Light Egyptian
by Tom Williams
Lying on her stomach, staring idly at her Granny’s TV, Candace dreams of dozens of shows she’d rather watch. Back home, she’d flick through twenty-five color cable channels on a twenty-five inch screen and choose from Cubs games and cartoons, Lucy and Gilligan reruns, and movies set in faraway places with beautiful people and action in every scene. Instead, on the tiny screen before her is a black and white musical, decades older than she. Older than her parents, both of them born thirty-five years ago in 1944, though not on the same day and in two different states. But it’s the best thing out of the four channels Granny’s set picks up. Besides, Granny told her not to change it. That musical’s not going anywhere.
Granny and Candace’s mother sit behind Candace in plush chairs that are easy to fall asleep in. Both have seen the movie before and Granny knows the words to the songs. Though she never took a lesson, she sings along in as strong and pretty a voice as Candace has heard. Meanwhile, her strong brown hands shuck sweet corn with quick and efficient motions that leave each ear so clean that Candace can’t find a stray piece of silk on the floor or the arms of the chair. Candace’s mother snaps green beans, a chore she’s not used to, having grown up in a house where vegetables always came in cans, you didn’t grow them in your backyard. “How much longer is this?" Candace says, facing the TV, her chin riding her palm.
“Hush," Granny says. “Don’t know what you missing."
Between her mother’s long, pale fingers, the beans make a crisp snicking sound. The onscreen characters for now have stopped singing, but the words they say don’t interest Candace either. She slides her toffee-colored hands over her ears, hoping they’re big enough to block out all the noise.
It’s Saturday. In two months Candace will turn ten. She’s not in her own home watching all her cable channels because her father needs a haircut. And whenever he needs a trim or serious cut, he drives past the many barbershops near their suburban Columbus home and heads the car south for a two hour drive to Barnes’, the Cincinnati barbershop Granny took him to when he was a boy. This time he’s bringing along Alvin, Candace’s older brother, for his first hair cut at Barnes’. Candace wanted to go too, just to see her father’s and brother’s afros trimmed from their present shaggy states, but her mother, father and Granny said Barnes’ is no place for a girl, though none would say why that was. Candace can’t believe how Alvin, only two years older, can go, while she has to stay in the too-hot house her father grew up in. It’s unfair. But she won’t say anything. She’s growing&emdash;by leaps and bounds, her mother says&emdash;yet she’s still the smallest in the family, which makes it hard for her voice to reach anyone. It has too much distance to travel.
A fan by the front door stirs a slight breeze, but Candace’s tee-shirt, a hand me down from Alvin, sticks to her armpits and lower back. She can still hear the movie, so she removes her hands from her ears and rubs them on the rug until her palms tingle and turn a deeper pink. In the movie, the characters are all black. At first, this surprised her. She didn’t believe such movies were made before she was born. As well, this one has no white people at all. In Foxy Brown or Coffy&emdash;drive in movies she pretends to sleep through&emdash;there’s always at least one white person, even if it’s the bad guy or a cop. But once the black folk in this movie started singing and dancing in those old-time ways, Candace’s eyelids drooped and the yawns followed shortly after.
Now she rolls over on her back and stares at the ceiling. All of her father’s relatives live in or near Cincinnati, yet none can make it to Granny’s house this weekend. Uncle Butch and Uncle Tony are both working overtime at Coca-Cola. Uncle Mike is away in Dayton at summer school. Granny’s sister Vera has taken Candace’s cousins, William, Mark and Tracy, on a week-long trip to Memphis. If any of them were here, she thinks, she wouldn’t need to watch TV. Her uncles perform gymnastics on the front lawn until the change falls out of their pockets, and they teach her complicated hand springs and forward rolls. With their stories of what happens at their schools in the city, her cousins keep her amazed. Even Alvin might amuse her, though when he’s not ignoring her he’s pinching her knees and saying her pigtails look stupid or that she’s ugly.
Suddenly, Granny says, “Miss Lena." Candace hears the stripping sound Granny makes when she cleans the corn, followed by the sudden snap of the stalk.
“She’s so beautiful," her mother says. Snick, snick, go the beans.
Still on her back, Candace rolls her head so she can see the screen. On it, a younger woman smiles as she struts toward Little Joe, the chubby man who made a deal with the devil. Upside down, she still registers her mother is right: the woman is beautiful. At the same time, she knows this woman must now be as old as Granny, who has a short, silver afro and false upper teeth but doesn’t have a wrinkle on her round, coppery-brown face. For a moment Candace wonders if her Granny too is pretty, but she doesn’t know whom to ask about that. Instead, she says, “Who is she?"
Granny snorts. Candace flops over to see her placing the last clean ear in a paper bag. “What?" Candace says anxiously, feeling she’s said something wrong, which is how she feels most of the time she opens her mouth around her Granny.
“That’s Lena Horne," her mother says. The yellow bowl of beans sits on her lap. Next to it lies a wrinkled paper bag for the stems. Her mother moves her hands from the bag to tuck stray blond hairs behind her ears. She flexes her fingers, saying, “Really gives you a workout."
Granny shakes her head. “Your father," she says. “When he was younger, he was crazy over that gal." She laughs, a deep chuckle that sounds more like a cough. Candace’s mother smiles, still keeping her eyes on each bean she snaps. Candace tries to think of her father in love with anyone but her mother. She can’t imagine him as anything but the man he is now: strong, bearded, brown as a chocolate bar. The man who pins Alvin with ease on the living room floor when they wrestle. The man who kisses Candace on the cheek every night when he gets back from work. She turns back to the television, wishing the static would stop. Still, she can see through it well enough. Tall and graceful, the woman curls like a cat in the hammock with Little Joe. Her hair isn’t kinky or tied back in braids on her head. It’s wavy and shines so much Candace has her fingers in her own hair, comparing, before she knows what she’s doing. A strange warmth spreads then knots like a shoe lace in her stomach. “How old is this movie?"
“I think I saw it when I was eighteen," Granny says. “Long time ago."
“She is pretty," Candace says.
“Those eyes do work," Granny says, chuckling.
A toothpaste commercial interrupts the movie. Candace blinks, then flops on her back. “Candace," her mother says. “Don’t bounce around like that. It isn’t very lady-like." Lately, her mother’s been saying this about a lot of things Candace thought were fun, like splashing in puddles and chasing grasshoppers and shooting hoops with Alvin. If being lady-like means doing without these things, Candace isn’t sure that’s what she wants. She’d rather learn how to shoot a lay up.
Granny’s Zippo flashes open. The flame catches her cigarette. She always seems to have one, whether she’s reading her Bible, washing dishes or cooking, even when she’s in bed. Candace’s father cautions her not to smoke there, but she cuffs him on the back of the head and says just because he’s grown, don’t mean she won’t whup him. Candace watches the smoke spiral toward the ceiling. Over the snick, snick of the beans, she hears her Granny say, “Miss Lena. What she did to folks."
Candace slides against the rough grain of the rug so she can stare at Granny’s warm brown eyes. Smoke wreathes her face, making it hard to tell where the smoke ends and her afro begins. She can see Granny smiling, though, showing off the uppers she’s starting to get used to. Candace digs her elbows into the rug, sits up, and says, “What did she do?"
Squinting through the smoke, Granny clutches both hands together, the cigarette still burning. Candace’s mother stops snapping beans and dabs the back of her hand against her forehead. Granny leans forward. “Folks I knew practically burned off their hair to get a wave like hers. And she was so light-skinned, lord, if you were the tiniest bit brown you’d take a look at her and feel ugly as a dump truck. Plus, she could sing. Didn’t seem fair. Looking so good and singing so pretty.; Her eyes close, then open quickly. She grinds her cigarette into the ashtray and turns to her daughter-in-law. “How those beans coming?"
“All done," Candace’s mother says, turning the bowl of beans so Granny can shake her head at them. She touches the back of her palm to her forehead. “It’s funny about her being light," she says. “I don’t remember where I heard this. Some talk show, I guess. But some people felt she was too light."
Granny, carefully inspecting the beans, turns and looks at Candace’s mother the way she does before smacking somebody’s wrist with a wooden spoon. Candace has seen all her uncles and her own father get the spoon at least once. So far, Candace has avoided the spoon, but Alvin’s gotten it more than once for taking the Lord’s name in vain, sometimes hard enough to make him cry. Now Granny says, “Ain’t no gal I know ever complained about being too light. No man neither." Candace cringes when Granny huffs as if blowing out a candle. Her broad brown hands twitch but remain on her knees.
Candace watches her mother hand over the yellow bowl of beans. Her tee-shirt is too thin and the rug itches her back. The last thing she wants to see is a disagreement between her mother and Granny. She wouldn’t know which one to support. If pushed, she’d say her mother, yet she loves Granny so much, and sometimes wishes she lived here, not Columbus. There’d be better food. She could attend the same school as her cousins and see if their stories of disco dance lessons in gym class and kids making out and fighting teachers in study hall are true. She wouldn’t have to wait for holidays or her father’s haircuts to be with Granny, and she’d learn more about how things were when Granny was her age. Just then the commercials end and Little Joe and his friends appear on the screen to sing again. Candace’s mother says, She didn’t want to be darker. She said some producers forced her to wear a make up that made her appear darker.;
Granny huffs again and lights a new cigarette.
Candace sighs. There won’t be a fight, she’s pretty sure, so she drags herself across the carpet to peer closer at the screen. Her elbows and knees sting from the effort, but she’s concentrating so much on Lena Horne she doesn’t care. She wonders if what her mother says is true. Because of the black and white film, it’s hard to tell the differences in skin tone between the actors, but obviously Lena Horne is the lightest. She practically shines. Candace is tempted to hold up her arm for a comparison. Of all the relatives in Cincinnati, none share her or Alvin’s milky tan coloring. No one ever says much about it, though Candace has seen her cousin Tracy, who’s darker than just about everybody, staring at her, then looking away. Back home, white girls stare, too. They say she’s lucky to stay tan all year, but their faces never seem at all envious when they talk to boys and shake their long, straight hair or touch their slim fingers to their smooth chins.
Now her mother, crumpling the bag of bean ends, says, “There was a name for it. The makeup. It’s on the tip of my tongue."
Granny picks up the bowl and walks toward the kitchen, the cigarette between her lips. Lena Horne exits the screen. Disappointed, Candace turns to her mother, who taps her index fingers together, mumbling. Then she says, “Light Egyptian. That’s what it was." She calls for Granny, who comes out of the kitchen. Candace watches the two older women stand face to face in the hall&emdash;her mother blond, tall and pale; her granny shorter but stronger and brown. “Light what?" Granny says. A bean hangs between her fingers like a cigarette.
“Egyptian," her mother says. “Light Egyptian. They put it on her to make her look more black."
“Huh," Granny says. She eats the green bean raw.
Candace peeks at the back of her hands. At school, she’s dark. Here, folk say she’s ginger-colored or yellow, and she’s light. She doesn’t know if she should be confused or not. She looks at her mother, then her Granny, both of them still standing in the hall. Her mother says, “How can I help?"
“Want to chop onion?" Granny says. She turns to the kitchen and Candace’s mother follows. She stops for a moment, says, “Do you want to help your Granny and me, honey?"
Candace rises from the floor. Her mother and Granny enter the kitchen as she passes the two easy chairs. But when she looks over her shoulder at the TV, she slows down. Then she stops. No matter how hard Candace wishes, Lena Horne doesn’t appear. Yet Candace waits, even as her mother calls her name twice. She wants Lena Horne on the screen. She wants her there to measure herself against. She also wants to know if her mother’s right about that makeup. For if she is, Candace wonders where she can get it, and how much she needs.