Love and Fury

by Richard Hoffman

  On the wall a dull rectangle of light with little shapes— dots, lines, streaks—and one permanent line from a crack in the plaster, then there they were, four young black boys in a row, seated on folding chairs. My father stood behind them. He leaned over and said something in one boy’s ear. And (I remember this vividly) whatever he said caused the boy to break into a dazzling smile and shake his head from side to side as my father stepped out of the frame.

  One boy began, drumming out a basic rhythm with his hands on his thighs. He called out:

  Hambone, hambone have you heard?

  Another boy joined in, slapping his thighs and chest in syncopation, the beat getting complicated, and responded:

  Mama’s gonna buy me a mockin’ bird.

  A third boy added his patting and clapping:

  If that mockin’ bird don’t sing

  And the fourth, the boy to whom my father had spoken, exploded in a virtuosic cascade of patting, slapping, clapping, and smacking while he sang back:

  Mama’s gonna buy me a diamond ring.

  The four of them continued through the rest of the lyrics while the beat bounced, intricately braided, and the volume rose and fell, pulsing in a patterned flow.

  If that diamond ring don’t shine

  Mama’s gonna buy me a fishing line.

  If that fishing line should break

  Mama’s gonna throw it in the lake.

  If that water splash on me

  Mama’s gonna beat my b.u.t.

  My father could not have known, nor would he have had the means to find out, hambone’s origin as a response to cruelty, fear, hatred, and deprivation. His admiration for the skill of his team members was genuine, and he didn’t understand why anyone might think otherwise. “People say you’re not supposed to say they got rhythm. But why? They do! They do!” Had he known that the performance he so admired was a defiance of cultural erasure, he would have been all the more admiring. The drum, any drum, was forbidden. The healing drum was broken; the wedding drum, torn; the full-moon drum, in tatters; the mother drum, the father drum, splintered; no drums across the gorges, the hilltops, the waters; no signals, no meetings, no stories, no plans of escape or rebellion. And so the body became a drum, the body with its variety of pitches, its many textures, its hollows and surfaces and declivities, its expressive slaps and claps and pops and thumps and brushes; more sounds, almost, than a mouth, and just as much to say to those with ears to hear.

  On the same visit to the Vermont Studio Center where I met my friend Letta, I shared a photo of my grandson with a Nigerian painter, Susana. We were in the dining hall, where I thought the food was delicious but where she could seldom eat anything without it upsetting her stomach. “This is your grandson?” Her puzzlement might have been that this gray old white man could be this child’s grandfather. Or perhaps she meant—what? Nigerian English is inflected very differently from American, so it was hard for me to be sure what was behind the question. “In Nigeria, we say that your grandchildren are your ancestors.”

  “I thought it was the other way round.” I laughed.

  She continued to stare at the photo on my phone. She put her hand on my wrist, squeezed so I felt her urgency, pursed her lips and nodded, once.

  “No. He is returned. He is your ancestor.”

  Once again I am challenged, in collision with a more capacious way of understanding the world that does not discount what language cannot convey, a view that describes time and eternity differently. It felt like stepping away from the wall, out onto the dance floor of the imagination. I have been taught to pretend that the imagination is not real, that it is not my constant companion, not an acceptable way to grasp reality, that it is a way of knowing that is to be left behind. The imagination is off limits to adults. An adult is someone who uses machines, who can drive. And an adult running a machine had better be where that machine is, whether it’s a plane, or a lathe, or a saw.

  Perhaps my grandfather was thinking of me when, a young man, he lost his forefinger to a circular saw? I still see his stump of an index finger though it is long since dust.

  So, I am the ancestor of that hard little breaker boy on a wooden bench in the colliery shattering anthracite into smaller chunks? All right then: from here in the imagination, where these encounters can take place, I bless him. And here in the imagination he wipes a black streak across his face and feels, oddly, strengthened. Maybe he is thinking of a beautiful silk necktie that he saw on someone at church the previous Sunday. “Howdy, Guvnor.”

  Perhaps the imagination is the realm where the living and the dead conduct their transactions. If so, then we are in exile from that communion.

  Except, perhaps, in dreams.

  In a dream, for example, on my mother’s last night on earth, her mother, Etta, appeared to me. No doubt the dream was so vivid because it took place downstairs, where I had been just before coming to bed. I had opened the back door for some reason and saw her in the darkened alley next to the house. She passed beneath a cone of light from a streetlamp. I was surprised but somehow not shocked that she was there. “Mammy Etta!” I said, very happy to see her. I had loved her very much as a child.

  “Shhh.” She put her finger to her lips then moved it back and forth. “I can’t stay long,” she whispered. She put her finger back to her lips and winked at me. And my mother died in the morning.

  Or the dream I remembered while holding my grandson on my lap when he was five months old. I cupped his head in my hands, felt the lamb’s-wool softness of his hair, nuzzled him, and looked in his eyes. A thrill, not a chill because it wasn’t cold, a vibration of some kind went through me as I understood that I had dreamed of this child before he was born. My impulse was to shrug this off as déjà vu, a neurological glitch. However, I remembered that I had written about that dream because it puzzled me. Later, I went back to my journal to find it, prepared, by then, to laugh at myself for being so silly.

  Such a strange dream last night. I’m in the backyard when a creature I don’t recognize emerges from the bushes. It looks up at me with brown eyes, asking for something. It wants me to hold its head. I can’t believe how soft and gentle it is. Its hair is soft as a lamb. I hold its cheeks in my hands, kiss its soft brown forehead. I am almost weeping with joy. What strange and beautiful creature is this?

  The date of the entry is September 21, 2006, before we knew Veronica was pregnant, just around the time that D— my dreamt-of ancestor?—was conceived.

  Neither Veronica nor I can recall whose idea it was, but I was the one who went to pick up the cake we had ordered for the family celebration of Kathi’s successful treatment. I had never been in a bakery like this one before. In a glass display case were cookies and cakes in the shapes of penises, vaginas, sculptured cakes of copulating couples, weird armless and legless female torso cakes with shaved chocolate pubic hair. There was a little plate of bite-size pink penises with a sign above it: DELICIOUS—TRY ONE! There was a binder on the counter with pictures of all the other varieties of indelicate delicacies you could order.

  “I’m here to pick up a cake,” I said to the bald woman behind the counter.

  “What’s the name?”

  “I think it’s under Veronica.” She went to a round-shouldered old refrigerator in the corner, took out a box, put it on the counter and opened it. “This it?”

  The cake was in the shape of two round breasts, perfect domes with a nipple in the center of each one. Above them read, Congratulations! and below, Super Woman!

  Recently, I was with my son, Robert, in the supermarket, just picking up a few items. There were only two registers in use and the lines were long, but there were several “self-serve” checkout machines free. I scanned my items and wished to pay with my debit card, but the correct menu wouldn’t appear on the screen. Try again, I was prompted, twice. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “You’d think if you were going to automate the process and put people out of work, you could at least get it right.”
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br />   “Dad, hold on a minute.”

  “No, I’m serious.” Now I was in a high working-class dudgeon. “There used to be seven or eight aisles here with cashiers and baggers. Where did those people go? Where’d those jobs go? Now you do the work yourself and they can’t even keep their machines working right.”

  “Dad. Here. You have to touch the screen where it says debit.”

  I did. Then I was prompted to swipe my card and the rest of the transaction went off without a hitch. On our way out, I continued, “I just hate what those machines represent. There are so many people out of work. My first job was in a supermarket. How does a person get started now?” Robert put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Okay, but still. I think we have to chalk this one up to user error. I don’t disagree with you, but really, Dad, come on.”

  It’s true that I’ve become impatient. I am gravely disappointed by my inability to stay young, and I am becoming more fully aware every day of the unlikelihood that I will outwit death and live forever. That small voice inside me that has all my life insisted on this special dispensation is now a child whose insistence that the world be different sometimes becomes a tantrum. All my many years have provided me is the wherewithal to come up with some articulate indictment of the world with which to express my abiding outrage. I answer the silent, powerful communique that is my son’s hand on my shoulder in kind—with silence: mine is a fear he doesn’t know yet. Besides, I do not want my foolish, tardy reckoning with reality to task my children, my friends, my students, with having to humor me. No fool like an old fool—and yet, though aging is not optional, becoming a fool is clearly the result of user error. My son drops his hand, I put my arm around him briefly and laugh. I believe we both understand what has just occurred.

  It should get easier, going to see Damion, but it doesn’t. For me, each time seems harder. Now I know how sad and angry I am going to feel afterward.

  In front of Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Concord, beneath the Stars and Stripes, flies the black POW/MIA flag, even though it was determined years ago that the issue that it represents is bogus: Vietnam no longer has Americans imprisoned there. That whole idea, appealing to the grief and the hope of working people whose sons never returned, was birthed and exploited by Hollywood, specifically by Sylvester Stallone movies. Now, two decades later, it seems to me to be the perfect flag to hang outside a prison: a flag to stubbornness in the face of the facts, a flag that insists on an idea that has been repeatedly debunked.

  There is a woman I see there in the waiting room no matter which day of the week I go. A white woman in her fifties, her hair dyed very black the way my mother wore hers, sitting with her hands crossed in her lap and legs crossed at her ankles. She smiles and says hello to other visitors. She’s there to see her son. She comes every day, and every day she is smiling, as if, for her, this is not so much an impediment to her love but an inconvenience. I haven’t yet decided if this is admirable or appalling.

  When I’m here, I feel myself transformed into an object of scorn and pity. Or else I defiantly resist this transformation in a way that also disfigures me. I can hardly hold onto who I am in my own skin for half an hour. It’s impossible to count all the tiny factors that undermine my sense of myself, but foremost is the attitude of the guards. Even when they are civil or polite, their faces betray their disdain. A few of the female guards will smile or make eye contact, but they are unpredictable and seem harder on female visitors, as if holding them responsible for being a bad influence or an insufficiently good one, for being a temptress or a shrew or a lousy mother. It is a kind of mud bath of shame, visiting this place.

  This time I have come because Damion’s father, Smithy, died of cancer two weeks earlier. Damion had not been allowed to attend his funeral in Connecticut. I knew from our earlier conversations that Damion’s feelings for his father were as complicated as my own. I am happy for those men who feel no ambivalence, no confusion or puzzlement about their fathers. They are able either to follow their father’s example or make a clean break and live unencumbered by the paternal ghost. I’ve never met a man like that, but they must exist somewhere.

  As soon as he sits down, I tell him I’m sorry to hear about his father’s death. He looks away, says nothing, shrugs. “He had a good life.”

  “You think so?”

  “Better than this,” he says, cocking his head to take in the whole room, the whole prison, maybe his whole life. “He got to do a lot. He went a lot of places. He got to do a lot of things he wanted to do.”

  I wait for him to go on, but when he doesn’t I try to stick up for him. “I guess if I were you, among other things, I’d be mad. I guess I’m a little mad at him on your behalf.”

  “Nah. He was no kind of father. He just wasn’t interested. I ain’t going to judge him. I mean, that’s the kind he was. That was just his way.”

  Then he tells me about an argument he got in with a guard.

  “Is that why you couldn’t go to your father’s funeral?”

  “Maybe. They said they didn’t have nobody who could drive me down there. They couldn’t spare a car that day.”

  Most people agree that what lands people in jail is either their poor choices or their lack of empathy for others. Our society, in its wisdom, has therefore chosen to create prison environments where regimentation eliminates choices— what time to rise and sleep, what to eat, what to wear, with whom to associate; and places in which empathy is not only unrewarded but is often an invitation to violence.

  I ask him, again, to tell me what happened the night he was arrested.

  “After I left the lawyer’s I was like, I just want to spend time with my son. If I was going to jail on Monday, then I wanted the weekend with him. So I called Veronica. You know that part.”

  I do. And as I sit there, the two of us sitting forward, elbows on our knees, being as honest as we can, I’m thinking of all the ways this could have turned out to be even more tragic. “What if she’d agreed? What if she’d relaxed the rule?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean then D would have been with you in that car, with you and your friends.”

  “No, man! No. It wasn’t like that. If I’d had D with me, I would have been at my aunt’s house. I would never have been with those guys.” He leans back, looks at me as if he’s trying to decide whether to be insulted. He shakes his head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  I believe him.

  He went over to a friend’s house in the projects, where they sat around drinking beer and watching TV for a while, waiting for another friend who never showed. He was the only one with a car, so when it got late he offered to give the other three guys a ride home. They had just piled in and Damion had just started the car when an unmarked police car pulled in front of him and blocked the way. These cops, known as the gang task force, were notorious for riding herd on young men in the projects.

  “They told us to get out of the car. And I was like, ‘We ain’t doing nothing wrong. I know my rights. Why don’t you move your damn car and let me get up out of here?’ But the dudes in the back seat, they got out the car and on a count of three, they ran in all kind of directions. The cop slammed me on the car and stuck his elbow in my back. I wasn’t running or trying to get away but he did it again. I told him, ‘Don’t do that!’ When he did it again, I turned and caught him with my elbow. That’s when he hit me in the mouth with his flashlight and busted my tooth.”

  He ran but he didn’t get very far. In the backseat, along with two guns on the floor, his friends had left a bag containing several handguns and a couple of Kevlar vests. Damion insists he knew nothing about them.

  I want to believe him. I don’t care as much about whether he knew anything about the guns in the backseat as I do about whether he is lying to me. I want to believe that he tells me the truth.

  In a recent letter, he writes, “There’s no feeling worse than that of being cheated out of life. Being a man, you always ha
ve to take responsibility for your own actions. So I accept what happened as a consequence of my own actions.”

  But to what extent is that the truth? I want to object; I want to remind him that from the moment he arrived here from Jamaica as a boy, he was marked by the darkness of his skin and the fears of those who still frantically roll up their windows, who would spit him out if they could. Once he told me that he didn’t know he was black until he came to the United States, and that for a time he corrected people who called him that. “No, I’m sorry. I’m from Jamaica.”

  Am I letting him off the hook? But it’s none of it fair: when in his entire young life has he not been on the hook? I recognize that his acceptance of accountability is a load-bearing wall of his self-respect, so I keep my mouth shut, but I don’t accept such a privatization of responsibility, either. The whole world must be “buyer beware”? Every man for himself? All he can do now is try to use the time to grow up. Is prison a place where one can do that? I wonder.

  One last thing about the film Attack! While I wouldn’t call it an antiwar movie as we have come to know that genre, it is clear throughout that none of the soldiers wants to be in combat. They are no longer raw recruits. They have left friends dead in the field. We hear the groans and cries of the wounded. When it appears that they will not be sent to “the show” again, they are relieved.

  Attack! is a film about courage and honor. It is clearly on the side of the enlisted man. The real antagonist is not the Third Reich, but their cowardly Captain Cooney, who twice refuses to come to the aid of Costa’s men, resulting in needless lives lost to his cowardice. The other officer, a colonel played by Lee Marvin, is a friend of Cooney’s father, a judge, and his postwar political ambitions determine his every move, including retaining Cooney in command of the unit even though he knows he is weak and unsuited to the job. After Cooney’s second betrayal, and while the Germans are advancing in increased numbers, the plot revolves around Costa’s promise to hunt down Cooney and avenge his men. The moral quandary faced by the other appealing character in the film, Costa’s friend Harry, who is Cooney’s adjutant, is about either adhering to the army’s code of conduct or turning a blind eye to Costa’s fragging. In the end, after Costa’s death, it is Harry who kills Cooney. Then in a final scene, the code of conduct coming back to the fore, he calls command to report what he has done.