No school bus ever when I was a little girl. I walked to Homewood School. Walked Cassina Way to Dumferline up Susquehanna or up Tioga to Homewood Avenue and right on Homewood to Hamilton left on Hamilton you know the way as well as I do why am I telling you how to walk to Homewood School from Cassina Way it's just about the same way you walked from Finance Street to get to the same raggedy building I walked to when I was little and your children would go to school in the same building today if you had little children and the school was open today if you hadn't got yourself together and moved away from here, same old trifling building except they stuck a new brick front on it and parked some trailers for classrooms in the schoolyard where we used to play hopscotch and chase one another around like wild Indians I don't need to tell you how far I walked on which streets it wasn't really all that far but back then seemed like a long ways a long walk from home past other people's houses a long way because I didn't know the names of any of the people lived in those houses, not much of a walk when I think about it today you know as well as I do the school's not very far except in a little girl's mind who needed her mother to walk with her and hold her hand the first couple weeks of school and anytime after that she could blackmail her mama squeezing tears out my eyes there on the front step and Mama in the doorway Mama please, please that little hussy begging with her crocodile tears so her mama would walk her to school not really far except I couldn't take one step of the way today not put down one foot after the other and walk two steps if the pot at the end of the rainbow sitting on the pavement full of gold shining two steps away it's me and this chair that's how it is now the walk to Homewood School mize well be a million miles I'm done with walking but there was something I wanted to tell you and I'm trying to get out the words but I'm old and my tongue's starting to stumble and soon it's going to be just as hopeless as these useless legs where was I going I was walking on my way to Homewood School a little girl walking on Susquehanna Street in the empty morning early just me no mama with my hand in hers up Susquehanna just past where Dumferline cuts in and three cute houses set back from the street with fences out along the sidewalk, not rowhouses like the rest on Susquehanna and the other streets I walked to get to school these three houses separate small neat homes Italian people kept up nice, you know, the way they do, vegetable garden along the side green striped awnings and grass and flowers, rosebushes in front like Mama grew in the front yard when we moved to Finance Street from Cassina Way I think half the roses in Homewood from cuttings Mama gave people from her rosebushes everybody passing said those sure some beautiful red roses, Mrs. French. You sure do raise some beautiful roses. I used to daydream sometimes passing those three particular neat little set-back houses pretend I lived in one or pretend I had a dollhouse at home looked just like one of those houses I could play with full of tiny furniture and tiny people I'd move from room to room, sit them on chairs or lay them down on their tiny beds to sleep or tack-tack-tack walk one of those stiff-legged dolls up the steps for some reason I don't know now and probably didn't know then either just tack-tack-tack up steps and in and out of rooms busy you know for reasons I can't say and don't matter really just tiny people busy in their tiny homes just a little girl daydreaming how pretty and busy her house would be if she was grown up and had a house and next thing I know a big snarling dog so close it sprays slobber on my bare arm, big dog up on its hind legs barking and snapping, tearing around then it drops down off the fence and runs in circles then brams its mean self up on the fence again and I can't even say, grateful as I was for that fence, what kind of fence it was, wire I think, a strong fence thank goodness with steel posts and that twisted steel wire maybe so it don't go nowhere but my heart in my mouth I just knew no fence could hold in that wild animal jumping and barking and whipping around in crazy circles to get at me and eat me up steel and wire or could have been wood I think each set-back house had a different kind of fence. All I remember is running fast as I could cross the street and promising God if he saved me from that dog I'd never walk next to those fences again and never did, never even thought about trying again ever in life. After I got away from the nasty dog come running and biting at me that morning, I always crossed Susquehanna before I got to the place where those three houses set with their green grass and flowers and fences and painted all nice and clean, never ever let myself get caught over there where the dog hated me. I made sure to cross over and would cross today if God put me back on my feet and let me walk the sidewalks again. Funny thing is I kept crossing Susquehanna long after that dog, I started to say giant dog but to tell the truth I can't really say how big or what kind of dog it might have been, bigger than a timber wolf to me when it ran at me trying to bram down the fence to get me but that was then, those were a little scared child's eyes, the little girl I was then who didn't know any better but now here's what I really wanted to tell you. Once when I walked you to Homewood School I was holding your hand in mine and crossed you over to the other side of Susquehanna and then further up the block, near the corner, I marched you back across Susquehanna Street to the side we'd been on in the first place after we turned from Dumferline and you always were a smart little boy you looked up at me as if to say, What you doing, Mama, almost as if you knew we'd gone out of our way for no good reason crossing and crossing back and probably by that time after all the years it took for me to grow up, well, almost grow up, grown enough anyway to get married and have you and for you to be a boy old enough to start school and big enough to begin learning your alphabet and numbers and your own way so you could leave the house in the morning and walk to Homewood School by your own self, and after all those years if you would have asked me that day why we crossed, I would have been ashamed to say because after all those years I was showing you a way didn't really make a bit of sense, the dog long dead, the three cute separate houses all rundown, maybe not even sitting there any longer, maybe a dead vacant lot dead as the dog and I'm teaching you my fear, teaching you to cross, teaching you to look out for something bad not even there anymore.
And I said all that to say this. The spot right outside Mason's bar along the vacant lot where the weeds were high before the city came and cut them, where the boy they shot laid there and died and left the mark of his body in the mashed-down weeds, that very spot where the worst thing happened to their son, I saw a couple had to be the dead boy's mother and father who else could it be with the boy's little sister by the hand, standing there on Frankstown, all three of them staring down at the spot where the weeds had sprung up again after the boy's body lying there had mashed them down to its shape, the three of them staring and I wondered how in the world they knew the exact spot where he'd died. I was sitting outside right up here the night they shot him and I heard the shots and watched the boys shot him running down Frankstown and him lying so still in exactly that spot I will never forget, never, never forget, I could go right to it now if you pushed me over there and draw the spot and he'd fit in my drawing just like he fit the spot that night. I don't know how his people knew the spot because I watched and watched the carryings-on after the paramedics covered up the boy's face and took his body away on a stretcher, watched the detectives marching through the weeds, cops searching up and down the alley behind Frankstown, watched the ambulances and trucks with searchlights and paddywagons and a hook-and-ladder firetruck and one with big spools of hose for god knows what reason unless they had the good idea to burn Mason's to the ground and wanted fire engines sitting at the curb so the fire wouldn't spread, armies of men and machines and big lights all kinds of commotion after they carried the boy off in a black van and I watched it all, watched till everybody left and it was quiet again as it ever gets around here and I never saw the couple that night I'm sure I never saw them till I saw them in broad daylight the next afternoon the boy's mother and father I'm certain, the right age, right look, with a little girl by the hand must be the poor boy's sister, I said to myself, the three of them coming up Frankstown and stopping after they passed M
ason's right beside the exact spot where I'd watched a boy lying so still I had no doubt from the first moment I saw a dark shape not moving down there in the weeds he was dead, and the three of them walked up like I just said and stood still a minute then they started moving, hugging one another and forgive me god for thinking and saying this they danced a kind of grief jig, the little girl watching, the two grownups moving jumpy like it hurt them to move and hurt too much not to move, like they had to shake their feet and hands in jerky little circles and shuffles, you know, because the air, the ground all the sudden too hot or too cold to touch, circling around each other, each one needing to fight that cold, that fire their own way, the best way they could and then all three hugging again and after that they dropped down on their knees, raising their arms, kissing the ground, swaying real slow, mashing down the weeds in the exact same spot the son's body had mashed them the night before and I thought of leading you by the hand to Homewood School and wondered if I remembered something terrible could I pass it on to you without saying a word and remembered your big eyes on me after I'd crossed you back and forth across Susquehanna for no good reason and I wondered if you saw in my eyes that nasty dog and if you'd always cross at the same spot I crossed you and now I'm asking myself and asking you too, could a person hold open in their mind the dead boy's place in those weeds for his people to find and drop down on it like I saw them drop. Could it have been me thinking of him lying there, right exactly there, me leading them, guiding them to him so they see him though nothing's there.
[Dissolve to JEW and JLG—interior of grocery store/restaurant]
I don't need you to remind me that getting my mother's stories on film next to impossible, Mr. G. I share your pessimism about the limits of cinema, about the lost cause of any made-up shit supposed to be representing real shit and I know my mother's old, her stories old stories and who gives a flying fuck these days about old folks' rambling stories, who's prepared to bankroll movies about grungy, smelly tail ends of lives when sexy, young-fleshed lives photograph so pretty, sell so well. I admit my mom's getting old but on the other hand she's not as old as the Sumerian culture you sample toward the end of your latest film Our Music to make your point about how language (thus narrative and meaning in general) operates both forward and backward in what we call time, the bit about Sumerian grammar employing a future tense to describe the past. Never goes away, does it, the paradoxical old/new nature of time, so how old is old anyway or how young and who cares Mr. G. when you get down to the nitty-gritty, everybody just wants their own time and more of it, call it whatever you want to call it, past, present, future, who cares it's all the same, my mother's old stories, mine, yours, young again if we're alive to hear them, tell them, see them, act them, the ancient Sumerians singing about past glories as if their history's going to happen any day now, tomorrow, today, yesterday, centuries in the future and keep on happening forever and Sumeria a heap of old stones scattered in the desert in the vicinity of Iraq and Iran, time's stupid and indiscriminate whether it's measured by dynasties or by inflections of verbs or carved up by calendars into months and years and centuries or light-years or the half-lives of elementary particles decaying or annular rings of a tree or geological epochs or intervals on a musical scale, the same bullshit same wishful thinking, whatever talisman or computer program people set to divvy up time, rationalize it, tame it, chain it, preserve it whatever year of this dog or that snake or this bearded savior or that comet or shooting star or quark's rotation around an imaginary nucleus, time stays what it is, waves goody-bye, goody-bye, like runaway slaves wave to Old Massa, old names forgotten, old chains broken, no tick, no tock. Goody-bye.
On one hand, given the above, I understand your reluctance, Mr. Godard. On the other hand, the invisible hand that makes clapping with one hand possible, why not try to film my mother's stories. Why not try your luck, set down your bucket, here, where we sit, Jean Luc, Lucky John. What's to lose. Except time. And there's always plenty of time. It's all we have, right.
And speaking of the future, Mr. G., do you know that the dead talk like niggers. Which means the language of the dead may be nigger language or the dead may be imitating for whatever reasons the language we hear around us in this neighborhood I grew up in. Maybe the dead hang with niggers a lot. Or maybe niggers hang out a lot with the dead. Or it could be the fact that all the dead are niggers. Could be the fact only niggers die, but I don't think so. Shit, to be honest I can't explain why the dead speak like some of my people speak. A thought about why once crossed my mind but I didn't take it seriously. It made me laugh really. The gist of it goes something like this: so-called white people rule this world—who could dispute that, Mr. G., everybody knows white people on top even if it's only a very few really on top of the top and more and more so-called whites sinking down through the cracks into places basically indistinguishable in many ways from Homewood, and yellow people and brown people and purple people and beige people coming on fast, breathing down white people's necks but that's another humorous thought not so funny according to your Mr. Eminem and that's not the thought anyway that cracked me up when it flashed through my mind to explain why the dead speak the way niggers speak. Just grant me the obvious fact that white people or so-called white people because they call themselves white, run the world as we know it, the world striding out of our TVs every day bigger than life and upon that world they run they impose their language as the official language for doing business, for deciding who's famous, who's smart, who speaks intelligently, the language for writing history and the last word on what's good or bad, ugly or beautiful. Their language a sign of who's on top and why and also a way of identifying who ain't on top, who can't be and ain't spozed to be since they speak the wrong language, like nigger language, which is not to say that many languages don't have their places in the world the ones on top administer, the many languages have places just like many so-called non-white, colored people have places and some, a few anyway (even a few niggers), have places you could call significant or desirable, perhaps indispensable in the world they serve, but the point I've already belabored far too much since as I said it's such an obvious point is that at the end of the day and when the day begins too, whites or if you will "so-called whites" run things, and a few reap godlike profits from this bullshit called a world, or whatever they call it, profiting even from the bullshit cages you see in this place we're visiting today called Homewood, these cages you might think belong to the people you see caged in them but in fact belong to the ones who built them and got the keys in their deep pockets, and even here in this so-called ghetto white is spoken, whether or not you hear one word of it everybody understands who's in charge whose voice matters but back to my tickling thought which is this: maybe on the other side, the so-called dead side, the side that's located, you know, through the looking glass or just below the surface of water or on the other face of a coin you can't see when you're looking at one face, over there maybe the people whom/who the language ruling this side calls colored or negroes or whatever, maybe over there some of the so-called black people are the bosses. And over there where everybody winds up sooner or later or maybe never exactly leaves, over there maybe—ha-ha-ha—you better speak nigger or else.
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