By the Light of My Father's Smile Read Online Free

what interested her, it seemed to me, even at that early age, was men, and what was concealed by their trousers.
    My wife did not see this as a problem. Leave the child alone, she advised as we prepared for bed at night, children are curious! I complained that Maggie embarrassed us by her boldness. Her staring and her sidling up to boys three times her age. She is curious, my sweet daughter, said my wife. She laughed. And the young men here
are
magnetic. She shrugged. Come to bed yourself, and don’t forget the nightly rubber.

    Langley made me laugh. Almost each and every night she made me laugh, as she had done the very first night we met; at a society ball thrown by upper-class Blacks for their grown-up Jack and Jill offspring in a sleek and prosperous enclave of Harlem. Her parents had inherited what was referred to at the time, with envy, as “musical money,” from a famous uncle who was a jazz composerand performer. After Jack and Jill, which was considered by most black people as a kindergarten for the rich, and after boarding school, she’d gone to college in Maine. I, on the other hand, had worked my way through Hampton Institute in the South, and in fact was so poor that I owned only one suit, the one I was wearing when she asked me to dance.
    I was so astonished by this breach of propriety, especially as I noticed her parents looking on, and yet so thrilled by the playful recklessness in her eyes, that I spilled the pink punch I was drinking, all over myself.
    You look good in pink, she’d said brusquely, cracking nary a smile and coolly using a dainty, heavenly-scented hanky to dab at my tie. I laughed because it was certainly not what I’d expected her to say.
    In Mexico she was a woman split in two. During the day, as the “pastor’s” wife, she wore dark colors, even in the midday heat. Or snowy white on feast days, as some of the Indians did. At night she wore nothing at all. Oh, what does God care about what I wear? she had asked the first night we slept together and I was stunned by her beauty, naked, but also profoundly shocked. God gets to wear everything, including us. I suppose I could have forced the issue. But she did not even own a nightgown. Although she did find something, and hold it up. It looked serviceable and was the color of poached salmon, “flesh colored,” it claimed on the label. There were stays. Shall I sleep in this slip your mother gave me? she asked. Frowning, draping the ugly color against her peachy skin.

    Susannah was fascinated by the gigantic pots that the women made in heaps. Some were so big she could put her whole head inside.The Mundo women used only three colors: the red of earth, which was the pot itself and came from the local clay; the black of charcoal; and the white of lime, used as decoration, which after baking in the fire was not white but gray. There were few designs on Mundo pots: their beauty was in the burnished smoothness, the rich symmetry of their form. Their usefulness. The rough, unpolished pots which they also made were bound with strips of goatskin; these were filled with grain and strapped to the backs of donkeys that took them down to the market for sale.
    We were there when the railroad came within a day’s journey of their mountainous territory, almost a century after it was begun in Mexico; and there to see the beginning of the end of the long line of donkeys snaking down the mountain in the blinding sun.

    Langley studied pottery making with the women. She learned to dig the clay, clean it, wedge it, roll the long coils that formed the sides of each pot, and then to kneel before the growing pot as it magically rose from her shallow grass basket, her tongue often poking out the corner of her mouth in rapt concentration, as the other women’s did. There was in building a pot a distinct feeling of prayer, she said. Especially in the first, beginner’s lessons, when she did pray that her slippery,