Writing to Save a Life

by John Edgar Wideman

  I was a spy. Studied my mom’s moods, actions. Believed I could eavesdrop on her thoughts. Registered each time she squandered on one of my siblings a juicy morsel of food, a smile, a kind word which should have been saved for me, the eldest son. Worse, much worse when she lavished a special attention on my father. My favorite moment of any day—him leaving. Door slammed shut behind him. Going out, his phrase to cover any destination—work, Henderson’s Barbershop to play a number, crosstown to drink with his cronies. Ten minutes, ten hours, a whole day or night—whatever. Going out. My mother knew better than to ask what out meant. Knew better than to rile him by asking where or how long. She seldom risked challenging his silence because she might find out more than she was able to handle if his mood happened to be brutal honesty.

  Selfish. Just like him. When she addressed those words to me, my mother acknowledged the vulnerable place inside herself where my father reigned absolutely. Unopposed, unopposable, my view back then, because he didn’t care. To have her or lose her—neither mattered to him. He didn’t give a good goddamn push come to shove, about her or anyone else. Didn’t care. Wore his not caring like armor. No one, nothing could touch him. Change him. What my mother shouted at me one day wasn’t news to her or me. Both of us had understood for a long while that I possessed the power to hurt her. Listening closer then and now I hear more disappointment than anger or scorn in my mother’s voice. Just like him. Too late for me to refuse the legacy bequeathed father to son. His meager and overwhelming gift. The chilling distance I feared in him. Distance that isolated, exiled me. Empowered me to hurt those who love me.

  The day my mother accused me of being Just like him, I understood him to be my father. Half a century or so later, him not so easy to pin down. I paid only superficial attention back then to the Him my mother addressed as her Heavenly Father. Knew nothing yet about Louis Till or his doomed son my age, Emmett. My mother had not heard the name Till either. Nevertheless, she grew up a kind of sister to Mamie Till, accommodated herself to the same unnerving fact that Mamie Tills of the world confront. A disturbingly simple fact: every time a him, a colored male person they love, man or boy, leaves and the door shuts behind him, door to a dwelling in which they are attempting to make something of their lives together, there’s a good chance that he, him, that colored male person, won’t return. Not when she expects anyway. Or needs him most. Maybe not ever. Once he leaves the space they are struggling to secure for their mutual benefit, for the benefit maybe of their children, once he’s beyond the door and out in a world which does not love him, there are no guarantees. Except shit will cross his path. Deep shit that won’t make it easy or simple for a colored him to come back clean, in one piece. A miracle if for years he’s able to go out and come back regularly from a steady job and still be more or less alive. No miracles operate to return him unchanged. Changed far too often for the worse by a world that refuses to welcome him. Or worse. Very much worse. A world acknowledging his presence only as chaos. Denying his name, his dignity. To stay alive he becomes very, very selfish. Very silent. As if nothing can touch him or hurt him or ever will.

  Hardness and selfishness a means of survival once he steps out the door. Out. The survival rule for women like my mother and Mamie Till is they must adjust. They must change, too, or be destroyed. Fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, lovers, if they survive, return changed. A wife or mother learns to be grateful if her him doesn’t disappear altogether or die in spirit before he’s dead. Often the man or boy who returns is a silent stranger, hard and selfish, little or no resemblance to the special one she had hoped for, prayed for, bargained for, dreamed of when she offered him some or all her love. Love no doubt she should have known better than to risk, given all the terrible stories, sermons, songs, gossip, hearts broken, women with features frozen into masks of bitterness or emptiness or just plain pitiful looking. And often she does know better, but gives, despite knowing better, some or all her love.

  My mother shared with Mrs. Till certain unyielding truths about their men, about him, father son husband, holy ghost. Truths my mother feared in me. Truths leading to this admonition: no point moaning and begging, weeping and wailing when he, when your him says he’s going out the door and you’re afraid maybe he never will return and you start carrying on like you don’t have good sense—stop your foolishness. Where else is he supposed to go if not out. If he believes he’s a man, he’s going out. And do what he has to do to survive. Do his dirt. His selfish things. Going, going, gone. Leaving you alone inside four walls. Alone with your unrequited or doomed or vanished or imaginary or lost or punished love. Alone to chew on your fingernails, chew on your love. Unless you change, too.

  * * *

  Not nice. My mother said the night she caught me looking. I’m still ashamed she had to say the words aloud to me—not nice. I knew better. Deep down inside myself I knew better and had worked diligently to teach myself to look away from my mother if the close quarters of the small apartment into which she was crammed with a husband and five kids exposed her half-dressed or naked body to my gaze. From the moment I understood I was a boy, her son, a male, and she was a female, a woman as well as my mother, I treated her body as a site of certain privacies I could not and should not share. I understood my eyes could trespass and hurt her. Make her sad. Sadden myself because looking put something I couldn’t cope with in my hands, in my mind. Mixed up my mother’s body and mine. My shame and privacy mixed up with hers. Far too much for a boy to deal with. So I just didn’t look. Looked away. From a certain age on, I knew better, always averted my eyes. Feeling each time a warm flush of warning that strangely came after instead of before the look I avoided.

  I believed I had tamed my curiosity about what I shouldn’t see. Until once. Then there I was. On my knees in the dark hallway outside the downstairs bathroom we shared with the Lemingtons. Drawn by the quiet of the absent Lemingtons away visiting relatives in Georgia. Drawn by familiar noises, louder in the end of day stillness. Water running, my mother’s body sloshing in the tub, faucets on and off, a roar in the pipes, then creaking until silence returns after each blast of water. Drawn to the steps by a pinprick of light on the landing below, I tipped down. Dropped to one knee in the dark hallway to see the bright world on the other side of the door. Not to spy on my mother. To spy on a woman’s naked body, courtesy of my mother, if I knelt and peered through the keyhole.

  A confusion of shapes and colors appeared and before I could make conclusive sense of anything—of what was only inches away, moving inside the bathroom—my mother’s voice came from the other side of the door, that’s not a nice thing to do. Then a washcloth or towel draped over the end of a doorknob killed the light that peeked through the keyhole. An unfortunate once, and neither my mother nor I ever spoke about it all the years after. One of our secrets. Her words through the door said perhaps everything that needed to be said. Her words and silence that followed. What could I possibly say in response. Her words branded me forever the instant I heard them. Red letters across my guilty forehead. Selfish. Just like him. I’m sorry. So sorry. I’ll never do the not nice thing again. Unspoken words a boy, a man, a him might have said aloud to stop the burning but didn’t. I’m sorry. Forgive me, please.

  * * *

  I got lucky with weather during my stay in Brittany. Even on the one morning when rain apparently imminent and I decided that to avoid getting soaked, I better jog not walk my usual route. Somewhere near the run’s midpoint, I revved up my pace. Glory surge toward an imaginary halfway finished line until heat in my chest and lead in my legs forced me to slow down. No bargaining. End of discussion. Click. Lights out.

  I dropped to the sand, flat on my back, legs splayed. Above me faint slashes of blue here and there but the sky was still overcast—vast expanses of dull, featureless gray, a few rippled banks of clouds the dirty color of old snow piled on city streets. Good burn in my thighs and also a warning they need a rest if I expect them to repeat the distance they’d just humped
. I pulled off the red bandanna knotted do-rag style round my head, wrung it dry as I could, and wiped salty streaks from my sunglasses, mopped sweat from my face.

  Nothing much to see in the deserted cove except sky and sea, presences too large to miss, clean glasses or not. The gray weight of sky. Gray roar of water. At the cove’s far bend white eruptions of foam exploded above giant black boulders. Was the tide receding or creeping back, millimeter by millimeter, to cover flat stretches of sand studded with rocks it had uncovered earlier. If I returned to this spot in an hour, would it be submerged. Water always moving, one tide subdued and subduing the next, but my eyes were unable to detect the tide’s direction. Wind beating into my face becomes visible as I watch gulls soar, dive, glide, skim the shallows for prey, white wing tips blinking in the grayness of sky and sea.

  About a hundred yards away in one of the miniature pools formed within clumps of rocks along the shore, a tall white bird high-steps, long legs thin as threads, beak a needle. It appears more intent on elegance than fishing as it struts slow motion, pin head bobbing atop elastic stem of neck. The bird’s awkward medley of parts plays a kind of syncopated rhythm, repeating the same routine to execute each short stride—weight balanced on one stick leg while the other leg lifted slowly, cautiously, breaking at an invisible knee, the two parts of it hinged at a right angle, a long foot dangling, suspended above the shallow pool, then slowly replanted until the leg ramrod straight again in the sea, waiting for the other leg to organize the next lazy, mini step. Meanwhile, the spear of beak darts into the pool every now and then, an off-time beat punctuating the nonchalant stroll. For whom was this bird on double-jointed stilts performing. Fastidious, careful locomotion, more saunter, more ghetto bop than wading in water. Is it concerned about the state of its feet. Raising them for inspection, making sure long toes and hooked talons are not sullied with mud.

  When it flutters up, out of water into air, up a stuttering rise, a matter of stages that slow time again like its high-stepping strut through water. The bird hovers until its wings, four, maybe five feet tip to tip, catch sufficient wind under them, then it veers sharply out to sea. In full flight it becomes a black silhouette circling higher and higher. Swift, imperial, on its breast a swastika emblazoned in a crimson crest, a bundle of lightning bolts in one claw. Louis Till gripped in the other.

  A Nazi war eagle in Brittany’s gray sky. But Nazis didn’t hang Louis Till, did they. Till had more to fear from his own army than from Hitler’s legions. Nazi Germany did not invent war or race or genocide. Many wars waged before and after World War II. Wars being waged today whose purpose is to eliminate entire so-called races of people. Us. My people. Done to us. Done to others. Done by us. Done to each other. I was drifting.

  Drifting. Hiding. Going nowhere. Somewhere beside an ocean I’d flown across just days before. Nicely exhausted, nicely sprawled on the sand a few days after finding Louis Till’s grave. Daydreaming evil birds. Soon I would revisit Plot E or not. Return to the States, and still nowhere. Still adrift. No closer, no clearer. Closer to what. Clearer about what.

  The sky was still threatening, but no rain yet. I decided to walk not jog back to the cottage Antoine’s grandfather had purchased. I think I would have welcomed a drenching rain as I returned along the wooded coastline broken by small and large inlets, estuaries, coves, bays, channels the tide fills and empties predictably so during certain hours you can swim in brisk salt water, other times of day the same stretch a sea of mud. If I had not reversed direction after my stop, in an hour or so I would have reached Vannes, the Gulf of Morbihan’s center of commerce and tourism whose prosperous citizens had once commissioned stained glass church windows from artists like Antoine’s grandfather, the grandfather from whom he inherited the secrets of pâte de verre, a technique for coloring and molding glass. Vannes, where in 1731 the great-great-grandfathers of today’s citizens had pooled money to outfit a ship, the Diligent, for a voyage from Vannes to ports in West Africa where slaves could be purchased cheaply then sold in Martinique for enormous profit.

  * * *

  In Paris Antoine had shown me slides of his new work on exhibit in Nice. Transparent cubes, globes, chunks of glass with all sorts of unpredictable things displayed inside—antique coins, pressed flowers, perfect miniaturized replicas of frogs, lizards, snakes, seams of color, Latin and Greek inscriptions, a cluster of grapes—things which seemed to both swim and be frozen, trapped and liberated within glass walls. I’d always been intrigued by my friend’s work, its roots in ancient Egypt, necromancy, alchemy, and family tradition. The best of the new pieces continued an investigation of time, his whispered conversation with time I could eavesdrop upon. Time engaged. Time a medium both intimate and distant. A medium transparent and opaque as glass. All life sealed in glass and glass itself sealed within a sheath of uncertainties that allow it to assume forms as various as fire, water, air, earth. Glass complicit with time yet not quite able to alter or evade it. Lives encased in glass doomed to repeat and suffer history. Bearing witness again and again to time’s unchangeable grip.

  * * *

  In the shuffle of Paris slides one in particular had caught my attention. An ebony-tinted block about twenty by twenty-four inches, five inches deep, containing thousands of tiny bubbles like breath bubbles or stars trapped in the implausible vastness of its interior, a galaxy of stars along with one immense bubble, a bone white, see-through sphere filling nearly a third of the sculpture’s actual volume. A dark, purplish spill spreads down the sphere. Letters from a foreign alphabet are visible in neat black rows through the purple cloud. The letters glow mysteriously and though they seem solid, substantial, they also crackle or dance or shiver bearing the weight of many, many indecipherable messages. The piece unsettled me like those darkly uncertain shapes of roadkill when I walk or jog.

  Roadkill is always my first reaction when I notice some unrecognizable dark form lying up ahead alongside my path. Something randomly, violently emptied of life, I think, though obviously I’m not sure what it is, nor sure how or when or even if death struck it, or what kind of death, and not exactly sure I want to know either.

  Dead how long. A grisly, lumpish body part or remains of an entire creature. I won’t know until I get closer and sometimes uncertain even when I reach whatever it is lying there and halfway inspect it or halfway ignore it or a little bit of both usually while I pass. Often, I will keep guessing, wondering after the shape’s long gone behind me. Alive once. Dead once. Alive again as I had glimpsed it up ahead. Now dead again. Alive or dead perhaps not separate. Not either/or. A matter of time. Of now you see it, now you don’t.

  * * *

  In an essay started the second night in the cottage, I had attempted to figure out at last, at last, what it was about those shapes beside the road that compelled me to look and look away, look at them and through them. Why do they seem like windows and mirrors. What connects them to ideas about mortality and time embodied in Antoine’s pâte de verre sculptures. I didn’t get very far with the essay. The dark shapes ambushed and eluded me as they did when I encountered them on a road. Words I squeezed out in the cottage could not express how the dark shapes beckoned sometimes like a yawning grave. I blamed the essay’s failure that night on too much head, not enough heart, on thinking instead of feeling my way into a subject. Then next day, the overcast day of running and walking along the Gulf of Morbihan, I blamed heart. Heart too full of things I wasn’t prepared to deal with, including ungenerous envy of any art’s success while my Louis Till project falters. Heart stymied. Head unable to craft words that did more than register confusion, report uneasiness and sadness. Head. Heart. Dark somethings alive and dead along a highway. No explanations. Heart. Head. Failure can’t be explained. No more than Louis Till’s birth or his son, Emmett’s death. Or a sculpture, a novel, a painting, a song. Equally mysterious and banal. Mortal. We try and fail. To fail is to fail is to fail.

  * * *

  The Till project has stalled. I’m a
drift. Probably on purpose. Probably conscious flight. Running. Hiding. As if I can close the distance between whatever it is I possess and what I’ve lost. Running. Hiding. South to collect villains and family stories. France to find a grave, jellyfish, a dead uncle’s shoes, talking stones, glass sculptures. Nowhere to put it all, no way to connect, bind together scattered bits and pieces. To render them lifelike, usable, or even better, free them from darkness that surrounds and consumes. Free the power of those gleanings, details, remains. Fragments shored against ruin as a poet friend of the imprisoned poet called them. Do words have power to create more life. To reach back far enough or forward enough and help me enter Louis Till’s silence. Mine. Words on these pages. My file, my story. These words I chase to represent a life. Who will open the file. Read the words. What will they make of me, us, after I’m silenced, like you, Louis Till.

  * * *

  On that gray day, I needed to let words go, but could not. Figured the next best thing might be to pretend I could. I decided—as I decide far too often when I feel control slipping away—to deny heart, head. Shut them down. Concentrate on walking, the simple physical effort of following one footstep with another. Summoned all the good music I knew to play and play and play while I made my way back to the cottage.