Sparrow Needy
FROM Kenyon Review
I had a brother, and that says it all.
—From a conversation overheard on a New York City bus
When I was growing up in Harlem, there was a tough neighborhood bully, Lynwood,1> who had killed someone in a brutal shooting, and he was feared by all of us. Most of us knew other tough kids and many of us had heard rumors about them. Yet no one really knew if John had stabbed the fat boy, or if Frankie had smothered the pink-faced, scarecrow-looking vagabond, Raif; but Lynwood’s acts were verifiable: there were bodies.
My neighborhood was usually safe; murders were as uncommon as zebras or cobras on wealthy Park Avenue. On my street, 147th Street, everyone knew who did the shooting; it was only the authorities who were perplexed. Coloreds like to kill each other, one of New York’s finest was overheard confessing in a fit of candor, as he conducted the “rigorous” crime investigation, hauling in suspects who might have easily confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. One suspect was blind: he couldn’t see a gun; the other, one of the neighborhood’s true griots, had witnessed, just before the murder, “a comet strike a pharaoh’s house in the third century.”
Unfortunately, my brother, Paul, did witness the murder when he was merely eight years of age. It occurred in front of our brownstone, a few feet from him. Paul seemed preternaturally selected for horrible encounters, and if anyone were to find trouble, it was he. Paul seemed inevitably to attract the attention of the police, and for that reason, and a host of others, he hated them.
When he was six years old, Paul was held by a policeman for two hours in a dreary police station for stealing money from someone four years his senior—Paul was no saint, but he was not a thug at age six: I doubt if anyone is. At the time, Paul was going to the famous Collegiate School—the oldest independent school in America, where I, too, languished—and he was doing well. And though he never liked the school and felt rightfully that it was the “white boy’s kingdom” (his term), he was the usual boyish amalgam—a bit randy on Monday, taciturn on Tuesday, studious on Wednesday and Thursday, and skittish on Friday.
In his early years at the school, Paul easily made friends with the janitors and all the staff—they liked his easygoing camaraderie with them: they saw in his natural reticence a reservoir of respect, something that the other Collegiate boys, used to having their way with princes and kings, rarely evidenced. Paul brought Simeon, the custodian, a book he thought he would like, and Simeon and his friends held a birthday party for my brother—replete with a piñata, which Paul attacked like a prizefighter. Paul was never more delighted.
Paul, too, was very gifted at music—and he played the recorder well, often taking the instrument, after a Sonny Stitt–like daring solo and hitting it tenderly against the music stand, as he would later hit the skins of the drums, touching them lightly, as a feather skims the surface of a pond. Here Paul, characteristically, was acting out: he would be a drummer, not a reed player, but he wouldn’t state as much—you had to read his body.
Yet I well recall my brother being brought home by my father after his time at the police station, how much he was shamed by sitting among the dispossessed, envisioning what the world expected of him; my brother that day, moving slowly, vacantly, as if his spine had been infected with a deadly virus. Paul was literally half-stepping, his bones sidling against themselves, as if his locomotion had been eviscerated. It might have been funny if it were not my brother. From that moment on, he detested the police.
Paul, in truth, was oddly grafted to my family, as if the providential birth stork had somehow made a mistake and flew to the wrong house. When Paul was three, I recall him packing his bag and heading out of our Harlem residence, with that grim determination that is the hallmark of children. Although the young often anticipate running away from home after some tiff, nothing palpable had occurred to occasion this departure. Paul was simply giving bodily testimony to something ineluctable, although it hurts me now to admit it. Characteristically, Paul did not belong to us: He was a night person; my parents and I were morning people. Paul was usually quiet; we were story-rich. Paul loved the streets; they terrified us. My parents, of course, did not permit Paul to leave, although they did let him walk a hundred yards from our house, watching him from the window just before he engaged the corner and would become invisible, like Annie, a girl we had all heard about who had, on a bright Sunday morning, simply “disappeared,” a notion as unusual and frightening in 1954 Harlem as seeing the giant sinkhole in the Seventy-Seventh Street Riverside Park field—a place where all of us would go to play softball on weekends—a miraculous hole so enterprising that one could witness the water running under the field, like sluicing fingers of quicksilver, as if the world above needed a busy subterranean terrarium. In the three years I watched the hole, it would grow larger and more menacing, brimming with bottles, potato chips bags, broken dolls, condoms, all rising like a demented volcano; and you could hear the water gurgling, the city seemingly alive, the first time that I understood that the city was truly geologic, wondrous, nature-rich. Young Filbert—who had six fingers on one hand, five on the other, and had recently arrived from South Carolina, part of the Great Migration—said that even Annie might be in that hole: young Filbert who would later, on a simmering August day, slip into the Hudson River, head out toward the George Washington Bridge, swim farther than any of us could imagine, angle close to the mythic Little Red Lighthouse, and then head back to us, not damaged or deracinated, his body luminescent.
Harlem in the 1950s, in the early spring, was lovely, and my mother, brother, and I would often walk from our house on 147th Street to 116th Street, traipsing down Broadway, welcoming the new bodegas, which seemed, in the glance of an eye, to appear everywhere—the Spanish lofting like a splendid aria; the young men proudly hoisting their children on their shoulders like precious gifts; the zoot-suiters, already beginning the process of growing obsolete, up to less than good, never bothering us; the young men, and the oldsters, who saw my mother as beautiful, tipping their hats; a few of them, with studied decorum, saying, It’s a beautiful morning; a few of them watching my mother, then thin-hipped, a bit lustily, as she gracefully sauntered away. Harlem was a community of shared values, and I had a legion of family and would-be family. I was never unattended. Should my brother and I misbehave, Aunt Tina or Aunt Alvatine (neither of them blood relatives, though you dare not tell them that!) would whip me—I was a child of 147th Street, and every adult on that street watched over me, and everyone had the right to set me straight.
In truth, it must have been horrible for Paul, being placed among people as otherworldly as his family must have appeared. It wasn’t that we didn’t love him, or he us. It was simply that we were incomprehensible to one another. Some of it, possibly, was that Paul was a fledging musician—he would later become a good jazz drummer, playing at times with Carman McCrae; some of it, just as truthfully, was that Paul, by desire and impulse, loved life, although he seemed to be doing everything imaginable to forswear it, be it with alcohol or pills; some of it, quite simply, was human peccadillo, and the realization that our desire to have Paul live might yet require an alembic that we could not discern; and some of it, most powerfully, involves the truism that love—no matter how prodigal—can ill perform every miracle.
Still, whatever the reason, Paul would die of alcoholism in his early thirties, something that even today I find incomprehensible. We often talk about life and its possibilities; for those of us who have lost a brother, there seems a great gash in the universe: there was the world before, when whatever the world’s verities, your brother was there participating, at times driving you crazy; at times, making you mute with his daring.
Often, when I am talking with parents at Cornell, the parents will, in an understandable moment of duress, worry that their child may not get accepted to Harvard Business School or get the plum job on Wall Street. Sometimes, without meaning to, I’ll stammer, Is your child alive?
This, of course, is not what parents wish to hear from their child’s adviser, and yet it is my most profound ministry.
Make a big noise, my brother used to say, but he was resoundingly silent, moody, imperturbable, and not in the way of a monk or an aesthete—not in a way that was serviceable. Paul was an activist—that is, you knew he loved you because he performed it. His body in its oscillations was his language. If you couldn’t comprehend this, Paul was merely a cipher. In fact, if you didn’t know this about him—if you didn’t understand his inner life, that interiority that was as hard as an uncut diamond and just as murky, you might have even been scared of him, for his solemnity might be perceived as truculence or anger, none of which was true. Yet if you are not easily comprehensible, if you do not fit into our facile categorizations, we stand ready with rocks at the stoning ground, which is why fear can always raise a mob—be it in Harlem or Sioux Falls. And Paul seemed a veritable lightning rod for others—cops, as I’ve said, always found him irresistible; the headmaster of our school actually wondered if Paul was “possessed.” If you are among the elect today, someone must be relegated to the inelect. Paul, like hundreds of others, was not conscious of how his indeterminacy influenced us: he was simply trying to live. But I remember his telling me, he was very young, only five years old, two years after he made his initial pilgrimage to leave our house, People don’t like me.
And I recall when we visited George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon, that lovely mansion that makes me understand why one tenaciously fights for empire, how Paul, at age four, simply became prostrate at the entrance of the slave quarters, which was merely a mound of unadorned stones. I was trying to fathom how Washington might throw a coin across the Potomac; Paul just slumped down, as if he were constitutionally tired, as if the whole magnitude of the Middle Passage had settled upon him, like a death mask. We thought he was sick—he didn’t move for ten minutes. It was not a temper tantrum, he was not unconscious—it was simply as if the enormity of the human devastation had entered him.
When I was thinking about going to graduate school, in my usual fit of anxiety, I told my brother that I was considering Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, a place I knew little about. Paul, at the time, was living in Harlem with my parents, half in college, half in chaos, playing his drums at local joints, drinking and smoking pot—and he was beginning to evidence that detachment that some found troublesome, and others—women especially—found sweet. Paul was then an alcoholic, although I didn’t truly understand it, and I would later fail him, calling him at home, instead of visiting, thinking of him, instead of gathering him bodily up. Paul, like all addicts, knew how to outmaneuver us—“I can’t visit this weekend, I’ve got a gig,” he’d say, when I asked him to come to Ithaca. He couldn’t visit because I would not have let him drink, and he knew that. And, in truth, he wanted to protect me. He knew that I would be overwrought, that whatever his dilapidation, I was even less available. Truth for us, sadly, was a Maginot Line that neither of us dared cross. And he was right: I would never truly make him ante up. I was too self-involved to truly comprehend my brother’s life—I was too self-infested. And, even today, I rarely extend myself to others in the flesh: I’ll give money for any cause; I’ll write a letter to save near any living thing. But I find it impossible to put myself truly on the line—to act. I don’t visit people I love. I’m afraid of the telephone so I rarely make calls. I simply can’t do it. So my own reticence, coupled with my brother’s illness, made us both unapproachable.
“Ken, get in the car,” my brother yelled. He was looking fit, well nourished, and happy, as vibrant as when he was seven and chided me for liking Susie, a girl who, charmingly, would wait for me on her stoop, from nine to three, until I returned from school.
“I’m driving you from Ithaca to Providence—get in.” Paul has just driven 250 miles from Harlem to Ithaca and now he was attempting to drive to Providence, Rhode Island, another 350 miles. And yet he did it: he drove carefully, said nary a word on the entire trip, and had his friends tell me about Brown. “Tell my bro what this place has?” he said. “Don’t dope it down.” And then we slept for five hours, and he drove back to Ithaca, driving with the skill of a practiced chauffeur, and once at my driveway, he literally thrust me out of the vehicle, as if staying another minute might turn him into stone. “Bro, you know now what to do.” And then he drove back to New York City. He was ill then, but you wouldn’t know it.
That was Paul’s way.
I knew little of this when the murder occurred in front of our brownstone, within a few feet of our small front yard, when Paul was eight. Paul had watched it through the first-floor window, barely twenty-five feet from the crime. It was horrible, and my brother would never forget it, especially the sight of the victim’s attempt at extracting the bullet from his own chest. “It was like he was trying to confirm his own murder,” my brother would later say. Yet as the policeman began his interrogation, he admonished my brother, “I know you didn’t see anything,” and Paul—whatever else his demons—was not tone-deaf.
In Harlem, in the 1950s, the police acted like gods, and my brother would never cower. As I was Paul’s older sibling by two years, I was supposed to watch over him, which was more than a notion. As you might well imagine, Paul was little interested in my protection. I well recall Paul giving a patrolman “the finger” after the officer stopped his police car and asked him a “minor” question concerning his friends’ whereabouts. Paul was merely age ten; the officer was bored. Since the officer was clearly not the least concerned about my brother’s friends, three kids who could barely manage a pimple, he quickly returned to his patrol car. And yet Paul—who was then as thin as a car antenna—was itching for a fight. Paul didn’t like the police, he didn’t like their assumed superiority, and he didn’t like to feel as if he were “an ant dancing on a Cadillac,” which the police, in their intemperate questioning, always seemed to demand of black people. When Paul’s body tilted to the left and his head developed a slight upward inclination, I knew he was no longer interested in “quiet palaver.” And yet Paul was still only ten—which meant that he knew everything and nothing. And this was America, and I was his brother.
Suddenly, the officer jumped out of his vehicle, and I was certain that he had somehow intuited my brother’s distaste. If I was worried, my brother was boisterous. Paul stood up, looked the officer in the eye, and said, “Did you forget something? Your gun, maybe?”
I was aghast. The cop looked at my brother, as if he had finally seen him, and yet things were still unfixed, gauzy. This is a very dangerous moment for anyone, but especially for blacks and whites who know so little about each other—especially, that is, when one of them has a gun. “You’re crazy,” the officer said, shaking his head as he walked away, with that hip-strutting swagger, which is someone’s idea of manliness. Undeterred, Paul just pointed at his head and slowly rotated his long fingers counterclockwise. “Yeah, I’m crazy, asshole,” he said.
Lynwood, who was only sixteen when he shot that boy in our yard, was given a wide berth by everyone in my neighborhood, and my friends would try to hide, slinking into the alleys when he appeared. Lynwood had an odd way of simply becoming present: there was a pause in the scenery, one of the tenants might be yelling a belated welcome to a passerby, and Lynwood would materialize like an apparition, mayhem and horror trailing in his wake. Lynwood was malevolent, truculent, and brittle, and it seemed as if one were always in midsentence with him, as if the subject had been lost but the verb was firing like a crazed piston so that one might perceive the action but not the context. One time he brutally hit a boy for simply looking as if the boy had a question: Don’t look stupid, Lynwood yelled and popped him in the head, the young boy’s face appearing like a symbol of twentieth-century torment, as the blood flowed down his chest.
And yet I also remember that Lynwood presented my mother with a beautiful rose one Sunday morning. The rose was big, “skyscraper tall,” as Fred, the neigh
borhood floriculturist, termed it, although Fred was known for his hyperbole. Lynwood never explained this lovely gesture; my mother was simply undone by his generosity. Like so much that happened in those years, it did not make much sense to me, or at least I did not try to understand it. My friends thought that Lynwood had gone crazy; I simply thought that he liked my mother, which was not difficult, since she took everyone seriously, often bringing them a sweet, or praising some act of unheralded civic responsibility. My mother, for example, began a neighborhood preschool, with mixed results. For a few weeks the children came, but then a few of them discovered basketball; then a few others, the local movie theater; in a few weeks, it was just my brother and I, learning about the “hidden treasures” of Harlem. Yet people valued my mother’s high-principled affirmations, even if they found sustenance elsewhere. And my mother, somehow, saw something precarious and incandescent in Lynwood: “There’s something sweet in him,” she often said.
After the rose incident, I was determined to say hello to Lynwood, thinking that my acknowledgment might limit his possible scenarios for havoc. If you are constitutionally cowardly, it is best to take whatever little fight you have immediately to the confrontation; retreat will hasten soon enough. Yet Lynwood never truly threatened me—in my case, thank goodness, it was merely all mouth; he was even gentle, in his own peculiar way.
One day, with a solemnity reserved for a parish priest, Lynwood told me that he wanted “someone to get out of Harlem. I’m going to die,” he said. “I’m going to continue to hurt people,” he continued, his last statement as precisely enunciated as Julie Andrews’s thrilling elocution in Camelot. “I want you out of here!” Lynwood commanded, his entire body suddenly yawing between anticipation and dread, with a new, evangelizing insistence that might even smash the ghetto it so frightened both of us. A wish, I now realized, could be a dangerous thing.
The Best American Essays 2017 Page 17
