She whips a message on him. It hurts him. She’s also hurt and mad as a wet hen. Sounds just like her father when she’s angry. Births him live onstage. Turnabout fair play.
Caliban snatches his hand back from her fire. Pain causes his tongue to thicken and twist. Old injuries cannot be undone. You hear them every time he opens his mouth.
Yo. Mama. How bout some dat roundeye, sweetcakes? Is it true your thang runs east to west, stead of north to south? Is it a fact the hairs grow from outside inside your tickly tunnel of love? Are you truly Goldilocks below your equator? People say that when you set your mind on something you subject to tear up anybody, anything to get what you want. Gingerbread houses and little minding-their-own-business cottages with nobody home.
Caliban’s blueprint for the future: First, gimme. Then I’ll be much obliged, he says. Flesh today. Word tomorrow is the proper order of business. Later, afterwards, we’ll rap in that postcoital snuggle and baby-babble each to each, coo-coo like pigeons, our own aboriginal, lovey-dovey tongue and that talk elaborated by generations of Calibans will grow up to be a full-fledged voting member of the United League of languages. All the talk we’ll ever need.
Other way round won’t work. I know plenty curses already. See because while you pouring all that nice poison in my ear, your daddy shipping my island piece by piece back to where it won’t do me a bit of good. You neither, quiet as it’s kept. Never met your mama. Nothing against her. For all I know she might be my mama, too. So I ain’t playing the dozens but that lying ass wanna be patriarch Prospero who claims to be your daddy and wants to be mine, he’s capable of anything. Incest, miscegenation, genocide, infanticide, suicide, all the same to him. To him it’s just a matter of staying on top, holding on to what he’s got. Power. A power jones eating away the pig knuckle he was dealt for a heart. All his fancy talk don’t change a thang. Cut him loose while you still can. C’mon, put away the Magic Slate, my dear, and drop them pantaloons, step out all that funny stuff I see when you wear them dresses the sun comes shining through.
He squints. Like a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store. Measures this child, half-asleep at her desk, for a part, a costume. Too much TV. Not enough nourishment. Rickets. Kwashiorkor. Third World diseases in this best of all principalities and powers. West Philadelphia in the year of our dark lord Prospero, 1968. Springtime. The buds bursting. Birds singing. In a language of their own. She doesn’t hear that either. Should I awaken her? Is she remediable? Can she play a part?
I’m going to make it happen.
I think it’s a great idea. Real guerrilla theater. Better than a bomb. Black kids in the park doing Shakespeare will blow people’s minds.
Miranda’s age is not given in the play. I think she’s probably a little older than you, hon. Two, maybe three years at most. Do you have an older sister? Yes? Couple years older? Yes? Then you know what Miranda’s like. Boys on her mind all the time. Thinking about boys even when she’s thinking that’s not what she’s thinking about. You’re smiling. You know what I mean, huh?
What’s your sister’s name . . . that’s a pretty name. Do you like the name Miranda? I think her name has something to do with the sea. I’ll look it up. Or maybe we’ll look it up in the dictionary together. The more you learn about Miranda the better you’ll be at playing her. She lived four hundred years ago but try and think of her being somebody you know. Shakespeare’s time was different but some things never change. Boys and girls fall in love. Right. Your sister likes boys and Miranda likes boys. Some things will be different, of course. In Shakespeare’s day, when he wrote The Tempest, girls were married very young. Much younger than is usual today. They started families at an age when we’d still consider them children.
Oh. Your sister does? Twins?
* * *
Gold smoke twists from the lake this morning. An illusion of fire. The water smolders, reflects the reddish colors of high clouds drifting in from the west. Lower, peach-tinted clouds climb, dissipating in a vault of blue sky. Half a mile away, toward the center of the lake, a bird’s flight parallels the horizon, catches light filtering through tattered layers of cloud and flickers on and off, a blazing iridescence, a white chip, a beacon flashing on off, on off as it traverses a cleared space between tranquil blue above, cloud mist and fiery water below.
Through a breach in the low-lying haze a stand of pine trees on the lake’s far bank appears snow-laden, a winter postcard in August. A door opening on the wrong season. Frieze of white-draped evergreens asleep on the opposite shore. Ghostly trees, disguised, spray-painted white out of season.
Yeah, but that’s another story, another country, it doesn’t fit here. You can’t rewrite The Tempest any damn way you please. Schoolmarms. Freedom riders. All the dead weight of their good intentions. You can’t put that on stage. How’s Caliban supposed to sass Miss Ann Miranda without him get his woolly behind stung good and proper by that evil little CIA covert operations motherfucker, Ariel? Round-the-clock surveillance, man. Prospero got that island sewed up tight as a turkey’s butt on Thanksgiving. Play got to end the way it always does. Prospero still the boss. Master of ceremonies. Spinning the wheel of fortune. Having the last laugh. Standing there thinking he’s cute telling everybody what to do next. And people can’t wait to clap their hands and say thanks.
Aw, man. That’s worse. That’s jive. How she gon steal the wand? Even if the bitch did get her hands on it, what she gon do wit it? She ain’t nothing but a wimp. Daddy got her so brainwashed first dude from the world she see she think he’s god. The girl’s ignorant, man. Stone hick. Easy pickins. Kind of chick those big-hat boys in the Port Authority waiting for when she simpers off the bus from Minnesota. What she gon do with a wand? Who’s gon believe some trumped-up story like that? You got to do better. Everybody knows The Tempest ain’t about penis envy. Laugh you out the park, man. Everybody knows can’t nobody free Caliban but his own damn self.
Hey. I’m just trying to help, good buddy. I want to see the play happen. But I agree with Timbo. It can’t be the girl. Wait. I think I see a way. Prospero. Let me be Prospero. Let him have a change of heart. Prospero realizes he’s fucked up and . . .
. . . and what? Gives the nigger forty acres, a jackass and his daughter, too?
No. Listen. I could play Prospero as an outcast, a kind of hippie saint, alienated, hiding out because the world’s too ugly. You know. A good guy at heart. Just sick and tired of the bullshit. Weary. Discouraged. So he splits to an island. Sticks his head in the sand. Then one day he wakes up. Something wakes him up.
Caliban’s foot in his ass.
No. No. Nothing violent. This shouldn’t be a western. See, it’s all inside Prospero. The good, the bad, the ugly. He can be anything. A matter of willing it. But he has to work at changing himself. Spiritual discipline. If he turns himself around, he can turn the island around. The play’s really about Prospero’s guts. Everyman. The inner drama. The war of light and darkness within our souls. The power of the artist to create, transform. Poet as savior.
You’re too fat, Charley. Too fat, too white and too old. This is a play featuring skinny black kids. Point of the whole thing is for them to master Shakespeare. To learn from putting on the play. To teach their teachers and families. Maybe teach this whole neanderthal city what kids are capable of. You’re something else, Charley. Cudjoe shares his idea with you and what do you do, you try and eat it.
* * *
For a long while I didn’t believe. Convincing other people I could pull it off was my way of keeping the idea alive. I didn’t believe a word I was saying, but if they believed, well I was encouraged to talk more. Bounce the notion off someone else. Easier than trying to convince myself, easier than lying to myself. I can look back now and admit. Yes, I was depending on an illusion. I was strengthening myself by feeding other people a lie. I marginalized myself. If all these other people believe this bullshit, this harebrained project, what’s wrong with me, why can’t I believe it? Why should I be diff
erent? I talked them into talking me into doing it. If that makes any sense. And it probably doesn’t. Or if it does, the sense is a scary kind of sense. Something not to be examined too closely. The point is then, at some point I began acting as if the play could be staged. The act became a habit. The habit brought the play closer and closer to life.
Alberto Giacometti revolted from his father Giovanni’s aesthetic convention that known reality is identical with perceived reality.
* * *
To live on an island. Captive of air and wind and sea. To be the island. Buffeted by sensuous wind, sound of trees and water, bird-song, the sun on naked skin, black nights, golden dawns, sparkle of the sea in late afternoon, a sheet of tin hammered light and flexible and spread upon the water, so thin the sea wears it like a second skin and every ripple every breath is caught and held and silvered, petrified an instant then released into the vast flat sheen stretching to the horizon.
Ah. Think of it. Your untouched island. Days and days. Ask nothing of you. Food hangs on trees, grows on bushes, sprouts from the earth. Best fresh water in the world gushes cool from an underground cavern. You can’t be lonely because you know nothing but yourself. You are like the island. To prosper you don’t need another island beside you. You are complete. Time is yesterday never ending, returning again and again. As always. Your future is each season recycling. What has been, once more.
You watch the sky crack. You see deep into the night. Lightning holds for a fraction of a second too long and you see farther into the darkness than you’ve ever seen before, another island, a city of trees and hills, teeming, terraced, dropping into the sea a thousand miles away, beyond the horizon line that till this moment has always defined the limit of your vision. You have seen your face in the water and understand that trick, understand how the hand reaching up for you as you reach down for it never cracks the pool’s surface. You must always be the one to go a little farther. Enter its medium because it will never venture into yours. How all it takes is the slightest touch, water on your skin, and the other’s gone. You wonder about the island the lightning revealed. Wonder if it will always remain far away. Would your touch destroy it if some miracle ever brought it closer?
You remember that night, that storm cracking the horizon, that new, pale island hovering an instant before black night slammed shut again, remember it all when one morning you see the wing of a great white bird loom over the edge of the world, falling, falling, but never quite touching the sea as it glides toward you.
One wing of a great white bird, standing tall like a falling tree. Is the other wing buried beneath the sloughing waves? Or is what you see a bird’s gleaming breast, puffed, serried with ranks of feathers fluttering, the whole wide shape tilted, staggering back and forth as if the drunken weight of its leaning intends to crash it down into the murmuring water? You have asked yourself a question many, many times before, unable to form it into words but now with this struggling thing whatever it is zigging and zagging toward your island, with it there so unexpectedly, bright, injured, but weaving closer, closer, bearing down on you, you realize that coming at you is also perhaps coming for you and the nagging question you never quite put into words crystallizes, flashes clear as this slash of whiteness against blue sky. The question says itself, reveals the words always there, familiar as this new thing is familiar now that it finally arrives, finally announces itself: where did I come from?
You never knew how to ask the question about your beginning until the end sighted, bearing down on you with studied nonchalance. Then a storm bursts through the needle’s eye. A tempest spins round the tall wing, cocooning it. A spitting, kicking raucous web of sound and light and rushing dark cloud. A fist closes upon the intruder and wracks it. Strangely, beyond the fiery ball of tempest and the white bird snarled and tossed in the storm’s net, the sea is calm. The elements seem detached, passive spectators of the unnatural squally presence so suddenly whipped up.
As abruptly as it dropped upon its prey, the clutter of storm swirls away. Whirling particles, a million warring pinpricks of light and darkness are sucked into a funnel cloud that instantly narrows to a point, then drains into the sky, leaving no trace of itself, no echo, the harmony of a moment before restored, except on a sandy beach in a broad horseshoe cove two hundred steps from where you stand, becalmed, ancient in your watching as the elements, a crippled something lies mangled. The dark hand that untidied the sky and sea had finished by depositing something there in the cove. And you wait, wondering if the same hand will launch it again, send it scudding over the breakers, back to open water from whence the tempest snared it. You see white. You think of bones. A carcass some beast has partially devoured and caches in the bush until its appetite rises again. You wonder for the first time if your bleached bones will be viewed by another creature. You are chilled in spite of a blazing sun. A draft created by the storm’s sudden passing is almost visible, expands in ripples as it reaches you, explores your skin inch by inch, then enters and shuffles through layers, down to the wetness inside the bones and chills that too.
Welcome. Welcome. Are you speaking aloud? Do you know how to talk? Are your words inside or outside? It matters now, for the first time, in a way you never dreamed it could.
* * *
You depend on the children’s capacity for make-believe. Ahmad will rattle a sheet of tin. Thunder and lightning. A drumroll announcing the play’s beginning, the moment when identities slip away. Spirits descend and walk about like ordinary folks. In their mammies’ laps, mammies sprawled on the lap of greasy grass bordering the stage, little kids will whoop and holler, shriek with delight. Their enthusiasm will ignite the rest of the audience. We’ll all be seized. Players. Play. Audience. Bound together by the screaming children.
Never happened, did it?
No. We were set to go. Then it rained. Two days and two nights.
Too bad.
A lot of hard work went into it. The kids were ready. I know it would have been a smash. They were very good.
Was it ever performed?
Nope. Things happened. Time ran out. I quit the teaching job. Went to grad school. Whole business just petered out. Funny. For a while there in the halls of West Philly, you could hear Elizabethan English. Snatches of Willy’s verse in the most unlikely places and times. Scared the shit out of some people. You know. Witchcraft. Possession. Outside agitators fucking with the kids’ minds. Wow. You can probably still hear lines from The Tempest wherever those kids are, whatever they’re doing.
They’re not kids anymore.
Guess not. Let me tell you, though. They were good. Iron heads. Never forgot their lines once they memorized them. Good kids.
Too bad. Too sad. It never came off, huh.
Wonder what happened to my beautiful cast.
Wonder if they wonder about you.
I’ve always felt guilty about deserting them. When I was teaching, every day I’d go home with a sad feeling, a guilty feeling, knowing I should have done so much more. And that’s what kept me coming back. It’s also what finally drove me away. Running, talking to myself. Tail between my legs.
I understand just what you’re saying. Teaching’s impossible. Trying to explain what you don’t really know yourself. Especially teaching in one of these detention-center concentration-camp rag-ass prisons we call public schools.
They change as soon as they bust out the doors. For a moment anyway, before they remember they don’t have any place to go, their faces light up. They’re real kids. Children. Free at last. All colors of the rainbow in their faces. All the better things we could be, we could do if we believed what’s in their eyes. Then the outside shit starts raining down on their heads and it’s as bad as the shit inside the school building. Off they go, half-asleep again. I couldn’t keep coming back to that. To failing every day. Little teensy, teensy successes and mountains of failure. Couldn’t take it. The play’s the best thing we did and the city pisses on us. Rains two days and nights steady.
/> So you think they’re still saying their lines.
I used to believe I’d hear the whole thing, start to finish, the way I rewrote it. That I’d stumble up on it one fine day. The kids still kids, meeting, doing the play in the park. Their secret ceremony. Their way of keeping something special alive. I wonder why I believed that.
I will write you soon again. Can you learn to hope in what seems a hopeless situation? What makes sense? What might help? Where do we go from here. I don’t feel I can tell you anything. You’ve been places I’ve never been, you’re facing threats and fears and burdens I can barely imagine. We’re different. But not separate. I don’t have any choice about that. My connection with you is not something I can think in or out of existence. I’m stuck with you as I’m stuck with myself. If I draw a line around who I am, who I can be, you are inside the circle. I have no choice. Don’t want a choice. To be who you are you must draw your own circle. Or rather as you grow, as you become, you’ll draw many circles, your sense of who you are, who you must be grows, changes. Right now you must feel trapped. By the terrible consequences of your acts, the frightening portion that seems to be your fate. But if you, if we can preserve your life, conditions, awful as they are, will change. Even if externals might seem to be the same to someone looking at you, the conditions of your life, your feelings about it will change because every day your mind must form a new picture of your circumstances. That picture changes, if only because you’ve lived through one more day of hell. The next day you’ll have a slightly different outlook because you have survived the hell, you are facing what’s next, whatever.
Philadelphia Fire Page 16
