Writing to Save a Life

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  The one they call Saint—what the fuck else they spozed to call a negro named Louis who comes from Missouri—stumbles from the crowd of other sweaty colored men, wobbly, dizzy on his feet, a windup woogie just about danced itself to death. He wobbles out the mess out there where no room to dance, it’s war out there, people bump and grab and knock. People hold on to people’s arms to get past, to get through. You nod, and they nod and grapple, cling, wrestle. You hang on and rub and get smacked apart, flung together. Some garlic breath bitch all up in your face you rub her big behind, hold on till some nigger call hisself dancing snatch her fling her, she gone. Hair short as a man’s and shoulders broad as a man and big farm girl hand can squeeze hard as you can squeeze and you push a knee, a thigh into her meat. Rub, touch Miss Ann soft hair. Rub a leg up in there and she grinds she bounces away another fool got her, and gone.

  Saint. Over here, Saint. Over there’s the table, McMurray, Kitchen, Junior Thomas, Hite. Glass of beer in each of Till’s hands, quick hands don’t shake, break you up. Here he come sipping both glasses, Till ain’t carrying no beer for none those fools at the table, Till fight you try to take one of his half-full, half-empty glasses. Here he come bumping to the table, nerve to call hisself dancing, halfway falls, a fucking war out there man fiky-fiky work bitch fuck you through your clothes right out there under that red light in the ceiling. Work bitch, work. Hey man how you doing, man, hey blood, hey splib, hey spook, hey home watch the fuck where you’re going nigger yeah man you my man kick your ass, fool, cool breeze, be spades, be coons, be your brother man, hey, hey, man watch the fuck out the way, man, that’s my man, Saint. Say hey, all the way, it’s the 177 of the 379, shit yeah. Say hey, Saint. Gotta be okay.

  * * *

  Louis Till finishes both glasses of beer before he reaches the table. Eyes big as saucers, eyeballs rolling round like he’s checking to make sure the room’s where it was before he blinked. He’s coming up for air, born again, remembering instantly the presence of ancient enemies. There’s beer down the front of his khaki blouse. Beer in his fists slopping out so he can’t bob and weave and duck, can’t counterpunch, hook, clinch. No footwork, no feint, slip, jook. You run, skip, hop-hop-hop for hours, days, months in the gym to go a quick minute in the ring. Why you go through all that dumb shit, man—why you waste your time, man. Look like some big old wobbly bear on a bicycle stumbling over here from the bar. You crazy, Till. Sit your behind down, boy. Before you fall down. Nobody gone pick your big black ass up off the floor if you fall, boy. Sit your drunk self down, Saint, before you fall down, Saint.

  * * *

  He didn’t live long enough to hear Otis Redding sing “Dock of the Bay” and Otis didn’t live very long either, but since Louis Till knows there, you could say he goes there, sits on a dock at the edge of the bay, stares at the sea he hears more clearly than sees. It’s night, no stars. Now and then a flash way, way out, the sudden white sheen of a wave’s marcelled crown etched a second before it crashes into another wave, black wave after wave invisible if no shine blinks here and there, blinks like somebody searching, combing the black sea with a flashlight beam.

  He’s on the dock of a bay and listens to far-off waves explode like big guns and smaller, closer waves lap and suck the sea, it’s very near indeed, sloshes inside his belly, though sea also distant as the Casablanca moon hidden by clouds tonight after a whole day of white sky and white heat and humping ammo boxes with McMurray, Thomas and Hite. Sky black now but he recalls sun on his back, and remembers a pinkish, freckle-faced boy in New Madrid, orphan like him, nigger like him, name gone, but round, pale face comes back clear as a bell, the pigeon-face boy with a sliver of eyeglass in his speckled pink hand, showed him how you burn holes in newspaper. Glass makes fire like a match, a tiny white circle hotter and hotter, then a curl of smoke and the paper burns. Burns like Till’s dark skin in Italy’s white niggerish heat.

  Till wished he had eyes in the back of his head. He could watch his self catch fire. Would a twist of smoke rise, like from that bug his quick hand snatched and pulled off the wings. Then they cooked it, wriggly legs wriggle faster, faster. Black bug on its back going nowhere.

  No eyes back there. No sun. No moon. Silent black sky, noisy black sea. On the dock of the bay he hears Otis. Hears wood creak. Wooden posts in the water hold up one end of the dock where he sits. Legs dangle, heels touch nothing when he swings them. Lets the thought come into his mind of the whole damn dock a chair one of them fools snatches out from under him and his crew laughs at the look on ole Till’s face. Saint Till from dry-ass Missouri drops into the sea and he don’t know a lick about swimming. Till would laugh too, if he had time before he drowns. Pretty funny if he thought about it. Dumb arms and legs trying to learn to fly, learn to swim, before he hits the water. Funny even if it’s him, his turn.

  Everybody laughing. McMurray got the biggest mouth. Laughs loudest. Damned greedy-ass McMurray on the dock behind him tonight. McMurray got lucky. Heads you lose, tails I win, Till. Talked that silly old shit but he got lucky, goes first. Big mouth McMurray back there in those boxes, getting him some trim. All up in them Miss Ann drawers. McMurray got lucky goes first. You called tails, Till. You lose, Till. What else he spozed to call. It’s about tail, right. Tails wrong. Wrong, you wrong, Till. Wrong. Heads. My turn first. And Ima wear that trim out. Shut up, nigger, and hurry up, nigger, we ain’t got all night. Hurry up, McMurray, you ain’t nothing, just got lucky, nigger. Hurry up. Over and out, nigger. I ain’t sitting here waiting on no goddamn dock of the bay the whole damn night. One more minute, I’m coming back there snatch you off it, nigger. My Johnson tired of listening to you. You ain’t nothing no way, nigger. Just lucky. Just get up off it. You know you ain’t doing nothing.

  POET

  * * *

  Private Louis Till, incarcerated in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army (MTOUSA) Disciplinary Training Center, Metato, Italy, must have wondered what kind of motherfucker so bad they weld steel bars to his cell. Old skinny white motherfucker army gon hang, they say. Poet, they say. Dry as a dried up rattlesnake skin. In a cage with extra bars they say cause he badder than a nigger, they say. Till thinks, No-no. Huh-uh, No damn way. Rolls his eyes, sucks his teeth, hisses Shee-it at nobody in particular, shakes his head no and says shee-it again under his breath. No goddamn way. These motherfuckers nuts round here.

  * * *

  A traitor they call him. Poet Ezra Pound convicted by his own treasonous words. Betrayed his country on the radio. Friend of the enemy. Off with his poet’s head. Confined until trial in what he dubbed my gorilla cage, in duplicate letters, one posted to his sweetheart wife, one to his mistress. Witnesses agree Pound suffered. Alone night and day in a bare, outdoor, steel-barred, steel-mesh-reinforced, roofless cell. Some say it broke him, say he drooled, barked, chased his tail. Many observers believed and continue to believe the poet deserved worse. Deserved more punishment than wind, sand, sun that cured his skin the parchment color of pages of Provençal ballads and lays he had read in a Florence library. Hang the poet because he never learns. Continues to accuse. Blame. Excoriate. Deny. Complain like Sibyl singing in her cage.

  * * *

  One moonless night not long before they transferred him from a colored barracks to a locked death row isolation cell, two cells away from the poet Pound’s cell, Private Till risks a beating or a bullet from guards who shoot to kill after curfew. Other colored prisoners know he sneaks out. You crazy, Till, somebody says. Till, falsetto, mocks him. You crazy, Till. Till grins at the others. Can’t nobody hurt me. Dead man already.

  Till knows he’s lying through his teeth. A beating worse than a bullet to the brain. Hurts so bad he wants to cry like a baby. After the guards finish, blood, sweat and pus stick him to his cot. Hurts to breathe. Cuts sting like a swarm of angry bees. He sneaks out anyway every chance he gets. Breaks rules because if a prisoner doesn’t break the rules, rules break your heart, my brother, my son, all
the colored prisoners I know and have read about assure me.

  Black sky drops like a hood over Till’s whole body first step away from the barracks. Lights are strung on the fence like it’s Christmas, but they can’t change the darkness. Creep, creep. He pretends he’s a spook nobody can see. Nobody wants to see. His feet know the invisible camp. Creep, creeps. Charmed, he believes under the dark, heavy hammer of sky. Nothing to lose, dead already, just one life and they took it, can’t steal it again. A ghost already with a ghost wife, ghost son, ghost home in a ghost city, Chicago. But one night a voice calls out, Till. Saint Louis Till. Stopped in his tracks, he shivers. Hot as it was that particular night. Frozen absolutely still. Not a sound, not a breath. He’s dead. Why another ghost fucking with him. Don’t make no goddamn sense. Crazy fucking camp got me nuts, he thinks. Remembers the skinny, old white man. Death-row cages like shark teeth out there in the dark. Over there. Can’t see shit, but sure enough a voice from over there. Till. Old white man with your name in his evil mouth. How the fuck he know your goddamn name, Till.

  * * *

  Doc. Do you think you could arrange for me to speak with one of my fellow guests. Private Louis Till. A nigger the niggers call Saint Louis. We might have been neighbors once. Back in Missouri. We’re neighbors again here, so to speak. I’d love to chat with that particular colored boy before I’m transferred. A meeting with Private Till before the army hangs one or both of us.

  * * *

  Pater Dear and Mater Dear, the poet wrote his parents . . . 4 conditions necessary for a nation to produce an epic. Unfortunately, in our sweet land of liberty, none of the 4 exist. (1) a beautiful tradition (2) unity in the outline of that tradition, (3) a hero, mythical or historical (4) a damn long time for the story to lose all its garish detail and get encrusted with beautiful lies.

  In spite of all the above, your humble son is trying his hand at epic. A modern epic must be a prose poem, I reckon. Mine will consist of three sections. The first will introduce a character who endures the meanest of lives. A nigger or slave, maybe. Part two will chronicle his miraculous transformation. Aided by pluck, luck and the gods’ insatiable appetite for a good joke, the protagonist will achieve undreamed of success. From a life of no meaning wrest meaning. The third section will demonstrate the folly of meaning, the folly of abandoning irresponsibility. We will observe our hero (darky?) yearn unto death to taste again the sweet chaos of nothingness he’s forsaken.

  * * *

  In his cell the poet listens to colored prisoners talk. Colored prisoners who speak a different language. Theirs is almost like his. His almost like theirs. He pilfers. Collects. Savors. Mimics. Envies their speech. His poet’s fancy delighted, instructed by colored exchanges, colored words, colored names. Colored soldiers whose actual names are colors—Black. Green. Niggers bearing stolen names of white presidents—Washington. Jefferson. Wilson. They call Louis Till, Saint. In the poet’s cantos Till is called a ram. He lends Till a greek god’s name. Tags Till with a Chinese pictograph signifying negation, -no, not.

  * * *

  A poem by a colored poet, Robert Hayden, remembers names of slave ships—Desire, Estrella, Amistad, Esperanza—names he calls bright, ironical . . . jests of kindness.

  The dark ships move, the dark ships move, Hayden wrote. Colored people like him cargo aboard those dark ships, dark cargo branded with new names. Old names lost. Silenced. Like Till’s. Like mine. Old names forgotten before we discovered how to speak them.

  Voyage through death to life upon these shores. Death, life, darkness, light too ancient to be owned by human beings of any color.

  How many meanings and jests are imprisoned in Till, the traitorous poet Pound may have wondered as he unpacked meanings and jests in his own. Till (noun) a box for money. Till (verb) to prepare earth for seeds. Till (adverb/preposition?) a measure of time. How much time. Whose time. What is the weight of a pound of flesh. How much time left for Till, for him, the poet, fellow prisoner in the Metato, Italy, D.T.C. Till tried, convicted, doomed now to solitary confinement until he’s hanged by the neck and dead. Until he’s not Till. Till his time up. No time. Not a man. Why does the poet brand Till with all these names. Mark him Otic, ancient greek for no one, nobody. A name Ulysses named himself to fool the blind Cyclops.

  * * *

  Goodbye for now, my love. I miss you terribly, the poet writes to his wife and to his mistress. Pity your poor old Xerxes in his pointy cap and pointy beard, his magnificent armada wrecked by storms before it could conquer the Greeks. Yesterday the world’s most powerful monarch. Today hiding in his tent, weeping.

  * * *

  Louis Till likes the idea of a fast, clean knockout. Finish off a guy. Get it over slick and quick. Blam. Hands not stinging not bleeding or busted up when you unwrap the tape. Sing that little song nobody hears you sing but you. Little tune inside your head when you finish something just the way you spozed to finish and it’s done, finished, clean. Uh-huh. Shee-it.

  * * *

  He could sit like a dog or cat sit and watch all day all night the way that water come up and go back down the beach like water’s one thing and wants to be another thing like maybe water wants to be land and water keeps coming up to land, climbs all over land but water ain’t land it’s water and land just sits there being land don’t move a inch it’s land like before water come up and still land after water go away and water still water no matter how many times it creep up on land all that water out there still water why it come back again to land when it just gon touch land and go back again to water long as you sit here and watch.

  PITTSBURGH

  * * *

  Towards the end of the summer of 1955 I saw in Jet magazine a scary photo of a dead boy almost exactly my age, a dead colored boy murdered in Money, Mississippi, whose mutilated face looked like a black bug somebody had squashed under his thumb. I fell in love and had my heart broken the first time that same summer, but the big news on our end of Copeland Street, where a few raggedy houses held a few poor colored families living just down the block from Walnut Street’s upscale shops, was neither my aching heart nor the far-off Mississippi murder of Emmett Till who we whispered about like it was our fault, a shameful, dirty secret. The big news that summer was a showroom-fresh, three-tone green Mercury docked alien as a spaceship at the curb on our end of the block.

  Like everybody else colored on the street I couldn’t get enough of the spit-shined, fighter-jet sleek car. Its owner, Big Jim the gambler, who people said paid cash he won on a single roll of the dice for his new car, had given us another thing to talk about earlier in the summer. He started to appear, Brooklyn Dodgers cap on his head, baseball bat in hand at an early morning hour when nobody expected to see night owl Big Jim up and about on the street. Then all summer he bragged about how he caught a trolley car and went downtown every morning. Bragged that he planted his huge behind on a chair just inside the door of the Duquesne Light Company office. Scowling, bat across his knee, not saying a word till finally some office chump scared or tired or both of seeing him sitting there each morning asked what he wanted, sir, and in no uncertain terms, he told the person Lights, dammit, and Duquesne Light turned his lights back on that they’d turned off for lack of payment.

  * * *

  With a Big Jim scowl in his voice my father hollers from the kitchen: Get your tail in here, boy. Why didn’t you come in the house when your mother called you last night.

  Wasn’t late, Daddy. Not hardly past ten o’clock.

  Didn’t ask you what the damn time was. Don’t care what hour of night or day, when your mother tells you do something, you know you better do it. And quick.

  She called me out the window. I wasn’t nowhere, Daddy. Just sitting downstairs right across the street in Big Jim’s car where Mom could see me if she looked.

  Since when you grown enough to be sitting around at night in anybody’s car.

  Wasn’t going nowhere, Daddy.

  Then what you two doing in the damned c
ar.

  Nothing.

  What he say to you.

  Nothing, Daddy.

  Well, I’ll be talking to Mr. Big Jim soon’s I get home from work tomorrow. Meanwhile, you’re grounded. Don’t set your foot out the door without asking your mother. And if she says yes, don’t you even think about going anywhere near that lard-ass yellow man or his shit green car.

  * * *

  Three-tone green. Three colors were a fad that summer. All kinds of brand-new shiny rides in crazy color combinations dazzled the streets. Though for years most of us at the tail end of Copeland would continue to watch TV in black and white on small screens, picture snowy, flip-flopping, in 1955 we could peer through a Walnut Street appliance store window at a World Series tinted in wobbly colors on a twenty-one-inch Magnavox console.

  Color’s the future. Emmett Till’s black and white photo in Jet the past, an old story of old-timey, terrible shit white men did to black boys down south. Changes coming fast but some things don’t change. A long time after that summer of ’55 and I’m still trying to make precise sense of my deep fear, my father’s deep anger, my own deep anger, my father’s deep fear, strutting peacock cars, fathers and sons afraid of each other. War and hate and terror and love.

  * * *

  On Copeland Street, Latreesha’s pretty face arrived two months before the crushed face of Louis Till’s son greeted me in Jet magazine. Same summer I see the photo of Emmett Till’s dark face with all the boy, all the human being battered out of it, I’d fall in love the first time. Make love, so to speak, for the first time. With Latreesha. Sweet, sweet, impossibly pretty-faced, smooth-limbed, Latreesha. My first time in love and I’m gloriously loved back and then she’s lost in a minute after I thought she would be mine forever. Latreesha’s gone, never comes back, never another summer visit from New York City, never cuddles again with me on my grandmother’s sofa. Only that once. One chance, Latreesha. We pass on the street, lovemaking not two weeks old, and she looks away, or worse, ignores me, grins like a Chessy cat at a guy who strolls beside her, arm round her shoulders, her eyes smiling up at him like he’s the only person on planet earth. Latreesha long gone before she catches a Greyhound at the end of August back to New York City. Cruises past all summer in some dude or another’s shiny ride, smiling, going places a fourteen-year-old chump with no wheels, no driver’s license could take her. July and August she might as well be in Harlem where she came from before she arrived to stay the summer in my grandmother’s house where Latreesha’s father boarded on the first floor. He worked double shifts on his good job in the steel mill and Latreesha didn’t know anybody else in town her age so I got my chance. She’s my first love on the downstairs sofa bed in my grandmother’s house while her daddy worked and Grandma snored like gangbusters upstairs.