Bear sat outside, the backs of his short legs prickled by the grass that grew in the shade of a crepe myrtle.
“I brought Bear with me today,” Joanie apologized to Mrs. Harris, “His grandma wasn’t feeling well. I couldn’t trouble her with this boy and all his energy. You know how he is. He needs to run and play, and my momma just can’t keep up.”
“Oh, I understand,” Margaret Harris said, the tone of her voice giving away that while she did understand, she still didn’t like the idea of the small child running around her house all day. “Just make sure he doesn’t break nothing.”
“No ma’am. I’ve told him to stay outside and not to bother nobody,” Joanie reassured Mrs. Harris.
Bear was six years old now. Six years ago, he’d been named Bernard Lucas Williams III. Bear had been named by and after his father, Bernard Lucas Williams Junior. Sometime between then and now, Bear’s father had died. Bernard Junior died early on a Sunday morning after too much alcohol and a brutal fight, which, judging by its outcome, Junior lost. Joanie couldn’t stand to hear the sound of herself say her deceased husband’s name, so she nicknamed her young son Bear.
“Now you just sit there and don’t cause no trouble,” Joanie said to Bear, with a preventative scowl. It was a hot summer day in Georgia, in 1955. Joanie, a Black woman, had been working as a cleaner, cook, and all-round household manager for the Harrises, a white family, for what seemed like forever. “Okay Momma,” Bear responded, without removing his gaze from the blade of grass that he had been running between his fingers.
Joanie headed inside to proceed with the Saturday morning chores. She would make beds and chop the vegetables. She would sweep, and then she’d mop. Outside, the slowly aging Vincent walked across the lawn between the woodshed and the back of the house. Vincent walked with a large cloth draped over his shoulder. In their day, Vincent’s shoulders had been much stronger and broader. Now, they failed to fill out the yoke of his cream colored button-down shirt.
Vincent was in his 60s now. The bulk and vitality of youth had begun to give way to the thinness and peaceful resignation that accompany a man’s lifelong accumulation of experience and wisdom. Vincent sensed, as aging men do, that his time and energy were growing ever scarcer and ever more precious. He had become deliberate in his actions and words, and judicious in deciding when to deploy the fullness of his temper. Vincent pushed a wheelbarrow as he walked. Into the wheelbarrow, Vincent had carefully piled two rickety sawhorses and a few long boards.
Vincent arranged the sawhorses in the side lawn; he stretched the boards over them. He then covered this makeshift table with the old cloth, which Bear now noticed was checked, blue and white.
Like Joanie and Bear, Vincent was Black. Unlike Joanie, who was a full-time employee, Vincent was only occasionally employed by the Harrises. Vincent worked in town as a mechanic, but he still did odd jobs at the Harrises’ from time to time. Bear could not remember when he had first met Vincent. To Bear, Vincent had always just been around. To Bear, Vincent was like an uncle, or maybe even a father.
Today Vincent would dust the Harrises’ chandeliers. The Harris house was a large country estate—a hundred years ago it had surely been some kind of plantation, though not a huge one. The size of their house was the only indication that the Harrises might be wealthy, or that at some point they might have been so. Other than their employment of household staff, the Harrises did not act like wealthy people. Their house was tidy, thanks mostly to Joanie, but their home slid slowly and irreversibly into a state of stained and faded disrepair.
Mrs. Harris had a neurotic aversion to dust. Every so often, she insisted that the rugs, furniture, and even chandeliers be removed from the house and dusted in the fresh and circulating air. The moving breeze would remove the dust for good, she said. If you dust things while they’re in the house, you just chase the dust from lampshade to bookshelf and back again. “I want the dust gone,” Margaret would say, “not just moved around back and forth and hither and yon all over this place.”
And so, Vincent had stood a stepladder in the foyer. He had lowered the chandelier that dangled above the base of the staircase. He hauled it outside and laid it carefully on the cloth that had been spread over the boards that had been placed on the sawhorses which stood in the grass on the side lawn and near the crepe myrtle in the shade of which Bear still sat.
Bear looked on as Vincent returned to the house. Some minutes later Vincent emerged with a pair of smaller chandeliers. The matching lamps must have come from the hallway that linked the upstairs bedrooms. Vincent began to floss the chandeliers with an old cotton rag; Bear sat and watched from a distance. Bear imagined the dust flying away, wondering if it might land on someone else’s chandelier in Atlanta or Macon. Or maybe it’d go all the way to another country. Perhaps the dust would float all the way to Africa, where Bear had been told he and his ancestors had come from, even though he’d never been there himself. Maybe in Africa the dust would become soil or make someone sneeze. Or maybe it would land on a table only to be wiped up or chased away, eventually, by one of Bear’s distant relatives who, Bear assumed, still lived over there somewhere.
On this June morning in Georgia, the hazy sun soon burned the dew from the trees’ leaves. The temperature and humidity rose. Bear felt groggy; he shimmied himself backwards and rested his shoulders against the small tree. He watched Vincent work. Soon, Bear could no longer restrain the urge to let his small eyes close.
The image of the chandeliers sparkling in the sunlight stayed in Bear’s mind as he began to doze. Bear imagined he could hear the chandeliers, congregated on the old gingham cloth, speaking to each other. How the chandeliers enjoyed this day, the day of their annual outing.
“I’ve been staring so long at that staircase,” said the chandelier from the foyer, “and it’s all so pointless. People go up, and down; up, and down. And I wonder, will they ever get to wherever they’re going?” She continued, “And I just languish there, in front of those two massive doors! Especially when those cold drafts come in, ’round Christmastime. I love when the carolers come by, but to cling there in the wind and the cold through all three stanzas of O Holy Night just so that the Harrises don’t have to dirty their socks or chill their toes by stepping out onto the verandah—it’s more than I can take!”
The twin lamps from the upstairs hallway voiced their complaints in a melancholy duet. “Same for us,” they said, “these folks trudge up and back, to and fro. To the bedroom, to the bathroom, and back again. And again, and again. The strawflowers in that vase on that table have been there since 1948. The only excitement we’ve had is watching the cobwebs slowly accumulate around us.” One of the twins offered a caveat: “Well there was that one time Mrs. Harris stumbled through, clearly drunk, barely able to open the door to her own bedroom!”
“Oh yes,” said the chandelier from the foyer. “I remember that night. I had seen Maggie lumber up the stairs, pulling herself up, gripping the banister tightly and very clumsily dragging one foot in front of the other. I’m glad to hear she made it.”
Bear, fast asleep, wanted to shake the chandeliers awake. He felt so sorry for them. “You’re all so beautiful,” he imagined himself saying to them. “You’re so pure, so bright, so wonderful. You brighten entire spaces, you illuminate everything. You give life to infinite forms in a million shades and hues.” Bear knew that the chandeliers had seen so much. But for all they’d seen, they’d never seen themselves. They had only ever seen their drab surroundings, so that’s what they thought they were, and that’s what they complained about.
Bear awoke from his nap, returning swiftly to this reality, the reality in which chandeliers neither think nor converse. Vincent had gone inside. Bear got up from under the myrtle. Bear approached the makeshift table that had been constructed in the side lawn. He looked closely at the checks on the gingham cloth. A small insect had landed on the cloth and was crawling around. Bear wondered if the bug was headed anywhere in particular, and whether the bug knew where he or she was heading. Bear wondered if the bug knew, at that moment, that there was more to the universe than blue squares and white squares. Then Bear wondered whether the bug even knew of its own existence.
Bear watched the insect for a minute or perhaps two, or maybe ten.
Vincent reemerged from the house, where the sparkling chandeliers had now been returned to their usual locations. He seized two corners of the cloth and jerked his arms abruptly towards his body. The cloth came flying at him; he quickly folded it once, twice, three times, then put it under his arm. Vincent turned back toward the shed where he would leave the cloth while fetching the wheelbarrow.
The folding of the cloth had happened so fast that Bear had not seen what had happened to the small insect. The bug may have flown away, or it may have been folded into the cloth. Bear imagined the bug’s future. If it had flown, it might be eaten by a swallow or devoured in mid-air by a bat. If it had been trapped in the cloth, it might starve, buried alive in the shed, not to be unearthed until next year, at the next Chandelier Picnic.
Bear thought of his life. He wondered whether he was only seeing the blue squares and white squares, a tiny sliver of all creation. Was he, like the bug had been, waltzing around on a two-dimensional stage, thinking that this plane of time and space was all there is? Bear wondered whether there might be more to life, things he hadn’t considered.
Bear thought of the cotton threads—blue and white—that when arranged in their pattern gave the cloth its two-dimensional form. Bear imagined himself as the bug on the cloth, searching the cloth from end to end, looking for meaning and asking about the Creator. The bug, persistent but not clever, would search all the blue squares, and then all the white squares, and never find his Creator. Bear thought to himself: “Five minutes before the dawn of time, where was God perched, and what was on his mind? Two inches beyond the end of space, will I find God there?”
Bear knew he’d been silly. Asking when in time God had been created, or where in space God might exist is as silly as asking where within the blue and white squares of a gingham tablecloth is the person who set the table or the person who weaved the cloth.
It was mid-afternoon now. The heat and humidity continued to damp Bear’s fiery energy. Bear walked toward the house. He knew he should not go in, lest he become a nuisance to Mrs. Harris. It was bad enough his mother had brought him along today. Mrs. Harris would not appreciate having this stray child running loose in her living room, foyer, or dining room. Or anywhere else, for that matter. The rear entrance to the house was a mudroom, a small shed behind the kitchen. There were boots in there, and egg baskets that had last been used a decade ago, before the last of the hens had been plucked and boiled. There were other things, too, most of which had belonged to Mr. Harris. The things in the mudroom were too valuable to be thrown away but not valuable enough to be guarded in any better a place. Bear sat in a corner of the mudroom on an old, embroidered rug. The rug, once thick and shaggy, was worn and faded now, but its design was still clear: a large vase, several flowers. The flowers had green stems with red petals, gilded with yellow to indicate the warm sunlight that had been shining nonstop since the day the rug was made—probably forty years ago, now.
Bear sat on half of the rug, contemplatively lifting the other half. He took the corner of the rug between his thumb and index finger. He turned the rug over and noticed a spiderweb of yellow yarn on the back of the rug. What had appeared to be small and disconnected points of light on the edges of the flowers’ petals were in fact tiny loops of a single, still-connected thread.
Bear released his hand and allowed the rug to fall again to the concrete floor. He thought of his father, a man he had never known, but whom Bear nonetheless still loved and missed. Why had his father’s presence been so short, so limited?
Bear imagined that his father’s life had been like a glint of yellow sunlight shining off the edge of a tulip or blanket-flower or perhaps a gladiola. Bear contemplated the sunlight and realized that the glinting reflection would be blinding if it were everywhere. It would not be special if it lasted forever. Preciousness depends on scarcity. Bear thought to himself that if the rug had been a composition of pure sunlight, of nothing but sunlight, that it would have been a bland yellow rug. And so, for the sake of the beauty of the whole composition, the golden yarn had been allowed to pop through to the surface of the tapestry only sparingly, and most infrequently.
Bear stared out of the mudroom into the lawn. Vincent loaded the sawhorses into the wheelbarrow. Behind him, the sidelong rays of late-afternoon sunlight came spilling over the roof of the shed, backlighting and shining through the petals of a host of flowers in red and other colors, like dahlias and petunias.
Bear stretched his gaze toward the horizon, out beyond the flowers, and to the cotton fields nearby. He wondered whether the yarn of the rug he still grasped had been woven from cotton that had been picked by his father, or perhaps his grandfather. He wondered which cause, divine or otherwise, had given rise to the effects that were still so tangible and perceptible—the rug and its design and its faded colors and its worn shagginess.
Bear wondered how his family had ended up in Georgia, and how he had ended up here, the child of a dead father and an impoverished mother. Why had his father died so young? And about the cotton—who had decided that it was his family’s job to pick it, and who had determined that some of the cotton should become gingham while the rest of it might become yarn? Who determined how the yarn would be spun and dyed, and how the various colors would be woven back together to create innumerable designs, including the one that now lay beneath his bare knees in this mudroom in Georgia?
“If I were yarn, what color would I be?” Bear wondered. “And would I even be allowed to decide? If I were a strand and if I were blue, could I choose whether to be sea or to be sky? Or would someone else decide? Because if it’s up to me, I want to be Blue. And I want to be Sky.”