Writing to Save a Life

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  Louis Till’s grave subdued me. During the car ride from Oise-Aisne to Paris, and later in the restaurant. I had no desire to speak about Till or anything else. Told only one Till tale that night, and not until a waiter had refilled our glasses from a second bottle of good Bordeaux and I noticed Chantal was not being her usual voluble, flirty self. I didn’t want her to believe my silence about finding Louis Till’s grave meant I was excluding her because she missed the trip or worse, believe I was treating the Till business as strictly man business I intended to discuss only with Antoine.

  My abrupt arrival alone, suitcase in hand, into the midst of busy preparations for Nice, had allowed us very little time to catch up with much of anything personal. This was fortunate, in a way. I couldn’t explain to myself why I felt compelled to rush across an ocean to visit a dead man, so how could I explain to my friends my sudden appearance at their door. A bit of background information about the Tills, father and son, was the best I could offer, plus an awkward admission I was following a plan whose shape and intent remained mysterious to me, a plan that evolved as it invented itself step by step, me in tow. The steps were clearly necessary, as I performed them, though I had not anticipated or consciously prepared for them nor could I guess what the next step might be or where it would lead. Fortunately, both my hosts had long been smitten by a very French love of blues, jazz, and gospel, and when I finally hit upon the word improvisation in my uneasy ramble, they both mercifully nodded and smiled.

  In the restaurant, two of us fresh from the Oise-Aisne trip she’d been forced to miss, a trip she understood was urgent for me, Chantal’s good sense and good manners prevented her from asking questions. I knew she had to be more than curious. I owed her and definitely didn’t want her to feel left out, so I broke my silence about Louis Till’s grave as best I could under the circumstances. Described a recent truth-stranger-than-fiction news item, replete with blackly humorous details about grave stealers and a family of possums residing in an abandoned, glass-topped coffin.

  After I finished the anecdote gleaned from the Internet, Antoine volunteered to drive me to the cemetery again, first thing after they returned from Nice. I thanked him and hoped aloud Chantal would be free to make the trip. She smiled at me, and suggested that Antoine offer the keys to his family’s holiday cottage in Brittany, just in case I might prefer a few days of rural peace and quiet to bumping around in hectic Paris while they were away in Nice. Yes of course, he said. I gratefully accepted both offers. I didn’t tell them I welcomed the chance to hide away more than I relished the prospect of revisiting the cemetery. I needed downtime. I’d found Louis Till’s grave. Stood next to it. Now what. I caught a train to Brittany the morning my friends drove south. We agreed to rendezvous in five days at the Paris apartment, and two days after that I would be on my way back to the States, my wife, all the time allotted by my special excursion fare exhausted.

  * * *

  Surrounded by fields and woods, the cottage near the Gulf of Morbihan sat private and isolated, a forty-five-minute walk from Arradon, the closest town. Arradon a town where years later my wife and I would buy a house. Train from Paris to Vannes, bus Vannes to Arradon, taxi from town to cottage, Antoine’s family name as he’d promised, enough of an address for the taxi driver to deliver me.

  I imagined the cottage must be centuries old. Huge chimney and a steeply sloped thatch roof like an oversize, beat-up straw hat pulled down snugly atop its stone walls. An outer wall of stone enclosed the cottage and its small garden. The sort of dwelling I remembered from pictures in fairy-tale books my mother read to me. Except there was no family of bears to greet me when I unlocked the front door, switched on the lights in rooms whose shuttered windows and doors sealed out the afternoon sun. The interior of the cottage was compact, efficient, tidy, with rooms all on one level except for a tiny loft in one corner, more bird nest than room. The ceilings high, beams exposed. Plank floors and wood-paneled walls gave it a warm feel. Casual, miscellaneous furniture, sturdy and indestructible. Bric-a-brac, knickknacks, prints, and paintings everywhere. The presence of previous visitors is so palpable I felt obliged to announce myself, new guest in residence, just passing through, folks. Anxious not to do anything that would spoil the next person’s stay. I promise to dispose of garbage, leave floors broom clean, bathroom scrubbed, and when I depart, rest assured, everybody, all my stuff will leave with me.

  * * *

  About forty-eight hours before I introduced myself to an empty house, I had been standing alongside Louis Till’s grave, a stay in a picturesque cottage unanticipated. No future is conceivable in Plot E. Only endless, gray repetition, unhappy flashbacks collapsing into more unhappy flashbacks. No excitement. Not a glimmer of satisfaction when I’d reached Till’s grave. Nothing to cushion the fall. What did you expect, turkey. I’d been in Plot E before, in a book, and that visit had prepared me for Till’s absence, for Plot E’s smothering quiet, the neatly trimmed grass, numbered stones. But I had not foreseen the palpable presence of Till’s enemies. Their thoroughness, implacability. Louis Till unable to shed them even after death.

  * * *

  In Brittany as I decided, among other things, whether or not to return to Louis Till’s grave, I spent lots of time with my mother. She walked beside me. I heard her voice. Remembered how much I missed her, and that loss made me remember missing other family members. My uncle Eugene for instance, my father’s younger brother killed by a sniper’s bullet as he and his buddies beachcombed for souvenirs on the island of Guam in September 1945, a few weeks after Japan had surrendered and victory declared in the Pacific. Though his body, like the body of Louis Till, never made it home after the war, my uncle had not surfaced in my Till file ruminations until my mother talked about Eugene in Brittany.

  My mother had never accepted my claim I possessed recollections of my uncle apart from stories I’d heard about him. I remain positive that I saw him live once, balancing himself on one long leg then the other, as he tugs off giant sneakers and tosses them into the closet just inside the front door of my grandmother’s house. Boy, you know you better not come in my clean house with those stinky dogs on your feet. I believed I had heard those words. Saw shoes on my uncle Eugene’s feet. Saw him loosen the laces and kick his sneakers off. Eugene grinning down at me as each one landed clunk in the closet.

  My mother conceded I might recall seeing Eugene’s shoes, but empty shoes she’s sure. Eugene’s sneakers sat in the back of the hall closet gathering dust because my grandmother refused to accept the fact her son Eugene, alive—Hallelujah—in his letter celebrating the war’s end, wasn’t coming home. The yellow telegram from the government had to be a mistake. Grandma forbid everybody, on pain of death, to touch Eugene’s shoes, so I may have seen his shoes and heard stories about his big, funky feet, but not until after the war, when we moved north from D.C. and I was grown enough to begin remembering things. Afterwards she said, that’s what I was remembering. Too young to recall Eugene before he left, underage himself, in a big hurry in 1943 to go fight the war.

  My mother had plenty of stories about the years my father was away in the war and we lived with my mother’s parents, John and Freeda French, my light-skinned grandparents. In Brittany I recalled my mother’s memories of my brown-skinned grandmother’s inconsolable grief. Grandma waiting, waiting for word of Eugene, her missing son, my father’s brother. She said she was watching for the postman, but everybody knew it was Eugene she waited for at the gate of the knee-high, rusty iron fence in front of her row house’s thumbnail of yard.

  My father’s mother grew enormous yellow roses, and shared cuttings from them with neighbors. On my trips home from college, years later after she died, I’d see her when I passed big bunches of yellow roses in other people’s yards. My grandmother at the mailbox beside the gate every morning for ten years till she was too crippled up by a stroke to make it on her own down the short, brick path. Too proud and bitter to ask for help. Year after y
ear, every single day for ten years, my mother said. Not one day missed, rain or shine, sickness or health. But my mother may have been exaggerating. My mom not always totally accurate. Not always right. About me and Uncle Eugene, that’s one good example, probably. But, anyway, it was mostly my mother’s stories, her voice, keeping me company in Brittany’s quiet.

  * * *

  Brittany’s quiet seldom silent. Seldom empty. From high overhead on wires that delivered power to the cottage, touterelles coo-cooed from dawn to dusk. Each searching, solitary cry perfectly echoed all the others. Cries that did not break stillness but enlarged it. Cries endlessly announcing and lamenting loneliness, whether or not coo-cooing aroused another touterelle’s response. The large, pigeon-like birds also played hide-and-seek inside thick foliage above the garden walls, rustling leaves with swift, busy bouts of lovemaking. Invisible sea and wind always present in the quiet. If I shut my eyes I would hear the faraway rumble of waves crashing, shrieks and caws of gulls.

  At night the wooden walls, floors, and ceilings of the cottage expanded and contracted, perhaps to accommodate the weight of dreams passing back and forth, unfinished dreams left behind by previous visitors. Brittany’s busy stillness night and day a relief of sorts, different from the silence of Louis Till’s wordlessness. Then again not so different either. In eloquence. In effect. If I meet Louis Till eye to eye, and he chooses not to utter a single word, I would understand that I was being addressed by his silence. Understand that much more than words at stake.

  * * *

  In Gare Montparnasse on my way to Brittany, as I had waited for a train to Vannes, my eyes happened to settle on a stranger, a man with nothing special about him who passed by close enough to touch, a man going in the opposite direction through a crowded underground corridor. For an instant his gaze crossed mine. Caught looking, we both performed the urgent, slapstick, head-snapping look away, as if we were guilty of something, or suspect at least. Guilty of what. Looking or looking away. Guilty of curiosity. Fear. Secrets. Why so uneasy in the mirror of another’s eyes. Even when another’s gaze engages only an instant. Louis Till’s gaze is not shy. He refuses to look away. Silence is Louis Till’s briar patch. His ground zero. Till does not break the silence of exchanges with him. Scorns words. Till’s naked self in my naked eyes, mine in his.

  On the same day of the guilty encounter in Gare Montparnasse, I watched the French countryside unfurl between Paris and Vannes, a tapestry of orderly strips of green, brown, black outside the TGV window, and tried to imagine Louis Till’s silence forming around things he observed. Till mapping an inner landscape he can move through efficiently, wordlessly. Guide others through it if he chooses. Or let others think whatever the fuck they want to think about what he’s thinking. Till hears words spoken or unspoken by others, then decides whether the words belong in his world. He’s probably correct that silence works better than speech to test whose world exists—Till’s world out there huffing, puffing to bust down the door, barge in and eat him or eat the world another person’s words invent. Silence is a game of chicken. Don’t flinch. Winner takes all.

  Mile after mile of rich land basking under bright sunlight rolls placidly by the train window. Operating-room-clean orchards drop no fruit to litter the grass. Perfect copies of perfect specimens of cows, goats, sheep, horses in place, copies that don’t need to move or move their bowels or be fed. Why would anyone insist anything should change. What could be better than this, this way it seems the French countryside has always been, always is. Maybe I should leave Till’s dry, old bones alone. No sign Louis Till was happy to see me when I showed up at his grave. No high five. No hug. No grin.

  * * *

  Before France, before I began to grasp how little or how much of Louis Till’s story could be retrieved, before I understood I would need more than a lifetime to acquire the little or the lot, not to complete a Till project, just to tease it forward a useful inch or so, I rode a bus south to look for information about James Thomas, Junior. If any single voice guaranteed a noose would settle around Louis Till’s neck, it could have been the voice of Junior Thomas, Till’s buddy in Port Company 177, 379th Battalion, Transport Command. A voice rising from the welter of ghostly voices that had settled like dust on the Till file’s yellow-gray pages I read again and again, dust on my fingers, in my eyes, nostrils as I sifted through the transcript asking dust to do what dust cannot do, assume shape, substance, breathe and speak again. On that trip south to research archives and public records, hoping I might discover something useful about Junior Thomas, about the south Louis Till’s son Emmett had visited in 1955, I decided I would pay a quick visit to the graves of my father’s side of the family in Promiseland, South Carolina, a pilgrimage, a duty I’d avoided far too long.

  On the way south droning bus tires, drone of the interstate’s interminable sameness, a peculiar combination of anticipation and dread kept me from dozing off, reminded me of my first return home from college. I’d worn a Senegalese boubou on a Trailways bus droning at night across the turnpike, Philly to Pittsburgh. My father had registered his disapproval of my tunic the instant I entered the front door of our Copeland Street house. Before I could cross the room to his chair, he made his opinion abundantly clear, dismissing my garment not with words, just a slow nod, eyebrows raised, lips pinched inside one corner of his mouth, head cocked to one side, cheek tensed, tilted the way he had held it up to shave difficult spots with his straight razor while I stood behind his back entranced, three or four foot tall, watching him through the open bathroom door gaze at himself in a mirror.

  After my father’s silent critique of my tunic, I made sure to don it each day of my stay. Then never wore it again in life. The boubou didn’t return to school with me, discarded who knows where, though I thought about it, missed it on the three-hundred-mile ride back to my dorm room across Pennsylvania’s empty mountains. Missed the coarse fabric, its ribs of raised stitching I liked to pick at, the faint, oddly sweetish funk inhabiting the tunic when I lifted it from a hanger in a West Philly shop. I often wondered if other people could smell it when they stood close to me. I missed its threads of many colors, colors to which I assigned the few African female names I’d heard, imagining hair, voices, eyes, lives for the women, for us, our bodies entwined, a dance of touches, scents, noises, warmth, weaving the boubou’s bold, bright stripes.

  My father’s contempt is almost funny now, and I wish I could have smiled at him, let him see I understood he was not simply putting me down. Show him I was grown enough, smart enough to figure out some things on my own. Not always only about me, my tender ego, fragile vanity, my predatory youngblood self at the center of the universe. I wish I had possessed the courage to speak loud and clear to my father. No, Daddy. Yes, Dad. Say yes and no to my father and let him understand that I meant what I said. Why couldn’t I say then what I would say now—You’re always part of the picture, Dad. Picture is you, me, both of us and this whole precarious family in the shit together.

  Whether I agreed with him or not about the appropriateness of draping myself with a particular piece of Senegalese cloth, my father had more than earned his right to pass a judgment. And why wouldn’t he resent, disparage, even despise the sudden privilege I granted myself to distance myself from his world. Silent disapproval was not necessarily intended to chill me. Stop me in my tracks. Probably less a matter of trying to hurt my feelings than a reminder to respect his. His rights. His obligation to protect them. A son’s obligation to honor a father’s space. Both of us touched and hurt most by exactly what we could never talk about—things like why no silly tunics, no college for my father.

  If I had responded differently to him both of us might have survived prickly exchanges with less regret, more grace, more peace. Laughing together later about moments which he himself, even back then, must have seen as at least partly humorous—his knucklehead son home from college wrapped up in some kind of Halloween costume bathrobe strutting around Pittsburgh’s streets. Funny
in a way, though also absolutely not amusing. Like fear of the south that sneaked back to tease me, haunt me on my journey below the Mason-Dixon Line to find facts about James Thomas, Junior.

  * * *

  For me, a colored kid growing up in the fifties in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, South, like Hollywood’s Africa, was a distant, primitive region. Dark. Dangerous. Untouched by time. By history or progress. South was the home of savages not my color who would catch, cook and eat me, not welcome me back. I’d been cautioned never to trust those pale-faced southerners with their odd accents. Their ghost color. Ghost blue eyes. Beady black eyes with no pity. They mean you no good, the elders warned. Never have. Never will. And watch your step, boy. Plenty them up here in the North.

  Boys who were teenagers, colored boys raised in northern cities like Emmett Till and me were only a generation or two removed from the old days, old ugly ways, old ugly country. We’d been taught in school and schooled daily by messages in the culture to believe we were not exactly Americans. More like orphans. Ancestors unknown. Except for cartoons of dumb, black slaves or Africans even blacker, dumber. And who wouldn’t want to forget them.