Makeda

  My grandmother’s eyelids rose slowly. She shivered in a way that suggested that the shiver had bridged her back into the present. She took a deep breath and expelled the air slowly while allowing her shoulders to fall with the mannerism of a small sigh that I interpreted as a peace of sorts. Knowing nothing fitting to say, I remained silent. Her visage wore a mark of wonder her sightless eyes shone wide to complement.

  She said with disbelief, “The people in the dream all looked like us. I was told, or somehow knew, that they were called Moors and ruled most of Europe.” She laughed, it seemed, at the absurdity of the idea. “My mother was the only person I’d ever heard say the word Moor about a group of people. Have you ever heard tell of it, Gray?”

  “I’ve heard it, Grandma. I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard it. I heard it from you once long ago. In English literature, Shakespeare wrote a play, or was credited with writing a play, about a Venetian general who was a Moor. His name was Othello. He was black in the play, but it was just a play.”

  “Well, isn’t that something? What do you s’pose this all means, dreamin’ things I never heard about, but happened?”

  “I don’t know, Grandma. I know I asked you this once before, but I really don’t know. Do the dreams scare you?”

  “Lawd no, son. What scares me is wakin’ up.” She smiled to herself, savoring the dream she had only just recalled to me. “My, were the people rich, rich like you never seen before. Gray, will you read up on these Moors for me and tell me about them when next you come? Will you do that, son, for your grandmother?”

  I had never tried to discover from her whether or not she believed that she had actually lived the lives she dreamed about, although she had said to me many times that the dreams were very real, very different. It then occurred to me just how profoundly the dreams had affected her, and that what had inspired the transcendent contentment that set her apart from her surroundings was not the mere knowledge of past lives she had lived, but rather the more renovating knowledge of the better worlds the dreams recalled. She lived, because of this, not with mortals in the rough contemporary moment, but in the long ages where the broad experience of events averaged down all suffering.

  When I was ten, I had asked her in the parlor one late Saturday afternoon, “Why, Grandma, do you call yourself African, when everybody you know or ever hear talk on the radio calls us Negroes and colored people?”

  With no trace of argument or prepossession, she had answered from shadow matter-of-factly and softly, “Well, son, it’s that I’ve been African much longer than I’ve been anything else.” She’d stopped there and remained silent for a time—as if she were mulling memories of far-off discrepant existences. “You like sardines, Gray?” Asked lightly.

  With no idea where she was going with this, “Love ’em. You know that, Grandma,” both of us smiling.

  “Well, son, when they were fish swimmin’ in the ocean, they weren’t called sardines. Did you know that? They weren’t called sardines until they were put in cans. And we weren’t called Negroes until we were put in chains. Slavery’s the reason why we’re the only people in the world to be called by so many different names—and now, some not-sonice ones we’re calling each other. I’ve even heard you say the word, playing with your friends outside on the street, Gray. I’m just who I always was. Simple as that.”

  Recalling the talk I’d had with my grandmother all those many years before, I thought about what Dr. Harris-Fulbright had said, that the remembered past life is of the same race as that of the living person being regressed. My grandmother saw herself as the same person belonging to the same race of people. She was and had always remained African and black.

  “Yes, Grandma,” I now said lightly, “I will do the research and bring you a full report on the Moors sometime between my commencement in May and my departure for Mali in July.”

  “Good. Wonderful,” enjoying herself, “I hope I’m not keepin’ you too busy.”

  “There is one other thing, Grandma. The woman who wrote the book I gave you. Her name is Joyce Harris-Fulbright.” I felt, as I spoke, a small inchoate twinge of guilt. “She would like to come and talk to you about your dreams.”

  She asked a flat uncolored, “Why?”

  “As part of her research.”

  “I already know what I know. I know what I dreamed. I told you. You told her. Now she knows what I dreamed. Why would she come all the way here to hear me tell her what I told you?”

  “Well … she thinks you might actually have lived before, you know …” I was floundering, “and that she could prove this if she could get from you more details about those past lives. I, I …” I stumbled, “She would like to hypnotize you.”

  Her sightless eyes seemed to lock onto mine. Her open countenance sagged in broad disappointment. “What has gotten into your head, Graylon March? Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t need to prove a thing. Why would I have some stranger come here and hypnotize me?”

  I did not know what to say. I felt oddly soiled, as if I had been caught in a bath of molten light priming to trade my soul for small public notice. A smarmy novice thief, called out and scorned.

  “My God, son. I don’t want to be in nobody’s book. I don’t want people readin’ what some stranger has to say about me.” She sounded more grieved than angry. She stopped and swung her head in a woeful arc that took the place of the words she could not find to say. All she managed was, “Why? Why would you? Why would you betray my trust in you?”

  “I—I thought—”

  “You thought what, Gray?” Her voice had hardened.

  “I told you that I wanted to write the story of your life and dreams. I told you a long time ago and you encouraged me, Grandma.” Cold sweat trickled crookedly from my armpits down across my ribs. My voice floated high and plaintive. Broken thoughts strained to dance away in flight.

  “Gray, I have loved you as much as any mother has ever loved a child. I never wanted to be in a book. But I was willin’ to allow it because I thought it would help you to become what you wanted to become—a writer.”

  “Grandma, no one will believe it if I write it, no one will publish it either.”

  “Then let it not be published.”

  “Then no one will ever know about the dreams, Grandma.”

  “Do you think that has anything to do with my worth as a human being—or yours?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t need nobody to know me. I know me. That’s more than enough knowin’ for one person.”

  “Grandma, what has happened to you is a miracle the world should know about, our people should know about.

  You could expand the body of knowledge.”

  “College make you talk like that? Let me tell you somethin’, son. Ambition is a good thing, but only if you really know yourself before ambition gets ahold of you and blows you about like wind in a kite. Let me make myself plain. I will not meet with your professor and I certainly will not let her or anybody else hypnotize me. You got that?

  Knowledge—or what is it you said, the body of knowledge?

  — will do well enough without me, I’m sure. Okay?”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  She made a dramatic gesture with her arm, punctuating her remonstrance. “You write it, son. Whether it gets published or not, you write it. But not to get you famous. And Lord knows, not me. Write it because you call yourself a writer, and that’s reason enough. And maybe buy yourself a hat, and check from time to time to see that you can still fit your head under it.” She winked a blind eye and made us both laugh.

  I left my grandmother seated in the dark parlor and walked through to the vestibule. When I opened the front door to leave, so bright was the midday sun that I saw nothing at first except the featureless shape of a man standing there before me on the little wooden porch, motionless and silent. As my pupils adjusted, I saw that the man was my father. Discernible first were the weary eyes, rimmed with dessicated g
ray parchment skin. The eyes, a burning ruin of puzzled agony, shone wetly from deep sockets and conveyed a scourge of relentless melancholy. The shoulders sloped as if they had been borne down by the dead weight of harsh fortune.

  He said only my name, “Gray,” wedging with one word the choking inhibition of pride hard against the warring coequal truths of love and fury.

  I said, “Hello, Daddy.” Then he moved past me into the darkness of the house without saying anything more.

  I did not return to the house until after dark that evening. Daddy had left for home hours before.

  “Gray, I want you to promise me something.”

  “Sure, Grandma.”

  “Don’t give me sure, boy. I’m serious.”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “I want you to promise me now.”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “Is this girl, this girl Jeanne, is she somethin’ you’re sure about?”

  “Yes, Grandma. I’m just not so sure about me, you know?”

  “Then you must do what you have to do to make things right, boy. Don’t fool around and lose her, you hear me?”

  “Yes, Grandma. I hear you.”

  “That means you have to do whatever it is you have to do to straighten things out with your father. He can’t do it. He just doesn’t have it in him. You’ll have to show him, son. He’s not a bad man. He’s a good man. He just can’t seem to find his way.”

  “I’ll try, Grandma,” I answered uncertainly.

  “I’ve been a better mother to you than I was to him. You’re stronger than he is. Help him, Gray. Help him find his way out. Do you understand what I’m asking you?”

  “Yes, Grandma, but—”

  “No buts. You do it!” She sounded afraid, and then continued, “My family is fallin’ apart and I can’t stop it. You know like nobody else will ever know what that means to somebody like me. Life is not worth living without family and mine is fallin’ apart. Oh God! Oh Osanobua! Oh Onyame! Oh Allah! Please help me. Help me, please.” She spoke these exhortations quietly, but with a tremulous robustness, as if she were warring against some defining weakness that characterized the dangerous new age that she neither liked nor understood. Then she began to weep. I moved by the side of her chair and knelt and put my arms around her and held her close to me.

  “I’m with you, Grandma. I’ll always be with you, Grandma. Do you understand me? Do you know what I mean?”

  Her sightless eyes shone in the evening light like polished stones. “Yes, son. I understand.”

  We held on to each other for what felt a long while. Then she released me and for a moment seemed to see me.

  “You go to that girl and you love her, hear me? And you marry her and you have children. And you let her and those children know your soul, and they will be safe because yours is a soul worth knowin’.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I did not attend the May commencement exercises. I told Jeanne that this was because I did not believe in the nonsense of pomp and ceremony. The truth was that I was ashamed of having no family to attend and I did not want Jeanne to witness this. I collected my master’s diploma from the president’s office on the following Monday and that was that.

  I made calls on the same Monday to arrange a number of job interviews. Although I had already committed to begin work at the University of Pennsylvania toward a PhD in September, I had lately begun to think about working awhile first. Thus, I was seeking a college teaching position and was already under serious consideration by two English departments, one in western Maryland and another at Cheney State, a historically black school in Pennsylvania.

  I then drove downtown to Blanton’s Books, a usedbook store with thousands of little-known titles. I bought a fairly recent softcover edition of a book that had been originally published in 1886: The Story of the Moors in Spain by the English writer Stanley Lane-Poole. The book’s cover design had been taken from a painting by Eduard Charlemont that belonged to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painting was a full-length portrait of a bearded darkskinned black man dressed in an elaborately embroidered white silk robe and headdress. The artist had entitled the painting, The Moorish Chief.

  When I got back to my apartment I called Mrs. Grier and asked her to get my grandmother to the phone.

  “Grandma, I’m sending you a book about the Moorish civilization in Spain. Have Mrs. Grier over to read to you and don’t let her stop until you’ve gotten through, at least, the first 131 pages. Oh—and also ask her to describe the man on the cover. Ask her who the man looks like. Don’t tell her, just ask her, and I bet she says Daddy when he was young. Okay, Grandma?”

  “Are you still coming home before you leave for Mali?”

  I was glad to hear her ask this. “Yes, Grandma, I won’t leave without seeing you.”

  Later that evening, I called Dr. Harris-Fulbright at home in Los Angeles and told her that my grandmother had decided against hypnosis, or even a meeting with her.

  “Did you make clear to her the importance of this kind of research?” The question bore a tone of accusation.

  “I did the best I could, Dr. Harris-Fulbright.”

  “Did you explain to her that she would be credited in any writings about her experiences?”

  “Yes. But she doesn’t want to be credited.”

  “She doesn’t?” Incredulous.

  “My grandmother sees the world differently from most people.”

  Jeanne and I, by then, had been seeing each other exclusively for just under three months and had yet to make love. In the matter of sex, we were both old-fashioned in very much the same way. We had become quite serious about each other, and while our separate florid chemistries gathered pace for release, we mutually understood that because of the serious character of our relationship, ill-timed sex would alter it irrevocably. Intuition told her that I needed healing first, thus making the closed, shrouded piece of my story all the more concerning to her. Generously she had decided to wait on me. Waiting was but another thing that she did well. She understood me, even the bruised, hidden parts of me she had yet been given leave to know. She was possessed of some intrinsic faith that I would survive whatever it was that was troubling me. Indeed, it was her faith, not mine, that gave me to believe that she may have been right.

  I fantasized a great deal about having sex with Jeanne. Yet I was reluctant to press my case for it.

  In early adulthood, I found my parents’ teachings attacking me with surprising force in the literal verse of their very own brittle biblical morality on sex that makes the whole business of the dance so exciting on the one hand and so wrong on the other, both of which hands needed to applaud God’s greatest gift to humankind, far and away.

  Society had instructed me that sex was a bad thing to do, but not nearly as bad for guys as it was for the girls we begged to do it with us. While sex soiled us maybe a little, it soiled girls a lot. Although I am sure my parents never gave it much thought, they contributed significantly to our acceptance of this notorious double standard. I saw the relief and approval very much written on my mother’s face as she worked hard to scold me after one of my condoms surfaced in the suds of her weekly clothes wash. Her son was safely heterosexual. I’m sure she told Daddy about the washtub rubber that very night. I’m just as sure that Daddy breathed a sigh of relief and crossed one of the bigger items from his long worry list.

  It was that evening as we watched the sun set from her apartment balcony that I told Jeanne the story of my grandmother, Makeda Gee Florida Harris March, and her Homeric dream travels across the arc of time.

  My mother called me on a Monday morning after my father left the house for work. It was not my birthday. It was not Christmas.

  My mother was fifty-two years old. She had once been a brilliant and beautiful young woman of formidable promise. But the years and terrible times, and indeed the men— her sons, her husband—in her life as well, had worn away all the colors of hope in her character, leaving in its gr
ay open space only the dull daily mindless repetitions of the dutiful housebound wife and mother. She had submerged her once creative specialness and sacrificed herself all but wholly to the decorated shrine of my father’s embattled ego. She had once loved him fiercely. But her ardor, like the rest of her unnoticed passions, had cooled over the years in its ritual mold. She knew that my father loved her. She also knew that he worshipped his mother, the woman who had given him everything with which he had scratched his way to manhood. Thus, my mother had no real grounded place in the world, except that of serving the men in her house, and doing so for neither glory nor praise. She, in truth, lived, or existed, between us, ever mediating, ever seeking a peace that was inherently unachievable.

  “Virgil, you know how your father feels about your grandmother. He goes there every day. He worries about her constantly.” I had no idea where she was going with this and thus elected to remain quiet. “He was there on the Saturday after you were there. With your father sitting there, your grandmother received a phone call from a professor in California that got her very upset. Your father said that your grandmother told the professor repeatedly, and then nearly shouted at the person, that she would not let the professor hypnotize her. Then your grandmother hung up on the woman. Your father got your grandmother to tell him the whole story about the professor and the strange dreams your grandmother’s been having. Your father asked your grandmother how a professor in California would know about his mother’s dreams, and your grandmother told your father that you had called the professor and told her all these things about your grandmother. Your father is beside himself with anger. He says that you’re making his mother look like a lunatic.”