by John Keene
LITERATURE AS A GUIDE TO THE LIFE LIVED, A DELIVERANCE
On the template of night’s sky they visually traced the constellations, which proved far more difficult to perform at home than they had witnessed at the planetarium. Thus, the worn yet lyric intensity of each evening’s secret offering, what its occurrence might furnish beyond our small and sparsely lit furnace. Meate-chi-cippi. Lay teachers and priests, the latter becowled and armed with crisp, authentic British accents, appealed to the authority of the “Classical” European tradition, now besieged with conflict to the point of internal sedition, like so much once imparted by “masters.” Samuel Clemens. Throughout the boys a spirit of ridicule, beneath a veneer of respect, but only later would they fathom the immensity of their debt to these ill-paid, beleaguered pedagogues. Meachum Park. In the classroom Homer, Cicero, Melville, Tennyson, Hemingway, and Mauriac, while on the sly you perused Onstott, Heinlein, and Walker, yet those that would forge your aesthetic center in those formative years were Joyce, Tagore, Faulkner, and Morrison. Oozing, seething magma of presence, what I represents. “Gee, that’s interesting, I had never noticed any patterns there,” to which our silence was as much disproof as concurrence. Their theories to explain all manner of matter, though no theory to explain this thirst for theories. In the laboratory at the famous midwestern university, he prepared slides and learned the rudiments of neuroanatomy, sometimes growing giddy from the fumes of the rarefying benzene. Whereupon the accident with the microtome, which they shied away from shaping into a lawsuit. “J’averterai Bill dès qu’il sera revenu,” repeat it, to impress them. Ultimately although some tired of bandying about “Nigger Jim” or “pickanines” before him, most were reveling in the new climate of conservatism, which introduced far more subtle ways of impressing upon others one’s social and economic superiority. Time had come to begin applying to college, the next step to which the aspirations of their class had most logically led. Please remove seal before opening. “Harvard don’t keep on folks who can’t pay or charm their way!” she cackled, her face a cracking, crackling lantern. Who would leave the city of one’s birth without hesitation, lest one suffocate under the swaddle of so much past. Convogosa. The strain of our ruse quite rightly blinded us, until we lost sight of who we truly were. Many of them now worked at the post office, which had become such a trying job. One must, in other words, eventually come to terms with the provisional. According to the standards the images conveyed, your appearance was grotesquely disharmonic. High butt, narrow hips, broad shoulders, full lips. As a result you cut the cake or stollen into minuscule pieces, aiming to perfect yourself, yet deep down you knew the real reason behind your actions was to savor more fully each morsel. In this way a sense of economy developed, whose flip side became an inability to see the larger picture. “Happy Days.” Now you must talk up our quarrel. It is foolish, the perceptive film theorist noted, for them to invoke post-modernity when as a people they appear to have been bypassed by the modern. Besides, dialogue has proven so woefully insufficient, though we continue to invest our energies in it. Your cognizance linked these as a chain of incidents, closer observation made clear their antecedents, but what you sought, like any artist, were the very events themselves. St. Louis Blues. Afterwards, we dispersed to our pre-appointed stations in society, with many becoming doctors, bankers, or mechanics. This naturally obviated the need for friendly contact or regular, intimate phone calls. Hindsight is often crueler than an unforgiving lover; perfidy is the knife that wounds far more deeply than others. The parents were still whispering something about those two, which lent this all an aura of shame. Always the desire to be loved formed the nucleus, about which other events and moments, positive, negative, or otherwise, whirred like the elementary particles. Some men, women, certain trees, bare certainties. Were these accounts, as was projected for this aesthetic project, selected and set down as carefully as tesseracts, the cumulative effect would approximate that of a living, dazzling, eighteen-panel mosaic. Given the general trends towards ignorance and indifference, however, no one thought to challenge his methods, let alone his motives. We took turns reciting poems by the Black Arts poets from one of those volumes now growing dusty on the godmother’s bookshelves. “Man, you don’t even know the scrapple from the apple, and you ain’t gon’ get that out no old dead cracker’s book,” our reply a prolonged, anguished stare into a portrait of life dissolving before us. Thus his musings, when written down, gradually melded, gathered shape, solidified like a well-mixed mâché, and thus, upon rereading them he realized what he had accomplished was the construction of an actual voice. The final dances of youth, dim incandescence. Willow weep for me. And so, patient reader, these remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations.
Boston—Dorchester—St. Louis—Charlottesville
1992–1994
REFERENCES & NOTES
REFERENCES
Collins, Earl A., Folk Tales of Missouri, Christopher Publishing House: Boston, 1935.
Foley, William E., A History of Missouri, 1673 to 1820, University of Missouri Press: Columbia, 1971.
Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom, Vintage: New York, 1969.
Lipsitz, George, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1988.
March, David D., A History of Missouri (4 vols.), University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1967.
Marsh, Sarah Louise, and Charles G. Vannest, Missouri Anthology, Christopher Publishing House: Boston, 1932.
Olson, Audrey L., St. Louis Germans, 1850–1920, Arno Press: New York, 1980.
Peper, Christian B., Ed., An Historian’s Conscience: The Correspondence of Arnold J. Toynbee and Columba Cary-Elwes, Monk of Ampleforth, Beacon Press: Boston, 1986.
Primm, James Neal, The Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, Pruett Publishing Company: Boulder, 1990.
NOTES
pages
5 Rudipoots: A colloquialism akin to “ghettoheads,” meaning an ignorant or foolish person.
7 Chatillon-DeMenil: This refers specifically to the historic mansion and tourist site in south St. Louis that once housed the family of Dr. Nicholas de Menil, a prominent resident of the nineteenth century, and more broadly to the era of St. Louis’s ascendancy.
8 Aos pés da cruz: A Pinto Gonçalves tune, as played by Miles Davis, a native East St. Louisan, with Gil Evans and orchestra, in a Columbia recording from the 1960s. “Aos pés da cruz,” a Portuguese phrase, translates into English as “at the foot of the cross.”
9 Ring-A-Levio: A common children’s game in which members of one group try to find and capture hidden members of another group.
10 Poinciana: An ornamental shrub commonly found in the West Indies; also the title of a song by Simon and Bernier, played exquisitely by Ahmad Jamal on his Pershing Lounge session of 1958.
13 Chain of Rocks: A series of bluffs, with a park, overlooking the Mississippi River north of St. Louis City.
13 Treemonisha: A 1905 opera by Scott Joplin, written while he was resident in Sedalia, MO, and not premiered until 1972, in Atlanta, GA. The theme of the opera is the salvation of the Black race through education, and Treemonisha, a young woman, is the protagonist.
17 Aleikam salaam: Arabic for “And peace be with you,” the traditional reply to a greeting.
25 La Ba-Kair: The French popular nickname for the great Josephine Baker, a native St. Louisan.
27 Raus, Ihr kleine Mäuser, raus: German for “Get out of here, you little mice, get out of here!”
27 Juneteenth: In the Midwest and South(west), this celebration, usually June 17, commemorates the day when slaves of those regions learned they were no longer in bondage.
31 Pannonica: The title of a serene Charlie Parker composition, named after the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a Jazz patroness of some renown, in whose apartment Parker died in 1955.
32 Turner’s Hall Turnverein: A St. Louis based German
gymnastic society, whose small arsenal and membership would form part of the Unionist “Home Guard” organized by Samuel Blair in pre–Civil War St. Louis.
34 Asafetida: A malodorous medicinal gum, believed to ward off illness, that was sometimes placed in a sack or bag and strapped around the neck of Southern black children.
34 Evonce: A composition by Danny Quebec West and Idrees Sulieman, played by Thelonious Monk and his combo in a Blue Note recording from the 1940s.
37 Carondelet: The name of the city, founded in 1767, avenue, commons and park in the St. Louis area. Baron de Carondelet in 1793 organized the (re)settlement of the native Indians in Louisiana territory.
39 Bakai: A composition by Cal Massey, as played by Jazz visionary John Coltrane and a sextet on a Prestige recording from the late 1950s. According to the liner notes by Ira Gitler, “Bakai,” an Arabic term, translates as “cry” in English.
40 Palmares: The great city established by escaped slaves, or quilombo, in the seventeenth century in northeastern Brazil. Palmares was also known as the “Black Troy.”
46 Klactoveededstene: A composition by Jazz trumpeter and bandleader Dizzie Gillespie.
53 Grumio erat coquus: Latin for “Grumio was the cook.” An adaptation of a line from the early levels in the Cambridge Latin Series.
55 Schneeblick: German for “snowglance, snowgaze.” A neologism, after Paul Celan.
57 I’n-Shta-Heh: Little Osage for “Heavy eyebrows,” the name given to the French colonizers.
58 Marronage: French, for the condition of being a marron, or runaway/escaped slave, in a francophone nation or colony, such as Haiti before 1804.
69 Legei hoti touto alethes estin: Ancient Greek for “He says this all to be the truth.”
72 Salus populi suprema lex esto: Latin for “Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law,” the official motto of Missouri.
75 Meate-chi-cippi: The Algonkian name for the Mississippi River, it means “Father of the Waters.”
77 Convogosa: A brave mythic Illinois chief whose courageous stand in self-defense supposedly left the “Footprint on the Rocks” in southwestern Illinois across the Mississippi from St. Louis.
Copyright © 1995 by John Keene
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Acknowledgments: Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors and publishers of magazines in which sections of Annotations first appeared: Callaloo, Eyeball, Hambone, The Kenyon Review, and o.blek.
Author’s Note: Thanks are due to the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, whose Fellowship partially supported the creation of this work.
First published as New Directions Paperbook 809 in 1995
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited
eISBN 9780811225861
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
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