American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  NEW START

  * * *

  We were in bed watching TV. My beautiful, scared wife and scared, colored me. Watching had become our nightly habit since treatments began that might save my life if they didn’t kill me. We’d pick a series recommended by somebody we liked, with, ideally, lots of seasons already under its belt, so depending on mood, degree of exhaustion, length and quality of episodes, we could choose to watch one, two, sometimes, rarely, three before sleep. Or watch, as was often the case, before a night of broken sleep. Restless, anxious. Waiting for morning. One day less in the countdown to my final treatment. One night less. Us closer to the next night we could start to watch again.

  * * *

  In one of Downton Abbey’s cavernous rooms, large enough to hold the entire house I grew up in, a room whose art and furnishings worth more money than you’d need to pay off all mortgages on every dwelling in the block of real estate in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where my family had lived, the Abbey’s owners and present residents sit and stand, posed elegantly, drinks in hand or close enough at hand to reach easily or to be handed to them by an efficient servant. A cast of meticulously dressed and groomed British aristocrats exhausted, a bit stunned by the financial success, announced only moments before, of the tour of Downton some of them had just finished conducting, ushering members of the public, willing to pay, through fabled inner sanctums of their ancestral home in order to raise funds for a war memorial to honor young men of the village who had gone off to fight the Kaiser’s legions and would never return.

  * * *

  So many visitors. So many strangers willing to buy a ticket. Such curiosity. The interest not unexpected, of course. Downton Abbey was Downton Abbey, wasn’t it. And always would be, would it not, thank you. Thank goodness. Long lines all afternoon. The endless questions. Adult villagers, farmers, laborers, tradespeople wide-eyed as children stringing along beside and behind them, even people in service at other Great Houses streaming in, excited, cowed to speechlessness at certain moments, faces expressing awe or almost reverence of a sort. Like peasants in church. Or country folk at a traveling carnival delighted by an opportunity to be delighted, or delighted by the privilege of a few hours free to play at being delighted. A public, private treat. Or even treatment, you might call it. Church on Sunday morning. A day at a country fair. A slow amble through polished marvels of Downton Abbey led by one of its formidable denizens.

  * * *

  And, wasn’t that it. Wasn’t a guide, one of us close enough to touch, the touch that made a tour inside Downton utterly unforgettable for the dears.

  * * *

  No. No-no, Cousin. They flock to view us in our cages. A day at the zoological gardens to observe odd creatures through the bars.

  * * *

  What a perfectly disagreeable idea. Shame on you, you wicked girl. Surely you don’t believe that our guests entertain actual thoughts. Goodness gracious, dear. Why bother ourselves one tad about that lot or their notions. Except to recall that Mr. Branson reported money positively poured in today. More tours could produce useful revenue.

  * * *

  More tours. No-no-no. Please. Never again. Heavens, no . . .

  * * *

  In bed we watch and listen. Tourists, too. Paying, too. Watch a moment in a TV melodrama when a tour conducted by Downton Abbey’s owners surprises them into a sudden awareness of themselves as characters in a show being staged for an audience, watched by an audience. A moment characters did not see coming until the script demands a tour of their imaginary lives.

  Downton Abbey’s characters slightly dismayed when they realize the roles they play consume, not save them. A show may be a long-running hit, yet remains temporary. Empires fall, individual lives, virtuous or villainous, collapse. Sooner or later, no matter how convincingly an actor renders a character, you can only fool some of the people some of the time. And even though a sucker born every minute and fools rush in and writers contrive sudden, unexpected exits and entrances to unsettle or entice viewers, everybody knows that sooner or later, all good things must come to an end.

  * * *

  After the scene I’m recalling, after tours had been dispensed at Downton Abbey and crowds had passed from room to room, all visitors finally led away, gate locked, big day over, we watch till the episode concludes. Reach this last room. Last scene. Just the two of us, alone, quiet, TV dark, watching ourselves watch an empty screen. Stuck here frightened in our bed. Tour dissolving and we have nowhere else to go. I try to imagine someone watching us, watching through eyes not ours, eyes present, attentive. We need eyes to watch us. Watching as if we are special and eternal as nobility. Eyes that imagine the show we perform worth more of their time.

  * * *

  To feel safe again we need others spying on us as we spy on them, their eyes a video cam that hovers above us all in the sky. But the same camera delivering us to others and delivering them to us delivers other shows, many shows, far too many, all beamed at once—floods, fires, earthquakes, plagues of incurable disease, young men in antique uniforms exploded to gravy just yesterday in the bottom of trenches in France, a brown young man slumped today in the front seat of a Honda Civic, bloody, dying, dead. Woman narrating the story we observe as it unfolds, her voice-over oddly detached until it breaks, Don’t tell me you shot him, Officer, please don’t tell me you shot my man—bang, bang, bang, bang—four times—don’t tell me my love’s dead, Officer, please, sir, don’t say it.

  * * *

  Shows intervene and we can’t turn them off, competing, multiplying, streaming faster than the speed of light on millions of screens.

  * * *

  I think I hear the Downton actors complain, Stop watching us, please. Stop watching, waiting to see us lose our places, our lives. Watching us to forget who you are. Watching us undress, watching us weep. Crying along with us. As if you don’t dance, pray, burn, too. As if you don’t pretend to be real. Stop, please. Allow us to do our jobs. Maintain our distance, composure. Our characters. Please. Go your way and let us go ours. Why would you wish to see us as we see you, dead on an empty screen.

  * * *

  I recite to myself the simple rules. How we arrive here, empty-handed, and must stand in line for tickets, rain or shine. How all stories are true, my love, like ours, until we tumble out of them and then they are different and true again. How we are required to stand in drizzle outside the Abbey’s gate. Silence the rule until the show starts again. Silence the rule while we imagine treats wonderful as the promise of blue skies over our heads, wonderful as a time when anyone can be king or queen for a day.

  * * *

  No TV. Room dark. Are we closer to sleep or no sleep. Man and wife, each of us alone now. Scared woman, scared man. Wondering what comes next. Our bedroom like a space where people stand before a movie starts or the space where you hover in a restaurant until a table cleared for your meal. I think of the little plaque almost hidden in a corner by subtle lighting in Clandestino, our favorite chic but not too expensive Lower East Side spot. If waiters could talk.

  MAPS AND LEDGERS

  * * *

  My first year teaching at the university my father killed a man. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember the man’s name, though I recall the man a good buddy of my father and they worked for the city of Pittsburgh on a garbage truck and the man’s family knew ours and we knew some of them, my sister said. Knew them in that way black people who lived in the same neighborhood knew each other and everybody else black in a city that divided itself by keeping all people of color in the same place back then no matter where in the city you lived.

  I did not slip up, say or do the wrong thing when the call that came into the English Department, through the secretary’s phone to the chairman’s phone, finally reached me, after the secretary had knocked and escorted me down the hall to the chair’s office, where I heard my mother crying because my father in jail for killing a man and she didn’t know what to do except she had to let me know. She
knew I needed to know and knew no matter how much a call would upset me, I would be more upset if she didn’t call, even though calling meant, since I didn’t have a home phone yet nor a direct line in my office and no cell phones, she would have to use the only number I’d given her and said to use only for emergencies and wasn’t this an emergency, hers, mine, we had to deal with, she and I, her trying not to weep into the phone she was holding in Pittsburgh while she spoke to strangers in Philadelphia, white people strangers to make it worse, a woman’s voice then a man’s before she reached me with the news I needed to know and none of it anybody’s business, terrible business breaking her heart to say to me even though I needed to know and would want to know despite where I was and who I was attempting to be, far away from home, surrounded by strangers probably all of them white which made everything worse she didn’t need to say because I heard it in her voice by the fifth or sixth word, her voice that didn’t belong in the chair’s office, a story not for a chairperson’s ears, but he was southern gentleman enough as well as enough of a world-renowned Chaucer scholar to hand me the phone and excuse himself and shut the office door behind him so I could listen in peace to my mother crying softly and trying to make sense of a dead man and my father in jail for killing him, his cut-buddy I can say to myself now and almost smile at misunderstandings, bad jokes, ill will, superiority, inferiority stirred up when I switch between two languages, languages almost but never quite mutually intelligible, one kind I talked at home when nearly always only colored folks listening, another kind spoken and written by white folks talking to no one or to one another or at us if they wanted something from us, two related-by-blood languages that throttled or erased or laughed at or disrespected each other more often than engaging in useful exchange, but I didn’t slip once in my conversation with the chair, didn’t say my gotdam daddy cut his gotdamn cut-buddy, no colored talk or nigger jokes from either of us in the office when a phone call from my mom busted in and blew away my cover that second or third day of my first or second week of my first college teaching job.

  * * *

  My aunt C got my father a lawyer. Aunt C lived five doors away on our street, Copeland, when I was growing up. My family of Mom, Dad, five kids had moved into an upstairs three-room apartment in a row house at the end of a block where a few colored families permitted because the housing stock badly deteriorated and nobody white who could afford not to wanted to live on the busted block, after coloreds had been sneaked into a few of Copeland’s row houses or modest two-story dwellings squeezed in between, like the one Aunt C and her husband could afford to buy and fix up because he was a numbers banker, but most of us coloreds, including my mother and father, had to scrimp and scuffle just to occupy month by month, poaching till the rent man put us out in the street again, but residents long enough for their kids to benefit for a while from better schools of a neighborhood all white except for a handful of us scattered here and there down at the bottom of a couple streets like Copeland.

  Aunt C a rarity, a pioneer you might say because she worked in the planning office of the city, a good job she finessed, she explained to me once, by routing her application through the Veterans Administration since she’d served as a WAC officer during WW II and guessed that by the time the city paper pushers noticed her color disqualified her, the military service record that made her eligible for a position and elevated her to the top of the list would have already gotten her hired, only woman, only colored, decades before anybody colored not a janitor or cleaning woman got hired by the city to work in downtown office buildings. Aunt C who I could always count on to find some trifling job around her house for me to earn a couple quarters when I needed pocket change or bigger jobs car washing, neatening up and cutting the grass in her tiny backyard when I needed new sneakers or a new shirt my parents couldn’t buy, and then counted on her again years later because she was the one who knew everybody and everybody’s dirt downtown, and got my father—her elder brother—an attorney, a colored one who also knew everybody and everybody’s dirt downtown, the man as much or more of a rarity, an exception in his way as my aunt since he not only practiced law but served in the state legislature as majority speaker, an honor, achievement, irony, and incongruity I haven’t been able to account for to this day, but he wound up representing my father and saving him from prison, thanks to Aunt C. That same colored lawyer one day would say to me, shaking his head and reaching out and placing his hand on my shoulder, Family of poor old Aeschylus got nothing on yours, son, as if to inform me, though he understood both of us already knew, that once my mother’s phone call had caught up with me, Aunt C doing her best or no Aunt C—things would only get worse.

  * * *

  No, my father didn’t serve time for murder. Lawyer plea-bargained self-defense and victim colored like my father anyway so they chose to let my father go. But things did get worse. My father’s son, my youngest brother, convicted of felony murder. And years later my son received a life sentence at sixteen. My brother, my son still doing time. And my father’s imprisoned son’s son a murder victim. And a son of my brother’s dead son just released from prison a week ago. And I’m more than half ashamed I don’t know if the son, whose name I can’t recall, of my brother’s dead son has fathered a son or a daughter. My guess is the rumor of a child true since if my grandnephew was old enough for adult prison, he would be way past the age many young colored men father babies back home.

  Gets confusing doesn’t it. Precedents from Greek mythology or not. Knowing or not knowing what variety of worse will probably come next if you are a member of my colored family hunkering down at the end of Copeland or on whatever divided street you think of as home or whatever you may think a home is. Gets damned confusing. I lose track of names. Generations. No end in sight. Or maybe I already know the end and just don’t want to think about it out loud. Whose gotdam business is it anyway. Knucklehead, fucking hardhead youngbloods and brothers. Gotdamned Daddy. Gotdamned cut-buddy. Words I didn’t slip and say out loud that day attempting to explicate an emergency to my chairman in the departmental office.

  * * *

  Get away, I kept telling myself, and none of this happens.

  * * *

  I always had been impressed by my grandmother Martha’s beautiful hand. Not her flesh-and-blood hand. Her letters. Her writing. Perfect letter after letter in church ledgers and notebooks year after year in my grandmother Martha’s beautiful hand. You almost felt a firm, strong hand enfolding, guiding yours if your turn to read Sunday school attendance or minutes of the Junior Deacons’ board, each letter flowing into the next into the next word then next sentence so you didn’t stumble or mumble repeating aloud what you found waiting for you so peacefully, patiently, perfectly shaped between faint blue lines on each page. Not that her hands weren’t hands a person might notice and think something nice about. Maybe a bit mannishly large but my grandmother Martha wasn’t a small woman, her wide-boned hips not swaying side to side when she walked, more of a tall person’s rocking-chair lean and tipping-forward-then-back momentum that propelled her strides, striding down the sidewalk purposefully though never in a hurry, walking like you’d probably imagine she probably writes when she records church business, her hand’s fingers slim, smooth-jointed, tapering to big teardrop nails she often painted plum to complement light brown skin.

  Letter after letter perfect as eggs. Perfect as print. But better. Her hand cursive. Letters flow like alive things that grow. One growing live into or from the other whether connections visible or not. As the Bible grows if you are taught to read it in the fashion I was. Each verse, each psalm, parable, book, sermon connected. Truths alive and growing in the pages after you learn in church how to read Bible words. Cursive you learn in school. Cursive one of many strange words telling you a different language spoken in school and you will always be a stranger in that strange land. Not everybody good at cursive, not every boy or girl in class remembers new words, nor gives a flying fuck if they do or don’t, but my
grandmother’s cursive flows seamlessly page after page when you leaf through one of the old Homewood AME Zion notebooks and ledgers with thick, ornate covers she filled and you are not aware until you discover one more time as you always do how shabby the world will be, how much it hurts when her hand drops yours and perfect writing stops.

  My grandmother picked her husbands as carefully, perfectly as she performed her church secretary cursive. Except every now and then she decided it was time to change scripts. After she abandoned then divorced her first husband—a dark-skinned workingman, shy emigrant from rural Promised Land, South Carolina, father of my father and my aunt C, the man I grew up calling Grandpa—my grandmother Martha chose to marry preachers. A series of three or four preachers whose names I often could not remember when they were alive, names mostly lost now they are dead, like the name of the man my father killed. Uncle this or Uncle that is what I called my grandmother’s husbands and one I called “Reverend” because he addressed me as “Professor,” a darkie joke we shared, minstrels puffing each other up with entitles, Yo, Mr. Bones . . . Wuss up, Mr. Sambo.

  Same grandmother who wrote beautiful cursive played deaf (almost but not quite her version of darkie joke) when people were saying things she preferred not to hear. A highly selective deficit she displayed only when she chose. For instance, sitting on her pink couch she protected with a transparent plastic slipcover, chattering away with a roomful of other family members, if someone mentioned the name of one of ours in trouble or prison, my grandmother Martha would shut her eyes, duck her head shyly, totally absent herself as if she’d suddenly nodded off like very old folks do. If you didn’t know better, you’d think she was missing the conversation. Elsewhere. Immune. But if the unpleasant topic not dropped quickly enough to suit her, she would shush the person speaking by tapping an index finger against her pursed lips. Not nice . . . Shhhh. Some mean somebody might be listening and spread nasty news about a son or grandson or nephew shot dead in the street three years ago or locked up in the pokey twenty years, or a slave two hundred years ago. Shhhh. Whisper, she orders as she leans over, pouts, and mimics whispering. Best whisper in a family member’s ear so cruel strangers can’t overhear, can’t mock names of our dead, our wounded, our missing ones.