A Town On A Lake

By Albert Christer Singletary

artistic photography by santypan

Andy always took a long time to fix my car, and I knew that this day in June would be no different. He was expensive, too, and never failed to find something more wrong with my car than what I had brought it in for. I would drop it off for a brake job, only to return a few hours later to have him explain that, while replacing my brakes, he had discovered I needed new C-joints too—whatever they were. Before asking for the go-ahead to do the additional job (since he could see that I was wavering), he would carefully explain how necessary C-joints were, that without them the axle might go, and that, though the C-joints themselves were not inexpensive, replacing them would be much less expensive than replacing the axle.

The necessity of the repair having been put to me this way, I, of course, would give the go-ahead for the job, not without suspecting he was taking advantage of my ignorance of cars. But I did not go to him because I trusted him. I went to him because he could always fit me in the day I called and because his shop was conveniently located in downtown Burlington: One could have a beer, take in a movie, go down to the Champlain lakefront, or whatever, while the necessary repairs were being made.

There was a cafe I liked going to whenever I was downtown. Going there reminded me of the years I had spent in Providence working in a cafe and being very happy doing so. Since the cafe’s clientele was eclectic, I always felt a little more sophisticated going there, sipping my Russian tea, with jazz playing in the background and the paintings of local artists on the walls—this week figurative, the next week abstract.

If I was in a hurry, say on my way to work, I would pop in, grab a cup, and leave. But if I had time to kill, as I did on this particular day, I would order a pot of tea, find a table somewhere quieter in the back, and write or read. So, after dropping my car off at Andy’s, I headed to the cafe, with my black leather book bag swung across my shoulder and within it some writing paper, a few pens, and some books. The cafe was no more than two blocks away, and, once there, I intended to spend the next three or four hours at work on a poem until Andy fixed my car.

When I arrived, I was happy to find at least half of the patrons sunning themselves in chairs out front. Sometimes, there were so many people inside that there were no empty tables. When this happened, I would have to go to some other place that I was not as fond of, but today I had my choice of seats. After ordering a pot of tea, I planted myself at a table in the very back, just off the corridor leading to the restrooms. 

I took out the writing paper, the pens, and the books, and set them on the table. The writing paper and the pens were, of course, for the writing I intended to do; the books were for reading, just in case the writing went badly, or I grew tired. I always brought the books along, hoping I would not need them but glad they were there should the need arise, for reading was a kind of consolation to me. It made me feel that my time—which I hated to waste, being something of a Puritan at heart—was, nevertheless, well spent while I had been unable to use it for writing.

To get myself started, I jotted down: 

as though a droplet in sunlight

light sits upon the leaves,

as though after a downpour,

the sun shines upon the trees

as though a spot a dryer’s towel missed,

light sits upon a trunk

as though it had just been washed

a red car shines.

These were the two parts of the poem I had figured out already. While at the cafe, I was

hoping to flesh out a third part that, added to the first two, would make them something more; because as the poem stood, it seemed to me as incomplete as an outline that had an (a) and a (b) but no (c).

I began to write and did so steadily for about ten to fifteen minutes. In that time, I felt myself sinking further and further into the poem, the paper, the white tabletop, and becoming less and less conscious of the snatches of conversation and the clanking of porcelain about me. 

I had yet to reach the other shore, that mythical place where the muse dwells, lying  nymph-like upon beaches of sand; but I was upon the bridge and, as I crossed, could hear the music of the language coming from the other side. Then, it was as if that music had been coming from a needle suddenly snatched from a spinning record: Someone was standing too close. I looked up.

A young Black man whom I knew by face, but not by name, was staring down at me. We often exchanged greetings when passing on the streets. I would be walking along when I would spot his dark face ahead, conspicuous among the mostly white Burlington crowd, and he, I was certain, would see my dark face in the opposite direction. When we were within a few feet of one another, I or he would say, “Hey, Brother, how’re you doing?” And before passing, each going his own way, he or I would reply, “Just fine—hanging in there.” 

There was one such time that we passed in the streets that I was quite fond of remembering.  It occurred on a cold, snowy day that I was downtown running errands. I was walking north on one side of the street and he, south, on the other. Wearing gloves, boots, a knitted cap, and a goose-down  ski jacket, he was as appropriately dressed as I for the weather, but, despite his efforts, he still looked visibly cold; and when he saw me walking on the other side of the street, and that I was as defenseless against the Burlington winters as was he, he shouted, “Cold, Brother—ain’t it?”

“You’ve got that right,” I shot back. Then, we both laughed aloud as we each went our own way, the cold, snowy streets ringing with our earthy cachinnations.

We laughed at ourselves that day because we had guessed the other was not from Burlington, and as such, we both were still trying to adjust to the weather of the place. Our guess that the other was not from Burlington was an easy one, for there were few young Black men who actually were. On the whole, the young Black men in town were from somewhere else and, broadly speaking, had come to Burlington for one of two reasons, though, to be sure, there were those of us who had come for both.

There were those who, wooed by the University of Vermont desperate to diversify its student body, had come for an education; and there were those who had come from places like New York, Boston, Providence, and New Haven, hoping to find a fresh start in Burlington, a picturesque New England college town on a lake.

I was pretty sure the young Black man staring down at me had come for the latter reason and had surmised I had come for the former; and it was our different reasons for being in Burlington that perhaps best explain why we waved to each other whenever we crossed paths but had never stopped to introduce ourselves. 

It seemed that he had suddenly decided to do just that when I looked up and found him staring over me. Being quite comfortable with our habit of merely waving and each going our own way, I was not so sure that his approach now was such a good idea. This change in his behavior should have been a tip-off. It seems so obvious now that, with him, something had gone terribly wrong.

He began speaking loudly and rapidly about how he had been jumped by some young white men. I sat thinking, in Burlington? No way. He stared down into my face as he spoke but was not really looking at me. He looked at the three or four men—however many there had been—that had emerged from darkness and surrounded him.

He continued speaking, now about the hospital, his recovery, and how he had taken his offenders to court. Still, he was not really looking at me but into the faces of his offenders during the trial and afterward, when the verdict had been read and he had won. He finally looked at me for the first time, exclaiming with much bravado, “With the settlement, I am out of here.” And he was still looking at me when he said, as though in explanation of his decision to leave, “The white folks here are crazy.”

“The white folks here are crazy, the white folks here are crazy,” he kept repeating with the emphasis of someone who thinks he’s making a point, original and profound.  He would lean in toward my face to say it, then lean back, nodding his chin silently as if to say “uhm, uhm,” and he could not have looked any more serious than if he had been Noah warning a fellow tribesman, days before the Great Flood, that the world would end in three days.

But for all his earnestness, I did not feel that he believed whites here were insane. Rather, I felt he was only saying what he did (loud enough, mind you, for the patrons sitting nearby to overhear) because he was (and would be for some time) still hurting—and, out of an unconscious need, was now striking back.

Read the rest of Singletary's story and more from other Black voices in the anthology Black Butterfly.

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An Air Force brat with Southern roots, Albert Christer Singletary holds a BA in Afro-American Studies from Brown University and a Master of Social Work from Washington University. Largely self-taught as a writer, he benefited from the guidance of the late poet Michael S. Harper. Singletary has spent many years working overseas as a clinical social worker, with extended stays in Germany and Japan. When stateside, he resides in Mystic, Connecticut. His writing reflects his efforts to understand and beautify his experiences.