After the boy in the fedora finishes, two other white students speak, and then the microphone stands unattended. None of the Black students move. At first Claire thinks their silence is hesitation, but everyone remains still long beyond awkwardness—ten minutes, exactly. One by one the Black students stand. They hand their note cards to the Dean of Students, and then they leave. The Dean turns over card after card after card; all of them are blank. Handfuls of white students begin to stand, gather their things, and file out behind them. Robert is scribbling a note.
Claire has come prepared for an argument. She does not know how to resist this enveloping silence. It is strategic. It hums in her head. But the room is still half full. The microphone is still on. There are three reporters from the student paper, and ten from national news outlets. There are still ten feet between her and the echoing sound of her own voice, telling her she can still be anybody she wants to.
Alcatraz
Everyone had told me that Alcatraz was nothing but a tourist trap, but I was desperate that summer for anything that would give my mother a sense of closure, and it seemed fortuitous that the prison that had opened all the wounds in the first place was right in the middle of the water I could see from the window of my new apartment. I hadn’t come to the Bay on purpose—a string of coincidences and a life I hadn’t known I’d wanted until I got there brought me to Oakland. Still, almost since the day I had arrived, it seemed like the only thing keeping me from the island was deliberate avoidance. I felt like I’d gotten it backward. Everyone else I’d met who’d come to California from the East Coast was running away from something, and I’d gone and gotten so close to the sting of the past that it sometimes seemed like I could touch it.
I had come west to work at an experimental after-school theater and dance therapy program for children who had been abused. A friend I’d gone to college with spent months recruiting me, sending me literature about the program: smiling children’s faces, photographs of the Bay and the Pacific. I was sold on the adventure, on the postcard-perfect water’s specific shade of blue, but by the time I said yes, she’d decided to move to Texas to begin a PhD program. I went anyway—I was twenty-four and convinced that the life in which I made some critically important difference to everyone around me could start on my command, that the world was only waiting to know what I asked of it. I was anxious and exhausted all the time then, but I remember those days now as being filled with optimism, a sense of possibility.
The organization’s budget was so strained that our supervisors worked for free some months when we were between grants. I made ends meet tutoring and doing SAT prep for kids in Berkeley and Marin County. Two of our college student volunteers quit after working at the center for less than a week—one of them had her cell phone stolen and the other was cursed out by four different kids, in three different languages. My own first week on the job, a child had threatened to stab me with a pencil, but by and large I loved the work I did, the crayon drawings and earnest thank-you letters I got to pin to my wall, the way kids who used to greet me with skittishness at best, open contempt and hostility at worst, started running to hug me when I walked through the door.
* * *
—
My mother had never been to the West Coast and didn’t like that I was there. We were East Coast people and this coast had done us wrong, almost kept us from existing. My great-grandfather had done time here—had been kept in the basement of Alcatraz, and been told every day that when he was dead they would feed him to the rats. He was eighteen then, finally of legal age to be in the army, except he’d been in it three years already thanks to a falsified birth certificate. It was 1920 and Alcatraz was still a military prison, infamous not for its gangsters but among would-be deserters. They were still building the parts of the prison that would later be immortalized, but it was already enough of a prison to be Charles Sullivan’s private hell, the one he never really left, the one my mother, God bless her, was still trying to redeem.
My mother was born nearly four decades later, born at all because after two years, the army, with the help of his appointed lawyer, admitted their mistake. They cleared him of murder and told him he was free to go. He took the long way back to the Bronx—spent years trying to make himself homes in inhospitable places—but when he finally arrived back in New York, he married Louise, the first woman who took pity on him, and they had two children, the younger of whom was my grandmother. I never met her; she left a few months after my mother—a brown girl in a white family—was born. When my mother was six, a neighbor told her to her face that her own mother was too ashamed to stay in the house and claim her. After she came home crying, Charlie Sullivan pricked his finger and then hers and pressed them together and said they had the same blood now and whatever she was he was too, but my mother was too young to have heard of the one-drop rule and the intention was lost on her until years later. My mother called her grandparents Grammy and Papa: Grammy was firmly assigned the role of grandparent because they all chose to believe her mother might return someday, but Papa was her everything. When she was thirteen, her Grammy died, and my mother belatedly came to appreciate what she had done while alive—squirreled away money before Papa spent it, saw to it that the rent was paid and the heat was on and everyone in the house had clean clothes and three meals a day, and that her husband stayed sober enough to work, except when he had the prison nightmares, and had to be kept drunk enough not to wake the neighbors with screams.
At eighteen, my mother left home for college. She only went as far as Jersey, but her grandfather was dead within two years of her going. It wouldn’t occur to me until well into my adulthood, most of it spent in California, a full country away from her, to question my mother’s conviction that the former event had caused the latter, or to wonder what she wanted me to do with a cautionary tale in which the caution was against growing up.
* * *
—
By the time she came to visit me in Oakland, my mother had been involved in some form of litigation or negotiation with the U.S. government for the better part of twenty years. Her latest calculations—which she had me double-check annually, adding the accrued interest—concluded that the U.S. government owed us $227,035.87. She wanted the number exact so that we did not seem unreasonable. I was a kid when she started the complaint process, first with letters to the Board for Correction of Military records, the same board her grandfather had been writing letters to for years before he died. This was right after my parents’ divorce, though I’m not sure it’s fair to imply the correlation. Before the divorce they had fights about the fact that she wouldn’t sell any of Papa’s old belongings, or dispose of the boxes of paperwork, but it wasn’t those fights or any other that finally broke them up so much as the way they had less and less to say to one another when they were happy. With my father out of the house, my mother threw herself into a mission to clear her grandfather’s name, to finish in her lifetime what he hadn’t been able to finish in his. There were no adults around to talk her out of it, only me. She asked me what I would do if someone told a lie about her, asked if she died with it still written down somewhere, whether I would ever give up fighting to prove the truth. I knew that the only correct answer was no.
Her odds of succeeding were low. When she started the process, it had been fifteen years since Papa’s death, and more than seventy since the conviction. Still, there was a logic to her argument—the discharge paperwork she kept carbon copies of in our attic said he’d been pardoned, and she thought it would be easy, from there, to have his dishonorable discharge changed to an honorable one. It didn’t make sense, she reasoned, that if he’d been cleared of the crime he was accused of, that the government should consider him dishonorable. As years passed without action or response, she was buoyed by occasional signs of what she saw as precedent on her side. In 1999, Lt. Henry Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, had been given a posthumous presidential pardon, more than a h
undred years after he was falsely charged with embezzlement in a scandal designed to push him out of the service. My mother had bought a bottle of champagne and shared it with me while we watched the official pardon ceremony, where descendants of the late Lt. Flipper sat on a podium with Bill Clinton and Colin Powell and received a formal apology.
“Do you see what happens,” my mother had asked me, “when you don’t give up on making things right?”
But what I’d seen happen—before that brief moment of optimism and especially in the five years since—was my mother becoming increasingly dependent on an outcome that seemed less and less likely. She taught elementary school, but all of her holiday breaks, half days, and weekends went into the litigation, into letters to the army, the president, her congressman. Not counting our hourly labor, my mother must have already spent almost half of the $220,000 we were theoretically owed on court filing fees, photocopies, and certified letters. When I had lived at home, my spare time went into organizing the files, photocopying important documents, holding my breath. Two months after I moved to Oakland, the Supreme Court denied my mother’s request that they hear her appeal against the VA. My mother called from the other side of the country, sounding defeated. There was nobody left to argue with.
“Papa will never have his name back,” she said.
“You know who he was,” I said, but it didn’t seem to comfort her any.
After I got off the phone with her, I’d felt helpless, and finally booked a reservation on one of the Alcatraz tour boats. When I got out to the docks at my appointed time, I couldn’t bring myself to actually get on the boat. I’d milled around Fisherman’s Wharf instead, ducking out of tourists’ snapshots and trying to name the source of my unease. I’d watched the water for a while—the same fierce, unwavering blue of it that I felt had called me here—and ended up stopping at one of the gift shops on the pier and buying my mother a poster commemorating the Native American takeover of the island. Alcatraz Indians, it said on the front, under a cartoonish picture of something half man, half eagle. I thought it might be easier to remember that this could also be a place of freedom, I scrawled on the back. She never mentioned receiving it.
Reticence was not my mother’s nature, and when, in the weeks that followed, she had less and less to say about anything, I panicked. She was still a few weeks away from the start of the school year. I insisted she come out to visit me. I wanted to see for myself how bad things were with her.
She arrived twenty pounds lighter than when I’d seen her a few months ago. My mother, who lived in discount denim and told me once that she found mascara unseemly, was wearing makeup and designer heels. If I hadn’t known she didn’t believe in mood-altering drugs, I would have taken her for heavily medicated. She was dressed like an actress auditioning for the part of my mother in a movie. A different daughter might have been reassured, but I looked at my mother and saw a person directing all of her energy toward being outwardly composed because the inside was a lost cause.
“How are you doing?” I asked her once we’d gotten back from the airport and settled her into my apartment.
“How do you think?” she asked.
I offered to sleep on the couch and give her the bedroom, but she refused, and most nights passed out on the couch by ten, after watching syndicated sitcoms and having two glasses of wine. When I’d imagined her having more time for normalcy when the case was over, I hadn’t imagined this. Nothing I suggested excited or distracted her. When pressed, she made increasingly bizarre plans for the future. She was moving in with me, never mind that she had a house full of things on the other side of the country. She was moving to France, never mind that she didn’t speak French. She was joining the Peace Corps, never mind that she was in her late forties and had never so much as been camping because she didn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily separate themselves from reliable indoor plumbing.
It was probably my mother’s focus on unlikely and unreasonable futures that gave me the idea that I could still fix something for her. I found Nancy Morton, who was technically my mother’s first cousin, and, besides me, her last living relative. Nancy was Charlie Sullivan’s granddaughter too, and my mother had not seen her since his funeral. The family’s failure to bridge their divide in her generation was on her list of ways Papa’s legacy was being dishonored.
I’d already made arrangements with Nancy and booked the boat tickets by the time I explained the plan to my mother. She was wary. She had tried to reach out to her cousins when the litigation first began and her letter had come back marked return to sender from the address she had for Nancy’s older brother.
“They’re still your family,” I insisted.
“They are not my family,” my mother said. “We’re just related.”
I’d finally convinced her that the whole trip was what her grandfather would have wanted for us, because I had her own words on my side. Almost immediately, I had doubts about the brilliance of my plan, but it was too late. I’d invited a group of practical strangers to meet us on a boat, and now here we were—instant family, just add water.
* * *
• • •
It was uncharacteristically hot for the Bay Area in August. The air felt thick and stifling like the East Coast summers I had left behind. Nancy Morton kept pulling an economy-size bottle of sunscreen out of her giant straw handbag and slathering gobs of it on her already reddening skin. Her husband, Ken, kept staring at his sneakers. He had barely spoken since we’d all done handshakes and introductions at the pier. Actually, he had spoken exactly six words since then, those words being “Kelli, put your damn clothes on,” when their younger daughter had taken off her damp T-shirt and begun walking around in her bikini top. Their older daughter, Sarah, was twenty-three—we shared a birthday, though a year apart—and looked as embarrassed by her family as I was.
This was only the third time that my mother and Nancy had seen each other. When they were small children, Nancy and her brother had been brought to their grandparents’ house for monthly visits, on the condition that my mother was out of the house. By six, my mother understood that she was Black and her family was not, and this was why the rule existed, but her understanding was impersonal and matter-of-fact; it was a rule like gravity, one from a higher authority. From the window of the neighbor’s apartment where she’d been sent, my mother could see Nancy on the front steps of their grandparents’ building. She was a small girl with a long blond braid hanging down her back; it brushed against the dingy ground as Nancy did her best to flatten a series of bottle caps with a rock. My mother was generally obedient, but her curiosity and her nagging sense that other children weren’t sent away when their families came by got the best of her; while the neighbor who was supposed to be keeping an eye on her watched her stories in the bedroom, my mother went downstairs and peeked through the glass of the front door to get a better look at Nancy, who finally looked up and pressed her face against the other side of the glass to look back. My mother opened the door.
“Why were you watching me?” Nancy asked.
“We’re cousins,” said my mother. “And your hair looks pretend.”
“Is not,” said Nancy. “And I don’t have cousins.”
“Do too. I live here. With our Grammy and Papa.”
The names meant nothing to Nancy, who called them Grandpa and Grandma Sullivan, but my mother offered as evidence the locket around her neck, the one with her grandparents’ pictures sealed in it. It was convincing enough for Nancy, who shrieked and hugged her. Nancy offered her a flattened bottle cap, and when my mother said it looked like a coin, they got the idea to play store, make-believe buying and selling flowers and dirt from the backyard and the clothing and jewelry they were wearing. They were absorbed enough not to notice that Nancy’s parents had emerged from the apartment and were on their way out until after Nancy’s mother opened the front door and saw them playing together.
> She screamed her daughter’s name and grabbed Nancy by her pigtail, pulling her by her hair down the block to their car, Nancy’s neck straining unnaturally backward the whole way. My mother, afraid Nancy’s mother would come back for it, clutched the bottle cap in her hand so tightly that it sliced her skin. Nancy cried hysterically as her mother shoved her into the back seat and slammed the door, without a word to or from her husband, who took his son’s hand, followed his wife and screaming daughter to the car, and started the engine without so much as saying goodbye. My mother watched them drive away like that, her own palm still bleeding. Nancy’s tear-streaked face was pressed against the rear window. It was the last time her uncle brought his family over, the last time my mother saw him aside from his parents’ funerals. For years she told and retold Papa the story of the game, as if she could find the detail that had made it go wrong, until she was old enough to understand that she was the detail, the wrong thing. Someday, Papa told her, all this foolishness will be done, and all my grandchildren and their children will celebrate together. But whatever it would take to make someday happen, it did not seem to be happening in her house.
“You have no idea how much you take for granted,” my mother told me the first time I’d brought a white friend home to play. But she was wrong about that—you take nothing for granted when the price of it is etched across the face of the person you love the most, when you are born into a series of loans and know you will never be up to the cost of the debt.
The Office of Historical Corrections Page 7