Brothers and Keepers

by John Edgar Wideman

  After that first contact, after that instant of threat and consolation and promise flickers out as fast as it came, my eyes drop to the vinyl-cushioned couches, rise again to the clutter of other prisoners and visitors. I force myself to pretend the eye conversation never took place, that Robby and I hadn’t been talking about first things and last things and hadn’t reached a crystal-clear understanding of what we must do. We’d lost the moment. The escape route closed down as he looked away or I looked away. We’re going to deal with the visit now. We’re going to talk, survive another day. I have to pretend the other didn’t happen because if I don’t, disappointment and shame will spoil the visit. And visits are all we have. All we’re going to have for years and years, unless we choose the other way, the solution burning in Rob’s eyes and mine before each visit begins.

  The last iron gate, the last barred door. The visit proper doesn’t begin until after we meet and touch and decide we’ll do it their way one more time. Because the other way, the alternative is always there. I meet it every time. We know it’s there and we consciously say, No. And the no lets everything else follow. Says yes to the visit. The words.

  Whatever else the visit turns into, it begins as compromise, an acceptance of defeat. Maybe the rage, the urge to fight back doesn’t rise from a truer, better self. Maybe what’s denied is not the instinctual core of my being but an easily sidestepped, superficial layer of bravado, a ferocity I’d like to think is real but that winds up being no more than a Jonathan Jackson, George Jackson, Soledad-brother fantasy, a carryover from the old Wild West, shoot-em-up days as a kid. The Lone Ranger, Robin Hood, Zorro. Masked raiders attacking the bad guys’ castle, rescuing trusty sidekicks in a swirl of swordplay, gunfire, thundering hooves. Maybe I needed to imagine myself in that role because I knew how far from the truth it was. Kidding myself so I could take the visits seriously, satisfy myself that I was doing all I could, doing better than nothing.

  Point is, each visit’s rooted in denial, compromise, a sinking feeling of failure. I’m letting Robby down, myself down, the team. . . . Always that to get through. The last gate. Sometimes it never swings all the way open on its hinges. A visit can be haunted by a sense of phoniness, hollowness. Who am I? Why am I here? Listening to my brother, answering him, but also fighting the voice that screams that none of this matters, none of this is worth shit. You missed your chance to put your money where your mouth is. A good day to die but you missed it. You let them win again. Humiliate you again. You’re on your knees again, scrambling after scraps.

  Sometimes we occupy one of the lawyer-client tables, but today a guard chases us away. Robby’s had trouble with him before. I commit the guard’s name to memory just in case. My personal shit list for close watching or revenge or whatever use it would serve if something suspicious happens to my brother. I consider making a fuss. After all, I’m a professional writer. Don’t I have just as much right as a lawyer or social worker to the convenience of a table where I can set down the tools of my trade, where my brother and I can put a little distance between ourselves and the babble of twenty or thirty simultaneous conversations?

  The guard’s chest protrudes like there’s compressed air instead of flesh inside the gray blouse of his uniform. A square head. Pale skin except on his cheeks, which are bluish and raw from razor burn. His mustache and short curly hair are meticulously groomed, too perfect to be real. The stylized hair of comic-book superheroes. A patch of blue darkness etched with symmetrical accent lines. His eyes avoid mine. He had spoken in a clipped, mechanical tone of voice. Not one man talking to another but a peremptory recital of rules droned at some abstraction in the middle distance where the guard’s eyes focus while his lips move. I think, Nazi Gestapo Frankenstein robot motherfucker, but he’s something worse. He’s what he is and there’s no way to get around that or for the moment get around him because he’s entrenched in this no-man’s land and he is what he is and that’s worse than any names I can call him. He’s laying down the law and that’s it. The law. No matter that all three tables are unoccupied. No matter that I tell him we’ve sat at them before. No matter that we’ll vacate if and when lawyers need them. No matter that I might have a case, make a case that my profession, my status means something outside the walls. No matter, my pride and anger and barely concealed scorn. I move on. We obey because the guard’s in power. Will remain in power when I have to leave and go about my business. Then he’ll be free to take out on my brother whatever revenge he couldn’t exact from me and my smart mouth. So I take low. Shake my head but stroll away (just enough nigger in my walk to tell the guard I know what he thinks of me but that I think infinitely less of him) toward the least crowded space in the row of benches against the wall.

  Not much news to relate. Robby cares about family business and likes to keep up with who’s doing what, when, how, etc., but he also treats the news objectively, cold-bloodedly. Family affairs have everything and nothing to do with him. He’s in exile, powerless to influence what goes on outside the walls, so he maintains a studied detachment; he hears what I say and quickly mulls it over, buries the worrisome parts, grins at good news. When he comments on bad news it’s usually a grunt, a nod, or a gesture with his hands that says all there is to say and says, A million words wouldn’t make any difference, would they. Learning to isolate himself, to build walls within the walls enclosing him is a matter of survival. If he doesn’t insulate himself against those things he can’t change, if he can’t discipline himself to ignore and forget, to narrow the range of his concerns to what he can immediately, practically effect, he’ll go crazy. The one exception is freedom. Beneath whatever else Robby says or does or thinks, the dream of freedom pulses. The worst times, the lowest times are when the pulse seems extinguished. Like in the middle of the night, the hour of the wolf when even the joint is quiet and the earth stops spinning on its axis and he bursts from sleep, the deathly sleep that’s the closest thing to mercy prison ever grants, starts from sleep and for a moment hears nothing. In the shadow of that absolute silence he can’t imagine himself ever leaving prison alive. For hours, days, weeks the mood of that moment can oppress him. He needs every ounce of willpower he possesses to pick up the pieces of his life, to animate them again with the hope that one day the arbitrary, bitter, little routines he manufactures to sustain himself will make sense because one day he’ll be free.

  I arrange my pens and yellow pad atop the table. But before we begin working on the book I tell Robby my sawing dream.

  I am a man, myself but not myself. The man wakes up and can’t see the stars. The smell of death surrounds him. Fifteen hundred other men sleep in the honeycomb of steel that is his home forever. The fitful stirrings, clattering bars, groaning, the sudden outcries of fear, rage, madness, and God knows what else are finally over at this hour of the night or morning as he lies in his cell listening to other men sleep. The monotonous sawing sound reminds him of the funny papers, the little cloud containing saw and log drawn above a character’s head so you can see the sound of sleeping. Only the man doesn’t see logs floating above the prisoners’ heads. As he listens and shuts his eyes and gets as close to praying as he ever does anymore, praying for sleep, for blessed oblivion, the cartoon he imagines behind his closed eyes is himself sawing away the parts of his own body. Doggedly, without passion or haste, drawing a dull saw up and back, up and back through his limbs. Slices drop away on the concrete floor. The man is cutting himself to pieces, there is less of him every time he saws through a section. He is lopping off his own flesh and blood but works methodically, concentrating on the up-and-back motion of the saw. When there’s nothing left, he’ll be finished. He seems almost bored, almost asleep, ready to snore like the saw’s snoring as it chews through his body.

  Robby shakes his head and starts to say something but doesn’t, and we both leave the dream alone. Pass on to the book, the tasks still to be accomplished.

  Robby had said he liked what he’d seen of the first draft. Liked it fine,
but something was missing. Trouble was, he hadn’t been able to name the missing ingredient. I couldn’t either but I knew I had to try and supply it. By the book’s conclusion I wanted a whole, rounded portrait of my brother. I’d envisioned a climactic scene in the final section, an epiphany that would reveal Robby’s character in a powerful burst of light and truth. As the first draft evolved, I seemed to settle for much less. One early reader had complained of a “sense of frustration . . . By the end of the book I want to know more about Robby than I actually know. I know a lot of facts about his life but most of his inner self escapes me.” On target or not, the reaction of this early reader, coupled with Robby’s feeling that something crucial was lacking, had destroyed any complacency I had about the book’s progress. I reread Robby’s letters, returned to the books and articles that had informed my research into prisons and prisoners. I realized no apotheosis of Robby’s character could occur in the final section because none had transpired in my dealings with my brother. The first draft had failed because it attempted to impose a dramatic shape on a relationship, on events and people too close to me to see in terms of beginning, middle, and end. My brother was in prison. A thousand books would not reduce his sentence one day. And the only denouement that might make sense of his story would be his release from prison. I’d been hoping to be a catalyst for change in the world upon which the book could conceivably have no effect at all. I’d been waiting to record dramatic, external changes in Robby’s circumstances when what I should have been attuned to were the inner changes, his slow, internal adjustment day by day to an unbearable situation. The book was no powerful engine being constructed to set my brother free; it was dream, wish, song.

  No, I could not create a man whose qualities were self-evident cause for returning him to the world of free people. Prison had changed my brother, not broken him, and therein lay the story. The changes were subtle, incremental; bit by bit he had been piecing himself together. He had not become a model human being with a cure for cancer at his fingertips if only the parole board would just give him a chance, turn him loose again on the streets of Homewood. The character traits that landed Robby in prison are the same ones that have allowed him to survive with dignity, and pain and a sense of himself as infinitely better than the soulless drone prison demands he become. Robby knows his core is intact; his optimism, his intelligence, his capacity for love, his pride, his dream of making it big, becoming somebody special. And though these same qualities helped get him in trouble and could derail him again, I’m happy they are still there. I rejoice with him.

  The problem with the first draft was my fear. I didn’t let Robby speak for himself enough. I didn’t have enough confidence in his words, his vision, his insights. I wanted to clean him up. Manufacture compelling before-and-after images. Which meant I made the bad too bad and good too good. I knew what I wanted; so, for fear I might not get what I needed, I didn’t listen carefully, probe deeply enough. As I tried his story again I began to recognize patterns, a certain consistency in his responses, a basic impetuous honesty that made him see himself and his world with unflinching clarity. He never stopped asking questions. He never allowed answers to stop him. The worst things he did followed from the same impulse as the best. He could be unbelievably dumb, corrupt, selfish, and destructive but those qualities could keep him down no more than his hope, optimism, his refusal to accept a dull, inferior portion could buoy him above the hell that engulfed black boys in the Homewood streets.

  Robby watched it all. Ups and downs. Rises and falls. What was consistent was the watching, the consciousness, the vision in which he saw himself as counting, as being worth saving at any cost. If he had lost that vision, if he loses it now, then we will all matter a little less.

  To repair the flawed first draft I had asked for more from Robby. He’d responded sporadically with poems, anecdotes, meditations on his time behind bars. What he was giving me helped me turn a corner. I was closer to him. I was beginning to understand what had been missing in the first version of his story. I was learning to respect my brother’s touch, his vision. Learning what was at stake in this give-and-take between us, initiated by the idea of a book.

  A letter from Robby had added this coda to Garth’s story, the story he thought might be one place to begin telling his own:

  After Garth’s funeral, me, Mike, and Cecil, our ladies, and Garth’s lady sat in Mike’s car and waited for all the other cars to leave. We weren’t doing any talking, just crying and sniffling. It was raining outside and the silence was broken only by the pitter-patter of the rain on the car. Now I was always the oldest of our crew and Garth had always been my little brother though always taller. So when Mike finally started up the car the radio came on and a song by the group War was on the box. The name of the song was “Me and Baby Brother” and the chorus goes: “Me and baby brother used to run together. . . . Running over one another headed for the corner.” It was like it was just for me. I sat there in the backseat with tears just running down my face.

  His new girl friend Leslie claims Robby lives through the words of songs and movies. Robby admits maybe it’s true. He’s sent me the lyrics of a Sly and the Family Stone jam, “Family Affair.” The song was popular at about the time Robby was breaking up with his first wife, Geraldine. For him the song says everything there is to say about that period in his life. Part of the magic’s in the words, the line-by-line correspondence between what was happening to him and the situations and people the song described:

  Newlyweds a year ago but they’re still

  Checking each other

  Nobody wants to blow

  Nobody wants to be left out

  You can’t leave cause your heart is there. . . .

  But another part was the music itself, what transfigures the personal, the unique with universals of rhythm, tone, and harmony, what must always remain unspoken because words can’t keep up with the flood of feeling, of experience music releases.

  The music Robby loves is simple; the lyrics often seem sentimental, banal. Though rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll are rooted in traditional African music, the soul sounds Robby listened to in the sixties had been heavily commercialized, exploited by whites. Fortunes were made by whites who produced, performed, wrote, and distributed this so-called black music. About the only thing whites didn’t do to black music was destroy it. Miraculously, the best black singers and musicians transcended the destructive incursions on their turf. Afro-American musical styles passed through one more crucible and emerged on the other side modified externally but intact at the core. Robby could see himself, recognize his world in the music called soul.

  Over 125 years before Robby discovered visions of himself reflected in “Family Affair,” young Frederick Douglass learned in the music of fellow slaves truths about his life, about the ordeal of slavery and the capacity of the spirit to rise above it, truths that were articulated in the form of strange chants, cries, percussive clapping and stomping, call-and-response cadences created by black field hands as they marched from one backbreaking job to another. “Their songs still follow me,” Douglass later wrote; and certain songs continue to haunt my brother. Simple songs. Lyrics as uncomplicated, transparent as the poetry of the gospels and spirituals we sang in Homewood A.M.E. Zion church: Let my people go. Farther along we’ll understand why. Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound. One bright morning. His eye is on the sparrow so I know He watches me.

  The messages are simple. The mysteries they enfold are not. What Robby hears is the sound of what he has been, where he has been, the people he traveled with, the ones here, the ones there, the ones gone forever. The best, the authentic black music does not unravel the mysteries, but recalls them, gives them a particular form, a specific setting, attaches the mysteries to familiar words and ideas. Simple lyrics of certain songs follow us, haunt us because the words floating in the music are a way of eavesdropping on the mysteries, of remembering the importance of who we are but also experiencing the immens
ity of Great Time and Great Space, the Infinite always at play around the edges of our lives.

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. Our grandfather John French loved that song. Hummed it, crooned it high on Dago Red, beat out its rhythm on his knee, a table’s edge, the bottom of a pot. Froggy went a-courtin’ was another favorite, and we’d ride like Froggy jiggedy-jig, jiggedy-jig on Daddy John’s thigh while he sang. Those songs had survived. John French found them and stored them and toted them on his journey from Culpepper, Virginia, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the place where we began to know him as our mother’s father. He saved those songs and they documented his survival. All of that hovered in the words and music when he passed them on to us.

  Here are some more of the lines Robby remembered from “Family Affair”:

  One child grows up to be somebody

  who just loves to learn.

  And the other child grows up to be