What I heard over the phone was a man who’d speak up and continue to speak up. I heard no sobs, no curses, no grunts or exclamations, no special pleading, no arguing with the inevitable, no sign of incredulous recognition and bewilderment and throwing up his hands or bowing his gray nappy head, I heard no evil wind howling, as he hums a blues in a segregated army barracks in Texas, no baby Michael singing Got to be there, no holler when at last, at last, Kareem whips the Celtics with a championship-winning sky-hook and Magic high-fives the moon, no drawing back his hand when colleagues who couldn’t look him in the eye offered their parting shake, no cringing, no outraged condemnation, no sullen teeth-gritting, jaw-grinding silence, no benediction, no sad farewell as he stood on the bank, and she sailed on, sailed on, no chorus answering a sister’s perfect laddered solo, I heard none of that, all of it, in the silent interstices binding his words as he spoke to me over the phone.
Some of us ain’t gon let it die. You’ll hear more and more. We are not going to let it die, John.
What about the official silence?
Man. Don’t worry about those folks downtown. You won’t ever hear anything from them. Still hiding. Still got their behinds in the air and their heads in the sand. But plenty people out here determined to let City Hall know what they think.
Sounds like I would enjoy your seminar.
Oh, we’ll still be carrying on when you come in October. It’s been really something so far. People are just beginning to come forward. Lots of facts and material available now that the commission didn’t have during their hearings. Don’t know how the commission would have handled what we’re finding out. Far worse than I first thought it was. A nasty business all round.
You’re doing fine then.
I’m here. You know I’m here.
Good to hear from you.
October then, OK?
God bless.
Peace.
Will I ever try to write my son’s story? Not dealing with it may be causing the forgetfulness I’m experiencing. Not as bad as pitiful Zasetsky but I do feel my narrative faculty weakening. A continuous, underlying distraction so that if I look away from what I’m doing, I lose my place. What I’m doing or saying or intending engages me only on a superficial level. I commit only minimal attention, barely enough to get me through the drill I’m required to perform.
Getting by, getting through. But I’m afraid I’m losing even that capacity. Synapses not synapsing, wires crossed or uncrossed, some chemical sentry asleep or hyperactive, arthritis of the mental circuits, whatever. My fate rearing its ugly head. 1 keep recalling how Jonathan Swift paused and stared at a gigantic tree whose upper branches had been blasted by lightning. He said to his companions, I’ll go like that one. At the top first.
For every foul-up I catch, every distraction I circumnavigate and get myself back on course, for each success, there are failures, chances lost, plans unraveling. Doubt and insecurity are themselves distracting, reinforce the state of mind that causes them. Second guessing, duplicating and rechecking, treading water, going nowhere fast and also excruciatingly slowly.
Made such a sinner of his memory
To credit his own lie.
—THE TEMPEST
The unmitigated cruelty of the legal system. My son rots in a cell. Courts neither shitting nor getting off the pot. None will act, render a decision yea or nay on our appeal to remove my son’s case from adult to juvenile court. So he sits in limbo. Solitary confinement month after month while the appeals court, then the state supreme court sit on the case. Frustration began with the hearing in juvenile court. A judge ignored a day and a half of expert medical testimony, chose the narrowest possible definition of mental illness, and declared my son not committable to a mental institution, and thus not eligible for treatment. Therefore, stuck him in a cell to await trial in adult court. That was a year and a half ago. Hardened criminals crumble after a few weeks in solitary. My son gradually deteriorates. How could he not? He can’t treat himself, no outside help is provided. Because of his age, he’s in a phase of maximum jeopardy. According to the experts, adolescence is the time when childhood personality disorders almost certainly coalesce into incurable adult schizophrenia. Even with the best sustained professional help, prospects for recovery are slim. He sits day after day alone in a cell because he’s a juvenile in an adult jail and the system has no other facility for him. Even if some official recognized the torture, the damage the state is inflicting on my son, that official, if he or she tried to help, would discover what we have discovered: no humane alternatives exist. The state chooses to believe my son’s illness is not real and thus accepts no responsibility for treatment.
If my son were wounded or diseased, chances are he’d be treated. The inhumanity of allowing sores to fester, infection to rage, that species of cruelty is universally condemned. Mental illness is just as real, cruel and destructive to mind and body as a gunshot wound. Only a colossal failure of will and imagination allows us to pretend otherwise.
Why is my son left alone to suffer and try to make sense of his imprisonment, the chaos of his personality, his terror and guilt? That’s the portion he awakens to each morning and goes to sleep with each night. Is it any wonder he’s giving up, turning out the light in his cell, attempting to blot out the world by sinking into a profound stupor? That’s the instinctual behavior of a wounded animal. To crawl into its den and curl up and die. Why would we allow anyone, adult or child, to suffer untended, alone, an agony enacted not deep in the forest but in a so-called civilized city, in a building with a number, on a street with a name, in a cell with a tiny window we pay people to watch?
* * *
Aside from worrying about his own children, Cudjoe wonders what happened to the kids he taught. Fact is they’re grown and have kids. Cudjoe’s confused. The kids he’s looking at, searching for his students’ faces, are the children of the kids he taught. He’s a generation behind, lost in time. Standing still while the world passes him by. His kids have disappeared into a hole in the mountainside. Cleaning somebody’s house. Washing dishes. Janitors. Cooks. Prisoners. Sanitation workers. Housekeepers. Doing all that invisible shit. Down the tubes, babe. Under the sidewalk we’re standing on. This a new crop. Long live the kids. Come up like grass. And get trampled on. And new grass next spring. Youall some prolific people, man. Youall just keeps coming. Teeming loins. Yes indeedy. If babies was gold, youall’d be the King Midasses of the New World.
Today is my grandmother’s birthday, my father-in-law’s birthday, the birthday of the daughter of my wife’s best friend in this town. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King’s birthday. My sister’s a grandmother again. My niece’s baby is not two months old yet. When the baby Cheryl sat on my grandmother’s lap they spanned five generations. No one took a picture but next time someone must. Miracles like that don’t happen every day. It’s a duty to preserve them. The best way to do it would be all five representatives. My grandmother, mother, sister, niece, and grandniece, if that’s what the little one is to me—gathered together, perhaps Grandma sitting with the baby in her arms and the others framing them, leaning over the back of the rocker to keep the focus tight so the faces won’t be too small. I would love to own a copy of that picture. I would explain to anyone willing to listen, the names, the unusual circumstance, what such a rare, lucky conjunction says about time and blood and family. Into my rap I’d slip a reference to a picture I actually possess. It’s no slouch. Even though one less generation is represented. My first son, myself, my father, his father, the male string stretched taut as a bow ready to be fired. I feel a peculiar kind of dizziness when I contemplate the meaning of these pictures, the real one, the imagined are equals when I consider them this way. Dizzy from the intersection, the connection. My grandmother is ninety-three today and if by chance the baby whose face she looks down into lives for the same number of years, what is caught in the picture is two centuries, two lifetimes, which could encompass a skein of time close to the age of thi
s country. Two faces connected here, at this nexus, by a camera, in my mother’s house, noticing each other and their two pairs of eyes could be a bridge between an old man rocking my infant grandmother on his lap and another man taking the arm of a frail, tottering, ancient woman to guide her up a step or through a doorway, one man from the nineteenth century, the other from the twenty-first, touching here, linked here, not by a thought or a number but an actual bridge of flesh and blood joining them here and now. The thought could take your breath away. All those years. What transpires in them. My grandmother a witness, living through every event occurring in the twentieth century, the horrors, the slow blooming and death of so many of us as our family slowly climbed the hundred steps. How many has she seen stumble and fall? And the new life she cradles in her arms could endure just as long as hers, longer even, or be gone tomorrow. A life can be a great soaring arch with the shadows and sorrow of a century huddled under its span or shorter than the tick of a clock. There aren’t words for what I think as I watch the oldest and youngest females in our family size up each other. Where they’re going, where they’ve been is part of what they’re learning, exchanging. Their conversation excludes me. As it must. As it should. A door opens and a wind sweeps over them, sealing the moment, a silence and crystalline murmur too fast, too ancient to register anywhere but in the two pairs of eyes meeting. Neither will forget the moment. The baggage carried forward, the trip still to make. Words fail me because there are no words for what’s happening. I am a witness. All I know is that everything I could say about what I’m seeing is easy, obvious and, therefore, doesn’t count for much except to locate me, outside, record my perplexity.
My wife said her mother told her it doesn’t matter how old you are when your last parent dies. What you feel, however old, is orphaned. You are an orphan in the world. But what is the word for a parent who’s lost a child? I have no word, no place to begin. Nothing to start you thinking, no word like my wife’s mother’s word to tell you how I feel.
If you’ve lost a child it’s like undoing that picture of four generations, or the one yet to be taken of five. Having it but then watching it burn, or be erased, or unwinding, or waking up one morning to the news it was all a mistake. Never happened. Forget it. A child lost cancels the natural order, the circle is broken. The photos of generations set my head spinning because in the face of time they are a record of its incomprehensibility but also its finitude, its peculiar, visceral, sensuous availability. We all swim in the same sea of time. That could be true, couldn’t it? We can hold in our hands proof of the endless ebb, flow and possibility. We can remember that what brought us here takes us back and brings us again. We can believe for an instant in this ocular proof, the photo we possess. The mystery overwhelming us also allows us to step back and take a sounding. We aren’t able to touch the same place once again but what’s there has been there a long time and so we’ve been there too, and so will again. The photo, though mysterious, offers proof and promise. The lost child, the parent who grieves for the lost child owns an emptiness as tangible as a photo. You carry it around. It’s there to show anyone you choose to show it to. You can relate the names, the unusual circumstances, the failure of blood and family and time to persevere. This emptiness, this not having is so palpable you can pass it around a room. A ghost photo going from hand to hand as you spy on each face in turn. You hate pulling it from your wallet but sometimes you can’t help yourself. Imposing on people, embarrassing them as you say over and over again the only thing you can say. You say nothing. Because the emptiness has no name, no place. A negative marvel, a phantom pain incomprehensible, inexplicable while the orphaned photo makes its circuit, and you stand tongue-tied, wondering why you exposed it again. Think of a leg that’s been amputated. Then think of the emptiness where it once was. The pain resides in that space. I feel it, point to it. But of course the leg is invisible. It’s not a leg. Anyone with a leg knows that. I know the pain is not in my leg because my leg is gone. No word for the space where the absence of a leg is real, the pain is real. No word for the confusion. My life forming around an absence we’ve been in the habit of calling one thing, but now it’s another without a name, but I must speak to it, of it, exist with the pain of its presence and absence speaking to me a hundred times a day, every day.
Who am I? One of you. With you in the ashes of this city we share. Or if you’re not in this city, another one like it. If not now, soon. Soon enough to make it worthwhile for you to imagine this one, where I am. Sometimes I’ve thought of myself, of you, of ourselves, as walled cities, each of us a fortress, a citadel, pinpoints of something that is the inverse of light, all of us in our profusion spread like a map of stars, each of us fixed in our place on a canvas immense beyond knowing, except that we know the immensity must be there to frame our loneliness, to separate us as far as we are separate each from each in the darkness.
(Enter Caliban, heavy, heavy dreadlocks resembling chains drag nearly to the floor. A cloak of natty wool. His natural cape, suggesting, repudiating Prospero’s dashing midnight-blue silk one with all its devices, astrological symbols, alchemists’ calligraphy, Stars, Stripes, sickle moon, comet and tail, etc. Caliban is naked under his dreads, but they cover him without hiding him, his proper, modest fur. His speech queerly accented, traces of the Bronx, Merry Ole England, rural Georgia, Jamaican calypso, West Coast krio, etc.): Wait. Wait please, breddars, before you put your hands together, man. Tis I and I mek for one last word so. This the church. This the steeple. Open sez me. Out come all de peoples. See. Like roach, man. When you light oven in morning. So, breddars, please. No clap now. Sit seats one moment more.
Think of this play this man done. Him broken my island all to pieces. White folk weeping and wailing cause all lost. Ship lost. Fader lost. Storm taken ebryting away. Walls dem all fall down fall. Son on him knee cry for Fader. Dig wet sand for trace of him fader eye. Noting. Wind howl. Thunder and lightning ring deep down in ear chamber. So moist down in dere, so long, so loud, so gone.
Do you listen? Do you hear down dere weeping and wailing? All fall down on golden sand of this island mine.
Or was mine. Once pon time. As that fancy one dere does testify. Mine by way Queen Sycorax my mother. Him say all dat and say my mother am witch. Why him play dozens now? Say island belong to him now. Say my mother dead in nother country. Why he swoop down like great god from the sky, try make everybody feel high? Take ebryting. Den ebryting give back. Go off teach at University. Write book. Host talk show. Jah self don’t know what next dis dicty gentleman do.
Ebryting restore but what him first stole. Island mine from my poor mother. Island stole from me.
Noting make self. I be her son and son of some fader. Don’t try guess who. Don’t say in de play. I no know, no want to know. Just want island back. Queen Mama back. No time be playing dozens now.
Heigh ho and fi fun
Nasty blood of Englishmun
Plow in ditch
Catch him itch
Fee fi foe fun
Bloody end of Englishmun
We all somebody’s chillren. We all Eden born. Eden bound. All claim same two fader, mother. Who am so dirty take what him don’t belong? Steal from breddar. Steal from son. Break bond. Break word.
What I say here is dis, Rasta. Make some things better you must make all better. Don’t be steal me again. Dis island mine. Been mine always. This mother-humping play can’t end no oder way.
The saddest thing about this story is that Caliban must always love his island and Prospero must always come and steal it. Nature. Each one stuck with his nature. So it ends and never ends.
Why this Cudjoe, then? This airy other floating into the shape of my story. Why am I him when I tell certain parts? Why am I hiding from myself? Is he mirror or black hole?
I cannot recall a name. The failure is frightening. Forgetting this name is like forgetting my own. I search through an alphabet of women’s names: A for Angie . . . J for Judy, Jill, etc. I feel myself regi
stering cold, lukewarm, ice as names appear on the screen. F is Felicia, Feride, Fran. A scoreboard. Lovers’ names pop up at each outpost of alphabet. Can’t write this morning on the dock, can’t do anything else but wonder what the fuck her name is. I sort through images, listen to conversations. Snap my fingers in exasperation as her nickname dissolves on the tip of my tongue.
She is a friend’s daughter. Her siblings’ names flash on and on. Tease me because they are so obvious, unforgettable, except when I can’t remember them either. If I could only stop thinking, I might think of her name.
R again. R teased me first time around. I pull back the R curtain. Reba, Rachel, Rene.
Why am I playing this game? I could walk up to the house and ask Judy the name of our friend’s daughter. Because yes, last night in Rick’s Café we were talking about the awful world adults have made for kids—the desperate measures kids have adopted to cope—in that conversation the name had popped up, maybe I’d said it myself—her name spoken as recently as last night—her complaints remembered—how her friends see themselves as flower children, listen to sixties music, recycle sixties saints, clothes and slang but they’re not hippies, she said, they’re punk with soft uniforms, selfish, narcissistic, each concerned only about himself or herself and lonely, lonely, always in packs, parading malls, streets, school halls, lonely, lonely. I hear the conversation but sit befuddled, getting crazy because I see her face but can’t recall her name. Pull out the drawer of another letter—K—it’s empty. I’m too embarrassed to ask for help. When I see her next should I admit, I’ve been thinking of you lately but you had no name?
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