I must have found out the way I found out most things, by eavesdropping on adults, probably listening to my parents’ conversation through the floor register at night when we were supposed to be sleeping. My Uncle Francis had “thrown her out of the house.” That’s what I understood as a young boy. That, and the additional information that she “went to live with the coloreds.”
It isn’t hard to imagine Uncle Francis in a racist rage. I don’t think I saw him more than half a dozen times over the next half century, but each time, somehow, he managed to insert the term “nigger” into the flow of the conversation, no matter what the topic. All through the years of the civil rights struggle, or watching Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Elston Howard play baseball, or Wilt Chamberlain or Oscar Robertson play basketball, it was always nigger this and nigger that.
My uncle disowned his daughter, his only child. She was sixteen, maybe seventeen, still in high school where she met a young man who shared her taste in music, who treated her as the beautiful woman she was becoming, and who was black. Something happened then. My uncle saw them walking down the street together in one version of the story; in another, the young man beckons to her on the dance floor and she joins him and someone tells my uncle. What does it matter? We never saw her again.
I once tried to write a novel based in part on this situation, but I couldn’t imagine the life of my cousin afterward, when the African American community took her in, recognizing her as a casualty of the same ugly racism they knew so well. I knew nothing of that life. It was a historical novel; no, worse, a costume drama. I could outfit the characters with garb and accents, always careful to avoid, offset, or subvert stereotypes, but I knew nothing of the ways, the understandings, the culture of black people in that place and time but what I could glean from books, magazines, and the Internet. It was all a put-up job and I abandoned it, having discovered that I was a liberal in the worst sense: I wrote my black characters just like all the other people I knew, white people. I wrote them in blackface.
How could it have been that I grew up in the industrial heartland and in a blue-collar neighborhood of mostly steel-workers and autoworkers—and still I knew no black people. How can that be? The answer to that question lies in the deeply internalized segregation that was the geographical expression of the hatred that had taken my cousin from us. Perhaps it was a liberation for her.
And I realize now, writing this, that my awful vision of Veronica alone and desperate and defeated is the American nightmare, generated and sustained by white supremacists like my uncle.
And my grandfather. My grandfather and his watermelon—it’s a summer memory from 1954 or ’55. My grandfather sits in his black leather chair by the window onto the alley, his cane hung over one arm of the chair where some of the horsehair stuffing is visible through a brown tear in the leather. Not long before, I’d had my hand slapped for pulling some of the long bristles from the slit. Now, Bobby and I are sitting cross-legged on the floor at my grandfather’s feet in his high-top, lace-up shoes before half a watermelon and a long knife on newspaper. We’re not allowed to handle the knife. My grandfather gives us each a slice of the melon and we watch as he eats his, making exaggerated sounds of delight, Mmmm, mmmmnnnn. After each bite, he spits the seeds out the window, which is shocking and comic and, we know, forbidden. Our grandmother would not approve. Five or six years old—I don’t believe we’d started school— we love this moment. We’re Pappy’s trusted coconspirators, although we can’t wait to run and tell someone, “Pappy spit the seeds out the window! Pappy spit the seeds out the window!” And as he does, he says, “Get out of here, black nigger!” Too-ey! “Get out of here, black nigger!” over and over.
Bobby and I do it, too, laughing so hard we almost choke. We both know we must not swallow the seeds; a watermelon will grow in your stomach. It isn’t easy to spit out only the seeds. Bobby has bits of the pink flesh down his chin and I haven’t mastered it, either. To be sure to get the seeds out the window we stick our heads out. Bobby can’t say his L’s— later he will get after-school help with this—so he says, “Outta here, byack nicker. Outta here, byack nicker.” We mimic our grandfather, laughing and chanting and spitting till the melon is a pile of ribs next to the knife on the newspaper. Our hands, our chins, our forearms are sticky with drying juice.
Once when I’d asked him about Joanne, my father said that the last he’d heard of her, somebody had said she was pushing a baby in a carriage. “The baby was white,” he added. “It was a white baby!” He shook his head as if to say that my uncle had been mistaken, which made me wonder if Joanne’s banishment had been a response to a pregnancy, and if my uncle had been led to believe that the baby’s father was black. My father seemed to think that it was a shame, not that my uncle had disowned his only daughter, but that he had done so needlessly: “It was a white baby!”
Beyond the murkiness of my cousin’s story, there are other questions that I despair of ever fully understanding. How could my parents have gone along with this? Especially my mother. Joanne’s mother had died while she was very young, and my mother was without a daughter. Was my mother so powerless to intervene? And how could my father have acquiesced? Francis was his older brother; was there some strict rule of primogeniture at work? “She just disappeared,” my father said, “poof! just like that. I think she sent Kitty a Christmas card or a note once in a while, but she was just gone.”
When my uncle was on his deathbed in Florida, one of my cousins thought she might be able to track down Joanne by means of her most recent return address. “Do you want us to try to find Joanne?”
“Joanne who?”
“Your daughter!”
“I have no daughter.”
A short time after telling my father of Veronica’s pregnancy, I sent him a photograph of Veronica and Damion sitting together on our living room sofa. At the time they were living in our house, along with our son, Robert, who had returned from Miami, where he’d been struggling in college. My father called to thank me for the photograph. “But she don’t look happy,” he said.
I dodged the invitation to candor, the first of several times I would do so. He was insistent, and right, of course. “I know my granddaughter, and she don’t look happy.” In fact neither Veronica nor Damion was happy. They were scared. They were fighting. They were on again, off again. They’d hardly known each other before the pregnancy, and now they were trying to learn how to love each other while living in our crowded house. So my father was, as always, perceptive, but I knew there was a racist element to his concern, and I wanted to be careful not to engage with it. I considered it a sleeping dog it would be best to let lie.
The next time I visited, soon after my father’s diagnosis, I saw that he’d tacked the photograph up on the bulletin board beside his chair, which occupied the same spot, in the same room, by the same window onto the alley, as my grandfather’s. When I mentioned to my brother that it was nice to see it there, Joe laughed. “When I got home from work the day that picture came, he handed it to me and asked me what I thought. ‘Nice picture,’ I said. And then he spilled it. ‘But look at the guy. He’s black!’ I said that I thought we had established that. But he shook his head and kept saying, ‘He’s black. He’s black!’ I think he thought he’d be Derek Jeter or Obama or something. He figured he’d be brown, I guess.”
Oh come on, you were never raised like that.
My father didn’t know the half of it. I couldn’t begin to tell him the complex truth of the situation. It saddened me, since we had for the past fifteen years or so been able to talk honestly about our lives. It had taken us both a great deal of effort to reestablish, some years after my mother’s death, a communication beyond the sports and weather talk that had replaced, for decades, our lost intimacy. Now, once again, I had a secret I could not bring myself to share with him.
Damion, the smiling, broad-shouldered, warm, funny young man who lived with us, was a felon, recently paroled from federal prison, where he’d
served time for dealing marijuana across state lines, and for gun possession. I watched his mounting discouragement as he tried to find work; day after day, following some lead, he would go off hopeful and come home sullen and sad. It was a tight job market, and employers wouldn’t give a second look to anyone with a record. After several months he found work refurbishing electric meters. I helped him buy a car to get back and forth to the job. He seemed to be doing all he could, making every effort to turn himself into the father he’d never had.
But he was also facing state charges for gun possession, charges a good attorney would have folded into the previous court case. The court seemed to be stringing him along, continuing his case for more than a year as if ratcheting up the tension, month after month, to see how much he could take. He was about to start a family, and he could be plucked from his life at any moment and sent back to prison. We hired a defense attorney. I wrote to the DA. I spoke to my state representative. Damion and I spoke to a reporter who did a story on his case. Why, we argued, would the state want to resurrect this old charge? His offense had no victim and had taken place before he’d gone to prison. Why negate the changes in his life, changes that are the whole point of sending a person to prison? Why throw him away? Why punish a newborn who needed a father? We were fighting hard on his behalf. Kathi, Veronica, Robert, and I, along with several of our friends, wrote letters to everyone we could think of who might have some influence.
But I couldn’t tell my father any of this; I knew very well what it would mean to him, what it would wake in him. Not long before, I had sat next to him watching, on his mammoth TV, a program called Lock-up: RAW, which as far as I could tell was a white supremacist’s wet dream—and I’m using that term on purpose: the screen was filled with black men stripped naked and herded in a mass of flesh, past iron bars from one room to another, while a voice-over spoke of the warden’s challenges keeping order and the guards’ valiant efforts to not sink to the level of depravity of the prisoners. Whenever a prisoner happened to turn toward the camera, his genitals were hidden by a blurry disordering of pixels. “What the hell are we watching?” I asked him. “Let’s find something else.”
“You never seem to be able to completely civilize them.” That’s what my father said as he pointed the remote at the TV. My father who had been a counselor at the Boys Club in the black neighborhood in town. My father who laughed and smiled and greeted black friends warmly when we were in a bar or restaurant. My father for whom every black person he knew personally was an exception to the rule.
I could hear a strange, proud note in my father’s voice when he talked about his illness. He kept saying that his body was shutting down. He liked to think of his bone marrow as a factory where red blood cells were produced. In addition to being proud, I think he felt somewhat relieved: he wasn’t dying through any fault of his own. Like so many guys in that postindustrial rustbelt city, he was out of work, so to speak, but there was no shame in it—the factory, the steel mill, the truck plant, his bone marrow, had shut down. Nothing to be done about it. Not his fault.
Which suggests, to me anyway, that he still blamed my mother for her early death. It was her fault—three packs of Chesterfields a day—of course she would ruin her lungs. He had managed to quit. Why couldn’t she?
He had not been overcome nor defeated: nothing had eaten him, neither tiger nor microbe. He was simply “shutting down.” The sidewalk around the house was heaving and cracking with weeds in clumps. The chain-link in the yard was rusty. The whole place, the whole life, was shutting down. Nothing to be done about it. It’s nobody’s fault.
I was the one looking for an explanation, for a scapegoat. Aunt Kitty had died in her nineties, Uncle Eddie was still alive at the time, ninety-four or ninety-five, and Uncle Don, another nonagenarian, was out in Oregon. My father could have had at least another decade, if only he’d eaten better; if only he’d exercised; if only he’d been treated for depression; if only. I was the one who still needed to find the world reasonable, intelligible in some larger sense.
I usually called him Tuesday nights since he would have his lab results then, “my numbers,” he called them. He had his notebook, a kind of scorebook not unlike the spiral bound books of box scores he kept assiduously during his years as a baseball coach, the notebook now filled with numbers tracing the rise or fall of platelets, hemoglobin, white blood cells, and so on.
There was something surreal about our phone conversations. That he was dying was acknowledged, and yet he was somehow invigorated by the struggle. It was as if this man, who had been a paratrooper in WWII, who had struggled to support a family that included two terminally ill sons, and whose wife had died nearly a quarter century earlier, recognized, even welcomed, his old adversary. It was as if this time, both fearful and curious, he wanted to get a good look at him, maybe get the chance to spit in his eye.
He wondered if death would come in the night, if it would come in his sleep. How much time do I have? He read his numbers for clues, charted their rise and fall from week to week, searched the Internet for explanations of what was happening to him. One Tuesday night when I called he seemed especially upbeat.
“So how are your numbers?”
“Pretty good. Pretty good. A couple of them went down but only slightly. Two of them even went up a little bit!”
“That sounds great. Maybe you hit some kind of plateau.”
“That would suit me fine. I don’t feel sick. I’m tired as hell but I don’t feel sick.”
“So what are you doing different?”
“I try to think if I changed my diet or something. I don’t know. I’m eating a lot of chicken. Is chicken good for you?”
“Oh, sure. A lot of people swear by it. Chicken soup especially.”
“Soup?”
“Yeah. How are you cooking it?”
“Oh, I don’t cook it. Your brother brings it home. You know, the good stuff. The watchacallit, Colonel Sanders chicken. A couple, three times a week on his way home from work.”
“KFC!” I laughed loudly. “Oh yeah, that’s health food, all right.”
“Well, it seems to be working!”
When Damion moved in with us, we were already a full house. Veronica had been living in her college dormitory for a semester but chose to return home and commute. Robert had been living in Miami, supposedly going to school; in fact, he had failed some courses, stopped attending others, was living on money we sent him every month, and could not bring himself to come clean with us.
We had all been worried about him for some time. A couple of years earlier, Veronica, then a high school student, went to visit him. At the time he was still enrolled at Florida International University. He had his own apartment and she was going to stay with him there. She called me crying.
“Daddy, you have to get him out of here! I don’t know what’s happened to him, but you’ve got to bring him home!” What she told me then, about multiple identities, different narratives of his life offered to different people, drinking, steroid injections, a complex web of feints and dodges, was frightening.
I had been sober nearly twenty years by then, and I felt sure that I recognized the frantic self-invention covering the sucking wound of addiction. And I knew that as the firstborn son of an alcoholic, the odds of escaping some version of addictive illness were stacked against him. Still, I reasoned, he needed some room to find himself. I felt I had to be careful not to overwrite his story with my own, the easiest trap for any parent to fall into.
And yet, as the poor grades arrived, along with court summonses for moving violations, for stacks of parking tickets unpaid, and for fender benders, I found myself awake and staring at the ceiling many nights, feeling helpless and worried. I only understood how worried I was when the phone rang at two in the morning—a wrong number—and after I hung up I realized I’d feared it was the Florida State Police.
Kathi and I met with a substance-abuse counselor, a former colleague from the years when I worked at
an addiction and mental health clinic. He was an expert at staging and conducting interventions. He thought an intervention premature, maybe inappropriate. We all worried about overreacting. We needed more information, so we arranged to visit Robert in Florida. We spent a week with him. We took a trip down along the Keys. We returned home none the wiser and only a little less worried.
It would be another two years before the extent of our son’s deceptions and the unsustainable webwork of his lies—the ones he told us, the ones he told his friends, and the ones he told himself—became known. He had recently rented an apartment with his oldest friend, who was in the Coast Guard and stationed in Miami. The friend called us one night. He spoke to Kathi.
“I’m worried about him. He doesn’t seem to care about anything. He just hangs out with his friends or watches TV. He doesn’t work or anything. It’s like his life is going nowhere.”
“Well, we don’t want him working too many hours a week. He’s been falling behind in his coursework and we want him to concentrate on school right now.”
“School? Jesus. You think he’s going to school?”
He had been quoting me, to the penny, his tuition, fees, books each semester. After his first year, he’d established residence in Florida: off-campus apartment, driver’s license and registration, etc., because in-state tuition was much cheaper. I was depositing money—borrowed from home equity—into his account, along with an amount each month for his rent, utilities, and expenses.
Love and Fury Page 4