Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  She chuckled. I touched her hand, which was trembling again. How could it be that she was repeating the same quotes I’d been hearing inside my head?

  I was conscious then of C.O. Janson back on the case, moving closer to see if anything material had passed between us. Pills, a nail file. She is most likely gone crazy, I thought. Like Billie Dee.

  “So you memorized just about everything that he wrote? How did you manage that? It’s amazing.”

  She looked puzzled, then smiled at me again.

  “I told you. He speaks through me.”

  I shook my head at her.

  “Polly,” I said. “You don’t have to say that.”

  She looked around suddenly, as if she were seeing the Day Room, the Women’s House, for the first time, surprise on her face.

  “Did I ever tell you”—she kept smiling at me as she spoke—“how much time I spent on North Brother Island? Upriver from this island here? You can travel there by raft, but you got hell to go.”

  When I didn’t respond, she stopped smiling for a second.

  “I ain’t told nobody. But it’s Where I Come From More Recent, and I’ll give you the shadow of it, if you listen close.”

  “I’m listening,” I said. “To every word you say.”

  Later that day I sat down opposite Albert Cantwell, the head of the Columbia University graduate writing program. He was a kind-looking gentleman, an academic of the old gracious doomed school—in a bow tie with a Phi Beta Kappa tie clip and ruddy cheeks.

  “Tell me, Miss Mattox—I’ve read your lovely book of poems—but let’s review, where have you taught before? I believe I received a copy of your résumé, but I hope you don’t mind my asking for an extra?”

  I handed him a second copy of my résumé.

  “I’ve taught at the New School and N.Y.U.,” I said. “Poetry and fiction workshops. And now I teach at Rikers Island.”

  He looked up from the xeroxed pages.

  “Rikers Island? Do you mean the prison?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The prison. I’m learning quite a lot teaching there. At the Women’s House.”

  “The Women’s House,” he repeated. “That’s a prison as well?”

  “Yes, it’s a prison for women—detained and sentenced,” I said.

  “Well,” he said. “We’ll have to give you extra points for bravery.”

  He looked at the attachments to my résumé.

  “Oh yes, look here,” he said. “I see you have a dazzling recommendation from Baylor Drummond. Very impressive, Miss Mattox. He rarely writes recommendations. He mentioned that his friend Samuel Glass—the editor of the journal Samizdat? Do you know him?—asked him to speak for you.”

  Sam Glass tried to kiss me and I turned just slightly away. We were standing under the Washington Square Park arch that same day, as it turned to evening. Sam Glass wanted to kiss me, and for the first time, I began to think about kissing him back. Then shook myself awake and pulled away. I had come from my job interview at Columbia to the Sam offices to tell him off, to order him to stay out of my life, out of my attempt to make sense of my life. If I applied for a job, I wanted to know that I got it on my own steam. Our argument about whose business was whose (his right to do what he had a right to do, plus where was my gratitude? after all, he’d offered me a vote of confidence in my work, et cetera) had somehow ended up here. After an hour or so of shouting and intense talk at a wobbly table in the dark and smoky Cedar Tavern, we’d washed up under the historic arch in the heart of the Village.

  “What,” he murmured, “are we going to do about this?”

  “Listen,” I said, pulling away again. “I have four brothers. Men don’t impress me.”

  “So? I have three sisters. Women don’t impress me—that is, if you think there is some kind of mystery attached to secondary sex characteristics.”

  “Mystery. That’s just it. Romance obscures what’s really going on.” N.Y.U. students passed us on their way to evening classes, arm in arm, carrying books. There were the usual background scents of dope and body oils, vetiver, attar of rose, musk—and the new scent, Rain—and someone was playing a guitar on the other side of the park past the fountain, the strummed bass rose and fell, and then a clear ethereal heartbreaking Joni Mitchell–like voice sang Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.”

  And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind…

  “I used to talk to my mother candidly about my sexual feelings as I was growing up,” said Sam.

  “You talked to your mother about sex?”

  “Sure—it was a very open household—everybody said what was on their minds.”

  I thought back to the Golds’, their dinner table, their animated candor.

  Sam Glass put his arm around me again.

  “You don’t have to overthink this, you know. And you don’t have to underthink. Try to stay alert.”

  We stood there, swaying in place, trying to stay alert, as the wavering soprano voice sang on about the seduction of traveling blind, of boats going by on the river, of tea and oranges that came all the way from China. And trust—yes, trust between women and men. What an idea! So why did Sam Glass’s arm, draped casually around my shoulders, feel light and tender and also like an eight-hundred-pound weight?

  When Sam Glass was in Tangiers, he met everyone in the world. He developed a coterie. He was an uncommonly talented editor, he was a poet—and when he founded Samizdat West, all of his international writer friends sent work for publication. Overnight he was a literary sensation—overnight everyone wanted to publish in his pages—and he was invited to all the parties. Besides the water-softener heiress, he acquired other devoted patrons. When other literary magazines were struggling, printed in basements with stapled binding—Sam was laid out on elegant paper with perfect binding and hand-set type. It was distributed by a major distributor, and it actually turned a profit.

  I fancied myself a woman who was not impressed by men, but Sam Glass’s chutzpah and editorial acuity impressed me. And his ready sexuality hypnotized me. Made me oddly passive. I wasn’t even sure I liked Sam Glass—but I couldn’t seem to shake free of him.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “No you don’t,” he said. “Stay for a while.”

  We lingered under the arch as lights came on in the great literary neighborhood before us: in the redbrick Washington Square town houses, in the trees, and in streetlamps marching straight up Fifth Avenue, straight up the blocks Henry James walked, and Mark Twain, and Marianne Moore—right before us, as we lingered there, almost kissing.

  Somehow or other I got Aliganth to tell the workshop, very hesitantly and sketchily, about Where She Sort of Came From: about how she had worked at the old Women’s House in the West Village. She’d filled us in on prison history. Prison history from her point of view.

  “It was hell on stilts,” she roared. “All them bitches yelling out of windows. Standing on the toilets with they big mouth out the bars, out them little bar-windows—calling to pimps, johns, hippies, tourists, lurkabouts, you got it, from up there on the floors.”

  It had been hell on stilts. I’d done my research at the Jefferson Park Library, just around the corner from the old Women’s House, another red tower on a corner, a Big Ben clock in its brow. I lived a block or two away, and on Saturday morning, before I went to Balducci’s to browse among the fresh sun-ripened tomatoes and vivid green basil and parsley and the little cracked pale frescoes of pecorino and Romano (I was not exactly learning to cook, but grazing around the subject), I sat in the stacks and read some local history.

  “We had ladies crowded in, near hangin’ from the rafters. You all got it good out here on the Island! You hear me ’bout that?”

  As Aliganth talked on, I envisioned the old Women’s House of Detention standing at the crossroads of Village Square. Greenwich and Sixth and Eighth and Christopher all ran together there. What it must have been like! It was Village history for my notebook: the crossed stre
ets filled with tourists and shoppers heading for the Eighth Street Bookstore or Jefferson Market or Balducci’s. Ten copies of Abbie Hoffman’s hot-off-the-press book (Steal This Book!) blazing in a window. Prosciutto in paper-thin slices and brown sexual figs in a bright red woven basket. Hippies from all over America, buying Zig-Zag rolling papers and penny candy and copies of the Voice to read Nat Hentoff and Jill Johnston and Alexander Cockburn. Cream and Hendrix swirling up air shafts. Gay men cruising up and down Christopher. The Village Fairy with his/her tutu and sparkling wand, six feet tall, bare hairy legs, on roller skates. Couples eating outsize ice cream cones with rainbow sprinkles. Comics. Dr. Brown’s soda. Egg creams. The Village smell of restaurants and hot dog vendors and patchouli oil and the drifting blue hempy stink of joints. Power to the People.

  Then Aliganth described what it was like for the inmates looking out between the peeling maroon-painted bars, looking down on all that carnival atmosphere, the smells wafting up, the music spiraling higher, the longhairs in capes and jeans and top hats. Six hundred women in a space built for four hundred. I thought about those hot Village nights, ten P.M. and still eighty degrees, a slice of orange moon over the buildings—and those voices unwinding from the blood-colored tower, the jammed-to-the-rafters redbrick tower. What it felt like, Aliganth let everyone sense it—standing on tiptoe on a broken toilet seat while someone at ankle level tried to push you out of the way as you gulped down the quick sparkling night air, the heat—wild, caged, shouting down, hoarse, to the gawkers below, faces upturned:

  “How’s it hangin’, Ray Dan?”

  “Sherifa, you need to call my sister!”

  “Who bringin’ bail? You got bail? You got a dime bag?”

  “Hey daddy, you need a slow hand?”

  And Aliganth: “Those were the days, ladies. Y’all think hard about the roaches and rats they had there. You could saddle ’em and ride ’em—and loudmouths screamin’ out the tower all night! You gonna tell me about lunatic asylums?”

  Number Ten Greenwich Avenue. Later, after the workshop, I walked west and stared at the empty building, Romanesque Revival, redbrick, for a long while. I thought I could hear the ghostly voices, the screams and lengthening shouts. But the voices were gone, transferred—ferried across the Queensboro Bridge, out through the borough streets and across the water to the new holding center, where the voices, they hoped, would be silenced. It was far far away, it was not the Tombs of Manhattan or the old Women’s House of D. It was modern, antiseptic, automated. It was an island. In a fast mean lit-up river. The planes flew over nonstop. But the plan had failed. There was no way, I thought, they could ever silence those voices.

  For the moment, I turned to thank Aliganth, who bowed oddly, formally, to us all, then straightened up again. She nodded at me to continue teaching the workshop. She looked a little less annoyed than usual. Being listened to as a storyteller rather than a lock-and-key jockey seemed to have made her gentler.

  “Polly wants to talk to us about something,” I said. “She told me about her time on North Brother Island. She told me that she was there, on the island, for several weeks. She’s going to tell us about it as her Where I Come From, okay?”

  Aliganth settled herself at her post near the door. I looked up, but she just nodded, mildly. She was not going to give me or Polly trouble about this, I thought with relief. She was looking nostalgic, sentimental—in other words, not like C.O. Aliganth.

  I smiled at Polly, who waited expectantly, nodding nervously.

  “Okay, Polly is going to talk about how she lived in this place. She wants to write a poem about it, and she wants us to help her write it. Most of us don’t even know where North Brother Island is—right in the middle of a busy river next to the busiest city in the world: a deserted island.”

  There was some mumbling and fidgeting, but overall, the response was good. Even Gene/Jean, who was back in class, looking a bit pale, a bit medicated, seemed cheerful about tuning in. Gene grinned at me, ran her index finger around her lips, made a kissy-face, then stroked her goatee, still smiling at me.

  “Hold that thought, Gene,” I said.

  I nodded at Polly and she straightened up and folded her hands in front of her, as if she were about to recite something from memory.

  “North Brother Island,” she said, smiling at everyone, “lies, as the crow flies, just southwest of Hunt’s Point in the East River. It don’t pretend to be a big brassy island—it might be anywhere from thirteen to twenty-some acres. Modest as islands go. Now it turned into a sanctuary for birds—all kinds of birds, wading birds and herons, cormorants, and great egrets and snowy egrets. They’re very, very noisy, those birds, but damn industrious.”

  She paused and looked around her. Everyone was listening, startled by the odd way that Polly was speaking.

  “But there no humans on the island. You might say it’s been deserted—maybe even by ghosts! But there are buildings there, hospitals and doctors’ houses and a lighthouse and docks. All empty and falling down. All the clocks stopped around 1954. That was when the City closed the big old hospital there—the cornerstone says 1886. North Brother Island was the place where they brought the poor souls with TB and smallpox and typhoid fever and scarlet fever—to the contagious hospitals. Typhoid Mary had herself a bed there.”

  She glanced around again.

  “You may recognize that name,” she said to their uncertain faces. “She was there in the early nineteen hundreds. And you’d swear that time had stopped then. All the beds and furniture still in the hospitals—old-fashioned washstands and little old candlesticks. All left behind. Gas lamps along the cobblestones.”

  Roxanne looked up suddenly from doodling on her tablet.

  “Why was it deserted?”

  “They didn’t need it anymore for TB and such. Then they put in the opium eaters and all in the nineteen fifties. But then there was no more money. They just closed it down and left. There are vines growing over everything, over the brick and cobblestones, over the old docks. And there’s rats, some the size of dogs.”

  “How you get there, and why you stay there?” This from Sallie.

  “I arrived on a raft, and I—”

  “You sayin’ you come over them currents in the river on a raft? Child, you plannin’ drag us this line?”

  “Let her talk,” I said.

  Aliganth cleared her throat.

  “Then let her come to a point soon,” Aliganth said.

  “Okay, so you come on a raft. Now you tell me how you keep yourself alive and store up whoppers to tell on that island!” Sallie added.

  “I come on a raft, yes, ma’am. The currents were awful, high wind all the way. But I hauled up on the crumbling dock and I ended up staying on. I found a way into the old lighthouse keeper’s house—there used to be a tower on top with the light eight sides. The light’s gone and the tower, but the house is still hospitable, in its way. All I’ll say more is this: I fetched up, I made a fire, I boiled water. There were rusty pots and pans and spoons and forks. I found many eggs from all the birds. I apologized to them for takin’ their offspring. But I was hungry every day. I found edible greens and I even caught a fish or two. The river was good to me.”

  Gene made a sound. She stared longingly at Polly.

  “Would you be my wife? Or could you suck my dick?”

  “Shut up, Gene,” I said. “Please.”

  Aliganth shook her keys.

  “Keeley: ease back, you hear me?”

  “Jesus,” whispered Darlene. “Jesus.”

  Polly smiled at Gene.

  “You are a fine-fangled gentleman,” she said. “But I’m not amorous.”

  Gene looked confused, a more or less typical look.

  “Gene,” I said again. “Think estrogen. In other words: think.”

  “Gene,” said Sallie. “Think Sallie Keller whup your ass.”

  “I apologize for my eruptions,” Gene said, nodding to everyone, then burped softy and looked away, petulant
, chastened, pulling her goatee. I glanced at Darlene to see if she was still running her prayer, and she was: silently, lips barely moving.

  “I’d like to write a poem about living there on the island. About living with all the birds, under the sky—”

  “Well, there’s your poem,” said Baby Ain’t. “‘Living on the island, living with the birds under the sky’—it soundin’ good! Just like a song there.”

  “Write it down,” I said. “You’re making this poem together.”

  “Eatin’ birds,” Gene contributed.

  “She didn’t say she eatin’ birds,” shouted Sallie. “She say she eatin’ birds’ eggs. After the sky part, you could put in about eatin’ the eggs.”

  “And rats big as dogs,” added Never, shuddering. Darlene, praying silently, shuddered too.

  “Honey, you ain’t seen the rats here yet? Where you been? They so big they eat you,” Baby Ain’t laughed.

  Roxanne laughed too and added, sotto voce, “Yeah, and they all wear uniforms.”

  Aliganth stuck her ear in then, trying to hear better, but to no avail—as the class began rustling industriously, pulling out tablets, writing down the first lines.

  “This a weird poem,” said Sallie. “But I’m goin’ to say how she set there all alone, makin’ up stories.”

  “Me too,” cried Gene. “I’m getting’ in about her eatin’ rats.”

  Never moved her chair away from Gene and looked at Polly.

  “What else do you want to say?”

  “I want to say that you can get there. Any of you can get there. From here, from Rikers Island. That’s all.”

  “Sharks eat you up,” Billie Dee said.

  Sallie laughed. “Ain’t no sharks in the East River. But you got such bad pull—you put your toe in, it bent backwards.”

  “But it can be done,” said Polly Lyle. “’Cause I done it—I rode that river and I’m here to tell.”

  Aliganth jangled her keys. Then I noticed that Akilah, who had said nothing and had been staring at Polly, had opened her eyes wide.