Downstairs, something of that generation-bonding barbershop camaraderie would circulate among the men in the remodeled basement. “Our father who sits in Washington, whatever be thy name. You took me off Chesterfields and put me on Gold Grain.” As a boy, when I wandered among my father’s friends, I heard, between talk about the cornucopia of FHA loans, voter registration, and relaxed credit terms, about Foggy Bottom in Atlanta, Chicago, Paddy’s Bottom in my hometown. Every town had a Bottom, every Negro had a story with a Bottom in it.
Men and women would meet again in the living room, under the dispensation of a shared “sadidiness”—an Old Country expression for narcissism—as if they constituted an endangered genus. The line would go something like: She may cheat at cards, but she’s family; he may be a crook, but he’s family; she may be in the CIA, but she’s family, he may be a drunk, but he’s our drunk. My elderly relatives could call their New Orleans connections a bunch of French-speaking niggers. I, however, hadn’t earned the privilege. And yet for all the tearful, laughing embraces what this woman had hated about this man in 1925 would never change. She would never forget his refusal to pay the five-cent fare to have a tooth extracted.
I hadn’t known Uncle Ulysses, except as Grandfather’s congruent hypothesis, so to speak. I couldn’t even say what he looked like. His most distinguishing feature was his stomach. It cast his shoes in shadow, a symbol of well-being from the days when blacks didn’t think any more than anyone else about high blood pressure.
Uncle Ulysses gave the impression of concentric circles, a brown snowman. His head was very large, a fact that made him sensitive about Grandfather’s passion for hats. Perhaps he had suffered as a student when the cephalic index was taken seriously. I was told that when the medics attempted to resuscitate him, his stomach grew monstrous with air, and Aunt Odetta, remembering his girlish vigilance about keeping himself covered at all times, interfered with the wires and pads to pull his shirt over his bloated paunch.
He called me “Cotton Chopper,” which I never liked. It sounded, to my ten-year-old ears, too Southern, that is to say, too Negro. He knew that I didn’t like it, but that never stopped him. Though Uncle Ulysses was known as parsimonious with words, reserved, given to elaborate sentence structures to avoid the overly assertive pronoun I, he was a bully. He used to demonstrate pressure points and judo holds on me. He talked about chickens eating the weak among them, asked if I meant seriously to imply that I had never enjoyed wringing a chicken’s neck.
He imposed an insane frugality on Aunt Odetta. The first time I ever saw a lock on a telephone was in their house. It was as odd a sight as women who diet by having their mouths wired shut. He doled out his coiled, aggressive, bullying facts to his forever-assenting, grown-up son, while Aunt Odetta cooked and cooked: “Did you know onions were first grown in Mongolia?” He was fussy, down to the toothpicks he liked—the minty kind.
The family had a theory. Uncle Ulysses worked all his life at a paper company. He entered as a stock boy in the 1920s and was retired some fifty years later, at not much higher than a stock boy’s salary, though he was spoken of as practically running the whole company. Some said he hadn’t been “right” since the trenches. Others disagreed, saying he’d been well behind the lines with the rolling kitchens. That’s the way it was with the past: live long enough and you could massage the facts.
I remembered his fragile glass cabinet, which held intriguing French coins, a bolo knife, a copy of Moss’s Private’s Manual, and two intensely cherished German pike helmets. I had some idea that it was a memorial to an earlier version of himself, before his entombment in the back office of the paper company. Classroom editions of books like Storm’s Immensee with his name thickly written in black ink along with the forgivably pompous “Universitas Bostoniensis” had the poignancy of faded snapshots of total strangers.
It was possible to connect Uncle Ulysses with the vulnerability of colored regiments that marched with broomsticks, which made people laugh. There weren’t enough uniforms, so most of them had to wear clothes that blended in. His father, Old Esau, didn’t think much of the army because the ranks of officers were closed.
Old Esau didn’t think much of Woodrow Wilson either. Just as Uncle Ulysses had remained a Baptist, as firmly in place as one of the decayed concrete lions on the steps of the Holy Zion Fired Baptist Church, he also had stayed with the GOP. I held over from my childhood the notion that Negroes, even rich, light-skinned ones, were supposed to be Democrats. Uncle Ulysses was suspicious of Negro magazines, Model Cities programs, quotas, Harlem, James Brown. He never “bought black” in his life.
Once, when they were both in Indianapolis, Grandfather, in one of his moods, said that we all knew that “Ulyss” had spent most of World War I sitting on his duff in Hoboken and that he bought his pike helmets off someone later. Calling someone dishonest was Grandfather’s method of deep fishing. Usually the person fell into the trap and, to prove that he wasn’t a liar, said more than he meant to.
Uncle Ulysses had his defensive details about the transport and the convoy from Sandy Hook, how the men sang “Rock of Ages” to calm themselves, how the ropes tore gloves and the cold at sea burned hands. He went on at Grandfather about the officers who kept the regiment uninformed about its movements, partly from disrespect and partly because of their uncertain relations with their French superiors.
I couldn’t believe that Grandfather hadn’t heard Uncle Ulysses’s stories before; they were over fifty years old by that time. Uncle Ulysses recalled Senegalese drivers at Maffrecourt and women atop the rubble of buildings. He said they would have made anyone think of the refugees down South after they were burned out of their homes.
The rats of Fortin and Ravin des Pins—it wasn’t as though Grandfather hadn’t known his own brother back then, where he had or had not been. But I wasn’t sure. They were a feuding bunch. It was puzzling to me how people lost sight of one another, how siblings fell out of touch. I thought perhaps it was a function of age, or a regrettable outcome of an era when people didn’t have the means or the time to visit. I couldn’t imagine life without my parents or my sisters.
Grandfather smiled at Uncle Ulysses’s standard information about whizbangs and silent 88s, how they sailed in at a very low ordinate and a soldier in their way became a very sorry fellow. Shells dug craters, blood dyed pools red. Wooded ravines and high hills afforded the best protection, Uncle Ulysses said. Then he noticed something in Grandfather’s face. His own puffy cheeks flushed with fury and embarrassment, as if his younger brother had tricked him again into saying something personal or showing emotion.
Not every busybody is a moral primitive. I was both, and alone in Grandfather’s house. There was no wake. No ancient relatives had come from deep pockets of the Old Country and Uncle Ulysses had not had much of a knack for cronyism. Crowded, exciting, singing wakes only happened in the movies, in the folklore of continuity where people were allotted one town from cradle to coffin. The family, when I thought about its gatherings over the years, had been more territorial and less adhesive than customers in a self-service laundry.
They were either ailing or dead themselves anyway, those weird names from my childhood when I couldn’t understand why my mother’s relatives didn’t know my father’s. Grandfather struck me as being one of the last of his period. He was “collectible.” I sat at his desk, eased out his drawer à la I Spy, co-starring Bill Cosby, and put my paws on his manuscript. He didn’t belong to himself; he had no right to privacy. The old darky was mine.
Convention led me to expect an attempt to evoke the sweet milk, the raw turnips, the thunder, sandflies, and linguistic isolation of the Old Country. Talk de ole African talk? Grandfather had some understanding of irony. From the memoirs: “To our astonishment, as we discovered much later, the little church which our father pastored consisted for the most part of the lineal descendants of the once prosperous slave owners.” It was 1905 in that sentence. Madison, Georgia. Grandfather was the thi
rd of five boys and had three sisters whom he neglected to mention, which was perhaps what he meant when he used to talk about the strength not to languish where there were no constraints. “There were white churches also, but no one said that a person could not worship there if he wanted to.”
The starched jackets, straight-legged knee pants, scrubbed brick church, the Christmas barrels and separate but adequate school of the happy colored childhood. However: “Life’s romance is never a high road of complete sweetness. There were months of tenseness that touched the nerve center of our being.” This was an incident in Madison. A lynch mob had formed in town. The mayor was quickly ushered into the study of the parsonage. “A horse and carriage stood waiting at my father’s disposal, in which he might ride hastily around the town and advise all the colored people to get off the streets immediately and stay indoors until morning,” Esau, the leader, riding off into the night.
Another happening from Grandfather’s record: Madison’s liberal white superintendent of education found himself in danger with some “underprivileged Nordics.” He was escorted out of town under heavy guard, having agreed that if the party was overtaken he would be left on his own. “Here again my father was brought to the table to share and give advice. Oh, how he understood: he that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and faith of the saints.”
All Grandfather had left that had been his father’s were a few books. A Catechism of Scripture and Doctrine Practice for the Familial and Sabbath Schools, Designed Also for the Oral Instruction of Colored Persons, Benjamin Tucker Tanner’s Theological Lectures, an almanac entitled Progress of a Race, and Booker T. Washington’s The Story of My Life—worn volumes upright like Pilgrims, wedged between a rose-colored lamp and a pot of coins and buttons. There was also an old edition of Milton’s poems. Esau’s initials were inscribed on the title page, along with the price. There were serpents in relief on the cover, the pages flaked at every turn. Included were texts in Latin and Greek which, in Grandfather’s jealousy, he did not believe his father could read.
Not surprisingly Old Esau, in Grandfather’s version, never got out of the wagon, returned from church business. The chapter on Madison was brief. Grandfather blessed the boys Grady and Paul, who’d brought him milk when he was ill as a child. He recalled the Stovalls, the Atkinses, the Shaws. “There was neither bitterness nor fear in the little blue-eyed lassies who showed me how to ‘play store’ with chests of Confederate currency.” Then it was over, his seven years in Madison giving way to boisterous Augusta, Georgia.
Grandfather lived without photographs. His house was bare, like a bunker. No shoebox, no leather album with which to beguile the hours, none of his first wife. He was more than a bit vain, but he didn’t even have pictures of himself on the job, signing a wedding certificate or standing among the well-met at the conclusion of some interdenominational conference. Perhaps the beige stepgrandmother was holding hostage the images from his past.
A light rain began. Through the dirty curtains clouds trapped the city’s illumination and threw it back to earth in silver strands. The air grew cooler and cooler in the way friends write to one another less and less and finally vanish. Modern life roared over the rooftops a few blocks away, but Dana Street was so quiet it seemed to belong to a backwater where you couldn’t tell if the population was aware of what it lacked.
The telephone rang. I froze like a burglar caught with a sack of silverware on his back. I rearranged Grandfather’s manuscript, shut the drawer, wiped away my fingerprints. The phone rang and rang, like a recrimination. I’d heard a man in the club car of a train brag that he had hopped up in the middle of the night and lied to the receiver that he was sleeping, alone. I watched a woman eavesdrop. Her expression into her plastic cup said that the telephone always sides with the injured party; but it’s the victim who throws out the verdict.
The telephone wanted to know if Grandfather had turned up. Evidently he had run away from the funeral. He was last seen moving ahead of his brother’s body. He was down the steps and around the corner before anyone spoke. The hearse waited, gave up, and went to the cemetery. My instructions were to call Uncle Ulysses’s house the moment Grandfather showed.
The rain increased, the wind moved the spray like particles in a dust storm. Under the streetlamps the rain took on the character of smoke. It came through the window that I had opened to let air into the overheated room and to let out my sneakiness. Drops as fine as salt mingled with the punctuation marks of Grandfather’s church bulletins. “Nothing like a good storm to scour the sky,” he used to say. Those wise sayings he was forever coming up with—some satire in them after all, some laughing at himself, at old darkies everywhere, and at all of us who only wanted them to talk in the language of buildings that done gone to leaking.
Several telephone consultations later it was clear that Grandfather was off, maybe boarding a Greyhound in the rain without a stitch of luggage. He had moved on, severed himself from pleasant and unpleasant situations in that way more than once. Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. I thought of him on the road, like Uncle Castor in the weakest days of the big band era: at the Municipal Auditorium in Cleveland, at South Parkway in Chicago, trying to get hot in Omaha.
Before I thought about the worry his disappearance had caused my parents, aunts, uncles, sisters, about the calls to hospitals and the missing persons bureau, before we found out that he had gone to the last place we thought to look for him—to the beige stepgrandmother’s table overlooking Harlem—I admired him for still gambling, after so many years, on the fresh start.
7 /
Soul
It was over. Firecrackers and sparklers went off all over campus, from South Field to the law school terrace. Around the Sundial, the setting of many historic harangues, up and down College Walk, on the steps in front of the notorious administration building known as Low Library, the twang of guitars, the crackle of radios, the putter of three-wheeled security vans, the eruptions of voices, and the flags of the NLF said it again and again. Even the jocks were out drinking, throwing footballs in the twilight, crashing into hedges, showing off for the Ophelias of the peace movement, who straddled the windowsills of the Student Mobilization Committee.
I squinted from my dormitory’s entrance across the nappy lawn to the Quad, the courtyard on the other side of campus, where student-leader types were trying to hook a pair of Harpo Marx glasses on the statue of the young Alexander Hamilton, so available to militant decoration after his shoes were painted red in the golden days of’68. No matter that since then demonstrations and sit-ins degenerated into farce; “living theater” we called it. I remained in the doorway for some time, afraid to take a step. It was the end of spring according to our psychological calendars, study period, the week before final exams, after which you would have either blown it or not blown it, but in the joyous and idle meantime Saigon had fallen.
I backed up the steps into Furnald Hall. The lobby was busy and unexpectedly cool, like a church on a travel itinerary. The guard, Jesse, union member, moonlighter, and taker of beer bribes, already snored at his post. His head rolled against the back of the chair. His bald spot matched the leather, like expensive luggage. “You ain’t holdin’ no air,” he said, if he was awake, when I flashed my ID card in the small hours of the night. “Mess with me, boy, and I’ll have to jump down your throat and swing on your liver.” He was conspiratorial with black students who flouted the rules, such as they were, and distanced the white ones with a grunt, hardly condescending to hear them out. White students who knew how to give a driver the Black Power salute, or who had raised their consciousness, as the expression went, to the point where they said more than thank you to the doorman back home were intimidated by the political correctness in Jesse’s glance. He was nicer to the jocks who didn’t care to know even his name.
“Boy, does your daddy know you’re up here running the streets?” That was
the night I passed out on the subway, bolted at the 116th Street stop so as not to end up in Harlem, and turned to see the graffiti of the doors close on my glasses left rattling in the seat. But Jesse had got it right. It was as necessary to self-conscious living as the Fourteenth Amendment: your parents sent you out into the world; that is, they sadly waved you off with a cashier’s check and had no idea what you were up to, apart from the information that could be extrapolated from computer printouts at the bottom of the semester or from how often you called home to beg.
My mother called every Sunday. If I had to, I would have taken a plane or an all-night train from the scene of the crime, experience, to be in my room in time to get my script together. Once she called in the middle of the week. “Are you still in school? The FBI was here to question you about Patty Hearst.” Two of the heiress snatchers were from my home state, Indiana, and had lurked about the local Committee to Free Angela Davis. I rushed all over the place with the news that the FBI was looking for me, careful to wipe the smile off my face before I knocked.
My parents were not reconciled to my being in New York, so far away. One learned things in Indiana, too, they argued. From time to time I received clippings about the harm marijuana and LSD could do to chromosomes. But jurisdiction was precisely the point. What I wanted was the veil of miles, the freedom to stay up all night, to waste my time, their money, you name it. In those days, when months were like years, when students thought of themselves as bravely parasitic and “I miss you” wasn’t just another lie—in those days when we had more appetite than good sense, the punishment for mistaking white clouds for distant mountains was not loss of life.
I saw a Frisbee bang through a chandelier. I saw Jesse straighten up. “You look like you about to throw up a Buick again,” he said, and closed his filmy right eye, one of his many disconcerting tricks. “Don’t cry Hughie ’round me.” The left eye shut like a ticket window.
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