American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  I regard my empire. Map it. Set down its history in ledgers. Envy my grandmother’s beautiful hand. Her cold-bloodedness. I’ve done what I needed to do to get by, and when I look back, the only way to make sense of my actions is to tell myself that at the time it must have seemed I had no other choice.

  * * *

  As far back as I can remember, I was aware the empire I was building lived within an empire ruled by and run for the benefit of a group to which I did not belong. Mm’fukkahs, the man, honkies, whitey, boss, peckerwoods, mam, fools, mister, sir, niggas some of the names we used for this group not us, and the list of names I learned goes on and on, as many names probably as they learned to call us by. Growing up, if I found myself talking to people, small gathering or large, almost always it would be composed exclusively of members of my group or, except for me, members of the other. On the other hand nothing unusual about contact between the two groups. Ordinary, daily mixing the rule not exception. In public spaces we politely ignored each other or smiled or evaded or bumped, jostled, violently collided, or clashed. Passed through each other as easy as stepping through a ghost. Despised, killed each other just as easily, though since the others held the power, many, many more fatal casualties in our group resulting from those encounters than in theirs.

  Majority rules, we learned. Fair enough. Except, since we spent most of our time among our own kind talking, interacting only with each other, slippage occurred naturally. Reinforced by the presence of friends and family, we considered ourselves among ourselves the equal of others. Or considered ourselves better. Considered our status as minority, as inferior not to be facts. Or at best relative facts, irrelevant to us unless we assumed the point of view of the group not our group. On good days members of our group would make fun of such an assumption. Bad-mouth the other group with all the nasty names we dreamt up for them. Names and laughter like talismans—string of garlic, sign of the cross—European people in the old days would brandish to fend off a vampire. A survival strategy we practiced while the other group survived by arming themselves, by erecting walls, prisons, churches, laws. By chanting, screaming, repeating, believing their words for us.

  * * *

  Ain’t nothing but a party, old Aunt May always said. How long, how long, sighed Reverend Felder, in Homewood AME Zion’s pulpit, Dr. King in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist.

  * * *

  Aunt May’s skin a lighter color than my grandmother Martha’s light brown, and the difference, slight though it was, cowed my grandmother enough to look the other way or pretend to be deaf when May got loud, raunchy, or ignorant at family gatherings. May, tumbler of whiskey held down with one hand on the armrest pad of her wheelchair while the hand at the end of her other arm points, wiggles, summons all at once, a gesture synced with a holler, growl, and mm-mm, boy, you better get yourself over here and gimme some sugar, boy, get over here and dance with your aunt May, boy, you think you grown now, don’t you, you sweetie pie, past dancing wit some old, crippled-up lady in a wheelchair, ain’t that what you thinking, boy. Well, this old girl ain’t done yet. Huh-uh. You all, hear me, don’t, you. Ain’t nothin but a party. Woo-wee. Get your narrow hips over here, you fine, young man, and dance wit May.

  They left something behind in Aunt May’s gut they shouldn’t have when they sewed her up after surgery. Staple, piece of tape, maybe a whole damn scalpel my sister rolled her eyes telling me. You know how they do us, my sister said, specially old people can’t help themselves, won’t speak up—poor May in terrible pain, belly blew up and almost dead a week after they sent her home. So weak and full of drugs poor thing lying there in her bed could barely open her eyes. But you know Aunt May. Ain’t going nowhere till she ready to go. Hospital didn’t want her back, but we fussed till they sent an ambulance. Opened her up again and took out whatever festering. May got better. Didn’t leave from here till she was good and ready to leave. You know May. Hospital assholes never even said they were sorry. Threw May away like a dirty old rag after they saw they hadn’t quite killed her, and then got busy covering their tracks. May dead two years before anybody admitted any wrongdoing. Too late to hold the hospital accountable. Simple-minded as all those pale folks on May’s side the family always been, couldn’t get their act together and sue the doctors or hospital or some cotton-picking somebody while May still alive.

  May’s nephew, Clarence, you remember him. Browner than I am, I reminded my sister as if she didn’t already know. I ran into him five, six years ago, when I was in town for something. Clarence a cook now. Guess at some point May and her pale sisters decided some color might be a good idea. Two, maybe three married brothers from the same brown-skinned family, didn’t they, and broke the color line so Clarence and a bunch of our other second cousins or half cousins or whatever after a couple more generations of marrying and mixing got different colors and names and I’ve lost track, but Clarence I knew because he was my age and a Golden Gloves boxer and everybody knew him and knew his older brother, Arthur, in jail for bank robbing, put away big-time in a federal penitentiary, so when Clarencie walked into Mrs. Schaefer’s eleventh-grade class, which was a couple grades further than Clarencie ever got, he wasn’t supposed to be in that eleventh-grade classroom or any other, he just happened to be hanging out, strolling the high school halls and saw me and came in and hollered, Hey, Cuz, how you doing, man . . . and me, I kind of hiss-whispered back, Hey, what you doing here, him acting like nobody else in the classroom when he strutted in, walked straight to my seat in the back, loud-talking the whole way till I popped up, Hey, Cuz, and hugged him, shocking the shit out of Mrs. Schaefer because I was her nice boy, good student and good citizen and example for all the other hoodlums. You could tell how terrified the poor white lady was most the time, coming every day into a school not all colored yet but getting there and getting worse and she needed me as much as I needed her we both understood so who in hell was this other tall, colored boy acting like he owned her classroom with nobody he had to answer to but himself and that was my cousin Clarencie, he couldn’t care less what anybody else thought, Cousin Clarence, and you could tell just looking at him once, stranger to you or not, that you better go on about your own business and hope this particular reddish-brown-skinned negro with straight, dago-black hair and crazy eyes got no business with you, you heard the stories didn’t you, Sis. You most likely told some of them to me—bouncer at a club downtown, mob enforcer maybe, got paid for doing time for the crime of some mafia thug don and afterwards Cousin Clarence a kind of honorary made-man people say, but most of the worst of that bad stuff long after we hugged and grinned and took over Mrs. Schaefer’s class a minute because he didn’t care and I forgot for once to care whom it belonged to.

  * * *

  Aunt C, my father’s sister, got him a fine lawyer. But things continued to get worse. Worse is what you begin to expect if worse is what you get time after time. Worse, worser, worst. Don’t let the ugly take you down, my mother said. Don’t let it make you bitter and ugly, she said. She had led me by the hand to a few decent places inside me where she believed and tried to convince me that little sputtering lights would always exist to guide how I should behave once I left home and started a grown-up life. Her hand not as powerful and elegant as my grandmother Martha’s, but my mother wrote good letters, clear, to the point, often funny, her cursive retaining features of the young girl she’d been when she learned to write. Neat, precise, demonstrating obviously she’d been an attentive student, yearned to get right the lessons she was taught.

  Earnest another way of putting it, it being my mom’s character when she was a schoolgirl and then when she fell in love with my father, I bet, and that sort of mother, too, I absolutely know, serious, conscientious without being boring, never boring because whatever she undertook she performed in the spirit partly of girls in grade school nearly junior high age, always a little scared but bold, too, both idly mischievous and full of hidden purpose, full of giggles and iron courage a
dults could never comprehend, often dismiss, yet stand in awe also, charmed, protective of the spark, that desire of young colored girls to grow and thrive, their hunger to connect with an unknown world no matter how perilous that new-to-them world might turn out to be for girls determined to discover exciting uses for limbs, minds, hearts still forming, still as stunning for them to possess as those girl hearts, minds, limbs were stunning for adults to behold. In the case of my mother, from girlhood to womanhood, an infectious curiosity, a sense of not starting over but starting fresh, let’s go here, let’s do this, not because she had mastered a situation or a moment previously but because uncertainty attracted, motivated, formed her.

  Look at this writing, I can almost hear her say, look at these letters, words, sentences, ideas, feelings that flow and connect when we attempt something in this particular, careful fashion, with this cursive we studied and repeated in a classroom, but mine now, see, see it going word by word, carefully, and I follow her words, her writing like that of a bright child’s who is occasionally distracted while she busily inscribes line after almost perfect line from manual to copybook. Going the way it’s supposed to go. And where it’s going, nobody knows exactly where but it looks the way it should and worth the trouble, the practice, because it’s mine now and yours, too, she tells me, if you wish, and work hard at it. Whatever. Take my hand. Hold it as I hold yours, precious boy, and let’s see, let’s see what we shall see.

  That’s the message I read in her hand, in letters my mother sent when I went away to college. Letters I receive today from home beyond these pages. Home we share with all our dead.

  * * *

  I thought at the time, the time when I’d just begun university teaching, that the worst consequence of my father stabbing another man to death would be my first meeting with the chair in his office after I returned from Pittsburgh. After I’d said to my mother, Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon, and hung up the phone and tried to explain an ugly, complicated situation in as few words as possible and the chair had generously excused me from my teaching duties and granted me unconditional license to attend to family affairs, A terrible business. Sorry it hit before you could get yourself settled in here. The worst would be wisdom, commiseration, condolences I’d have to endure one more time animating his face, in his office, in his position as departmental chair after I completed my dirty work at home and stood in his office again, forgiven again by his unrufflable righteousness.

  * * *

  A good man, my mother would call him. Ole peckerwood, May would say. I heard both voices, responded to neither. Too busy worrying about myself. Too confused, enraged, selfish. Not prepared yet to deal with matters far worse afflicting my father, his victim, the victim’s family, all my people back home, our group that another more powerful group has treated like shit for centuries to intimidate and oppress, to prove to themselves that a country occupied by many groups belongs forever, solely, unconditionally to one group.

  * * *

  My sister needs a minute or so to summon up the name, but then she’s certain, “James . . . and I think his first name Riley . . . uh-huh . . . Riley James . . .” she says is the name of the man our father killed. Neither of us speaks. Silence we both maintain for a while is proof probably she’s correct. Silence of a search party standing at the edge of a vast lake after the guide who’s led them to it points and says the missing one is out there somewhere. Silence because we’ve already plunged, already groping in the chill murkiness, holding our breath, dreading what we’ll recover or not from the gray water.

  Thought I’d recognize the name if I heard it. That jolt, you know, when you’re reminded of something you will never forget. But James sounds right, anyway. And Riley James had kids, didn’t he. Yes, my sister says. Three. One a girl about my age I’m pretty sure. Used to run into her before it happened.

  Coming up, did you ever think we might need to have this conversation one day. Daddy killing someone else’s daddy.

  Oh, we knew. Children understand. Don’t need adults to tell them certain things. Kids supposed to listen to grown-ups, better listen if you don’t want a sore behind, but we watch them, too. Kids always watching, wondering why big people do what they do. Understand a whole lotta mess out there adults not talking about. Scary mess kids can’t handle. Or maybe nobody kid or adult can handle it, so you better keep your eyes wide open. Don’t even know what you looking for except it’s bad. Gonna get you if you not careful. But no. Thank goodness, no. Huh-uh, I’m not standing here today saying that when I was a little girl I could see my father would kill another man. But we knew, we saw with our own eyes awful stuff happening day after day and worse just around the corner waiting to happen. Grown-ups didn’t need to tell us all that mess happening to them. We watched while it happened.

  Wish I could disagree, Tish. Wish I could say no, but no, I think we probably did know. You’re remembering right again, my sweet lil sis.

  Whoa. Don’t remember everything, but some things I sure don’t forget, so lighten up some on the sweet sister bullshit. As if you always treated me like I was your sweet lil sister. Like youall’s favorite game back then wasn’t teasing and beating on me to see me cry. My little brothers torturing me as soon as they were big enough. And you, too, eldest brother. They learned it from you. You . . . you not me always the sweet one. Oldest, sweetest one. At least that’s what you had all the adults in the family calling you and believing about you. Him so nice. All those good grades in school and talks so nice to grown-up people, so smart and a good boy takes care of his little brothers and sister to help out his mother. What a sweet, nice boy. Wasn’t hardly bout no sweet lil sis, you devil. My sweet eldest brother the king. Making me pay in spades if I dared to sass you or look at you cross-eyed or stick out my tongue or beg please, Mom, could I please have that last little wing, the wing you had your eye on since you sat down at the table and counted the pieces of chicken on the plate and figured an extra one left after everybody got their share and that extra wing meant for you.

  Okay. Warm and safe and nice as we felt home was, maybe not always but lots of the time, really, still there was the worry about worse coming. Could hear it when Daddy slammed the door behind himself going out. Or I peeped at Mom’s red eyes. Or checked out the thumb she chewed on. Or Daddy’s clean, ironed white shirts he pitched in the laundry basket and wouldn’t wear till they came back starched in cellophane wrappers from the cleaners. Or Mom forgets she’s scrubbed a pot clean and stands at the kitchen sink humming gospel and scrubs and scrubs and scrubs.

  Thinking now about Mom’s poor thumb, didn’t I suck on mine when I was a little girl. Yes indeed I did. Seems to me I recall you sneaking off when nobody paying attention and you sucking yours, too.

  Yes, all that’s so. Still, whether or not we knew things would get worse, our fear doesn’t answer the question, why. You must wonder now like I do. Why. Why did things get worse.

  Wish I knew the answer to that one, older brother.

  Will it always be like this, then. Too late. Damage done. Another victim. Trial. Funeral. Inquest. Story in the newspaper, on TV. More tears. Hand-wringing.

  Stop now. Stop. Don’t need to go there this morning, do we. Been there. Done it far, far too many times. Wish you were here, brother dear, to gimme a hug. Some sugar May used to say.

  Is it worse now. Doesn’t seem possible, but it just might be. Not only for our family. Shit no. Not just us. Everybody. Everybody jammed up here wit us in this stinking mess. Everybody just too scared or too dumb to know it, is what our brother said with his eyes when I came to town to visit and we let go of each other and time for me to leave the prison and he has to stay where he is and nothing to do but look at each other one more time, one more sad, helpless stinking time. Clang, bang, gate shuts behind me and they still got the key.

  We had talked about power during that visit. Talked in the cage. Power how long, too long stolen by the ruling group to diminish and control the ruled. Power of this political sy
stem that has operated from its start as if vast gaps dividing us from the ruling group either don’t exist or don’t matter. Same ole shit. Ask the brothers in here, our brother says. Ask the outlaws. Ask them about law supposed to protect everybody—rulers and ruled—from each other equally. Law calling itself the will of the people. Law that got all us in here blackened up like minstrels. Color, His-Honor-Mr.-Law says, No problem. While out the other side of his mouth he’s saying color gives law power to abuse color. Look at the color around us in here. Some days I look and cry. Laugh some days. Our colors, our group. Power serves itself. Period. Exclamation point. Truth and only truth, our locked-up brother says. And he’s not wrong, our brother’s not wrong, so how can I be right. My empire. They slam the gate shut. Blam. Time to leave my brother’s cage, go back in mine. My maps. Ledgers. Theirs.

  * * *

  Remember when I called you couple weeks ago, Sis, and asked the man’s name Daddy killed. Conversation got long, much longer than usual, nice in a way because usually conversations shortish because we skip over awful things and don’t want to jinx good things by talking too much about them but I remember I think we both got deep into the begats, both trying to recall Daddy’s grandmother’s name and neither could and Owens popped into my mind and I said Owens to you and you said, Sybil Owens—wasn’t she the slave from down south who came up here to found Homewood and you were right of course and I laughed because I was the one who wrote down the Sybela Owens story and you knew the story from my books or from family conversations. Same family conversations from which I’d learned, mostly from May, about May’s grandmother or great-grandmother, Sybela, who had fled slavery with a white man who stole Sybela from his slave-plantation-owner father and settled in or near what’s now called Homewood where one day when May was a little girl she saw, according to her, an old, old woman on a porch in a rocking chair smoking a pipe, woman in a long black dress, dark stockings, and head rag who smiled at her and she’d hear people say later the old woman was her grandmother, maybe great-grand, and May never forgot and passed on the memory or tale or whatever to us, a story about Mom’s side of the family, not Daddy’s, and I wrote or talked my version of it and you probably heard May herself tell it like I did but years and years ago and the best we usually do as we try to sort out the family tree and put names to branches, to people, is most likely to mix up things the way I did with Owens before you corrected my memory and I reminded myself and you how family stories were partly what one of us had heard live from the mouth of the one who had lived the story or heard it second- or thirdhand and passed it on but partly also stuff I had made up, written down, and it got passed around the family same as accounts of actual witnesses telling stories the way May told hers about Sybela so that day on the phone we were begatting this one from that one and so on, you said, Hold on a minute and went up to the attic where you keep those boxes and boxes of Mom’s things, the papers and letters she saved from the old people in the family, because you believed there was an obituary in rough draft in Mom’s hand on tablet paper that might tell us Daddy’s grandmother’s name, the name I could hear my father and Aunt C saying plain as day but could not raise beyond a whispering in my ear too faint to grasp or repeat aloud to myself. And sure enough you quickly retrieved information Mom had written down long ago for a church funeral program, maybe for the colored newspaper, too, a couple sheets of blue-lined school table paper, lines and handwriting faded, creases in the paper also cuts, the obituary notice we both had remembered but neither could repeat the exact contents of. You had the folded sheets in your hand in a minute once you got up those steep-assed attic steps I worry about my little sis climbing because she’s not little sis anymore but sweet, still sweet.