Atlantis: Three Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

the ocean of theology and ancient languages. Sharp-tongued Corey had seemed, for a while, the one likely to follow Papa into that sea. Then she had turned from its waters—sharply—with the realization there was little enough a black man could do with Greek and Aramaic. (Though Mama always insisted it was more than well-deserved, the suffrage bishopric was after all an anomaly.) Still less, a black woman. She had followed her younger brother, Hap, first to New York, then into dental school.
    Cigarette still fuming between his teeth, Sam was just buttoning his shirt when, outside in the hall, someone twisted the doorbell key.
    Clarice came in.
    Hubert’s girlfriend was—like last time—another pale-complected creature, who looked, really, whiter than Hubert. (This one’s name was Clarice!) “This is your little brother? He’s not so little at all! How come all you boys in this family are so good looking?” Within moments Sam learned, now from Clarice, now from enthusiastic Hubert—when Clarice suddenly remembered to be modest—that she wrote poems that got published in newspapers and sometimes in small magazines (Hubert brought some out to show him) with titles like
Broom
and
Spark
. Their ragged-edged pages were thick as fabric as you turned them. Passionate about the Negro Question (as was Hubert), she read
The Messenger
and
Opportunity
and knew writers and artists, black and white—Wally and Richard and Bruce and Jean and Angelina and Waldo and talked about them at length and a woman named Lola at whose house on Ninth Street she had met a number of them—from Washington to New York, from Harlem to Gay Street, the block-long colored enclave in Greenwich Village, she explained. Greenwich Village was where Hubert went, in the evenings, to his law classes at New York University Law School.
    And they were all expected at Elsie and Corey’s at four o’clock for Saturday dinner—Elsie and Corey were his and Hubert’s oldest sisters;and Saturday dinner, Hubert said now, was easier for them than Sunday, because of Elsie’s studying for School on Monday—not to mention Hubert’s.
    The surprise, that evening, was that Hap—another brother—and his wife came too.
    â€œSam, how’s everybody down at the college?” Dr. Corey wanted to know. Calling her “Doctor Corey” was something of a joke, because she was a woman. (They didn’t call Hap “Doctor Hap”—or Lemuel, his oldest brother who was a real doctor, not just a dentist, “Doctor Lem.”) But Corey had decided it was her due. She’d tell you in a moment, if you asked: “Filling teeth and getting paid for it is a lot better than teaching Greek to a bunch of hands, straight out the field, who couldn’t care less about the difference between a first and a second aorist!”
    Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine, they all laughed over that long Thanksgiving letter Hubert wrote—Sam repeated.
    â€œOh, yes,” Elsie said. “Hubert came and read it to us before he sent it. I thought that would tickle Mama.”
    Corey sent him to the bathroom to wash his hands.
    As Sam stood, caressive water falling warm over his fingers from the verdigrised faucet, in the alley outside someone called, again and again, sounding now like,
“Dandelion . . . !”
now like,
“Handle-iron . . . !”
The voice was shrill—the shrillness of a man who was going to call for a long time and wanted folks to hear. Sam tried to imagine the body with that voice: brown face under a squashed-down hat, hard hands, bony hips in loose pants, sharp shoulders in an old vest . . . 
    More because he was tired than because he had to go, Sam dropped his pants and sat on the commode’s wood ring. (At Hubert’s the commode was behind a door out in the hall.) Newspapers lay on the two-tiered stool beside him. Lifting up