Brothers (and Me)
Page 21
Mani, no surprise, was his usual, accomplished self. After junior-year internships at PBS and at Tom Hanks’s Los Angeles film company, Playtone, he’d spent a semester in Rome. At the term’s end, I joined him in Italy’s Eternal City for three days; afterward we visited Paris and London. Of course my “perfect son” was admired by teachers and peers, and knew as many hip nightclubs as he did Italian phrases.
There was one problem: Mani, now a man, had passionate opinions. About everything. We clashed about when to rise, where to eat, which ruins to visit, how to fit luggage in Porta-John-sized hotel rooms. When I asked where my congenial-at-all-costs son had gone, Mani insisted his disappearance was—get this—my fault.
“The value you placed on the truth has made me into a frank, sometimes inappropriately honest man,” Mani explained. “You always stressed that lying was worse than whatever I was covering up. Now I’m so honest, it gets me into trouble with people, but they usually come around when they realize it’s a sign of respect.
“Thanks to you,” he said, “I can’t lie.”
Not even on one trip? I wanted to shout. At least our feuding made me feel better about his plan to move to Los Angeles after he graduated magna cum laude, an honor which Darrell, unimpressed, dismissed as “magnum cum latte, a coffee drink, right?”
At twenty, Darrell was still Mani’s opposite, pushing my buttons with his apathy rather than his passion. Performing in a summer drama production, he astounded us with his virtuosity. “I’m going to be an actor,” he stated afterward, describing the Porsches, Oscars, and Halle Berrys his genius would earn. Yet for months, he took only the courses required for his filmmaking major. No extra acting classes. No auditions. No inquiries into Mani’s Hollywood contacts.
“You have to work for stuff in this world!” Kevin and I insisted. “You think an acting career is going to fall into your lap?”
“I’m going to be an actor,” Darrell repeated. “In my own way.”
In 2006, he asked our friend, Emmy-winning Post writer-turned-screenwriter David Mills, to introduce him to the casting agent for The Wire, the HBO series about life on Baltimore’s drug-decimated streets. “If you can’t act,” David warned him, “they won’t hire you.” Darrell auditioned, winning a one-line role as a drug dealer in the series, which filmed near his college. Darrell’s tiny part grew into a two-year featured role, Mani heard later, because he “gave his throwaway character a voice.” A promising acting career had all but fallen into his lap.
In the months after I confessed my fears about him ending up like my brother, I watched Darrell warily. Would his toxic woe-is-me-ness return? When remnants of it did appear, they evaporated quickly. Eventually, the kid who craved a work-free career launched facebookwastaken.com, an effort-intensive online video series of quirky minute-long comedy sketches. We expect miracles to be announced by lightning bolts and cymbal clashes. Yet Darrell’s slow slide into self-awareness was as miraculous as any burning bush.
So was his gratitude that I’d never given up on him.
“I still can’t believe you stuck by me,” Darrell told me years later. “I really was an asshole. But even when I hated you, I felt you were the only woman who could have been my mother.
“God gave you to me because it was the only way I would survive in the world.”
Talk about a miracle: my refusal to stop offering love and support to Darrell had saved him from the allure of the ultimate escape. But now, relatively assured of my sons’ independence and well-being, I felt every instinct telling me to flee, from them and everyone else I loved. Something in me clamored to escape from the people I couldn’t stop doing for, and to examine the doing.
Who can become whole in a place where everyone has a piece of her?
Escaping can be tough for oversubscribed women—and not just because of the problem of who’ll fill in for us. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote about it in Gift from the Sea.
A mother of five and firm believer in retreats, Lindbergh admitted that for a woman, even briefly leaving her family feels like “a limb is being torn off,” until the richness of her aloneness makes her feel more whole than before. If this homemaker could ditch her family for her sanity a decade before anyone even heard of women’s lib, surely I could swing it in 2007. Who said change was easy?
But after finally escaping from my home and my sense of obligation to everyone in it, I had a different thought: maybe change is easy.
It certainly looked that way as I gazed at a postcard-worthy stretch of blue-sky mountains outside my window. Underlying the spare loveliness outside my Baja California room was something more exquisite and exotic:
Silence.
Not just the room’s silence, which filled me like hot water plumping a tea bag. The silence in my mind. An unaccustomed clamorlessness had overtaken me. Look at me, I thought, words spreading slowly as just-spilled honey across my mind. Not parsing my problems, cursing my duties, planning my next move.
I was ten again. Peering outside, replete with… nothing much.
Kevin had first visited Rancho La Puerta while we were dating; he’d read a GQ article describing North America’s first destination fitness spa as a paradise where he could eat organic meals, hike a sacred mountain, and exercise four times a day. Arriving home six pounds lighter, he’d taken pity on my broke, single-mom self and awarded me a $1,200 “scholarship” to join him the following year. A few years later, I started going alone.
Each time I visited, I relearned something Mom always knew: Every aching woman, especially every bruised black woman, needs a place where she can find the peace and clarity to keep going. When I was small, Mom baffled me by escaping—alone—to a motel. “I need to get away,” she said, refusing to apologize for addressing a need few women admitted in the 1960s.
I don’t apologize, either. I can’t count the times I’ve retreated; if not to the spa, which I couldn’t always afford, then to an empty office at work, a vacationing friend’s home, or just an unoccupied bathroom. I couldn’t afford not to hole up in a quiet space with a door that closed. Where the only person I was beholden to was me.
I’d escaped to Rancho La Puerta this time because I couldn’t explain how at odds I felt with how I was seen by my husband, my kids, and my employer. Now I asked who, really, was to blame? I’d abandoned my office for home, assigned myself the impossible roles of “perfect” wife and mother, and immersed myself in duties I hated. Brilliant.
Alone in my room, I let myself wonder: What, really, was wrong with my life?
I still found Kevin sexy and supportive; somehow, the affair and its aftermath had resulted in us cherishing each other more, being more devoted. Years afterward, I half joked that as much as anything, fear of losing the boys, especially Skye, had kept him with us. Surprised, Kevin replied, “That would have been awful, but people make that work. I didn’t want to lose you.” I knew exactly what he meant.
Our sons, though far from flawless, were terrific. I hated that the world wasn’t as welcoming as they deserved, that I daily put my boys, my heart, in God’s hands. But wasn’t that where they’d always existed?
Most problematic was work. A popular columnist for fifteen years, I wanted to do more. Like every newspaper, the Post was facing an alarming drop in readers. I spent weeks conjuring ways to help bring them back: moving the column to another section, “bouncing” it between sections to tackle different issues. All were rejected. Once, my bosses couldn’t see me. Now they couldn’t see me differently. Why rock the boat? I felt them asking. You’re doing fine.
Staring from my window, I had to agree. Things are fine. Why am I so unsatisfied?
And just like that, I knew. This time, the revelation didn’t appear in a flash. Dawning as slowly as the sun over the Mexican horizon, the truth, like the sun, had always been there. My love-hate relationship with giving was a symptom of something deeper. The problem wasn’t between me and my job, my kids, or my mate.
It was between my brother and me.
There was no escape. Getting a handle on my giving and moving forward with my life required facing the man whose life and death had shaped so much that I’d become.
I had to make peace with Darrell.
Finding Darrell
Darrell and Bruce “riding” Taffy and Scooter, 1975.
When Bruce dreams about Darrell, his departed brother usually shows up at a family gathering at the old house, the one Daddy and his friends built with their own hands. Darrell saunters right in, looking just as he did at twenty-six—his smile knowing, his solid body broad, his eyes alight with the same mischievous glint. Each time Bruce dreams it, “Everybody tiptoes around Darrell because they’re afraid to ask him where he’s been. The understanding is that he just had to go away for a while to get his head straight. And we’re so glad to see him, we don’t ask any questions.
“But there’s this palpable tension about where’s he been.”
I didn’t kid myself. Freeing myself from my entrenched give-or-someone-will-die demons wouldn’t be easy, especially if it meant confronting the brother who had so profoundly affected me.
Decades after his death, I realized that as the years had passed, I’d thought less and less about him, and thereby was hurt less by his goneness. Now when I spoke of Darrell, it was with dry eyes and a near-steady voice. My attitude was remarkably similar to the one I had in grad school before he was killed: Darrell and I aren’t close now, but someday we will be again. And it will be great, like before. Much as it did in 1977, it worked for me.
Until it didn’t. The revelation that I’d locked myself in a must-give, must-help, must-prop-up prison led to my sense that exploring my life’s defining moment—Darrell’s death—might explain those tendencies. Yet the decision to reexamine my brother’s life and death brought the most surprising realization of all:
I had lost Darrell. I mean, really lost him. I had plastered what he represented onto male friends, lovers, coworkers, husbands, and sons whom I’d cheered, pushed, and sought to protect. Each had provided an outlet for my ongoing need to give to my brother. But now I wanted Darrell, not stand-ins. And he was lost to me.
Lost.
When my father died in 1999, I was struck by the cards I received expressing sorrow for my “loss.” At least a dozen kindhearted people said, “Sorry you lost your father.” The words lent his death a hint of impermanence, as if Daddy was a cell phone I’d misplaced and might yet recover. My father had died. But nobody wanted to say it. “Dead” is too redolent of decay and final resting places. So we speak of our “loss” and of our loved ones “passing.” Both terms imply movement and action, leaving room for the possibility of realms beyond the one in which we’re enmeshed. Room for “it ain’t over.”
But can’t people die without being lost to us? Can’t we continue to savor their way of regarding us, the spread of their smiles, their voices’ timbre? I’d retrieved my brother twelve years after his death for the article I’d written for the Post about what his death taught me about the value of black life. But the excavation required to write the piece was agonizing. After its publication, I let Darrell slip quietly away.
To some extent, my brother’s fade from my memory was natural and protective. But when I wanted him back—when I felt sturdy enough to entertain him again in consciousness—I couldn’t find him. I invited his return to my dreams; he remained a no-show. I meditated, hoping he’d rise in my awareness. I found solace and quietude, but no Darrell. Closing my eyes, I mentally returned to our Gary home. Peering in long unvisited rooms, I saw myself staring in the bathroom mirror, Steve peacock-walking through the den, Bruce’s head thrown back in a preteen guffaw. But Darrell was largely missing. Wherever I’d buried his memory had become matted and overgrown.
Once again, I became aware of a fact that had shaken me decades before: I didn’t know Darrell anymore. Back then, at least, I had memories, some so vivid, it ached to evoke them. Now, only a few well-worn moments were easily recalled. Darrell, the essence of the man who’d been my joy, was gone.
I had abandoned him again.
In 2007 when I decided to write this memoir, I knew I’d have to hack through the thick, protective walls I had erected to find my brother. Yet I was paralyzed.
One afternoon while lamenting my quandary, I was riffling through a little-used drawer for a turtleneck when I happened upon an unfamiliar clear plastic bag. Curious about the yellowing papers inside, I unzipped it—and gasped. Years earlier, Mom had thrust into my hands a plastic duvet bag filled with Darrell stuff—notes, doodles, and letters taken from his apartment after he died. Terrified of it, barely looking at it, I had pressed it deep inside this drawer. Forgotten it.
Heart thumping, I briefly leafed through the bag’s contents—and then pushed the treasure trove back in its hiding place. For weeks, I couldn’t reopen the drawer, confront Darrell even in this indirect way. I wanted him back but couldn’t face him. Few people knowingly rush headlong toward pain. But the depth of my reluctance at a time when it was imperative that I face Darrell bewildered me.
Why was I afraid to find my brother?
It was during this period of searching for Darrell while keeping him at bay that I remembered my friend Kathy’s experience with hypnotherapy. Studying to become a family counselor, Kathy had been skeptical of this aspect of therapy until a professor hypnotized her and she recalled details of her childhood she’d had no idea she had retained. Could hypnotherapy bring Darrell back, with a minimum of pain?
Settling into a chair in the office of Betty Silon, a psychiatrist recommended by a colleague of Kathy’s, I waited for this kind-looking woman’s instruction. Would she ask me to gaze at a swinging watch? Count backward aloud? Alarmingly, she launched into questions, about Darrell, me, our family. “I want you to feel your emotions. Emotions will take you where you want to go,” she said, placing a box of tissues beside me. Staring at the box as if it were a grenade, I thought, It took decades to learn not to feel Darrell’s death. I’m not filling any more tissues with my tears.
But I was in her office, with no backup plan. Inhaling, I answered her questions. They did take me deeper into my feelings, which felt… good. On my third visit, she asked why finding Darrell frightened me. My answer was so obvious, it shouldn’t have surprised me:
“I want to protect him.”
I’d treasured my childhood memory of Darrell the hero for so long, I was terrified of learning anything that might destroy it. What if he wasn’t as perfect, as pure, as I recalled? What if the golden light in which I’d bathed him was undeserved?
For thirty years, my view of what had happened in that Indiana ditch had been ironclad: My sensitive, warm, and caring brother—an innocent black man—had been unjustifiably killed by a pair of rogue white cops. If he’d been white, he would still be alive. Simple as that.
But was it that simple? Darrell and I had drifted apart. Who was the man in the ditch? The born-again minister-to-be? The slow-to-boil powerhouse whose eruptions stunned me? The confused soul whom the truck owner saw as a thief he was “holding,” a description that probably got my brother killed? A man whose fascination with mysticism and drugs had backfired in a baffling, tragic way?
Learning that Darrell was complex could make him culpable. Make him like all those other black men whose all-too-human behavior resulted in their deaths—and meant nobody had to give a shit about them.
I couldn’t risk handing a weapon to those who believed every problem a black person has is his own fault while simultaneously giving eve
ry benefit of the doubt to whites. I hadn’t forgotten the 2008 presidential campaign, in which some of the very people who bleated about Michelle Obama’s being “really proud” of her country and her husband’s angry pastor blithely overlooked John McCain’s thirteen cars and multiple residences as well as Sarah Palin’s pregnant and unwed teenage daughter. Such issues surely would have sunk Obama.
Black people had to be perfect. After decades of trying to achieve perfection—or just be good enough—I’d decided to forgo the approval of hypocrites. But the prospect of learning that my childhood hero wasn’t so heroic terrified me. What if Darrell was like those imperfect, all-too-human brothers whose behavior contributed to their deaths? Whose shootings even I had dismissed? What if he was… human?
No, black human. Someone whose death—and by extension, life—hardly mattered.
Thousands of black men have been murdered in this nation—millions if you count those who died with women and children on the Middle Passage. How many of their deaths were mourned? When I unconsciously resolved that no other man would suffer through my inattention, I joined countless black women who’ve harbored similar guilt and remorse. So what if their men were lost through racial violence or through other black men’s brutality in a tragic criminal loop? They, too, heard an ancient blood memory whisper that the “reasons” for their men’s slayings weren’t reasons at all.
One murdered brother whispered too much about freedom. Another “didn’t work his share.” That one made a pass, real or imagined, at a white woman. Yet another one refused to bow down to white men. One man’s prosperity made him dangerously uppity; another’s destitution made him a burden on society. Still another’s land—or wife or goods—were coveted by his white neighbor, and the fool wouldn’t part with them. And don’t forget the ones whose drug deals went sour or who dissed the wrong thug. And what about the one who wanted to be a comic, then a drug counselor, then a preacher—who stood in a ravine with a pot on his head, acting so crazy they shot him like a rabid dog?