American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  Quick, hot surge of jealousy, envy of the Devil flashing in Basquiat’s eye as I listen, but just as instantly I’m pleased, profoundly grateful beyond words for brightness in K’s eyes while she reminisces about her encounters with a famous artist. My wife who has been suffering brutal insomnia, her gaze, her affect dulled by the wages of sleeplessness, despair, and anxiety over a string of deaths, of sudden serious illnesses striking family and closest friends, her own increasingly frequent attacks of tachycardia and other ominous, unresolvable threats to her health, so of course I worry with her, about her. No, not worry. I quake inside with fear I may be losing her. Thus losing everything. Though I must believe, must trust, trust, trust her mind’s deep-down toughness, her small body strong as a horse.

  * * *

  On the worst days I launch endless searches for reassuring signs of our former, familiar selves. Walk for hours alone to empty my head of anything except the effort, the noise of my footsteps through this dreary time capsule of a latter-day Lower East Side, this remnant of a boundless universe we once roamed together. Boy wonder, colored painter, victim, heir, wife, husband, kids, scratchers, thieves, flirtatious Haitian fathers, all of us, the fallen and survivors, coloreds and not, then and now, too many to count or keep track of, or touch or talk with. Bridges and high-rises, ghettos, music, fashion, meatpacking districts, financial districts, hi-line, traffic, parks, news, ethnic and religiously cleansed slums, and racialized enclaves battered, bruised, cowering. Foreign nations collapsing here, bleeding, museums, sprawl of new construction, prisons, galleries, cell phones, war, murder, terrorists.

  * * *

  Who dat. Who she. Pedaling down Spring Street. Crazy little French mama come Knock/Knockin at my front door. Bon jour. Bonjour. Not the Devil, are you, you French sweetie pie. Open up and let me in, Samo almost scratches on the door, the window, the mirror within which he sees her welcoming eyes, sees his. Sees the grinning Devil’s face.

  * * *

  The door a forgery, experts almost unanimously agree. Wannabe. Imposter. Fraud. If the original Jean-Michel Basquiat ever painted a Devil on the door of a dope den or even just scratched one, this ain’t it. Clearly the work of another, obviously inferior artist, opines one expert, and not only am I certain, he adds for spite and to needle his colleagues, I happen to know the person’s name whose work it is. Guy even admitted it to me, risked forfeiting the million or so door was worth if he claimed it as his. Says he’s an admirer of the great Basquiat. Knew him back in the day, on the street, the scratching scene. Frequented same dealers, dope joints, etc. Sorry Samo dead, he said. Miss him. Bad luck to diss him, said my informant. But he winked, and added that the rumor on the street is boy never painted anything anyway. Samo a scratcher. Keeps on scratching. Once a scratcher, always a scratcher. Ask Samo. If you can stand the look on his face. Looks like the Devil when he grins. Bad grill. Gaps. Bad speckled, bumpy, pimply skin. Bad color. Bad boy smile when he looks at you says, Hi. I’m spooky Samo. No way you’d believe he had it all once, looking at him today. Half dead. Or dead. Depending on which expert you believe.

  * * *

  Ask the Authentication Committee organized, authenticated by his colored West Indian daddy. They/he determine who, when, what comes and goes through gallery doors and how much it goes for. And what goes phizzz in the night because nobody loves it. Committee makes paintings real. Not scratch. Not not worth squat. They decide what’s art. They make Samo real. Same ole Samo. Stamped with Samo Copyright Stamp.

  * * *

  To this collage of conversations, which perhaps never took place, let me add one more. Behind bars of a ten-by-ten-inch, four-inch-deep stainless steel rack anchored low on our bathroom wall—packed, squeezed so tightly not one more could fit—K, my wife of twelve years, saves, for reasons known only to her, old copies of French home decorating magazines. On two covers—Elle Décoration (nov-2014) and Marie Claire Maison (fev-mars-2012)—are phrases that struck and stayed with me as I browsed through K’s collection while I sat on the toilet. In my mind many times since, I’ve cut out and pasted up the phrases. Formed them into an exchange that very likely could have occurred between two extremely smart, curious, intense young people. Two immigrants, wayfaring strangers in the teeming metropolis of NYC circa 1986:

  N’ayez Plus Peur de Noir

  Petits Espaces/Grande Idées

  In the spirit of English editions of Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace that supply translations of the French Tolstoy liberally mixes with his Russian, I offer translations of the French words above that captured my attention:

  Fear Black No More

  Great Ideas for Small Spaces

  Since I’m unsure who thought which thought, I won’t attach speakers’ names to the phrases. Anyway, in their original arrangement of bright colors and a variety of fonts on glossy magazine covers that first caught my eye, the French words express ideas no one in particular owns. Thus I float or rather scratch those words here, a collage in this collage, above the heads of K and Basquiat, not as evidence the thoughts were ever spoken aloud by either of them, but as thoughts that belong to them—embedded, released in conversations their eyes struck up.

  * * *

  One luxury of growing old, Bearden says to Basquiat, says it a bit shyly, self-consciously, since he knows Basquiat will not get very old, is more time to ask questions about simple stories. Stories that make us up as we make them up. Will I be born again. Alive again once this particular allotment of years runs out. Is a city called Pittsburgh still reachable by catching a train north from Mecklenburg, North Carolina, or a train south from Harlem that passes through Philadelphia then climbs over and tunnels through many mountains, rounds a gigantic horseshoe curve. If Pittsburgh continues to exist—a golden triangle cordoned by bridges and three rivers, clinging to steep hills like Rome—and if I reach Pittsburgh and walk its streets, am I a boy there or old like I am here and now, still asking a boy’s questions. Is teasing my nearly bald head with such idle speculations a less forgivable luxury now than when I was a kid. Am I stuck forever, man or boy, with a bad habit, perhaps, of wasting precious time daydreaming. As if living and questioning never ends, as if a simple question might stump time, buy time, stop time long enough for a boy, a man, to slip past the conductor and ride back and forth to Pittsburgh on a beam of light without paying the price of a ticket.

  * * *

  Anyway, Romare Bearden confides, my first drawings, like your Devil on a door, not very nice. I learned from my friend Eugene how to draw nasty stuff we spied through rotting floorboards of the attic he shared with his mother over a whorehouse that sat down Spring Street and around the corner from my grandmother’s boardinghouse. One Saturday afternoon Grandma saw us extremely busy, busy, drawing on big, greasy, blood-speckled sheets of paper chickens came wrapped in from the butcher shop, and she marched over: What you boys up to. Why you so quiet over here. When she saw what we were up to, her eyes got wide. She hollered. Snatched our drawings. Ripped them up and rained the tiny pieces into the kitchen garbage pail.

  * * *

  I expected a good whack or two. My grandmother one of those pillow-bosomed women who love children dearly, especially me, but when you made her mad, watch out. Pow. Trouble was Grandma so nice and easy most the time you don’t notice her getting mad. First sign of mad. Pow. Then it’s too late to move out her way cause with Grandma getting mad also a matter of getting even. Fact is I didn’t exactly understand why she might be hitting mad when I saw her coming over to where we were busy at the kitchen table, though I sort of knew the pictures Eugene and I were drawing had something very secret, very private about them I surely didn’t want Grandma of all people to see.

  * * *

  What I had peeked at between the raggedy floorboards had scared me, main man. People hurting one another my first thought. Noisy, ugly thrashing about. Mean grabbing, mean pushing and squeezing, spilled whiskey, dirty sheets, cigarettes. Bare skin of grown-up body parts I’
d never seen so naked before. More scary because it was colored bodies and white bodies down there mixed up closer than I had ever seen colored and white mixing on Spring Street and in the little checkerboard patches of neighborhood around Spring around the rolling mill where a few lucky colored folks had regular jobs. All kinds of people living in the neighborhoods. Poor the only requirement. Mixing on one hand but on the other hand definitely not mixing. No trespassing the Golden Rule. Only colored men rented my grandmother’s rooms, and different houses, different blocks, different barbers, different churches for white and colored because people believed in sticking to their own kind. Even kids believed it, so the first time I met up with Eugene, it was me, Mumps, and Bo, the three of us teasing then beating on him unmercifully because what the hell a white boy think he’s doing standing there staring at us, him ugly as a fresh knot on somebody’s head got conked by a rock. Probably him being crippled as much as being the wrong color (though my skin wore almost the same color, by the way) made us jump him, smack him down so he’d go away and never bring his pitiful self back to our alley behind Spring where Mumps, Bo, and me played.

  * * *

  My grandmother busted in that time, too. Set down her shopping bags on the cobblestones, yelled, Stoppit. Stop that, you bad boys, and whacked whoever she could lay her hands on, running us away from that skinny white kid. Whacking Mumps and Bo like she whacked me because that’s how it worked back then around Spring Street. You were everybody your color’s child and if you got caught doing wrong by any colored adult friendly with your people, they had the right to whip your behind and send you home for another good beating because you should know better and not shame yourself, not shame your family by doing wrong in public as if you hadn’t been raised to know better.

  * * *

  Anyway, going back to the other, later time after she tore up those butcher paper drawings and shredded them or maybe burned them to ashes in the kitchen sink, Grandma calmed down and asked me and Eugene what in Jesus name did we think we were doing and where did we get the idea of those terrible pictures. We told her about the room under the attic room Eugene lived in with his mother, about a spy hole in one corner of the floor covered over by just a ratty piece of linoleum we lifted to check out the action below. Told Grandma in which particular house Eugene resided around the corner from Grandma’s, the house I went to almost every day after school and many evenings, too, if Grandma said okay.

  * * *

  My, oh, my. Good Lord have mercy, Grandma groaned and snatched Eugene by the hand after she let go the ear she was pinching, and he gimped off beside her, though I know Eugene didn’t hardly want to go home but he knew he better go with her and did, dragging his bad leg to slow things down as much as he dared without letting on he was scared or stubborn or just plain didn’t want to go. But off he went with Grandma and when she came back to our house, I was surprised to see she still had Eugene by the hand and he got a little plaid, cardboard suitcase and Grandma carrying his birdcages and Eugene stayed with us till he got sick and passed.

  * * *

  Nineteen twenty-seven the year Eugene buried, Bearden says, and in 1978 I tried to pack all that Eugene story and Homewood, East Liberty, Pittsburgh story, the whole damned known world and probably the unknown, too, Bearden smiles, into a 161/4-inch by 201/2-inch collage pasted on board I titled Farewell Eugene. All those worlds as they appeared to me fifty years afterwards in my memories of how crowded a time, a city, a boy’s universe can be at any moment once you teach yourself to look closely and practice patiently for a lifetime the skills of cutting and pasting, gluing down textures, colors, fabrics, layer after layer to picture what the past may have been and how it rises again, solid and present as the bright orange disc of sun I put at the top-right corner of Farewell Eugene.

  * * *

  Same sun shining almost red over Eugene’s funeral fifty years before with everybody on earth in attendance or at least nobody missing who should be there. Eugene’s friends, his people, mine, his pigeons, Grandma, me, we’re all there in the crowd back then and this time, too, if I got the collage close to right. All of us remembered, revived beneath an orange sun coloring the city, coloring flowers Eugene’s pale mother holds that day. Same old sun, same old Pittsburgh, same old simple questions asking to be asked. The crowd of us then and now, living and dead saying our goodbyes, our hellos to Eugene. As many of us you might say as boarded Noah’s Ark or as many as in the number religious thinkers in the Middle Ages used to bicker over if asked how many angels fit on the head of a pin.

  EXPECTATIONS

  * * *

  Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

  “Their colour is a diabolical die.”

  Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

  May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

  —PHILLIS WHEATLEY, FROM “ON BEING BROUGHT FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA,” IN POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL (LONDON, 1773)

  I expect shorter days. I expect war. I expect winter, felt winter’s ghost present in July heat when scudding clouds hid the sun and a fall chill rode the air momentarily yesterday as I walked where I walk many days, a path marked by two parallel scars of bare earth about seven, eight feet apart which frame a slightly mounded seam of open ground—fleeced bright green by grass in spring—obviously a trail left behind by tire tracks on an unpaved back road frequently used once, abandoned now, except to serve as a double-rutted footpath of gravelly stones and hard-packed dirt thru farmer’s fields, through pastures, through patches of forest common in Brittany, stands of very old, tall trees along the coast or here, inland, separating one small town or village from the next, leftover woods, leftover road edged by wire fencing or a single strand of wire, barbed, electrified perhaps, stretched between wooden posts, or the path lined by a dense wall of foliage, head high, scraggly hedges, bushes, or passes under branches and leaves that form a canopy, darkness beneath it, and sometimes if I’m looking far ahead in the direction I’m going, the two bare tracks and lane of cleared space between them disappear where the road bends sharply or dips after it climbs a rise of rolling countryside, or the old road, surrounded by forest, seems to enter a tunnel that continues endlessly beyond its circular mouth of shadow and floating spots of light, path obscured or consumed or both by unstill brightness and darkness, a path no longer on the ground, but hovering in air, and as I follow it, I do not expect to see anyone I know, only the rare walker or jogger coincidental as I am, a mirage like seasons that come and go each step I take.

  I expect color to be used against me. I repudiate color, refuse color, and if I call any color mine, I am mistaken because it belongs to others, to people who use color against me, a color not my color, but something they call color, call me, a name for me, or rather many, many names for me, as many as there are many colors or many shades of a single color, as if the color they call me by is one that separates colored me clearly, finally, beyond doubt or correction from them, from the color they call themselves, from all other colors that my color is not, nor was, nor ever will be. I expect the difference of a color others say is mine, color they claim to see coloring me, will forever serve only purposes they perceive as beneficial to them, even though they may understand quite clearly that achieving those purposes harms me. I expect difference to be preserved by color the way any idea or limit or border or rule can be determined and settled by law, once and for all, absolutely, fatally, no exceptions, if law is empowered and imposed by irresistible force and force is empowered by law, the circles of force as law, of color as difference unbroken. Unbreakable bonds if I commit the error of calling myself a color or calling myself colored.

  I expect that in order to continue to expect, continue to walk, think, and breathe, I must have water, air, food, shelter. I expect that without them I would expect nothing, I would be nothing, or be as close to being nothing as I am able to conceive or I wish to conceive or wish to bother myself attempting to conceive, since while I am some
thing, whatever else I might be is inconceivable to me, except as nothing, except as not me, and what would that make of me, if I am nothing, if I am unable to expect, unable to find myself anywhere, except nowhere, nothing, what would be the point of trying to go there, to be nothing there, nothing in an imaginary world truly unimaginable, if no air, water, food, shelter, no expectations.

  I expect to miss my right hand if I lose it. Expect my left hand, if I lose my right hand, not to miss it. The parts of my body strangers to one another. A body constituted of millions and millions of minuscule parts, each part selfish, oblivious. Dedicated, obliged to perform a single option, a simple act of on/off, yes/no, an act that perpetuates saying yes or no/on or off and nothing more. No idea of connection, dependence, no notion of an entity other than itself, nor of itself, no awareness, of course, of a particular body to which it belongs, a mortal body within which it functions, a body determining the life and death of each of the body’s parts, every microscopic part or combination of parts such as a right hand or left hand I have learned to call mine and would miss terribly—perhaps more terribly even than if I lost someone I believed was the love of my life—if I lost either one of my hands, but a hand means nothing to other body parts, just as the parts mean nothing to themselves, no consciousness, each governed only by the simplest set of rules—on or off/yes or no—concerned by only a single function eternally or instantaneously, once or infinite repetitions, no difference for them. Still I willingly host this horde of strangers, autonomous and greedy and treacherous and temporary as each part is, I welcome them, embrace them call them my body. And nothing is closer, more intimate to me than my own body. We are identical. Without it I would be no one, nothing, and not to care about my body, not to love it first, last, always, or to neglect it, forget it, not only unwise, not only the beginning of madness and dissolution, but next to impossible because I am the signals sent to me by senses that constitute my flesh and blood, that animate my thoughts, the continuing presence constituting me.