All Over but the Shoutin'
Page 23
I was warned by one of the foreign editors not to predict in my story a judgment day acoming for Haiti. It would be premature. But it is hard not to expect some cataclysm. How can it go on and on like this? But like I said, I was ignorant of the place.
“The black market can supply what the wealthy people need. They keep their assets in U.S. banks,” I wrote, “and they can wait out the crisis in Miami or Santo Domingo. The corrupt military has its own sources of income, contraband, drugs and protection rackets. The embargo only inconveniences the rich. But a missionary said he had seen the number of people in line for food double in just two weeks at his mission. The army shoots people who break in line for gasoline. The migration already has started in Port-au-Prince. The people are walking out of the city, into the mountains, to get closer to the food. From the air, they look like a caravan of rags, with buckets on their heads and babies in their arms. Trucks that carry food from the docks and fields don’t reach the poor of the cities because the trucks don’t have fuel. Aristide wants a complete embargo to force his return, but the hungry and the well-fed agree it won’t happen that way. The embargo already has cost an estimated 5,000 jobs, as plants close. Another 10,000 were lost over the past year as the political tension grew. Many people with jobs can’t get to their work because there is no gas. Stalled cars block the roads. Blackouts silence the music in the bars. Sirens sound at 10 and 11, warning people to go inside. At 11:01 sharp, gunshots break the silence, and people hope it’s only the soldiers firing warning shots into the air. Haiti’s society is disintegrating. Aristide waits. The soldiers play with their guns. Ask Haitians what they think will come of all this and they shake their heads. Haiti’s story, the religious say, is pulled straight from the Book of Exodus. The poor Haitians wandered in the wilderness for 200 years, and found the man who promised to lead them out. His exile is just part of their wandering, their suffering.”
I hint—against the editor’s advice—that surely something profound is coming, some great change.
“Louis Bolivar, a woodworker in the downtown, knows the future,” I wrote. “He turns rough lumber into sturdy tables, chairs, whatever the people want. The tap-tap-tap of his hammer has been constant, seven days a week, well into the night. He is making coffins.”
I chartered a plane and flew to Santo Domingo, and from there, home. When I got home to Coconut Grove, it was Halloween night. People filled the street, in rubber masks, covered in fake blood, waving toy knives. People might have wondered why I was laughing.
27
Snow in a can
I came home for Christmas that year, like every year, to tiny houses ablaze with Christmas lights, twinkling islands of red, green, yellow and blue separated by acres of pine barrens and dark, empty miles. People who know they don’t have enough money in their coffee cans or bank accounts to pay even their usual electric bill will string them for fifty yards across rain gutters and peach trees and hog-wire fences, lighting my way home from the airport in Atlanta. I smiled every time I passed a particularly garish neon garden, happy and proud that my people had not given in to the pretension popular among people in town, who called such displays tacky.
I love this time. The air, after the balm of Miami, was chill, delicious, but it would be stretching it to call it really cold. It just felt like home, like Christmas. Christmas does not mean snow to me. I have never seen it snow on December 25 in my life. Snow came in a can. We sprayed the tree with it before we put the lights on. If we didn’t have the store-bought kind, Momma just used spray starch.
Momma never strung a lot of lights on the little house we lived in. But through the window, all my life, there has been a weak glow from a single strand of lights on a simple, small cedar tree. I looked for it as I pulled into the driveway, and it was there.
Momma was the same, still worried to death about Mark, but otherwise solid. I asked her when she wanted to go back to the dentist and be fitted for her new dentures, but it was a warm winter and so I had little hope. Mark was the same, still oblivious to the pain he caused her. I told him I wished he would try to do a little better, but he only grinned at me. He said he planned on coming to see me, down in Miami, maybe live with me. I told him it would be fine, but I knew he would never come. It was just as well. Miami would have consumed him, like a puddle of gasoline consumes a lit match. Sam was the same, still working, days, nights, weekends. My aunts and uncles were the same, still asking me when I was getting married, still two or three girlfriends behind.
Only my grandma was different. She was quiet now. She had never been quiet in her whole life.
I know there is nothing special about getting old. Everyone gets old. But you had to know my grandma, had to see the child in her that grinned when we were bad, that would have created the mischief with us if her old bones could have stood the strain, to understand the pain of it, seeing her that way.
If I had been coming home more regular, more often, I would have seen the change coming over years, as she grew older, more frail. As it was, it was as if she suddenly just got very tired. She had never been tired before, either. I would stick my head in the door and she would squeal out my name, year after year, and jump to her feet, or at least she would come as close to jumping as her age and slowly healing broken hip would permit. In minutes, she would have out her harmonica or banjo. She would announce to me, like she was calling a tune on the stage of the Grand Ol’ Opry, that we would now have a little bit of “Boilin’ Cabbage Down.” She plucked the strings a little clumsier every year. It still sounded sweet to me. She would tire of one instrument and grab up another, and sometimes I would sing if I knew the words.
When I was a child, we would sit on her bed and sing “Uncloudy Day,” or at least as close as we could come to it, at the very top of our lungs. We sang so loud that the kinfolks would come rushing in, and she would cackle a little, because she just liked to get a rise out of folks, sometimes. But as we got older we sang it loud to make up for the fact we still didn’t know the words, or had just forgotten them, or didn’t give a damn, because the noise was the thing. Just an old woman and a young man making noise.
Oh they tell me of a home
Where no dark clouds rise
They tell me of a home
Far away
Oh they tell me of a land
Of cloudless skies
Oh-h-h-h they tell me
Of an uncloudy day
It was different this time. She sat in her little room, surrounded by the tokens of love that we bestow on the old. There were pictures and dolls and stuffed animals and more knickknacks than I have ever seen in one room. There were her instruments, the guitar and the banjo and the harmonica, but they lay silent, unused. She did not play for me that day. She never played for me again.
I was so very afraid, as I walked into that room, that she would not know who I was. Her eyesight was not good, so I leaned in real close. I saw a grin spread across her face. “Rick?” she said, and I said, thankfully, “It’s me.”
I only sat with her a few minutes. She asked me how Lisa was, my onetime wife, and I told her that she was fine. She asked me if she had come, and I said no, she was at home. I know that she knew we were not married anymore, but that it just slipped her mind. She had always loved her, and I saw no need to hurt her now, for the sake of clarity. I could stand a lie better than she could stand the truth.
I told her she looked good. She said, no, she looked bad. I told her she looked young, but she dropped her head at that, and said, no, son, I’m old.
I asked her, as I always did, if she had “a feller.” That always got her grinning. This time she just said no, she was too old for that, too.
She had seemed ageless to me. The sun and wind had scoured and grooved her early in life, and as long as I knew her, she was gray. The years tumbled past and seemed to have little impact on her, at least on the outside, but on the inside she was beginning to weaken, to fail.
Both my grandfathers were long dead, a
nd I had never really known my daddy’s mother beyond a quick visit every few years. My grandma Abigail, for all my life, had been my only real lifeline to the distant past. That Christmas, as I sat in the little room and held her hand, I felt more than her hand tremble.
The kinfolks gathered on Christmas Eve, as always. As always, they gave me presents that I needed. Momma, as always, got me nine pairs of white Fruit of the Loom underwear, size 36. Others got me towels, socks, T-shirts, a pocketknife. Sam got me tools, to make up for the fact I had moved so far away he couldn’t come and rescue me. When I am seventy, I hope I am getting a gross of underwear and a dozen pairs of socks, and tools. With presents like that, you can ratchet yourself firmly into place, and remember who you are.
The next day we had Christmas dinner, and I don’t reckon I’ve ever had food as good as we had that year, every year. There was a ham as big as a five-gallon bucket, and mashed potatoes, and pans of dressing (you might call it stuffing), and pinto beans with the ham hock swimming in the pot, and cabbage slaw, and biscuits that were hot and crisp on the outside and soft inside, and cranberry sauce because you can’t have dressing without cranberry sauce, and sweet tea, in a gallon pickle jug.
I ate too much and let Sam beat me, badly, in a game of Horse. The basketball goal had been at the regulation ten feet when he first tacked it to the tree, but over time it had grown a lot, and I claimed that was what had thrown off my shot. He called me a chucklehead again. I noticed his hair was getting thin.
He asked me, as he swished through a perfect twenty-footer, if I was ever coming home to live again. I told him I did not reckon so, at least not for a long, long time. He told me he was sorry about that, and I saw no reason to say what I always said, that I lived away from home because I was doing good, because my career was taking off, not because I was being punished. I lived in Miami because I wanted to, because I could. But to Sam, no one lived away from here, away from these pines, by choice. I am still not sure who is right and who is wrong, or if there is even a right and wrong to it.
I went in and said good-bye to my grandma, and made her say my name again.
I told Momma to call me collect. I didn’t see Mark. As I left for the airport in Atlanta, Sam gave me a last gift. It was an orange plastic hard hat with a plastic screen to protect my face. It was a logging hat, what you wear to keep the falling trees from knocking your brains out and the limbs from gouging out your eyes. I looked at it, then at him, puzzled.
“For them riots,” he said.
28
The interview for the Ivy League
Except for that pesky hurricane, Andrew, the summer of 1992 was magic. I had made something almost like a home for myself in Miami. I roamed the place, searching for stories or just diversions, just living. I ate grouper sandwiches on the Miami River, roamed and fished and waded the Glades, floated on trade winds, stayed warm. My then-girlfriend moved on about that time, but I didn’t feel much sting. We had been mostly just roommates for a long time. Passion is something you really don’t miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, “Boy, I wish I had a Coke.” The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.
This was a sweet time, even sweeter by the simple fact that this life now had a distinct horizon. I had been here almost three years, longer than I had stayed anywhere in quite some time. Even though I was happy, I was restless. I needed a change.
Lord, did I get one.
On the urging of some friends, I applied for a Nieman Fellowship for journalists to Harvard University, for nine months of study in 1992 and 1993. It is the most prestigious fellowship in the country, about the nicest thing that can happen to a working journalist who lives story to story. I had about as much business at Harvard as a hog in a cocktail dress, and the competition for the thing was fierce. But friends told me I was perfect for it, and it for me. How many journalists, my friends told me, had gone as far as me, but were as ignorant.
In essence, all you had to do to win it was write two essays about yourself, and convince a selection panel that you would make use of the time, give something back to the university, and not burn the place down. The truth, I would learn over the next few months, was that a lot of the people who got in it were not people filling gaps in their education, but people who had fancy educations already.
I felt like the lowest form of hypocrite. I did not need a fancy education to do my job. I was openly scornful of people who rode their school ties like some chariot. In fifteen years of writing stories for money, all I had needed was talent. I wore that chip on my shoulder like a crown. I hung my plaques on the walls, all of them, until my living room looked like a dentist’s office and I had some left over to give to Momma. When I had finally proved myself, at one of the best papers in America, I came looking for, for what?
I told myself it was because the man in charge, the Nieman “curator,” was one of the legends in our business, a Southerner, a former New York Times editor and reporter named Bill Kovach whom I had always wanted to work for, or at least talk to. It would be, as I said in a magazine story about Kovach once, like “shooting the bull with Moses.”
But it was more than that. I applied to the place and the program because they had something I wanted.
I made the next-to-final cut and was invited up for an interview before a panel of Harvard professors and journalists who had been Nieman Fellows before. They held it in an elegant old white house that is the Nieman headquarters, a house that just looked like Harvard, somehow. The interview was held in a room where the selection panel sat gathered around a table. At least I didn’t have to stand before a raised dais.
It would be a lie to say I was shaking when I walked in. I have never been afraid to talk, never been shy, always able to think on my feet. But I was a little nervous here, because it was more than a test to see if I would get $25,000 in cash, a year off from work, free tuition and all the sherry and goose liver pâté I could handle.
It was a test of whether or not I really belonged among these people, in this world, even if only for a year-long visit. Nothing they would tell me would make me feel less than proud of who I was or what I had done, over years. At least, I sure hoped not. No, this was a test of whether or not I could make them believe that I was smart enough to give something in return, something of value, to the finest university in the land. I had spent a lifetime telling myself I didn’t give even a little bitty damn what the smart people thought. Yet here I was, hat in hand to them.
It was worse than I ever imagined.
One of the first questions they asked me was if I was a fake, if “this Southern thing” this country boy image, was just my gimmick. It was not that I sounded Southern—Southerners are some of the most pretentious people on earth—but that I sounded country, or, since I was at Harvard, “rural.” Southerners, a lot of them, work to rid themselves of their accents. They believe they sound slow, or at least unsophisticated, to outsiders. I guess now I know why.
I got mad then, but I just smiled through the heat in my face and said that no, I really was what I sound to be.
“I am not a phony,” I said. “This is what I am.”
Another person on the selection committee asked me how I could say, in one of my essays, that a respected black mayor in Alabama had failed the people who voted for him. His inference seemed to be that, me being a white Southerner, I was probably also a racist and a redneck.
I told him that when the mayor had taken office, blacks had owned less than one percent of all business in his city. Three terms later, almost time for their children to vote, blacks still owned less than one percent of all business.
“I don’t expect anyone to correct in a few years a hundred years of good ol’ boy leadership,” I said, but the mayor had time to make a small difference in the pocketbooks of his constituency.
The questioner nodded his head, and I thought, “I dodged a bullet, there.”
I told the truth. I told him that I had worked hard and taken risks—to my life, my career—to get where I was, but that this business of journalism has a bubble of pretension over it, one that I often found myself pressing against. Harvard would give me a needle, to burst it, to get through. I had proved myself. But, as my old editor Basil Penny had said, I didn’t have enough jelly on me.
“To tell the truth,” I said, “it’s gonna mean a whole lot more to other folks than it will me.”
Kovach wasn’t buying that answer, which was just half an answer. I don’t remember precisely what he said, but it was to the effect of: “So you’re saying that painting a big ‘H’ on your chest will take care of all your problems?”
I said no, I wanted to learn. I told them what I wanted to learn and why, so I wouldn’t be always winging it, so that I could write with some authority, instead of just seeming to.
When it was done, the man who thought he was fast on his feet, who was determined not to let the fancy people put him down, was raining sweat. It is one thing to be sure of yourself. It is another to have someone tell you to quit dancing, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth even if it hurts your pride.
I was certain I would never see this room again, this house. They asked me to please leave by a side door, so that I wouldn’t come into contact with other hopefuls waiting in the lobby of the old house.
The plane ride home was the longest one I think I have ever had. I had gone to visit the fancy people, with my hand out, and left feeling like I had forgotten to clean out from under my fingernails.
The Nieman Fellows are apprised of their selection by an early morning telephone call, a few weeks later. If your phone hasn’t rung by 9 A.M., you’re probably screwed. I didn’t sleep at all the night before.