Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  Think on it and place it in the proper perspective because it rained the Saturday the show scheduled. And Sunday. Then blue again Monday. No one survived the weekend. We had to start all over again. Lost again. Cudjoe wondering why the weather had been so mean. Whose idea was it to wash away The Tempest with a tempest before it ever got started. So one more ring of imaginary, of play around the play because as we consider it further it’s only fair to break the news that it never really came off. Cup to lip, but . . .

  Begin with a double meaning. If Cudjoe did not live to see his play hatched, he did spin from the endless circles of its possibility that second meaning cached in the drama’s tide: time. Borrowed time, bought time, saved time.

  So this narrative is a sport of time, what it’s about is stopping time, catching time. Watch how the play works like an engine, a heart in the story’s chest, churning, pumping, tying something to something else, that sign by which we know time’s conspiring, expiring.

  What’s the point?

  Doing it. That’s the point. Why not?

  Ahmad is quiet but he loves noise. Perfect for the maker of thunder and lightning. Long sheet of tin to wiggle. A bass drum to strike. Ahmad’s perfect. Swaggers as if one leg’s shorter than the other. Regular little Shango. Tough, cranky, a warrior. Other kids keep their distance from him. Yet he’s a leader in a way, because they watch him, want to know what he’s thinking, what he’s going to do next. Seldom says a word but when he does, the others sure listen. We’ll have him speaking and leading both. In the thunder’s voice. Shake it, Ahmad. Don’t break it. Shake rattle and roll us a storm, son. Tear this old building down.

  Ahmad in the wings. Sound effects. Stage manager.

  In the wings? Thought you said you’re going to stage it in the park.

  Only way to go. But we’ll build a stage. With wings and tower and a machine for flying Ariel.

  Good luck, dude. Better take out lots of insurance on any them black kids you expecting to fly.

  It’s going to happen. Needs to happen. Negative shit’s bound to come up. This is the kind of thing scares people. So they’ll be bitching, moaning, and backsliding. But I guarantee you. It’s going to happen.

  I think back to the beginning. When the project was just an idea teasing me. Black kids doing Shakespeare. How impossible it seemed. Farfetched. Maybe not even a good idea, even if I could pull it off. Blowing smoke. Talking to anybody who’d listen. Black boys and girls mastering Shakespeare. Bucking myself up by telling everybody how confident I was. Constant PR campaign with me as supersalesperson. At the same time I didn’t believe a word I was saying. Underground, in the shadows, sneaking around, inspecting the doubts I wouldn’t let my audience see. Trying, like the Chinese person sitting on the fence, to convince myself I could make a dollar out of fifteen cents.

  I catch myself staring at one of the kids. At a small perfect skull, still growing, the bone porous so when I trepanned away a side wall my entrance was silent, cunning, a perfect cross section revealed, framed by the curve of the skull’s crown, a stage set under a proscenium arch. I sit, unobtrusive as a video camera at a keyhole and observe the goings-on. Melissa is at her kitchen table. She is eleven years old. A tall girl for her age. No one, however, would mistake her for a woman. Even a very young woman. She is defined by long, bony arms and legs. Beyond them, not much to her. If she were standing you might think high-waisted, shoulders thin as clothes hangers, a skinny neck which must be tough and fibrous as a tree trunk to support the weight of the scene we are watching through the peeled-back temple of her skull. One lanky arm flung out flat on the kitchen table. She collapses forward and rests her head on it. Gives in to the sleepiness still abounding in this early-morning quiet kitchen where she sits alone, empty eyes tracking the ceiling then gazing at a cereal box. Though her head is not upright, miraculously the scene inside does not spill and come apart. Some subtle proprioceptive accommodation inside the vestibules of her body—ear canals, sinuses, tiny reservoirs of fluid strategically spotted here and there— allows her head to fall, her dream to stand. Her lips move. She’s sounding out words from the box of Cap’n Crunch or Corn Pops or Sugar Crisp or Frosted Flakes. We cannot read her lips. The box of breakfast cereal is turned away from us. They all look alike from the back. From where we have fixed ourselves for this time being. Her eyes not focused on the box so perhaps she’s not reading. She’s mumbling to herself what she’s read a hundred times before. Reciting the box from memory. Yes. The way one would memorize a part in a play. So we are encouraged. Continue to spy.

  Long as you are able / Keep your elbows off the table. She is alone but pops up as if at a command. Her own perhaps. Get it together, girl. Don’t be sitting here falling asleep again. Too much tube last night. Johnny Carson was a doctor and a man came to him for help and said, Doctor, Doctor. I have a problem. Sometimes I think I’m a wigwam. Sometimes I think I’m a tepee. And the doctor he said, Aha. I know just vhat’s vrong vit you. You’re too tense. Nobody laughed for a second. Then everybody start cracking up. And Johnny Carson he giggling his own self. She didn’t get the joke. What was funny about too tense? All she could think of was a frozen river and snow and tepees neat row after row asleep. Up on a ridge blue-coated soldiers watch quiet smoke curl from the tent town. Horses snorting and spurs jingle-jangling the blue men gallop down a hill, toward the snowy riverbank where Indians sleeping peacefully cause they don’t know what’s dropping out the sky on their heads. Cannon fire. Snow churned blood red. She thinks of that. The time she’d seen that late movie on TV and babies running naked in the cold, yelling for their mommas, their mommas chased by men with swords on horses, hollering, cutting the women down in the snow. One Indian lady naked as the babies, her clothes blowed all off her. Couldn’t believe it for a moment. Grown woman hair and titties hanging out on TV like that. She didn’t know what was funny but smiled anyway. Smiled because everybody laughing. She didn’t want to be dumb. Even though nobody could see her in her own apartment curled on the floor, thumb in her mouth, rubbing her nose with an old end of blanket. Up too late. The house empty because, Mama has got to live too, baby. Going out tonight. Be back before you be home from school tomorrow. You all right here by yourself, ain’t you, baby? Mama’s big girl. Love you. Don’t sit up all night staring at that TV. Don’t be late for school.

  So she jerks up. No more time for lazy daydreaming with her head on the table like it’s a pillow. That’s not what a table’s for.

  Her hair is plaited in cornrows. Took hours and hours. The girls did it for each other when their mamas couldn’t. She does her mama’s.

  Cereal box is her company this morning. She parts the flaps. Digs down and undoes the plastic inner wrapper she’d rolled tight to roach-proof its contents. Whatever the contents are— crunch pops nuggets chex flakes krisps grains pebbles—she sprinkles them in a bowl. Sweet already but that don’t count so she sweetens them again, tablespoonful waved, then tapped to spread the sweet dust evenly. Top refitted snugly into the sugar bowl. Only once did she find a big black bug in the sugar. Ate hisself to death or asleep or whatever there he was big and black in the bowl when she lifted the lid. Nasty and black as black could be in the snowy sugar. She screamed when she saw it.

  What’s wrong with you, girl? You crazy? Nothing but a roach. Close things up tight nothing won’t crawl in the food. Now dump that out and eat your breakfast.

  Happened only that one time with the sugar but the black hole there every morning after when she opens the lid. She can feel her breath riling up. The scream armed and ready to blast off. Her eyes put the nasty thing in there, then they take it out in less time than she takes to blink, less time than the knot in her stomach takes to unknot, gone before she knows it’s there, there even though she knows it’s gone.

  Her ankles crossed. She’s scooted forward so her narrow behind barely grazes the edge of her chair. Hunched forward, weight on her forearms that are parallel, laid on the table like walls of a fort protecting t
he flanks of her bowl. She nibbles the bowl’s chill lip. Rests her chin on the table again. The box upon which she seems to be concentrating is taller than the bumpy silhouette of her gardened head.

  How many words does the box hold? How long must she study her part? Is she able to read it or is she saying letters of the alphabet to herself? Is she waiting for the box to speak? Does she unravel the letters on the box each night when others are sleeping and then each morning knit them back together again? Patient. Tireless. Never completing her job because she must hold out till her lover returns. Is it that story or another we get an inkling of, watching her fascination, her rapt attention, the drift of her eyes that signals presences we, with all our privilege, cannot see? She is perhaps enchanted. By her time of life. Neither little girl nor teenager. A few in her class at school have already changed. Sprouted, budded, bled. Some couldn’t care less, leap into the arc of the churning rope, the singsong metronome of pipy voices double Dutching like there’s no tomorrow. Because there isn’t. For some. For this one whose talent we’re scouting there is a moment soon when she steps out or is smacked out of the rope’s angry wind, the teasing, signifying, tell-your-business rhymes of the other girls, a moment when she’s clear, when her turn’s over and she knows she’s not going back. Maybe once more, maybe ten times. But never going back, not really, not like always before because in that moment clear of the game, the game is miles away behind her back. She can hardly hear it, can’t imagine why it’s still happening, why anybody’d want to play. Because she knows. It’s finished for her. She’s done. Sidewalk shudders behind her each time the rope slaps down but it’s a sound mize well be on the other side of town. With those screechy voices. None knows her name. Her secrets. None knows the names we know. Penelope. Miranda. The new world she will step into once this long stunned moment between is over. You can’t see the cage of rope, but it’s there sealed a line at a time. When you’re inside you hear it buzzing like a cloud of insects round your face.

  Where is she? The furniture, the kitchen walls disappear. Our aperture closes.

  I’m asking myself, Who can she play? Or whom? Did she reveal anything in this moment we’ve stolen from her that encourages me to believe the play can happen?

  If I could, I would speak directly to her. Ask her questions. A quiz. What kind of chance do you think we have? Any? But this fakery, viewer and viewed connected temporarily by a hole in a skull, does not allow real questions back and forth. Look, don’t talk. Talk is touching, is disturbing the scene. Keep your seats. Don’t upset the delicate balance of our fiction within hers within yours within whatever this is twisting and hissing and crackling like a churning rope.

  Figure of the rope roped into my design. Playing. Dead serious. Enough to hang me. Us. Together or separately. Let the rope the girls are turning freeze at the height of its cycle. A perfect arch above the pavement. And she too is frozen there, restored, virginal, intact as Coyote one panel after he’s been tricked by Roadrunner and smashed to smithereens on the desert floor. Imagine her in sumptuous costume or elflike in next to nothing at all, stepped forward, to the edge of the stage, framed by the keyhole of proscenium arch we’ve constructed of plywood and cardboard painted and tacked to a temporary platform in the park. We transform this moment of the play to a soliloquy by bringing her stage front, by directing Prospero her father and Caliban her suitor manqué to drift subtly away and back, a fog dissipating as she slides forward, closer to us, nearly in our laps if we are seated in the bright-eyed mob settled on the grass below the stage. The men subside; they are less than they thought, less than we thought, than she thought, less at the center of this speech than some editors have thought who ignored Miranda’s claim, attributed the words about to be spoken to her father. As the eyes of the mostly women and children who’ve settled on the grass in front of rows of benches, sitting on that green margin because they can’t get any closer to the stage, as the eager eyes of kids and mothers follow the slow glide of Miranda toward them, Prospero and Caliban should become as insubstantial as possible without actually exiting the platform. If there were lights I’d chance one on her, soft, soft, and a purple-colored gathering of darkness misting the men who should be mere shadows as she speaks:

  Abhorrèd slave,

  Which any print of goodness wilt not take.

  Being capable of all ills! I pitied thee,

  Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

  One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,

  Know thine own meaning, but would gabble like

  A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes

  With words that made them known. But thy vile race,

  Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures

  Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou

  Deservedly confined into this rock, who hadst

  Deserved more than a prison.

  There it is, children. The spurned woman speech. Clearly Miranda, not Prospero talking. This is personal not planned. Testimony to her passion, her suffering to bring forth speech from the beast. Unbeast him. And what did she receive for her trouble, her risk? More trouble. Beastly ingratitude. She offered the word. Caliban desired flesh. She descended upon him like the New England schoolmarms with their McGuffey’s Readers, the college kids with books and ballots. Caliban, witches’ whelp that he was, had a better idea. Her need, his seed joined. An island full of Calibans. He didn’t wish to be run through her copy machine. Her print of goodness stamping out his shape, his gabble translated out of existence. No thanks, ma’am. But I will try some dat poontang. Some that ooh la la, oui, oui goodness next to your pee-pee. Which suggestion she couldn’t abide. Could not relexify into respectability. He asked, in short, for everything. She knew she was her father’s daughter. A lien on his property. Daddy’d taught her not to give but to negotiate. Calculate and get down on paper all terms of endearment. What’s always at stake is the farm. Bargains must be struck carefully. Keep your elbows off the table and your ankles crossed, knees together. Someday, when your prince comes, then you may people this property with property. More. Makes more. In the meantime, go to Vassar. Travel, if you must, during school vacations but not on the Frontier because there are barbarians sleeping at the gate. If we wake them, we must teach them manners. Manners maketh man. Teach them to speak the when spoken to. Are you following me, children? The dangerousness of this speech about speech shoved in a woman’s mouth. It’s informed by a theme older than Willy or Willy’s time. Eternal triangle and wrangle. The Garden where three’s a crowd. Monkey in the middle. Who’s in, who’s out, who says so?

  So it’s Caliban who gets moved out, exiled, dispossessed, stranger in his own land, who gets named just about every beast in the ark, the bestiary, called out his name so often it’s a wonder anybody remembers it and maybe nobody does. But is Caliban the snake on this island paradise or is the serpent wound round old Prospero’s wand? Or is it Caliban’s magic twanger, his Mr. William Wigglestaff he waggled at Miss Miranda and said: C’mere, fine bitch. Make this talk.

  Oh shit. Excuse me. This is not turning out to be a children’s story. I could get fired for telling my pupils this one. Expurgate it as you listen. Bowdlerize. Daddy Caliban learned enough to pick out meaty curses. Like starving prisoners in concentration camps straining kernels of corn from do do. It happened. At Andersonville for instance. It happens today, every day, round the world, round the clock, where the wind blows and the cradle rocks, prisoners catching hell, captive populations beaten into submission. Or death. Kid stuff. Elementary. Old as nursery rhymes.

  That’s why I shove aside both suspected killers, those blue-chinned, hard-knuckled, baldpate cons and con men, expurgate and exile to one side of the stage, or rather each one to a separate side so they won’t start a fight to draw attention to themselves while we’re trying to achieve, through the guile of dramatic art, our original production in the park, an opportunity for Miranda to talk for once, unencumbered, cl
ear of the shadow of their lusting after the one, the many meanings she suggests with, among other things, what’s secreted between her thighs. They will fight over her forever. Not really over her. But she is their excuse. The reason put forward for the storm. The exile. The falling out.

  We bring her forward to clear the air, to entertain and instruct the next generation. She’s trying her best to be her own person. She wants to share. But she can’t. She’s a prisoner, too. Hostage of what her father has taught her. A language which Xeroxes image after image of her father, his goodness, his lightness, his deed to the island and the sea-lanes and blue sky and even more than that. The future. Which is also confirmed and claimed in the words he taught her and she taught Caliban, buried of course, unmentionable of course, like her private parts, but nonetheless signified in the smallprint forever-after clause of the deed. Her father needs her to corner the future, her loins the highway, the bridge, sweet chariot to carry his claim home. Her womb perpetuates his property. Signs, seals, delivers. Spirit needs flesh. Word needs deed. And Caliban understands the connections. Wants out. Wants in. All her civilization whispered in his ear. Her words on the tip of his tongue.