And there came at last Vernor Matheius's voice above me. And it was a voice of sobriety, and not reproach; a voice still lowered with emotion; a raw voice, a voice of hurt and dismay. "Anellia, is that you?" A pause, a beat. My heart continued to beat calmly with the certainty of what I would do, and what I would not do; what I would not ever do again; and I didn't turn to look up the steep steps at Vernor Matheius. I heard him mutter, "Jesus!" I heard him descend the stairs slowly, like a man just awakened from sleep; he was breathing quickly, audibly. When on the step above me he paused, I had a childish fear he would kick me; and very possibly that thought ran through his head, too; but he said, "Anellia, you shouldn't be here. You'll only be hurt." I might have said I've already been hurt. But I said nothing. Vernor stepped down to sit beside me, with a sigh; a sigh like a shudder; stone cold sober the man was, and shaky; I had to ease aside to make room for him, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for us to sit together here in the dark, in the rain; Vernor lit a cigarette and expelled smoke through his nostrils, and after a moment said, thoughtfully, "I don't have a black soul. Because I don't have a black soul, I don't have any soul at all." I said, "Vernor, I thought you didn't believe in 'soul.' I thought you didn't believe in personal identity, history." He said, "I don't. The way a colorblind person doesn't believe in color because he hasn't experienced it." There was bemusement in this remark, and melancholy; a melancholy I'd never heard in Vernor Matheius before. I said, "You have a family, I guess? Young children?" and he said, "No longer," and I said, "What do you mean, 'no longer'?" and he shrugged and said nothing; and my voice quavered with indignation I hadn't known I would feel, since the initial feeling I'd had, seeing the big-boned smiling woman in the snapshot, had been jealousy, "You left your wife and children? Left where? Where are they? How could you do such a thing, Vernor?" and Vernor said quietly, "It's none of your concern who or what I've left behind me or who or what I am. Or what you or anyone else expects of me." And I said nothing, for this was so; this statement of fact could not be contested; I said nothing, but I didn't acquiesce; and Vernor sucked at his cigarette and released clouds of stinging smoke which was the smell of guilt; and it crossed my mind that I would not miss this: the smoke, the stink of cigarettes, my poor father's smoking habit, my father's mysterious dying, the perverse romance of addiction; I would not miss this at all. We watched a car pass in the rain, it must've been a police squad car with a red light on its roof, driving fast along Chambers splashing through puddles; there were rivulets of rainwater rushing down Chambers Street, the steep hill from the university hospital complex. And at last Vernor said in a flat voice, a voice from which all pretension had drained, "My ancestors from Dahomey were tribal people, they were captured and brought to North America as slaves in the 1780's; but they'd been slave traders themselves. They'd captured and sold other black tribes as slaves. This was a secret imparted to me by my mother's grandfather, a minister, when I was twenty-one years old. This was our handed-down secret, handed to me. That my ancestors, his ancestors, had sold other black Africans, other tribes, to white European slavers." I turned now to look at Vernor; I looked at him in astonishment; for this was a man out of whose mouth revelations emerged, and always unexpected. I had believed I could predict him at last, and yet I could not have predicted this; never could I have predicted the sadness in his voice, and the resignation. As if, for him too, something had ended. Yet there came his wry humor, his sidelong grin and squint as if (after all) he and I were allies in this predicament; this problem; as if Vernor Matheius were an intellectual puzzle we might contemplate together as colleagues and attempt to solve; like those students of philosophy devoted to logical analysis; enjoined in a singular quest for truth which is the philosopher's life's work. He said bitterly, "But why judge them? My putative ancestors? They were human beings and like all human beings they were cruel, exploitative, xenophobic; they were primitive people in a tribal society in which members of other tribes aren't perceived as fully human; you can kill them, you can sell them into slavery, you can practice genocide like the Germans of the Third Reich, and someone will absolve you—it's 'natural,' it's 'Nature'; it's instinct. So my ancestors sold their brother and sister Africans into slavery and they flourished for a while until it came their turn to be slaves. White men's trading ships sailed from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa and traded textiles, arms, and other cargo for black men and women; the ship sailed across the Atlantic to Jamaica where the black men and women were traded for sugar, which was brought back to England to be sold; for what would the English do without sugar in their tea and pastries; what would the white man's civilization be without sugar in their bloodstream; again the ship sailed from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa and loaded up with black men and women; and so on, and so forth; it was a prosperous business, these were boom times, everyone flourished except those with the bad luck to be branded 'slaves.' " Vernor spoke with the mildest irony; this was a recitation of facts, of history; yet every syllable was damning; every syllable was an outcry of pain. Hesitantly I touched his arm, and said, "Vernor, you aren't your ancestors any more than I am my ancestors," even as my voice faltered, for maybe this wasn't true; and Vernor said practicably, "Then I'm no one. I don't know who the hell I am." I said, "But why should it matter?
Why—now?" For hadn't we faith in pure rationality, pure logic and language pruned of all sentiment, all tribal history; wasn't the dream of philosophy possible, even now? Vernor said, for even at such a moment Vernor Matheius was one to have the final word, "Yes, why should it matter? Yet it does." How strange to be sitting beside this man on these wooden stairs smelling faintly of rot, at such a time; gazing out toward the rain; a couple seated together gazing out into the rain; they live upstairs and have come outside for fresh air, the man smoking and the woman seated close beside him; a harsh, sibilant rain blowing along the pavement beneath streetlights, with a look of antic excitement. Another time we heard the remote sonorous tolling of the Music School bell tower; more chimes than I could count, it must have been midnight. How strange, how uncanny and how wonderful, what elation flooded my small gnarled heart on the eve of my twentieth birthday as I sat beside Vernor Matheius on the stairs at the rear of the shabby stucco building at 1183 Chambers Street, Syracuse, New York on the rain-swept night of June 18, 1963.
If you'd driven by, and noticed that couple, wondering who they were, they were us.
* * *
III.
The Way Out
1
To show the fly the way out of the bottle? Break the bottle.
There was the shock of my brother Hendrick's call. One evening at dusk in June 1965. When I was staying in a rented cabin near Burlington, Vermont; living alone for the summer, immersed in my writing. The telephone rang and there was my brother Hendrick!— with news so unexpected, at first I couldn't grasp what he said.
Hendrick's deep gravelly voice and nasal upstate New York accent. Jarring to my ear, for I spoke with him rarely; I spoke with my brothers rarely; you might have thought that I was estranged from them, or that they'd cast me off, and forgotten me. And so my brother Hendrick's voice frightened me as if he were calling me to account for something I'd failed to do, some family obligation I'd failed to meet in my desperate flight from Strykersville one day to be construed as my career, my destiny. My voice went small and vulnerable, stammering—"Yes, Hendrick? W-What?" Not absorbing what Hendrick was saying with such urgency as if the distance between us, approximately three hundred miles, were compounded by a distance in time; for Hendrick and I hadn't seen each other since our grandmother's funeral and burial in the Lutheran cemetery eighteen months before; and in my confusion as I stood in a doorway of the rented and unfamiliar cabin at the edge of a small lake I struggled to recall Hendrick's adult face for his boy's face had vanished, I knew, it wouldn't be to that brash careless good-looking face I must appeal but to a face matured and thickened about the jaws, Hendrick now thirty years old and though the yo
ungest of my three elder brothers no longer young; my only brother not yet married, my only brother not yet a father, yet Hendrick was mysterious and inaccessible to me as the others; at the time of my grandmother's funeral his eyes had drifted onto me, with baffled affection, perhaps not affection but a subtle resentment in which there dwelt some small measure of admiration, for Hendrick believed it was unfair, God-damned unfair, that I'd been the one to leave Strykersville on a scholarship to a highly regarded university while he, smart as I, maybe smarter, certainly better at math, and as deserving, had had to work at demeaning jobs to support himself through school; he worked now at General Electric in Troy, New York, and the few times we'd met in our new, awkward disguises as adults I'd felt the weight of his brotherly disapproval, his envy and dislike a hand shoving at me, backing me from him, I'd seen those mica eyes even as he forced a smile for his younger sister, I'd wanted to plead with him Please! please don't hate me, Hendrick, our lives are only luck. But I knew that such a remark would only embarrass him, as he sounded for some reason embarrassed now, and incensed, over the phone—"Jesus! What a trick. When we'd thought all these years he was dead."
"Hendrick, what?" I must have heard, but I hadn't heard. I was having difficulty getting my breath. "Who—is dead?"
"'Was dead. Turns out, after all, he isn't!'
"Who?"
"The old man, who the hell else? Who else was dead, whose body we never saw buried? Who else for Christ's sake I'd be calling you about?"
He meant who else, what else, had the two of us in common, except our father? The burden of his memory?
Otherwise, Hendrick and I were strangers.
Faintly I asked, "Our f-father is—alive?"
"Only just barely. A nurse or someone, a woman, called. This time he's dying for real."
"But he's alive? Our father?"'
He'd been assumed dead for years. He'd disappeared into the West. I couldn't remember how my brothers and I had referred to the man, forever mysterious in absence, who'd been our father. Through the years of my growing-up. And my brothers, my tall beautiful brothers, so often absent from me, too. We hadn't said Father, I was certain. We hadn't said Daddy, Dad.
Hendrick said, "Right. He's living in a place called Crescent, Utah. About two hundred miles south of Salt Lake City. He was in a hospital in Salt Lake, now he's been discharged. They let him out to die by his request. I didn't speak with him myself, for all I know he can't talk. Just this woman. Who she is, I don't know. Maybe they're married. Y' know, he's fifty-six? He's dying of some kind of cancer." This was said in the tone of voice in which a minute before Hendrick had muttered the word trick.
"Cancer!"
When I'd lifted the ringing phone I'd had no expectation of hearing alarming news. Few people knew where I was, few people had any need to call me. If I'd had to guess who the caller might be I'd have guessed it was a wrong number. Who? I'm sorry, no. There's no one by that name at this number.
Hendrick was speaking rapidly now, wanting to end the conversation. Maybe he'd become emotional after all; or maybe the subject was distasteful to him. He would supply me with the telephone number of the woman who'd contacted him, her name and address in Crescent, Utah, and I could call her myself; no further information about my father because Hendrick had no further information, and wished none. I was fumbling with a pencil, trying to write on a scrap of paper, blinking back tears. Alive! Our father was alive. He'd never died. It would be one of the profound shocks of my adult life as the news of his sudden and unexplained death had been one of the profound shocks of my adolescence. You could see why Hendrick had said trick for there seemed to be an element of trickery in such shocks, and in trickery an element of cruelty.
Behind my brother's hurried voice there came a faint, querulous cry that might have been a child, and a sound of coughing. Was Hendrick living with someone? What was Hendrick's life, unknown to me? Of my three brothers Hendrick was the closest to me in age yet he was seven years older; an immense gulf, in childhood; I had no idea what his life was like now, and could not ask. At my grandmother's funeral Hendrick had stood tall and somber and frowning, apart even from his brothers, with that subtle air of resentment as if the elderly woman's death, like her life, had had very little to do with him; with his own inner, private life; my grandmother had not been a woman of much sentiment or feeling, she'd loved only her son, the man who was our father; in loving her son, she'd exhausted her capacity for emotion; he'd broken her heart, possibly; he'd broken all our hearts; no one else had the power to break my grandmother's heart, and no one else would have wished to have that power. At the funeral my brother Hendrick had watched me covertly; I'd felt uneasy under his gaze, and at the same time defiant; for what right had he to judge me; if I'd seemed to have excelled in a world he had been barred from entering, how was that my fault; I refused to be made to feel guilty by another's envy, as I could not feel pride or superiority for such a reason; I could not form any judgment of myself based upon my family's judgment of me, for they hardly knew me; my brother's unsmiling eyes, my brother's stone-colored eyes like my own, and like our father's. When Hendrick smiled, as sometimes he did, it was a quick teasing flash of a smile and you saw the possibility of warmth in him, and trust.
Before you could respond, the smile vanished.
How badly now I wanted to say, "Oh, Hendrick, why did he do this to us, do you think? Please don't hang up, talk to me."
How badly I wanted to say, "Would you come "with me to Utah, Hendrick? To see him? Before it's too late? We could drive out to-gether." How badly I wanted to plead, "You won't let me go alone, will you?"
But I knew what the answer would be. Instead I thanked Hendrick, and hang up the phone.
2
Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short.
The last time I'd seen my father, that sudden rough embrace. The touch of a man who hadn't touched me in years. I would remember it for days, for years.
Four years ago. When he'd come to my high school graduation.
The shock of seeing him there in the audience! For I hadn't known he would be coming, I hadn't known he was in Strykersville. (He'd arrived the previous night, staying at a motel in town.) The prevailing fact of my father during my years of growing up was simple, blunt: when the man was home, he was home; when not, not. To be in one place for long, he'd have to be dead my brothers joked of him. But there unexpectedly he was in the high school auditorium. In a white shirt open at the collar, in matching coat and trousers. His hair, what remained of it, slicked back on his head; his nose flattened, bulbous; his jaws unshaven. And I, the girl valedictorian, in a black academic gown of light wool like a nightgown and a pasteboard-cloth black cap, its tassel swinging dangerously near my left eye. At the age of eighteen I more resembled a precocious thirteen-year-old boy; one of those small-boned ferret-faced individuals who ascends to a stage, a podium, confronting an almost palpable wave of resistance in an audience; a polite, subdued, yet perceptible resistance; who is both terrified yet fearless, borne aloft like Icarus by a mere voice, mere words, the very audacity of performance and a passion to utter something not yet said that would not otherwise be said except in this way. And the audience is startled into listening, and startled into applause. And afterward the doubt Did it really happen? Did they really listen, and applaud? And what does applause mean? After the ceremony ended, in a haze of smiles and handshakes and congratulations I'd looked around to see him headed for me, my father who was taller, larger, more physically present than any other man in the room; my father with the manner of an upright, just slightly swaying steer; unshaven, flush-faced with drink, and his eyes bloodshot yet gleaming with a combative paternal pride. He'd grabbed me and hugged me, breathing his hot-fumey breath into my face, advising me in a careless loud voice Don't let no fuckers out there sell you short.
It's advice I have tried to remember. Even when I've betrayed it.
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