERS, ONE DAY YACUB WAS DONE. ONE DAY YACUB WAS FINISHED WITH HIS WORK. AND WHAT HAD HIS WICKEDNESS CREATED? AS I HAVE TOLD YOU BEFORE: LIKE CAN ONLY COME FROM LIKE. YACUB HAD CREATED THE WHITE MAN! BORN OF LIES. BORN OF HOMICIDE. A RACE OF BLUE-EYED DEVILS.”
Outside, the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class installed silkworm trays. They worked in silence, daydreaming of various things. Ruby James was thinking about how handsome John 2X had looked that morning, and wondered if they would get married someday. Darlene Wood was beginning to get miffed because all the brothers had gotten rid of their slave names but Minister Fard hadn’t gotten around to the girls yet, so here she was, still Darlene Wood. Lily Hale was thinking almost entirely about the spit curl hairdo she had hidden up under her headscarf and how tonight she was going to stick her head out her bedroom window, pretending to check the weather, so that Lubbock T. Hass next door could see. Betty Smith was thinking, Praise Allah Praise Allah Praise Allah. Millie Little wanted gum.
While upstairs, her face hot from the air rushing out of the vent, Desdemona resisted this new twist in the story line. “Devils? All white people?” She snorted. She got up from the floor, dusting herself off. “Enough. I’m not going to listen to this crazy person anymore. I work. They pay me. That’s it.”
But the next morning, she was back at the temple. At one o’clock the voice began speaking, and again my grandmother paid attention:
“NOW LET US MAKE A PHYSIOLOGICAL COMPARISON BETWEEN THE WHITE RACE AND THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE. WHITE BONES, ANATOMICALLY SPEAKING, ARE MORE FRAGILE. WHITE BLOOD IS THINNER. WHITES POSSESS ROUGHLY ONE-THIRD THE PHYSICAL STRENGTH OF BLACKS. WHO CAN DENY THIS? WHAT DOES THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR OWN EYES SUGGEST?”
Desdemona argued with the voice. She ridiculed Fard’s pronouncements. But as the days passed, my grandmother found herself obediently spreading out silk before the heating vent to cushion her knees. She knelt forward, putting her ear to the grate, her forehead nearly touching the floor. “He’s just a charlatan,” she said. “Taking everyone’s money.” Still, she didn’t move. In a moment, the heating system rumbled with the latest revelations.
What was happening to Desdemona? Was she, always so receptive to a deep priestly voice, coming under the influence of Fard’s disembodied one? Or was she just, after ten years in the city, finally becoming a Detroiter, meaning that she saw everything in terms of black and white?
There’s one last possibility. Could it be that my grandmother’s sense of guilt, that sodden, malarial dread that swamped her insides almost seasonally—could this incurable virus have opened her up to Fard’s appeal? Plagued by a sense of sin, did she feel that Fard’s accusations had weight? Did she take his racial denunciations personally?
One night she asked Lefty, “Do you think anything is wrong with the children?”
“No. They’re fine.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at them.”
“What’s the matter with us? How could we do what we did?”
“Nothing’s the matter with us.”
“No, Lefty. We”—she started to cry—“we are not good people.”
“The children are fine. We’re happy. That’s all in the past now.”
But Desdemona threw herself onto the bed. “Why did I listen to you?” she sobbed. “Why didn’t I jump into the water like everybody else!”
My grandfather tried to embrace her, but she shrugged him off. “Don’t touch me!”
“Des, please . . .”
“I wish I had died in the fire! I swear to you! I wish I had died in Smyrna!”
She began to watch her children closely. So far, aside from one scare—at five, Milton had nearly died from a mastoid infection—they had both been healthy. When they cut themselves, their blood congealed. Milton got good marks at school, Zoë above average. But Desdemona wasn’t reassured by any of this. She kept waiting for something to happen, some disease, some abnormality, fearing that the punishment for her crime was going to be taken out in the most devastating way possible: not on her own soul but in the bodies of her children.
I can feel how the house changed in the months leading to 1933. A coldness passing through its root-beer-colored bricks, invading its rooms and blowing out the vigil light burning in the hall. A cold wind that fluttered the pages of Desdemona’s dream book, which she consulted for interpretations to increasingly nightmarish dreams. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling, dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam. Now she avoided all lovemaking, even in the summer, even after three glasses of wine on somebody’s name day. After a while, Lefty stopped persisting. My grandparents, once so inseparable, had drifted apart. When Desdemona went off to Temple No. 1 in the morning, Lefty was asleep, having kept the speakeasy open all night. He disappeared into the basement before she returned home.
Following this cold wind, which kept blowing through the Indian summer of 1932, I sail down the basement stairs to find my grandfather, one morning, counting money. Shut out of his wife’s affections, Lefty Stephanides concentrated on work. His business, however, had gone through some changes. Responding to the fall-off in customers at the speakeasy, my grandfather had diversified.
It is a Tuesday, just past eight o’clock. Desdemona has left for work. And in the front window, a hand is removing the icon of St. George from view. At the curb, an old Daimler pulls up. Lefty hurries outside and gets into the backseat.
My grandfather’s new business associates: in the front seat sits Mabel Reese, twenty-six years old, from Kentucky, face rouged, hair giving off a burnt smell from the morning’s curling iron. “Back in Paducah,” she is telling the driver, “there’s this deaf man who’s got a camera. He just goes up and down the river, taking pictures. He takes the darndest things.”
“So do I,” responds the driver. “But mine make money.” Maurice Plantagenet, his Kodak box camera sitting in the backseat beside Lefty, smiles at Mabel and drives out Jefferson Avenue. Plantagenet has found these pre-WPA years inimical to his artistic inclinations. As they head toward Belle Isle he delivers a disquisition on the history of photography, how Nicéphore Niepce invented it, and how Daguerre got all the credit. He describes the first photograph ever taken of a human being, a Paris street scene done with an exposure so long that none of the fast-moving pedestrians showed up except for a lone figure who had stopped to get his shoes shined. “I want to get in the history books myself. But I don’t think this is the right route, exactly.”
On Belle Isle, Plantagenet pilots the Daimler along Central Avenue. Instead of heading toward The Strand, however, he takes a small turnoff down a dirt road that dead-ends. He parks and they all get out. Plantagenet sets up his camera in favorable light, while Lefty attends to the automobile. With his handkerchief he polishes the spoked hubcaps and the headlamps; he kicks mud off the running board, cleans the windows and windshield. Plantagenet says, “The maestro is ready.”