by John Keene
THE TERRITORY OF HISTORY, WHOSE UNRECORDED STORY
Toynbee, in a letter to the prior, his friend and spiritual advisor, proposed the thesis that St. Louis had consisted of an originary Creole core. This center, he argued, successive waves of English Southerners and Yankees, then Irish, and later Germans, had subsumed, thereby eliding the reality of the pre-Spanish Indian presence or the various African slaves and freemen who had helped to found the city in 1764. Men are the question, and their efficient reintegration. Jacques Clamorgan. Such was the splendor of those erstwhile eras, when the streetcars ran from St. Charles to Kirkwood. Slaves had been sold at market on the steps of the grand courthouse that we now glided through in awe. The tour guide, however, slighted this aspect of the building’s history, believing this subject disruptive and unrelated to his evocations. Steerage, so as to get over here. Who spoke of the African-American denizens, through the metaphor of an unablatable excrescence. Chauffeur’s Club combos. A nearly incestuous series of interrelations allowed the founding families to retain their property and titles. Pierre de Laclède de Liguest. Some forty years later the gynecomastic general approved the fire sale as a way of cutting his losses, though great doubt remains in many minds as to whether the land was his to sell. To what extent is American history the history of American capital. But that former Haitian slave wrought all of this. If they could only have steered him to the piano sooner, he might have elected a more worthwhile enterprise. So much of our sense of identity depends on this desire for attention, yet we conversely deem it unseemly to draw great notice to ourselves. Incongruous, in Congress. Later the laity repainted the walls so that the saints resembled their families. As in all propaganda, substance was sacrificed for superficial appeal. We took turns reciting the “Negro” poets at one of those gatherings for children that bourgeois yet working-class parents felt would instill a sense of pride and self-recognition. These occasions, arrived at by appropriating known and invented rituals, constituted, as they would eventually comprehend, a fragile line of defense. By the end of two years most of the families had dropped out, proving that indifference constitutes a political stance too. It is better not to mention names as they often indict the collective memory. If in doubt refer to the operation manual. Dumas School. Some of those formerly “colored” institutions would eventually vanish through consolidation as part of the desegregational restructuring plan, their memories blazons on the minds of their alumni, their names empty vessels of sound to the children who might roam their abandoned grounds today. The effect, from this coign of vantage, verges plainly on the novelistic. But oh, Saint Louis, such a colored town, a minefield of myth and memory. Their father, while listening to Coltrane, was poring through Cleaver in the evenings, though it would be a few years before they connected that author with the pig-eared copy of Soul on Ice. Ron Karenga, another. Daddy also coached basketball as a means of providing those boys with a viable life-alternative. Later on, he was as prone to drink as he was to cuss, a fact that rapidly trained them to tread as if on crystal. Note that it is easy to underestimate the power of representation, and yet to fixate on this site of contestation to the exclusion of other problematic areas is to consign the nature of the struggle to the scopopsychic realm. Uh-huh. With the tape recorder she fashioned her own call-in program, devoted to the theme of history, which allowed her to bypass the usual crank callers and the necessity of masking her voice. “And what on earth are we supposed to do with you now,” to which you balked at furnishing an answer. As the child of an alcoholic one tends to retreat from conflict, which engenders further conflict itself. Transforming the letters, nevertheless, into fully formed words was as important a confidence-builder as keeping the bike aloft on the graveled road or reaching the lake’s mile marker. Thus he wrote but they professed to comprehend not a word, claiming the entire text unfolded like a riddle. Black pearls. The doctor, a born-again Christian, approached his mother in a way that was not quite acceptable, which he couched within a discourse of “friendship” and “salvation.” In retrospect you see why others failed to intervene, though at the time this marked the final betrayal. One’s trunk thus brimmed with daggers of vengeance, which one sheathed to forestall any bloodshed. In all of this we detect the influence of the media, which points to a fundamental failure of resistance. Kinds of blue. Truth, that abstruse and unrepenting philosopher wrote, is another aspect of revealing.
A CALL TO THE ANCESTORS, A CANTILENE
With each move we refashioned fresh and functional identities, imposed in part by the will of each new neighborhood’s children, influenced too in part by these opportunities to be reborn. The prisonhouse of cogito. Scenarios: alternately Friday and Crusoe, at other points Gallant or Goofus, most often one of the numerous TV characters like J.J. or Fonzie or Raj, but then there appeared that moment at the peak of yet another family crisis when he proclaimed himself the next Percy Shelley. They consequently decried literature as a guide to the life that one lived, as mere retreat, fool’s flight from the world’s true horrors, but instead he derived from these stories, those poems, maps to realizable liberty, and took in each finished text a step ever closer to the zone of deliverance. East Saint Louis. In Los Angeles and its environs, scale appeared to warp itself, for they drove and they drove and they drove some more, yet they still had not gotten there. What he noticed first were the palm trees hovering above, the heat’s white shuddering at the horizon, the waves’ soft churning as they lapped upon the shore, the sparkling mazes of the supermarkets. Out of earshot, shouts and whispers. So much to tell which they concealed from the children, convinced of their inability to cope. One’s mouth is the runway from which the possible taxis, alights in words, or the hangar in which life’s verities, lies lie dormant. Left alone you marched through all of the Dr. Seusses, then shocked them by declaiming passages aloud. “Keep reading in this dim light, you’re gonna lose your eyesight,” a warning unheeded before the promise of so much prose. We could spend hours in the upstairs stacks just wiping dust from the spines in order to examine the titles better. Who recited the four main rivers that feed the Missouri in Missouri—the Gasconade, the Osage, the Locust, the Chariton—though the Cuivre River flows into the Mississippi. Your memory is transformative as opposed to eidetic, which best serves the purposes of literature or lying. Other times the jones they traded could have filled their own dictionary, which led him to indite a mini-lexicon. Klactoveededstene. And so we never, under any circumstances, experienced a dearth of interesting material, nor did we ever presume we might be wasting our time. Back at home, in the waters of the Northlands pool, he began his training to become a “dolphin,” which the traumatic event at the Tiny Tots school would disastrously interrupt. She placed her heel on his best friend’s head, daring either to cry or to climb out of the water. A terrible wailing, a scream from below. Myth or mendacity, depending on how you tell it. After the hurling into the deep end your confidence returned, so that as you swam for the bobbing buoy you considered only the mirthful aspect of that moment. Still, when one speaks of ethics one is implicitly speaking of actions, and when one talks of morals one is talking about beliefs. Poorly marked or unmarked responses will count against your total. Nana required that we bow our heads and utter a passage of Scripture before lifting even napkin or fork, while at home we rarely prayed, but simply plunged right in. The other grandmother, Maman, never obliged them to say grace, however manners mattered at her table too. “Clear the peas off your plate, please,” achieved with the aim to appease. Raised on the harsh Mississippi soil, the grandfather knew the rudiments of self-sufficient farming, such as how to keep bugs from devouring potatoes without pesticides, or how to sow okra seed, and leading them down to the drainage lagoon, explained the lack of necessary acreage for corn. In their minds, as in the then-current television shows, however, the farmer still continued to constitute a mildly romantic figure. Federated Block Units. In such cases you might recur to therapy against the more infrequent response of analysis, just
as one in a political setting might appeal to nature against interpretation. “Salt peanuts, salt peanuts,” the President gaily sang, words the little boys knew belonged to Daddy and “Dizzy.” Joplinesque. To speak of culture is to foreshadow a battle. And so when the fun began it was bedtime, few pleas for leeway proving persuasive. He fled as a matter of course but no one deigned to follow, so he eventually had to skulk back home. Giant steps. Love, therefore, assumes the status of a cynosure, when in truth it is but one outward manifestation of the internal discourse of returning.
III
BEHOLD ST. LOUIS, CITY HONORED NEAR AND FAR NAMESAKE OF THE GREAT CRUSADER IN COLUMBIA’S CROWN, A STAR!
Susan Louise Marsh
A LEADING CITIZEN WROTE IN l8l8 THAT “THE PREVAILING LANGUAGE OF THE WHITE PERSONS ON THE STREETS WAS FRENCH THE NEGROES OF THE TOWN SPOKE FRENCH. ALL THE INHABITANTS USED FRENCH TO THE NEGROES THEIR HORSES, AND THEIR DOGS.”
Audrey L. Olson
ST. LOUIS / SUCH A COLORED TOWN / A WHISKEY BLACK SPACE OF HISTORY & NEIGHBORHOOD / FOREVER OURS TO LAWRENCEVILLE
Ntozake Shange
MULTEITIES, DISJUNCTIONS, INTENSE POLYSEMIC PLEASURES
By the autumn of his childhood they had abandoned their prefab in the ghetto for a ranch house in a suburb whose property values and lack of crime could boast of national renown. No one, you understand, carped at the size of the required down payment, since it was assumed that they would eventually own their own property. Ignorance is incapable of concealing itself. Out there many of the Blacks were descended from the slaves or servants who had once managed those estates, so tensions were bound to abound when the educational system finally integrated. Douglass School. Few Negro families had settled land as far out as Red Bud, though even Franklin and Jefferson Counties had shown a minimal Black presence since well before the Civil War. This unconcern with the questions of whether a “there” was there, or of what this “there” consisted, remained unnamed until a later encounter with what they were denouncing as “pragmatism.” History has been kindest to the charming old German quarter, where the wealthier or more committed ones had hidden in their rathskellers those dark fugitives headed north for freedom. Information, he first noticed, in a series of notes that someone had inscribed in the narrow, running margin. “Missouri Compromise.” Out there then one never needed to lock one’s doors or speak to one’s neighbors for weeks. Once a week a man, bearing more than a minor resemblance to the president whose name became a curseword, delivered orange juice and grape drink and lemonade just as they had observed in the movies. My address, Madras. Hush Puppies, bell-bottom denims, a Bengal-striped shirt, though you refused to be photographed in platforms. A fulvous swatch of velour that tired the eyes, your sweater was the only one lighter than your skin. “Dibs on your Tootsie-Roll” was all they had to say to quash any attempts to deny them, so you broke it into morsels as had been demonstrated on TV, and went home without anticipating a “Thank you.” Boys should not flap their arms when they run down stairs, or cover their mouths when they laugh, proscriptions made less to correct a child’s deportment choices than to allay a parent’s useless fears. “Though the crust may be brown the bread is still white.” Lacking any real conception of evil, a child is prone to explore the limits of her will. He fought back but they laughed at him, so that he discovered his skill as jokester, but he kept in mind the example of Richard Pryor. Mode for Joe. The father eventually began to dwell on the numerous half-veiled jealousies this move and its aftermath induced. Often, he would speak of Captain Wendell O. Pruitt, and the other Tuskegee flyers, who had never been properly honored. Just remembering the treatment of all those distinguished Black airmen filled his eyes with tears of awe and bitterness. Benign neglect. Who stood and saluted when the flag flapped high, who sang the anthem without anger. Time is no equalizer. As you will recall she was a blond divorcée with two attractive kids, whom she appeared to love more dearly than she did the thought of them. Although working-class and Irish, they quickly ignited a friendship, which differed from what we had encountered in the city. Civility offers an acceptable way to evade the issues at hand. Name us anonymous. “Grumio erat coquus,” he yelled out in earnest, to the consternation of a number of his classmates and the instructor. Chalk hurled at the head was the usual punishment, though kneeling while hoisting a dictionary was not unknown. My mind is the sandbox that my thoughts play in, or the court in which they exercise their claims to reason. Nine, the magic number. Quietly they strode through the grounds of the Eden Seminary, the thrill of actually being there far more compelling than anything they encountered therein. Reinhold Niebuhr. Accordingly, along with the doctrinal classes the Opus-Dei brothers offered scale-model construction; however, journalism more thoroughly captured his mood. By then it was the Bicentennial, and you were playing “John Henry” in the program at the Loreto-Hilton, which entailed memorizing a medley of songs, and learning how to swing an invisible hammer. Hurry up this way again. More the name of the Algonquin Golf Club where one caddied than any other identifiable aspect, and the waiting buckets of crawdads which made the traipse across the greens go more quickly. Of course, the city’s importance had diminished progressively since the days when it had served as the gateway to the West, though one’s perspective on this fact waxes as one gains distance from it. DeSoto. Having abandoned it for the far more sterile suburbs, they were drawn back to that laboratory of human interaction. Against closure. As a result those endlessly engaged in the quest for happiness usually constitute the unhappiest lot. Anthropology offers us among its many conclusions that boys throw a certain way, girls another.
THESES, ANTITHESES, A WELTER OF THEORIES
Trundling through the pass of bald maples across the valley of ice, he felt bound irrevocably to the outside world and to some inner, still aspiring self. Schneeblick, so blink now. Daylight, reflecting off the soundless frostscape of the nursery, transformed his hands into two bars of franklinite. The early, wintry sunsets arrived, and then, although they waited, nothing. O soul, sublime subject of bodily subtraction, which the sky has entombed in all this whiteness. He cowered in fear of the implications of such thoughts, yet brazenly continued to think them. His mother nevertheless purchased two pairs of long johns which inevitably curled and shrank. These scaled the calves like spiders, forcing one to wrench until they reached the socks. Indifference is not the same as ambivalence, which proceeds from different situational premises. Joliet, Père Marquette. Most winters pinched the flesh like pincers, yet a few hacked through the bones like scythes. Often the ground glared back as would a freshly Windexed mirror, so that when he fell, breaking what the doctor termed a “coccyx,” seven years of bad luck became part of the bargain. One loses 90 percent of one’s body heat through the head, though most worry about the throat, feet, and limbs. “Where did you leave your gloves this time?” which kept us silent, praying against frostbite. Catch-a-girl, kiss-a-girl. One could still go tobogganing down the steeper part of Art Hill, but there were lesser hills much closer in the more historic parts of Webster, where the dauntless ones could sled or ski-board on a stolen trashcan top. On your back, in the snow, making angels the sun would summon. White swath. Summer they awaited for its bounty of trips and excursions, such as a return to Meramec Caverns or Silver Dollar City, now, from what he read, not far from where the Klan was presently headquartered. A cathode bath usually proves easier than self-immersion in a written text, thus did the ends of those evenings eddy through that small, transfixing screen. On the other hand, you noted at the Monet exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, which you attended with your classmates and the chaperone, that although painting had once served as the transcriptor of the soul, it now mainly served to break the hold of mechanical reproduction. The effect is essentially Suric, or “Quranic” with the subject matter secular. What seized their interest without parallel was the spectacle of the soldier grinding with the half-asleep young woman, which they watched through the undraped hotel window, while their elders sn
ored two rooms away. Boys view, voyeurs. Yet he persisted in his interpretation of the surface of the oil, or was it charcoal mixed with oil, since for something so thick and black that one can make little of it, appreciation becomes an effect rather than an immediate feeling of the picture, followed by a gradual perceptive glowing. A guide, unbidden. Now he sings, now he sobs. And so although the choice between competingoptions creates a thicket of perplexing problems, one still can envision that open meadow of narrative possibilities, as that New York poet of the process of makes clear in his expressively opaque treatise. “Stop where you are and do not move,” the policemen yelled out in unison. Dizzy, however, he dropped to his frozen, grassy bed, which they disdained as “so much unnecessary drama.” I’n-Shta-Heh. Mittened, parkaed, he etched the scene around him with a penknife on a board the reverend had discarded. Please read directions carefully before opening. Stripped bare of all life, all color, the outdoors seemed in mourning, so we crept towards the road on our tiptoes, cringing that our crunching might offend. Lester leaps in. They too were unable, remember, to categorize to their satisfaction the book of drawings, and went about dismissing them as the products of a “troubled” mind. Snowblink, now blink, see. One’s thoughts are the goads that drive one’s calf-like existence forward, strange, diaphanous gods reappearing day and night. Marronage. Seen properly as a field of multeities, characterized by the presence of so many disjunctions, one might learn to appreciate this experience if only for the intense polysemic pleasures that it offers. Worry later. And so it was at that time when you lacked any real notion of the “body” that your grandfather lay silent on his deathbed, cradling you in his still strong arms. Appalled, they refuse to believe that you have told, since they remember your vows of silence.