Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  The old people die. Our grandfathers, Harry Wideman and John French, are both gone now. The greatest space and no space at all separates us from them. I see them staring, dreaming this ravaged city; and we are in the dream, it’s our dream, enclosed, enclosing. We could walk down into that valley they saw from atop Bruston Hill and scoop up the houses, dismantle the bridges and tall buildings, pull cars and trucks off the streets, roll up roads and highways and stuff them all like toys into the cotton-picking sacks draped over our shoulders. We are that much larger than the things that happen to us. Accidents like the city poised at the meeting of three rivers, the city strewn like litter over precipitous hills.

  Did our grandfathers run away from the South? Black Harry from Greenwood, South Carolina, mulatto white John from Culpepper, Virginia. How would they answer that question? Were they running from something or running to something? What did you figure you were doing when you started running? When did your flight begin? Was escape the reason or was there a destination, a promised land exerting its pull? Is freedom inextricably linked with both, running from and running to? Is freedom the motive and means and end and everything in between?

  I wonder if the irony of a river beside the prison is intentional. The river was brown last time I saw it, mud-brown and sluggish in its broad channel. Nothing pretty about it, a working river, a place to dump things, to empty sewers. The Ohio’s thick and filthy, stinking of coal, chemicals, offal, bitter with rust from the flaking hulls of iron-ore barges inching grayly to and from the steel mills. But viewed from barred windows, from tiered cages, the river must call to the prisoners’ hearts, a natural symbol of flight and freedom. The river is a path, a gateway to the West, the frontier. Somewhere it meets the sea. Is it somebody’s cruel joke, an architect’s way of giving the knife a final twist, hanging this sign outside the walls, this river always visible but a million miles away beyond the spiked steel fence guarding its banks?

  When I think of the distance between us in terms of miles or the height and thickness of walls or the length of your sentence or the deadly prison regimen, you’re closer to me, more accessible than when I’m next to you in the prison visiting room trying to speak and find myself at the edge of a silence vaster than oceans. I turned forty-three in June and you’ll be thirty-three in December. Not kids any longer by any stretch of the imagination. You’re my little brother and maybe it’s generally true that people never allow their little brothers and sisters to grow up, but something more seems at work here, something more damaging than vanity, than wishful thinking that inclines us to keep our pasts frozen, intact, keeps us calling our forty-year-old cronies “the boys” and a grown man “little brother.” I think of you as little brother because I have no other handle. At a certain point a wall goes up and easy memories stop.

  When I think back, I have plenty of recollections of you as a kid. How you looked. The funny things you said. Till about the time you turned a gangly, stilt-legged, stringbean thirteen, we’re still family. Our lives connect in typical, family ways: holidays, picnics, births, deaths, the joking and teasing, the time you were a baby just home from the hospital and Daddy John French died and I was supposed to be watching you while the grown-ups cleaned and cooked, readying the house on Finance Street for visitors, for Daddy John to return and lie in his coffin downstairs. Baby-sitting you in Aunt Geraldine’s room while death hovered in there with us and no way I could have stayed in that room alone. Needing you much more than you needed me. You just zzz’ed away in your baby sleep, your baby ignorance. You couldn’t have cared less whether death or King Kong or a whole flock of those loose-feathered, giant birds haunting my sleep had gathered round your crib. If the folks downstairs were too quiet, my nerves would get jumpy and I’d snatch you up and walk the floor. Hold you pressed in my arms against my heart like a shield. Or if the night cracks and groans of the house got too loud, I’d poke you awake, worry you so your crying would keep me company.

  After you turned thirteen, after you grew a mustache and fuzz on your chin and a voluminous Afro so nobody could call you “Beanhead” anymore, after girls and the move from Shadyside to Marchand Street so you started Westinghouse High instead of Peabody where the rest of us had done our time, you begin to get separate. I have to struggle to recall anything about you till you’re real again in prison. It’s as if I was asleep for fifteen years and when I awakened you were gone. I was out of the country for three years then lived in places like Iowa City and Philly and Laramie, so at best I couldn’t have seen much of you, but the sense of distance I’m trying to describe had more to do with the way I related to you than with the amount of time we spent together. We had chances to talk, opportunities to grow beyond the childhood bonds linking us. The problem was that in order to be the person I thought I wanted to be, I believed I had to seal myself off from you, construct a wall between us.

  Your hands, your face became a man’s. You accumulated scars, a deeper voice, lovers, but the changes taking place in you might as well have been occurring on a different planet. The scattered images I retain of you from the sixties through the middle seventies form no discernible pattern, are rooted in no vital substance like childhood or family. Your words and gestures belonged to a language I was teaching myself to unlearn. When we spoke, I was conscious of a third party short-circuiting our conversations. What I’d say to you came from the mouth of a translator who always talked down or up or around you, who didn’t know you or me but pretended he knew everything.

  Was I as much a stranger to you as you seemed to me? Because we were brothers, holidays, family celebrations, and troubles drew us to the same rooms at the same time, but I felt uncomfortable around you. Most of what I felt was guilt I’d made my choices. I was running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness. To get ahead, to make something of myself, college had seemed a logical, necessary step; my exile, my flight from home began with good grades, with good English, with setting myself apart long before I’d earned a scholarship and a train ticket over the mountains to Philadelphia. With that willed alienation behind me, between us, guilt was predictable. One measure of my success was the distance I’d put between us. Coming home was a kind of bragging, like the suntans people bring back from Hawaii in the middle of winter. It’s sure fucked up around here, ain’t it? But look at me, I got away. I got mine. I didn’t want to be caught looking back. I needed home to reassure myself of how far I’d come. If I ever doubted how good I had it away at school in that world of books, exams, pretty, rich white girls, a roommate from Long Island who unpacked more pairs of brand-new jockey shorts and T-shirts than they had in Kaufmann’s department store, if I ever had any hesitations or reconsiderations about the path I’d chosen, youall were back home in the ghetto to remind me how lucky I was.

  Fear marched along beside guilt. Fear of acknowledging in myself any traces of the poverty, ignorance, and danger I’d find surrounding me when I returned to Pittsburgh. Fear that I was contaminated and would carry the poison wherever I ran. Fear that the evil would be discovered in me and I’d be shunned like a leper.

  I was scared stiff but at the same time I needed to prove I hadn’t lost my roots. Needed to boogie and drink wine and chase pussy, needed to prove I could still do it all. Fight, talk trash, hoop with the best playground players at Mellon Park. Claim the turf, wear it like a badge, yet keep my distance, be in the street but not of it.

  Your world. The blackness that incriminated me. Easier to change the way I talked and walked, easier to be two people than to expose in either world the awkward mix of school and home I’d become. When in Rome. Different strokes for different folks. Nobody had pulled my coat and whispered the news about Third Worlds. Just two choices as far as I could tell: either/or. Rich or poor. White or black. Win or lose. I figured which side I wanted to be on when the Saints came marching in. Who the Saints, the rulers of the earth were, was clear. My mind was split by oppositions, by mutually exclusive categories. Manichaeism, as Frantz Fanon would say. To
succeed in the man’s world you must become like the man and the man sure didn’t claim no bunch of nigger relatives in Pittsburgh.

  Who, me? You must be kidding. You must be thinking of those other guys. They’re the ones listen to the Midnighters, the Miracles, the Turbans, Louis Berry, the Spaniels, the Flamingos. My radio stays set on WFLN. They play that nigger stuff way down the dial, at the end, on WDAS, down where WAMO is at home.

  Some of that mess so dumb, so unbelievable I can laugh now. Like when I was driving you up to Maine to work as a waiter in summer camp. Just you and me and Judy in the car for the long haul from Pittsburgh to Takajo on Long Lake. Nervous the whole time because you kept finding black music on the radio. Not only did you find it. You played it loud and sang along. Do wah diddy and ow bop she bop, having a good ole nigger ball like you’d seen me having with my cut buddies when we were the Commodores chirping tunes on the corner and in Mom’s living room. The music we’d both grown up hearing and loving and learning to sing, but you were doing it in my new 1966 Dodge Dart, on the way to Martha’s Vineyard and Maine with my new white wife in the backseat. Didn’t you know we’d left Pittsburgh, didn’t you understand that classical music volume moderate was preferred in these circumstances? Papa’s got a brand-new bag. And you were gon act a nigger and let the cat out.

  Of course I was steady enjoying the music, too. James Brown. Baby Ray and the Raylettes. The Drifters. Missed it on the barren stretches of turnpike between cities. Having it both ways. Listening my ass off and patting my foot but in between times wondering how Judy was reacting, thinking about how I’d complain later about your monolithic fondness for rhythm and blues, your habit of turning the volume up full blast. In case she was annoyed, confused, or doubting me in any way, I’d reassure her by disassociating myself from your tastes, your style. Yeah, when I was a kid. Yes. Once upon a time I was like that but now. . .

  Laughing now to keep from crying when I think back to those days.

  My first year at college when I was living in the dorms a white boy asked me if I liked the blues. Since I figured I was the blues I answered, Yeah, sure. We were in Darryl Dawson’s room. Darryl and I comprised approximately one-third of the total number of black males in our class. About ten of the seventeen hundred men and women who entered the University of Pennsylvania as freshmen in 1959 were black. After a period of wariness and fencing, mutual embarrassment and resisting the inevitable, I’d buddied up with Darryl, even though he’d attended Putney Prep School in Vermont and spoke with an accent I considered phony. Since the fat white boy in work shirt, motorcycle boots, and dirty jeans was in Darryl’s room, I figured maybe the guy was alright in spite of the fact he asked dumb questions. I’d gotten used to answering or ignoring plenty of those in two months on campus. “Yeah, sure,” should have closed the topic but the white boy wasn’t finished. He said he had a big collection of blues records and that I ought to come by his room sometime with Darryl and dig, man.

  Who do you like? Got everybody, man. Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. Lightning and Lemon and Sonny Boy. You dig Broonzy? Just copped a new side of his.

  None of the names meant a thing to me. Maybe I’d heard Leadbelly at a party at a white girl’s house in Shadyside but the other names were a mystery. What was this sloppy-looking white boy talking about? His blond hair, long and greasy, was combed back James Dean style. Skin pale and puffy like a Gerber baby. He wore a smartass, whole-lot-hipper-than-you expression on his face. His mouth is what did it. Pudgy, soft lips with just a hint of blond fuzz above them, pursed into a permanent sneer.

  He stared at me, waiting for an answer. At home we didn’t get in other people’s faces like that. You talked toward a space and the other person had a choice of entering or not entering, but this guy’s blue eyes bored directly into mine. Waiting, challenging, prepared to send a message to that sneering mouth. I wanted no part of him, his records, or his questions.

  Blues. Well, that’s all I listen to. I like different songs at different times. Midnighters. Drifters got one I like out now.

  Not that R-and-B crap on the radio, man. Like the real blues. Down home country blues. The old guys picking and singing.

  Ray Charles. I like Ray Charles.

  Hey, that ain’t blues. Tell him, Darryl.

  Darryl don’t need to tell me anything. Been listening to blues all my life. Ray Charles is great. He’s the best there is. How you gon tell me what’s good and not good? It’s my music. I’ve been hearing it all my life.

  You’re still talking about rock ’n’ roll. Rhythm and blues. Most of it’s junk. Here today and gone tomorrow crap. I’m talking about authentic blues. Big Bill Broonzy. The Classics.

  When he talked, he twisted his mouth so the words slithered out of one corner of his face, like garbage dumped off one end of a cafeteria tray. He pulled a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket. Lit it without disturbing the sneer.

  Bet you’ve never even heard Bill Broonzy.

  Don’t need to hear no Broonzy or Toonsy or whoever the fuck he is. I don’t give a shit about him nor any of them other old-timey dudes you’re talking about, man. I know what I like and you can call it rhythm and blues or rock ’n’ roll, it’s still the best music. It’s what I like and don’t need nobody telling me what’s good.

  What are you getting mad about, man? How can you put down something you know nothing about? Bill Broonzy is the greatest twelve-string guitar player who ever lived. Everybody knows that. You’ve never heard a note he’s played but you’re setting yourself up as an expert. This is silly. You obviously can’t back up what you’re saying. You have a lot to learn about music, my friend.

  He’s wagging his big head and looking over at Darryl like Darryl’s supposed to back his action. You can imagine what’s going through my mind. How many times I’ve already gone upside his fat jaw. Biff. Bam. My fists were burning. I could see blood running out both his nostrils. The sneer split at the seams, smeared all over his chin. Here’s this white boy in this white world bad-mouthing me to one of the few black faces I get to see, messing with the little bit of understanding I’m beginning to have with Darryl. And worse, trespassing on the private turf of my music, the black sounds from home I carry round in my head as a saving grace against the pressures of the university.

  Talk about uptight. I don’t believe that pompous ass could have known, because even I didn’t know at that moment, how much he was hurting me. What hurt most was the truth of what he was saying. His whiteness, his arrogance made me mad, but it was truth putting the real hurt on me.

  I didn’t hit him. I should have but never did. A nice forget-me-knot upside his jaw. I should have but didn’t. Not that time. Not him. Smashing his mouth would have been too easy, so I hated him instead. Let anger and shame and humiliation fill me to overflowing so the hate is still there, today, over twenty years later. The dormitory room had pale green walls, a bare wooden floor, contained the skimpy desk and sagging cot allotted to each cubicle in the hall. Darryl’s things scattered everywhere. A self-portrait he’d painted stared down from one dirt-speckled wall. The skin of the face in the portrait was wildly molded, violent bruises of color surrounding haunted jade eyes. Darryl’s eyes were green like my brother David’s, but I hadn’t noticed their color until I dropped by his room one afternoon between classes and Darryl wasn’t there and I didn’t have anything better to do than sit and wait and study the eyes in his painting. Darryl’s room had been a sanctuary but when the white boy started preaching there was no place to hide. Even before he spoke the room had begun to shrink. He sprawled, lounged, an exaggerated casualness announcing how comfortable he felt, how much he belonged. Lord of the manor wherever he happened to plant his boots.

  Darryl cooled it. His green eyes didn’t choose either of us when we looked toward him for approval. Dawson had to see what a miserable corner I was in. He had to feel that room clamped tight around my neck and the sneer tugging the noose tighter.

  A black motorcycle jacket, car
ved from a lump of coal, studded with silver and rhinestones, was draped over the desk chair. I wanted to stomp it, chop it into little pieces.

  Hey, you guys, knock it off. Let’s talk about something else. Obviously you have different tastes in music.

  Darryl knew damn well that wasn’t the problem. Together we might have been able to say the right things. Put the white boy in his place. Recapture some breathing space. But Darryl had his own ghosts to battle. His longing for his blonde, blue-eyed Putney girl friend whose parents had rushed her off to Europe when they learned of her romance with the colored boy who was Putney school president His ambivalence toward his blackness that would explode one day and hurtle him into the quixotic campaign of the Black Revolutionary Army to secede from the United States. So Darryl cooled it that afternoon in his room and the choked feeling never left my throat. I can feel it now as I write.

  Why did that smartass white son of a bitch have so much power over me? Why could he confuse me, turn me inside out, make me doubt myself? Waving just a tiny fragment of truth, he could back me into a corner. Who was I? What was I? Did I really fear the truth about myself that much? Four hundred years of oppression, of lies had empowered him to use the music of my people as a weapon against me. Twenty years ago I hadn’t begun to comprehend the larger forces, the ironies, the obscenities that permitted such a reversal to occur. All I had sensed was his power, the raw, crude force mocking me, diminishing me. I should have smacked him. I should have affirmed another piece of the truth he knew about me, the nigger violence.