Images from a Paris slide show vanished. One sudden, short blaze of sunshine parted densely packed layers of cloud, then they zippered shut for good. No light overhead, but heaps and strands of algae like shadows littering the sand. Like people’s hair on a barbershop floor. People’s butchered hair stolen, stored in a warehouse in a scene from a grainy documentary that had popped up one night in New York City on the History channel. Blues and gospel, gospel and blues, rhythm and blues inside my head stopped abruptly and I found myself silently counting with each step the number of dead it would take to produce mounds and swarms and hills of hair. Human hair in a warehouse, hair the color of tangles of seaweed strewn on the beach.
I had instructed myself to walk away from things I couldn’t bear to see and things I couldn’t say, but my count, my steps on an overcast afternoon in Brittany mourned the dead. Mourned each lost person’s lost name. Names borne once, alive once, spoken once. Unspeakable now. Names only the sea remembers like it remembers to keep track of the ebb and flow of tides. Remembering, counting. Infinitely patient and precise. The way Clement from the barbershop remembered every number bet. Who won. Who lost. How many pennies, dimes, quarters, dollars wagered. Remembering, counting. How many dead are required to fashion trails, pools, streams of dark algae on the sand, how many heads shorn naked to produce a bale of clipped hair, how many fistfuls of hair to pack bale after bale. Hair curled, braided, twisted, spooled. Silent bales stacked to reach the ceilings of vast rooms.
* * *
No mother’s voice for company that afternoon. No one speaking. My mother’s face a pale mask. Lips painted too pink, closed eyelids sealed too tightly by grains of powder. Faces of my dead father and brother, grandfathers and grandmothers, the lost smile of my imprisoned brother’s lost son, the smile of the baby girl my sister lost. The dead face I had imagined for Clement. His own ghost name he never spoke. His limp, when I first saw him from my grandfather’s shoulders. His broom guiding quiet, quiet hair across the barbershop floor. Emptiness opened under my feet and I plummeted within a medium not quite silence, not hair, more like the sea’s moan no one notices most of the time because it’s always there.
* * *
Step inside Henderson’s Barbershop Saturday, late afternoon, and Clement or no Clement, you can’t help stepping on hair. Hair everywhere. And voices. Chairs have been full of customers since eight a.m. Some men hang out all day long. Father and son march in for the son’s first cut. A boy, first time solo in a barber chair, looks around to see who’s looking. Boosters duck in and out many times on Saturday to sell fabulous shit they steal. Colored janitors, lawyers, garbagemen, clerks, laborers, a dentist, a cop. Talk, talk, talking. Colored men of all colors. Men in work coveralls. Men Saturday night sharp at noon. A show when I’m a youngblood in a barber chair or waiting my turn seated below mirrors that double, triple the Saturday action inside Henderson’s.
I wanted to be one of the dudes bopping in from big cars, sporting the perforated leather, two-tone Stacy Adams shoes Big Jim wore and everybody wished they could afford. Some men quiet as Clement, others tell loud stories that begin in the middle and never end, play on and on like serials at the Belmar show where my grandmother or an aunt used to drop me off Saturday morning to join the line of other little colored kids, hot dime in our fists, hungry for a day of Technicolor double features cartoons, an action-packed, black and white serial.
The word serial was a puzzle the first time I heard it. Cereal, what we ate with milk and sugar in bowls at breakfast, right. No. Same sound serial also a story, my aunt Geraldine explained. Same tale that’s a different tale each time, I finally figured out. Like one Saturday morning you’d see a pretty white lady tied up on the train tracks and a big black locomotive snorting down the rails to run her over. Better git out the way, fool. Engine gets bigger and bigger. Fills the screen. Lady screams. Every little kid in the Belmar screams. Steam whistle shrieks. Steel wheels cut up the poor, soft, pretty, tied-up lady. Told you git out the way, didn’t I. But the screen goes black so you miss the chance to see her bloody, chopped up bones and meat. TO BE CONTINUED. Then you pay your dime next Saturday morning and she ain’t even dead at all. Huh-uh. Cowboy fool in a big white hat snatches her off the tracks. She’s safe as a sack of potatoes curled up in his arms. Lady gone so the hooting train runs over nobody. Some kids clap and whoop and dance in their seats. Big BOOOO when the pretty lady hugs the cowboy’s neck, kisses his cheek. Serials don’t worry about last time, just this time, just keep on running Saturday after Saturday. Like same barbershop story always a different story. Serials remember only what they want to remember, but who cares long as it’s a good lie.
* * *
Louis Till’s story is a serial. To be continued glows in white letters each time the screen darkens. The word Clement starts it again. Clement who drools, limps, Clement who never speaks, never ages. Who doesn’t turn up one day in Henderson’s and nobody says, Clement dead. They say Clement tired of youall’s foolishness. Gone to sweep out another barbershop. But I knew better. Even as a boy I had known Clement was dead and could take me away, turn me dead like him. Clement’s red rag caked with blood and his nasty, dead filth. Frankenstein-Dracula–Wolf Man face of Clement in the mirror spins into my dreams. There’s spooky silence in the name Clement. In the huge boot his foot drags. No one ever hears Clement speak his own name and after he’s gone who would want to hear him say it. First time I saw him in the Homewood streets I knew he was a ghost and from that moment on I was sure he would sneak up one day and Boo. Holler his name in my ear. Steal my life.
* * *
Clement. Horse-faced, parchment yellowish Clement who never spoke and seemed not to age during my decades of haircuts in Henderson’s Barbershop. Mr. Henderson dead, his three sons, my peers, grown up to be barbers like their daddy, and Tito, one of them who used to cut my hair, dead like his father and my father, and Clement still sweeping balls of hair off Henderson’s floor. Clement’s never a day older. His jaw hangs wide open while he sweeps, polishes, tidies up, scrubs, mops, hobbles out on errands, plays people’s numbers in the tobacco shop up the Avenue. Say a number once to Clement, he never forgets it. If you’re a player, say your figure to Clement because his head count is truer than numbers scratched on slips of paper. Clement’s the final judge. When disagreements grow too loud, everybody’s paid off or loses according to the numbers Clement speaks with his fingers. Clement’s always busy, busy, except once in a while on the hottest days he catnaps on an upturned milk crate beside the window whose large red letters spell out Henderson Barber Shop, letters which also could have said Clement Orphan Shop. He sits on his crate like he owns the whole wide world. Says not a word, looks not a minute older year after year. Just fewer and fewer teeth, more stumps, snags, gaps.
Just before Mr. Henderson died and his surviving sons took over the shop, he bought Clement a shiny, new grill of white teeth. Clement wore them, but still drooled, losing spit and sneezing sprays of spit just like the first time my father sat me in Mr. Henderson’s chair and Mr. Henderson skinned my head and I couldn’t take my eyes off the yellow boy or small yellow man who pushed a push broom up and back, back and up. Mr. Henderson hollered, Boy, wipe your mouth, at the horse-faced yellow boy or little yellow man who pulls a nasty rag from his back pocket, mops his long chin.
The nasty red snot rag in Clement’s hand had made me shudder, almost made me sick. I was close to throwing up, already close to tears that first time in a barber’s chair because my father was mad at me and Mr. Henderson’s electric clippers lawn-mowing every last blade of my nice, thick, nappy hair, hair uncut till that morning. Boo-hoo, what’s happened to all my nice hair. Hair the women at home loved to pat and comb and brush and coo-coo. They’d tuck me under my chubby chin, coo-coo, or pinch my dimples, pretty hair, look at hims pretty long hair, ain’t him a handsome boy, sweet boy.
* * *
Clement in my dreams for years. Since the first time I saw him. His two big nose holes
. Two big eye holes red moons inside a yellowish sky. Clement’s spitty mouth never closed, never said a word. Was he sorry for me or teasing me, first time I sat in a barber chair. Did Clement catch me spying on him or was he spying peekaboo on me while I searched for myself and couldn’t find myself in the wraparound wall mirrors that mashed together, pulled apart everything in Henderson’s.
* * *
Clement memories jump-start many stories. Talked stories that flow, merge into the name Clement never speaks. Clement’s quiet broom pushing balls of hair unheard unless Henderson’s empty and if Henderson’s empty who would hear except Clement. Ghost silence of everybody’s hair, same, same on the floor, gone off the top of whomever’s head it once covered, heads shaved cue ball bare, same, same. Soundlessness of clumps of hair dropping on the floor, a mound of hair or many mounds, same, same, pushed slowly together, mounds growing wider, deeper.
Deeper than the deep blue sea is what I thought, a kid once upon a time, first time, first haircut in Mr. Henderson’s chair, stomach knotted, bare feet sinking deeper and deeper into wormy masses of swarming, clammy hair. Close to tears. Lips quivering. Afraid I’d lose control altogether and blubber if I tried to open my mouth to answer my father. What in hell’s wrong with you, boy. My father definitely not happy with me. Ashamed of me. Ashamed for me because I was acting silly in public. Behaving like a sissy first time in a barber chair. Disappointment fills my father’s eyes. He tries to shake off his own shame and embarrassment. Nods tsk, tsk, at Mr. Henderson. But I couldn’t help it. Couldn’t stop. I sniffed, trembled in the cavernous chair. Sank deeper and deeper into its soft cushions. Drowning. Eyes, ears, mouth, nose slowly sucked down through layers of slime. Smelled it, tasted it. Blinded by thick, wiggling yards and miles of people’s silent hair. People’s sheared off, dead hair like ropes and piles of algae, it could have been algae, endless mile after mile of dark sea waste I envisioned, though at that age I had not been near the ocean, knew nothing about seaweed I’d see one afternoon in Brittany imitating stolen hair.
* * *
On my second day in France, Antoine had driven me from Paris to Oise-Aisne to search for Louis Till’s grave. We parked across the road from the imposing stone portals of the main cemetery, in a lot next to an administrative building with nobody at home around noon when we arrived, so after a brief browse unescorted through two small rooms of artifacts and photos that illustrate the history of the American Cemetery and Memorial, we exited a rear door, same door probably Alice Kaplan had exited in 2004, but we had no administrator to guide us. We walked about a hundred yards in the wrong direction towards a combination garage and utility shed beside which some workers were finishing lunch, others loading equipment on vehicles, a crew of groundskeepers in gray-striped coveralls who nodded, no, huh-uh, or dropped their eyes when I asked in my best French about the location of Plot E, until one of them, pale blue eyes shaded by a Phillies baseball cap, pointed across the road in the direction of the vast cemetery proper where the person might be who could answer questions about a smaller, separate burial site. Given the workers’ not unfriendly though guarded responses, I didn’t want to cross the road just yet because any official who could help could also be a pain-in-the-ass and order us to go away.
We waited until all the workers walked or drove off, then poked around in sparse woods below the shed and garage, me gradually realizing as we checked out the terrain that I had no idea how distant or disguised a graveyard for dishonored dead I had read about in a book might be if its custodians wished to conceal its presence. After we had circled through the trees and wound up more or less back where we’d entered them, we mounted a slight slope that leveled off not far beyond the administrative building, and at the top of the rise, confronted by a high, thick mass of trees and shrubbery, we hesitated again, not wishing to be caught skulking around, not quite ready to abandon the search either, unsure what to do next, until one of us decided to push aside some branches, slip inside a small break in the dense barrier of greenery to see what might lie beyond it. One, two, three cautious steps, ducking, bobbing, weaving to avoid thorny branches, and there we were inside a circle of pines and laurel at the edge of a serenely green, set-aside space that contained one small, freestanding stone cross and ninety-six identical, four-by-four-inch, flat white stones arranged in parallel rows, each stone bearing a number just as Alice Kaplan’s book, The Interpreter, had informed readers they would.
Beneath each white marker embedded in the slightly sloping, meticulously groomed lawn, if Kaplan and numerous other sources I’d consulted were accurate, lay the remains of dishonored American soldiers who had been executed by the U.S. Army during World War II and transported here for reinterment sometime around 1949 from burial grounds in various countries that once constituted the Mediterranean and European theaters, so to speak, of World War II.
Louis Till’s grave, The Interpreter said, is number 73, to our right, at the near corner of Plot E’s rectangular arrangement of four rows, twenty-four graves per row.
Till’s grave is exactly like all the others. Marked by a small flat stone with probably an underground zinc liner beneath it containing a wooden box containing another wood box containing remains. Eighty-three of the ninety-six graves hold colored remains. Each of the ninety-six is allotted approximately half the room allotted to each of the 6,012 graves for honored dead across the road, graves for casualties of a battle fought nearby, one of the fiercest of World War I. In the official American Cemetery and Memorial of Oise-Aisne, a thirty-five-acre expanse constituted of Plots A through D, the headstones of the honored dead are tall crosses of white marble, imported from Carrara, Italy, crosses deployed so that, as one proceeds through the cemetery, their long rows rise gently from the main entrance . . . presenting an ever changing array of geometric patterns.
Inside Plot E, I had stepped away from Antoine to be alone. Moved closer to Louis Till’s marker, close enough to speak privately to Louis Till on this, our first meeting, this first chance to say hello, goodbye, whatever. A silent exchange, of course. Like silence within glass sculptures. Like silence Antoine and I had maintained since entering Plot E, as if a sign forbidding talk on pain of death had been posted beside the gap we found through the thicket of greenery enclosing the dishonored graves.
No conversation with Antoine. None with Louis Till, either. I could not pretend Louis Till would hear a greeting, a benediction spoken or unspoken. Nor pretend Till’s silence signified anything other than Till’s absence.
No Louis Till. No man under marker 73. Full-size, grown men laid out properly on their backs would not fit into the cramped spaces defined by Plot E’s grid of stones. Then what the fuck was under each marker. Inside a zinc liner, inside wooden boxes. What did the army find in 1949 when they dug up and pried open the original coffin containing Louis Till’s remains. A uniformed or naked corpse folded up like a fetus. A skeleton wearing rags of flesh. Heap of dust, hair, teeth. Trash bag of ashes. Remains. What remained. Did they chop Till up, break his bones to fit into a container designed for Plot E’s stingy dimensions. After you tie a man’s hands, blindfold him, put a noose around his neck, drop him through a trapdoor, let him swing in the breeze, shitting and pissing on himself, neck broken, heart stopped, was it possible to inflict more injury, more insult and dishonor on his body. On his remains. Who conceived the idea to exhume the dishonorable dead and reinter them in this isolated, separate, restricted Plot E. Who conceived the elaborate specifications and protocols of the reburial project. Who contracted mortuary specialists to execute the plan.
I wanted to rip Till’s plaque out of the ground. Hurl it far away. A scream, growl, curse, moan, howl wanted to leap from my throat. Something, anything to disrupt Plot E’s preposterous dignity. Why the obscenity, the madness, the irony of special handling, costly attention devoted to a man after he’s been reduced to dead meat. Rotting meat and bones exhumed, then trucked, shipped, riding a train, flying through the air to wind up in hole number 73, on
e of ninety-six four-by-four holes more appropriate in size for burying large dogs than men.
* * *
If you stood beside Louis Till’s grave today what would you hear. Probably not the cries I kept inside myself. Would you hear blood. Blood’s loud flow a river dividing humankind. Blood of crimes in Italy. Crimes in Mississippi. Blood deep. Blood guilt. Till blood. Evidence loud and clear in the stillness of Plot E. The Till father condemned by dark blood at birth. An orphan no one claims. Origins unknown. Probably not quite human. A beast to be penned, tamed, worked, slaughtered. The son’s fate differs only slightly. False innocence his crime. Blood chose Emmett Till. His time was cut short to demonstrate what bright blood must be willing to do if it wishes brightness to live on and on. To thrive and prosper uncorrupted.
Louis Till’s story, his son Emmett’s, mine, my father’s, my family’s could begin or end there. With a story of stolen sugar. With a blood price exacted for theft. With rage. With resignation. With grief. Mourning. With ancient bloody lies twisting inside me. A scream I suppressed. Silent screams of the dishonored dead filed in boxes at my feet. Lost names. Lost faces.
* * *
My visit to the dishonored graves didn’t last long. I forced myself to look away from Louis Till’s numbered stone. Stared at pine trees and laurel bushes that had been planted to shield Plot E from view. The perimeter of bushes and trees had grown quite tall. Evidently it was no one’s job to trim the top of it, blackly green and sprawling scraggly against clear blue sky. I could pick out individual branches, twigs, thorns, briars high above Plot E’s neat lawn. I kept my eyes fixed up there until I began to feel the dark barrier circling, closing behind my back. I traced the entire circle in my mind one more time. What I could see of it, what I could not see. I followed it again, one last time even more slowly, slowly, then lowered my eyes to find Antoine. Nodded at him and we walked back to his car.
Writing to Save a Life Page 16