Makeda

by Randall Robinson

  I have been told by people close to me that my face remains impassive when I am feeling emotions like fear and anger. (I am not sure, however, how I look when merely alarmed, as opposed to being mortally frightened.) Thus, it may have been that she read nothing from my face when I learned that the check exceeded fifty dollars. All I know is that she knew I was all but penniless. After all, I had told her during dinner what my father, the sole March family breadwinner, did for a living.

  I am certain it was for these reasons that she suggested we spend the afternoon “taking advantage of the glorious sunshine.”

  We drove downtown and walked to the water and along the quay. Afterward, we spent two hours in a public park, biding the afternoon hours, walking, sitting, talking—talking easily about a range of things, serious and frivolous.

  I often found myself looking long at her when she could not see me doing so. I remember doing this as she was talking very smartly, I thought, about the relative merits of communism and capitalism for common people. “You know, Gray, no economic system, created by humans, can effectively rein in greed.”

  We talked about this for a while (as if it mattered what we talked about) before meandering into art, followed by the music of James Brown, the various foods we liked (Chinese, Indian, Caribbean, soul), religion (ritual Christians, but spiritual in the main), table games (we agreed they were crutches for the socially challenged), cross-cultural relationships (which we self-servingly thought could be made to work), sports (she pretended interest, I disinterest, both done feebly), smoking (the most repellent of personal habits), and, as it grew dark, Lorraine Hansberry (whose play-based movie A Raisin in the Sun we would see later that night at a small downtown art cinema).

  She moved across subjects, large and piddling, with intelligent ease and without the hard leaden judgments usually born nonbiodegradable of incurious minds, sharp only to decide the inherently undecidable. I thought as I regarded her that her parents must have kissed her spirit often and unconditionally when she was very young; formed her, loved her to walk effortlessly in the smooth cocoabrown skin she wore like the confidence that seemed for her an innate gift.

  Whatever it was that she exuded was to a degree transferable. I felt better when I was around her. It was as if the war of negative mutually destructive reflex behaviors that had doomed the only serious relationship I’d had would not visit this one. Jeanne was whole with no need to reduce or excavate those who happened into her magnetic field.

  I was wary, however, owing to a painful relationship I had endured with a decent respectable girl from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, named Derma Innis. Derma, a classmate at Morgan, was a big, gorgeous athletic type who did not relish a life in the world of ideas, and only viewed her disinterest in such as incompleteness upon coming into sustained contact with me, whom she claimed to love, but actually resented greatly for reminding her by example of what she was not. She required being rock certain about any number of things and people. To stay on top of this formidable responsibility, she dispensed with large groups of things and people with wild categorical verdicts, starting most of her sentences with They are, Men are, Women are, Blacks are, Whites are, and, finally, inevitably, You are.

  She had once told me: “I bet you think you’re smart enough to be the president of the United States,” which was true enough, and a self-assessment I had counted as an important personal asset. She hated this sort of thing in me for reasons that made us, as a couple, a good deal less than the sum of our two quite different and fundamentally incompatible parts.

  I was, for her, the funhouse mirror that I had not wished to be, and that which she hated, because its reflection of her distorted large her failings. Over time her affections became more and more extractive, demanding. But I had no expendable part of me available for sacrifice to her needs. I was in trouble all by myself and had been for years.

  For me, there is nothing in the world more beautiful in a woman than an insatiably curious intellect accompanied by an elegant self-possession. Not only is the possessor of such traits worthy of admiration, but the gifted soul is also more fully free to return affection without compromising important interior defenses.

  This is how I saw Jeanne. She was free. And without so much as trying. She was pretty, of course, and this, I confess, counted for something—well, a great deal in fact. But her physical appearance would have meant little to me had she not had the other qualities that were essential to sustaining one’s interest.

  By the time we reached the park in the mid-afternoon of April 3, 1970, the temperature had soared to an unseasonable eighty-two degrees. The buds on the giant oak trees had cracked but not yet opened. The sun, finding its strength, bore down with no relief to be found beneath the trees’ naked boughs. We sat on a bench atop a knoll overlooking a small placid pond of gliding ducks quacking lazily as if they too had registered the dramatic change in weather. I wore a cotton windbreaker, and Jeanne a fashionable mauve sweatshirt that she took off and draped over the shoulders and back of her short-sleeved sport blouse. I threw my windbreaker across the back of the bench. We were quiet, watching the park’s peace. Our upper arms came close to touching, and then slowly, searchingly drew themselves very lightly together in a way that stoked my nervous system and evacuated a thought I could not thereafter reconstruct. Our arms stayed together like that, unremarked, as if they had achieved safe docking from a perilous sea voyage.

  I experienced then an emotion that was almost entirely foreign to me. It brought with it a surge of euphoria so intense that I became mildly dizzy, and may have been dumbstruck as well, had I, at the sensation’s apex, attempted to speak. I knew, in that extrasensory way that one knows such things that Jeanne was feeling much the same. The outward indications of this were such that neither of us uttered so much as a word, or moved, even slightly, or looked away from the little pond that now held for us some great and enormous sentimental significance because it was what we were watching when our unclad arms touched for the first time.

  In a nervously awkward motion, I moved the arm that had touched hers across the top of the slated bench. Looking still toward the lake, she nestled back into the cup of my shoulder. I rested my cheek against the soft, sculpted crown of her natural, unspoiled hair.

  We stayed like this for an indeterminate time, speaking finally as if we had been transiting the same thought, however improbable that may have been.

  “I want to go to Mali this summer,” I said quietly.

  She did not appear surprised or ask for an explanation. “Do you speak French?” she asked.

  “Not a word.”

  “Well, then you’ll need someone to translate for you, won’t you?”

  We looked at each other. Then we smiled and kissed. I had been shy about such displays for the whole of my life. This was the first time that I had ever kissed anyone in public.

  It seemed the most natural thing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dr. Harris-Fulbright called me on Monday night at eight o’clock as she had said she would. She came swiftly to the point.

  “Mr. March, have you talked to anyone else about your grandmother’s dream?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Has your grandmother talked to anyone about this besides you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, until we can investigate this, we should keep it under wraps.”

  We? Investigate?

  She seemed to sense nothing of the small dead space between us. No ear apparently for the language of silence.

  “Has your grandmother had any other dreams of past lives like the one you described to me?”

  I did not know quite what to say or do. I did not know how to advance my curiosity about my grandmother’s experience, or whether I could do it at all without the help of someone like Dr. Harris-Fulbright. I was not even sure abou
t why I hadn’t been willing to let the whole matter drop, which, I’m sure, would have suited my grandmother well enough.

  “Yes, two that she mentioned, one a few years ago, and another recently that she said she would tell me about when I got down to see her next.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “Dr. Harris-Fulbright, I think we should back up for a minute.”

  “Yes?” Brusque. I decided that I wasn’t going to like her, knowing that this would neither matter very much to her nor deter me.

  “What is it that you have in mind? I think you should tell me now before asking any more questions.”

  “I am going to Washington for a meeting in June. I would like to make a day trip down to Richmond to meet your grandmother after I finish my business in Washington. Can you work that out for me?”

  “I don’t know. What would you talk to her about?” This sounded, I know, quite stupid and hadn’t been at all what I wanted to say.

  “Well,” she said, pausing, “I wonder if your grandmother would allow herself to be hypnotized. Regressed?” It sounded less a question than a pro forma declaration. “It’s the only way we can get to the bottom of this.”

  “W-well, I—”

  “It’s painless and won’t take much of her time.”

  “That’s not the—”

  “You can be there, of course.”

  I wanted to be done with the conversation. I needed to regroup. I needed time to think.

  “I’ll talk to my grandmother about it when I see her two weeks from now.”

  “Good enough.” Clipped. Dismissive. Suddenly so, as if the whole matter had fallen in importance to her. “Call me after you’ve spoken with her.”

  She hung up.

  * * *

  During the two weeks before I left Baltimore to spend a weekend with my grandmother in Richmond, Jeanne and I talked, either by telephone or face-to-face, every day. We were fast becoming all but inseparable, with the new habit of her presence in my life affording me a sense of growing well being. We would meet either at her office downtown at Johns Hopkins or at Morgan’s library which was not far from her apartment complex in North Baltimore. On most evenings we carried out our dinner from Mr. Pei’s Chinese or Negril’s Jamaican or Tandoori Star’s Indian restaurant. Twice we brought pizza home to the one-bedroom apartment she shared with the books that lined the walls and stranded her overmatched furniture in the middle of the apartment’s three large rooms. She had a far-ranging music collection, a quarter of which comprised tapes of Haitian music for which I had small familiarity, but a surprising and immediate appreciation of the music’s tonal idiom in which Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean could easily be heard.

  We kissed. We caressed. We played. We were silly one minute and serious the next. We talked about large global issues and small local ones. We went places, making spur-of-the-moment decisions: museums, bookstores, movies, a party, a walk. She even went with me to the funeral of the mother of a local college friend. I had confided to Jeanne how much I hated funerals, particularly those in which the families left the coffins open until the service began. I did not like looking at the dead bodies of people I had known. They seemed smaller than they had in life, shrunken, as if their departing souls had taken with them large sums of their former bodies’ volume.

  Things like this, things that I had never told anyone else, I told Jeanne. I loved her and thought she felt similarly. We had not, however, spoken the words. And we had not yet slept together. I had also not spoken to her of my demons.

  Later that evening, while listening to a thirty-yearold recording of the composer-pianist and grand figure of Haitian classical music, Ludovic Lamothe, Jeanne filled in the spaces in her Haitian family’s story, but said little of her American father’s history. I assumed this was because there was less drama surrounding it. Her mother’s parents, Giselle and Montas Cesaire, had come from Jacmel, a 300-year-old city on the south coast of Haiti. They had been born there poor. They were both black and, thus, not heirs to the privileges of mixed-race Haitians under the society’s color caste system.

  Though noted for his gifts as a painter, Montas Cesaire narrowly escaped death twice, once in 1916 during the American military occupation that claimed 15,000 Haitian lives, and again in 1937 when the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo invaded and massacred 35,000 Haitians. In 1916, an American Marine shot Cesaire once in his chest and twice in his right leg. In 1937, two of Trujillo’s killers came within two feet of Cesaire who had taken refuge amongst the sharp clicking reeds of a sugarcane field. His two younger brothers and a nephew had been shot dead in the attacks.

  Three generations of Cesaires believed to varying degrees that America had been hostile to Haiti, unrelentingly and for so long, because of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s unprecedented humiliation of the slaveholding white world, that Americans believed only in white freedom, not in black freedom.

  Montas Cesaire, in any case, made enough money from his paintings to send his gifted daughter Marie away to study writing and drama in Paris in the 1930s; after which she had come to the United States and met Jeanne’s father, Dennis Burgess, in New York.

  Driving home from Jeanne’s apartment in the noisy old Corvair I had bought for $650 from a departing graduate student, I reflected upon how little I had volunteered to Jeanne about myself. Indeed, I had shared almost nothing she couldn’t have learned from a public registry. She had not pried into why I’d been so close-mouthed. She had, however, on more than one occasion, looked at me worriedly, as if she liked well enough what she saw of me, but that the well-hidden parts concerned her. This entirely reasonable sentiment never caused her to ration her own disclosures about herself, her family, her view onto the world, or as you might well have come to expect, her defining Haitianness, which appeared to decant from its deep storied well a life-force energy of its own. She seemed, though, very much frustrated by this gift, as anyone would have been, I suppose, who owned, as she saw it, a rare, priceless treasure that had been viciously maligned by a smarting West and buried nearly 200 years beneath the smothering mass of an elaborately mistold account. She was laden with a wonderful, heavy, liberating truth that she could share in America with neither whites nor blacks. For it was the white world that had made her mute, and, in the same stroke, rendered the non-Haitian black world deaf. All of which had caused me to believe that she spoke out of an obsession which was uncharacteristic for one who was otherwise so levelheaded and patently intelligent.

  She had said to me, mildly irritating me, “Gray, the Haitian Revolution is acknowledged by many respected historians to have been of greater hemispheric and global significance than the American Revolution. The world must be made to accept what these scholars have conceded.” She had faltered slightly then before adding, “But it is very important to me that you believe this. First as a black man, but more importantly as the man I have begun to love.”

  None of what she said, including this last, did I return with any investment of emotion to match hers. She had to have wondered if her instincts about me had been wrong. Or maybe it was I who believed that this was the case. The truth is that I had always been slightly uncomfortable around people who deeply believed in anything. At least anyone save my grandmother and her dreams.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Mindful of the young consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s warning that the little biscuit-shaped rear-engine Corvair was “unsafe at any speed,” I puttered south from Baltimore along Interstate 95 at a tortoise clip of fifty miles per hour. The trip to Richmond that would take an able car roughly three hours would require of mine a minimum of four.

  I left my apartment at five on Saturday morning. It was dark when I crawled onto the interstate access ramp. Beside me on the passenger seat was the leather briefcase I had packed with my writing materials and a softcover copy of Dr. Harris-Fulbright’s book. I had also brought with me an overnight bag. My plan was to drive directly home on Sunday morning after chauffeuring my grandmoth
er to church.

  I had written her to expect me between nine and ten. The sun peeked above the eastern horizon just as I exited the Washington-area beltway and headed south along the 100-mile leg to Richmond.

  I had always liked driving alone on the highway in the dim early-morning quiet. It gave occasion to a rare real privacy, unthreatened by interruption, where one squandered time with no tax of guilt and mulled things carelessly in forgettable pieces of dissociated fleeting images.

  I had not been to Richmond since I last saw my grandmother some months back.

  I spent most of the long drive thinking about Grandma. Makeda had always struck me as a hauntingly beautiful name. I knew that Grandma’s mother had given it to her, and that she had never explained to her why, or from where she had gotten it. I don’t think Grandma was being mysterious about this, either, though a lot about her may have seemed so. But it’s not that she was trying to be mysterious or anything like that. It’s just the way she was.

  I believed that I knew her better than anyone did, but it’s like I really didn’t know her. But … well, it’s hard to describe. It’s like she was one person and several people at the same time. As if she was in places I couldn’t be in, and so I couldn’t understand much of what was going on inside her.

  It did not help that I’m a literal sort of person, and not really religious. Daddy’s not religious either. Mama claims to be, and she’d deny it, but I believe she’s just pretending to be religious because she thinks that being religious, and believing she’s believing in it, is how she is supposed to be. It was different with Grandma. She wouldn’t talk about it much, but she believed the stuff. Yet that’s not even quite it. She, I think, is the stuff.

  I think maybe she was much like everybody else before she had the second dream, the Dogon dream (or was the Dogon dream the third dream now that I’ve learned from her of her twelfth-century life in Lalibela? No, I was just a little boy then, she said, so this must have come after the Dogon dream), which would probably make anybody religious—spiritual might be a better word for it—including me, maybe. I did not really know her before she had the dream, so I don’t know how she was before that, but you’d think something like that would change anybody, wouldn’t you? Maybe even me, after I saw what I saw on the news. Jesus! How can you explain something like that?