Black Deutschland

by Darryl Pinckney

  He said it was because he belonged. He’d been on South Sixty-Third Street when the high school students from up in Belmont-Cragin wouldn’t let the demonstrators go beyond that point. He said it was because it was their turn in the streets. He’d been in Marquette Park when white citizens of Chicago threw bottles and rocks at the colored people taking cover behind the line of police. A friend sat on his shoulders in order to see over the helmets.

  He’d been behind the line of smoke inside the park when the mood among them turned. He said that when the police finally charged, people ran in every direction, and therefore so did he and his friends. Their battle plan fell apart. The thud of police boots terrified him, he said.

  He was with people he didn’t know by this point, he said. Fear had darkened everything around him. They happened on a group of five women. He had not expected anyone to hit a woman. A white guy caught one of the white women with a simple cross. He said she was lifted off her feet, almost parallel to the ground. The other women threw their bodies on top of the fallen body of their friend. They prayed, he said. The guy who hit the white woman hollered “Go home” over his shoulder as his gang sprinted into the tree line toward a golf course.

  * * *

  I had come back to Chicago to help out Dad, I told myself. I’d come to lend support to Mom. Uncle Ralston and the Eagle had failed. Dad got the so-called board to call in the receivers over Uncle Ralston’s head. Everything Uncle Ralston had was being readied for the lawyers. I’d been helping out for far longer than I had anticipated.

  Two bald janitors from the Eagle wheezed and I said that I would shift the files and microfilm to their final resting place in the room that used to be Cello’s privy chamber. We shook hands. Their smiles contained a great deal of precious metal. They rocked back downstairs, last paychecks signed by Dad in their pockets.

  I’d had a summer of lying low. Bags invited me to his old lady’s place in Schöneberg and I watched them drink. The suffering of hanging out in a Schöneberg that Manfred had dumped wasn’t helped by the speedy coke I got from Bags. I was glad when I had to admit that I didn’t have the money. He would have turned me on anyway, but his old lady was on his case about loose business practices. He hung out in more than one bar or café, but the ChiChi was most like home to him. He didn’t understand my need to stay away from it for certain periods, precisely because I could so easily convince myself that the ChiChi was home.

  I’d been dropped officially from Rosen-Montag’s Japan plans before the summer started. I visited the inland docks and the closed Art Deco swimming pools and the unused subway stations that had interested Manfred. There was nothing I was yet willing to do about the feeling. One day I went to East Berlin and sat. I used the border crossing at the train station on Friedrichstrasse and felt myself in my private movie. I sat in the Lustgarten, where young Nazis had burned cartloads of books. I sat in a youth club in the basement of the Ratskeller, trying to overhear a man who had something to do with the building’s restoration talk to a group of expressionless students.

  I had to show myself that I could manage homelessness, the short-term renting and long-range crashing. I could improvise, I could jump on what circumstances offered. I could do it not as a falling apart, but as a getting it together.

  Because Bags’s painter friend wasn’t paying for his storage space, nobody brought up the matter of my paying anyone either. Consequently, I had enough money to eat rice and drink Turkish coffee for a while. Coke was for others; travel was for others. I mentioned my thirtieth birthday to no one. Then one fine day I did not have the money to feel part of the West Berlin daydream of My home is the sea / My friends are the stars / Over Rio and Shanghai.

  * * *

  It was easy to be sober in Chicago. Mom continued to phone Cello, because of the Eagle’s demise, though I knew Cello cared less than her mother or my brother about the newspaper. But it had been a long time since talk came easily between them. One afternoon Mom was electric with the news that she and Cello had discussed how hard the Grieg Concerto used to be for her and how she could almost breeze through it now. Mom no longer hid the row of medicines she took in the mornings.

  Cello never referred to how often she and her little sister and brother had been dropped off at our house at the last minute or how often my father had gone to pick them up, to give them some stability, as Mom called it, while their parents went through their latest drama. Then came the night of the big fire and she didn’t really leave again until she went to the conservatory.

  She’d found her way back to Mom, even if I sometimes suspected that she felt toward my parents the loyalty a sovereign lady restored to her throne might have for the folk who protected her in her exile. Her feelings toward my parents she kept on a channel completely separate from her feelings toward me. I was keeping her secrets, and she’d helped me out, but I was not rewarded with a new intimacy. It didn’t matter, compared with the sense of power I now felt in my relationship with Cello.

  Before, it had been okay to owe her because she owed Mom. But now she owed me and I could do the grown-up thing, the male relative thing: I could forget it, call us even. I’d looked out for her, in my way. I thought I was so butch, suddenly needed by the first black winner of the Stokowski Society competition, she who hardly ever needed me before or cared. It was my turn to be cool about her, and therefore as cool as she.

  I was impressed with myself. I was not hinting that I was keeping the lid on something big: Cello was an Ibsen play in blackface. To lie and to keep my own secrets had been the chief strategy of my life, but complete discretion for someone else’s sake was a new experience of maturity for me.

  I ventured again to Mom that I’d been emotionally ambushed when that friend who had given me sanctuary in his place took a job in West Germany. Mom’s tone said she understood that I’d tell her about Manfred when I was ready. But it was she who was putting me off. As a subject, my private life was not reliably housebroken. If I could just not bring Berlin inside, not after she’d gone to the trouble of washing and waxing the difficult, messed-up floors of that part of the house.

  Dad told Mom to leave me alone, every man had to stand on his own after a point. It was not unusual that he was home in the middle of the day. He could disappear into his basement for hours. But the back porch and halls were lined with boxes from the Eagle. There were more junk chairs than ever in the living room. Then the phone rang. Mom picked up in her basement office.

  We heard her cry out. She bumped into Dad as he ran down to her. They panted back up together and turned on the television. Reporters stood in the rain in front of Northwestern Memorial. The tears were already coming down for Chicago’s first black mayor. A press spokesman was saying that Harold Washington had been pronounced dead. He’d had a heart attack at his desk that morning. The phone rang again. Dad pressed Mom into a chair and went to answer.

  I’d grown up seeing Mom wipe her face in front of the television, or while she was on the phone, or over a tissue-thin newspaper or a blue letter that folded back up to be its own envelope. In my memory, my dad is in the kitchen, pouring her a glass of water, trying to think of something else to do for her, brought low by news of another assassination, in Jackson, in Birmingham, in Dallas, in New York City, in Memphis, in Orangeburg, in Los Angeles, in Kent, in Munich, in Beirut, in Port Elizabeth, or blocks away, over on troubled Madison Street.

  * * *

  I was eight years old going on nine and Uncle Ralston was bringing Cello’s father back from Ghana. Dad fed us catfish sandwiches, but Cello ate tuna from the can without a trace of mayonnaise or a crumb of saltine cracker anywhere. My father took the five of us with him to Holy Cross Hospital after he got the call from Mom. Dr. King and the protestors had been trapped by white mobs at certain points during the day. She’d gone on the march against Dad’s wishes.

  We found Mom and her nuns. They had short hair instead of habits and they wore pants. They were sitting with a white boy, a high school student
, who was shaking his head and saying that that was the last time he was going to use violence. We’d missed it. The hospital emergency room mixed the wrong kind of whites with blacks. “Take a bath while you’re here,” some white guy snarled at Mom, and Mom’s white boy raced over and slapped the guy’s face sideways. But we’d missed it. Dad was so put out he wouldn’t speak. I was planning to wish again for superpowers when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake in less than two weeks.

  I got to ride in the back of the nuns’ station wagon with the distressed white boy from the North Side. He tried to smile at me, but his heart was heavy. He said at least three times that it would be fine to let him out at the corner. Solomon had white friends in his scout troop and at school. He said in sports you just did, if the other guy was good enough. Mom had white friends. Cello didn’t talk to anyone, but had I friends, they would have been everyone, too.

  That summer Martin Luther King was trying to persuade white Realtors to open all-white neighborhoods like Chicago Lawn or Gage Park to black homeowners. Any time we heard Mom and Dad argue about Martin Luther King we got nervous. Mom and Dad explained things. Dad explained them again, taking back what Mom had said. I never understood, not until much later. One of the surprises of growing up was finding out what things had been about.

  That night, Mom wanted to prove that it was not dangerous out there; she was willing to take just me along for the ride, a Friday-night treat. But it was dangerous. South Kedzie Avenue was blocked off behind the whipping lights of patrol cars. Mayor Daley’s most loyal whites were shocked by what they’d done, the smell of tires burning in the night heat. We left the hospital, looking back, Dad after us, pulling at Mom’s belt, confused, Mom and Dad hitting each other’s arms, nuns running alongside, ineffectual, everything noise, bright lights, and sirens as we left Dad behind.

  There was what I thought happened and what Mom and Dad told me later. The nun driving knew how to take backstreets. She ran stop signs and some lights. Because they had a kid in the car, they hoped they wouldn’t look like protestors, Mom admitted. The year before, a white woman from Detroit, a mother, had been murdered in Alabama for driving blacks home after a march. Infamous Selma.

  When we pulled up that night we could hear Cello at the piano. We were expected to go to bed. Dad was waiting at the front door with Soloman. Cello’s brother and sister were already upstairs. We’d missed Hogan’s Heroes on TV, so the day was over for them. They were used to plans falling through, those two. Cello shepherded Solomon and me toward the stairs, a sign of her new maturity. Adults needed to talk, especially the ones in their right minds. I’d not been afraid, not once that night.

  Dad said that every friend he had on the university police force was looking for Mom. He said they were burning the clergy in their cars. But Mom and Dad didn’t have an argument. I remember that Mom thanked him. She reminded him that she’d let him go to Sam Cooke’s funeral and now they were even. She said that afternoon they had parked on Halsted and never got anywhere near the back of the march. They met up with waves of red-faced Americans running amok. Mom said they looked like they played pinochle, not bridge. Mom and Dad both laughed, in the middle of the emergency sounds still going in my head. Cello led me on.

  The suburb of Cicero, Illinois, kicked Reverend King so hard it made Mahalia Jackson groan. Mom didn’t like her, but everybody knew that Reverend King adored her as the song of trial. Mom told me years later that she had, indeed, piled on top of the knocked-down nun with the other sisters to protect her that night in Marquette Park, but she hadn’t shouted prayers to anyone.

  * * *

  On the day of Harold Washington’s funeral, we met by the front door, dressed in a kind of mourning, for the mayor, for the black family-owned newspaper that would not have been able to cover the story of the fallen black hero. It had been a while since our house had been a gathering place at such a time. Something like church platters of carrots, celery, deviled eggs, and ham and cheese slices between miniature buns had been placed around the living room, dining room, and on top of the hall bookshelf. The church-platter fairies turned out to be two arthritic, trembling secretaries, the last of Shay Holdings, Inc.

  They talked at the same time, but not about the same thing. They were right behind Mom as she retreated to the kitchen. One was telling Mom that she would never forget her winter as a returning graduate student in Detroit. The snowplows were out every morning. Wayne State was practically stranded behind the walls of snow the plows had built up. The other was asking over her, like a descant line, if Aunt Gloria, Ruthanne’s mother, had ever made that album of Christmas songs she was always talking about, because she could use gift ideas.

  The doorbell rang, admitting former newspaper staff members. Word had got around. Before too long, the living room seemed full of old heads examining the trays in Dad’s and Mom’s hands. Maybe I didn’t comprehend or stop to consider what the end of the Eagle might mean to them, but these people did, elderly vendors, retired machinists.

  The doorbell kept ringing, bringing in movement types, Unitarian church types, grandmothers who’d got off night shifts that morning, University of Chicago sociology contacts, more people who used to work at the Eagle, neighbors, black or white, though some of them, blacks included, wanted to call the square East Ogden again.

  Of the many women over the years whom Mom had made phone calls to jails for or loaned money to, few stayed in touch or went back to school. This did not mean that they had not turned their lives around, wherever they were, Mom sometimes said. Dad let her believe what she wanted when it came to her crazies. He didn’t argue. Mom moved on to greet an old colleague from the National Welfare Rights Organization. Two former crazies in front of me didn’t look as though they were doing that great, but that was no reason for the old secretaries to pretend the crazies had not said hello and that it was a sad day. Shay Holdings, Inc.’s last servants walked out of the kitchen rather than be compromised socially by the formerly homeless.

  “Good soldier, where is thy switchblade?” I heard Dad say to a priest from St. Thomas the Apostle up the street. Dad wore a black armband and a red bow tie. Mom had fixed to the back of her head a fractured fascinator of small artificial cream-colored roses.

  The television in the living room, the only one in the house, had been going nonstop since Harold Washington’s heart failed him. He was a good man, ahead of his time, the television repeated, the professional mourner among us. I heard Shay Holdings, Inc., say that she couldn’t hack the cold November rain or the downtown crowds, and that she was glad to pay her respects without having to mess with a service, while the other secretary topped her with her gratitude that she had found all of her recipes in a big Christmas box, when for the longest time she just assumed she’d lost them with her other things that time her basement flooded.

  They were hanging out by the hall bookshelf, glancing into the living room where denture-rattling Uncle Ralston sat with a mute Ralston Jr. and a low-moaning Aunt Gloria. Everyone was in the kitchen or the dining room, Mom and Dad, too, so as not to have to navigate that triangle of family weirdness.

  I looked at Cello’s father, sitting in his fantastic absence of mind. His first breakdown wasn’t called that, but the second, in 1964, was impossible to explain away. He became manic over Dizzy Gillespie’s campaign for the presidency. They brought him home, almost hog-tied. Cello was twelve. Before she ever had a date, he’d been brought back from Africa, and then he starved himself in an adaptation of Dick Gregory’s diet. In those days, he carried around chess pawns that he’d press into our palms. We’d hand his secrets over to Dad.

  “Who they?” a former crazy asked of me in the hall outside the living room.

  “When the going gets rough, make pancakes,” I heard Dad chime somewhere.

  * * *

  “Happy trails. Put it there.”

  “Jed.”

  He slow-motion punched my Pillsbury Doughboy middle. “Jed.”

  He didn’t
tell me his name, but I knew his name because he came to see Mom a lot in the days following the riot.

  The white boy backed Dad up in his not letting Mom go to any more demonstrations that summer. Dad said it was bad enough that there were psycho nurse killers loose in the city. As if to make it up to her, the white boy let Mom convert his feelings into an eyewitness account of a white riot by one of the rioters who had repented of his ways and joined the very movement he had attacked. He spoke roughly; she put it down cleaned up. He understood quickly that that was how things were done.

  I sat around and watched them, my legs swinging from the chair. He lasted two weeks in the movement. He confessed that his people didn’t know about his open letter in the Eagle, a colored newspaper, and they didn’t want him in parts of town he didn’t know after dark, even at his age. He’d not told his people enough about what he pretended was the church group he’d become interested in. I’d somehow won my own copy of that issue of the Eagle, though I did not understand what the trouble was about. I couldn’t believe he’d been one of the whites throwing cherry bombs at our cars. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  I’d come across the yellowed copy of his letter from the summer of 1966 in the bottom of the last box in my closet. I started to ask Mom what had become of him, but I didn’t want to learn that she’d found his name on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., which Dad had refused to visit with her.

  * * *

  Dad said, “Crow is my least favorite food. It’s even worse when taken with the recommended slices of humble pie.” He was telling the story of how Mom believed in Harold Washington from the get-go, while he thought the poor man would just lose and lose.

  Mom raced into the living room, as though getting away from someone in the hall. She looked over at Aunt Gloria, who still had her head in her hands, the straps of her black patent leather purse wrapped like reins around her hand. The priest pushed through us and sat beside Aunt Gloria, comforting her. We could pretend that the triangle of family weirdness was a vigil for coalition politics in Chicago.