Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  With Judy recovered and Jamila home, relatively safe after a two-month ordeal in the hospital, I still couldn’t talk about how I had felt during my first visit to the preemie ward at Colorado General. I was shocked by the room full of tiny, naked, wrinkled infants, each enclosed in a glass cage. Festooned with tubes and needles, they looked less like babies than like ancient, shrunken little men and women, prisoners gathered for some bizarre reason to die together under the sizzling lights.

  Jamila’s arms and legs were thinner than my thinnest finger. Her threadlike veins were always breaking down from the pressure of I.V.’s. Since I.V.’s were keeping her alive, the nurses would have to search for new places to stick the needles. Each time she received an injection or had her veins probed for an I.V., Jamila would holler as if she’d received the final insult, as if after all the willpower she’d expended enduring the pain and discomfort of birth, no one had anything better to do than jab her one more time. What made her cries even harder to bear was their tininess. In my mind her cries rocked the foundations of the universe; they were bellows anything, anywhere with ears and a soul could hear. In fact, the high-pitched squeaks were barely audible a few feet from her glass cage. You could see them better than hear them because the effort of producing each cry wracked her body.

  My reactions to the preemie ward had embarrassed me. I couldn’t help thinking of the newborns as diseased or unnatural, as creatures from another planet, miniature junkies feeding in transparent kennels. I had to get over the shame of acknowledging my daughter was one of them. Sooner than I expected, the shame, the sense of failure disintegrated and was replaced by fear, a fear I had yet to shake. Would probably never completely get over. The traumas attending her birth, the long trial in the premature ward, her continuous touch-and-go flirtation with death had enforced the reality of Jamila’s mortality. My fear had been morbid at first but gradually it turned around. Each breath she drew, each step she negotiated became cause for celebration. I loved all my children, but this girl child was precious in a special way that had brought me closer to all three. Life and death. Pain and joy. Having and losing. You couldn’t experience one without the other. Background and foreground. The presence of my daughter would always remind me that things didn’t have to be the way they were. We could have lost her. Could lose her today. And that was the way it would always be. Ebb and flow. Touch and go. Her arrival shattered complacency. When I looked in her eyes I was reminded to love her and treasure her and all the people I loved because nothing could be taken for granted.

  I had solemnly introduced the new baby to my brother.

  This is your Uncle Robby.

  Robby’s first reaction had been to say, grinning from ear to ear, She looks just like Mommy. . . . My God, she’s a little picture of Mom.

  As soon as Robby made the connection, its lightness, its uncontestability, its uncanny truth hit me. Of course. My mother’s face rose from the crib. I remembered a sepia, tattered-edged, oval portrait of Mom as a baby. And another snapshot of Bette French in Freeda French’s lap on the steps of the house on Cassina Way. The fifty-year-old images hovered, opaque, halfway between the crib and my eyes, then faded, dissolving slowly, blending into the baby’s face, alive inside the new skin, part of the new life, linked forever by my brother’s words.

  Robby took the baby in his arms. Coochy-cooed and gently rocked her, still marveling at the resemblance.

  Lookit those big, pretty brown eyes. Don’t you see Mommy’s eyes?

  Time continues to loosen my grasp on the events of Robby’s last free night. I’ve attempted to write about my brother’s visit numerous times since. One version was called “Running”; I conceived of it as fiction and submitted it to a magazine. The interplay between fiction and fact in the piece was too intense, too impacted, finally too obscure to control. Reading it must have been like sitting down at a bar beside a stranger deeply involved in an intimate conversation with himself. That version I’d thought of as a story was shortened and sent to Robby in prison. Though it didn’t quite make it as a story, the letter was filled with stories on which I would subsequently draw for two novels and a book of short fiction.

  Even as I manufactured fiction from the events of my brother’s life, from the history of the family that had nurtured us both, I knew something of a different order remained to be extricated. The fiction writer was also a man with a real brother behind real bars. I continued to feel caged by my bewilderment, by my inability to see clearly, accurately, not only the last visit with my brother, but the whole long skein of our lives together and apart. So this book. This attempt to break out, to knock down the walls.

  At a hearing in Colorado Johnny-Boy testified that Robby had re-counted to him a plot to rob a fence, a killing, the flight from Pittsburgh. After his performance as a cooperative witness for the state, a performance he would repeat in Pittsburgh at Robby’s trial, Johnny-Boy was carted away to Michigan, where he was wanted for murder. Robby and Michael were extradited to Pittsburgh, charged with armed robbery and murder, and held for trial. In separate trials both were convicted and given the mandatory sentence for felony murder: life imprisonment without possibility of probation or parole. The only way either man will ever be released is through commutation of his sentence. Pennsylvania’s governor is empowered to commute prison sentences, and a state board of commutations exists to make recommendations to him; but since the current governor almost never grants commutations, men in Pennsylvania’s prisons must face their life sentences with minimal hope of being set free.

  Robby remained in custody six months before going on trial. Not until July 1978, after a two-year lockup in a county jail with no facilities for long-term prisoners, was Robby sentenced. Though his constitutional rights to a speedy trial and speedy sentencing had clearly been violated, neither those wrongs nor any others—including a prejudiced charge to the jury by the trial judge—which were brought to the attention of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, moved that august body to intercede on Robert Wideman’s behalf. The last legal action in Robby’s case, the denial of his appeal by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, did not occur until September 1981. By that time Robby had already been remanded to Western State Penitentiary to begin serving a life sentence.

  You never know exactly when something begins. The more you delve and backtrack and think, the more clear it becomes that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is. The intertwining strands of DNA that determine a creature’s genetic predispositions might serve as a model for this complexity, but the double helix, bristling with myriad possibilities, is not mysterious enough. The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape of your life from the rest of us, when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad.

  When you were a chubby-cheeked baby and I stood you upright, supporting most of your weight with my hands but freeing you just enough to let you feel the spring and bounce of strength in your new, rubbery thighs, when you toddled those first few bowlegged, pigeon-toed steps across the kitchen, did the trouble start then? Twenty-odd years later, when you shuffled through the polished corridor of the Fort Collins, Colorado, courthouse dragging the weight of iron chains and fetters, I wanted to give you my hands again, help you make it across the floor again; I shot out a clenched fist, a black power sign, which caught your eye and made you smile in that citadel of whiteness. You made me realize I was tottering on the edge, leaning on you. You, in your baggy jumpsuit, three days’ scraggly growth on your face because they didn’t trust you with a razor, manacled hand and foot so you were theatrically displayed as their pawn, absolutely under their domination; you were the one clinging fast, taking the weight, and
your dignity held me up. I was reaching for your strength.

  Always there. The bad seed, the good seed. Mommy’s been saying for as long as I can remember: That Robby . . . he wakes up in the morning looking for the party. She’s right, ain’t she? Mom’s nearly always right in her way, the special way she has of putting words together to take things apart. Every day God sends here Robby thinks is a party. Still up there on the third floor under his covers and he’s thinking, Where’s it at today? What’s it gonna be today? Where’s the fun? And that’s how he’s been since the day the Good Lord put him on this earth. That’s your brother, Robert Douglas Wideman.

  The Hindu god Venpadigedera returned to earth and sang to the people: Behold, the light shineth in all things. Birds, trees, the eyes of men, all giveth forth the light. Behold and be glad. Gifts wait for any who choose to see. Cover the earth with flowers. Shower flowers to the four corners. Rejoice in the bounty of the light.

  The last time we were all together, cousin Kip took a family portrait. Mom and Daddy in a line with their children. The third generation of kids, a nappy-headed row in front. Five of us grown-up brothers and sisters hanging on one another’s shoulders. Our first picture together since I don’t remember when. We’re all standing on Mom’s about-to-buckle porch with cousin Kip down in the weeds of the little front yard pointing his camera up at us. I was half-scared those rickety boards would crack and we’d sink, arms still entwined, like some brown Titanic, beneath the rippling porch floor.

  Before I saw the picture I had guessed how we’d look frozen in shades of black and white. I wasn’t too far off. Tish is grinning ear to ear—the proud girl child in the middle who’s survived the teasing and protections of her four brothers. Even though he isn’t, Gene seems the tallest because of the way he holds that narrow, perfect head of his balanced high and dignified on his long neck. Dave’s eyes challenge the camera, meet it halfway and dare it to come any closer, and the camera understands and keeps its distance from the smoldering eyes. No matter what Dave’s face seems to be saying—the curl of the lip that could be read as smile or sneer, as warning or invitation—his face also projects another level of ambiguity, the underground history of interracial love, sex, and hate, what a light-eyed, brown-skinned man like David embodies when he confronts other people. I’m grinning too (it’s obvious Tish is my sister) because our momentary togetherness was a reprieve, a possibility I believed I’d forfeited by my selfishness and hunger for more. Giddy almost, I felt like a rescued prince ringed by his strong, handsome people, my royal brothers and sister who’d paid my ransom. Tickled even by the swell and pitch of the rotting porch boards under my sandals.

  You. You are mugging. Your best side dramatically displayed. The profile shot you’d have demanded on your first album, the platinum million seller you’d never cut but knew you could because you had talent and brains and you could sing and mimic anybody and that long body of yours and those huge hands were instruments more flexible and expressive than most people’s faces. You knew what you were capable of doing and knew you’d never get a chance to do it, but none of that defeat for the camera, no, only the star’s three-quarter profile. Billy Eckstineing your eyes, the Duke of Earl tilting the slim oval of your face forward to emphasize the pout of your full lips, the clean lines of your temples and cheekbones tapering down from the Afro’s soft explosion. Your stage would be the poolroom, the Saturday-night basement social, the hangout corner, the next chick’s pad you swept into with all the elegance of Smokey Robinson and the Count of Monte Cristo, slowly unbuttoning your cape, inching off your kid gloves, everything pantomimed with gesture and eye flutters till your rap begins and your words sing that much sweeter, purer for the quiet cradling them. You’re like that in the picture. Stylized, outrageous under your big country straw hat pushed back off your head. Acting. And Tish, holding up the picture to study it, will say something like, Look at you, boy. You ought to be ’shamed. And your mask will drop and you’ll grin cause Tish is like Mom, and ain’t no getting round her. So you’ll just grin back and you are Robby again at about age seven, cute and everybody’s pet, grin at Sis and say, “G’wan, girl.”

  Daddy’s father, our grandfather, Harry Wideman, migrated from Greenwood, South Carolina, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1906. He found a raw, dirty, double-dealing city. He learned its hills and rivers, the strange names of Dagos and Hunkies and Polacks who’d been drawn, as he had, by steel mills and coal mines, by the smoke and heat and dangerous work that meant any strong-backed, stubborn young man, even a black one, could earn pocketfuls of money. Grandpa’s personal quest connected him with hordes of other displaced black men seeking a new day in the promised land of the North. Like so many others, he boarded in an overcrowded rooming house, working hard by day, partying hard at night against the keen edge of exhaustion. When his head finally hit the pillow, he didn’t care that the sheets were still warm from the body of the man working nights who rented the bed ten hours a day while Harry pulled his shift at the mill.

  Harry Wideman was a short, thick, dark man whose mahogany color passed on to Daddy, blended with the light, bright skin of John and Freeda French’s daughter Bette to produce the brown we wear. Do you remember anything about him, or were you too young? Have you ever wondered how the city appeared through his eyes, the eyes of a rural black boy far from home, a stranger in a strange land? Have you ever been curious? Grandpa took giant steps forward in time. As a boy not quite old enough to be much help in the fields, his job was looking out for Charley Rackett, his ancient, crippled grandfather, an African, a former slave. Grandpa listened to Charley Rackett’s African stories and African words, then lived to see white men on the moon. I think of Grandpa high up on Bruston Hill looking over the broad vista spreading out below him. He’s young and alone; he sees things with his loins as much as his eyes. Hills rolling to the horizon, toward the invisible rivers, are breasts and buttocks. Shadowed spaces, nestling between the rounded hills, summon him. Whatever happens to him in this city, whatever he accomplishes will be an answer to the soft, insinuating challenge thrown up at him as he stares over the teeming land. This city will measure his manhood. Our Father Who art . . . I hear prayer words interrupting his dreaming, disturbing the woman shapes his glance fashions from the landscape. The earth turns. He plants his seed. In the blink of an eye he’s an old man, close to death. He has watched the children of his children’s children born in this city. Some of his children’s children dead already. He ponders the wrinkled tar paper on the backs of his hands. Our Father. A challenge still rises from the streets and rooftops the way it once floated up from long-gone, empty fields. And the old man’s no nearer now to knowing, to understanding why the call digs so deeply at his heart.

  Wagons once upon a time in the streets of Pittsburgh. Delivering ice and milk and coal. Sinking in the mud, trundling over cobblestones, echoing in the sleep of a man who works all day in the mouth of a fiery furnace, who dreams of green fish gliding along the clear, stony bottom of a creek in South Carolina. In the twenty years between 1910 and 1930, the black population of Pittsburgh increased by nearly fifty thousand. Black music, blues and jazz, came to town in places like the Pythian Temple, the Ritz, the Savoy, the Showboat. In the bars on the North Side, Homewood, and the Hill you could get whatever you thought you wanted. Gambling, women, a good pork chop. Hundreds of families took in boarders to earn a little extra change. A cot in a closet in somebody’s real home seemed nicer, better than the dormitories with their barracks-style rows of beds, no privacy, one toilet for twenty men. Snores and funk, eternal coming and going because nobody wanted to remain in those kennels one second longer than he had to. Fights, thieves, people dragged in stinking drunk or bloody from the streets, people going straight to work after hanging out all night with some whore and you got to smell him and smell her beside you while you trying to pull your shift in all that heat. Lawd. Lawdy. Got no money in the bank. Joints was rowdy and mean and like I’m telling you if some slickster don’t
hustle your money in the street or a party-time gal empty your pockets while you sleep and you don’t nod off and fall in the fire, then maybe you earn you a few quarters to send home for that wife and them babies waiting down yonder for you if she’s still waiting and you still sending. If you ain’t got no woman to send for then maybe them few quarters buy you a new shirt and a bottle of whiskey so you can find you some trifling body give all your money to.

  The strong survive. The ones who are strong and lucky. You can take that back as far as you want to go. Everybody needs one father, two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers, then thirty-two, then sixty-four, and that’s only eight generations backward in time, eight generations linked directly, intimately with what you are. Less than 150 years ago, 128 men made love to 128 women, not all in the same hotel or on the same day but within a relatively short expanse of time, say twenty years, in places as distant as Igboland, New Amsterdam, and South Carolina. Unknown to each other, probably never even coming face to face in their lifetimes, each of these couples was part of the grand conspiracy to produce you. Think of a pyramid balanced on one of its points, a vast cone of light whose sides flare outward, vectors of force like the slanted lines kids draw to show a star’s shining. You once were a pinprick of light, a spark whose radiance momentarily upheld the design, stabilized the ever-expanding V that opens to infinity. At some inconceivable distance the light bends, curves back on itself like a ram’s horn or conch shell, spiraling toward its greatest compass but simultaneously narrowing to that needle’s eye it must enter in order to flow forth bounteously again. You hovered at that nexus, took your turn through that open door.