* * *
The last morning in Brittany is hazy, a paleness which would steep to bright blue before noon. One final, long, leisurely walk felt like a good idea. No reason to hurry. No one waiting in the cottage for me to return. No last-minute chores. No place I needed to be until four when a taxi to the train station in Vannes was due. Then on to Paris, New York, home, my wife. A whole wide world out there, unchanged, imperturbable, unresolved whether I return or not. Return to a Till project or not. Louis Till’s file no conundrum. It contained a simple story. Unresolved. Unchanged. Imperturbable.
* * *
During my walk that day I recalled something I’d never told a soul. A memory which had never formed itself into words. Not even words I’d said only inside my head. A secret once, once and only once, lost and buried as it happened. Silent as the silence surrounding it. Memory of the boy I had been when he found himself alone with Clement.
Inside the memory I was afraid. Past tears. Past hollering for help. Stranded alone with Clement while Clement finished his workday in Henderson’s. Seeking a hiding place in what might or might not be a dream, I crouched in a shadowed corner of the barbershop. No doubt in my mind danger was real. Holding my breath, heart pounding, I hoped against hope Clement wouldn’t catch me spying on him. I hid from him as I’d hide years later from a photo in Jet magazine of a colored boy’s disfigured face, one eye swollen shut, the other eye missing. A dead, blind boy and no way to escape his awful, silent stare.
Clement peers into the mirror in Henderson’s where I’d been watching him, and he is not the spooky Clement of my nightmares. He’s a small, shy man. Our eyes meet. His finger taps his pursed lips, Shhhh. Then soundlessly his mouth forms the shape of his name, Clement. And Clement does not shatter quiet. Does not betray me.
* * *
In France beside his dishonored grave I had not spoken to Louis Till about Clement, about my father or mother, nor Latreesha, nor Promiseland. Nor about the statuette of Saint Martin de Porres, patron saint of the poor, the humble, of lost causes according to the elderly woman who took a shine to me and gave me a small wooden figurine as a farewell present in Chicago fifty-some years ago. Thomasina Hawks was her name, Tomahawk her street name, a fierce veteran of Chicago’s deadly war on Black Panthers in the sixties. She was as full of stories as Clement was full of clamoring silences. Tommie gave me a talisman to keep me safe during my life’s journey, she said.
* * *
I didn’t tell Louis Till that for me it’s always winter in Chicago. Windy city. Swirling snow and bitter, bitter cold. Unless it’s a day warmed by Tommie’s gift or September 1955, and I’m standing in the Twelfth Street Station, not too far from Mamie Till, waiting for the Emmett Till train. I didn’t admit to Louis Till I’d lost the statuette of Saint Martin. Forgotten it for years until on the plane to France, leafing through an account of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca empire in Peru, I came across Figure 10, a photo of a contemporary votive card sold in front of Lima churches. San Martin in the hospital infirmary with his trademark broom and one of his many miracles.
Saint Martin de Porres, the book would inform me, renowned for piety, modesty, the all-forgiving leniency, mercy of his gaze, had spent most of his life as a lay brother, a nurse and domestic servant inside a Dominican monastery in Lima. He grew up in the turbulent sixteenth century, a period during which the Catholic Church was busy importing African slaves, slaughtering, converting, pacifying, enslaving Indians and mestizos, mixed people of color, like the Tills, me. Like Martin de Porres, illegitimate son of a Spanish knight and a Panamanian slave, his mother’s African darkness effaced from the painted figurine Thomasina Hawks presented to me, but evident in the portrait of Porres as Saint Martin decorating the votive card. Same saint. My pale, lost wooden statuette and the colored San Martin pictured on the card in the book, broom in hand, his face a dark disk framed by a halo and at his feet the humble miracle of mouse, dog, cat, eating from one dish. Over his long-sleeved, snow-white alb he wears a flowing black cassock, gold cross on a chain draped from neck to knees. A white dove hovers at Saint Martin’s right, and on his left, the sick with tiny crosses above their beds lie in an infirmary behind him.
* * *
In Plot E, since I had not yet discovered the fact, I couldn’t tell Louis Till that in Brittany as I read further in Todorov’s chronicle of Europe’s ruthless subjugation of the Americas, I shook my head in good, old-fashioned wonder, startled, but also strangely unsurprised when I learned the father of Martin de Porres had apprenticed him to the trade of cutting hair and bloodletting and one of the boy’s regular chores was to sweep the barbershop floor.
* * *
When I visit Louis Till again, I will try to find words to let him know Clement rescued me once, a secret once, from a boy’s terror. Let him hear how I heard Clement, the silence of the name Clement echoing in the legend of a colored boy/man in Peru who swept day after day a barbershop floor, a monastery’s stone paths. I must find ways to address Louis Till in the manner Louis Till speaks to me. Not only with words. Words are insufficient, much too late for only words. I must respect Till’s absence. His silence. I must begin with doubled silences, absences. His. My own. Lost words, unspoken words. His. Mine. Begin with wishful thinking. With a language that exposes my naked hunger, the raw desire of my eyes to see, listen, speak, learn.
I will invent ways, Louis Till, to tell you Tommie Hawks bestowed a gift upon a young man, a gift she hoped would protect, guide, and light the long life she wished for him. Light that was hidden from you by a hood executioners dropped over your head, Louis Till. Extinguished in the photo of your murdered son Emmett’s crushed dead face. Light I lose, forget, remember, dream. Found and lost, found again, lost again. Found in a stranger’s eyes. In sad eyes, laughing eyes. It’s always a great surprise and no surprise at all. Light I recall from my last day in Brittany, while I walked and listened deeper, longer to loneliness and darkness inside myself. Light in the watchful eyes of my people, living and dead just yesterday, and many, many years before. Luminous eyes I searched in the colored face of Saint Martin de Porres on a votive card reproduced in a book. The book I opened on a flight to find your grave in France.
* * *
Listen up, Saint Louis. I see you got one bubble eye half-open listening over there. Don’t be falling asleep on us, man. Night’s young. A lil corner left in the jug even though you bout drowned yourself trying to empty the motherfucker. Wake up, nigger. Don’t start calling them hogs, boy. Loud as you snore it’s a wonder you don’t wake up your own damned self. Listen up, Till. You gonna like this story, my man. Read it in a book and Ima be nice and tell it to you cause everybody know you too ignorant to read shit your own self. Call it Fable of the Bees and the Bear in the book but I ain’t telling it all. Just the part I know you’ll like, Till, cause it’s about these bees crazy as you. Kamikaze bees like them Jap Kamikaze planes they say tearing up Uncle Sam’s navy over in the Pacific. What happens at the end of the story, see, is Brer Bear come fucking with a beehive looking for honey and all the bees gets riled up. Every damn mama bee, daddy bee, and every little jitterbug bee jump Brer Bear’s burly ass. And while Brer Bear be swatting and growling and swinging his big self around every which a way inside a cloud of pissed-off bumblebees, some the wildest, meanest bees, them crazy Kamikaze motherfuckers, dives down the bear’s big mouth. Bear hollering and biting and snapping, slapping hisself upside his own jaws, steady smashing bees, but the Kamikazes don’t give a fuck. They dives straight down, deep down inside Brer Bear’s soft, pink parts—sting his throat and stomach and liver and lungs. Insides stinging like fire drive that big ole bear crazy with pain. Bear start to roll round on the ground, choking, throwing up whole weeks of dinner, spitting big globs of bee and honey till he wobble back up on all fours and hauls ass, gone like a turkey through the corn. Wish he ain’t never heard of bees nor honey. Wish he ain’t never been born. Ain’t much beehive left behind. But you know how busy bees is. In n
o time they got that hive up and buzzing again.
Strange thing is, all them chewed-up gobs of bee and honey and food and blood the bear throwed up. Not all the Kamikaze bees dead in there. A few crawls out the mess. Maybe they a little sticky and beat to shit, but a couple few alive. Alive and just as wild, mean and crazy as ever. Brer Bear come back, they gone bust his big chops wide open again.
Damn. You snoring already, Till. Bet you smiling over there. Knew you’d like them Kamikaze bees, Till.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JEAN-CHRISTIAN BOURCART
John Edgar Wideman’s books include Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots, and Sent for You Yesterday, among others. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. He divides his time between New York and France.
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First Scribner hardcover edition November 2016
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016015604
ISBN 978-1-5011-4728-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-4730-2 (ebook)
In this work, which is an amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, I have changed the names of some of the people and places that appear and in a few instances have created composite individuals.
Writing to Save a Life Page 17
