Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  Once again she hoped the Virgin would choose her younger brother to go up to Heaven and sing with the choir of angels. Technically, as he had never been properly buried, he was not sleeping, so his spirit was somewhere out there, wandering, searching. But perhaps if he were chosen to go up to Heaven, the Holy Mother would keep him there. She hoped too that her older brother would be allowed to slip into Paradise, even if it wasn't her idea of Paradise, but his—his Protestant one—which he had always told her included spending eternity in the same crystal palace as “His Savior.”

  The priest was incensing the altar, the smoke rising in a perfumed cloud toward the thorn-crowned head on the golden crucifix. Her daughter chose that exact moment to mumble something to her father while pointing to someone sitting diagonally on the aisle three rows down from them.

  Anne wanted to tell her daughter to be quiet, but her scolding would mean more conversation, and her daughter's murmurs were already drawing stares from those sitting nearby.

  When her daughter's garbled whispers grew louder, however, Anne moved her mouth close to her husband's ear to ask, “What is the problem?”

  “She thinks she sees Emmanuel Constant over there,” her husband calmly replied.

  Now he pointed at the man her daughter had been aiming her finger at for a while now. From her limited view of the man's profile Anne could tell he was relatively tall—even from his seated position his head stood above those around him—had dark brown skin, a short afro, a beard, and a mustache. All this was consistent with the picture a community group had printed on the WANTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE HAITIAN PEOPLE flyers that had been stapled to lampposts all along Nostrand Avenue a month before. Beneath the photograph of Constant had been a shorthand list of the crimes of which he had been accused—“torture, rape, murder of 3,000 people”—all apparently committed between 1993, when Constant had founded a militia called FRAPH, to Christmas Eve 1994, when he had arrived in the United States.

  For a month now, each morning while opening up and again at night while lowering their shutters, both Anne and her husband had been casting purposefully casual glances at the flyer on the lamppost in front of their stores. But they'd never spoken about it, even when—bleached by the sun and wrinkled by the cold—it had slowly begun to fade; the letters and numbers disappearing so that the word “rape” became “ape” and the “3” vanished from “3,000,” leaving a trio of zeros as the number of Constant's reported casualties.

  Even before the flyer had found its way to her doorstep Anne had followed the story of Emmanuel Constant through Haitian newspapers, Creole radio, and cable access programs. Constant had created his death squad after a military coup had sent the democratically elected president of Haiti into exile. FRAPH members had sought to silence the deposed president's followers by circling neighborhoods with gasoline, setting houses on fire, and shooting fleeing residents. Anne had read about incidents of facial scalping, where FRAPH members were said to have peeled back the skin from their victims' faces so no one would be able to identify them. Constant had been tried in absentia in a Haitian court and sentenced to life in prison, a sentence he would probably never serve.

  And every morning and evening as her eyes wandered to the paling flyer on the lamppost, she had had to fight a strong desire to pull it down, not out of sympathy for Constant, but out of a fear that even though her husband and Constant's reported offenses were separated by more than twenty-five years, she might arrive at her store one morning and find her husband's likeness on the lamppost rather than Constant's.

  Now that her husband had whispered that name so long unspoken between them, she found herself turning to her husband's face, not the supposed Constant; the circular bite marks reminding her of the three zeros on what was left of the WANTED flyer in front of their shops.

  “Could that really be him?” she whispered back to her husband.

  He shrugged as someone behind them leaned over and hissed “Shush” into her ear.

  The man her daughter believed to be Constant was looking straight ahead, watching the choir sing a Christmas carol. It could not be Constant, Anne decided. Why would he come to a church filled with Haitians when so many despised him? Wouldn't he be afraid for his life? Why would he want to taunt his survivors, or the friends and relatives of his victims who might recognize him?

  The daughter was fuming, shifting in her seat and mumbling under her breath, all the while keeping her eyes fixed on the man's profile.

  Anne was proud of her daughter, proud of her righteous anger. But what would her daughter say if she ever found out about her own father? About how he had tortured dozens, hundreds of people; how he had taunted his prisoners before they'd taken their last breaths, bullying them into card games with the false hope that they could earn back their lives from him; how he had collapsed into Anne's arms outside the prison gates, after he'd murdered, among others, her own brother; how he'd tried at first to make her think he was an escaped prisoner even when she had seen him enter the church and remove her brother from his pulpit.

  Because of the political sermons he was preaching at his church, her brother knew his arrest was inevitable, so he'd prepared for it by practicing biting “6s” on the back of his hands.

  “My murderer will carry the mark of the beast until the end of his days,” her brother had said. “I will brand him with three sixes, even more if I can.”

  When her husband, then a stranger, had collapsed into her arms with those marks on his right cheek, she'd known then that her brother had succeeded. As he raced out of the prison gates, his face bleeding, she'd run toward him to make sure the marks were there. But she and he had both whispered the word “Help” to each other at the same time. And believing, as she had often been told, that people who simultaneously utter the same word are meant to die together, she quickly grabbed his hand and held it tightly, as though it were her brother's fingers between hers. Since her brother was now surely gone, she wanted to become the guardian of his killer, and of the mark her brother had left on him. It was the last thread connecting her to her brother, and she was not willing to separate from it.

  At some point while she was holding his hand, he asked her to see him home.

  Soon after they arrived at his apartment, on the lower floor of a two-story house nearby, he crawled onto a bare mattress on the floor and fell asleep. She watched him sleep until dawn, sitting in a corner of his bedroom, trying to think of ways to take his life.

  In the morning she stumbled to an open market to buy a knife to plunge into his chest, but next to the knife vendor was a seller of the fernlike fèy wònt, the shame plant, a Mimosa pudica in a small plastic bag with soil and roots still attached.

  She bought the plant and carried it back to his apartment. By then he was awake, darkened blood caked over the bite marks, which she was suddenly desperate to see again. So she got some water and scrubbed his face as he closed his eyes and grimaced. The marks were still there, three large “Os” that looked more like circles than numbers.

  He noticed her mimosa and assumed she had gotten it for the tiny leaflets, which could be used to heal cuts. He looked ashamed when he reached over and touched the prickly spines and the leaves bent, then collapsed onto themselves, as though to shut him out, but the plant's miniature leaves soon opened up like a baby's fist. His face lit up; he smiled, even while groaning from the pain. He spent most of the morning tapping the leaves to watch them close, then open and close again. She noticed that whenever he smiled the bite marks shrank and disappeared into the folds of fat on his cheek, and she wished she had never bought the mimosa.

  Maybe this was when she lost her mind, watching him enjoy the shame plant. Seeing her brother's teeth imprints carved into his cheek, she felt as though she could hear her brother's voice speaking to her from the wound.

  “Stay with him,” her brother was saying, “and hopefully you will live to see shame and regret tear at him until he takes his last breath.”

  So she became
a different person, a woman with no past, no present, and no future. She would do whatever was necessary to realize her brother's dream.

  That afternoon when he went to the national archives to get the birth certificate of one of his victims, she followed him there. She went along when he got them passports and paid for someone to immediately get them visas for New York.

  A week later, when an old army friend of his met them at the airport in New York and he introduced her as his wife, she did not disagree. During sex that first night, and other nights after that, she insisted he keep the light on so she could stare at the marks which grew smaller and less defined as they healed and slowly shrank in size as he lost more and more weight. But the marks were still like a grave she could visit every day. Each time she looked at them, she felt her brother near her, his entire life reduced to his final rebellious act. When she touched or kissed them, it was as though she were holding a part of her brother that he'd left behind, just for her.

  The day their daughter was born, she realized some good could come out of their union. He had insisted on naming their daughter Ka, after something having to do with Egyptian statues, which he was becoming more and more interested in.

  She agreed to the name Ka as long as her daughter's middle names could be Erica and Justine, after her brothers. She regretted that even if her daughter wanted to, she'd never be able to trace her paternal lineage, because he'd taken on someone else's name and has used it ever since. Though Anne knew his real name, she preferred to call him by the assumed one and did so until it became so natural that she sometimes forgot the old one.

  As her daughter grew up, she had a recurring dream of her daughter returning to Haiti after her father's death to look for his family and confronting the dead man's relatives. But she never let on she was aware he was the one who had arrested her brother, even when he told about the people he had “worked on” at the prison, describing his interrogation methods in detail.

  At first, she couldn't get enough of his stories, asking him question after question. Then she led him to the narrative of his last killing, to his wrapping his bare hands around the neck of the man who had leaped at him and in quick succession gnawed the three bite marks into his face. After that story, they never spoke of prisons or torture again.

  Perhaps if her daughter knew all this, she would hate both her and her husband in equal measure, like Anne did at times. Perhaps they would repulse her for months, years. But maybe she would also pity them, even deny to herself that they had ever been anything but a barber and a beautician, a husband and wife, mother and father. Maybe their daughter would teach herself to forgive them over and over again, convincing herself that loving them was giving her life more purpose than she had ever dreamed it would have.

  The congregation was now getting up to walk to the front of the church to take Holy Communion.

  “How lucky we are,” said the priest, “that Jesus has given of his flesh for us to take into ourselves.”

  When her turn came, Anne got up with a handful of people from her pew, including the young couple sitting next to her, and proceeded to the altar. Uninterested and unconfessed, her husband and daughter remained behind.

  Standing before the priest, Anne opened her mouth as wide as she could to accept the wafer. She then took a mouthful of wine, more than the portion she usually allowed herself. Crossing herself, she followed a line of people walking back in the other direction to their seats.

  As she neared the pew where her daughter believed Constant was sitting, she stopped for a second to have a good look at him. Though he looked enough like Constant to be a relative, he was not Constant. Constant was older, fatter, almost twice the size of this man. He also had a wider forehead, bushier eyebrows, larger, more bulging eyes, a longer nose, and fuller lips.

  Anne lingered at the edge of the pew, glaring down at the man until he looked up at her and smiled, appearing uncomfortable.

  Someone tapped her shoulder from behind and she continued walking, her knees shaking, until she got back to her seat.

  “It is not him,” she whispered to her husband, who relayed the message to their daughter.

  “It is not him,” Anne repeated under her breath, to herself. “I knew he would have never come here.”

  She felt strangely relieved, as though she, her husband, and daughter had just been spared bodily arm. Her daughter, however, was still staring at the man, looking doubtful.

  Anne knew at that moment that she would never attend Mass at this church, or any other Mass again. What if someone were to sit there, staring at them the same way her daughter stared at that man?

  She couldn't wait for the Mass to end. They would leave the church as soon as it was over, avoiding the meetings and greetings at the end.

  As they stepped out of the church, ahead of everybody else, the first thing Anne noticed was the extravagantly embellished house across the street, the one her daughter had referred to as “an inferno.”

  Looking over the icicle lights covering every available inch of the property and the life-size Santa, sleigh, and reindeers on the rooftop, Anne had to agree. The place did look like an inferno. But at least it was a temporary inferno, unlike their own.

  FROM Erasure

  BY PERCIVAL EVERETT

  My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid that others will see these pages. Since however I will be dead, it should not much matter to me who sees what or when. My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So, I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker. If for no other reason, I choose this last callus-building occupation because of the shame it caused my mother, who for years called my pickup truck a station wagon. I am Thelonious Ellison. Call me Monk.

  I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestor were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona, and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. Though I am fairly athletic, I am no good at basketball. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker, and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, hating every minute of it. I am good at math. I cannot dance. I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south. My family owned a bungalow near Annapolis. My grandfather was a doctor. My father was a doctor. My brother and sister were doctors.

  While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads. From a reviewer:

  The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus' The Persians has to do with the African American experience.

  One night at a party in New York, one of the tedious affairs where people who write mingle with people who want to write and with people who can help either group begin or continue to write, a tall, thin, rather ugly book agent told me that I could sell many books if I'd forget about writing retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists and settle down to write the true, gritty, real stories of black life. I told him that I was living a black life, far blacker than he could ever know, that I had lived one, that I would be living one. He left me to chat with an on-the-rise perfor
mance artist/novelist who had recently posed for seventeen straight hours in front of the governor's mansion as a lawn jockey. He familiarly flipped one of her braided extensions and tossed a thumb back in my direction.

  The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don't believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose, and slave ancestors. But that's just the way it is.

  Saws cut wood. They either rip with the grain or cut across it. A ripsaw will slice smoothly along the grain, but chew up the wood if it goes against the grain. It is all in the geometry of the teeth, the shape, size, and set of them, how they lean away from the blade. Crosscut teeth are typically smaller than rip teeth. The large teeth of ripsaws shave material away quickly and there are deep gaps between them which allow shavings to fall away, keeping the saw from binding. Crosscut teeth make a wider path, are raked back and beveled to points. The points allow the crosscut saw to score and cleave the grain cleanly.

  I arrived in Washington to give a paper, for which I had only moderate affection, at a conference, a meeting of the Nouveau Roman Society. I decided to attend out of no great affinity for the organization or its members or its mission, but because my mother and sister still lived in D.C. and it had been three years since my last visit.

  My mother had wanted to meet me at the airport, but I refused to give her my flight information. For that matter, I also did not tell her at which hotel I'd be staying. My sister did not offer to pick me up. Lisa probably didn't hate me, her younger brother, but it became fairly clear rather early in our lives, and still, that she had little use for me. I was too flighty for her, lived in a swirl of abstracts, removed from the real world. While she had struggled through medical school, I had somehow, apparently, breezed through college “without cracking a book.” A falsehood, but a belief to which she held fast. While she was risking her life daily by crossing picket lines to offer poor women health care which included abortions if they wanted, I was fishing, sawing wood, or writing dense, obscure novels, or teaching a bunch of green California intellects about Russian formalism. But if she was cool to me, she was frozen to my brother, the high-rolling plastic surgeon in Scottsdale, Arizona. Bill had a wife and two kids, but we all knew he was gay. Lisa didn't dislike Bill because of his sexuality, but because he practiced medicine for no reason other than the accumulation of great wealth.