"You a smart boy, all right, too damn smart for your own good. Now get down in that cellar!"
Mammy Jordon came across the kitchen and he moved back toward the cellar door. He knew she wasn't really mad, cause when she was mad she sent him down to the cellar dark, and here she was holding out the flashlight. And she wasn't looking at him like she was mad, but somewhere over his head, her bulk crowding him back, her perfume and party dress, even bigger now in her heels and towering over him.
How he hated her bigness, just as he loved it when she held him against her soft in the bedroom upstairs.
He went down the wood steps to the dirt floor with the ceiling so low no man could stand, for he was no man yet and he couldn't stand all the way, and he could hear the door closing and Mammy Jordon sliding the bolt into place. He could hear her moving about the house. And later her heels on the front porch and the old car coughing, and he knew she had gone into town to bring back one of her gentlemen.
He didn't turn on the flashlight.
It was still light outside and the light came through the chinks in the cinder blocks along three walls of the cellar and the flies hadn't come yet. If he looked through the chinks on one side he could see plowed fields and burnt-off hillsides and at night the lights of cars as they passed on the highway. On the other side, only fields and hills. But if he knelt down and looked through the chinks at the rear of the cellar, he could see their yard and the garden Mammy had planted and through the trees and beyond to Mr. Skinner's house in the distance. Mr. Skinner was their landlord. His house was white, whiter than theirs which was once white and Mammy called it dirt white.
He didn't know how she had found this Skinner place. When they left the other place they drove for days, sleeping in the car, Mammy making him stay on the floor in back so no one would see. Then they had come to this place and she started locking him in the cellar. He had been with Mammy since before the other place, but down in the cellar with nothing to do but sit and think and listen, he had begun to remember his real mother.
The cellar had been cold at first with the wind racing through the chinks. He'd found an old mattress and tried to lie on it with the blankets Mammy Jordon had given him, but the mattress was wet and smelled bad. When he pushed up one corner he could see worms and dark crawlies underneath. So he found a dry place on the dirt floor and curled up there with the covers and thought about his mother.
Mammy Jordon was his mother's mother, but she wouldn't let him call her that. She said she was too young to be anyone's grandma, leastwise someone grown up as he was getting to be. His real mother was smaller than Mammy Jordon and she didn't smell like Mammy, always sweet or flowery, still she smelled good, only he couldn't remember just how cause the cellar smelled and the mattress even when he wasn't near it. He'd get this all mixed up with his mother's smell and Mammy Jordon's. And sometimes he'd remember her and she was brown like Mammy Jordon or yellow like he was, and sometimes she was a white lady and once she was soft all over like a kitten. The more different ways he thought about her the less he remembered so she became less and less until finally there was nothing left to her at all. And then he couldn't think about her anymore or pretend he wasn't in the cellar.
So he began to sing to himself in the dark, tuneless nonsense songs which never repeated yet always sounded the same. He kept his voice low so Mammy wouldn't hear. She said he was strange enough already without doing no singing, and she only let him listen to music on Sundays when she read from the book. He loved the music and he could feel it trying to move inside him, but he had to sit still while the record turned on the player. Sometimes when he sang to himself in the cellar he didn't sit still. He rocked with the nonsense words. Hunched there in the dark, he beat the heels of his palms against his thighs until they were sore.
And that was when the seeing started.
He didn't tell Mammy about the singing or the seeing. He knew she wouldn't like any of it.
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