Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  I tried the “Where I’m From” writing exercise. Darlene was not praying so loudly anymore, just her lips moved lately as she addressed Jesus. I suggested a variation on the original assignment—I asked them each to come up with one word (two at the most!) to give the rest of us a sense of their origins.

  Baby Ain’t was quick: “The street.”

  Roxanne: “Bad timing.”

  Darlene: “Jesus.”

  Sallie: “My face.”

  Never: “Respectability.”

  Polly Lyle: “The river. I come from the river.”

  “Next,” I said, “we’re going to try writing a ballad using words like the one or two you came up with—so we can read where you’re from—within a time-honored poetic form.”

  “I come from Switch,” called out Gene/Jean. “Switch.”

  “So,” said Sam Glass. “Here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  We’d met for a drink at a dark little restaurant/bar on Irving Place in Gramercy Park. I’d shown up just because he’d asked me to. I wasn’t sure how he got me to do things I wasn’t keen to do; but somehow he managed it. Billie Holiday sang with pure tortured bliss in the background. The waitress set down our drinks: my wine, his scotch.

  “I have good news all around for you,” he said. “The Sam editorial staff has voted to take three of your new poems for publication. And there’s an adjunct position in the Columbia graduate writing program for which you’re being recommended. By me. I have pull there. Just in case you don’t know whom to thank if they hire you. You’re in line for an interview. And best of all—you get to share the afternoon with me—who knows where it will end?”

  “Far out.”

  He stopped smiling and took a judicious sip of his drink.

  “Far out? That’s all you’ve got to say about news like this? Far out?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m thrilled—really, I am. It’s just been a very bad day. And it’s a lot to take in at once.”

  “You are, without a doubt, among the most repressed individuals of my acquaintance. Yet you have this occasional energy and even humor. Why are you so uptight the rest of the time?”

  “Why are you such a prick all of the time?”

  I took a sip of white wine. Sam lit up a cigarette, and I briefly considered asking him for one. I’d been fantasizing about taking up smoking. Women poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay, maybe even Louise Bogan, smoked. Suddenly I pictured myself with a martini glass in one hand and one of those long thin cigars that Swedish models smoked in the other, lounging on purple velvet cushions in some goddam opium den with a Moroccan theme.

  Sam shook his head and blew smoke skyward. “I’m a prick? I know you like me, Holly. I can tell—despite all your attempts to deflect it. It’s not easy to admit this, but women love me.”

  “Right,” I said. “Show me a man who says ‘women love me’—or my other favorite, ‘I really know women’—and I will show you a man who has fucked up royally with the opposite sex.”

  “Then you must stick to your type, Heidi—the safe guys—men women love because they always agree with everything women say.”

  I took another sip of wine. I was weighing what I was about to say, but couldn’t figure out if it was the right moment or, more to the point, if I was being honest with myself about why I was saying it.

  “Well, guess what? I have some news too. I’m married. And have been for a while. And not to someone who fits either of your stereotypes.”

  He didn’t flinch. I watched his face. If he was shocked he covered it up with a quick cynical laugh. He exhaled a quick bark of smoke.

  “Did I hear you? You’ve opted to become chattel? You, the diehard square-head feminist?”

  He asked me about K.B. I told him about K.B.

  “And no, he’s not like other men,” I added. “He doesn’t always agree with me, but he has this thing about him that sets him apart from a lot of other guys. For example, he’s capable of loving someone besides himself.”

  Sam laughed again and signaled to the waitress. Another scotch, please.

  “How touching. The Little Woman: Mrs. Severn.”

  “I haven’t changed my name. I would never do that.”

  “Of course not. Your groom might mistake you for a person who wishes to identify with him. But why would you keep it a secret for so long?”

  “Because it was just for us,” I said, unsure what I meant, even to myself.

  The waitress put down his new drink and took the empty glass away. I shook my head at her. I didn’t want more wine. He smiled into his drink.

  “Okay,” he said. “Ask me how married I think you really are.”

  “Ask me how uninterested I am in your answer.”

  “You’re using this thing to hide from your own desires, I can tell you that.”

  Billie Holiday sang on, praising the child that’s got his own.

  “Like I desire…what exactly? Or whom? You?”

  I stood up. I no longer wished to see Sam Glass in front of me.

  “Leaving so soon? Do you have to cook dinner and darn his socks? And he’s a doc—I was just about to ask you if he would take a look at this mole on my arm.”

  “I have to get away from the sight of you. Nothing personal.”

  “Right on, sister!” he called after me, waving. “Don’t keep hubby waiting. And I’ll pick this up.”

  I marched back and threw a couple of dollars on the table.

  “I’m afraid that won’t quite cover your wine.”

  “When women make the same hourly wage as men, I’ll make up the difference.”

  I turned to leave, thought better of it, and tossed a twenty-dollar bill in front of him.

  “And that,” he said, “doesn’t begin to cover the cost of my analysis of your rather staggering marital error.”

  “Well, then,” I retorted, “how about if I buy a new poem slot in Samizdat? You know, the way your patroness purchases ad space? Or is that taken out in trade?”

  I’d finally scored a direct hit.

  “Fuck you, Holly.”

  “Ditto in spades, Sam.”

  “Call me when you need a divorce lawyer. I know a doozy!” he shouted after me. The bartender raised an eyebrow at me as I paused before the door, taking a deep breath, then another, before I opened it and went out.

  God Told Me This

  In church, where I go to ask help from Jesus,

  God told me ten years was enough now.

  He beat me every night all that time.

  Every night he come home with the bottle

  All over him, then he took his fists to me.

  He sat in the same chair after the worst.

  Black eyes, my nose smashed up.

  I got a cast one time. From going down the stairs.

  He sat in the same chair in the kitchen,

  At the table. The kids screaming. God said to me,

  In church that day, Let him beat you like he do

  Then sit himself down and pass out cold as before.

  When he snores, get his gun from the chifforobe.

  Walk around him three times where he laid

  His face on the table. Say I praise, I praise,

  I praise three times unto My Spirit. Make the sign

  Of the cross upon his head three times. All things

  Three times and when you have spoken what I say,

  I am the God of Three, put the gun unto his head

  And offer him to me. Then Darlene, he said, then the trigger.

  —DARLENE DENISKY, POET

  five

  I passed through the gates, the guard stations on the first floor, then took an elevator up to 2 Main. Some of the C.O.s knew me and nodded at me. I was on my way to see Polly Lyle Clement. I had a pass in my hand, signed by the Dep and C.O. Aliganth.

  Two Main was the Loony Bin. Actually, it was Pre–Loony Bin. It was a Detention, not a Sentenced, floor, since most of the inmates were psychiatric cases waiting to
be transferred to upstate mental hospitals. Others were locked in their cells after infractions and disciplinary hearings prior to being taken to PSA—the Punitive Segregation Area—solitary confinement. Also known as the Bing.

  The C.O. station on 2 Main, like those on all the other floors, looked like a bubble, a spaceship cockpit from which the on-duty officer could open the cells electronically, snap the lights on and off in the cells, and speak over a two-way microphone to inmates in their dorm-room-like spaces.

  I handed over my pass to the C.O. in the bubble, then walked down one of the two cellblock corridors leading from the bubble, with another C.O., named Janson, till we arrived at the place where Polly Lyle Clement lived. A few inmates penguin-walked up and down the halls, snowed—I could hear others yelling in their cells, calling for the C.O. to open their door-gates. There was radio music and the usual thundering P.A. announcements from the Watch Commander’s office.

  C.O. Janson stopped in front of a cell, and the C.O. in the bubble buzzed the cell door open. Polly Lyle Clement was standing there, in the center of a space with a cot, a closet, a desk and chair, a bookcase, a metal mirror embedded in the wall, a toilet, a sink. Behind her, the window–prison bars combination of the Women’s House. She was smiling at me.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “I’d invite you into my temporary abode,” she said, “but, alas, there is nowhere to rest one’s weary bones.”

  “Come on, Clement,” piped up the C.O. “Let’s go to the Day Room.”

  Before I’d made arrangements to visit Polly on her floor, I’d consulted Dr. Bognal, who was the AfterCare Services psychologist. I sat in his office and asked him questions about Polly’s case. On the desk in front of him was a half-eaten bologna sandwich he’d brought from home in a greasy brown paper bag. He was tearing the brown paper bag into small perfectly aligned strips as we talked. He lined the strips up carefully in a row.

  “She’s delusional,” he said, focusing on his design. “Like the rest of them, she’s around the bend. Irreversible damage, psycho. That type of thing.”

  He realigned the strips of paper.

  He was a big man and it struck me that he must have been quite handsome. His dark, once-alert gaze was now peevish and hooded, a mean bloated squint. Today he’d softened this squint with a large pair of black-rimmed bifocals canted down the bridge of his nose. I’d noticed once, following him down a prison corridor, that he walked with a side-to-side sway, like a bear. He was like a bear in a cage, harassed, as he saw it, by disturbed caged desperate females. I’d also noticed once, sitting in his office, a very raunchy porno magazine peeking out from under a stack of intake files. He preferred passive willing fuckable fantasy women, I suspected. Instead, all day long he got something else: bigmouthed combative troubled bitches, used to making men pay hard cash on the line for each ride on the pony. If they called a man Slick or Sugar, if they put their tongues and other parts to sex-work—it was, and had always been, just a contemptuous rendering of service. What their bodies accomplished was not seen as affection or even recreation. It was cash, a dime bag, a meal, a place to live, protection. Sex was a way to keep alive.

  It was clear to me that Bognal wasn’t going to help much, but I nonetheless asked another question or two about Polly. His information on her was less complete than Aliganth’s—and he told me that his final opinion was that she was “unsalvageable.”

  I stared at him, taking in that word. Unsalvageable. He looked up from his line of paper strips and grimaced at me. I thought of deserted ships, of sinking hope, a dark hold below deck—I thought of someone, an indistinct figure, in the hold, or outside, in the sea, drowning, reaching out for a spar. Unsalvageable.

  “So whaddya want from me?” he asked.

  We sat across from each other at a scratched-up table in the Day Room. The TV was on, low volume—the Flintstones theme song filled the air. Yabba-dabba-doo. There was only one other inmate in the Day Room, sitting at one of the other multicolored tables, and she was nodding out on Thorazine and mumbling about what she had had for lunch. “They got that corn salad with them little bitty red things in it, uummhumm…” There was graffiti everywhere—scratched on the walls and the table and chairs with forks or bobby pins: Death Mamba and Cola, Touch Up and Number 9. Sweet Baby, 6-Pack, Love Tunnel, Princess-You-Got-It. The stove and the refrigerator bore OUT OF ORDER signs, also touched up by graffiti.

  C.O. Janson stood by for a few minutes, then got bored and went off to shoot the breeze with the C.O. on duty.

  Polly sat before me with her hands folded and the same odd radiant smile on her face. I noticed that her hands shook a little, then they stopped.

  “Polly, I would like to ask you some questions about yourself. I’m interested in what you said in class the other night about Mark Twain.”

  “You mean my great-granddaddy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Your great-granddaddy, Mr. Twain. Samuel Clemens.”

  “You know his family name used to be Clement?” she said. “Like mine. You know what you asked us to write about? Where I Come From?”

  She was suddenly extremely animated.

  “My people are from New Orleans, colored on my side. Samuel come to New Orleans as a riverboat pilot—on the Mississippi?—and had what we call a dalliance with my great-grandmother, who took the name Clement as hers. Since it was his, passed down. Now mine. His blood come up through me. His voice—I got that too. And I got his books and his memories stored in my head, just as sure as if they happened to me. He speaks through me. I proudly bear his name. Though my great-grandmamma was a just-freed slave when he took up with her. It was before the Civil War. She was a whore. Prettiest whore in New Orleans. She had asked her master to be free to go on ahead and set up in Louisiana. And she more regal than any queen. She didn’t call herself a high-yella Nigra, as they might say down there; she called herself a woman of means. And Samuel was a dashing man, a captain, you know. Clement was the name of his ancestors in England. They were earls. So she up and become a Clement—she said they were married in a whorehouse way. Anyway, she wrote all this down, his line-age—in the Whorehouse Bible. Where she kept her thoughts. And Samuel Clement signed his name, his new American name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, in that Bible. His name is right there for all to see.”

  “Do you have this Bible with you?”

  “Alas. See, I come here on a raft and I couldn’t risk carrying it with me.”

  “Where is it now?”

  She winked at me. The burn on the side of her face appeared to glow.

  “I stowed it safely away, where I can find it if I need to.”

  She smiled at me and sat up straighter.

  “That Bible full of sayings she and the other whores wrote down on the edges of the pages. Like ‘Blessed is Jesus who never casts the first stone.’ And ‘Blessed are the whores whose legs slide open like the Gates of Heaven.’”

  I didn’t know what to say to this, so I smiled at her encouragingly.

  “Tell me more.”

  “So my great-grandmother took up his name. And then he left—the War was coming. They’d already fired on Fort Sumter. He had to get out. They turned all the riverboats around in New Orleans and sent them back up the river. And my great-grandmother honored what he gave her—and she made him ours.”

  The penguin-type at the next table cried, “Get them MM’s with the peanuts in Commissary? Y’all hear me? Red ’n’ yellow?”

  “I see things,” Polly said, speaking louder now. “And I see my great-granddaddy all the time, he watches over me. And I see…”

  She leaned closer to me and I drew back from her involuntarily.

  “…inside things. Deep inside. Right before I get the spells.”

  “You mean seizures? Epileptic seizures?”

  “They used to call them fits. Julius Caesar, born with a caul like me, he had spells. They called it the Royal Disease back then. And just about when I have them, everything is quiet
and everything is clear and I get a rainbow sliding in, wrapping itself around my brain.”

  She began to tremble a little, alarmingly.

  “Are you all right, Polly? Should I call the C.O.?”

  “I’m all right. I ain’t near that lightning now, Teacher. But I see you, I see inside you. Forgive me, Teacher, I can’t help it.”

  I couldn’t resist, of course.

  “What do you see?”

  “You not happy staying with those who love you. You don’t let people love you—why is that? You say you want one thing, then you turn up wantin’ another.”

  I stared at her shifting, altering face, the mouth moving quickly.

  “Why?” I asked stupidly.

  “Because,” she said. “There’s one thing from before still on your mind. Floatin’ there. It’s like the Christian Bible say—No rest for the wicked!”

  I saw my mother standing in the sun, her hand fluttering nervously—her mouth moving with that quote.

  “But you ain’t been bad, Teacher, you ain’t been bad. Anyway, like the whores say, ‘No rest for the wicked, but better the Wicked than the Holier-Than-Thou!’ They the ones snore righteous, then get up and sign death warrants!”

  She smiled her unnerving smile again. I was getting used to it now and it seemed kinder suddenly, a more genuine smile. She was slowing down a bit.

  “I see where you going,” she said. “But you can’t go there for your Mama. You must go your way for yourself.”

  She sat back in her chair, relaxed now, twirling a strand of her white hair.

  “Of course there ain’t no difference now a’tween him and me. He tells me what he wish to say and I say it. He just said to me this about jail: First American jailbirds was patriots. Convenient to keep ’em locked up. Now it’s convenient to lock up the ones we want to forget.”