Searching for clues I resurrect another scene. Remember myself here. In this very chair on the dock. Two years ago. Her family is visiting. Her father and mother, my wife, myself, all on the dock. She’s swimming. She parts the water. (I look at it now. The space unoccupied, undisturbed, unparted.) She parts the water slim and white as a candle. A little girl. Shy. Yet her body knows for sure it’s on its way to being a young woman and she’s ready and anxious to share that knowledge. Still a little girl’s body so she can swim without a top in her underwear while the adults sit like blind judges on the dock. Skinny-dip when her mother throws her a bar of soap and yells, Clean up. As she pulls off her underpants she turns her back to us, natural modesty—also coquettish—reminding us of what’s coming—the thrill, danger, complication and possibility of a woman’s body soon—even though she’s safe now, just a skinny breastless unfleeced kid, flashing in the water as she bounces and surface-dives, cavorting, flirting, telling us to look, look, look what I can do, naked and past blushing, apologizing. She cracks the surface and smiles, enjoying what she is, enjoying being watched, secure, teetering on an edge.
In shallow water she flips backward, does a handstand with her head submerged, her spraddled legs kicking in the air, her sex displayed seamed and taut as a fist. A child on her way to being a woman. What she soon will be clairvoyant in her body’s promise. I hear her mother yell, Come in now, Becky. The nickname. So easy. The name I couldn’t squeeze out, no matter how hard I tried.
Was I compromised by the sexuality of that moment. Seeing Becky as female / woman though she was just a child. One I am bound to protect as a daughter. Is that what was at stake in my forgetting? Must I first own up to a moment of confusion, ambiguity, not just about Rebecca, but her sisters, my daughter, their friends, that flood of young womanly flesh ebbing and flowing around me as I grow older? Am I still trying to find the proper place to file my reactions? Is there still a live wire? A name won’t come because it carries baggage that’s compromising. A little shame. A sense of cheating. Of being more and less to her than I wish to admit to myself. Did I have to ask the right questions in order to free the name? Free myself. Open, Sesame, the magic formula must be relexified precisely. Memory speaking only if addressed in a language it understands. Smell of madeleines. Bite of apple.
Dear Mr. Wideman. On the Move!
I am writing to you because I read an article in a magazine and it featured a story or a piece on you.
In this article the writer gave a brief history of your work and named some of the books you have written including your best-known memoir: Brothers and Keepers.
I understand from the article that you are currently at work on a book of short stories and a novel about a group based on Move and this is where my concern comes in; not because it is a novel based around my Family only. But because there have been many distortions said about the Move org. that was and still are being printed about us that need to be cleared up. I say this to say, I wish that you would get in touch with some of my Family members here in Phila. and I’m sure you will be well informed and given some clear information as to what we are about and some profound wisdom from the teaching of John Africa, our founder and source of energy, strength. John Africa is very much alive. Long live John Africa!—There are plenty events, confrontations that we have had with the city of Phila. for the last fifteen years and they need to be told by us. (At least we could enlighten you as to the truth about Move as opposed to the perpetual lies and distortions by the mass media and this government and its deceptive mind-molding agencies of treacherously laced propaganda!)
I am presently in jail in upstate Pennsylvania along with ten of my brothers and sisters who was framed for the killing of a Phila. cop in August of 1978. We are serving 30–100-yr. sentences. Enclosed will be a letter that was written recently by the Move org. that will be attached to a zeroxed copy of City Paper with a article on the Move indictments e.g. Wilson Goode and his blatant murderers of my family on May 13th ’85.
I hope this letter reaches you.
Here it was then. The thing he would do with them, the thing. The play. Prove. Ten- and eleven-year-old black kids. Shakespeare.
He would cast about. Cast himself a caste. A cast in his net. Catch of the day. Fresh. Castanet.
He sees them in their seats. Counts. Semicircle on chewed little short-legged chairs gathered round him. Eye of the round. Their teacher. He reads whose speech? Teaches whose voice? Let it be Prospero. The father in his moony sunglasses. The good tyrant, protector of his island children. The one willing to lose everything to prove a point. In control to the last. Then he gives away the store. Maybe. His daughter gallops off into the sunset. Brave new world. Goody-bye. Goody-bye. The women sing for her. And moan. Spread a meal for her on a patch of earth they’ve swept till it shines. She’ll come and get it when they’re gone. When she’s ready. If they’ve fixed it correctly. And, brother, you know they’ve done it up right. You can tell by the angle of their lean backs as they leave the clearing and are silhouetted an instant in moonlight when they reach the verge of the forest. For a moment they are a city. Frozen skyline that breaks into the narrow-hipped switching of a pack of hunting dogs, every body part they own quivering with the excitement of the chase as they two-step into the woods. Good, broad-beamed sisters who move when they’re happy like teenage girls, the tired old flesh then surely nothing but disguise, something they can leave behind like dishes of food on the bare disk of ground to summon a spirit. Buildings. Wolves. Lost in enveloping darkness once beyond the shaft of moonlight that shows off branches like lace, like intricate highways of bone, like an X ray of some dead god’s brain.
He’ll read Prospero to his ducklings and they’ll cue up behind him, all in a cute line, a dragon’s tail, kite tail, string of letters on a page. A word for what they must do, Imprint. It means they choose one to follow and mirror its behavior. They learn that way what it is to be duck or goose or whatever. Imitation. Sneaking through the looking glass so you are on both sides at once. Looking in and looking out and it seems you know perfectly well how you should act, who you are, what you should say, until you catch the worm of doubt in the other’s glance and then you are the other, or not the other, or both or neither and it doesn’t really matter does it, who’s zooming who, who you imprinted or the shadow imprinting you, who or whom, the bird in the water or bird skimming just above the reflected reversed image of its flight on the still lake. It’s all a game. Imprinting never more than skin deep. You walk on water. Learn to shed a whole skin daily. Gimme some, and you smack back, Ahmad’s brown, cockeyed, half-pint grin teasing out yours. If you’re lucky you grow new skins faster than you wear out the old ones. Luck of the draw. Baby goose waddling behind a water buffalo. Trying to keep up. Snorting and tossing imaginary horns on a huge wedge of head that grows beneath its shoulders.
Luck of the draw. His charges fidget in their seats. Waiting for him to speak. To perform. Will he be the one? The role model as they say these days. Orphans. Dead at an early age. No ducks or geese or sheep in their neighborhoods to follow. To be like. His tabula rasas. If that’s the plural. What fucking kind of role model him? An English teacher who don’t even know how to form Latin plurals. Little learning. But he possesses the advantage of color. They can’t help noticing that, can they? His net. His emperor’s clothes. He’ll be their drum major and nobody’s perfect anyway. Nobody scores 100 on the test except the guy who made it. Made it. Made it. And nobody can be like him. Only him. Like him. Because he made it. Test scores prove the point. Only so much room at the top. What good would a test be that doesn’t prove what anybody with good sense knows already to be true. A bell curve. Rings true. For whom? Is it tolling? Bell. Period ends.
He’ll do. Do he. He can hear their flat, webbed baby feet paddling behind him. Perfect V’s of their wakes gouged into the water’s thin skin. That heals instantly. Heedless. Headless. He leads them along the rocky shore, astride the still water. They are on it and in i
t. Perfect doubles of themselves. I love you he quacks back over his plumy shoulder. They have long curly lashes like Daisy, Donald’s love. They sleep behind those butterfly lashes. And dream. Eyes full of dust in the morning. Clotted by sleep. Curtained. Some eyes crust over because they are diseased. A word he can’t recall. Eye rot is what? Gum rot is gingivitis. He remembers lurid illustrations on a dentist-office chart. He’d better get started while these kids still own some moving parts. Before their vital parts silently rust away. Mad people cogwheel their limbs like Frankenstein’s monster, fluid motion broken into lurching tics. While he’s watching and waiting his kids rot away in their seats. Gingybread girls and boys. Little motors idling. Waiting for a prince to come. Or princess. Someone to teach them to be other than what they are. Lost behind snotty, dingy curtains.
Ah hem. Ahhh. Hem. Amen, this morning, children. Say amen.
Amen, Mr. Cudjoe.
Amen, boys and girls. Today’s lesson is this immortal play about colonialism, imperialism, recidivism, the royal fucking over of weak by strong, colored by white, many by few, or, if you will, the birth of the nation’s blues seen through the fish-eye lens of a fee fi foe englishmon. A mister Conrad. Earl the Pearl Shakespeare, you see. The play’s all about Eve and Adam and this paradizzical Gillespie Calypso Island where the fruit grows next to the trees but you’re not supposed to touch, see. Point is, long before Fanon or Garvey or Marley or any of that, before the spring storm in Memphis that ate the foliage and opened a line of sight from the window of a motel up on a hill down to the balcony of the divine Lorraine, long before a bullet booked down that long lonesome highway and ended the life of a man who’d just enjoyed a plate of fried fish (the dish still sits in the room and the dish was what broke my heart, summoned him back from wherever he was, to stand full of life and smile and not know it was his last supper, ummmm, this fish is good, man. Some good fish. Here, have some, brother Malcolm, brother Chaney, brother Goodman, and here, Addie Mae, honey, you cute little angel you, taste a piece and take some for your lovely sister too, you surely look beautiful today, my children. Help yourself, Medgar. Go on, man. It’s good fish.), long before various events, each of which is a story in and of itself worth learning, studying, black brown red yellow female histories like special platters you can choose off a menu, long before a Third World when there was only One and it was cakewalking, expanding by leaps and bounds, big fish swallowing little fishes and little ducklings, in Bermuda, near the fabulous, infamous, mystical Triangle, your Godfather Caliban was hatched. And it was a playwright, a Kilroy Willy who tabulated the plot. Who saw the whole long-suffering thing in embryo, rotten in the egg, inscribed like talking book on the tabula-rasa walls of the future. Sentient. Prescient. Yes, Willy was now. Peeped the hole card. Scoped the whole ugly mess about to happen at that day and time which brings us to here, to today. To this very moment in our contemporary world. To the inadequacy of your background, your culture. Its inability, like the inability of a dead sea, to cast up on the beach appropriate role models, creatures whose lives you might imitate.
So let’s pretend.
You Ahmad, scratching your ear. I think you’d make a good . . .
He casts about in his mind for good matches. Dry ones. Symmetry, synchronicity. Matches. To light his one little candle. Start his fiery storm of protest. In this void. This dry wilderness of the United Emirates of North America.
The lingo is English landwich. Quack of the baddest, biggest Quacker. King’s English. Pure as his tribe. We’ve heard it before, leaking from a circle of covered wagons, a laager squatting on the veld, a slave fort impacted on the edge of a continent, its shadow athwart the deep blue sea, a suburban subdivision covenanted to a lighter shade of pale. You’ve also heard it on TV, if nowhere else, boys and girls, the slang of getting and spending. Howdy Doody. Buffalo Bob. Claribel. Walter Klondike. Mister Rogers. Mr. Jellybeans and Mr. Green Jeans. Cork-faced minstrels use it. Black mammies and midgets and clowns. Your own hip babble comes back at you like a yo-yo or boomerang in their smiles, on their tongues. But this Shakespeare not what you’d call everyday paddy-boy speech. Not your common garden-variety blank prose. It’s a verse of another color clime and time, the days of old when sailors were bold and beknighted for such exploits as scalping aborigines or laying a cloak over a puddle so my lady’s dainty toes saved from the miring clay. This was back when everybody lived on islands and English sounded like the geechie talk you hear today round Charlestown or in Frenchtown, places nice to visit, but like the streets where you live, not exactly desirable full-time residences, not quite up to snuff. But the lingo, mi buckos, my sweet oreos, the talk they talked, Queen’s English to be more exact, was down, especially in the pen of this one, the master blaster, bad swan from Avon, number-one voice and people’s choice, scratcher and mixer and sweet jam fixer, ripsnorter and exhorter, cool as a refrigerator prestidigitator, have no fear, Mr. Auctioneer is here super pitchman mean as a bitch man, pull my goat and milk my goat ding-dong pussy-in-the-well wheeler-dealer and faith healer, record changer dog-in-a-manger platter-pushing poppa of the rewrite righteous doo-wopping, skin-popping, hip-hopping got all the ladies’ drawers dropping camel-hair benny ain’t giving away any but got it all wrapped up tight, tighter than a whore’s pussy on Christmas cause she ain’t giving away nothing to nobody not today nor yesterday, not to her mama nor yours nor the seven dwarfs nor Bambi nor you my tragic lil indins all in a row, in a line, circled like covered wagons on the Laramie Plains while hostiles swirl around you, howling at the moon, faster and faster, tigers churning you to cocoa butter my lost Sambo children.
But be that as it may. I’m here this morning to tell another story. Listen up. May sound strange at first but it’s hip. Got its own hippy-hop cadence and blue notes, same blue been used since the middle ages to designate a state of mind (thank you, Al Murray) among white people when they don’t feel quite white. Right. But a blue closer to you. A shade you can turn more naturally than red. So don’t be embarrassed. It’s your history too in the word. A bit out of sorts, out of breath from running day and night. Blue. As in melancholia. As in blue spirits or the black dog when things ain’t the way they spozed to be or how they used to be. See. Now we getting down to origins. Think on Adam and Eve (whose color are they) squatted in the ferns, missing the good ole days, how things used to be, and they ain’t been in the garden five minutes, ain’t never been nowhere else in time or space and here they sit commiserating about what’s been lost, how things used to be, before the fall, and they still unfallen, naked of memory and means to picture past or future. And these pure children, your original mom and pop, got a nostalgia jones plaguing them. Yearning for dusty disks, golden oldies they ain’t never heard before, which ain’t even been cut yet, ain’t no Motown, Vee Jay, no Atlantic, no Apollo but here they sit inventing stuff to be miserable about when there wasn’t nothing but just the two of them, looking into each other’s moony eyes, all their equipment checked out and A-OK and primed and that’s what they seen but didn’t know what to do with it so they started crying. And been blue since.
Well, with this kind of history, black white red and blue, you can imagine the devilish fun Mr. Willy had putting words in people’s mouths.
He started from scratch. But said it was the itch come first. And folks still trying to figure that one out. So he’s off and running. Seventy-five thousand years on Broadway. Great Emancipator, motongator with his bag full of bones and stones and feathers and ugly pills and hallucinogens right on down to our present-day most advanced uses of hoodoo, voodoo, couches and the entire cornucopia of modern dramacology. He did it all with one stroke of the pen. Set this nigger free. Your number-one great great great greater than god grandfather Caliban.
And thereby hangs a tale. Willy said that, too. And one of my jobs as model and teacher is to unteach you, help you separate the good from the bad from the ugly. Specifically, in this case, to remove de tail. Derail de tale. Disembarrass, disabuse, disburden—demonstrat
e conclusively that Mr. Caliban’s behind is clean and unencumbered, good as anybody else’s. That the tail was a tale. Nothing more or less than an ill-intentioned big fat lie. And that when all is said and done, sound and fury separated with Euclidean niceness, with Derridian diddley-bop from the mess that signifies nothing, what you discover is the one with the tail was old mean landlord Mr. prosperous Prospero who wielded without thought of God or man the merry ole cat-o’-ninetails unmercifully whupping on your behind and still would be performing his convincing imitation of Simon Legree, of the beast this very moment, in this very classroom, cutting up, cutting down, laying on the stripes, if it weren’t for me, girls and boys. Your big boppa, name droppa, cool poppa, daddio of the radio.
Say Amen.
Amen.
Say Free at last.
Free at last.
But don’t go yet. Don’t clap your hands. Stay awhile and help me mount this authentically revised version of Willy’s con. We been in the storm too long, chillun. We gon crank up the volume, crank up the volume, to a mighty tempest and blow the blues away.
And blow (I got to whisper now so lean them nappy heads, that sooty breath, those crusty eyes, lean it closer so I can whisper into the conch shell limbo swirling down down your earry canals, into the untouched back channels of your brains). And blow away whole regiments of any honky mothafuckers gits in our way.
* * *
This is the central event. I assure you. I repeat. Whatever my assurance is worth. Being the fabulator. This is the central event, this production of The Tempest staged by Cudjoe in the late late 1960s, outdoors, in a park in West Philly. Though it comes here, wandering like a Flying Dutchman in and out of the narrative, many places at once, The Tempest sits dead center, the storm in the eye of the storm, figure within a figure, play within play, it is the bounty and hub of all else written about the fire, though it comes here, where it is, nearer the end than the beginning. Think of a gift to the community where he’s been teaching four years. These black children going nowhere are tapped early and instead of oozing off the comers of the map—oil spill, sludge, dregs, tar babies—the geyser of their talent and potential explodes here in the park, an ebony tower taller than Billy Penn’s hat spouting to the stars. Their achievement cannot be ignored. Suddenly, as they stand above the footlights, drawn to stage edge by our applause, our hooting told-you-so and knew-it-all-the-time pride and reflected glory, as they stand in cruel daylight because after all there is no electricity in the park, we did it alfresco, on a platform of sawhorses crossed by planks anchored by railroad ties and a turret braced by diagonals so from the back the skeleton of the tower resembles a gallows, as they stand triumphant and revealed for what they really are, our kids discard flimsy bits of homemade costumes, fling masks, superfluous ornaments into the threshing crowd, our children’s, your children’s, my life, your lives are vindicated. The play was the thing. To catch a conscience. To prick pride and dignity and say, Hey, we’re alive over here. That was Shakespeare youall just saw performed. And we did it. Blank verse and fustian, shawns and bombards, the King’s English. Tripping lightly off their tongues. So look upon these heros. Don’t ever forget them. They wave madly. Want your approval. About to implode. Shedding another skin for us. Flaying us. Our children. And their children after. But never the same again.
Philadelphia Fire Page 14
