“It’s hard getting it right,” I said.
“It surely is.” Her hands stopped. “Here.” She shoved the book toward me. “I want you to have this.”
“What?” I didn’t pick up the book. Still shooting.
“I want you to have this. Take it. Put that camera down and take it.”
I did, shaking. “You take care of that now,” she said.
“I will.” Then she lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes, her signal that we were finished for the day.
A couple of days later, I asked her about the riot. I’d been going down to the library, looking through old archives, getting more and more freaked out. I knew I was going to have to ask her, on camera, but I was afraid of what she’d say. Finally, as we sat alone one sunny day in the backyard, she in her wheelchair, I at Aunt Jolene’s picnic table, I asked her.
“Grandma, you were in the riot, weren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
Her eyes widened. She bit her lip, and her eyes filled with tears. But then she turned her gaze to me, immutable, and her voice was firmer than I’d ever heard it. “You get your mama. You get your mama and then you ask me again.”
I was startled, but the steel in her voice left no alternative. Still holding my camera, I went in the house and called Mama. She came out, blinking in the sunlight, a copy of Entertainment Weekly in her hand. “What? Is everything all right?” she said. Without us ever discussing it, she had stayed out of the time I spent with Grandma.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. Grandma wants you out here now.” I still didn’t quite know what was going on. We both walked back to my grandmother. She gazed at the lawn, lost in memory.
“You got your mama?”
“Yes’m, I do. She’s sitting right there.”
“Got that camera on?”
“Yes’m”
“Ask me that question again.”
So I did. Were you in the riot?
She turned her head and looked directly at Mama, her eyes unwavering and clear. “Yes, I was. They killed my mama, Anna Mae Stableford. Liked to kill my daddy and me. But they shot her dead in front of me. I was eight years old.” Mama gasped. The only other sound was the flutter of the magazine falling to the ground and the caw of a faraway crow.
My hands were shaking, but I didn’t stop. I knew she didn’t want me to. “Tell me about it.”
She told us her story. Five minutes or five hours, I had no idea how long she talked. I didn’t think how I’d use it. I only listened. Mama only listened too; occasionally I heard a low moan from her, but that was all. My grandmother told the whole thing, barely pausing for breath, tears running freely down her face. When she finished, she said, “Your mama has the picture. The picture of my mama. The only one we had left. My daddy kept it for me, and I gave it to her.” She took a deep breath. I looked at mama, whispered, “On your bureau?” She nodded. Grandma went on. “I ain’t never had the strength to talk about it. Neither did her daddy. We was young. Everybody knew. But nobody talked about it. We didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry about that now. But now you know. You got it right in that thing, that camera. And one more thing. There’s a work shed out back of my house. Jolene can tell you where. It’s got a lock on it. You go on and cut that lock off. If Jolene or Otis give you a hard time, tell them I asked you to. You do that for me, all right, Tamara?”
“I will, Grandma.”
She sat back in her chair, relieved. “You do that for me. We all done now?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re done.”
“Take me back inside then, I need to lay down.”
My mother just sat there, ankles crossed, sun gleaming her smoothly weaved hair, magazine at her feet. She didn’t even look up as I wheeled Grandma past her. Once I got her settled, I came back out, camera in hand. Never drop the camera. I pointed it toward my mother. “Well?” I said.
“Well, what? What am I supposed to say? Jesus Christ, Tam, what do you want me to say?”
“Whatever’s on your mind. What do you think, hearing that story?”
“I . . . my God . . . I can’t believe.” Here her voice went soft. “I can’t believe she lived through that and never told us all of it.”
“Why do you think she never told?”
For the first time, she looked at me, at the camera. Her voice wavered. I lifted my head to gaze at her. “Sometimes it hurts too much to tell the truth.”
“Do you wish she had?”
A sigh older than the world. “Maybe. Maybe. But what would that change?” She stood up. “I gotta go have a cigarette, Tam. Turn that thing off. Wouldn’t hurt you to do something without it for five minutes.” She stalked off. I stood shooting the sharp green grass, the rusting chair where she had been seated, for a minute more. Then I turned off my camera, sat down on the wooden bench of the picnic table, lowered my head, and cried.
35
AFTER THAT DAY, MAMA WAS GETTING ITCHIER and itchier to run. I could see it. The cigarettes, the nervous tapping of her left foot, her hand straying to the back of her head and twirling, twirling. Staying in one place, feeling stuff she doesn’t want to feel, hearing stuff she doesn’t want to hear—that’s just not something she does. Before I started filming Grandma, I got in Mama’s face about why we hadn’t ever been here before, but like always, I didn’t get anywhere. So we retreated to our separate corners. She went to a lot of movies. She didn’t ask me to go with her, which hurt my feelings, but I didn’t want to let her know that. So I didn’t say anything. She talked to Sheila sometimes until late into the evening, laughing their private laugh into her cell phone. She helped Aunt Jolene with a tight-lipped show of effort that I had never seen in her. She was trying to stay, to focus, not to fight with her sister, not to fight with me. But she wasn’t gonna be able to do it much longer.
In the days after Grandma told us about the riot, we were very, very careful with each other, circling, circling, not saying much more than was necessary to take care of her. Grandma slept a lot, most days and often into the evenings. Some nights she was horribly agitated, crying out names from long ago, my mother and Jolene and I taking turns holding her hand in the bed as she sobbed and tossed. During the days, I felt a little lost, but I kept filming Grandma when she was lucid and I read and talked to Aunt Jolene about living in Tulsa. I filmed her too and went to the library and learned more about the riot.
One night, I came home from the library after dark. I went straight to Grandma’s room when I got home and looked in, the way you might look in on a child. Her face was relaxed, her hair wiry on the pillow. When I came out, my mother had appeared on the sofa, staring out into the blue night, her legs curled beneath her. Her hand worked in her hair. She looked up when I came in. I could hear Jolene laughing at something on television distantly from her bedroom. There were crickets outside, a sound I could not get used to. Sometimes they kept me up at night, all that chirping. Mama looked away from the window, picked up her cigarette, took a drag, put it out, and said, “You know, I have your father’s phone number.”
Sometimes, when people say things, it really is like in a movie. I turned to her, my ears ringing. I could hear my voice going up, up, up. “What?”
“I have your father’s phone number. His name was Rafe Madigan. I think . . . I think I should give it to you.”
“How long have you been in touch with him?”
She looked away. “I’m not in touch with him. But I know how you can reach him.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
“Did you tell Sheila?”
“No. No. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t see him. I talked to him a couple of times. He’d always call and make sure I had his right number. But I didn’t know what to do. He . . . I loved him, but he was gone, and I love Sheila, all right? And he wasn’t never there for you. Called out of the goddamn blue. What was I supposed to do? He didn’t come around. I didn’t want to let him around you . . . I . . .”
“Why ar
e you telling me this now?” I was crying, standing up, walking frantically around the room. It suddenly seemed very small. I went to the door. I don’t know why.
“Because . . . because we’re here and I see . . . I see.” Her voice got very small. “I see what it might have meant to you. You’re grown now. You ought to know.”
“Jesus Christ, Mama. Jesus Christ.” I opened the door and went out.
The stars were very clear overhead, almost comically so, and the air was cold. I just stood there. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there a long time before I felt a hand on my arm. My mother stood beside me. “I’m sorry, baby. I just didn’t know what to do.”
“You never do.”
“But I did my best. I hope you know that.”
“Right.”
“Well, I got his number for you when you want it. I love you. I do.”
“Right.” I knew it was cruel, but it was all I could manage. “Mama, I’m gonna go for a drive.”
She nodded. I got into the car wordlessly. I looked out the back window at her as I drove off. She looked sadder than I’d ever seen her.
When we lived in LA, she never let me drive. Whenever we went anywhere together, even after I learned, she was at the wheel. We went where she wanted to go. I opened the window and let the cool air blow on my damp face. There were very few streetlights out here where Aunt Jolene lived. I pressed the pedal to the floor, and the car sped forward. I shouted, screamed. “Dammit, why didn’t you tell me? Dammit, why didn’t you tell me?” I eased off the gas pedal, my throat raw. Now what? Now where was I going? I turned the wheel. I wasn’t thinking. I was just going.
I drove all the way downtown. It was late. No one was out. I thought how busy it would be back home right now, the lights pounding, everyone on cell phones, walking and talking. I wondered what Colin was doing, what my father looked like. I thought about my mother saying, “Sometimes it hurts too much to tell the truth,” and the look on my grandmother’s face as she heard the gunshots again, the gunshots that tore her mother open, left her bloody in the street. I pulled up in front of the memorial. The car stopped and I got out. I stood there. I just stood there. Words formed in my mouth, soft. I could almost taste them. For once, I couldn’t think of a movie scene that this was like. “I can do it,” I said to the smooth black stone in front of me. I touched it with my bare hands. First one, then the other, then I leaned forward as if I were going to push it over. “I can do it. I can do it. I will.” I stood like that for a long, long time. My hands were very cold. The air was still. The breath of my ancestors was all around me.
36
WHEN MILDRED DIED, ANGELA WAS SHOCKED right to her shoes. Even Angela could see that her mother wasn’t recovering the way she should have. Even though she could see the intensity with which her mother talked to Tamara, like she was trying to say everything at once. Even though she carried the trays of food back to Jolene’s kitchen nearly untouched, looking much the way they had when she brought them into Mildred’s room. Even then, she wasn’t ready. She didn’t think she’d mourn the way she did.
Tam found her, of course. Going in there with that camera, the way she had been almost every day, getting quieter and quieter, only saying, “I can’t tell you yet,” whenever she or Jolene asked about what she was gonna do with all this film. She went in first thing in the morning. And then just a couple of minutes later, she came right back out. Angela was sitting on the sofa, reading People. “She’s gone, Mama,” she said.
“What you mean gone, Tam? Where’s she gonna go? She can’t walk.”
“I mean she’s dead, Mama. Grandma’s dead. Come in here with me, I’ll show you.”
Angela’s knees started shaking. She took her daughter’s hand. They went in together, two little girls in the woods. Mildred lay in bed, eyes open, face relaxed, curiously beautiful, her hair spread about her on the frilly, frilly pillow. They stood there for a long time, holding hands, before they left the room to go tell Jolene and begin the long work of making it real.
So then she had no mother, and Tam had no grandmother, and they were both crying all the time. Once Angela heard Tam talking tearfully on the phone to that boy Colin, that boy she used to date, and she thought, Well, that’s one thing that’s different, when you break up with somebody now, you don’t stay broken up. And she called and asked Sheila to come to her because she couldn’t hide it anymore and Sheila came on the first thing smoking and was there holding her up and she couldn’t even make a pretense of not needing her, a pretense that they weren’t lovers. Angela could no more have slept alone at this moment than she could have flown to the moon. She didn’t even think about how it would look. She just did it. And no one said a mumblin’ word. Tam asked everybody if she could film everything and no one said no. The camera just seemed like part of her, and she was careful to respect them, careful to turn it off when it might have been embarrassing. But it was part of her, that camera. Tam was who she was. Angela was beginning to feel all right about that. She’d done all she could; maybe not so much, but all she could.
A couple of days after the funeral, Tamara asked Angela to spend some time with her, alone at Mildred’s house. Jolene’s had been such a swirl of old people, people who went to church with Mama or knew Jolene or Otis, people who were rooted in this place, that they hadn’t had a moment together in days. Just as well. They hadn’t been speaking to each other much before Mildred died, what with Angela finally deciding she had to tell about Rafe and all. “I want you with me there,” Tamara said. Her voice was even, her reddened eyes steely.
So Tamara and Angela went to Mildred’s house and watched a movie together one more time. They watched some of Tamara’s footage of Mildred. They sobbed like children together as she talked about William, about Angela’s father, about the riot and her mother’s murder. They sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Every now and then they had to stop the video. But they watched it to the end. And after it was over, Angela looked at her daughter and said, “Let’s go see what’s in that shed, all right?”
Tam was dressed for it in jeans and a T-shirt; Angela was not, in high heels and a bright red dress. They found an old crowbar lying in front of the door (“like God put it there,” said Angela), and Tamara pried open the door.
At first they didn’t see what they were supposed to be looking for. It was just an old shed. Here a broken old baby carriage—probably the one she herself rode in, Angela thought—there a toolbox, everywhere dust and dirt. Tamara stepped in cautiously, spoke to Angela cautiously. “What do you think?”
“I’m not sure,” Angela said. She stepped in too. “Let’s look on the worktable.”
So they did. And that’s when they found them. Not many. Ten or fifteen. A few careful paintings, mostly done on large pieces of plywood. So careful. Some clumsy and not much good, the colors rough and untutored, the images cartoonish. But then there were more. But some, two or three that took their breath away, had photographs collaged into them and showed an assurance that was almost frightening. Vivid collages—one with a singed old postcard of The Last Supper in the middle of it, then covered with shellac and painted gloriously a rainbow of colors, with bottle caps and rocks and shells and beads heavily layered all around it. Here was one with an old family photo. And here was one with Johnny Lee. And here . . . here was one of Angela. Her headshot from around the time of Coffy, right before she got that speaking part, before she found out she was going to be a mother herself. She barely remembered sending it; she’d sent it to prove to them that she was really trying to get work as an actress. It was before that movie where she danced on the bar and Mama called her, her heart torn out of her chest. She and Tamara stared, transfixed.
She was the most beautiful woman in the world. Her eyes wide-set and long and falsely lashed, her Afro proud and new, her skin like poured honey, her throat like a song. “That’s me,” said Angela. “That’s me.”
“Yeah,” breathed Tamara. “You’re beautiful, Mama.”
They stood there together for a long time, Angela clutching the collage, unable to speak. Tamara spoke first. They both kept gazing at the photo. “Mama, I’m gonna come out to LA to see you when this is over, and I get things settled at home. And I’m gonna call Daddy. I want that number.”
“I want you to have it. I should have given it to you a long time ago.”
For once, Tam didn’t bite her head off. “Yeah. Well. I’m glad you’re gonna give it to me now. You’re so beautiful, Mama.”
“Thanks, munchkin. So are you.” And they looked at the picture again and then at each other with surprise and delight and broken hearts. Angela spoke first this time: “Let’s take this stuff out of here, OK?”
“OK,” said her daughter. And together, they gently began to remove Mildred’s art.
DREAMLAND
2005
Here is the opening scene of Dreamland: The screen is black. You hear my voice: “My mother was an actress. In some ways, she doesn’t look very different from the way she did back then. She still has honey-colored skin and eyelashes that make you think of fur or feathers. Her movies were all made in the early 1970s, before I was born. You know the titles of some of the big ones: Shaft and Super Fly and Blacula. She wasn’t in those. Then there were the little ones that blew in and out of the dollar theaters in Cleveland and Detroit and Gary inside of a week, until the last brother who was willing to part with $1 had done so: TNT Jackson and Abby and Savage Sisters. She’s in some of those. You wouldn’t know her, though. She was no Pam Grier. These are her credits: Girl in Diner, Murder Victim #1, Screaming Girl, Junkie in Park. She was the third girl from the left in the fight scene in Coffy. When I was little, sometimes she woke me late at night and we sat down in front of the television to watch a bleached-out print of a movie with a lot of guys with big guns and bigger Afros. They ran and jumped and shot. They all wore leather and bright-colored, wide-legged pants made of unnatural fibers. They said, ‘That’s baaaad’ as percussive, synthesized music perked behind them. The movies made their nonsensical way along, and then suddenly my mother said, ‘See, see, there I am, behind that guy, laying on the ground. That’s me.’ Or she said, ‘That’s me in that booth.’ Then Richard Roundtree or Gloria Hendry or Fred Williamson sprayed the room with gunfire, and my mother slumped over the table, her mouth open, her eyes closed. Blood seeped slowly out from under her enormous Afro. I looked away from the television at the mother I knew. She smiled watching the gory death of her younger self. Her pleasure in her work was so pure, even though all she was doing was holding still as dyed Karo syrup drained from a Baggie under her wig onto a cheap Formica table.”
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