State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Pennsylvania, my birthplace, is green. Not because of forestage, or ecological virtue or the pastels on elementary school maps. Just in terms of the colors with which my synesthesiac mind defines alphabet letters, and states of the union. To me, Maine and Virginia are also green, but the former is a dour nordic spruce and the latter suggests pea soup. Only the Keystone State—that charmless architectural nickname that yet has a certain heavy whimsy—is the proper pastoral shade. I recognize it at once, when in a history text I first read William Penn’s dreamy yet transpicuous instructions for the first layout of Philadelphia:

  Let every house be placed in the middle of its plat … so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a greene country towne which will never be burnt and always wholesome …

  His green suggests both utopian ambition, and the kind of nostalgia for a nonexistent perfect past that Gatsby feels, gazing at Daisy’s green light. It is the green of hope, that Benjamin West captures in his iconic painting of the glade beside the Delaware, where Penn and other tricorned Quakers strike their treaty with the Lenape Indians. It’s the shade that European philosophers see as they first gaze over the Atlantic and envision Eden in the virgin New World forests, the same woods that inhabit Pennsylvania’s name. No doubt it hovers in Voltaire’s mind as he eulogizes Penn: “[He] might glory in bringing down upon earth the so much boasted golden age, which in all probability never existed but in Pennsylvania. …”

  Golden ages are so often green.

  Of course Pennsylvania has other colors: fieldstone gray; mousebrown pastures; the black of slagheaps, of shadowy faces under the El; red city bricks striped with graffiti; the blued bronze of Penn himself, enchanted into the statue whose tyrannical Quaker hat-brim for so long stunts Philadelphia skyscrapers. Yet at the same time, the green is always there: inexhaustible, ineluctable bequest of Penn the proto-suburbanite, who dies bankrupt—sucked dry by his greedy new colony—yet, one imagines, still expectant, envisioning those verdant mansions, each on its wholesome plat.

  Writing about my state brings with it a rush of energy that feels almost like love. I’m not sure I love it, but all the same it’s mine.

  COLORED MAN’S GARDEN

  In fact, my idea since childhood has been that Pennsylvania is a nursery place, to be outgrown and left behind as soon as possible. I do this early, moving from college in New England to New York to Europe, traveling to Asia and Africa. My rare trips home from what I think of as the great world, the world worth exploring and conquering, show me a Philadelphia as unbearably eroded by the passing years as my mother’s face, and in the background the rest of the state—still green, but worn and disposable as an old bath mat. I marry an Italian, settle in northern Italy, and begin exploring in art and in life what it means to be a foreigner.

  I’m good at being foreign—I learn it as a child. In the sixties, my parents, an elementary schoolmistress and a Baptist minister, are part of a group of black Philadelphians from the middle-class brick neighborhoods of Christian and Ringgold Streets, who advance into the suburbs with the wary determination of earlier settlers pressing back the frontier. That is: timorously proud of lawns and colonial houses; stockaded in the country clubs they’ve had to create; ambitious in pushing their children, like small, reluctant Indian scouts, into the new territory of white schools. Good works are part of the deal: with Quaker and Jewish friends, they march in Washington, Birmingham; boycott in Philadelphia; run fellowship weekends, work camps, youth clubs.

  All this with—we kids feel it—a light but unceasing wind of fear whistling at the back of the neck. Fear of the South, its charred nooses and cattle prods such a short drive away, down Baltimore Pike, just past the shopping center; fear, also, of the poor black masses—our brothers, but oh so removed—slowly combusting in the inner city. We kids, riding bikes, calling our faithful dogs like kids on TV, feel only half in possession of our domain. There is always a distant murmur telling us that this fat life is not our birthright. Always the possibility of running into the bad Catholic kids who throw bottles and shout nigger from cars. Always the possibility that a traveling salesman may assume that one’s mother, opening the door of the big fieldstone house in her June Cleaver apron is not June Cleaver but the maid—Hattie McDaniel. My father, the civil rights leader, the broad-minded ecumenical Baptist, laughs scornfully when I asked him to plant roses in our front yard.

  “And have it look like a colored man’s garden?” he sneers.

  So we are immigrants, but we often revisit the old country: the row houses of North and South Philadelphia. Where, in earlier years, my mother and her sisters scrub their marble steps before tripping off to Girls High; where my father trudges home from days among hostile white seminarians at Eastern Baptist; where my grandfather the insurance man has his family photographed reading in a prim Edwardian group; where an ancient cousin has crowded her what-not shelves with Moroccan brass and Navaho pottery from her travels with the Negro Women Globetrotters Association. By the time we children visit, the streets of our parents’ narrow past are furnished with trash and scary nodding men with do-rags and dead eyes. Still, all the institutions—the doctor, the dentist, the hairdresser, the caterer, the undertaker—remain in the city. Not to mention my father’s church, First African Baptist, its centennial gray bulk rising on Christian Street, its roots extending deep, with the bones of slaves and free blacks, into Philadelphia history. When I am very young, that name, First African, carries to me shameful savage echoes. It’s not in any history books. It has little to do with the brick Georgian hall where powdered aristocrats have left a piece of parchment inscribed with freedom. In my father’s church, as his baritone oratory echoes on the gilt ceiling, as the choir alternates Bach and spirituals, we hear only about burdens to be lifted, liberty still to be achieved.

  Later, I’m one of the first blacks to enter a rich girls’ school in a Main Line suburb. Here, as a teenager, I learn how to drug myself with literature. And spring after spring, I watch girls with cornsilk hair soar off campus in open cars, bound, I imagine, for supernal debutante parties, nymph dances in rolling pastures beyond the last commuter stop, in some mystic arch-suburb that is the real Pennsylvania. Which is for girls like them, not me.

  For them, not me. This is a basic belief, a motive, that sends me away from home and across the Atlantic to a place where, for a long time, I try to shrug off my piece of America.

  NOTHING

  Mom, tell us some more of those weird stories about when you were a social worker back in Pennsylvania!

  A car with a passel of sunburnt kids, and two women—me and my new friend, the neighbor from across the valley. Mother of the boys who shout across to my son. We’re driving back through the Ligurian highlands from the beaches of the Cinque Terri.

  My friend downshifts, pushes up her swimsuit strap, and launches into a series of tales of herself at twenty-one, a fresh-faced college graduate with a cape of Goldilocks hair, venturing with her new degree into the drug- and incest-ridden desolation in the country towns of southeastern Pennsylvania.

  “Tell us,” her boys clamor. “Tell us about the crazy Mennonite farmer and where he locked up his daughter. About that gross trailer full of roaches, like moving wallpaper. About the guy who stuck doorknobs up his butt.”

  The tales are startling in their grotesque humor, the light they shed on the draggled hinterland between civility and monstrosity. The fact that they come from the lips of a small, blonde, beautiful woman with an overwhelming air of health and normalcy at first makes the facts she recounts seem obscene, like toads dropping from the lips of a comely television housewife. I’m briefly shocked that she’d tell this stuff to our kids, but I see that she’s in control of her narrative; that the stories are dark, but pruned of complete horror; that even the most bizarre are softened by a luminous compassion. Delivered in her clear voice, with that flat, familiar, mid-Atlantic intonation, the stories take on the exalted dimensions, the eeri
e pedagogic grandeur of fairy tales. And I get caught up too, guffawing in amazement. Staring out of the window at the passing landscape where plummeting valleys succeed ruined castles like illustrations from a gothic novel, I’m startled to find that my cast-off state, Pennsylvania, has become romantic as well.

  My new neighbors have been transferred to Italy for two years. My friend and her husband are both from Altoona, a crumbling red-brick railroad city, set above the Juniata River almost at the center of the state, and their rambunctious family forms a traveling homeland with roots still magically connected to this land-locked region, where there are school friends, parents, cousins, acres that hold their name. They are the best American travelers I have ever seen—adventurous, courteous, without pretensions. They impress even my traditionalist Italian husband, who is shocked by the barefoot wildness of the boys, but won over by their supremely elegant confidence, the core of identity they carry with them.

  “We come from nothing,” my friend once jokes to me, over coffee. “Nothing” meaning: “not much money.” But her half smile means that she knows how much they actually come from. What inherited wealth they’ve brought to the Old World. And how, as I’m beginning to understand, nothing is the beginning of everything. A starting point for stories. Another word for home.

  NIGGER LIPS

  I don’t realize it is a mob until later. The girls of Lenape Division cluster around me under the weak bug-yellow light bulb. It’s a kind of light I associate with cabins, with the image of settlers huddled in a frail carapace of logs chinked with mud, wilderness pressing in, the sighing darkness of trees punctuated with panther screams. Of course the first Europeans have no electricity, no smelly spruce-brown toilets, no stretched-out screens with girls’ initials painted on them in nail polish. This is camp, a Petit Trianon exercise in bushwhacking, somewhere out in the Pennsylvania boondocks. But it’s a pioneer expedition for me, because through some lapse in my parents’ sensitive racial radar, I’m the only black camper in all of Camp Sunnybrook.

  A Baptist institution: fairly open minded, with only a few campfire hymns. But the kids in this session are all white, and not white like my schoolmates, whose parents in sensible shoes drop by our house for tea, carrying mimeographed sheets about rallies and charity square dances. No, these kids are the white unknown, like the teenagers lounging on car hoods outside the Bazaar, our local dingy proto-mall. Kids from blue-collar suburbs where Northerners act like Southerners—burning crosses on Negro lawns. My parents sometimes slip, and call them trash. These campers aren’t from Philadelphia but from far corners of the state, outside Pittsburgh, outside the pious German farm territory; from anthracite towns and half-civilized hollows on the West Virginia border. My mother has gone off with my aunt to explore ten-dollar-a-day Paris. My father is at a religious conference in Denver. And I’m abandoned to a wilderness sinkhole of unreconstructed Caucasians.

  And I love them. At least I try to suck up to them, particularly my bunkmates, a big-breasted blonde from Williamsport, and an evil-tongued will-o’-the-wisp with a pixie cut, from some hamlet called Beaver. I try hard, from an animal sense of self-preservation, but also because I’ve always imagined winning the hearts of hateful people. I picture the cross-burners, the baying homicidal crowds in Alabama—and myself, parting the human mass like the Red Sea, sending everyone into a trance of goodwill with my courage, my good looks, my compelling speech on why all men are brothers. However, the real me is a small, bony, light-skinned girl with unkempt hair exploding out of its maternal braids into a jungle of frizz. A natural victim, I have no saving charisma, or gift for sports or for anything except scribbling poetry, a talent worthless at any camp.

  Yes, I seek to impress my cohorts with tales of school, travels, my cool brothers. But here I am, under the yellow light, in the free hour before dinner when the counselors disappear with illicit cigarettes, and the killing fields are open for business.

  One girl asks me where my father is.

  “In Colorado. At a meeting for Baptist ministers.”

  “African Baptists,” comes a whisper from the crowd, and everyone giggles but me.

  “Where’s your brothers?” demands another girl, known for her phenomenal number of scabby bug bites.

  “At home with my aunt. One is working for a newspaper, the other—”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “In France.”

  A hush falls, and then my pixie bunkmate says: “I hear they like people like you there. Does your mother look like you?”

  “Yes, she does, she—”

  “She must be pretty,” says my blonde bunkmate, who is big and bossy enough to stop this if she wants to, but she doesn’t.

  “Does she look like you, does she have your same mouth? Your mouth is really cute, isn’t it? Your mouth—”

  “Nigger lips,” hisses the pixie. Something has locked my eyes to my sneakers; I can’t stop staring down.

  The others crack up, and break into a chant I’ve heard them whispering before. “Two little niggerboys sleeping in a bed / One fell out and the other one said / I see your hiney, all black and shiny!”

  “To think they let these things happen in a BAPTIST camp!” rages my mother, weeks later, when she is back from Europe with souvenir cameos and kid gloves. As if religion has something to do with it.

  And when my parents come to get me, I run to them, melting into them, but for days say nothing true about my two weeks in the woods.

  The afternoon they pick me up, my jolly reunited family wants to picnic, to visit local beauty spots. We tour a famous cave nearby, and nobody remarks on my unusual silence as I walk through chambers of shining underground fortresses and cathedrals. Mutely I observe cascades of crystals, stalactites like frozen ghosts, mineral rainbows shining under the mountain. A photo taken that afternoon shows me perched on a log outside the cave, still in my Camp Sunnybrook T-shirt. I’m very skinny, almost transparent, and my eyes are fixed on the dark entrance with a wary yet resigned look, as if I already know what monster will peer out at me.

  THE ONE WHO STAYS

  My middle brother is the one who stays.

  Of the three kids in our family, my oldest brother, and I, the youngest, leap in opposite directions, far from Philadelphia. Our brother, the second son, is curiously content to live where he was born. He travels around the world, visits me in Italy and his older brother in California, but is immune to the malady that gnaws his siblings: the idea that life could be better over there somewhere, out of sight.

  Some facts about this brother:

  Always our mother’s favorite. When I am in college, I walk into the living room one day and find him and our mother chatting together like an old married couple, and realize suddenly that he has been raised by a completely different woman from the one I know. That our mother, too beautiful and eccentric to relish a Baptist helpmeet’s role in the shade of her charismatic husband, has made her second son her distraction, and her great love. And who can say how much being your mother’s great love has to do with a lifelong passion for your home, your city, your state?

  My brother is a historian. At Penn, he runs a famous institute for urban teachers. And he gives me a rousing tour every time I come back to Philadelphia. Driving along with crunchy Philly folk-rock on the radio, pointing out new skyscrapers lifting razor-edged muzzles over streets that still carry wistful Arcadian tree names. Chatting about his good-looking wife, whom he’s known since high school. Reminding me how cheese steaks still gladden the heart. Showing me how the blocks around First African have mutated into condominium sleekness; how, farther away, black men still sit dead-eyed in the morning sun.

  He’s not religious, but he keeps up with First African. He stops by sometimes to check on the bell tower fund. And when the oldest parishioners see him, so much like our father, they don’t so much embrace him, as lay hands on him with a wondering pleasure, like Catholics touching a relic.

  When I think of my brother, the question in
my mind is: How is it that somebody remains? For the shiftless, shifting population of the States, staying put is unusual. In an oblique way, more of a virtue.

  All through the years he stays; he busts his ass staying. He stays to help his flesh and blood through the mysteries of decrepitude, and final salutations. And we, the self-styled adventurers, the voluntary exiles, are the ones who, with a pang, receive the 2 a.m. phone calls; jump trembling onto planes; walk like timid children into the arrival zone where our brother is always there to pick us up. With his face so like ours, but transformed by a certain look, a blend of privileged sadness, and a knowledge we don’t possess. Standing there waiting, of course, with his feet planted firmly on the ground.

  MEETING

  We, proud members of the Landsdowne Friends fifth grade, practice the words of Psalm 19 after lunch, every day for a week. We’re mostly ten years old, lords of this small Quaker elementary school, just lower than the sixth-grade royalty. This psalm is for performance in Thursday morning meeting, before the elders and the rest of the school, and our anticipation gives a satisfying gravitas to those orotund King James verses about the firmament showing God’s handiwork. Excited, the eighteen of us boom so loud that Teacher—all teachers at our school are called Teacher—has to regulate us like a blaring television.

  We recite some verses together, and then some lucky show-offs get solos. I’ve been chosen to chime in with a spectacular line: “More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold …” And my deskmate, her slanted black eyes gleaming through pink plastic glasses, will complete the phrase: “Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.”