I didn’t see Cello the night I left. Much earlier, across the courtyard, I could hear her calling her children into bed with her. Dram waited before he went back to the office, doing dictation on a portable machine. He shook hands with Manfred and grabbed a suitcase. Manfred manfully took two more of them. He didn’t humiliate me when Dram wished us good luck as though he thought we were together. Manfred said we might as well deal with the boxes of books. They left no room for me in the car. I followed in a taxi.
There I was in Schöneberg, on a futon on Manfred’s floor. It worked out because mostly he stayed over at his oncologist’s. He wasn’t drinking. I fingered his shirts in his absence but did nothing too creepy. The hot-water heater worked in the shower, but I wore a sweater and two pairs of socks under the duvet. I looked up over my boxes at the weak courtyard lamps trapped in the black of his wet, streaked window. A Liberty Bell, a gift from the people of the United States, slept in the tower of the city hall.
When he was around, he would yank my arms down toward the floor and stress how cool it was to have me staying with him. I was not in the way, Mann. To be pulled down like that meant that my head would bang against his shoulder, uncoordinated as I was. I listened to him close his book and turn off the light and cough. Though I was the goat in the stable that lets the stallion sleep, I couldn’t help it. I thought maybe I could rig my dreams. I tried to drift into sleep holding on to the image of us united and running the ChiChi.
FOUR
The first city to be mentioned in the Bible was built by an outcast. Poor Cain. The Lord rejected his harvest offering and then told him it was his own fault. How smug Abel must have been, but we mustn’t blame the victim. After all, that mark Cain negotiated from the Lord saved his life while Abel’s flock grieved for the touch of its dead master.
Cain was a fugitive, but as the son of Adam and Eve he was simply acting out the family tradition of exile. His wife, that roadside convenience, probably endured many a night of listening to Cain’s guilty tears and then many a morning of his loathing because she had witnessed his tears. Somehow he pulled himself together, and east of Eden, in the land of Nod, he founded a city, which he named for his son, Enoch.
Perhaps by the time Enoch grew up he was completely bored with his father’s neurotic, repetitive story of how harshly the Lord had used him. There, over the sputtering lamp and the darkening wine, was Cain, becoming morbidly self-pitying as he trotted out his old grievances and regrets. Perhaps Enoch and his mother exchanged a look, and one of them would say, My look at the time. We must to bed. And then they would abscond from the company of the anguished man.
I like to think that in this new city Cain found friends who welcomed his talk. Maybe some among them were true friends, but how could the founder of a city ever be sure people received him because they liked him. Perhaps it didn’t matter to Cain. An audience was an audience. Theoretically, the inhabitants of this city had to be his relations. If not, then they were phantoms, figments of Cain’s imagination. Hallucination was another family tradition. His parents believed in their conversations with a serpent.
* * *
The Chicago I grew up in was full of people who could not get away. They couldn’t cash checks; they couldn’t buy tickets out of town. State Street was Stuck Street. People without gas money went to work on State Street. They ate government cheese for lunch. The Dan Ryan Expressway slammed through property that had slipped from family hands before the Great Depression.
Liquor stores, beauty shops, check-cashing joints, gas stations, and tambourine Pentecostal churches in former drugstores made it impossible for me to understand what had been so fabled about Bronzeville. There were a couple of corners, but most everything was boarded up. My dad couldn’t get over the loss of the Regal, his favorite theater, the place with the balcony where he became a man, and Mom said she was tired of debating whether the Taylor projects could ever be cleaned up.
The South Side had been the scene of bitter anti-urban renewal meetings. The people, as represented by Mom, lost. She minded the high-rises we couldn’t see, those finished in the late sixties, so much so that she wouldn’t drive downtown with us to look at the Marina Towers or the Hancock building as they went up, the kind of Sunday excursions Dad liked to propose, almost as a joke. He liked to drive under the post office.
While he read the Hyde Park Herald, Mom sat defiantly with Voices. She and her white friends at the Unitarian church defended themselves against the charge that Hyde Park wasn’t just an integrated neighborhood, it was where white and black united to keep out the poor. The University of Chicago did what it felt it had to in order to house faculty in the neighborhood, to prevent the whole shebang from going to the dogs. I never particularly wanted to live in a spanking new apartment tower like Dr. Robert Hartley’s, but I wished we owned one of the cubic E Houses the university had bulldozed into place around itself in the early 1960s, especially after I learned who I. M. Pei was.
Root Square, as my mother succeeded in having East Ogden Square renamed, hidden by maples and elms, was a small, old pocket not far from Mom’s friends. My earliest humiliations at bat took place around the corner in Nicholas Park. Everywhere you met the smiling unreality of the neo-Gothic university. Mom said Dad wanted us to live where we could safely walk to school and come home for lunch.
We never took public transportation when I was growing up. After we left home, my brother, Solomon, and I had to hurt Dad’s and Mom’s feelings to make them stop taking us to the airport and picking us up from the airport. In the end, Solomon wouldn’t give them the details of his flights, which sent Mom up the wall because her days were nothing if not schedules. She suffered, wondering what had happened to me, until she heard the trunk of the taxi. Solomon clearly believed I owed him on this one and I went along with him and wouldn’t let Dad drive me. Solomon rented a car when he landed. He and I seldom visited at the same time.
Our house always looked as though it were playing dumb. The front garden died under the steps up to the front door and after a lifetime of costly and impractical schemes for it from one of Mom’s crazies after another, Dad declared it his territory and instituted no-nonsense, low-maintenance conifers, evergreen bushes and hedges that shielded the house. It was so unassuming it could have been a movie set held up by a giant T square in the back. But the narrow limestone façade hid what a warren it was. A couple of Mom’s crazies were usually lining up their shoes compulsively on the third floor. Mom gave shelter only to women, not that some of them weren’t as scary as any man. Cello was often ensconced on the third floor, too, in the room in the front, the sacred presence, the personification, however unwilling, of racial uplift through art.
My brother and I and Cello’s siblings had the second floor, each to his or her own cell. My brother and I were never bunk-bed pals. We had our own rooms. Mom and Dad’s bedroom was also on the second floor, but maybe because there was only one bathroom per floor, they spent a lot of their time in their basement domain, in his den, her office, and the back room where Dad worked on his planes and Mom painted placards. The closets everywhere were packed with boxes of labeled rocks or the minutes of forgotten social betterment ventures or 78-rpm records. Mom had the carpet removed on what she from time to time called the parlor floor. She put her beloved piano on sheets of acoustic-boosting tiles. We’d been there as long as anyone.
The flat-roofed, three-story houses of tiny Root Square wanted to scoot over some blocks and huddle under the El to get out of the rain. Once, I saw Dad look around when he was putting Cello’s father in the car and I could tell that in his head he was urging the old-timers to hold on. Two white “yuppie” couples, as the white Sunday supplements called them, had gone around the square trying to interest people in a new homeowners’ association. Mom suspected that they were checking to see who was their sort of black person, the kind that would fit in to the gatherings they were planning.
As a child, I knew that my parents were kind of laughed at, but
people respected them. Mom was built like a fire hydrant and though Dad was tall, his caboose was enormous. Dad was wild about sports, but neither he nor Mom was athletic. They walked like two bears in love. They couldn’t dance. Neither wore clothes well. Everything Dad had was dark gray and Mom stayed in dark green from season to season. They both had short hair, in order not to have to do much to it and, in Mom’s case, in order not to be accused of having “good hair.” Dad’s name was on the roster of a few black clubs, but that was because loyal friends had insisted. Once a Kappa, always a Kappa. Some remembered the Eagle in its better days. Mom wasn’t in any black women’s club and the Quakerism of her college pacifism meant that her committees in later years were mostly white.
Dad was an only child. His father died when he was young, of a heart attack on the train where he worked as a porter. My grandmother was a schoolteacher who ended up making paintings of photographs she liked in National Geographic. I remembered her on the third floor for a while. Then I hated going to see her in the nursing home. Her canvases were strung up around the back porch like the flags of all nations. Because Mom’s father’s family hated her mother, Mom grew up as an only child. I once accused Mom and Dad of having me just so Solomon wouldn’t be an only child.
I didn’t always feel that I belonged to the three of them, the walnut sitting with almonds. Because I was darker than my brother and my parents, to my way of thinking, had I been able to put shame into words back then, they had an expectation of acceptance I was denied. They would always look like decent people, the right sort of black people, whereas I had to talk for a few minutes before white people decided not to throw me out of wherever I was. Cello wasn’t light-skinned either, but she’d been a prodigy all her life. Her soft yet regal manner opened every door.
Mom wrung her hands when she saw me. I knew I looked terrible, a walking, sebaceous coffee bean. Cello had not reported me, but Mom and Dad knew I had moved out before I left Berlin. Mom concluded that Cello and I had had a disagreement of some kind, but she wasn’t going to push me about it. This would not have been the first time something had blown up between us. I’d been there awhile, as Dram said, and that was enough of an explanation. That Cello had kept quiet about the cocaine put me back in the sleuth mood, but there was nothing I could do about it. Mom studied me enough as it was. They used to be so close, Mom and Cello.
Dad had his own sheen on. Climactic tournaments in the sports he followed were only weeks away. Every year he parked Cello’s father, Ralston Jr., in a chair in front of the TV and kept up a running commentary on the games. Sometimes Solomon was in town and Dad had someone who answered and argued. Plus, I could tell as soon as I stepped inside the house: there were no crazies in residence. Dad was a different man when he’d had Mom to himself for a spell. He was outgoing and funny and put syrup smiles on the pancakes he should not have been eating.
* * *
In 1934, the Shay brothers, Ralston and Reginald, founded The American Eagle, and for a while there, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was a serious competitor in the weekly black newspaper market. It had an opera column, record reviews, poetry reviews, a very popular medical advice bureau, and a religion reporter who had an inadvertently entertaining way with the latest Baptist scandals. Its pages were open to a number of local cartoonists. The real star was Uncle Ralston himself, my mother’s uncle, who doubled as the sports reporter.
It had not been as easy to get back to the Alabama State Normal School as they had thought. Why the Shay brothers could never go back, they didn’t want anyone to find out, Cello’s grandfather liked to say. But that was a bit of make-believe, tough-dude publicity. My dad said that the Shay brothers worked one summer at a resort hotel in Wisconsin in order to earn their school fees, but they lost all their money to hustlers in Chicago. Their father told them not to come back to Alabama and they didn’t.
The Eagle appealed to obsessives among Chicago’s black residents, and given how crowded and rough that big place was, there were thousands of people who found something in the paper they could lose themselves in. Uncle Ralston analyzed first basemen and heavyweights, black and white, with such contrariness that he incited readers in Chicago and in other cities where the Eagle was distributed to send denunciations, which he printed unedited—except for obscenities—under the title “Letters to the Dunderhead.” He made a bad call early on as to Jackie Robinson’s potential.
The Eagle reprinted odd facts from old almanacs: “Did you know that in 1910…” Its news stories were mere notices compared with its features. But then the Eagle treated Bible sales meetings and barbers’ conventions as news stories. Because it was not a daily, it did not waste more time than necessary on the weighty questions of the moment. People searched its columns for mention of themselves. The paper was full of names, lists, memberships, reunions, prayers for the sick and the shut-in, who had gone to which bridge tournament, who had been licensed by which state authority, and what benevolent lodge had met where.
Uncle Ralston liked to say that they starved for the first ten years at ten cents a copy and then the war saved them. But they had made it to safety before then, when they got their own Goss press and the newspaper could come flying off the rack folded and cut. The investment was his wife’s. Her family’s insurance company had begun in the murky areas I read about in Urban Studies classes, among slick blacks who, for worthless stock in burial societies, took nickels from Southern blacks come North for jobs. The Eagle had white visitors during World War II because the army noticed that the paper printed letters about the treatment of black soldiers in Southern states where their training camps were located, most of the letters from members of the soldiers’ families.
The bullying by the army did little to enhance Uncle Ralston’s reputation after the war. He had some profile in the National Negro Chamber of Commerce. He was a Republican, officially, convinced that his support was important to Congressman De Priest, and the Eagle had ignored the New Deal in its pages while loving the post office as management training ground for Negroes. Uncle Ralston sometimes blamed his refusal to sell war bonds as the reason he could never get on the boards of the Wabash Avenue YMCA or Provident Hospital. He’d rejected membership in the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association at first, but he joined up after the war, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was interested in everybody and he needed cover.
He had a business on the South Side, but he was not popular, his position among blacks not secure. He said the snobs in the Forty Club looked down on him because he came from Alabama. He was jealous of the black leaders on Truman’s commission to desegregate the military, Mom said, as if anyone would have called on him for such a thing. Uncle Ralston did not become a Democrat until Rockefeller lost his party to Goldwater’s crazies. There were stories about his wife’s family that Mom liked to tell, about their having been in the policy or numbers game as much as the insurance business. She said that Uncle Ralston met Cello’s grandmother when the Shay brothers worked as bookies for Cello’s grandmother’s father.
“Keep the Panthers out of our schools,” Uncle Ralston said, looking at Mom. He told her she was a hypocrite for joining the National Housing Conference. “What’s wrong with your house?”
My mother was Betty Shay, Reginald’s daughter, and she married my father, Alfred Goodfinch, the newspaper’s young treasurer. Ralston Jr., vice president, was his best friend, mostly because everyone said so. They spent a lot of time together in the office, each in his world, not talking much. Ralston Jr. was the black nationalist casualty in the family, showing up everywhere with secondhand bean pies and pamphlets. Dad kept his distance from the struggle, though he was no self-hating black guy or fastidious conservative who somehow wanted to limit his exposure to other black people. He was on the side of historical justice, he just had no appetite for confrontation, whether it be on the streets or in the committee room.
It was 1966 when the Pennsylvania Railroad failed and Uncle Ralston went to Ghana to
fetch Ralston Jr., Cello’s father. He must have realized on the plane back just how whacked his son was. It was his third big mental episode in two years. Ralston Jr. was going to miss out. He’d gone off the deep end and was going to miss out on the enormous changes heralded by the Great Society. Uncle Ralston believed in Lyndon Baines Johnson as a white man who had seen the light. But his son had fallen out with his own reason just when it was his turn to be lifted up by federal programs and low-interest business loans and the Negro vote.
The Eagle froze, culturally, that summer Uncle Ralston went to Africa for the first and last time. He resisted change in any part of the newspaper thereafter. By 1968 the news stories and columns said first, “Afro-American,” then superhistorical “Aframerican,” and finally “black,” in spite of Uncle Ralston’s objections. For a year, he’d refused to give his permission to switch to something more in accord with the times. Then they just went ahead without his permission.
Bit by bit, the managing editor dared to go over the publisher’s weary head. Dad, acting vice president, went upstairs to the office in the two-story tower on the right to inform Uncle Ralston of what had already been done. If a thing had been decided for business purposes, then Uncle Ralston could accept it. After all, he’d lived through some dicey times that required him to eat compromise every day, he pointed out. Dad therefore presented change as business, as something about which the paper had no choice. But what was wrong with the Eagle had been a problem for some time. The old crew was either dead or retired and they couldn’t be replaced for what the Eagle could pay.
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