THE COLOR OF TREES
The Color of Trees
a novel by Canaan Parker
Boston ♦ Alyson Publications, Inc.
Author’s note
The question can arise whether a man who is both black and gay identifies himself politically as “black first” or “gay first.” The question is ultimately no more than a tactical distinction. I have seen that racism and heterosexism are incestuous evils, breeding a twin-headed psychological monster, and whether one chops at one head or the other is, again, no more than a question of tactics. My enemy remains the heterosexist, racist, homophobic swine, and I dedicate this book to his ultimate demise.
Copyright © 1992 by Canaan Parker.
Cover art copyright © 1992 by Earl House.
All rights reserved.
Typeset and printed in the United States of America.
This is a paperback original from Alyson Publications, Inc.,
40 Plympton St., Boston, Mass. 02118.
Distributed in England by GMP Publishers,
P.O. Box 247, London N17 9QR, England.
This book is printed on acid-free, recycled paper.
First edition, first printing: November 1992
5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 1-55583-207-5
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parker, Canaan.
The color of trees : a novel / by Canaan Parker. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-55583-207-5 : $8.95
I. Title.
PS3566.A6749C64 1992
813 ‘ .54—dc20 92-30486
CIP
My appreciation to: Pamela Pratt and all my friends at In Our Own Write, Sanford Friedman and all my friends at SAGE, Other Countries, Joe Dolins, my Apple Macintosh, and the Amazing Woodley for teaching me how to walk.
Part 1
1
We were trying to get to Green River, Connecticut, a small town north of Hartford. It had been hours since we left New York. My brother-in-law Russell was driving. Russell had lost his patience and was swearing loudly at missed exits and the twelve-wheelers thundering past. My mother sat next to Russell in the front, spying out the road signs and giving directions. I sat in the back playing tic-tac-toe with my kid brother Kenny, who was squeezed between me and my stepfather Seth.
This drive was the last I’d see of my family for some time, and there may have been some providence in its unexpected length. After breakfast we’d packed my suitcases into the trunk of Russell’s blue, black-topped ’66 Thunderbird and driven north out of the city, with no trouble, soon crossing the state border near Darien. By midday we’d entirely lost our way. It was afternoon now, and for hours we’d seen only miles of forest along the highway, a few farm silos, an occasional cow or horse in a field. A car had passed here and there, more often a transport truck. The big cross-country diesels infuriated Russell. One was speeding past us now, its giant hubcap only inches from our window. Russell yelled pointlessly at the driver, though not even we could hear him. When the hubcaps were past, Russell began muttering to himself menacingly.
“Somebody’s buying me new tires.” He reached antsily over the dashboard for a pair of sunglasses and put them on. “Somebody is buying me new tires,” he repeated more loudly. “This is the last time you’re going anywhere in my car. Did you hear me? The last time.”
Russell’s big mouth didn’t impress my mother. “You know, Russell, if you kept your mouth shut…,” she said, flipping through the folded squares of the too-large tri-state roadmap. “If you kept your mouth shut, we might be in Connecticut now instead of halfway back to New York.” My mother was the only person I knew who would dare tell Russell to shut his mouth.
“Give me that map, dammit. You don’t know where you’re going.”
“How are you going to drive and look at the map at the same time?” she snapped. She dropped the map in her lap and squinted out the window. “I’m reading the map. Turn off at the next exit.”
Russell glowered at me in the rearview mirror, looking scary in his blue sunglasses. “Next time you’re taking the bus to Green River,” he shouted, and for a moment I thought he was going to stop the car and leave me by the roadside. I looked away from the mirror and out the window as we sped past the exit ramp.
“That was the exit!” my mother cried.
“Dammit!” Russell yanked off his sunglasses and threw them back on the dashboard. “DammIT!” I glanced at my brother Kenny, who was trying not to laugh.
Being lost didn’t bother me at all. I was very young, all of thirteen, and this trip was exciting adventure to me, all the more so once the dwindling signs of compressed urban living — the cables of the George Washington Bridge, the moderately dense housing of the Pelham suburbs — had given way to ubiquitous country green. At one point we crossed the Rip Van Winkle Bridge in Dutchess County. I smiled to myself, daydreaming of a bony old main in a beard, and the duchess from Through the Looking Glass. Once we were out of range of New York City, we couldn’t find any soul music on the car radio, so Russell tuned into a Top-40 station. The pop music had a different feel to it; it sounded cartoonish to me, as though the sounds were painted in primary colors and the singers all had big round eyes and buttons for noses. I thought of the silent Farmer Dell cartoons I’d watched when I was a young child, in the very early mornings before my mother arose to cook breakfast. Whenever I thought of Farmer Dell, I thought particularly of the little black cannibal, a cartoon character with a bone tied to his head, whose theme music I later learned was the Hungarian Rhapsody by Franz Liszt.
“Does anybody know what state we’re in?” my stepfather grumbled.
“Does anybody know what hemisphere we’re in?” echoed Kenny.
Seth jokingly shoved Kenny over to my side of the seat. He too was losing patience. He hadn’t said much in the past hour, only piping in occasionally with sarcastic remarks to remind the front seat know-it-alls they weren’t the only adults in the car.
“We could use the process of elimination,” I offered. “If we cover every square mile in Connecticut, we’re bound to reach Green River one of these days.”
“First we have to find Connecticut,” Kenny said.
Kenny and I laughed while Seth returned to looking quietly out the window.
The sun was baking the roof of the car. The vinyl seats were becoming sticky. Russell grumbled and screamed intermittently, though with waning energy. Kenny fell asleep on my stepfather’s shoulder. My mother argued with Russell over whether we were going north or west. Somehow or another, maybe by luck, or maybe it was the process of elimination, we ended up on the scenic New England trail that led from Hartford to the Briarwood School, our destination.
This road and the surrounding terrain would later become familiar to me, yet I can still recall the sensation of newness, of freshness and birth, whenever I think of that first trip. I can only imagine, if the hills of Connecticut seemed new and strange to me at thirteen, how transcendently bizarre they must have been to Russell or Seth, who had lived their whole adult lives in New York City’s Harlem. I doubt either of them had seen so many trees since leaving Georgia and Alabama as boys.
It was the very late summer of 1968, more than twenty years ago. I was going to Briarwood on full scholarship. I came from Harlem. I was born on Amsterdam Avenue on the west side; when I was two years old, we moved to the city housing projects in East Harlem, buildings that were newer and not dilapidated like the west side tenements.
My guidance counselor in my Harlem public school had told me I was an ‘investment,’ like a municipal bond, and as such I was especially prepared to go away to private school. I’d been exposed to the symphony and ballet on cultural e
nrichment field trips (that’s how I identified the theme of the little cannibal). There had been classes in etiquette (the proper placement of dining utensils) and an intense program to eliminate bad diction (words like ain’t and git were forever burned out of my vocabulary). I suppose you could say I was a sociological experiment.
The experiment had really begun years earlier, when my mother decided that I would embody her future retirement plan. She taught me how to read and write, choosing not to rely on the public schools. She demanded that I and all of my brothers attend Sunday School and spend half our Saturdays cleaning house. I actually had not been interested in going away to boarding school; she had made that decision, and pursued the opportunity with her usual fire. She was a very fiery woman.
She had really been to blame for getting us lost this afternoon, though in keeping with her large ego she blamed it all on Russell. Like all of us, she grew quiet as the day grew long. I remember how she stared tiredly out the window, her chin cupped in her hand. How did she feel, truly, riding through the Connecticut hills, taking her son for his first year at preparatory school? I had no idea at the time; at thirteen, I wasn’t inclined to ask troubling questions. But perhaps she was wondering whether, possibly, I was being taken away from her. Another son. She’d already lost one in childbirth, and her oldest boy had died young from drugs.
Perhaps she was suspicious of all this green, all this peace. There were no wooded Edens in my mother’s past; she grew up in the southern urban setting of Baltimore. She became pregnant at sixteen and married a man she described to me as “incorrigible and mean.” When she was nineteen, she moved to New York with my oldest brother and sister, leaving her incorrigible first husband in jail for wife assault.
In New York she met my father, a shipping foreman at a machine parts plant. My father was a basically good man, but prone to alcoholic stupors that at their worst resembled psychosis. He was terrifically well-read for a high school graduate; I think his intellectualism challenged, intrigued, and yet bored my mother, who was tough-minded and managerial. But his income was fair by Harlem standards, and she did love him for his weirdness. She bore my father seven children and stayed with him for fifteen years, until his drinking became abominable. My mother worked as a dietary planner at a large private hospital. At the hospital she met Seth, a food services chef who went to church and didn’t drink. She never formally divorced my father — she simply instructed him it was time to move out.
The Briarwood School for Boys stood on a high hill, hidden from the roadway by thick, brambly woods. Cutting through the woods was a steep winding road, lined with neatly tailored bushes, that lead to the entrance to the school. We arrived at the top of the hill around sundown and went into the lobby of the school’s central building, the Chase Building, where the students and faculty had already sat down to dinner in the dining hall.
Two people were seated in the lobby when we walked in — a tall, black-haired boy and a middle-aged woman in a white dress. The boy wore a blue wool blazer, a pink dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar, brown loafers, and dark green, cuffed corduroy slacks. He was sitting with one leg resting on a black travelling trunk, and I could see that he wasn’t wearing socks. The woman kept bending over the boy’s shoulder and whispering into his ear. He walked over and introduced himself to me: He was a freshman like myself. He and his mother had also spent the day travelling and arrived late at school. His name was Sean Landport. Sean told me that he came from a small town in northwestern Ohio and that he rooted for the Cleveland Browns. I later learned that Sean’s family more or less owned northwestern Ohio, but that evening he seemed friendly and ordinary enough, and very sexy in a strange, new way. Sean and I talked about sports and upcoming courses, while our mothers commiserated about airport and highway mishaps.
Sean and I were entering the Third Form, a fancy English term for the ninth grade; there were a small number of Second Formers (eighth graders, or pre-freshmen) at school, but no First Form, which I found curious. I asked Sean about it, since he had been in private schools before. Sean said Forms were a tradition, and it didn’t matter whether it made sense.
After a few minutes, a crowd of students noisily filed from the dining room into the lobby. They were almost all white boys, dressed in ties and white shirts, jackets and loafers. The overhead lights reflected sharply off their white skin, giving the room an odd glow, and it occurs to me now that I’d never before seen so many Caucasian people under electric lights.
Behind the parade of students came a string of masters, and lastly the Headmaster and his wife. The Headmaster was an elderly gentleman with a swelling paunch and thinning gray hair. He wore a baggy gray suit and wire-framed glasses. He walked towards us, greeted my mother by name, and shook hands with my brother and stepfather.
My mother and I had met Mr. Chase the previous winter when I visited the school as a candidate for admission. I was nervous on first meeting him; he’d taken pains to put me at ease, so that I presented myself adequately in my personal interview. I’d sabotaged my interviews at other schools, brooding silently and crossing my arms to grip my elbows, as though I were autistic. These other interviewers seemed too brittle and formal, and dwelled on the problems I would have at their schools, coming from the ghetto, after all.
Mr. Chase, on the other hand, was enthusiastic about my prospects. On our first meeting, as he did again this first night of school, he greeted my mother by name and told her how he’d anticipated our visit. That afternoon I waited alone in the Headmaster’s study, staring out the window at skeletons of trees covered intimately with coatings of frost, while the Headmaster spoke briefly with the Dean of Admissions. Mr. Chase entered the study, sat behind his large oaken desk, and asked what I was reading in junior high school. “Wuthering Heights,” I answered, and we discussed the tragedy of Heathcliff. There was a small lamp on Mr. Chase’s desk, no brighter than a candle, which provided the only light in the room other than the snow reflection showering through the window. I could see reflections of the lamp in the lenses of Mr. Chase’s pince-nez. Mr. Chase lectured me on the hardness of life at Briarwood; he sat back in his chair and shivered and squinted in an unconvincing show of sternness. His lecture was unnecessary, for I was greatly impressed, in truth mesmerized, by the finely finished oaken furniture, the candle lamplight, the crystallized shrubbery; by the Latin phrasing emblazoned on the back of my chair, and the school coat of arms that adorned trinkets on the desk and shelves — ashtrays, pewter mugs, china plates. Mr. Chase told me that my mother was a charming, intelligent woman, and that the school would be honored to assist her in educating her son.
Mr. Chase had lost weight since the winter. His hair looked thinner, and he appeared to have weathered a serious illness. He wobbled slightly when he spoke, as though he suffered from a touch of palsy. “Are you ready, Mr. Givens?” he asked, trembling with a feigned sternness that resembled choked laughter.
“Yes, sir, I think so, sir,” I answered readily, having been drilled in deference and formality as part of my Harlem scholarship program.
I liked Mr. Chase, but I thought he was too fragile and gracious to survive a day at my public school in Harlem. As he talked with my mother in his soft, strained voice, I imagined him standing stunned in front of a public school classroom while packs of manic twelve-year-olds redefined the limits of bedlam.
Mr. Chase introduced me to my dormitory master, Mr. Bennett, a white-haired main with a square jaw and an impatient manner that I found more familiar — the manner of a commuter on the Times Square Shuttle. Mr. Bennett looked cool enough and mean enough to make it as a schoolteacher in Harlem, I thought. “How was your trip up?” he asked us, looking sideways, not interested in our answer. “Oh, fine. Very good,” we lied.
We drove over to my dormitory and moved my belongings into my room. I said good-bye to my mother. I met my new roommate and the two seniors in charge of my corridor. Later that evening, Mr. Bennett and his wife invited the fifteen or so freshmen
on my corridor for coffee and strawberry frosted cupcakes. I sat down on the Bennetts’ living room carpet and began to make my new friends.
There was a boy in the Bennetts’ living room who stood out distinctly. His name was Thomas Adams, but he went by the nickname T.J. He wasn’t a ‘new boy’ like most of us. He’d come to school the year before as a Second Former, so he wasn’t bewildered or timid at all. He appeared to already know everyone. He was a noisy and pixieish boy, small-boned, with twinkling brown eyes. At one point he stood in the corner talking with animation to my roommate, Barrett Granger, who was also starting his second year at school.
My first reaction was that I wanted to switch roommates. T.J. was handsome and looked interesting, while Barrett was dull and looked like a llama. I resented my bad luck of the draw; T.J.’s roommate Kent Mason, a plump kid with a patchy blond crew cut, was the lucky one, I thought. Still, I was happy that T.J. and I would be living in the same house. He would be just like my brother.
My family had already left for New York. I think they were relieved to get away. Russell hadn’t even left the car while he was here, and my stepfather just stood back away from everyone, tossing his keys from one hand to the other, with an unfocused glint in his eyes. Even my mother had been uncomfortable. On the corridor she put on proper airs with Mr. Bennett, speaking in the voice she usually reserved for doctors and bank managers. I’d gone into my room to unpack and left her in the hallway surrounded by nervous, blank-faced white boys lost for words to say to a black woman. I was surprised a few minutes later to overhear her in the hallway chatting away with someone, as casually as though she were in our living room at home:
The Color of Trees Page 1