Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  On his side of the closed door Fanon misses nothing. He hears the spinning wheels, the old, thumping heart. The door not exactly transparent, so her likeness took a while to seep through it, and now a clear image of her face available each time she rolls by. He's developed a preternatural awareness, a kind of Humbert Humbert spidery acuity in the lonely vortex of a web which trembles when a butterfly's wings agitate a breeze in Peru. How Fanon feels from time to time anyway, chained to a bed, lying there helpless, naked except for a diaper, hour after hour, or days or years, neither awake nor asleep, throat parched, a swamp of sweat, shivering, choking, assaulted by the frantic traffic of cells constructed, cells demolished and trucked away, cells remodeled, scraped, scrapped, workers and machines coming and going, a great excavation at the center of him, a constant thudding of wrecking balls and hooting bulldozers knocking down older quarters of the city, slums cleared, fresh construction tumbling down as it's completed, new and old consuming each other, collapsing into the same pit at the center of him into which everything, hands, eyes, memories, bowels, disappears, the cells clamoring, screaming because loud brutal tools are pulling them down faster than other tools can shape and secure them, love them, their walls giving way, giving up. There is nothing, no solid ground inside him to stand upon, cling to, just the lost city of him, demolished, sliding away, dust, rubble, and noxious waste. Each cell on a suicide mission, self-destructing, the raw walls buckling when the first dab of paint applied, bright panes of glass maneuvered into place on a top story, then crashing down into the emptiness where his island once floated, the city of him unfit for habitation, its foundations quicksand, his flesh sinking into mud, becoming mud, he breathes mud, tastes mud, swims in a slick wet ooze, he's drowning, the thick, smothering intimacy of the mud bearing dead messages from everywhere, nowhere, news of pain at the tips of useless fingers, pain messages delivered by follicles of hair with burning roots like a torturer's cigarettes stubbed on his chest.

  But on his side of the hospital room door, as on her side, you can't even depend on pain or death to get you through the night. It lifts. Not death. Not night. They don't lift, my brother. Pain lifts. A torturer's trick Fanon knows well. The torturers schooled him—all pain no gain, my brother. Keep hope alive. You must keep hope alive or the stubborn ones overdose on pain and die on you. A black mark mars your record, not theirs. You suffer the consequences, not them.

  Pain lifts. Temperature rises. Not fluorescent lighting searing your eyes, Doctor Fanon, it's the tropical sun. Shield your gaze. Scan the postcard view. Forget your skewered, blistered, bloated, blackened body roasting over a pit. Run toward the laughing ocean. Your legs are strong and sturdy again. Soccer trim. Run fast but not too fast. Your muscles have grown sluggish. Allow them to warm up. This is not a dream, not paradise. No wings. You'll need your legs. Remember, you're no better at imagining paradise when you're awake than when you're asleep. Don't sprint, a gentle lope because a small person with legs shorter than yours clasps your hand. Can't you feel the warm, wet squeeze. Can't you hear her squeals above the thudding surf. Waves loom ahead tall as skyscrapers. A city's famous face painted across the horizon rushing toward them. He'll sizzle when waves break over him. Salt will heal the charred threads of his skin. It will only hurt a moment, my dear, he shouts, smiling down at her crown of dready locks. Her small hand grips his tighter than skin. I won't let go this time, my daughter, my flesh. Soon we'll be free, home soon, as soon as we step into the cool sea we'll step out on the other side. See the rows of braids, the white ropes, blue ropes, green ropes of rolling and pitching water, see the rainbow fish, their bubble eyes and needle teeth, look down their tongueless mouths into the pink wells of their bellies, my sweet girl. Gentle strides but he must hurry too. Her short legs scissor to keep up, old sores popping and bleeding, his, hers, your flesh after all, your bad seed sprouting in this daughter, blacking up her skin, scarring her hair. It's not far, baby, hurry, hurry, don't pull her small hand off her small arm, Daddy.

  She survives you, whatever that means, and in an interview I imagine or read she talks briefly about her name, your name, Fanon, the difficulties claiming a famous name so neither she nor it's forgotten. A balancing act, the difficulty of shedding the famous name when she wishes to be known by another, the difficulty of wanting others to remember her different name yet not to forget her father's name her mother did not take but asked him to give to her daughter, your daughter, Fanon, your flesh surviving after you're gone, and though you were in love in Lyon, about to marry another woman, you said yes and signed the appropriate documents bestowing your name Fanon on your daughter, thus giving her the legal right to claim the name, but you did not include her right to claim more than you decided you were willing or able to give, and you never met her, this girl child Murielle, bearing your dead sister's name, the daughter whom I imagine further on a rainy day, your birthday perhaps, July 20, perhaps walking alone under a purplish umbrella down an aisle of the cemetery in Fort-de-France, a two-tiered cemetery, one tier a crowded, sprawling ghetto on the hillside's steep upper slope, the poor as you predicted at last on top, and at the foot of the hill the rich folks' cemetery, a walled village of miniature stone dwellings. Your daughter Murielle finding you where she knew you'd be waiting, at the base of the hill, her father handsome, dignified, in a photo encased on a marble page of an open book atop the stone crypt inside the iron fence enclosing the family mausoleum that sits at an intersection near the cemetery wall farthest from the little stone shed at the entrance where I asked directions of a goateed attendant and he pointed down a lane between two rows of elaborate, aboveground tombs tout droit, tout droit and I followed his finger along this street lined with monuments and mansions of the dead to arrive at the spot where I'm imagining her under her large mauve umbrella staring at photos, plaques, wreaths, dead flowers, imitation flowers arranged on a chest-high stone vault containing various remains, I assume, though not her father's, he lies many islands, more than one sea away, back where he came from and therefore she came from and where he has returned and she will too, but not yet on this rainy afternoon I imagine her paying her respects in the Cimitière de la Levée, the so-called cemetery of the rich, in Fort-de-France. Although her father's buried, they say, in Africa, he's also memorialized here by his family in the final resting place as they say of his mother, father, brothers, sister, etc., the Fanons, her people too, her name inscribed on mementos, carved in the tomb looking back at her as she waits dry-eyed in Fort-de-France under her umbrella. An easy day for mourning, no need to cry or tap deep private reserves of sadness. All nature's grieving. Dismal sky, dark puddles on the asphalt pavement, a small damp chill in the air that counts as cold in the summer tropics. The gray stones of this town of the dead blacker, heavier when they're wet. Tears from the sky gently tap, tap, tapping on the purple umbrella shielding her plastic-scarfed hair, and she's glad no wind today, no howling, no whipping, no snatching. She stands aside quietly, lets the universe mourn, the sliver of it anyway revealing itself here, on this gray day, lets nature cry for her father's absence so she's free to listen for him, to greet him if he arrives unexpectedly, lets the quiet in her deepen until she can hear the plink-plink-plink drip from yellow beaded tips of the umbrella's struts, slower, more lugubrious on the pavement than the tap, tapping above her head. It's a soundtrack appropriate for doing this dreary thing, being in this difficult place. Without looking at them she recites the words inscribed on the marble book holding her father's image, a lament honoring a beloved son and brother. The words dissolve, scatter as she repeats them to herself, fading like in a movie she thinks to take her from one scene to the next. Effortlessly she's thousands of miles away in a green place she's never been. Africa one name for where her father rests, where he or whatever's left of him rests in peace, she hopes, impressed as she always is and isn't that numerous nations now lay claim to her father's bones, his dust, while none claimed him when he lived and breathed and wrote and spoke his changing mind. She wo
rries his spirit may be drifting, unsettled and restless like the elders say fresh souls wander, just beginning their voyage back across the water. She wishes she could help him. Launch him where he needs to go or be his anchor, the tether her mother couldn't be for him ... but that's old, gossipy business, after all, they need each other now, all of them, us, these dead, the Fanons, in new ways none of us can dream properly yet. On gray days like this one she fears her father's lost forever, his name forged on empty graves, his body scattered to the winds by politics of naming and claiming. Her father kidnapped, then refused and abandoned like her. How could you give your name to a person and not claim that person, not allow that person's claim on you. How long does it take to make a daughter. How long to name her. Is naming a mere technicality, a cold, formal signing on or signing off, as simple as sleeping in one woman's bed one night, another woman's bed another night. The somber skies, the rain pouring now are mourning for her so she's free I think to imagine forgiveness or other less imposing possibilities beside a replica of the Fanon home, a representation in stone of the family parlor except one wall is iron bars so the living can spy on the dead as we peer at lions in a zoo, as lions in a zoo peer at us. Don't fret, don't mourn. Don't blame the years lost waiting for your father to claim you. He was busy in his way, intent on doing just that—claiming you, my mother would say. Fighting a war for you. A claim's not in a name. He'll know you by your footsteps, your knock, my dear, not by your name, your country, your color, your fate. Just step toward him. He'll meet you halfway when the iron gate swings open. And open it will, my mother would insist. Don't weep, my children, she would say to the Fanons, father and daughter, say to us, to Fanons gone and to come, huddled on either side of the door, if she could.

  And because she's old and can't work miracles, often my mother thinks of herself as a roach. Nasty and useless, scared and doomed as one of those panicked roaches scrambling everywhichway after her mother, my grandmother, Freeda, crept tippy-toe before anybody else out of bed winter mornings and lit the kitchen oven to warm the frigid ass-end of the rowhouse on Cassina Way, and the big dumb bugs—still busy picnicking on scraps and crumbs, forgetting like they do every time that fire's coming and the all-night party the last one for a whole bunch of them—would come flying and scooting away from the heat to discover Grandma Freeda waiting for them with both feet alert and a carpet slipper in one hand whap, whap, whap, deadly as god. My mother, scurrying along one of the hospital's long, gleaming, piss-stinky corridors, is sure god has his reasons she wouldn't understand any better than roaches understood my grandmother's murderous slipper, good reasons for being angry with creatures he fashioned in his likeness who behave no better than dirty, pesky, good-for-nothing insects even though she wonders why god on his high throne would waste much anger or time on them, wouldn't he just roll his eyes, suck his teeth, and go on and do whatever else he needed to do, no surprise, was it, human beings still hurting and killing one another by ones and twos and hundreds and thousands these Last Days, just like they been killing for thousands of years, people killing people almost as fast as birthing people it seems, even though it seems the people population growing fast as roaches every day. She could see why god would despise such sorry creatures, but he wouldn't despise, would he, after loving us into being, despise, hate the wrong words for what he'd feel toward humans he'd given a human nature, just as he gave roaches roach nature, why would he be surprised roaches act like roaches if roach is what he put in them, why crinkle his brow or fuss or punish the things people do to one another and to themselves, it's not news, not the score of a Super Bowl he didn't already know before it started which team would win, so not a matter of hating or despising, maybe, more like just being bored, like he's tired of the foolishness and ugliness on TV, and strikes a match, and quick, opens the oven door, and quick, sticks it in the fire to catch the swoosh of gas filling up the oven. Jerks his arm out the way and quick slams the door. Waits with a slipper in his hand for them to come tearing out the holes they had sneaked into. Whap.

  He's coming down the hall, slipper in his golden hand. Whap. She smiles to herself thinking what a foolish thing for an old crippled-up woman in a wheelchair to think the master of the universe didn't have nothing better to do than chase her down a hospital hallway. Mashed-up, bloody old slipper in the same fist had squeezed light from stars and set planets spinning like tops and shaped her out of mirey clay and lifted her up close enough to his sweet lips to blow in a breath of life. All those wonders performed and here she comes this morning busybody minding some other body's business, as if she didn't know better, as if she didn't know she should leave well enough alone, as if she could play hide-and-seek with him, as if her old stick arms, these wheels for legs could scoot her along too fast to be noticed from where he sits on high. As if he's finished with her. Nothing to lose, nothing of her left worth breaking or stealing or humbling she's down so low down to a bitter nub and all alone at last with nothing but her pitiful roach self in this pitiful chair he got to be done with me she thinks out loud and wonders why he isn't, why she feels his breath on the back of her neck, why her skin's hot with shame and guilty knowledge because here she goes again poking her nose into somebody else's business, whoever the person was behind a door she guesses is locked and the key in a bear's pocket.

  A few nurses in this hospital she wouldn't blow her nose on or wipe her ass with and then again a few of them tending her couldn't be nicer. If being a nurse her job, would she be one of the nice ones, the angel kind who never said no, never said too much or too little, who poked and stuck and drew blood the same gentle way they tucked her in or said good morning how you doing today, Mrs. Wyman, so the words sounded new, not like a scrap of food swept up off the floor nobody decent would think of putting in their mouth.

  Nice like nice Nurse Mimi who reminds her of Cora Brunson at church in her all-white missionary uniform leading old folks to the particular pews where they been sitting each Sunday since way before Cora Brunson—who ain't no spring chicken—born, since before there was a Homewood AME Zion church on the corner of Bruston and Homewood, old people occupying the same exact seat every Sunday, a seat some of them couldn't locate if it wasn't for Cora Brunson remembering and leading them to it, poor old brains fuddled and fogged, further gone than hers, my mother thinks, worried about her little bit of roach brain left, enough left in those old ghost people to get dressed and out the house on Sunday morning and know the wrong place if somebody don't lead them to the right place they'd refuse to sit down in the wrong place, wag their old heads Huh-uh. No indeed, and vanish, carrying off Homewood AMEZ with them if it wasn't for angels like Cora Brunson her hand guiding an elbow or taking the papery fingers slipped into hers. Cora a large woman, heavyset, you know, looks twice as large in all that missionary white with her bowlegs and overstuffed white gym shoes and little weensy white veil pinned like a bride on top her head. Even if your head bowed and eyes shut praying you knew when Cora Brunson passed up or down the red-carpeted aisle by the squeak of her bound up in fully packed nylon undergarments rubbing against the white uniform with not an inch to spare, squeaky like a man breaking in a new pair of Stacy Adams. Just like Cora Brunson, Nurse Mimi too big and black to be any kind of angel my mother would have thought before she knew better, way back when in Sunday school, a pale, empty-headed little color-struck girl, but today no doubt about it, an angel's what Nurse Mimi is. Thank you, dear. You're a real angel. You know you're an angel, don't you, Nurse Mimi. If nobody's told you lately, somebody sure needs to, so I will.