My welcoming into Brenda’s family was different, though not necessarily better.
She has four half siblings, all born to her father and his first wife. When their marriage failed, she left him with two of the children, an uncommon occurrence in a culture where child rearing was strictly the mother’s domain. Perhaps Brenda’s mother found his role as struggling single father endearing, or maybe she’d been taken in by his charm, grace, and soft-spoken manner. And then there were his good looks, a Sidney Poitier in his prime. Whatever the appeal, it must have been quite the shock to her when, two months after they’d met, just a few days after their wedding, he beat her.
Almost immediately she began plotting her escape back to the States, except that she had no money, and she wasn’t sure where she would go. She too had been born in a poor white community just a short drive from Erica’s, and her family had disowned her when she wrote to say that the man she’d married was not only black but one of the originals, an African, the lowest form of human existence, in her family’s view, on Planet Earth. It was this kind of small-mindedness that had suffocated her since her earliest memories and made her yearn to live in a distant land, a place whose quaint, exotic culture would help her forget the sinful flaws of her own. After college, she taught elementary school for a few years before departing for Africa, settling into life as an educator and expatriate in a rural Zambian village, relieved to be free of her intolerant family, of American racism, of the belief that blacks and whites could not live together in peace and harmony, only to find herself being assaulted by her black husband and, three months after their marriage, expecting his child.
Brenda was born in 1969. She was eight weeks premature, weighed just four pounds, and was not expected to live. Doctors kept her in the hospital for a month, trying to regulate her body temperature with the best medical technology available—an insulated cardboard box and an eighty-watt lightbulb. By some miracle she survived, and by another miracle Brenda’s mother managed to secretly stash away a little money each month, so that in three years’ time she had enough to fly herself and her daughter to the States. But here the miracles ceased; on the eve of her departure, her husband found the passport she’d gotten, which included Brenda’s name. The beating he gave her might have been fatal had he not decided that she could go after all, because that way he could go too. And of course, they would take his eleven- and twelve-year-old children, Judy and Robert. It would be Robert who, two decades later, would call me frequently in my Iowa City hippie commune, sometimes well after midnight, and tell me he was going to kick my ass.
“Why?” I asked him the first time.
“You know why.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“You know.”
This was the spring of 1992, around March or April. Brenda and I had been dating for almost a year. She still lived in Chicago, but not for much longer; she had been accepted into the master’s program in art history at the University of Iowa. Robert had not been happy when he learned she would be leaving town, but not unhappy enough to harass me. That started when she told him we would be cohabitating.
“You and me,” he continued, “we need to sit down and talk.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m looking forward to it. Brenda has told me a lot about you.”
“Did she tell you I can bench-press three hundred pounds?”
“No, she neglected to mention that.”
“How about squats? Did she mention the size of my quads? They’re mammoth.”
I suddenly realized he was drunk. Brenda confirmed with me the next day that he did have trouble in that regard. She insisted too that he was harmless, a typical overprotective big brother who, once I got to know him, would become my close friend. But we were off to a bad start. And his nighttime calls continued for several months. By the eighth or ninth call, my inner thug had been awakened.
“Actually,” I responded to him one night, “I’m going to kick your ass.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah!”
We met for the first time that summer. There was no ass-kicking, no bestiality movies, just a man-to-man drive through the winding streets of Elk Grove Village during which he spoke of how much he loved his baby sister. I assured him I loved her too. “I’ll treat her well,” I told him.
“If you don’t,” he said, “expect a thorough ass-kicking.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah!”
I let it go. He parked the car and hugged me.
Judy and I hit it off right from the start, too well, in fact, for her husband Craig’s taste. He was white, tall, thin, muscular, blond, and blue-eyed, a recipe for self-confidence that was undermined by his lack of education, wit, personality, or patience for a wife who liked to flirt and wear skirts that proved mammoth thighs ran in the family. She and I had a tremendous amount of fun when we were together, and after Brenda graduated from UIC and moved to Iowa City, Judy would often call just to speak to me. Whenever we visited her, Judy and I would plant ourselves on the couch and laugh and joke for long periods while Craig fumed nearby. One day he decided enough was enough. I don’t know exactly what he told her, but an hour after we left her house and stopped by her mother’s condominium, Judy called, asked to speak with me, and yelled into the receiver, “How dare you insult Craig like that, you … you … you common street nigger!”
“That was odd,” I said, after hanging up the phone and sitting back at the table, where Brenda, her mother, and I were having dinner.
Brenda looked up from her plate. “What was odd?”
“Judy. She called me a common street nigger.”
A bit of food sprayed from Brenda’s mouth, landing on my sleeve. “What?”
“Just now.”
“Why?”
“Not sure. Something about my having insulted Craig.”
We both faced her mother. She was quietly humming a song while slicing a piece of meat from a chicken leg.
“Mom,” Brenda began, “aren’t you going to do something?”
She looked up. “What do you want me to do?”
“Well, call Judy back and tell her that’s unacceptable! Make her apologize!”
“Why should I?” she asked, now facing me. “We’re all entitled to our opinions.”
It was not the response I wanted, but it was the kind of response I’d come to expect. Her opinion of men in general was low, thanks to her husband, from whom she was separated, and her opinion of me was even lower, thanks to my delinquent past. I hadn’t mentioned this past to her; to the contrary, I presented myself in the most positive light I could muster, going so far as to abandon my hippie clothes, shave my sideburns and goatee, and remove one of my two earrings. During the first year after we’d met, I’d mailed her silly Hallmark cards for her birthday and all the major holidays, and I went out of my way to compliment her cooking and her hair. She’d responded to these friendly overtures with indifference. Finally, as Brenda and I approached our second year of being together, I made a last-ditch effort to win her affection by showing her some of my writing. Perhaps, my reasoning went, she’d see a glimmer of talent and conclude that I wasn’t a total loser.
“What’s this?” she asked when I handed her a short story.
We were in the living room of Brenda’s and my Iowa City apartment, where her mother had come to visit for a few days. She had just unpacked her things and was relaxing on the couch. I sat next to her. “Oh, just a little something I wrote,” I said. “I’m thinking of submitting it to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop next month with my application.”
“Should I read it?” she asked.
“If you don’t mind.”
She smiled. “I don’t mind at all,” she said, drawing the manuscript closer to her face. Brenda came into the room with a bowl of popcorn and sat in a chair across from us. She turned on the TV, and she and I wa
tched the evening news until I saw her mother lower my story to her lap.
“So,” I asked, “what did you think?”
“I think,” she said, “that you are a criminal, and that you should be ashamed of yourself for the awful things you’ve done.”
I shot a look at Brenda and then back at her mother. “That wasn’t me in the story,” I said. “It’s fiction.”
She snickered. “It’s you.”
“Mom,” Brenda interjected. “It’s fiction. Just because Jerald wrote it doesn’t mean it’s about him.”
“Except,” she said, “that it obviously is.”
“It’s not me,” I insisted. “It’s about a fictitious character named Bobby Jenkins. I made him up.”
“Of course you did,” she said.
I recall being extremely upset by this exchange, not solely because she had drawn conclusions about me based on my story, but because she had tapped into my growing fear that no matter how educated I became, no matter how sober, or how law-abiding and clean-shaven, people would always see me not as the person I’d become, but rather as the person I used to be—the embodiment of the stereotypical black thug that pervades the American psyche. But the thing about it was that sometimes, when my self-esteem was low, I still saw myself that way too. And maybe, in some ways, that wasn’t such a bad thing. Because being a thug meant I possessed a certain toughness, a kind of fuck you attitude that allowed me to laugh when offered a can of nuts as black toes, or to brush it off when called a common street nigger, or to not want the love and acceptance of my girlfriend’s mother. “You know what,” I’d begun after she refused to chastise Judy, but I held my tongue. Her opinion of me, I told myself, simply didn’t matter.
But it did. And I realized just how much a week later, after Brenda and I had returned to Iowa City. I’d finished classes for the day and was on my way to see the graduate dean, James Jakobsen, whom I’d gotten to know well over the years because of his work with minority students. As soon as I walked into his office, he said, “Hey, I was just talking about you.”
“Really?” I sat in the chair in front of his desk. “What’s up?” I asked, digging in my backpack for my turkey sandwich.
“The Writers’ Workshop just called,” he said. “They’re looking for funding for you.”
“Funding? For what?”
“Don’t you get it?” he said, grinning. He rose and joined me on the other side of the desk. “You’ve been accepted into the program. One of only twenty-three, I think, out of about eight hundred applicants this year.” He extended his hand for a shake. “Boy, that’s something, Jerald. That’s really something.”
The next few seconds are lost to me forever. All I remember is running at full sprint across the campus, heading toward the union, where Brenda and some of her fellow art history students often had lunch. It was a little before noon, and when I burst through the doors of the cafeteria, it was so crowded that, if she was there, I doubted I’d ever find her. I moved in and out of the bodies and tables like a mouse in a maze, and as I was about to give up I heard Brenda call my name. I turned to my left and saw her; she was standing near a table in the far corner of the room, waving me over. I began working my way through the throng of bodies, nearly knocking a few down, already yelling my news so that many people in the room knew of my good fortune long before Brenda and I embraced. For the next several seconds, we just stood there holding each other, both of us crying, Brenda pulling back at some point to say how proud she was of me, and I, for a fleeting instant, longed to hear those words from her mother.
THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK
The white boys had no game but the refs were on their side. That’s because the refs were white, too. So were the hundreds of people in the stands. So was probably every person in this exclusive Chicago suburb that had castles as houses and parks for lawns. By the second quarter it was clear that we would lose, ending our shot at being regional champions. That this was happening in our church league would have made matters worse, except for the fact that by then I knew God was white as well. So rather than getting angry like our coaches and frustrated like my teammates, I relaxed on the bench next to Jimmy, both of us casually sipping from our water bottles, which we’d filled with gin and juice.
When halftime finally arrived, we were down by two dozen points, which wasn’t bad, considering the extent of our opposition. The two teams filed into separate locker rooms. As soon as we had gathered around our coach, one of the boys said, “The referees are cheating.”
“And that short kid,” someone else said, “called me a nigger.”
“Me too!” another boy added.
And then a fourth boy looked at our coach and asked, “Why are they doing this? I mean, aren’t these things, you know, sins?”
“They’re doing this,” the coach snapped, “because these are some racist honkies.”
I gagged, sending gin and juice all over my pristine jersey. I stared at our coach, shocked, and yet relieved that he was calling it like it was. I wanted to hear him say it again. “What did you say?” I asked.
But he wouldn’t repeat it. Instead he paced in front of us, lost in thought with his finger over his lips, as if to shush himself. He paused next to me and exhaled a stream of air that smelled like the pipe he smoked. I took another sip of my drink.
“Young men,” he began, his voice low and measured, “it’s time you learned that even God’s chosen ones are not entirely without sin. We are all flawed in the eyes of the Lord—some of us more so than others. We know that what is happening is sinful. We know that these actions are wrong. Therefore, it is our responsibility,” he continued, and I got the sense he was trying to convince himself of what he was about to say, “it is our obligation to pray for the souls of these white folk, for they know not what they do.” He bowed his head and led us in prayer. When he finished, he told us to take a few minutes to contemplate what he’d said, and then he left, the two assistant coaches on his heels.
Michael, our center, broke the silence. “What the coach just said,” he began, “was some A-1 bullshit.” Jimmy and I liked Michael. His family had joined the church only six months earlier, and he was decidedly not receptive to its teachings. He had gin and juice in his water bottle too. “These white folks know what the hell they’re doing all right. That’s why they’re doing it! And I don’t know about you all, but the next time one of these honkies gets the ball near me, I’m letting him have it!” To emphasize have it, Michael kicked one of the lockers, causing the flimsy wire to give way and his foot to disappear inside. He threw his hands over his mouth and mumbled, “Oh, shit,” and then, as he removed his foot, his eyes grew large. He bent over, reached inside the locker, and pulled out a brand-new pair of leather Converse All Stars. We all watched quietly as he sat on a bench and took off his shoes—which, like the rest of ours, were canvas and spotted with small holes. He slipped on the left All Star, and then the right. After he’d tied the strings he rose and walked a few feet away, lowered himself into a deep knee bend, and then sprang himself high in the air. He turned to face us as he looked toward the heavens. “Forgive me, Lord,” he said, “for I know not what I do either.”
The rest of us started kicking in lockers.
WORKSHOPPED
When I was in my early twenties and making my first crude attempts at writing fiction, I’d sit at my word processor and pound out stories brimming with blacks who understood only anger and pain. My settings were always ghettos, because that was what I knew, and the plots centered on hardship and suffering, because I knew that, too. And I also knew this: White society was responsible for the existence of this miserable world, and it was my duty as a black artist to make this clear. Three of these stories were what had gained me acceptance into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It was there that my awakening occurred.
My first course was with Frank Conroy, the program’s director. He was brutally honest and harbored a militant obsession with clarity. Most of the two-hour classes w
ere spent with him shredding the stories and our egos. We squirmed in our seats and wiped our brows as he did his infamous line-by-line, zeroing in on words and phrases that confused the work’s meaning or failed to make unequivocal sense. It was the most intense and best writing class that I’d ever had. I went into the second semester confident that my prose had improved and that the most difficult course was behind me.
Randomly, I decided to take a workshop with James Alan McPherson. During the break before classes resumed, I read for the first time his books Hue and Cry and Elbow Room. The impact his writing had on me was profound. He, too, chronicled the lives of African Americans, and he had done it in short-story form, at the time my genre of choice; this was the model I’d been searching for. I read the stories over and over again, convinced that I had found my literary father.
The contrast between Conroy and McPherson could not have been more stark. Conroy was tall, white, and boisterous; McPherson was short, black, and shy. Conroy cursed, yelled, laughed, and joked; McPherson rarely spoke at all, and when he did his voice was so quiet you often couldn’t hear him. The students dominated his workshops. I was disappointed. McPherson was a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all, the first African American to receive that honor for fiction. He was the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant and countless other awards. I wanted his wisdom. I wanted his insight. He gave it midsemester, when it was time to workshop my first story.
“Before we begin today,” he said, “I’d like to make a few comments.” This was new; he’d never prefaced a story before. A smile crept on my face as I allowed myself to imagine him praising me for my depiction of a den of heroin addicts, for this was not easy to do, requiring, among other things, an intimate knowledge of heroin addicts and a certain flair for profanity.
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