Ellen parted the Algerian ivy over the kitchen window. A man on the next rooftop swung a rabbit on a chain in a full circle. She was speechless with outrage. The rabbit squirmed pitifully. Ellen pounded the ledge. She compared his method of torture to that of the DINA, and said that Puerto Ricans were incapable of anything but barbarism.
She had once volunteered at a Catholic shelter for unwed mothers. She liked some of the names they gave their newborns: Toyota, Yashica, the twins Celanese and Dacron. She said her sympathy was for the women and perhaps the children, but the fifteen-year-old fathers were bastards. Though she was very fond of her super and her mother’s super, who prattled on about the immortality of the soul as he botched the plumbing, she regretted that Latin men were a menace. Charities called it “compassion fatigue.”
What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over, they say. I would have gone on a retreat but my check to the religious order bounced.
12 /
Going Home
I wasn’t heartless, but I was the next best thing: almost heartless. You’ve said goodbye to the house. You want someone else to take responsibility for it before it explodes or has squatters in it. Sometimes you go back to check the attic and the basement, but even then you don’t always get every piece of the china.
I cultivated an indifference that would be so big not even I would see it, but I didn’t know what to do with that funny feeling. I bumped against television images and wet newsprint, against people in the street, spotted myself, and couldn’t suppress that funny feeling.
I saw a black man asleep on the subway, an entire row of seats to himself. He turned over, reached into his trousers, and scratched. He was wearing a ragged shearling coat, a relic of better days or one of fashion’s castoffs. I wish I could say my reaction was one of pity. Instead, I felt embarrassment, the sort I would rather not submit to analysis. He opened his eyes, which compromised his fellow passengers, myself included: I’d been looking at him and he caught me. It had been easier to look at him when he was asleep. He got up and staggered into the next car. Those of us standing did not make a move toward the seats he vacated.
Some days when the streets were filled, I wondered where all the people were going. I picked out the blacks in the fancy restaurant windows, the way my elderly relatives used to examine the television screen and count the number of black faces in the chorus. It was as though I went around the city conducting my own informal survey, “Blacks I Have Seen.” In a West Side church, what united the convicted Brinks robber who rested behind Polo sunglasses and broke into cars for a living with the television producer who shopped at Agnes B. and chased her daughter around the pews as the simmel cakes were blessed? The priest didn’t mind either of them because he thought of his as an inner-city church.
In the end, the bone has to come out of the soup. I was noticed myself by a woman in a small group of the homeless who had made a stretch of St. Mark’s Place in front of Cooper Union their living room. I’d been milling around flea-market tables until I happened onto the makeshift encampment. It had fallen on her, as the only woman in the group, to be busy with household chores, to sweep the sidewalk around the ramshackle chairs on which the men sat as they listened to a radio. I was close enough for her to appreciate my aftershave. She said she had a slogan for me, free of charge: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans, and if you really want to make Him laugh, tell Him your plans for somebody else.”
The cult of Prester John was still going strong in 1985. A man would rise up with the sacred jewel of kingship around his neck and restore Mother Africa to her glory. Contenders were everywhere; they rushed to keep up with every controversy, like a flock of rooks, crying in the air currents, trailing gulls to a dump site. If you fired a bullet into space, you’d bring down a black leader.
I went to the Felt Forum, where the Pretender was to speak. Toward Thirty-third Street the crowd thickened and I had the dizzy sensation of being a child again, lost among legs. Surprisingly, there were few representatives from the lunatic fringe: lonely figures in quasi-military gear holding up charts showing the twelve tribes of Israel. The police shouted instructions—“Keep them off the barricades”—and their anger added to the crowd’s excitement.
Scalping began in earnest. More wanted to buy than to sell. One guy hugged his ticket and said he just had to hang on to this one. Filing into the arena, I saw the lines split up: men were directed to one side, women to the other, and for a crazy moment I thought some Islamic segregation of the sexes was to be imposed.
Instead, we were searched. Young men dressed in tight-fitting suits and bow ties, like middleweight champions at press conferences, told us to raise our arms and keep moving. Hands tapped lightly up and down every body. The mass frisking demonstrated the scale and discipline of the organization and announced to everyone that we had been transferred from police jurisdiction.
Supermarket music came over loudspeakers. I worried that my fake press pass would be challenged during a scene between one of the Pretender’s security guards and two white journalists who had settled on the steps. The guard told them they were a fire hazard and would have to move. They pretended they hadn’t heard. He made a show of getting angry, but that could not disguise his pleasure in telling them what to do. His stance said it was his turn to do some bossing around.
The two journalists gestured helplessly at the press section. All the seats were claimed. The guard told them to look for seats in the balcony. They said it was important that they be able to see. He told them it would go hard on them if he had to tell them twice. “Would you talk that way if a white man asked you to move?”
They picked up their cameras and surveyed the rows. The concrete walls were streaked with rust. One of the journalists suggested that they forget the assignment. A black woman testing her tape recorder said, “Stick around. This could be as much fun as Purim.” She obviously liked the looks on their faces. “Not to worry. I’m not halakahically Jewish.”
At 7:20 p.m. it was announced that there were 25,000 people waiting outside. “All brothers seated anywhere in the auditorium who know how to check please come to the rostrum immediately. They must be checked immediately. You know the atmosphere that’s been created here.”
Applause for the numbers waiting outside, applause for the volunteers, applause for the tense atmosphere, applause for the further announcement that the organization had its own film equipment and high-speed duplicating machines, and still more applause that videotapes of the evening’s ritual would be available immediately.
“I just got a whiff of something disrespectful. I smell that reefer right here on this rostrum and will not tolerate this. If someone is sitting near you, tell him to put that reefer out. You can’t understand better high.” That, too, was applauded.
The members of the audience also gave themselves a big hand. They were impressed by the scene they made, the threat of potential energy that they as a body conveyed to onlookers. A large proportion of the curious and the believers probably came to experience again the surge of power they once felt at protest rallies in churches, halls, and public squares.
A similar astonishment must have greeted such mass demonstrations in the past, when the marauding voices and scattered blacks came together outside their usual precincts. Marcus Garvey, they said, had done it, had shown them what they really looked like, and though he had been forgotten by the time Malcolm X was selling sandwiches on trains, having his hair straightened in the best place in Boston, and laying them out in the Savoy Ballroom the next night, he did it, and because it was impossible to imagine Malcolm X at sixty, new “buccaneers of the street,” “dim-descended, superbly destined,” were doing it again.
Some identities were like fires in old houses. There was no grate; just a big pile of ashes smoldering away. Maybe there was a hound snoozing nearby. You put on another log. The thing was to create a hotbed of ash and the fire would look after itself, though the applewood was neither as dr
y nor as old as it should have been. English had become a term of abuse, even when used by the English. People would rather have gone on about their Welsh identity. Only minorities could have an identity. It was too jingoistic in others.
But the links with Africa had fallen away, though there were plenty of people who would try to convince you otherwise. What survived was true. Some things remained, but that in its way was as wild as saying, “I come from Kentish men,” or, “That’s the Angle in me showing.”
A formerly despised people also once despised themselves, the theory went, and so there was no way to value the expressiveness of “sweating like a coon trying to write a letter” or “busy as a jump cable at a nigger funeral” when a white person said it. If you laughed, you would go to the other extreme once you’d stopped laughing, and a dog could have told you that.
“Welcome to the oppressed,” one of the night’s many warm-up acts said. “There’s a ticket for every seat. We don’t like to charge to tell the truth God has blessed us with, but we don’t charge much. When Michael was here it cost thirty dollars. Some of you have never been here because the tickets are too expensive.”
Another warm-up act: “Let’s lay some truth on the FBI agents planted in the audience so they’ll work for us. We are not poor, we are poorly organized. We don’t need talk, we need guns. I love the spirit here. I’m a born-again primitive. Your leadership told you not to come here. Either you’re not listening or they’re not your leaders. We’re going to take a bite out of this apple and spit it back at the mayor.” An exclusive invitation to the vernacular pie.
The Pretender appeared late, like a rock star. Flashbulbs exploded and made him poppy bright. He arrived onstage with his mouth working, coming in the name of Allah, who alone would give them victory over their enemies. “Who knocked Henry Ford out of the ring? The International Jew.” This was the main event: leftovers; an hour of peelings, bones, onionskins, fat.
“You may wonder why I’m smiling. I know something.” The Pretender had his work cut out for him, converting mundane ingredients into a high-caloric meal of sound bites. “The politicians call me ugly names. They are trying to undercut my magnetic attraction in my own people. They are trying to destroy my influence among you and ultimately murder me. They think they are doing God a favor and seek my death. Now, isn’t that something?” He held up both hands in an attempt to calm the storm of applause.
I remembered the thrill of a slippery kitchen floor during the lunch rush. I washed dishes. I hadn’t the time to properly scrape the plates. I flipped them at the bins. Most of the food went on the floor, and skating across the mixture of water and slops I elevated to a skill.
“What do you think will happen to America if anything happens to me?” the Pretender asked. “They say I am divisive. It has to be that way. You can’t mix Satan and God. Am I from Satan or God? If I were from Satan, this world would love me because this is Satan’s world.”
I saw stacks and stacks of dirty dishes, Mount Rushmores of crockery, as the Pretender talked on. “The wicked are surprised and angry. Jews are going through America trying to line up blacks against me. Your excuses are ending. I am your last chance. God makes me pleasant for you to look at. This little black boy is your last chance. You can’t frighten black people the way you used to.” The cheers were furious. They had licked every pot. Somewhere a watermelon was weeping.
A journalist with snowy hair like Mark Twain’s bit down on his pipe and said, “Begin life as a con and your character can improve; begin as a prophet and you can only go downhill.”
The Crooked Creek Retirement Home in Indianapolis asked Grandfather to help out at its Sunday services. Sometimes he smiled. The companions of his swift decline liked to “get happy.” He sat apart, infirm but correct, with his Borsalino in his lap. The staff didn’t press him. Participation optional. They had other preachers under their care, men willing to stand until needed, though they tired in their ushers’ poses, hands neatly behind their backs. Confusion overtook a few faces, as if they were afraid their patience might fall in the category of what the mild staff termed “something uncalled for.”
Never finding Grandfather in his room, we’d wander apologetically through the television room, nervous about what we’d catch him doing. I once saw a nurse pry a telephone from his hand. “That man’s in a home. He don’t know what’s he doing.” She hung up and asked, “Now, was that called for?”
And always the shuffling of slippers and the smell I thought I’d grow accustomed to. I tried to get my face ready by thinking of the experiments in which young macaque monkeys were force-fed in order to induce aging, but certain kinds of sympathy can’t be faked.
This for the man who used to tell me that the world was not made for equality. Grandfather used to say, “One morning Martin Luther and Erasmus were riding by the dead on a battlefield. Martin Luther said, ‘They died in a just cause.’ Erasmus said, ‘They were men and had something better to do today.’ The hope is with Erasmus.”
I brought a map of South Carolina to the nursing home and asked him where the old plantation had been. Grandfther confirmed that the tobacco-producing area was shaded lavender, that the soybean region was gray, exactly as the legend to the map indicated. Together we read that clay and mica were the major mineral occurrences. Sassafras Mountain stood 3,560 feet above sea level and Grandfather said to the air, “No good ever came out of Galilee.”
Then we got a call that he was missing. My brother-in-law searched the laundromats and hamburger restaurants along the highway. Grandfather was found in the back lot of the nursing home, standing in the toolshed with the lucid shovels, and ever afterward he sat in his chair disenthralled, silent, inscrutable.
We, my father and mother, my sisters and I, went armed with magazines in the hope of tricking his vanity into speech. He used to read aloud from these “wheels of life”—Newsweek, The Crisis—for hours on end, in his stirring pulpit tenor, without comprehension, the volunteer social worker insisted, until his fellow inmates were wet with tears of exasperation. Our ploy didn’t work. He refused to speak to us, we who had conspired to finish him off.
He declined to say another word to bird, child, or bored nurse’s assistant in the days that were left to him. He betrayed no interest in the news items we dangled before him and breathed in answer to such questions as who raked the gravel drive to the nursing home, or why did he want to hide and miss that delicious black bottom pie. Grandfather looked at us and our glossies as if from a great height, enveloped in the stillness mountain climbers are said to discover once the summit is gained.
I gave up hope of the heirlooms, the stories of how, in the old days, the poor boiled dirt to recover the salt that fell from meat as it cured. Grandfather checked his vest pocket to make sure that during the one-way hug I hadn’t lifted his valuable, handed-down tale of hooded night riders advancing under an ashen moon.
Grandfather was moved from the nursing home into the hospital and died after a lengthy rehearsal period in the form of a diabetic coma. His death in 1985 came to me in New York in the shape of a yellow envelope, a terrifying telegram lying on the floor. I hadn’t paid several telephone bills. I knew it was bad news. I opened it, lying on my back so that I had the telegram’s view of the mail slot in the door. I was relieved that it was Grandfather and not someone I was not then and am not now reconciled to losing.
I didn’t go to Grandfather’s funeral and never visited his grave. In the end, I went to Georgia to say goodbye to him, because, in spite of myself, I believed that if he was anywhere, he would be there, wandering along the banks of the Ogeechee River.
“Be careful of crackers,” Grandfather once said to me. We were talking about the farm he used to have. Many blacks were forced off their land. Grandfather wasn’t one of them, though it sometimes suited his mood to think of himself as such. In fact, he’d been anxious to get away after my father’s mother died.
I reminded him of what he’d always said about good wh
ites. He was peeling an orange. His hands shook. “I know. It just seems like I ran into so many bad ones.”
“What do you make of all that now?”
“That it’s typical.”
“Painful?”
“No. Well, if it is I don’t believe I have much right to the pain.”
“Why not?”
“Because I haven’t earned it.”
The farm had long since been turned into a motel, but Grandfather made pilgrimages to see the trees he’d planted. Everyone thought these sudden trips of his dangerous, at his age, but once he had made up his mind no one could turn him left or right. He had begun to show signs that he could remember in detail things that happened years ago, yet what had occurred the day before was a blur to him, like an interval at sea.
I was told that on his final journey to Georgia, sometime in the late 1970s, Grandfather had been very jumpy and often rushed to the window to follow the sound of a distant train. He landed in a small town in South Carolina. A black woman found him. He had no clothes, no money, no idea of who he was, where he was, or how he had traveled so far. She took Grandfather to the sheriff, who put him in jail for his own safety.
The sheriff’s wife cooked when there were prisoners. They enjoyed talking to him, somehow discovered his name, where he had family, and called around. After that he was kept under the close guard of old age. No more uprisings against himself. He’d been on his way to his ancestral home at Sugar Creek.
I had not been South since my childhood and still believed in the hurry-sundown Dixie of movieland. The New South was a surprise. Augusta, the last of the Fall Line cities, had treated itself to a facelift. Along the Savannah River, dwellings once “segregated in place, but integrated in sin,” as Grandfather remembered them, had been turned into a historic development. The bordellos and their world of paydays had given way to crab-cake parlors done in a sort of minstrel-era decor.
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