Green Doll: Mother America's Son
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CHAPTER ONE The Year is 1989 VARDAMAN His biggest secret was that he had a doll. It was made of wood and cloth and was small. The face of the doll didn't have dark skin like his was or white skin, it had flattened wrinkles like an old man or a tired baby and it was green. He took it from a hole in the wall which was part of the secret and looked carefully up and down the hallway and listened because it was dark and then pulled a spoon from the pocket of his bluejeans. He stuck the spoon into the hole he'd made between two cement blocks and turned it like a drill. He saw a movie once and they drilled inside a man's head with a screw and put a worm in there and it drove the man crazy. It must of crawled all around in there. He heard someone wheezing on the stairs. It was an old lady and she was heading down, seven floors to go. How did she think she would get back up? He held the green doll in his left hand and touched the face with his thumb while his right hand drilled the hole deeper with the spoon. He'd been putting off the hard part. He pushed up on the handle of the spoon to make it go down inside and pushed down to make it go up. The hole had to be wider. He pushed but the spoon was knocking on cement now. It wasn't like the stuff between the blocks. Sometimes green doll was a girl. He whispered to it. He picked up the black cape and looked at its stick body. The underneath wasn't green like the face; the green went down to the shoulders and then it was more like him. The legs were square but they got narrower at the bottom. The wood stomach was flat and there wasn’t any butt. He left the spoon inside the hole and held the doll to his cheek. The cape tickled his eyelash. He touched it to the wall above the hole and moved his face so that his cheek rested on green doll's front and green doll rested on the wall. It felt like sleep. Green doll woke him up just in time by falling to the floor. Marcellus and Keith were coming down the hall, so close that he couldn't reach for green doll. He ran to the open doors to the elevator and leaped into darkness, holding out his hands. They banged into cable and gripped. The cable shimmied and tried to get away. He looked over his shoulder; he might have to go up or down if they threw things. The only good part was that they were too big to bother with jumping. Two shapes stood quietly breathing in the dark hall. A red cigarette eye hung in the elevator shaft and just like that moved toward him like a space missile in Darth Vader. Marcellus and Keith laughed when his eyes got lit by the red sparks bouncing off his cheek. It was too fast to hurt much but he climbed higher on the cable. "Maybe I piss on him," Marcellus said. Keith said, "Bet I hit him more than you." Vardaman held tight with one hand and reached up with the other and heard zippers. When he had a good grip he pulled. A light thudding hit his pants near his feet. "That's mine," Keith said. He pulled himself further. "It's mine," Marcellus said. It dropped to his sneaker and then he was above it. Marcellus and Keith stayed quiet to listen but wherever it was landing now was too far away to hear anything. They stood next to each other like they were enjoying being there pissing together into the dark. When they were finished they put their dicks back and zipped up. "Little motherfucker climbs good, don't he," Marcellus said. Keith said, "Put him on the gymnastics, he win a medal. They all be young now, the ones winnin'." He sounded sad, as if it made him feel like he was just hanging around, not even full-grown and already too old. They left and Vardaman heard them starting down the stairs. "Want me help you with that bag?" Marcellus asked. "Thank you, young man," the old lady's voice said. "I wish they'd fix that elevator. But I'm almost up. I'll just rest here a moment." "What you got inna bag?" Marcellus asked. "Just some groceries." "I see for myself. Come on." "No," the old lady said. "Stop that!" He heard Marcellus and Keith running down the stairs. "That's my last money this month." Should have known better, taking the stairs by herself. He felt bad for her and it made him mad since there was nothing anyone could do. How had she lived so long. Her wheezing was staying in one place, like she'd decided to sit on the stairs and wait for her groceries back. He lowered himself on the cable, gripping hard because the grease had been wettened some places from Marcellus and Keith, then swung on it toward the open doors and away again, back and forth, closer each time, until he pushed on the far wall and flew back to where the cable almost touched the wall below the doors and he dropped off and landed on the floor, on the heel of his sneakers, facing into the shaft but right on the edge. He threw his hand out to balance himself, catching his palm on the inside of the hallway. But his palm slipped from grease and wetness and shot forward into nothing, and when his other hand reached to find the other side of the opening it was too far. He toppled slowly, from seven stories. With their last touch on concrete he sprung off his feet, trying for the cable.
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About the Book
Here’s how it starts: Vardaman is chased by two older boys and he jumps into the elevator shaft and reaches for the steel cable and catches it, seven stories high, but his hands are slipping. He can barely hang on. The elevator is broken because the building is in Chicago, the Cabrini-Green projects, and because the older boys run the building no one wants to venture inside to fix things. The steel fibers rip into Vardaman’s fingers and he falls, bruised but alive, one more escape. Not everything fits a label. Vardaman is smart and he does well in second grade. His mother checks his assignments when she gets back from her day shift at the nursing home, and it is there, after work one day, that she meets the wealthy and white middle-aged son of one of the patients. He introduces himself, approaches her as she’s bending over the engine of her car that won’t start and offers to help, attracted to her youth and exotic beauty. She accepts his help, attracted to his polite scent of money and perhaps a path for her and her son out from the projects. And so begins their cautious but quickened dance of daring as Alexander expands his boundaries and Linda tests the limits of her own. And watching it all is Vardaman, confused by what his mother is doing, afraid of what the brothers will think of her being with a white man, and maybe taking it out on him, and all he wants is for it to be ended. This is a novel about three persons exploring who each one of them really is – in their separate grips of age and race and money – and where their innocence might reside and their happiness might be found.
About the Author
Doug Power was Assistant Chief of Staff for Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor, whose opponent for office had campaigned with advertisements relentlessly depicting the city underneath a looming black cloud with the warning: “Before It’s Too Late!” But the media denied this was racial. “It’s just about competent management.” That was the message too when the white-majority City Council refused to confirm appointees and took control of city contracts to keep funneling the money and the jobs to their pals. This isn’t anecdotal: Doug Power knows – he was liaison to the Aldermen and received their requests. That was Chicago in 1983, a place of neighborhoods at war with other neighborhoods. Doug Power had the opportunity to witness it close up, living in the inner-city and sparring with gangs black and white, working as a counselor with children, and community organizing with the Congress of Racial Equality. It was in Chicago where he saw Dr. King speak in the early 60’s at Olivet Church across the street and where he played baseball on the dirt and rubble fields of the Cabrini Green projects. GREEN DOLL is about the boys he played baseball with. He's had stories published in the New Orleans Review, TriQuarterly, Witness, and Other Voices, and, as a proponent for community empowerment, has made presentations about broadband and economic development at conferences throughout the U.S. and Canada. And he notes that it isn’t much different today in the halls of Congress than it was years ago in the City Council. And not much different in the inner-city, either. Only worse. Attention must be paid.