There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  But I couldn’t make the drive. Got so tired, just about twenty miles outside Saint Louis, that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Hate, sometimes, can be so heavy it even weighs your eyelids down.

  Baby why don’t you gone and pull off the road, Granny said, almost a whisper. We can sleep a lil while. Get on up and finish it tomorrow.

  There was a Super 8 an exit or two ahead, on the other side of the overpass. No time to wait for Motel 6.

  C’mon, Tash. Your brother’ll stay in the car and we’ll tell ’em we got two people.

  I sat under the yellow glow of the Super 8 sign, wanting to go to sleep right there in the parking lot and wanting everybody else to die, starting with my mother.

  Granny left Tashia in the heated motel hallway and came back to the car. Get the bags, hon. Make sure it’s locked, now. She led me through the motel’s back door. Held the door open while I dragged our bags into the small room. Natash, me and you can climb up in this bed. Give your brother that other’n.

  One of them turned the lights out, yet as tired as I was I couldn’t fall asleep. Grew a bit delirious (that’s my story) and so texted Red, who hadn’t heard from me in months aside from the message I’d sent a week or so earlier, telling him that we’d found my mother and were going to pick her up in Saint Louis.

  She wasn’t even there, Red. I fucking hate her.

  He responded like he’d been waiting all day—Don’t say that. She’s still your mom. Get some sleep. I wonder if he knew how soothing that message was. A few moments after reading it, I finally fell asleep, fully clothed, splayed across the narrow stiff prickly mattress.

  Granny woke me the next morning, lobby breakfast in hand, and said to no one in particular—I’ll do some drivin’ today.

  And she did. All those six hundred miles, except the few I’d driven the night before, sometimes going ninety miles an hour, strangling the steering wheel with both hands unless she needed one to slide her glasses back up her nose. Granny brought us out of Saint Louis, past that slice of Kansas, down through barren Oklahoma, and back into the same old crumbling driveway on Old Ox. She never asked a question on that ride, never said a mean word, never let out a tear or sigh or moan, just kept calling me and Tashia hon and baby all the way, and made us dinner when we walked in her house, and let us eat without saying anything to her or each other, not even thank you.

  I’ve been watching Granny for a long time. Have known so many women like her—well, not so many, but enough. And as I’ve watched I’ve grown suspect of all that strength they show. Granny still has the scar from when she fell out of a tree as a little girl and split her upper lip; still has the picture of her baby Janet lying in that tiny coffin with the lace around her wrists; still has her dead husband’s coats and some of his bills. And for all those years I was trying to move on, she still had her disappeared daughter’s papers and children—children who had gone off on their own and had done about the best they could, but who were still children, even if she was the only one who knew it. So she carried them, too.

  But one of these days, Granny and her kind might crack. They might pick up the last straw that must be right in front of their faces. And when they do, when all the Grannies have had enough, what is the world gonna do? Who’s gonna carry the cross and the children and wipe the tears of the old women? Will you be ready? Will I?

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know why Granny and Tashia kept trying to find my mother—maybe that’s what love looks like, or an appetite for abuse—and I know even less about how they succeeded in smoking her out of hiding. It seems to me that the social services woman was the linchpin, and that she became a diplomatic go-between because of some genuine desire to provide social services, some buckling under Tashia’s persistence, and some respect for Granny’s age. I’d also bet she was lured by that tone in Granny’s voice that conveys her desire for something and her refusal to beg. This is speculation.

  What I do know is that a month or two after I walked down that red carpet on Signing Day to the cheers of all those strangers, I walked across Granny’s faded mauve living room carpet to grab the phone from my sister and hear my mother’s voice again.

  Hey, Man!

  Hey, Mama.

  I could make up some dialogue to reenact the conversation, but the truth is that I wasn’t listening to her, and everything I said was of the I gotta go variety. Either she said she would see me soon, or Tashia told me we’d see her soon, or I just gathered from the general shape of things that I’d see her soon, but in any event I did see her soon—after spring break but before graduation.

  Granny, Tashia, and I drove out to Dallas-Fort Worth Airport and huddled together under the arrivals board waiting for an update on the most recent flight from Saint Louis. As we waited, I thought about how nice it would be for the plane to crash, and how nice it would also be if the plane hurried up and brought my mama. Then she appeared.

  Big crinkly Sunkist hair. Wide gleaming Crest smile, one side tooth missing but not prominently. Face made up in the same way it had been in the last millennium, but with more foundation on the bridge of her nose to cover up a new scar. Ten stitches, if I counted right. All she had was the hair, the smile, the makeup, the nose scar, the clothes on her back, and a transparent plastic attaché bag, in which I believe I saw cigarettes (now Kool 100), a lighter, lipstick, and condoms.

  Y’all! Ah! Ohh!

  Same sounds she used to make, just louder, more jagged, and less in response to anything anybody had said or done. She reached out to hug me and held me for a terribly long time, maybe three seconds or so. After the hug, I looked at her and felt a tingling desire to slap—no, to disfigure her.

  And after I disfigured her, I wanted her to grovel. To walk back from the airport, not ride in the car. To go without sleep and food and sit on a mat outside the house and chant I’m sorry from sunup to sundown. To let her throat parch with thirst and sorrow. To forget how to laugh and, instead, to cry and cry until crying lost all meaning and the tears dried up and her eyes were filled only with images of all the wrong she’d done. And then, only then, would she be allowed into the house, where she would stand in the corner not looking at anybody in the face but staring at the blank wall, seeing nothing but her mistakes. And she would forget how to speak, would lose all grasp of language except the words I’m sorry, which would not be words but would be who she was. Yes. She would become Apology and stay that way until I decided she could be a person again. Then, after a trial period, perhaps she could have a real name. And if she played her cards right she might get some respect. And then, sometime before she died, she might become my mother again, but only on the condition that she earn the title every day for the rest of her life.

  Of course, none of this happened. Mama showed up at the airport, rode with us back home, moved into our house, sat at the table with me and Tashia for dinner, asked for a ride to the pharmacy to pick up her medication, said Good morning when she woke up, and bought new clothes for my graduation. After the ceremony, she demanded to be in all the pictures and spoke to everybody like she’d just seen them last week, and recounted stories about how she’d made me lunch and Tashia a birthday cake and told us both she loved us.

  Almost as if we were producing a blaxploitation Fellini movie, everybody played right along and even offered their own special storyline to this grand delusion, including my father, who despite not coming to my graduation, despite likely having had a hand—though I’m not making an accusation!—in his wife’s disappearance, offered not only to bring me a couple dollars as I headed off to college, but to rent a U-Haul trailer and drive me the 1,600 miles from Dallas to New Haven. Not just me, but Granny, Mama, Tashia, and Tashia’s newborn baby. (I like that baby, now a girl, a great deal and will leave her out of this.) And for that entire, surprisingly pleasant journey, we pretended that we were not a group of people who had destroyed one another, but a fam
ily. Maybe there’s no difference between the two.

  But all along, from the driveway on Old Ox where aunts and cousins stood to wave us off, to the gates of Vanderbilt Hall where the tall pale man with sunken eyes stood to welcome me, I thought—or I think now that it would have been fitting to think then—of the song my forebears sang so long ago and so well that Roberta Flack decided to sing it, too:

  I told Jesus, it’ll be alright if you change my name

  I told Jesus, it’ll be alright if you changed, changed my name

  I told Jesus be alright be alright be alright

  I told Jesus be alright if you change my name

  Then he told me, he said your father won’t know you child, if I change your name

  Yes he told me, said your mother won’t know you child, child if I change your name

  But I told Jesus, I said it would be alright, be alright, be alright

  If my father turns away now, and my mother turns away now

  Yes my brother, my baby sister, turn away, turn away

  I told Jesus be alright, if you change my name.

  An Interlude for My Friend

  I had a dream about my friend Elijah, who took his life last year. A few or many years ago by the time you read this.

  He was sitting in a booth at a diner. There was a small table in front of him, and a small chair on the other side of the table. The dream began with me standing, my hands on the back of the chair, facing Elijah. It was so good to see him.

  Before I went to sleep, there was a question that wouldn’t leave me alone: How should I tell what happened after I arrived at Yale? Elijah showed up in my dream to answer, which was a surprise since I had not seen him much before he died and not at all since. He had arrived at Yale a year after me, after his own journey from Saint Louis, also a mighty going-away. So maybe he showed up because he understood why I felt so sad. Why I wanted to apologize to all the kids who saw those posters of me plastered over every school in Dallas. Look Who’s Going to Yale! He Did It. You Can Too. Or maybe he was bored on the other side and wanted to talk. I don’t know.

  I was about to sit down, but I blinked or something and the diner got so crowded that I couldn’t pull the chair back. So I just stood there and leaned over the table so I could hear Elijah over the noise.

  Man, you know. Elijah grinned and leaned back in his booth. We did a lot of things that we wouldn’t advise anybody we loved to do.

  I was just about to ask What things, Elijah? But I woke up. He kicked me out of the dream. Out of the diner, where he still might be sitting with that grin on his face. Come on, Casey. You already know. I did know. I do.

  See, if you catch it from the right angle, a boy picking himself up by his bootstraps looks just like a suicide.

  chapter ELEVEN

  Do you want to be a loser? Do YOU want to be a loser?? I mean. Do you want to not achieve your dreams? It’s your call. Totally your call. Nobody else can control that other than you. The answer is no! Of course not!

  Look at the man on the stage. Lit from above. Pipe organ behind him. Names of fallen soldiers carved into the marble walls around him. A thousand boys and girls in the wooden seats before him. Four years from now, they will be back in the seats, ready to graduate. Tonight they’re freshmen. This is their first week. Here from many corners of the world, carrying the dreams of those they left behind. Here to learn to lead, to rule, to prosper, to win.

  Never eat alone.

  That’s what the man says. Yale has brought him to offer wisdom and a free book to its new sons and daughters. This is his message. Every meal is an opportunity to build a new relationship. To grow your network, which becomes your net worth. Say hello. Smile. Send a note. Get out of your room. Share your interests. Your passions. Your projects. Offer help. No, don’t offer help—help. Contribute. Suggest. Put your money in the bank of people. Invest it. Watch it grow. Write a check on it someday. You are here to win. Win the people first. The rest will follow.

  You don’t yet know you will win fewer people than perhaps any freshman in the history of Yale College. So you listen to the man. You never eat alone.

  There is Zoe Larson. Smiley blonde, sitting in the cavernous Commons dining hall with Chris Adams, a tiny basketball player from Jersey. Join them.

  Yo, son! You and Zoe should meet. You’re both from Dallas.

  Cool. Where in Dallas are you from?

  I’m from Richardson. What about you?

  Ah, yeah I’ve heard of Richardson. I’m from Dallas, Dallas. Oak Cliff.

  Oh, wow.

  You’re not sure whether eating in silence is the same as eating alone, but it feels like it. You bus your tray and leave. Your phone rings. It’s Chris. Always answer phone calls.

  Yo, son! You won’t believe what she said when you left.

  What she say?

  My dude. She goes, “Oh my God. He’s from the ghetto. It’s a miracle he made it out alive. He must be in a gang.” Son, I died laughing.

  You laugh. Hang up. Never talk to Zoe again. But never eat alone.

  Another day, another football practice ends. The practice fields are two miles from the main campus. Don’t hop on the bus and sit by yourself. Catch a ride with somebody. An upperclassman, preferably. Oh, there’s Jack Delaney. Good guy, Jack. Bet he looks just like his daddy, a boy from Yonkers who grew up to be a Houston oil executive.

  Want a ride back to Commons, Casey?

  Accepting gifts is a key to making friends.

  Oh sure. Thanks a lot, Jack.

  You ride through the outskirts of New Haven.

  Dang, I never thought it’d be so messed up around Yale.

  What do you mean?

  Look at all these houses. All these poor people. That’s crazy.

  Ha. You know, it’s all just a by-product of capitalism.

  Huh?

  That’s the way it works, Casey. Everybody’s not going to make it. Have to accept that.

  Arrive at Commons. Eat with Jack. Ask Jack questions, like why he’s racist.

  I’m not racist. That’s ridiculous. I have great friends who are black. And it’s not racist to say that those people need to work hard just like I did.

  Tell Jack that he didn’t work hard, he just lived off his daddy’s money. Yell at Jack. Stare at Jack while he yells at you. Feel the rest of the table stare at you. Bus your tray and leave.

  You didn’t have money for a computer, so a man who knows your daddy gave you one. Thank God for that man. And thank God for Mark Zuckerberg, who gave you Facebook before everybody else, since it’s 2005 and you go to Yale. Make a Facebook group. Name: “Jack Really is a Bigot, Huh?” Invite everyone you know. Not many. Even fewer join. Never eat with the people who don’t join. Running out of people now. Find your people.

  Black Student Alliance at Yale. BSAY. Sounds like the right group. Afro-American Cultural Center. Sounds like the right place. Go there. Be on time for the meeting. Sit in the circle. Just like that one Narcotics Anonymous meeting you saw. Look around. Where’s the lotion? There’s the pizza. Get some pizza. Eat your pizza and listen to the senior in charge of the meeting.

  So tonight we want to really unpack a big topic: What does blackness mean. Right?

  You’ve been black a long time. Your family has been black. Most of the people you’ve known have been black. You know the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Did you really need to go all the way to Yale to learn what it means to be black?

  Try to understand. Thank God you signed up for the class Freedom and Identity in Black Cultures. Pay attention, even though the teacher sounds high.

  This is an invocation of a people’s subjugation and resistance under the hegemony of race and privilege. Right?

  You don’t know what this means. You wonder whether she does. You wonder why she and everybody else says Right? after every sen
tence. The teacher assigns a book, Notes of a Native Son. You didn’t have money for books, so the school gave you some. Buy the book. There’s a black man on the cover. Cool. James Baldwin. You’ve never heard of him. Let’s check this out.

  I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again.

  Got it. Poor black dude in a bad neighborhood with a sad family. Not much to see here. You listen in class with wonder. To your classmates, this book is a revelation. To you, it is old news. Didn’t even get past the first page.

  The next class session is still about Baldwin, but it’s better. It’s movie day. Instead of a big metal cart, Yale has a projector. You can watch the movie right on a screen on the wall. Don’t even have to pull the screen down yourself. The teacher saunters in late, throwing lots of syllables around. She puts on the movie and leaves again. The Price of the Ticket. A man appears on the screen.

  There are days—this is one of them—when you wonder . . . what your role is in this country and what your future is in it.

  You have never wondered either of these things, but you wonder how this can be the same man from the book you didn’t read. Book James Baldwin said he was from Harlem. You’ve been to Harlem once. Got picked up right on 125th Street, and since you didn’t know how to get back to New Haven from Harlem, you went to that man’s house even though you didn’t want to. And even though you snuck out in the middle of the night, you were there long enough to know that there ain’t a single person in Harlem who sounds like the man in this movie who everybody says is the same James Baldwin from the book, from Harlem. And there ain’t a single person on this campus that sounds like either Book James Baldwin or Movie James Baldwin. And, for that matter, there ain’t a single person on this campus that sounds like you.