by Caryl Rivers
In my grave I rot
My thighs turn to worm-riddled mush
My lover’s semen long dried
Upon them
The memory of his sex
Upon my lips, long dead,
My lips a pulp
Of dirt and slime.
Mr. Wattles would smile and say, “That’s very nice, Becky. Now, we will read ‘Hiawatha.’”
All the other girls regarded Becky with awe, and it was rumored that not only had she lost her virginity but she had Done It with a Negro jazz drummer. Officially, every girl in Belvedere High was a Virgin — those who weren’t didn’t talk about it. Even Barbara Brownlee, who spent more time in the backseats of cars than anyone, swore up and down that while the necking was hot and heavy, she was saving her pearl of great price for the man she would marry.
In Mary’s fantasy, somehow — it was not clear how such disparate personalities would get together — Barbara and Mary Jane and Becky had signed up for one of the public White House tours. Barbara was a chubby mother of four, her once bewitching hips stretching out a spandex size 16 girdle, her middle bulging under a cheap wool dress. Mary Jane, with her now-squirrelly cheeks, had come upon hard times when her father’s stores went bankrupt. Now she was wearing hand-me-downs from the Goodwill bin in Silver Spring, and her look of insolent disdain had long since faded to a dull-eyed glare. Becky Bellingrath had been knocked up by her Negro lover, had an illegal abortion and was now a drug addict. She still wore black, which did not go at all with her greenish skin tones. Anyway, one day the tour that included the three of them just happened to pass by the Rose Garden, where Mary, chic in a linen suit, matching pumps and perfect hairdo, was chatting with John F. Kennedy about his policy on Cuba. All of a sudden, Barbara shrieked, “Oh, my God, it’s Mary Elizabeth Springer, and she’s talking to the president!”
And Mary, her perfect hair not even ruffled by the faintest of breezes, turned and gave them a dismissive wave.
“Who are they?” President Kennedy asked.
“Oh, they’re nobody,” she said. “Nobody at all.”
“God,” she said to Jay, “just think about what it would be like, on the White House beat full-time. You’d get to travel with the president, all over the world, you’d meet generals and prime ministers and kings. No more Rotary lunches.”
“No more Rainbow Girls.”
“No more Worthy Matrons of the Eastern Star.”
“No more store owners cutting fucking ribbons when the new supermarket opens.”
“We’ve been in the Emerald City, and they’re sending us back to Kansas.” She sighed.
He chuckled. “Keep your ruby slippers packed, we’ll be back. Listen, I’d better call in, the desk may have something for me.” He stopped in front of a Peoples’ Drug in Silver Spring, and Mary waited while he used the phone. When he got back in the car he said, “I think we got a fatal. Plane crash. Can you handle it?”
“Oh, Christ, of course I can handle it.”
“Sorry, you’re new on Cityside.”
“I can fucking handle it, OK,” she said.
“All right, let’s go.”
Journal: Donald A. Johnson
Today, I begin this Journal, in the Year of Our Lord 1963, in the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in what I believe will one day be called the era of Martin Luther King. I am 24 years old, male, Negro, Catholic, a graduate of the George Washington University, a resident (sometimes) of Washington, D.C. I am six feet tall, weigh 180 pounds and bat and throw right-handed. So much for stats.
I am going to put it on paper, now, what I have said only in whispers to myself, aloud only to my father in an act of bravado, never to myself because it sounded so — what? Absurd? Pompous? Because I was scared shitless to say it?
I am going to be a writer.
My father thinks that this is a phase, that it will pass, like my wanting to be the Lone Ranger when I was six. Writing is not a trade by which a Negro man can earn a living, except perhaps if he is fortunate enough to get a job with Ebony, he said. I told him I didn’t want to be a journalist, that I wanted to be an essayist or novelist, like James Baldwin or Richard Wright. He looked at me with that sadder, wiser expression he puts on when he wants to get the upper hand in an argument. I call it his De Lawd expression, but not to his face. He told me that writing was not a fitting profession for a man anyway, even a white man. I brought up Hemingway, and he snorted.
“Man runs around all the time shooting things,” he said. “Runs around in Africa, shooting lions. Damn fool thing to do.”
And thus was Ernest Hemingway dismissed from the company of serious men by Thomas Jefferson Johnson, M.D., literary critic and practitioner of internal medicine.
“I’ll be like Frank Yerby,” I said, straight-faced.
He took the bait. One thing about my father, he always does. His face knotted up into a scowl. I smiled again. My grandma Johnson had stacks of trashy novels by Frank Yerby in her bedroom, much to my father’s disgust, with titles like The Saracen Blade and Goodbye My Fancy.
“He’s a Negro, you know,” I said, “and he makes piles of money.”
“Damned trash,” my father muttered. “I can’t see why in the world she reads that stuff.”
I could. I certainly could. More bosoms were bared in the oeuvre of Frank Yerby than in all the harems of Arabia. Milk white ones, usually. The fact that Frank Yerby was a Negro was not widely known among his legions of fans. Even his picture on the book jacket wasn’t a giveaway. He looked vaguely like Cesar Romero, the movie actor. He was what my grandma Johnson used to call high yellow (my father hated that phrase, thought it common), light enough to pass.
Sometimes a bosom was “dusky” in Yerby’s books, but that was as dark as it got, sort of Mediterranean. I used to laugh, thinking of all the crackers reading those books, sweating over those imagined white bosoms, never knowing the imaginer was a lot duskier than they thought. That would make them pee in their pants.
Someone was always ripping bodices in Yerby’s books. I never knew there was a word like bodice until I read his books. People I know did not go around saying, “Wow, did you see the bodice on that chick?” But in past centuries women all wore bodices, pieces of cloth that seemed to be made specifically for tearing off. You could practically hear the racket as the stuff came shredding apart in virile male hands. The ladies seemed to like it, a lot. Grandma would read for hours, her foot tapping. Sometimes the foot would tap a little faster, and I figured another bodice just bit the dust.
I used to steal her books when she wasn’t looking, because I figured I wasn’t supposed to read this stuff. Frank Yerby wasn’t any Hemingway, though. Can you imagine Hemingway writing dialogue like “Ah ha, proud wench, you will come crawling to me in the end!” But he was very good at metaphors about torn bodices: flowers bursting into bloom, or ripe pomegranates. It was instructive for me at the time, because the only female chest I’d actually seen belonged to my sister, Darlene, who was seven then and flat as a board. Dusky, but no melons or rosebuds in sight, just a couple of brown bumps that were not at all like pomegranates — whatever they were.
Grandma knew I took her books, but she never chastised me for it. She never chastised me for anything, come to think of it. My father’s mother had lived with us as far back as I can remember. It’s funny, but it was my grandma who immediately swung into action when my sister or I got sick. My father never looked at us until we were at death’s door, typical of doctors and their own kids. My grandmother had her own limited but effective methods. Witch hazel was her therapy for most things, especially fevers. She’d strip us down to our underpants and sponge us all over with witch hazel and cool water, until our fevered bodies started getting goose bumps and we were in danger of getting Pee-new-monia, as Darlene used to call it. Then she’d march us to the kitchen for a bowl of Campbell’s chicken with rice soup, another healing subs
tance Grandma swore by. It wasn’t very exotic — grandmothers are supposed to toil for hours over homemade brews. Not mine. She just opened a can, dumped the gooey jell into a saucepan, added water and that was that. Witch hazel and Campbell’s soup from a can. They cured most things.
But the very best part of being sick was when Grandma would read to us. Children’s stories, when we were little, but soon she graduated to sterner stuff: Jack London’s Call of the Wild and books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and The Land That Time Forgot.
She never in her life had been north of Baltimore, or farther west than Belvedere, Maryland, where my uncle has his church, but she loved stories of the Alaskan wilderness, of a campfire flame glowing orange in the eyes of wolves. The way she read the stories, in that deep voice of hers, when she described the howl of wolves in the starry Alaskan night, I shivered with delight and felt the cold against my skin and heard the mournful cry hurled to the moon. At that moment, I believe, I actually became a wolf.
Grandma was just as much at home in the Jurassic as she was on the Alaskan tundra. I saw pterodactyls tearing at human flesh and mammoths thudding once more upon the earth in The Land That Time Forgot. Grandma had no truck with literary realism. Give her orange-eyed wolves and flesh-tearing birds, and of course, heaving bosoms.
Frank Yerby might have dreamed up Tarzan, but in his book, Lord Greystoke would have spent most of his time feeling up Jane. Edgar Rice Burroughs, more Victorian by temperament, drew a genteel veil over Jane and Tarzan’s private life, much, I am sure, to Grandma Johnson’s dismay. She liked to see it all hang out, in a manner of speaking.
Frank Yerby might have ruined me as a writer, with all that ripe imagery, if it hadn’t been for Thomas Walsh, S.J., of St. Aloysius Gonzaga High School. He smacked my hands with a ruler whenever I used too many adjectives.
“Simplify, young man, simplify,” he’d say. “Prose should be as pure as a martyr’s soul.” If Frank Yerby had been in Father Walsh’s class, ole Frank would have had both hands in casts. Father Walsh had absolutely no truck with fruit-imagery — nor with bosoms, I imagine.
He never seemed to notice that I wasn’t white like all the other kids in the class. I mean, he really wasn’t aware of it, so intent was he on whacking out all my adjectives. He was the first person who told me I could write. Very matter-of-factly he said to me one day, “Young man, when one has a gift, it is a sin not to nurture it.” He never called any of us by name. I wonder if he knew them. I could hardly believe my ears, and I said, “Me, Father? A gift?” And he said, “You have a dangling participle in your third paragraph.” And that was that.
But I couldn’t stop grinning all the way home from school, even when my lips felt stretched and sore. I had a gift. I felt this swelling inside my chest, as if somebody inside me was blowing up a balloon. And I knew that my life had changed forever. But I never had the courage to say it out loud. Now, I do.
I, Donald A. (for Abednego) Johnson, have a gift.
But that presents a problem. I have been working in the South with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on a voter registration project. I first came south on one of the Freedom Rides, probably the way Hemingway went to the Spanish Civil War, because he believed in the cause and that’s where the action was. I saw for myself how much work has to be done here, important work. I applied for a fellowship in the creative writing program at Georgetown University as a long shot, never expecting I’d get it. I did, to my astonishment. But I wonder, should I take it? There’s so much happening now, I think I ought to stay in the South. But I have this feeling that if I don’t strike out now, really try to be a writer, I’ll never do it at all. I used to wonder if Father Walsh was the only person who’d say I had talent; maybe it was easy to be good in high school, where the competition isn’t great. But I was selected from among five hundred applicants for this fellowship; it pays full tuition and a stipend, and the possibility of going on to get a master’s at the university. My friends here are telling me to go; they say if I get homesick, they’ll give a rednecked sheriff a bus trip north, and he can lecture in my class on the Bubba factor in southern literature.
I don’t know. It’s something I’ll have to think about.
As Jay put his foot down on the accelerator, the sullen mood he’d worked up earlier that morning was barely a memory. Belvedere, Maryland, was enough to make him sullen. He was twenty-seven and slightly desperate, and he could not forgive Belvedere for not being Burma or the Sahara or the subcontinent of India. At least it was only forty-seven miles away from the White House, and that was something. Belvedere was a city waiting for its future, anxiously, as a commuter waits for a bus. Early in the century Belvedere had the best manufacturer of lawn mowers in the East, precision blades, cast to last a lifetime, with sounds that were gentle swishes, a joy to the ear as the mowers sailed across American lawns from Syracuse to Toledo. The stately white homes on Main Street were built on a mountain of new-mown grass. But the coming of the power mower doomed the company and the city that had grown up around it. The postwar prosperity that engulfed the nation simply passed over many small urban pockets like Belvedere, as the Angel of Death passed over the houses of the Israelites. But Belvedere waited. Washington, to the east, and Baltimore, to the north, were growing like giant amoebas, part of the galloping megalopolis that the East Coast was becoming, and Belvedere could not fail to be engulfed. The new storefronts, with their smiling expanses of plate glass, were badges of hope. They hung on old buildings, false as dentures, waiting for prosperity to arrive.
This geography was the reason for the reemergence of the Belvedere Blade, financed by chicken money from the Eastern Shore. It was young, feisty and the equal of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in its munificence of pay. Its young staffers saw it as a way station on the way to the Post, the Times — and, for the most ambitious among them, the Pulitzer Prize. Their newspaper office was a converted warehouse, and a portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, ripped from the pages of Life, held a place of pride on one of its walls. He was their president — the others had been old men — the first to be born in the twentieth century, and he had stood eyeball to eyeball with the Soviets, and the other guy blinked. They were young, their country was young and so was their president, who said to them, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” They were not old enough yet to be cynical, or to believe there was anything Americans could not do. It was 1963, and everything was possible.
It was under that portrait, that very morning, that Jay had been busy at a task he deemed worthy of his talents. He had come in, on his own time, to examine the photo essays he had been preparing. The paper was put out by a new process called photo-offset, and pictures came out crisp and clear, not faded and murky like they did in most newspapers, and the Blade used many photographs. A project he especially liked was on Belvedere, in the manner of the Ben Shahn Depression photographs. Images of Belvedere captured the bleak eyes of the old men who hung around the railroad station and the shacks in Niggertown and the vacant, sagging second stories of the buildings that wore the flashy new storefronts. He gave the pictures to Milt Beerman, the city editor. Milt looked at them and said, “Christ, Jay, this makes Belvedere look like the Black Hole of Calcutta.”
“In Calcutta they talk about the Black Hole of Belvedere.”
“Can’t you work in a couple of happy pictures? Charlie wants happy pictures. How about children frolicking in a schoolyard?”
“How about children rolling a Spanish-American War veteran?”
“I like the spread, but it’s unbalanced. A couple of happy pictures, or it’s no go.”
“OK, OK, I’ll get pictures so happy they’ll make you want to vomit.”
He walked back to the desk and resumed work on another of his favorites, Life at the White House. He had pictures of astronauts and film stars and Kennedy relatives, and of course the President, and Jacqueline, who appeared on occasion to champ
ion a special cause, often in the arts. He spread a series of photographs of her out across his desk. He thought her exquisite, with her wide, dark eyes and dark hair, and her whispery, girlish voice. He suspected her primness concealed a deep well of sensuality. The fashion, these days, was for blond goddesses with enormous breasts, but he agreed with the functionalists that less is more. He liked to imagine that deep well in her that had not been tapped, fully. Yes, her husband was movie star handsome, but he was away a lot, and there were those rumors that floated around in the press corps. He thought how lovely it would be if, one day, as he followed her on a photo tour of the newly redone White House (he’d be with Life, of course), her eyes met his over an eighteenth-century Hepplewhite chest, and she reached out with her white-gloved hand and took his, and she led him upstairs to a small but beautifully appointed room. Her breasts would be small and elegant, white as marble, and he would make ardent love to her on a green silk-covered settee under a portrait of Alexander Hamilton. She would moan, delicately (this was a respectful, high-class First Lady fantasy, no whooping or thrashing or semen stains on the green silk). She might give him a delicate, passionate nip or two with her small white teeth. That would be nice. Afterwards, she would touch his face gently with her white gloves — she never took them off, and that drove him mad with passion — and murmur, “I never knew it could be like this.” And then they would continue the tour, under the eyes of Secret Service agents and visiting diplomats, she displaying her gratitude with only a slight pressure of her gloved hand on his arm as she pointed out a cabinet from the early Federal period.
Or he might be sailing on the world-class yacht of a patron of the arts, leaning against the rail, looking out at the calm ocean, and suddenly he would be aware of someone beside him. He would turn, and there she would be — her husband was off someplace talking to Khrushchev about nuclear war —and in her gentle whisper she would say, “I so admired your photographs, in Life, of the great cathedrals.”