ElethiaA CERTAIN PERVERSE EXPERIENCE shaped Elethia’s life, and made it possible for it to be true that she carried with her at all times a small apothecary jar of ashes.
There was in the town where she was born a man whose ancestors had owned a large plantation on which everything under the sun was made or grown. There had been many slaves, and though slavery no longer existed, this grandson of former slaveowners held a quaint proprietary point of view where colored people were concerned. He adored them, of course. Not in the present--it went without saying--but at that time, stopped, just on the outskirts of his memory: his grandfather's time.
This man, whom Elethia never saw, opened a locally famous restaurant on a busy street near the center of town He called it “Old Uncle Albert’s.” In the window of the restaurant was a stuffed likeness of Uncle Albert himself, a small brown dummy of waxen skin and glittery black eyes. His lips were intensely smiling and his false teeth shone. He carried a covered tray in one hand, raised level with his shoulder, and over his other arm was draped a white napkin.
Black people could not eat at Uncle Albert’s, though they worked, of course, in the kitchen. Bun on Saturday afternoons a crowd of them would gather to look at “Uncle Albert” and discuss how near to the real person the dummy looked. Only the very old people remembered Albert Porter, and their eyesight was no better than their memory. Still there was a comfort somehow in knowing that Albert's likeness was here before them daily and that if he smiled as a dummy in a fashion he was not known to do as a man, well, perhaps both memory and eyesight were wrong.
The old people appeared grateful to the rich man who owned the restaurant for giving them a taste of vicarious fame. They could pass by the gleaming window where Uncle Albert stood, seemingly in the act of sprinting forward with his tray, and know that though niggers were not allowed in the front door, ole Albert was already inside, and looking mighty pleased about it, too.
For Elethia, the fascination was in Uncle Albert’s fingernails. She wondered how his creator had got them on. She wondered also about the white hair that shone so brightly under the lights. One summer she worked as a salad girl in the restaurant’s kitchen, and it was she who discovered the truth about Uncle Albert. He was not a dummy; he was stuffed. Like a bird, like a moose’s head, like a giant bass. He was stuffed.
One night after the restaurant was closed someone broke in and stole nothing but Uncle Albert. It was Elethia and her friends, boys who were in her class and who called her “Thia.” Boys who bought Thunderbird and shared it with her. Boys who laughed at her jokes so much they hardly remembered she was also cute. Her tight buddies. They carefully burned Uncle Albert to ashes in the incinerator of their high school, and each of them kept a bottle of his ashes. And for each of them what they knew and their reaction to what they knew was profound.
The experience undercut whatever solid foundation Elethia had assumed she had. She became secretive, wary, looking over her shoulder at the slightest noise. She haunted the museums of any city in which she found herself, looking, usually, at the remains of Indians, for they were plentiful everywhere she went. She discovered some of the Indian warriors and maidens in the museums were also real, stuffed people, painted and wigged and robed like figures in the Rue Morgue. There were so many, in fact, that she could not possibly steal and burn them all. Besides, she did not know if these figures--with their valiant glass eyes--would wish to be burned.
About Uncle Albert she felt she knew.

What kind of man was Uncle Albert?
Well, the old folks said, he wasn’t nobody’s uncle and wouldn’t sit still for nobody to call him that, either.
Why, said another old-timer, I recalls the time they hung a boy’s privates on a post at the end of the street where all the black folks shopped, just to scare us all, un understand, and Albert Porter was the one took ‘em down and buried ‘em. Us never did find the rest of the boy though, it was just like always--they would throw you in the river with a big old green log tied to you, and down to the bottom you sunk.
He continued:
Albert was born in slavery and he remembered that his mama and daddy didn’t know nothing about slavey’d done ended for near ‘bout ten years, the boss man kept then so ignorant of the law, you understand. So he was a mad so-an’-so when he found out. They used to beat him severe trying to make him forget the past and grin and act like a nigger. (Whenever you saw somebody acting like a nigger, Albert said, you could be sure he seriously disremembered his past.) But he never would. Never would work in the big house as head servant, neither--always broke up stuff. The master at that time was always going around pinching him too. Looks like he hated Albert more than anything--but he never would let him get a job anywhere else. And Albert never would leave home. Too stubborn.
Stubborn, yes. My land, another one said. That’s why it do seem strange to see that dummy that sposed to be ole Albert with his mouth open. All them teeth. Hell, all Albert’s teeth was knocked out before he was grown.

Elethia went away to college and her friends went into the army because they were poor and that was the way things were. They discovered Uncle Alberts all over the world. Elethia was especially disheartened to find Uncle Alberts in her textbooks, in the newspapers and on t.v.
Everywhere she looked there was an Uncle Albert (and many Aunt Albertas, it goes without saying.)
But she had her jar of ashes, the old-timers’ memories written down, and her friends who wrote that in the army they were learning skills that would get them through more than a plate glass window.
And she was careful that, no matter how compelling the hype, Uncle Alberts, in her own mind, were not permitted to exist.