The Thanatos Syndrome

her thin brown body, sweet with the smell of hot cotton and schoolgirl sweat, there is both a yielding and a resistance. She’s a swift brown blade of a girl.
    â€œWhy you standing around?” Chandra asks me. Chandra is abrupt and unmannerly, but is the only one who will speak to me. “Why don’t you sit down?”
    I sit down.
    â€œYou looking good, healthy for a change,” says Chandra to me. “Roll, Margaret.”
    Tommy and Margaret are on an easy footing with old black Hudeen and young black Chandra. They look and talk past me, as if I were still a drunk, a certain presence in the house which one takes account of, steps around, like a hole in the floor. Are all fathers treated so by their children, or only disgraced jailbird fathers?
    â€œHudeen, what time is Miss Ellen coming down?” I ask, wondering whether to go upstairs.
    â€œShe be fine!” cries Hudeen softly, shelling peas and keeping an eye on the stereo-V. “She be down!” Is she telling me not to go up?
    Long ago Hudeen gave up ordinary conversation. Her response to any greeting, question, or request is not the substance of language but its form. She utters sounds which have the cadence of agreement or exclamation or demurrer. Uhn-ohn-oh (I don’t know?); You say!, You say now! , Lawsymussyme (Lord have mercy on me?); Look out!—an all-purpose expression conveying both amazement and good will.
    Hudeen is barely literate, but her daughter went to college and became a dental hygienist. She married a dentist. They are as industrious, conventional, honest, and unprofane as white people used to be. They have five children, three girls named Chandra, Sandra, and Lahandra, and twin boys named Sander and Sunder.
    Chandra is smart, ill-mannered, discontent, but not malevolent. She graduated in media and newscasting at Loyola, interned at a local station, worked briefly as a street reporter. She wants to be an anchorperson. The trouble is, she hasn’t the looks for it; she doesn’t look like a tinted white person, what with her Swahili hair, nose, lips, and skin so black that local light seems to drain out into her. Said Hudeen once, talking back to the TV as usual when somebody mentions black—Hudeen, who still has not caught up with the current fashion in the proper race name: colored? Negro? black?—“Black?” she said to the TV. “What you talking about, black? That woman light. Sunder he light. Sandra bright; Chandra now—we talking black!”—hee hee hee, cackling at the TV.
    At first it worried me, Chandra’s anger and her rash goal, aiming for anchorperson, perhaps even hoping someday, this being America, to replace good gray Dan Rather, and finding herself instead doing what? back in the kitchen feeding white children. Good Lord, such exactly might her remote ancestor have done, living in these very quarters—if she were lucky enough to get out of the indigo fields and up in the kitchen of the big house. Mightn’t Chandra blow up one of these days, I used to think, change one diaper too many and pitch Margaret into the bayou?
    As a matter of fact, no. So much for the wisdom of psychiatrists. Maybe this is what I might have done in her place, but not Chandra. Having observed them carefully, Chandra and Margaret, I long ago concluded that women don’t work that way. At least Chandra doesn’t. Chandra has nothing but good nature and patience and—dare a white Southerner say it?—affection for Margaret. Margaret loves Chandra.
    Instead, she, Chandra, takes it out on me. She goes out of her way to be pert with me, perter than I’m used to from people black or white. At first I took it for sass and felt the old white gut tighten: one more piece of lip and you’re out on your ass, and so on.
    Right now, for example:
    I: “How’ve you been, Chandra?”
    Chandra, frowning as she lands on Park Place with her little token, a flat iron: “Nothing wrong with me! Anything wrong with you?”
    Shocked murmurings from Hudeen, who overhears this—not real shock but conventional, socially obligatory shock: “Lawlaw ainowaytawpeepuh,” eyes not leaving the TV. Translation: Lord, Lord, that ain’t no way to talk to people, that is, white people.
    The other day Chandra gave me a lecture: “You want to know your trouble, Doc?”
    â€œWhat’s my trouble, Chandra?”
    â€œYou too much up in your