Here you sat straight up in bed. Your momma married to a black man? For real?
“Used to be,” I said. “But he wasn’t really black.”
How come he wasn’t really black?
“He was one of those white kind of blacks. He’s got black skin and everything but if you talked to him on the phone you’d think he was white.”
No I wouldn’t.
“Yes you would.”
Would not, you said. No way, no how.
“Trust me,” I said. “He listened to Bach.”
His last name’s Adams?
“Was,” I said. “Is, I guess.”
That’s a dead giveaway, you said. Don’t you know the first goddamn thing about black people?
I shrugged.
Don’t you know when the slaves were set free they named themselves after presidents?
“I know,” I said. “I know that.”
You always saying you know things, you said. When you don’t. Which is exactly your problem. You don’t know shit about shit, is your problem.
“My problem,” I said, “is that my mother left him and went off with some new guy everybody hates. Which is why I came to school all the way down here.”
What’s it like, you asked, your mom goes off and gets married and you got to move in with some guy you don’t know?
“I don’t know,” I said. “Weird, I guess.”
Weird is right, you said, and whistled in the universal manner of impressed people.
Then you wanted to know about my father. You mean to tell me your own father alive and well and walking around the same city as you, and you never see him?
“Never,” I said.
But you know who he is?
“Yup.”
And you met him a few times?
“He came over a few times but he was always drunk. Except the couple times he was in AA and trying to make amends and he came by sober and promised to take responsibility for us. That’s about it.” I said these things in a yawning, dispassionate voice, like I could hardly remember what I was talking about.
So you seen him, like, ten times your whole life?
“Pretty much. A couple times we ran into each other.”
You run into him? You run into your own father by accident? You laughed, snorted. Like maybe you standing in line at the grocery store and you look up and there he is in the next lane, reading the TV Guide and shit?
“I think it was the library,” I said.
What’s he doing in the library?
“How the fuck should I know?” I said. Though I knew. In an instant, in one of those moments in which you rise out of yourself and see everything with perfect clarity, I’d seen him and all of his trappings, spread around him at one of those giant wooden reading tables, scratched and scuffed and softened as driftwood, I’d seen the names of those books: How to Win Friends and Influence People, Ten Steps to the Life You Deserve, What Color Is Your Parachute?
About your own father you had little to say. You said your father could be summed up rather easily: that he looked, walked, talked, dressed, and conducted himself exactly like James Brown. He knows it, too, you said. He rides around in his Mercury all the time with James Brown blasting out the windows, he listens to James Brown all the time at home and at work. You said he worked in the fields, here and there, now and then, all around the county: cotton, tobacco, soy beans, grapes. One of those little men, you said, hell-bent on making himself bigger than he is, is what he is. He’s like one of them tiny dogs jumping around barking all the time all nasty-like.
You said he called you names: Lardass, Crisco, Hubba Bubba. I said, “Don’t let him talk to you like that!” and you clucked your tongue. Like a man could be stopped from calling you something. Like this was the worst of your problems. You said you had scars on your back from where he’d whipped you. For talking back, for breaking a dish, he whipped you until your skin was crossed over with bleeding gashes. Sometimes, you said, he even beat you for no reason. You’d be asleep and he’d come in the room and turn on the lights and get you out of bed, screaming. Says I’m too lazy, you said. Says he gonna teach me to lay around all day eating and watching TV, says he gonna teach me what’s what, goddamn little man is what he is. If it wasn’t the switch, you said, it was the belt. I had seen those scars once as you turned away to change, as you struggled to close your bra, those long raised-up scars all across your back which gave the impression that you were a person assembled from scraps, a human quilt. I can see them now. I didn’t know what to say about them then, I still don’t.
It’s not like I expect you to understand, you said. You got no idea what it’s like, no goddamn idea. Fat and black, you said, you grew up in a shack; fat and black groceries on credit; fat and black winter coats on layaway; fat and black and the bank calling for the mortgage; fat and black and your father gone missing with his paycheck for days, weeks at a time; fat and black with one pair of shoes, canvas, collapsed outward at the sides; fat and black you escaped in daydreams, saw yourself thin and famous, having sold your life story to the big screen, you saw yourself walking the red carpet in a twinkling gown, thanking the academy; fat and black you dreamt of the lottery, of driving around in a Cadillac; fat and black behind your back the boys called you names—Aunt Jemima, Mammy Two-Shoes, Mrs. Butterworth; fat and black when you sat on the bus the boys all went running to the other side, saying they needed to balance the freight; fat and black those same boys came around knowing you wouldn’t turn them away, what they wanted from you was practice for other girls, or relief from the way the other girls strung them along. They took you out back, into the woods and fields, and you came home with wisps of cotton clung to your clothes; fat and black all around that town of yours, you said, was cotton, and at harvest it took to the air, long white wisps of it floating everywhere, twisting and lifting in the breeze, catching in the limbs of trees, in the condensers of air conditioners and the grilles of cars, in the spokes of tires, in people’s hair, in screen doors and in shrubbery, it was everywhere, fat and black the first time you went out in the fields with a boy you came home with these white wisps clinging to your clothes, your hair, and your sister had known right away, she knew what it meant, she picked them off you before your mother could see and beat you blind; fat and black this was what it meant, only the beginning of what it meant, and I had no goddamned idea, you said, no goddamn idea at all, not even for a second, and never would.
Then you did what you always did when you’d talked too long about yourself and your problems. You picked up the phone and pretended to dial it, pretended you’d been patched through to the direct line of the President of the United States. Hello, Georgie? you said. Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Pie? It’s me, Carson. Why yes, you’re right, it has been too long, we should have lunch. But listen a minute, George, I’m calling for a favor. What I want is a national holiday. That’s right, in my name. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. January out of the question with Dr. King and all, I understand. February already tied up with Black History. March? No I can’t do March, March don’t work for me. April? April’s good. Let’s say April. Carson Washington Pity Day. Sounds good, sounds good, you keep it real now, Georgie.
You had a doll, Betsy, which you had slept with since childhood. She was blond-haired with a pink plastic face and a set of icy blue eyes that closed when you lay her down, then sprang open when you sat her up, and you lay there tilting her up, down, up, down, her eyes opening and closing, opening and closing, making the sound of a marble hitting another marble. After a time you said, Boy. Four husbands. Huh. And I fell asleep to the sound of those doll eyes opening and closing and opening again, opening and closing, and opening, and closing.
The next morning when I left for Donut Land I wondered if I’d ever see you again.
When you returned in January it wasn’t, as I first thought, to make good—it was to ride out whatever time you had left on your scholarship, spending your days however you pleased, a free roof over your head and no one
telling you what to do. You only went to the first week of classes, then started to skip, then quit altogether. You did this with the full knowledge that doing so meant you would fail out of school and be sent back to that town, that four-room house, that life you hated. The time you had remaining at school was like a joyride in a stolen car. You could do anything you wanted, and what you wanted to do was nothing. It got so that you hardly left the room, hardly got out of bed. It got so that the TV was running twenty-four hours a day.
For the most part you occupied your days with game shows and soap operas. Whenever you were bored—every few hours or so—you called home and talked to your mother. How two people could talk so much I didn’t know. Often you and your mother talked on the phone while watching the same television program, commenting back and forth on the folly of your favorite characters—the desperate, plotting mavens of daytime television. On screen an aging woman with giant sculpted hair and shimmering red lipstick would look off in the distance and drum her fingers together, would speak under her breath some bitter warning—I’ll get you, my pretty—and you and your mother would howl. You better watch it, lady, you’d say, You got another thing coming! And in moments like that it always seemed to me that you had never really left for college, had never really intended to go off and make a new life for yourself. Rather, you were merely living your old life at a distance.
After you talked to your mother you always asked to talk to your nephew Regis. You kept him on the phone as long as a person could keep a toddler enthralled, saying the kinds of things that adults say to children, things implying that what you wanted to do most in the world was to eat him. Who’s my little pumpkin muffin? you said. Who’s my crumb cake, my cream puff, my chocolate pudding pie? Is it you? Is it?
The evenings went by in a blur of reruns, Archie Bunker griping in his chair, Redd Foxx faking heart attacks, Flo the Waitress yelling “Kiss My Grits,” J. J. Walker going “Dy-no-mite!,” Jack Tripper writhing in all kinds of misunderstood humiliation, the same laugh track running through everything, periodic bursts of merriment, of hilarity. I fell asleep in the flickering blue and part of that rerun world seeped into my dreams. Toward morning I’d wake to the whine of the off-air signal. When I turned off the set it was hot to the touch.
It wasn’t long before the authorities, as you called them, were on your case. The phone started ringing throughout the day, various advisors and counselors wanting a word. You’d pick it up and say, “Carson? No, Carson ain’t here right now.” You’d examine your fingernails, turn your hand this way and that. “I’ll tell her,” you’d say, “if she ever gets back from the strip club.”
Then came a series of letters making various threats and promises. Your favorite letter was from an assistant dean, James Findley Ramsey III, whose name amused you. You said it over and over, in various different voices, most often with a British accent. James Findley Ramsey the Third. James Findley Ramsey was a good cop, and his letter was full of hope. All kinds of options were available to you: incompletes, tutoring, counseling. Whatever difficulties you might be experiencing could be overcome in a variety of pleasant ways. If only you would reach out, Mr. Ramsey wrote, and experience everything that the university had to offer. “There’s something for everyone!” he said. “I hope you’re enjoying our campus during this beautiful season, enjoying the fine spring air. It won’t be long before the cherry trees are in bloom!” The fine spring air! You read this and laughed. Oh James, you said, you do tickle me.
Sometimes I sided with James Ramsey and said, “Shouldn’t you study? Don’t you have a test, a report, a paper? Aren’t you, you know, failing?” And you said, Why don’t you mind your own business? Don’t you have anything better to do than sit around wondering what I’m supposed to be doing? Don’t you got any friends? Don’t you got to go to hide away in the library again down in the basement where no one would ever find you if you died, no one would find you until you start decomposing and stinking up the whole place? Don’t you have a test, you said, a report, a paper? Aren’t you one to talk? Aren’t you failing, too?
It was true that I was failing. Having no idea what I wanted to do in life, I had signed up for an absurd variety of classes: Astronomy, History of Jazz, Physics, Human Anatomy, Postcolonial Literature. Each of these classes seemed to have been designed specifically to undo every fervent belief and vague assumption I’d ever held. All my life I’d looked at the stars and listened to music, fallen down sets of stairs, lived and breathed and eaten and slept and read, all without understanding what I was looking at or listening to or doing—the physics involved, the math, the angle at which I approached things and they approached me, the distance between myself and everything else. And instead of being thrilled at understanding these things now, or at least beginning to, I was filled with an almost crippling embarrassment, I was humiliated, I suffered like a person does after performing badly at a party, replaying afterward every mishap and foible one has committed. I was stunned to the point of paralysis in all of my classes. In particular I was stuck in the middle of a paper on Heart of Darkness but couldn’t finish it. The assignment was simple—a five-page analysis of the book’s symbols—but I fell into it like Alice into Wonderland, plop down deep into a well, and couldn’t get out. In the world of that paper nothing was right-sized and everything shifted. Every time I wrote something it occurred to me that its opposite was also true, and it got so nothing could be said at all. And yet everything. The paper grew to twenty, twenty-five, thirty pages. Then I’d throw it away and start over. I sat at my desk for long hours bent over that book clutching my head; several times I even came to tears.
What’s that you reading? you asked at first. Then, after it became clear that the book was all I could read and all I thought about, that the book had become everything to me, you said: You still reading that Heart of Darkness? What the hell’s wrong with you? At some point while I was out you must have picked up the book and read it, because you started offering advice. If I was you, you said, which I thank God I’m not, I’d have a thing or two to say about that Kurtz character and his obvious homosexuality. I stayed up late into the night, every night. Every so often you’d rouse from sleep and tell me, Mister Kurtz, put him down. He dead.
Finally I turned in a forty-three-page paper and got a D. On the bottom of the final page my professor—a bitter German obsessed with Kafka—had written, in block letters that stood in stark contrast to the paper’s looping, fuzzy logic: GET A GRIP.
By then spring was in full bloom. In the quadrangle beneath our window people threw Frisbees, rode bicycles, played football, and their lively cries rose up to our room. There was a general sense of happiness and excitement in the air, but for us everything seemed to be taking a grim turn, lapsing into a minor key. One of the janitors we always talked with in the cafeteria—an ancient and painfully thin man named Leroy, who had trembling yellow eyeballs—developed a wet, pesky cough, and for a few days he could hardly get through a conversation. He was always taking a handkerchief from his chest pocket and spitting into it, great globs of bloody phlegm, and you kept telling him to see a doctor. “Ain’t got time for no doctor,” he’d say. Then he went missing for a week and when we asked after him we were told he had checked into the hospital and died the next day.
The news of Leroy’s death plagued you. I told him, you kept saying, angry. Didn’t I tell him see a doctor? Goddamn, you said. It was as if Leroy’s death and your failure were bound up together, you saw these things in the same light, his struggles—I keep on keeping on!—and your failures, they were mutual. After the news of Leroy’s death you fell into a foul mood you never recovered from. You started to complain in a general way about white people. Under your breath, in an almost constant stream, you listed their flaws. Look at them eating their yogurt, you said, drinking their little bottles of water, wearing their shorts, their loafers, their hand-knit Irish sweaters, riding their little bicycles to the library, sitting all quiet in class taking notes, balancing th
ey checkbooks, it bores me to tears just watching them, I’d rather die, you said, than be a white person.
Sometimes you took care to excuse me from these faults on the grounds that I was pathetic. But other times you turned even on me. I’d be reading and you’d mutter, Pretty little white girl think she got problems. I’ll tell you about some problems. And I’d say, “I can hear you, you know.” And you’d say, Good for you. We started to quibble like siblings elbowing each other in the backseat of the car. You complained that the sound of my pencil scratching on paper was interrupting your enjoyment of your favorite shows, I complained about how loud you kept the television. You started turning up the television even louder, I started bringing home plain glazed donuts instead of chocolate. I let my alarm go off for longer stretches each morning before hitting the snooze button, you picked my clothes off the floor and set them in a pile on my bed, told me to stop being such a disgusting slob; on the same pretense you washed my Donut Land uniform in the bathroom sink and hung it to dry in a shower stall. You should’ve seen the water, you said, all thick and gray, three times I washed it and the water was so murky it could hardly get itself down the drain, you pig.
Which was the last straw.
I started staying out later and later at the library. When I came home we fought like jealous lovers. Where you been? You must’ve been at the library again ’cause I know you ain’t been out with friends. You don’t have a friend in the whole goddamn world ’sides me. Your own family don’t even like you. When’s the last time anyone call you, or mail you something?
Elegies for the Brokenhearted Page 10