Deep Heat
/By P.J. Morgan
Alexandria, Virginia
I stretched out on the living room floor and threaded my fingers in the carpet. We hadn’t always had air conditioning, and I loved how glorious it felt on a summer day, the steady flow moving over you, the little pockets of cool trapped in the grassy green shag. Luxurious and languid bliss, just how a summer day should feel.
It was hot as Hades outside and definitely not a day to be cutting grass in the middle of the afternoon. I poured some iced tea, slid the patio door open and paused, the humidity pressing through my skin in a thick blast, my glasses fogging instantly. Mowing the lawn seemed like an exceptionally bad idea. But there was Jimmy, pushing the mower, wringing wet with sweat in this horrible heat wave.
I wasn’t sure why Jimmy was mowing. It seemed like the kind of job someone who didn’t have his position would do. I had seen him out at the mill, where he worked for Daddy in engineering and maintenance, and knew his daughter from school, where she seemed like a fellow bookworm despite being in different classes. They were both quiet, respectable, smart, hard-working, church-going. Not our church, of course. Somehow mowing our lawn seemed to go along with his job at the mill, which didn’t really make sense to me, but there were a lot of things about adults that mystified me. So I stood there, iced tea in hand, and called out.
“Jimmy! Come inside in the air conditioning and cool off before you keel over in this heat!”
I heard Mama come up behind me. Graceful, someone once called her. Pint-sized pistol, I’d say. She fussed about the house, always wanting it to be just so, and keeping it perfectly spotless to the point it sometimes felt like we couldn’t live in it. She worried a lot, her brow permanently etched with the furrows of her emotional state. Mostly she seemed to worry about other people’s judgment, so of course the newly teenaged me had judged that no way to go about life.
“Don’t tell him to come in,” she insisted.
“It’s near a hundred degrees out. He’s gon’ keel over out there.”
“You can’t invite him inside.”
“Why not?” I all but stamped in petulance. I clearly was missing something.
“You just can’t.” She looked uncertain. Worried. “What will people think?”
I looked skeptically at the woods around our backyard for the judging hordes and persisted, “It’s too hot out; he needs to cool off. I don’t see why he can’t just come in and drink his tea a few minutes.”
She knew that look on my face that said I had decided, so she finally sighed, “Fine, you invite him in. He won’t come. He won’t do it.”
“What do you mean he won’t? Who wouldn’t want to get outta this heat a minute?’
“You’ll see.”
I turned back to the patio and called again, “Jimmy, come inside and have some tea. It’s too hot out!”
“Thank you, ma’am, I’m fine.”
I looked at Mama. I looked back at Jimmy.
I thought, “This is crazy. Don’t y’all know how hot it is?” The words might’ve actually left my mouth. Everybody looked uncomfortable, only now it wasn’t just the heat. Finally, I badgered a reluctant Jimmy to step barely over the threshold enough for the nearby vent to blow some cool air on him while he slugged back the glass of tea before heading out again.
I understood for a moment the divide I was up against, and I balked at how it defied obvious practicalities. Later I would understand more of the complexities, that my resistance could also be dangerous, that his refusal might be deference, but more likely, it was self-preservation. That it was barely conscious after years of this dance, these moves everyone used to keep life flowing smoothly, without incident. I was barely learning the dance and didn’t know the steps, didn’t always hear the tune, but the beat of it was the rhythm of the South I lived in. It would be years before I awoke to the fact that, when the world worries about what “people” think, it never seems to consider what black people think.
I don’t really remember the conversation that evening when Daddy got home, other than the usual relaying of the events of the day. But I do remember that the next time Jimmy came to cut the grass, Daddy had a brand-new riding mower waiting for him in the coolness of the morning.