by Wesley Brown
“Theo, were you serious when you told him to use himself as a weapon?”
“I don’t know. But Keith must a thought so. Ain’t that a bitch? He did what I said. And I don’t even know if I’ll do what I say.”
“You didn’t go into the service.”
“Yeah, but… I can’t seem to keep up with events anymore. The appropriate response changes every day. It’s gonna be hard to follow Keith’s act.”
“Why try?”
“Cause I don’t wanna have it said that I ever let a white dude get the best of me.”
“But maybe Geneva was right?”
“About what?”
“About history not being everything.”
“It’ll do until something better comes along. In the meantime, I’m going underground until I can get some things into focus. I’ve had my greatest moments of clarity after someone I was close to died. First Malcolm, now Keith. It’ll take a little while before I’m ready to inflict a political consequence on America, but when I do it’ll be outrageous. And I’ll live to tell about it.”
Theo wanted me to go with him. When I told him I couldn’t, he split and left a note saying HAVING BEEN TREATED EXTREMELY DICTATES THAT WE TAKE EXTREME ACTION. While in prison I read a newspaper account about Theo being one of a group of blacks arrested in connection with a series of fire bombings of Harlem police stations.
Unlike Theo, I didn’t recover from my scare with uncertainty so quickly. I had believed with Theo that doubt was a punk half-stepping around self-evident truths. And I was quicker than soon and surer than shit about the shape and point of everything I did. But by the time Keith committed revolutionary suicide my rap was no longer the foil for disorder I once believed it was. In fact, my command of imagery was dribbling way past composure toward a directionless spree. So, being unable to play the political licks put down by Keith and Theo, I laid with what I could play and kept my date in court.
I still couldn’t go for Pauline reducing my not going into the army to trying to get attention. Chilly had run the same shit on me in the joint. Geneva was more on the money. I had drained the mystery from my history, and as a result, stripped my life of enchantment, which is a more sincere form of instruction.
I TURNED INTO MY BLOCK and saw the car in the driveway. My hands were sweating. As always with my folks and myself, it was time for the battle of wills. I was suddenly very tired. I climbed the steps slowly and rang the bell.
“Welcome home, son.” We embraced, but he got the best of it, putting the crush on me before I had a chance to hug back. Pops was short like me, but packed into his runt of a body was about two hundred pounds of muscle swelling inside his pants legs and shirt.
“Melvin’s here!”
“You look like you put on some more weight.”
“Yeah, that’s from all the starch they were feeding me.”
“Would you look at this boy!”
“Don’t he look good?”
“He sure do. You remember me, don’t you, Melvin? I’m your Aunt Clara.”
“I remember you, Aunt Clara.”
“How you, Melvin?”
“Fine. How are you, Uncle Arthur?” We shook hands and he applied his legendary grip, which brought me to my knees for a moment of silent prayer. When he let me up I saw my mother standing on the steps leading upstairs.
She was much taller than my father, which was something that used to make me wonder how they made it in bed. No doubt they had found a way, just like a Watusi and a Pygmy would if they were strung out on each other. I didn’t rush to Moms immediately, but took her in slowly, following the flow of her smooth, prune-juice skin from her face, down her long, bony neck to the branches of her collarbone. My mother had the airs of a giraffe. It wasn’t that she felt superior. She was.
“I guess you don’t see nobody else, hunh?” It was Debra. She seemed to be more the spitting image of my mother than ever, with just enough of her own unruly spray thrown in for good measure.
“Now that Melvin’s here, why don’t we eat?”
“Wait a minute, Rachel! The boy just got here. I wanna make a toast first.” A bottle of champagne was opened and glasses were passed around to everyone. “I’d like to make this toast to Melvin. We’re all glad to have you back home, son. So here’s hoping you’re on your way now and won’t stop. And with a name like Ellington, there ain’t no way you can fail!”
There it was. The invocation of the name Ellington. My father was an ardent admirer of Duke Ellington. He had collected almost every record Ellington had ever recorded and raised me on the discography. Pops had played pretty good stride piano when he was younger, but an accident to his left hand at the factory where he worked halted his ambition to become a musician. While he didn’t push me to become a musician, Pops encouraged me to adopt the style of our namesake in whatever I did. According to my father, this style was embodied in an Ellington tune entitled “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” and was on the album Ellington at Newport 1956. Pops interpreted the side as an expression of what it meant to be blue or really laid low and still sky right out of the blue. He believed that since being blue was one of the cardinal colors of existence, the most important part of life was the middle distance, or what happened between the diminuendo and crescendo of the blues.
This statement was developed in a solo by the tenor saxophone player Paul Gonsalves, who played for twenty-seven straight choruses. Pops said that every one of the choruses that Gonsalves played was a reshuffling of the same old same old, and that the significance of creating twenty-seven possibilities for the way things could go down turned everybody’s head around to the extent that after listening nobody could say, “Tell me something I don’t already know,” but would have to say, “Oh, yeah?”
The older I got, the more Pops urged me to follow the Duke Ellington lead, embodied in the twenty-seven-chorus solo by Paul Gonsalves. He drilled into me that life was a continuous jam session. And that it was only by trading choruses with the vamp of the blues that I would ever learn that freedom is staying loose when time is tight.
I sat down to a table that was definitely a dumping ground for the horn of plenty. The sumptuous spread of meats, vegetables, and freshly baked bread was such a departure from the cut-and-dried grit in prison that for a moment I just feasted on the seasoned steam rising from the table.
“I hope the food tastes all right, Melvin. I cooked all your favorites.”
“Everything is really good, Moms.”
“Rachel! Is that all you gonna put on his plate?”
“He can get more if he wants it, Walter.”
“Here, Melvin, take a piece of this country ham.”
“No thanks, Pops.”
“What’s wrong? Why don’t you want any ham?”
“I stopped eating pork while I was away.” Jaws locked in the middle of chews.
“Why’d you do that?”
“It didn’t agree with me, so I stopped eating it.”
“It agreed with you all right before you left.”
“Well, I just don’t eat it anymore.”
“Melvin! You aren’t a Muslim, are you?”
“No, Moms, I’m not a Muslim.”
“Well, I don’t know who you been talkin to,” Pops said, “but I can’t understand bein all choosy about what you eat. I guess you gonna tell me next that you don’t eat no flesh period, and that you done joined some group that eats plants and chews weeds all the time.”
“It’s all right, Walter. If Melvin doesn’t want any ham, he doesn’t have to eat any.” Moms was definitely trying to be slick, playing a vise closing in on me from the other side of the table. Already I was beginning to feel guilty. But I hung tough and didn’t accompany my folks’ harangue in support of hog meat by eating any.
“You shouldn’t let Daddy get away with some of the things he says to you,” Debra said later when we were alone. She had always been much more of a fighter than I was, resisting any unjustified attempts to bridle h
er. All through grade school she was one of the few girls whom boys would never harass. She had a reputation for fighting with such ferocity and abandon that even boys who were older were not willing to tangle with her.
“What difference would it have made if I had said something?” I said. “You know how Pops is.”
“Yeah, I know how he is. That’s why I always let him know what’s on my mind.” She was still too bony to be so brazen, drilling the air with both pinkies and staring with eyes that stung. “I’ve been that way,” she said, “ever since Daddy took me to the hospital to see Uncle Arthur after he had an operation. It was the first time I ever saw an adult who was weak and powerless. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. After that, whenever Daddy tried to intimidate me, it just rolled off my back, cause it was like watching Uncle Arthur laid up in the hospital scared to death but trying to order everybody around. If I knew an adult who was sick, I couldn’t wait to visit them, especially if it was a man. That’s probably one of the reasons I decided to become a nurse. Seeing people humbled by physical ailments helps me to deal with the arrogance of people who have their health and strength. So now if I cater to a man, it’s either cause I want to or cause I’m being well paid. Daddy knows that and doesn’t try to tell me what to do anymore. He knows if I wanted to eat veal cutlet through a straw not to say anything to me about it… But anyway, what about you? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m all right.”
“I worried about you a lot while you were gone. You’ve always been so soft-spoken. How did you keep people from messing over you?”
“I just tried to stay out of the way.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re out of that place… What are you going to do now?”
“Give up masturbation.”
“I think you’ll come through it all right.”
“Coming ain’t my problem. What I need is a co-respondent.”
“Hey, I wish I could help you, Melvin, but incest just ain’t my thing.”
“Yeah, I love you, too, sis.”
I slipped upstairs to the bathroom to take a piss. When I flushed the toilet there was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s your father.” When he got all formal like that it was usually the beginning of a long talk.
“I wanna talk to you about somethin.”
“What about?”
“Have a seat.” Another familiar line. Pops had opened with those same lines (years before) when he had given me my first supply of prophylactics.
“How old are you, now, Melvin?”
“Fifteen.”
“I been noticin your sheets lately and it looks like to me you been havin a lot of wet dreams. So I guess you at the age where you gonna wanna make some of them dreams come true. But what you gotta make sure of is that you protect yourself. You know what I mean?” I nodded that I did.
“Now, I’m gonna give you some protection to use and when you run out just tell me and I’ll see that you get some more… Now, you got a lot of these fast-tail girls out here that’ll tell you not to use nuthin. But you do like I tell you and use the protection. I’m tellin you this now so you won’t be comin to me later about some little girl you done knocked up.
“Have you gotten any yet?” he said, stirring his right index finger into a circle made by the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.
“Unh, unh.”
“Well, you got plenty of time. No need to rush things. Now, I’m not sayin you shouldn’t get a little piece as soon as you can. I’d rather you do that than lose your nature playin with yourself.”
I was so proud when he gave me those first prophylactics that I wore one to school every day for about a month. However, it was a long time before I had cause to use a rubber for any other occasion.
I sat down on the toilet seat and wondered what he was going to give me this time.
“I’m sorry about what happened at the dinner table a while ago. I wasn’t tryin to give you a hard time. It’s just that your mother spent a lot of time fixin all the things you like and when you said you didn’t want it, I kind a saw red for a minute.”
“That’s okay, Pops.”
“But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. What I really want to talk about is your plans.”
“My plans?”
“Yeah, the future. You’ve had a little setback, but now it’s time to plan your next move so you don’t make the same mistake again.”
“Mistake! What mistake?”
“What I mean is that you’ll be wiser the next time. And since every generation gets weaker and wiser, you got to have your wits about you cause you gettin weaker all the time. I’m not just talkin about you. That goes for me, too. You see, when I was comin up, I could only do what there was time for. And there wasn’t time for very much. But my generation had to bide our time so your generation could do the things we were never able to do. And when you can take the time to do what you want, you’re much wiser than somebody whose time was never their own. You understand what I’m tryin to tell you?”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. But how does being wise make you weak?”
“That’s because whenever things change for the better, people tend to get weaker. You need more strength to want something and not have any way of gettin it anytime soon than you do once you get it. That’s why you’ll never be as strong as me. It’s the same with the whole black race. We’re a lot wiser than we was in the past, but we’re not as strong.”
“What do you mean by strong?”
“Acceptin the fact that you can’t always have things your own way all the time.”
“I know that, Pops!”
“You may know it now, but two years ago you was so hard-headed nobody could tell you nuthin.”
“What are you trying to do, sentence me again? I already did my time, Pops.”
“But you wouldn’t have had to do any time at all if you hadn’t done so much talkin in the raw!”
“You’re probably right about that, but I’m not going to if myself to death over it. I did what I did. And if I can live with it, so should you!”
“All right. I was just checking to see where you situated. I’m a believer that if you say enough out-of-the-way things to somebody, sooner or later they’ll get tired of it and set you straight on which way they’re headed… Was it rough in that place?”
“It wasn’t too bad.”
“Nobody did anything to you, did they?”
“A few tried.”
“Well, I’m glad it’s over with. I knew you’d be all right. You an Ellington… You goin out later?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, before you go, talk to your mother. She wants to talk to you. But you know how she is. She figures you should come to her. She’s probably in the kitchen now. Go talk to her.”
Everybody seemed to be intent on wearing me down with these one-on-one inquiries into the whereabouts of my psyche. I felt like a reclamation site. And it was only fitting that my mother should be the last of the three-member panel checking me out.
“You need any help, Moms?”
“No, I’m about finished… Melvin, were you telling the truth when you said you weren’t a Muslim?”
“I told you I wasn’t. Don’t you believe me?”
“I just wanted to make sure.”
“Why are you so concerned about whether I’m a Muslim or not? Suppose I was?”
“I know you’d never become a Muslim. Your father and I raised you to believe in God.”
“The Muslims believe in God. They just call Him Allah, that’s all.”
“Melvin, there’s only one God and He goes by only one name.”
“Moms, Allah is Arabic for ‘God.’”
“I don’t know nuthin about no Arabic but I believe if you gonna serve God you don’t mock Him by calling His name in some strange language.”
“Are you trying to say that God can only speak English?”
“He sp
eaks English to me.”
“But how does He speak to people who don’t?”
“I don’t know about that. But I do know that this is America. And if you gonna be here you should speak English. God’s got better things to do than waste His time trying to figure out the prayers of people who want to deny who they are. If people wanna pray in Arabic they ought to go to Arabia.”
“Moms, you don’t really believe that, do you?”
“Yes, I do. You may think I’m foolish, Melvin, but if I am it’s from what I come from. I ain’t never played the fool to something I wasn’t familiar with.”
“You know, Moms, that’s the same attitude the judge had who sentenced me.”
“Melvin, how could you compare me with him? He was a stranger. I’m your mother! The only reason you went to jail was because you didn’t do what I told you.”
“But I didn’t want to go into the army.”
I could tell from her face that what I wanted didn’t matter. She had brought me into the world and discovered that, as quiet as she tried to keep it, the world still found me. And seeing me bruised didn’t hurt her half as much as my refusing her protection. The day that I was sentenced, I didn’t know if she had heard what the judge had said or just refused to believe it.
“What happened, Melvin? Is it over? Can we go now?”
“I got three years, Moms.” Her face splintered and cracked. But she quickly reassembled the pieces and walked up to the judge’s bench.
“Your Honor, I’m the mother, and I don’t see how you could judge my son without consulting me first. I’m entitled to that. I know he’s not perfect. When he was in school, he would cut up in class just like all the other boys. And if there was any disciplining to be done, I did it. So just because he was my son didn’t mean I couldn’t be firm when I had to be. So, Your Honor, I think I got some jurisdiction here. You can’t just take my rights away like that. I’m the mother!”
The judge never said a word, he just got up and left the courtroom without even looking at her. As I was led away by the marshals and the courtroom emptied, she was still making known my affiliation to her.
“You decided what you gonna do now that you’re out?”