Around the time I turned fourteen, my father died. Capable as she was, my mother could not bear life without a man, and three short months after my father passed away a small tyrant named Wendell had taken up residence on my father’s old La-Z-Boy. My mother never took the trouble to marry Wendell, but over the years she began referring to him as my “step-daddy,” a label I more or less accepted despite the fact I never much liked or respected the man. Wendell was a mean-spirited individual whose face was defined by the kind of pinched features that made all who glanced at him do a kind of double take, thinking he had just tasted something bitter. This perception was not wholly inaccurate, for the bitter thing Wendell had tasted was life. His perpetual mood was one of deep aggrievement. In his telling of it, the world was against him and was hell-bent on keeping him down at all costs. He was short and balding—he wore a soiled gray newsboy cap to conceal this latter fact—but he had the kind of wiry, intensely strong musculature that comes from a lifetime of exerting one’s body out of pure spite. I will grant he possessed a sizable store of raw intelligence, but his ignorance coupled with his stubborn hatred of educated men meant this mean, sprightly intelligence bucked around like a wild bull in a very small pen.
Being smart only made Wendell angrier about the bitterness of life, and he used his cunning mostly to exact revenge on those he perceived had slighted him. Unfortunately for me, he perceived that I was his chief offender. And now the fact that his hatred had begun to attach itself to Cob, my seven-year-old brother, with near equal force, rendered me perpetually nervous and protective. No fistfight had ever broken out between us, but I spent the latter half of my adolescence lifting dumbbells should one finally erupt. Be best to talk before Wendell get home, my mother had said on the telephone. I hadn’t the slightest idea what my mother wanted, but I was happy to comply with her request that we talk before Wendell was due back.
With this in mind, I wound my way through the streets near the park, north into the heart of Harlem, past the Apollo Theater with its neon sign and its marquee bearing the names of jazz musicians preferred by the white weekend crowds in large black letters, followed by lesser-known performers that were preferred by the locals in smaller letters just beneath. I turned a few more corners and neared my mother’s apartment on 127th Street. The familiar look of it gave me a friendly feeling, the old brown stoop with its park-green painted rails and tall rectangular windows like the features of a face I knew more intimately than my own. Once inside, I trooped up to the fourth floor, my footsteps pounding a satisfyingly loud beat on the rickety wooden stairs. When I got to my mother’s apartment I put my key in the lock, then halted and knocked cautiously on the door, just in case Wendell was inside. When no sound stirred within, I finished turning the key and let myself in.
I sat down at the kitchen table to wait and considered eating one of the apples perched in a bowl in front of me, then thought better of it. Four years ago, when I’d managed to secure my room in the university dormitory, Wendell had reacted as though this development was a personal victory of sorts. During the intervening years, he had grown increasingly prickly about my visits, demanding that I knock instead of letting myself in and that I stay out of the ice-box, the contents of which my mother stocked and paid for but that he inexplicably considered his sole property.
In recent months, my mother had grown even more jumpy than usual about me and Wendell occupying the same room. We hadn’t discussed whether I would move back in after graduation. The idea was I’d eventually marry Janet—no rings had been exchanged, but Janet and I had discussed as much—and we’d find a place of our own, but I had to save up the money first. Despite her abundant love for me, I knew my mother was dreading the prospect of my coming back home to live, even for a temporary time, fearful that the relationship between me and my stepfather would eventually arrive at a point of violent impasse.
I heard the sound of the front door. “Ma?” I called.
“C’mon and lend a hand, Miles,” her voice commanded, breathing hard. I found her laden with grocery bags and moved to lift the heaviest ones from her arms. Together we carried everything into the kitchen. Then she pulled an apron over her head, sighed, and fished something out of the front pocket.
“Here it is,” she said, exuding the same air of terse efficiency with which she had surely executed all of the afternoon’s errands, and placed a small nickel-chrome key into the palm of my right hand.
I blinked at it. “What is this?”
“Your daddy gimme that key,” she said. “I promised I would give it to you soon’s you old enough.” Having off-loaded her charge, she dusted her hands together with two claps as though brushing away an invisible layer of flour, and turned back to attend to the groceries laid out on the kitchen table. “Woke up with my mind set on that key this mornin’ and figure it’s a sign. Figure now’s as good a time as any. You know, I guess mothers, sometimes we blind to our babies. But jus’ lookit you now,” she said, not actually looking at me. “Gettin’ ready to graduate. You grown.”
I continued to gaze at the foreign object in my palm with incredulity. “I don’t understand,” I said.
“Hmph. Not sure as I do, either,” my mother said, her back still turned to me as she lifted canned vegetables into a cupboard. She produced a knife from a drawer, cut open a gunnysack of potatoes, and counted under her breath. “Shoot!” she exclaimed. “That no-good cheater promised me it was always ten to a bag.” My mind reeling with questions about the key, I watched as she loaded nine potatoes into the dark recesses of the larder. “I don’t want you to get your expectations up, now. You know how it was for your daddy when he get sick. He was babbling clear outta his mine. By the end I don’t know that sweet fool knew his rightful name.”
My hand trembled. “What . . . what does the key open?”
My mother sighed, and finally turned to face me. “Don’t go gettin’ no ideas. Ain’t no gold bars stacked up in a safe nowheres.” She peered meaningfully into my eyes, as if to will me into tamping down an invisible mountain of wild, optimistic hopes. I didn’t harbor any delusions that our family possessed secret riches, but it was useless to say so to my mother, so I gave a solemn nod in acknowledgment. “You remember your daddy always goin’ on about his Army days? Well,” she said, her eyes turning glassy and skeptical as she glanced at the key. “When he die, he lay there on his deathbed, his eyes wanderin’ all over the ceiling like he seein’ nothing and everythin’ all at the same time. Then suddenly he looks clear as lightning and he grab out for me. I give him my hand and I feel something sharp and when I open it I see that key. The key’s got to do with yo’ daddy’s journal, see.”
“Journal?” This was the first I’d ever heard of my father having kept a journal.
She shrugged. “He say he kept hisself a record of all the things he did in the war, and all the other soldiers he knew and battles they fought in, and he left it in an old Army locker on his way out to the Pacific. He always meant to go back an’ get it so’s you and Cob could read all ’bout his adventures, but never had the chance.”
I blinked.
“When he was dyin’, he tell me, ‘Mae, we done somethin’ good with Miles. He got his funny ways but he bright as the sun. That boy goin’ to be a college boy, sho’ as the day I was born. When he get done with his schoolin’, you give ’im this. I wants him to know my stories, and be proud.’”
“He wanted me to . . .” I paused, trying to fight my way out from under an avalanche of confusion. “. . . read his diary?”
My mother tsked. “I reckon that’s the way of things. My guess is you better go fine it first.” She paused, then added, “That is, if there’s anything to fine. That’s why I say I don’t want you to get your ’spectations up, now. Maybe that key don’t lead nowhere but to a dying man’s loony business.”
She lifted the heavy lid of the stovetop and reached for a roll of greenbacks bound in a rubber band th
at lay dangerously near the flickering blue flame of the pilot light. “Lucky your step-daddy never take an interest in doin’ any of the cookin’,” she said, pulling the rubber band off the wad and counting. “There,” she announced, handing me the majority of the roll. “I done saved you up a hunnerd dollars for your trip.”
“My trip?” I stammered. My head was swimming. I looked again at the key and then the wad of dollar bills. Never in my life had I ever held so much money in my hands at one time.
“Yes, indeedy, son. That locker he mention gotta be at an Army base som’ere out in Californ’a. He deploy there, but he don’t come back through the same facility, on account o’ his early discharge. I ’spect that’s the place he meant. That’s a start.” She pointed to the bills. “But you best save up more. Might take you some time to do the lookin’, and I hear Californ’a an expensive place.”
“You want me to go to California?” I found that my brain, meticulously educated though it had been, often had to work hard to catch up with my mother, whose shrewd, all-business mind often shot right through the most complicated details at lightning pace. “But what about Janet?” I stammered.
“Janet already waitin’ for you, son,” my mother said. “She wait some more.” She sighed. I knew my mother was not overly fond of Janet. Janet, like me, was something of an outsider within our neighborhood, and the same thing—education—that made my mother so proud of me was the very attribute that caused my mother to label Janet “uppity.” But at the same time she was impatient for me to marry, and she couldn’t understand why I was dragging my feet.
“See here,” my mother said now, taking my face between her hands. Her palms were dry and warm against my cold, clammy cheeks. “You go look for yo’ daddy, you have yo’self an adventure! An’ maybe when you come back, you be ready to do some plannin’ finally. It’s time someone lit a fire under yo’ ass, my boy! Get you to makin’ some choices in yo’ life! If that girl won’t do it, I will.”
I tried to look her in the eye, but eventually I glanced away and stared at the chipped tiles and permanently soiled grout of the kitchen floor, afraid to let my fear show. There had been rumors surrounding my father’s discharge—rumors that had swirled through the neighborhood but that I’d never discussed with my mother—and the idea of my father’s words sitting somewhere in a footlocker choked me with excitement, but it felt like the dangerous kind of excitement, the kind that could lead to deep disappointment. I bit my lip and didn’t know what to say. My mother’s posture relaxed and she heaved a sigh.
“Will you think on it?” she asked.
I nodded. “I’ll think on it,” I said, and reached to hand the wad of dollar bills back to her.
“No,” she said. “You hold on to that. You gon’ need it. I know you come around.”
10
When my mother handed me a key and told me to go look for my father, she of course did not mean look for his body. We both knew where that could be found: buried in a remote corner of the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, by that time for some seven years. My father had been accorded a military funeral, and this had left a deep impression on me. I was fourteen and overwhelmed by what I saw that day, mesmerized by the bugler who played taps and downright baffled by the riflemen who shot off a rigid, violent, earsplitting salute to a man who I’d rarely ever glimpsed in an Army uniform. Later, my mother never let me forget: he’d served with the Harlem Hellfighters during the First World War, and was one of only a handful of Negro men who had the distinction of having served during both wars. “Don’t you forget,” she would say, “yo’ daddy a war hero.” I did, however. I did forget.
It was difficult to picture. According to my mother, my father, a mature-looking teenager, had lied about his age to enlist at age sixteen. He had seen trench warfare in France, but of course this was long before I was born. In all the time I knew him, he was a sweet, doddering man who worked at a radio repair shop on 125th Street. The fact he remained active in the National Guard was a detail I mostly forgot about, only to be abstractly reminded when he disappeared one weekend a month to do his service. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and my father’s regiment was reactivated, I was flummoxed to watch him pack his bags and ship out. He may have been a precocious teenager in the First World War, but the man I knew when the Second World War broke out seemed to me to be too old, too kind, too fatherly; what on earth was this peaceful, soft-smiling man going to do in the war?
I didn’t have to wonder about this question for very long. Two months after he left, he came back to us from Okinawa in plainclothes, having been abruptly given an honorable discharge. My father never discussed the reason—not with me, at least—but in the years that followed his death, my mother insisted it was on account of disability. It was his lungs, a respiratory complaint he’d picked up in the gas-filled trenches of the Marne that ultimately rendered him useless in the humid South Pacific. There wasn’t a government man alive, my mother used to say, who wanted to be responsible for a used-up forty-year-old colored soldier whose lungs weren’t working right. Whatever the reason for his discharge, it seemed to drain a little bit of his spirit out of him. He seemed to be overwhelmed by some sort of nebulous, unnamed sadness.
I possess only a dim memory of the day he returned; I remember thinking it was funny that he knocked on our front door as though he did not live there, and that his clothes were filled with a mélange of strange odors I later came to identify as the olfactory cocktail that makes up the scent of travel: cigarettes, stale beer, mothballs and musty upholstery, fried food. He came home, but never completely. Thereafter, he spent the bulk of his hours in the same threadbare flannel trousers and dingy white undershirt, listening to radio dramas and coughing a small piecemeal rainbow of red and yellow fluids into a handkerchief. He didn’t talk about the Pacific, but sometimes he told stories about his glory days in France. I am ashamed to say I was dubious of these stories. I didn’t pay very close attention, listening to them with the same indifference I had for his frequent retelling of the various plot twists that had occurred earlier in the afternoon on Ma Perkins and Young Doctor Malone. I have a vague memory of him talking about what it was like to be colored and in the Army, about what it had been like to fight alongside the French and to see the English Channel.
I remember my father best with a soft expression and a grizzled beard—prematurely grizzled, I now realize (he was only in his late forties when the cough began to get the best of him). He didn’t bring home anger, or any traumatic traces of the bloody battles he’d seen. There were no night terrors, no trembling hands. Quite the contrary: Despite my father’s respiratory ailment, I can only conclude he evidently still had enough breath in him to sweet-talk my mother, as a few years after he came back from Okinawa, Cob was born. If anything, my father was lacking only in assertiveness. An honorable discharge meant he was eligible for the G.I. Bill, but my father took advantage of none of it. He sat in his chair, friendly enough yet inert, worrying the upholstery of the armrests with his restless thumbs and smiling a dazed smile at my school reports. I moved around him in our cramped living room as though he were a piece of forgotten furniture.
As much as I found him a kind and patient man, a vague air of shame followed him wherever he went. I could not puzzle it out. I could not puzzle it out, that is, until one day when I was eleven and a man named Clarence came knocking on our door.
“Mel-vin Till-man!” Clarence sang out in a slurred voice when my father answered the door. “Got a hug for an old war buddy?”
I remember watching Clarence, shiny with perspiration, ripe with body odor and visible dirt on his clothes, lurch for an embrace. I was vaguely horrified, but my father tolerated and even hugged Clarence back, clapping him on the back. He invited Clarence in and offered him a beer, which Clarence happily accepted.
“This here yo’ boy?” Clarence asked when they had settled into the living room, where I was curled up in an armcha
ir, reading a book.
“Miles, say hello to Clarence,” my father said, nodding. “Clarence was a Hellfighter like yo’ old man. One of only a few fellas who lasted in the Guard as long as I did!”
I shook hands timidly, then pretended to resume my reading, hoping they would permit me to stay so I could eavesdrop a little. I couldn’t understand how or why my father was friends with a man who, had I seen him outside on the street, I would’ve taken for a vagrant and a wino. They caught up on old times. It was plain Clarence wanted something, but was putting on some sort of mad tap dance. Finally, once the beer ran out and the conversation wound down, Clarence darted his eyes over to where I was still pretending to read, then looked back at my father and cleared his throat.
“I ain’t gonna lie, times has been rough,” Clarence said. “I wouldn’t mind some of yo’ good hospitality, Melvin. I wouldn’t mind it one bit.”
My father hesitated. I knew he was thinking of what my mother would say.
“You remember how I was always on yo’ side, don’t you, Melvin . . .” Clarence said, pressing my father in a low voice. “’Bout all tha’ business surrounding yo’ discharge . . .”
I looked up, and my father’s eyes shot to my face.
“We don’t need to discuss that, Clarence,” he said quickly. I could see there was something between them that had caused my father to recoil. “I sup’ose we can always make room on our sofa,” my father said, as though to change the subject. “Mae won’t mind.”
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