Black Deutschland

by Darryl Pinckney

  There were mutterings outside, in the community, wherever that was, that Uncle Ralston was an Uncle Tom, a relic of bygone ward politics. He wasn’t. He was as much of a race man as my withdrawn, private dad. But he sat out the militant years not because he didn’t understand the anger, but because the revolution had taken his son, so he believed. One day his suave heir had tailor’s bills and met white politicians at the Palmer House, and the next he was in denim overalls, flying to Ghana in search of his pre-industrial-age, natural soul.

  The women were the grunts of the revolution, the ones who didn’t miss the meetings, who put away the chairs and made the calls and bought the coffee and kept the minutes. Mom was a self-declared enemy of the Blues. “Everything is allowed, because I’m feeling bad.” She wasn’t a big fan of Gospel either. We seldom went to church anyway. Mom would show up at different churches and colleges for Handel at Christmas and Bach at Easter. She said she worked with so many pastors during the week that she needed rest from them on the weekend. But she liked priests, the guitar-playing sort. No tunes of the counterrevolution there.

  Mom’s mother had come up from Georgia and picketed Woolworth’s in 1930. She got pregnant and didn’t go back to Atlanta to teach music. Mom’s parents got married once her father’s divorce became final, but her cousins back in their teaching positions at Morris Brown College had always been a little “funny” about her, Mom said, and they were not close. Her father’s family, the Shays, particularly Cello’s grandmother, gave her the feeling of being picked up with a pair of tongs.

  Mom’s father’s children by his first wife blamed his decline into drink on her mother. They would never have anything to do with my mother. They went out of their way to be rude to her at his grave. The minister asked the widows to compose themselves in the presence of death. Mom’s mother, Lucille, bridge player and comrade to white leftists, wore white gloves, yet she was the brawling kind. There was no estate to fight over. Reginald’s bankruptcy hadn’t even been a drama. It was just a legal declaration of what had been so for a long time.

  Lucille—Champ, her friends called her—rotund, puffing, carried the odd survival supply in her purse, like a flashlight or a thermal blanket that could fold down into the size of a deck of cards. “What I have to have is a heel. I never leave the house under five feet six.” Her wig looked like a helmet of steel wool, something that could cut. Mom seldom saw her; we never experienced her as a grandmother. I was fat, but Champ couldn’t keep her eyes off my brother. Some Laboratory High School girls stopped bickering over Solomon when our grandmother showed them the .22 she’d brought along to his graduation.

  She started ringing doorbells in her huge building at upsetting hours, showing neighbors her .22 and letting them know she had their backs. When Mom decided that her mother couldn’t live alone anymore, she had to drug her to trick her into the nursing home. Mom asked Dad to remove the illegal handguns under the kitchen sink and in Champ’s night table. Solomon said her place smelled like a human barnyard. There were dead mice in the oven. She had gone downhill right along with the famed Rosenwald Apartments where Mom grew up.

  Mom kept a picture of her mother outside the Grand Terrace Ballroom on VE Day. She believed in music in the schools. Mom said her mother had been proud of knowing the legendary teacher and violinist at the DuSable School, Captain Diet. Through him, Mom had had first-rate music teachers. Champ gave Mom that.

  * * *

  “I always thought ‘Negro’ very distinguished,” Dad said. Solomon got up from the table. “Negro Spiritual, Negro historian.”

  “Ne-gro, Ne-gro,” Cello’s little brother Ronald and sister Rhonda chanted.

  “‘I am a black woman the music of my song some sweet arpeggio of tears is written in a minor key,’” Mom recited.

  “‘And I can be heard humming it in the middle of the night,’” Cello continued from nearby. She had been going to a hairdresser Mom disapproved of, someone who worked from a chair in her apartment bathroom. She’d styled Cello’s unbelievable hair into balls and loops tied up in heavy gold thread. She looked like she was wearing a queen bee’s egg sac.

  It was perfectly okay to stare at Cello when she came back from her unauthorized hairdresser. Mom was hoping to pressure her into returning to the fold, the shop that was also a policy parlor, not far from the Eagle, where she’d been going for years. Otherwise, we were forbidden to manifest our giddy responses to Cello’s experiments with her looks. That would add to her self-consciousness about her new life as a beautiful young slimmed-down pianist who’d impressed a jury with her playing of the Appassionata. Cello’s new, maybe still shaky confidence showed up in how many of Mom’s rules and Dad’s maxims she didn’t want to follow or believe anymore.

  “And I can be heard humming in the night,” Mom said.

  “What?”

  “The poem. Mari Evans. The line is, ‘And I can be heard humming in the night.’ And don’t say ‘what.’ Darling?”

  Both Cello and Dad answered.

  “And since when did you stop being my brown baby?” Dad said behind Mom’s chair. In those days, he went back to the Eagle after dinner.

  I was enamored of Cello and spied on her a great deal when I was a boy and she a teenager. I knew absolutely that she used to crack the door to the basement and stick her hair in, even if I didn’t understand what it was that she was trying to catch the sound of.

  * * *

  Nobody could kick me out of Berlin, I told myself. I had not flunked out. No construction went on in the winter months, I told the ChiChi. Incredibly, Rosen-Montag was attending to two projects in Japan. I was just taking a break. I had to. Rosen-Montag’s wife informed me that I would no longer receive wads of West German marks every four weeks. Instead, I would be paid from chapter to chapter, invoice to invoice—meaning, irregularly. I never asked about the faces no longer around the Nissen huts. Anyone not involved in site construction or Rosen-Montag’s next projects was expendable, the canteen gossip said. My German had improved. Stray bits of information seeped into my understanding unbidden.

  To celebrate my departure, Manfred himself prepared an onion tart. His blue-eyed oncologist brought a horrible, giant cookie of the season. I got to sleep, but a part of me must have been listening for it. She tried to keep it down when Manfred brought her to orgasm in the middle of the night. I could hear his balls slapping her ecstatic behind.

  My campaign for an adult life was not over. I had merely withdrawn to winter quarters. Some mornings it was so cold in Chicago the pavement burned the soles of my feet even in my Doc Martens. Mom and Dad had so much stuff in the garage the car wouldn’t fit. I went out in the mornings to scrape the ice from Dad’s windshield. I wanted him to see how together I was, mundane things included. My Berlin books were in those boxes under Manfred’s front-room window, I liked telling myself. The rest were back with me, in my room in my father’s house, because I could no longer afford the storage bill across town.

  I was working for the process server of a lawyer friend of Dad’s while revising chapters that Rosen-Montag’s wife had decided were not headed in the right direction. The editorial committee of Rosen-Montag’s foundation recommended that more emphasis be put on getting his points across through his illustrations. I was stunned to hear from such a body. My chapters were in danger of being reduced to captions unless I could come up with something.

  Dad had an office at home, in his basement den, and another at the Cracker Jack plant, an accountancy side job, and his main one in the Eagle building and printing plant off Wabash, near Forty-Third, in its own dead-end pocket of parking lot. One of the former dairies in the neighborhood, the Eagle building was sometimes mistaken for a hamburger joint because of its bright Art Deco front of white purple-bordered tiles, with two-story towers at either end. Only the front of the plant was decorated. The rest stretched toward a far alley, a wide, flat one-story structure of industrial brown and unreconstructed factory windows.

  The public walked
into a bleak, dusty reception area. Behind the listless secretary, a wall shielded the open-floorplan mysteries of the editorial process. A thicker wall farther back did nothing to block noise from the presses in the rear. The staircase up to Uncle Ralston’s domain was crooked. Dad and Ralston Jr. were shut up in the tower opposite, their stairs precarious with boxes there was no room for elsewhere. Nobody was ever worried about inspections. From the men’s room between editorial and press you could see across empty lots to the orange of the tin-drum fires of a homeless encampment two blocks away. Arguments on the rear wooden fire escapes could be sudden and violent.

  The whole neighborhood was a hazard, from the boarded-up buildings to the people fighting and sleeping with the trash on the green island of Garfield Boulevard. Dad’s office had stacks of papers and books and clippings, and boxes held rocks and minerals and philosopher’s stones and model airplane kits, the sophisticated kind, the kind you didn’t have to share with children, the expensive ones that really flew, operated by remote controls. His office was the perfect place for him to get away from Mom’s crazies, the sad cases that Mom was always trying to help.

  In the 1970s, when I worked menial jobs at the newspaper in the summers, there were advertisements from local black businesses—hair creams, hair straighteners, mom-and-pop restaurants, an independent black drugstore convenience chain, funeral parlors, a car dealership, a guitar and drum store, an African clothing design firm, a Third World–oriented travel agency that didn’t last long, a couple of motels, fraternal organizations, father-and-son sports events, sorority clothing drives. But I thought of the paper as a rickety operation, because the ads were for what most everyone my age could see was the obsolete, aging, segregated-Negro market.

  The jingling of the typesetting machine, the viscosity of the squid-black ink, and the clack of the ancient press never won me over. I hated journalism and politics and preachers. But at least when I was a sullen teenager the phones rang convincingly. By the time I left for Berlin for good, there weren’t that many political and city offices where Uncle Ralston could get a call through. His stories were hardly local anymore anyway. The struggle for copy had been resolved by depending on syndicates of sensational urban crime. The classified sections had shrunk. Meanwhile, Ralston Jr. had put a stop to what would be Cello’s mother’s last attempt to get away by having a really spectacular breakdown that culminated in his streaking naked across the parking lot at the Black Star Funeral Home.

  Mom’s father drank up his share of the newspaper and their other ventures. That’s no doubt why Uncle Ralston couldn’t really deal with me. In his mind I smelled and walked like his brother probably used to after five o’clock and often as early as three. Cello sometimes liked to remember, ever so casually, that her side of the family still owned everything while mine had become her grandfather’s employees. She liked to draw attention to the differences between us in what she called the psychological terms of blackness.

  Dad sometimes referred to Uncle Ralston as Old Man Shay or Old Man Ralston, but it never caught on at the plant or in the family. He was just Uncle Ralston, even to Cello and her sister. His outer-galaxy hopes of becoming a great patriarch of a black Chicago dynasty clan he transferred to the back of his young grandson, Ronald, and to my brother, Solomon. He just wanted to freeze-dry his son, the phone calls from some white underling at the State Department had been so humiliating. It had taken Uncle Ralston a year to decide to go get Ralston Jr. from Ghana. It was a big deal, like a spy mission. At the time, I celebrated Ralston Jr. in my nine-year-old head for being far, far away. When I grew up, I was going to live on the moon and shine its light into Solomon’s face whenever he tried to sleep.

  Nobody could kick me out of Berlin, but I was back where I’d started, alone in my room in Chicago, at my desk, as if still making up incompletes, handing in late term papers, unfree when those who had not messed up in their classes were enjoying what I had not earned. I did not go by the Eagle, and Dad had not encouraged me to say hello to anyone. Because there was no one upstairs with me, they let me smoke in my room. The house was redolent of Mr. Clean and Pine-Sol anyway. Mom had time on her hands. She never had a cleaning lady.

  Growing up, I didn’t use the ground floor of the house unless I was alone. I ran away after meals—we all did, except for Cello and Mom. When a crazy was staying with us, she might go to the living room after dinner, expecting television or company. But she learned to disappear. Cello played very loudly. Her scales pursued us up the stairs and into our cells. The hour was selfish, but Mom rejoiced in the technique that produced the sound. Then Cello was gone. When Solomon went off to college next, I realized how little he’d been around, how quiet he was in general. My turn was coming, but my prospects as a Negro Achiever were narrowing every semester.

  I was alone in my room most of the time but seldom alone in the house. Ronald and Rhonda had elaborate board games going on his bedroom floor at all times. It never occurred to me to touch Dad’s alcohol in the kitchen cabinet. I also didn’t turn on the TV. When Mom was out at something like her class in First Aid for Activists and Dad was at the Eagle, I liked to have doughnuts and hot chocolate in the living room, surrounded by old books on Napoleon. I never went to the basement when I was alone in the house. I never told on Cello or Solomon for going down there when Mom and Dad weren’t around.

  One time I struggled into Cello’s blue taffeta, turned on the living room record player, and opened the front door for a winter lip-sync concert. Mom and Cello did not pay as much attention to vocal music. Making my first move, I ripped the dress. I put everything back, but my crime was soon discovered. I knew enough not to admit that I’d had it on. I was just being destructive, angry with Cello.

  I could feel Lake Michigan. You could feel all of the Great Lakes and their conspiracies of ice crystals and surface winds. I used to disobey and make my way to the edge to watch the kids who dared to climb out onto the ice chunks piled up in the frozen rim of the lake. In North America, winter was not dreary, as it was in Northern Europe near the pillaged Baltic. It was big and wild and eventful with storms that looked around for somebody to kill.

  * * *

  I took a bus to a meeting, in order not to be in my room. The bus was heated and so was the side room of the Episcopal church where I was pretty sure I would meet no one I knew.

  “My name is Jed and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict.”

  “Hi, Jed.”

  “I have ninety days back.”

  I was rewarded with applause.

  “I haven’t spoken in a meeting since I got out of rehab almost two years ago. I just thought I should. That’s all I got.” That’s how the soldiers at the AA meeting in Dahlem would sign off. They’d stop talking and rock in their chairs, unable to make eye contact with anyone after admitting that they’d gone ballistic on the playground or placed a bet with their pay or put in for a transfer.

  I had a dream about taking drugs, not about drinking. I was back again with a crazy of Mom’s who a few years before had stolen the Christmas money from one of the shelters that Mom took an interest in, not far from the tracks. Mom believed in trusting her crazies, in treating them like adults. She was not discouraged by how seldom that worked out. This woman’s getting out of control, her daring to, was my fault. Mom’s first rule was no drugs in the shelter or anywhere where she was and I knew that this crazy was using, because I let her fix me up with my first speedball.

  It was easy to rent a respectable person’s curtain-shrouded living room for a few hours in order to consume drugs in private. The host was usually hovering around, himself or herself an addict. I insisted on watching as Mom’s crazy opened the packet containing the new needle. Sometimes I remember that I have no right to be alive. She must have cooked up the heroin and cocaine while we were sitting there, but I have blocked that out. I couldn’t look when she found my vein.

  It was to be my last speedball. I held on until the effects wore off. I knew that I would never
try that again. It was too powerful. I would not have cared had our host’s fourth-floor apartment caught fire. That astonishing apathy in the head, that indifference about the body was dangerous. I couldn’t wait to get back across the line, to go back to being an aluminum-foil-carrying cokehead in sawdust bars for gay losers. But for this woman, her new connect was the jam and when she at last turned up at the shelter, moving in slow motion, everyone but Mom knew that she was back at it.

  Cello’s sister, Rhonda, was visiting, in from her own life of Negro Achievement as the lone black woman accepted into the neurobiology department at Johns Hopkins. In spite of everything, she came back to check on their mother from time to time, to listen to her wail that “that spook” had ruined her life. Rhonda said that Sister Speedball was obviously wasted and she reminded Mom that she, Mom, believed in the greater good. The shelter was a place where battered women came to feel safe, sometimes bringing their children and the few toys they’d grabbed.

  Mom asked the woman for her keys. Unfortunately, she was what Dad called “street,” someone, so he believed, who would never get away from finding the bottom the most comfortable place to live. How many from Wendell Phillips High had given up before they were beaten, he’d ask. “She’s real tissue on the heel.” She’d made copies of the keys her first day as third custodian, one of those jobs Mom invented in order to give some parolee a break.

  When we met by chance in the laundrymat on the wrong side of Washington Park, where her connect’s runners could be found, Sister Speedball was talkative, waiting for them to come back with her shit. She explained that she’d got some guy to help her boost the shelter’s two televisions, the typewriter, and the electric can opener, but they couldn’t figure out how to get to the stuff with people around all the time. So they dropped that plan. She figured it was best not to use her keys, anyway. Instead, she let herself into the shelter late one night and jimmied the front office and then broke open the desk that held the strongbox of considerable Christmas cash.