American Histories
Page 4
Rules and words incontestably not us, and for that reason we’re correct to ignore her, the teacher, and ignore ourselves, a group of students incontestably not present, though here we are, too, and we better take down in our workbooks the rules, words she doesn’t exactly fling over her shoulder or sprinkle like a farm lady feeding chickens. But we ought to be grateful as chickens. Our lives at risk, at stake if we don’t pay attention or even if we do. We better gobble up what little we can of those words and rules to guide us in a dangerous, unforgiving world we will occasionally awaken from sleep to find ourselves immersed in, surrounded by.
* * *
In the morning, eavesdropping on sounds that drift up through the floor, occasionally I hear a radio or TV playing somewhere, in an empty room I believe, nobody listening to an announcer’s voice all business, articulating snippets of news that fade, dissolve before I’m able to identify a single word, and I regret I didn’t flat-out ask Mrs. Cosa the shape of the world.
* * *
Of course, no fourth-grade teacher, then or now, could answer my questions about where or how an unknowable world begins or ends. I don’t blame Mrs. Cosa, even feel sorry for her. Not her fault I kept my question inside myself. Big crush on her once, piece of chalk in her hand, a small, neat, pale white lady all alone up there in front of us in her cat-eye glasses. Then again I’d get furious with her for reminding me we were all of us, teacher, room, school, hopelessly lost. Nowhere in fact. She’s a turd, a stinking, ugly speck of shit floating around on the back of a roach with us till we all fall off again and land deeper in mucky nowhere.
* * *
If Mrs. Cosa heard me think that, I don’t believe she’d be angry or hurt or insulted. She might even nod, Yes. Yes, but she’s not responsible for what she is, is she. Doesn’t know, does she. She’s just there where she is. Like us in our seats or desks or boxes or emptified heads. Somebody else or some giant animal maybe squatted and pooped us, pooped her in front of us so don’t ask. She didn’t do it. Doesn’t, couldn’t know the answer. Words and rules not her, not hers. You shitty kids, what she would probably think or say about us if her mind were not busy performing this part of the job she’s paid for. Rules. Words. And we’d probably agree. You’re right, Mrs. Cosa. Yes. Yes, a pipey chorus of kid voices.
* * *
Reading a story or writing one, I hope the world will be different at the point the story ends. Same wish that motivates me some mornings to sit in the bathroom and listen for sounds, for silences telling me I am not the silence that surrounds me. Signs that assure me I possess a shape that belongs to me, and it can poke its way through silence, get on with a life. A different life I can’t imagine. Except as difference. Except as unknowable.
* * *
World I want to be different is not like fictions stirred up by words on a page, not one that starts where its words start and finishes with the last word like any story I can choose to read or not or stop reading or stop writing and do my time elsewhere. The different world I long to inhabit is the one inhabiting me, no beginning or end. This world where I’m stuck forever, however long that might be. Me and everything else and nothing. Same space, same shape, same thing I am.
* * *
So I wait. And wait and listen and wait while the unknown drips somewhere, drop by drop like a leaky faucet in a bathroom I almost can hear from mine. Dripping drops of it accumulating in a sink until the sink overflows, and a flood faster than the speed of light takes everything with it wherever it goes to vanish. No mess left behind for anybody to clean up, no stories with a person inside waiting.
MY DEAD
* * *
Edgar Lawson Wideman: sept 2, 1918–dec 14, 2001
Bette Alfreda French Wideman: may 15, 1921–feb 7, 2008
Otis Eugene Wideman: march 6, 1945–jan 11, 2009
David Lawson Wideman: may 7, 1949–oct 19, 2014
Monique Renee Walters: nov 21, 1966–feb 6, 2015
I list my dead. Father. Mother. Brother. Brother. Sister’s daughter. For some reason their funeral programs share a manila folder. During a bad ten months I had lost a brother, a niece, and they joined the rest of my dead. The dead remembered, forgotten, adrift. The dead in a folder. There and not here. Dead whose names never change. The dead who return secretly, anonymously, hidden within other names until they vanish, appear again.
* * *
March 6, the date I noted in my journal after I had compiled a list and returned the programs to their folder, happens to be my brother Otis Eugene’s birthday, a date like others in the list, I tend to forget, as he is often forgotten when I revisit family memories. My younger brother Otis who survived our unforgettable mother barely a year. My quiet, forgettable brother, his birth separated from mine by four years, by twins, a boy and girl, neither living longer than a week.
* * *
Their deaths, of course, a terrible blow for our mother. She never spoke of those lost babies, and late in her life denied to my sister that the births had occurred. No dead twins in the four-year interval between me, her eldest, and my next brother, Otis. Other siblings arrived after the empty four years. New lives, two years separating each birth from the next, regular as rain, until five of us, four boys, one girl in the middle. With her hands full, heart full of caring for the ones alive, why would my mother allow herself to sink back into that abyss of watching two infants, so perfectly formed, so freshly dropped from inside her, leave the world and disappear as if her womb harbored death as naturally as life.
* * *
My brother was named Otis for our mother’s brother and Eugene for our father’s brother. Uncle Otis was very much alive, but Uncle Eugene dead already or soon to die on Guam, when my brother born. Uncle Eugene dying needlessly, or, you could say, ironically, since war with Japan officially declared over, a truce in force the sniper who shot Eugene didn’t know about or perhaps refused to honor because too much killing, too many comrades dead. Why not shoot one more American soldier beachcombing for souvenirs where he had no right to trespass, no palpable reason to continue to live in the mind of an enemy whose duty was to repel invaders, to follow in his rifle’s scope their movements. Not exactly easy targets, but almost a sure thing for a practiced marksman, even a sniper very weary, beat-up from no sleep, constant harassment of enemy planes, tanks, flamethrowers, a shooter trained to take his time, forget hunger, thirst, his dead, his home islands far too close to this doomed Guam as he gauges, tracks his prey, picks out a brown man who will surely, fatally fall before the others scatter for cover, before he, himself, is observed or snipered on this day he’s not aware the war’s over or is aware and doesn’t care as he chooses someone to kill, freezes the rifle’s swing, stops breathing, squeezes the trigger.
* * *
Uncle Otis, like our father and our father’s brother, Eugene, served in World War II. Uncle Otis returned home to become a part of family life, always around until I was grown up with kids and my youngest sibling a teenager. We all still remember him fondly, Big Ote to distinguish him from Little Ote, my brother, who also carried the name of the uncle none of us in my generation had ever seen. Except I claimed to recall my uncle Eugene, even though my mother insistently objected, no-no-no you were way too young, just a baby when he left for the war. I persisted in my claim, wrote my first published story to bear witness to his living presence within me, my closeness with a long-dead man more intimate, continuous, and attested, I’m almost ashamed to admit, than recollections I have of his namesake, my brother. A brother who, for reasons never shared with me, preferred to be called Gene once he became an adult.
* * *
Gene, the name everybody I met in Atlanta called him when I traveled there for his funeral. Over the years I had taught myself to say Gene when I addressed my brother in groups not family or introduced him to strangers or on those rare occasions when just the two of us were conversing and I wanted to show him I treated his wish to be called Gene seriously, how once, anyway, in this specif
ic case I would make an effort to forget I was his elder, oldest of the siblings, and follow his lead. Act as if his right to name himself might really matter to me, and for once he could set the rules. My little brother Gene in charge, and me behaving as if he has escaped the box, the traps I spent so much evil time elaborately, indefatigably laying for him during our childhood. Not much use for a younger brother when we were growing up. Except when he served as temporary or potential victim and I was, yes, yes, like some goddamned sniper drawing a bead on an enemy soldier totally unaware his life dangled at the end of a thread in my fingers.
* * *
Gene. In Atlanta the name didn’t sound like the affectation I had once considered it, my brother’s rather late in the day, thus partly funny, partly irrelevant and futile striking out for independence. An attempt perhaps to wipe the slate clean by rebaptizing himself and answering only to a name he had chosen. A not-too-subtle effort to cancel prerogatives and status other members of the family had earned over the long haul of growing up intertwined, separate and unequal. Like the privilege I had granted myself, no blame or guilt attached, to seldom phone him. To not recall or acknowledge him whatsoever for long stretches of time if I chose. My forgettable brother.
* * *
Now I concede it was less a matter of qualities he possessed or didn’t possess that caused him to be forgettable, but my presumptions, my bottomless unease. Wasn’t I the most worthy, important brother in the family, the world. The one who, therefore, must occupy all space available, even if no space left for anyone else. Forgetting a brother a convenient tactic to ensure I never found him in my way. An annoyance. A barrier. A ghost.
* * *
I went to Atlanta to bury a brother and found Gene. Not Otis or Little Ote. Not Otis Eugene. Once my brother chose Gene as his new name, I stopped associating that name with the uncle who had died in the Pacific war. Eugene whose big sneakers I believed I remembered seeing on live feet. People in Atlanta who knew my brother had probably never heard of Eugene, our dead uncle. When they talked about a Gene, the name transformed me into a stranger, an intruder. I recalled names I had made up to keep my brother in his place, tease him to tears in ugly games while we were kids stuck in the same small house. Names I’d forgotten after we both left home. Then for years and years almost no name necessary for him. Few occasions arose to speak of a brother or speak to him or summon him into my thoughts.
* * *
I could have let him be Gene in Atlanta. Isn’t that what he asked. Wasn’t that one reason for his long, self-imposed exile. No trips back home unless someone very sick, dying, dead. Another city, another state, another start with another name he had picked. A new family, not necessarily to replace the old but to fill emptiness where maybe he’d always felt homeless or smothered or locked down in spaces like the ones I allowed him. Spaces with room for him only if he stayed in them alone.
* * *
I could have let myself be satisfied with seeing Gene, convinced myself I was saying goodbye to a stranger in Atlanta, but it was him, his neat, pencil-thin mustache, elegant features, my brother’s unbegrudging silence in the open casket.
MUSIC
* * *
I find my sister in the big, soft chair where I’d usually find Charles. Television playing with no sound. She is asleep until I pat her shoulder and her eyelids flutter. Leaning down closer to her ear I say, “Time for bed, miss.”
She’s dressed for bed. Probably had been upstairs to bed at least once before she wound up in the chair in front of a muted TV in the living room at three in the morning where I had wandered after bed and sleep failed me, too.
As I had tipped down the dark stairs, blinks of light from the living room did not help much, and my hand used the wooden banister on the stairwell’s open side to guide me, to remind me that a rail laid atop the steps ran down along the opposite wall, a steel track for an incline that carried a chair up and down, a rail that could trip you up and break your neck if you weren’t careful.
“Dreamed of my girl,” my sister, eyes shut again, halfway whispers as if worried speaking too loud might disturb somebody’s sleep. Her own. Her dream.
Dreaming of a daughter who had died only a few months before this visit, whose long illness had confined her to a wheelchair that required the motorized lift I’d just been avoiding. This is what I think first when I hear my sister’s words, but something soft in her voice had opened to let me enter, and I understand the girl she dreamed of was two girls, my grown-up niece whose untouched room I’m not yet prepared to enter alone, and the baby, not quite two, lost how many, many years ago, and as usual when I recall the one who never grew up, always strangely older and younger than her sister, a song starts to play, silently as pictures moving across the screen until I turn off the TV. That old Spinners song we had danced to in this same room, dark then, too. My niece tiny, fever sweaty, swaddled in a nightgown, me cradling her in my arms, blowing on her brow to cool it with my breath as we swayed, near to sleep like my sister in the chair who bestirs herself, reaches back to plant her palms on the armrests, scrunches her weight forward to get it balanced on her feet to stand. To smile, to go up to bed.
BONDS
* * *
She struggles to keep him inside her. Not because she knows that in less than six months Japan will bomb Pearl Harbor and this country, flags flying, will join in the slaughter of world war and that child after child, all colors, sizes, shapes, religions, nationalities, including babies like the one she’s expecting, will be gathered up and starved, tortured, incinerated.
* * *
Struggles to keep her baby inside not because she understood the horror of war, understood that once it starts the horror never ends, young men put in uniforms and marched off to save the country or die trying, some of those soldiers young men from her colored neighborhood, two she will never meet except as names on a memorial plaque beside the door of Homewood’s Carnegie public library, where her brother Otis, who made it back from war, used to take her by the hand to borrow books, then years later took her son, men returning she will encounter in the street or in movies or on TV, some full of love for any girl or boy inside her, men who gladly would risk their lives to protect her or her children playing in the streets, but others rotten with war’s hate, men with weapons the government issues and teaches them to shoot, men who would kill, no regrets, any children she’d bear.
* * *
She struggles to keep the baby inside not because she feared terrible pain once she starts to squeeze him out. Pain scalding her they say worse than the hot comb when her mother digs too deep. Told you stop your fidgeting, girl. Holler and jump you make me burn you again. She’d never disbelieved the women’s stories about how godawful the pain. Harder to believe what they said about how suddenly easy it is afterwards, after all the suffering, your insides tearing apart inch by inch, then out comes the baby and it’s a sweet, warm bundle on your chest and you won’t remember why all the screams and carrying-on. Won’t remember you’d been thinking just minutes before you’d rather die than burn one second more.
* * *
She keeps him inside not because she knew the baby a he, not because she knew she’d be closer to the end of her life once his life begins. Not because she knew his eyes the last eyes to see her alive. Him silent on a hospital chair beside her hospital bed, book in his hands, monitor beep-beep-beeping, his eyes on a page the precise instant she’s no more, missing her last breath.
* * *
She’s determined to keep the baby inside longer not because longer might change the baby’s color or keep money always in her child’s pocket. Longer inside not because of things she knows or should or could or might not want to know. She holds him inside because she’s sure the day is Friday, June thirteen, and sure the child she carries already has two strikes against it—strike of poor, strike of colored—and no way she’s going to let a third strike—bad luck of being born on Friday the thirteenth—doom every day of her first chi
ld’s life on earth before it even gets here.
* * *
She will struggle till midnight. Then four or five minutes past midnight, she decides. For good measure. To be absolutely certain. Four or five minutes more of agony, bearable or not bearable.
* * *
Then okay . . . okay now, she will say to herself, no strength left to speak the words aloud. No one in the room but her anyway, so she thinks okay. Rolls her eyeballs up to the wall clock to be sure, an effort that almost kills her, and then okay now, she says. Lets go of all that scorching air hoarded inside her gut. Only a tiny hole for it to pass through. She gasps, hollers. Sighs and gulps. A dull pop then a pop-popping push, rush, and shit . . . oh, shit. Please, not shit. Let it be air, a fart, no, many rumbling humongous farts. And oh my, oh my, my she’s spewing water, blood, beans, those baked beans doctor and mother both had warned her not to eat. Beans, a baby, a nasty mess dirtying the bed, cleaning out her insides. A small voice in her head mutters feeble apologies, but she knows she’s smiling. Stinky. Wet. Warm. Not alone.
* * *
She struggled to hold him inside a little longer she tells him one day because on that miserable night of June 13, and with two strikes against him she had no power to change, she told herself to stop shuddering, squirming, moaning, and groaning. Wrapped herself in bonds of steel. Steel around thighs, knees. Steel tying her ankle bones together so no part of him leaks or peeks or sneaks out and gets struck by a bolt of Friday the Thirteenth’s evil lightning.
* * *
She struggled to keep the baby inside not because she feared losing her first one. Not because she feared it might be her last. Not because she understood what would happen or not happen to the boy or girl. She held on because six minutes of June 14, 1941, needed to pass before she’d let go, and now more than three-quarters of a century has passed, many, many June fourteens, and each one his birthday, him alive and breathing and her, too, he tells her, and won’t let go.