American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  You full of shit now. Talking shit now. Say any damned thing.

  You’re the one asking questions.

  Not asking questions. Just want to know, is all.

  Just write.

  Sometimes I think you think you some kind of wall.

  Keep scratching. Maybe you make me go away.

  Sometimes I think you think you write on me.

  Maybe scratch on your scratching, maybe. Not on you. Why you think I wanna make my main man go away.

  I ain’t nobody’s damn wall.

  That’s what I’m talking about, main man.

  You bout done, man.

  Ready to split if you ready, main man.

  Let’s get the fuck gone. Scratching make me hungry.

  One last lick. Phziff. Can empty. Done. Finished. And there. See it. A hungry mouth like yours. We outta here, main.

  * * *

  Main can sound like man. Man can sound like main. Trains overhead can sound like trains underground, Basquiat says to himself. Though trains can’t fly. Though they sound like they up there in the sky. Like thunder. Can’t see thunder either. Can’t see trains underground either. They shake, rattle, roll. Invisible though you know they underfoot shake, rattle, rolling you and you think you see them, dark and invisible as it is under there. Like you see rumbles inside the stomach when you hungry. Like you know it’s trouble coming. No money. No home. No food. How you spozed to eat if you don’t go on and do wrong. How you spozed to write.

  * * *

  August Wilson, who grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wrote:

  In Bearden I found my artistic mentor and sought, and still try to make my plays the equal of his canvases . . . I never had the privilege of meeting Romare Bearden. Once outside 357 Canal Street in silent homage, daring myself to knock on his door . . . sorry I didn’t . . . often thought of what I would have said to him that day if I had knocked on his door and he had answered. I probably would have just looked at him. I would have looked and if I were wearing a hat, I would have taken it off in tribute.

  Romare Bearden born September 2, 1911, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Jean-Michel Basquiat born December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn. Both men died in New York City on the twelfth day of different months in 1988. Bearden in March. Basquiat the following August. Basquiat resided at 57 Great Jones Street until a drug overdose killed him. Bearden’s last address, 357 Canal Street, a short walk on the Lower East Side from Great Jones.

  * * *

  Romare Bearden, world-famous collagist, attended Peabody High, same public school in Pittsburgh my sister, my two dead brothers, my brother in prison for life, and I attended. Very same Bearden who heard from a friend that some artists at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance resisted demands of their patrons for paintings that conformed to fashionable rules of perspective mandated by the new science and math of rendering perspective. Artists feared deep cuts opening like doors into a canvas. Tintoretto, for example, screwed up on purpose. Believed illusory holes in a painting might become real holes into which the gaze, maybe the gazer’s body and soul, might plunge and be lost forever. Who knows, Bearden says to Basquiat. Point is resist. Painters might tumble in, too.

  * * *

  Bearden’s collages remind Basquiat of how his mother used to talk. Still talks on her good days. Her stories flatten perspective. Cram in everything, everyone, from everywhere she’s been. Spanish, her native language, and her English flow seamlessly, intimately when she’s telling tales. Like the mix of materials Bearden combines to construct collage. Her words may be foreign, her accent unfamiliar, but listeners able to follow. Anecdotes she relates fill space to the brim without exhausting it. Moments she has experienced become large enough, thank goodness, to include everybody. Nobody feels left out.

  * * *

  Bearden’s collage and Mom’s narratives truly democratic—each detail counts equally, every part matters as much as any grand design. Size and placement don’t highlight forever some items at the expense of others. Meaning depends upon point of view. Stop, Basquiat tells himself. I sound like a museum audiocassette guide when all I really want to say is dance. Mom talking story or Bearden at the turntable mixing cutouts with paint with fabrics with photos with empty spaces invite people to dance.

  * * *

  Basquiat loved to make music. Played in bands with his homies from scratching, hanging out. Jammed in clubs, recorded hours of tapes, their sound a mix of all the kinds of music they heard around them and noises in the streets, drug noises inside their heads. Basquiat disappointed when the band cooking and everybody in the audience too stoned to dance.

  * * *

  No one’s fault, Romare Bearden supposes, if a gift he fashions doesn’t quite fit in the box it was meant to fill with love. He tilts the collage board. Lets fragments he’d chosen slide back down to the worktable. Discovers they no longer fit there either. Collage board empty. Table overflowing. He must start again. Decide again what to include or discard. He believes his life depends on each choice. His feet shuffle beneath the worktable like Monk’s feet under a piano. Working collage is too hard, impossible really, unless he hears something resembling music whose rhythms guide his eyes, hands.

  * * *

  Not surprising, given the scope of his ambitions, that Bearden misremembers occasionally the dimensions of a board he’s preparing for collage or forgets how large a medley of ingredients he has assembled. Anyone observing him labor could have told him he’s undertaking a doomed task. Too much on the table, limited room, after all, within a frame. Bearden’s extremely smart so he knows better, too, but gets seduced by the privilege of paying absolute attention, piece by piece, to every item he selects. If pushed, he’d probably insist that losing track of the bigger picture a mercy, even a momentary state of grace, Bearden might add, especially when you are an older man. Why not linger over a swatch of antique Alabama patchwork quilt alive under his gaze as he rotates and rubs it, discovering new, mellow harmonies among its once brightly colored threads. Sweet funk of it, he brings it closer to his nose.

  * * *

  Collage should prepare brand-new space, Bearden says to Basquiat. I do not wish to abandon things I gather for collage into a space previous occupants own. I think collage envisions new pasts as well as new futures. Wonder if thinking is the proper word to express how I decide, separate, test.

  * * *

  Bearden recalls Alberto Giacometti lamenting a fatal skewering of attention as he sculpted the face of his brother Diego Giacometti. No matter how swiftly his eyes travel from flesh-and-blood brother to clay and back, Alberto wrote, he confronts the enigma of a Diego whose face changes. Never the face seen an instant before. Often the face of a stranger. Mysteriously troublingly to Giacometti, as my brother’s face can appear to me after six months, nine, a year between visits to the prison.

  * * *

  Space framed within collage at least as elusive as any human face. Each time Bearden studies an element he considers adding to a collage—a color, a photo, a triangle of denim—the total composition vanishes. To see it whole again, his eyes must relinquish their grip on the element. Same way I lose my brother when I exit prison walls. The way I must exit the world outside prison bars to visit my brother.

  * * *

  Well, Basquiat asks, how does an artist resolve this dilemma, Maestro. This perpetual losing battle, this shifting back and forth, this absence, gap, this oblivion between a reality the senses seize and a reality the imagination seizes.

  * * *

  You guess. You believe, Bearden would respond to Basquiat or anyone else curious and serious enough to ask. A kind of wishful thinking, he might admit to himself. Each step of building collage precarious. Unleashes energy. Revelation. Loss. Grasping something concrete in your hand, you leave this inextricable place, as a fellow artist, Samuel Beckett, called it, and revisit a remembered place. You understand the fragment you grasp is as fragile, fallible as memory. Understand no former place remains fixed, unchanged. Bu
t you guess, believe a reunion will occur. Not in a space waiting patiently as a prison cell. A generously welcoming place, you hope.

  * * *

  Bearden worries about things that may have slipped off the worktable to the floor. He’s unable to explain to Basquiat why removal of objects from an array sometimes makes the array more plentiful, not smaller. Nor can he explain how a board upon which he’s arranging things becomes more spacious as he packs it. He learns to live with the necessity of letting go. Enjoys the idea of himself being as surprised as the stranger who opens one of these gift boxes he prepares.

  * * *

  Our eyes observe waves rippling the sea. But where exactly is a wave, Bearden winks and asks Basquiat. We can’t see water molecules bobbing up and down. We think we see waves rippling. If my collages work, the stuff composing them gets agitated, makes waves.

  * * *

  Or you might say each collage starts with the bare bones of a story. For instance, me and two other colored boys beat up on Eugene, a crippled white boy. My grandmother intervenes, rescues the boy, and he becomes my best friend. Grandma discovers he lives in a brothel with his prostitute mother and rescues him again. He comes with his birds to stay in our house a short year then dies. A collage I built is layer upon layer of questions about that simple story.

  * * *

  Takes lots and lots of Angels and Devils hopping around to make a world anybody can see, Basquiat agrees. But where you spozed to put stuff that doesn’t belong in the picture, he would ask Bearden. How you get a genie back in the bottle once the genie’s out. What disease crippled poor Eugene. What names he give his birds. How much did Eugene’s mom charge for a piece of pussy. What’s her name. Did she earn more or less in a lifetime of selling herself than the price one of your collages or my paintings commands today. Rumor in the street says nobody survives. Who tries. Who asks.

  * * *

  There are about thirty words around you all the time, like thread and exit, Basquiat claimed.

  * * *

  I met a man who looked after Bearden in Bearden’s old age when he was cancer-ridden, too weak to drive himself to his studio on Long Island City or climb stairs to the second floor of his apartment or handle heavy collage boards. Man told me Romare Bearden loved collards. Loved even more the pot liquor in which collard greens cooked. Collards, if you say it like the man said it, sounds like coloreds and coloreds sounds like collards. Bearden a gentle, easy person to care-take, the man told me and being with the old, dying artist probably best time of the man’s life, he confides, smiling as he recalled their long conversations he taped, how scared he was carrying Bearden piggyback up and down steps. But you best not forget that bowl of pot liquor to start Romare’s day. Evil all day when no cup of steaming collard juice first thing.

  More than once found myself up at 4:00, 5:00 A.M., the man said, cooking collards so the liquor could simmer down a couple hours to where it would taste just right by the time Mr. and Mrs. B up and I had him washed, shaved, dressed, and ready at his little table kind of desk in the workroom downstairs. Most days I made sure some leftover liquor in the pot to save and heat up next morning, but to tell the God’s truth, I was getting old, too. Worried I’d stumble with him on my back and kill us both on those damned steps. Getting older every day along with Mr. Bearden. Starting to forget things with so much to do to keep his days running smooth and regular the way he liked it. Every day he could manage the trip, I’d drive him out to Long Island City. Be in the studio by noon working with Teabo, his assistant.

  * * *

  Sometimes I’d wake up in my bed, Oh, shit, and remember the greens pot empty on the stove. Damn. Too poor to ever own a watch when I was growing up. Taught myself to keep time in my head. Could tell you the minute and hour, just as good as if a watch on my wrist. Must have been born with the gift of a clock in my head or maybe I figured out I’d have one if I made a habit of paying attention. Won a whole lot of bets in college with that trick. Could tell you the time today. And still wake up at exactly the time I tell myself before I go to sleep. Wide awake, no alarm, no watch. Part of the gift, I guess. Me and time always been on good speaking terms, you might say, so when I remembered an empty pot on his stove, I’d know the hour and, Oh, shit, man. Get your big behind out the bed, man. Go fix Romare’s greens so they be simmered down perfect—greasy, salty, tiny bits of grit in the juice, too strong for most people, but just how he liked it.

  * * *

  Basquiat owned an illustrated encyclopedia of signs and symbols that included signs hobos chalked and scratched on small town walls to warn other hobos. Basquiat often drew on his paintings the hobo sign meaning “nothing to be gained here” or the sign meaning “a beating awaits you here.”

  * * *

  Once upon a time, Basquiat says to Bearden, I painted the Devil on a door to scare myself away. Go Away, fool. Never come back here again and stand here staring at this damned drug-den door. And fuck sure never again knock. And if you hear steel bolts unbolted, don’t you dare push it open and walk through to where you know the Devil’s crouched down inside, nasty, hairy, bare black ass all up in your face first thing you see in there. Devil bent down munching on garbage inside dead people’s stomachs.

  * * *

  Basquiat thinks he scratched not painted the goddamn door. Samo again. Scratching again. Never will be a painter. Always Samo. Samo sounds like Sam O. Means S-O-S: Same Ole Shit. Same ole Samo. Never not Samo. Means help me. Means help Samo. Samo. Samo. Stuck like a record. Samo over and over. Or Samo maybe sounds like Sa Mo, and means some more. Like Devil, please give Samo some more. Gimme s’ mo. Samo wants s’ mo.

  * * *

  Samo scratching Devil on a door. Ugly door. Ugly Devil. Paints words in the Devil’s ugly mouth. Words in his red, empty eye-hole tunnels. Go away, fool. Go away, Samo. Go away, Devil. Go away. No more. Never again, Samo. For Samo’s sake do not enter. Do not forsake. Don’t just go away, Samo. Run, nigger, run. Far away. Way. Way. But rumor in the street says you are Samo. Always. Scratcher not painter. You cannot change. Why in hell would you want to change anyway, even if the fool you are could change. Samo sounds like S’ mo. Gotta git me some more.

  * * *

  Confess. You the same Samo. Confess to the few who would listen. As if any fool would listen to Samo. Samo who can’t paint. Samo scratching. Scratch one of Devil’s names. Scratch means graffiti. Scratch means money. Means itch. Means fuck wit a record. Kill it. Same ole itch. Scratch it. Scratch buys a bag. Ten bags a day. Hundred. Here’s s’ mo, Samo. More scratch than you can count. Devil on the door. Behind the door. Sees you. Loves to see you coming. Everybody loves you, Samo. You the man.

  * * *

  Wuzzup, Dude. Wuzzup, Money. Wuzzup, Main Man. They can see you through the door. See through you. Watch you ache to paint the door shut. Shut. Shut. Shoot. Shooted. Shut away. Shoot away. Paint away the Devil. No. Not paint. Scratch. Roll of bills in your fist like a chunk of bloody bandages.

  * * *

  Devil means money means bags and bags of dope. As many bags as dead bodies stashed inside the door. They watch you. Dead eyes looking through the wooden door at you. Staring. Waiting. Scratching. They love you. Funny, you think. Run, you think. You want to paint it shut forever. Paint Devil on it, inside it forever.

  * * *

  Devil on door grins back at you. Thinks it’s funny, too, Samo. Same ole Samo. Funny Samo. Funny Devil. Dead eyes see you push through. Not a door. It’s a window, a mirror. Glass breaking. You fall through. Glass everywhere. Nails falling down like rain. Knives. You are falling. Down you go flat on your black skinny ass. Funny. You crack up. No. You step through. Glass slippery under bare toes. Step on a crack break your mama’s back. You hip-hop, whistle, snap your fingers, wiggle, squirm through untouched. To the other side. Samo.

  * * *

  Giddy-up, Jean-Michel Basquiat hollers. Rides a good horse he owns. Own all this, too, he thinks. This Paradise on this island where he bounces in the saddle
, astride a thoroughbred Arabian, nigger-colored horse. Giddy-up. Giddy-up, cowboy. As far as the eye can see owns waves of green of sea of clouds of blue sky above and below him owns the hooves of the animal squeezed between his knees, his thighs be-dumping, be-dumpety-dumping in a place called Hawaii he believes where sits this island he owns, rides and nobody can see him, bother him. He owns it, all of it, all of this place stretching to a horizon that shimmers, bobs out there, as far as he’s able to see. Finish line floats out there somewhere, finished like a painting stretched wet to dry on its frame of spears, a horizon opening as a dream stretches open. You clomp, clomp closer and closer to it, through it, and beyond each time you reach it forever.

  * * *

  There are about thirty words around you all the time . . . all of them DEVIL.

  * * *

  Perhaps it’s 1986 when Basquiat watches a fine young French thing pedal past, bare-legged on her bicycle. She’s K, a lady I will meet fifteen years or so later, marry eventually, long after that momentary encounter between notorious Jean-Michel Basquiat’s eyes and hers.

  * * *

  His eyes on her nice, tanned legs, big, cute frizzy hair, sweet hips, and lips that speak French, mother tongue of Jean-Michel’s father. A sure-enough fox, petite like he prefers, graced by that perfection nature reserves for smallish, compact women’s bodies like hers. She’s wearing short shorts that day. Then he sees her everywhere on the Lower East Side—Mudd Club, Studio 54, Area—and she sees him and sees he’s very aware of seeing her she’s sure. They are very aware of each other she’s sure, and he sure is, too. They speak briefly sometimes in passing. Greetings, smiles exchanged usually always except when he’s doing sullen or lost in space or mounted on his gray Dürer death horse or plain sleepy from no sleep for days or plain high or testing maybe if it’s true he’s truly, truly famous, beyond fame, everybody who’s somebody or not recognizes him and counts coup whether or not he notices them or nods or looks back or not or mocks like a blackface minstrel with a wiggly tongue their stares.

  * * *

  He notices her and she notices cute, brown him everywhere around LES until one night in Area when he waves her over she goes as far as to stand smiling beside the table where he sits with an older man, and though the painter doesn’t know her name he halfway introduces, halfway pimps her in a teasing, funny way she thinks to the dapper man who turns out to be his Haitian father.