Street Shadows

by Jerald Walker

  SIMPLICITY

  In 1992 I’d proposed to Brenda with a ring purchased with a student loan. We toyed with the idea of having a wedding with all the bells and whistles, but racking up thousands of dollars of debt in the process wasn’t an option, because that rack was already full. Besides, we felt there was great romance in simplicity. And so on May 11, 1995, with a justice of the peace and with two friends as witnesses, we stood in our backyard and took our vows in front of a garden of blooming tulips. For the occasion, I’d bought a new suit with money borrowed from my parents. Brenda wore the gown we’d purchased four years earlier at Neiman Marcus.

  Later that spring, our trip to Zimbabwe had served as a honeymoon, as we would not have been able to afford one otherwise. In 1996 we returned to Zimbabwe to conduct more research, and this time we stayed for nearly a year, three weeks of which were spent touring South Africa on, unofficially, honeymoon number two. But once we returned to Iowa City in the summer of 1997, we settled back into the lives of the have-nots, barely scraping by on the university’s money. Brenda received a small stipend to write her dissertation and serve as a teaching assistant, and I received an even smaller stipend for taking classes toward a doctoral degree that I had no intention of earning, since I had no desire to teach. My only desire was to defer repaying my student loans indefinitely, and to avoid gainful employment even longer. So I’d decided to continue studying black literature and culture with James Alan McPherson until Brenda graduated and became a wealthy college professor. Meanwhile, we’d continue to live on generic-brand foods. We’d continue to shop at Goodwill. In winter we’d continue to wear layers of clothing inside our house and scrape ice off our windows to look outside. And we would continue struggling to pay our mortgage, which would continue to upset my mother-in-law because she had purchased the small four-room ranch where Brenda and I lived. The easy solution to our financial strain, my mother-in-law often said, was for me to get a job.

  “Writing is my job,” I’d respond.

  “No, a real one.”

  “It is a real one.”

  “A real job pays,” she’d say.

  “Maybe someday my writing will.”

  “Or maybe someday houses will be free.”

  My family was no better. They simply could not comprehend how I’d left the medical center in order to attend college and graduate school, only to end up as poor as a brother still in the hood. “All you’re missing is food stamps,” my father said to me once, “and a bunch of babies.” We did not qualify for food stamps—I’d checked—nor, it seemed, for a bunch of babies. Soon after our second trip to Zimbabwe, we’d begun attempting to start a family, assuming that our mere desire for children would have them tumble forth, like so many spilled beans. A year later we were still trying. “Maybe,” my father said, “God is trying to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “To get a job,” he said. “Or to finish your PhD.”

  “I don’t want either.”

  “But you might need both,” he responded, and then, as was the case more and more, his thoughts drifted into the past, this time coming to rest in the year he and my mother were married.

  That was 1955. My mother had just graduated from high school and my father had just dropped out. He’d only been a year from finishing, but he wanted to support his new bride and to not have to live with his grandmother for more than a few weeks. He began working full-time as a Braille instructor. His position paid minimum wage, which would allow him and my mother no luxuries, save for the most important one—the ability to live independent lives. This, for my parents, as it no doubt is for most people with disabilities, was a big deal. It was with a tremendous sense of accomplishment, then, that my father moved my mother to their very own two-room apartment in the projects. And it was with a tremendous sense of failure, three months later, when my mother announced she was expecting a child, that my father realized he hadn’t thought his life through.

  The only thing he’d given much thought to since meeting my mother was their happiness. He hadn’t factored in children or given any consideration to what would make them happy too, but he knew that living in the projects wasn’t it. Even in the 1950s the ABLA Homes was an unsafe place; being blind, he couldn’t watch over and protect his children, and so there was no way he’d let them go outside to play. They would need a house with a fenced backyard, and he vowed, the moment my mother placed his hand on her stomach, to buy them one. In time I would fully appreciate the sacrifices he had been willing to make, but as I tried unsuccessfully to start my own family, I could not do so. That’s why a job, a real one that paid, was not high on my list of priorities, and neither was completing a doctorate. Maybe that was why it was so difficult for us to conceive; maybe God was trying to tell me something, namely that my life, like my newly married father’s, had not been thought through.

  This message must have been getting across, because my father was on my mind a lot in those days, the uncanny symmetry of our lives. After dropping out of high school, we both decided to return, me in 1982 for my GED, my father in 1957 to complete his final year. We both attended community colleges. We both transferred to four-year universities. I’d earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and he had too. I had no interest in earning a PhD, but, thinking about my father, I now knew that I would. My father had been interested in earning a PhD, but, thinking about his children, he now knew that he couldn’t. He needed to find a job.

  He worked first as a counselor of children with disabilities, and then he became a teacher. From the time he’d first placed his hand on my mother’s stomach to the time he taught his first class, most of the clothes he’d worn had been donated by his church, the food he’d eaten rarely varied from grits and beans, the welfare checks and food stamps he received had torn at his pride, and the strain of poverty had jeopardized his marriage. At last, fourteen years after he vowed to buy a house, he led his wife, and their now six children, through the front door. I could only imagine the pride and joy he felt at that moment. And I’d hoped that, one day, our lives would have that symmetry too.

  THE SECOND ACT

  We hadn’t intended to rob her but the opportunity was there—an elderly woman carrying a grocery bag into her house while two more bags sat in the opened trunk of her car. Steve grabbed one and I grabbed the other. We sprinted for a block and then jogged the rest of the way to my house to assess our booty: eight cans of tomato soup, two loaves of bread, twenty-four ounces of orange-flavored Metamucil, eight pounds of chicken fryers, lard, a bag of chips, and a pair of Dr. Scholl’s inserts. I opened the chips. Steve put the inserts in his shoes. The elderly lady, I assumed, called the police.

  Or maybe she called God. I imagined her standing by her empty trunk with her hands raised toward the sky, asking that the robbers be brought to justice. But I knew the justice she sought already awaited me. I had heard my parents and various ministers repeatedly speak of the lake of fire, and yet such talk had not deterred me from seeking my place there. Eternal damnation, the way I saw it, would simply be the second act, a continuation of the life I already led, day after day filled with debauchery and nights with more of the same. The lake of fire did not concern me. So I wasn’t sure what it was that made me say we should return the groceries.

  Steve was appalled. “You want to do what?”

  “Return the groceries,” I repeated. “Let’s take them back.”

  A smirk spread on his face. “What’s wrong with you, feeling bad for the little old lady?”

  I ignored him.

  “Maybe you’d like to take her some flowers, too.” He was using a whiny voice now, mimicking a bratty child. “Here, little old lady, I brought you your chicken and some roses …”

  I took my razor out of my sock and pointed it at his neck. His smirk faded. “Don’t play with that thing,” he said, a statement of formality because he knew I wasn’t playing. I had a big problem with being teased and everybody knew it. And I’d been drinking.
I backed him toward the door. As soon as he stepped outside he ran, and I ran after him, the razor still in my hand, even though it was midday and someone could have seen me. But the streets were deserted, as were the backyards and alleys we zigzagged through before I let him go. I tucked the razor back into my sock and went home to get the groceries.

  The old lady’s street was as empty as mine had been. Her car was still parked in front of her house, only the trunk was closed now. So was her front door. The windows that flanked it were opened a few inches and guarded by burglar bars. I climbed the stairs to her porch planning to ring the bell and flee, leaving the groceries for her discovery. But as I was about to set them down, the door opened. The old lady stood before me now, looking confused.

  “I …I saw someone take these from your car,” I mumbled. “Some kid, a stupid teenager. I chased him and got them back for you.”

  She joined me on the porch. I held out the bags for her. As she took them, our hands briefly touched. “God bless you,” she said.

  But I didn’t hear her, not for many years.

  SCATTERED INCONVENIENCES

  He barreled up on our left, momentarily matched our speed, then surged forward and waved a cowboy hat out the window, a bull rider in a brown Chevy. Somehow I knew he would swerve into our lane and slow down, and as he did the sound of his horn came to us over the rumble of our truck’s engine. We were in a seventeen-foot Ryder that held everything we owned, junk, pretty much, with ten feet to spare. Those were, we believed, the final days of poverty. After not being able to find a teaching position for three years since completing her doctorate, Brenda had landed a rare tenure-track position at a state college in New England, twelve hundred miles east of Iowa City where we’d spent ten years living with tornadoes, academics, and hippies. I was going to be a stay-at-home dad, watching our fifteen-month-old during the day and writing at night. It was the perfect scenario, one we’d dreamed of for so long. All I had to do now was prevent the man in the Chevy from killing us.

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter, checked the rearview mirrors in case a sudden maneuver was necessary. There were no vehicles within twenty yards, besides our reckless escort, just ten feet away.

  “This guy’s drunk or something,” Brenda said.

  I shook my head. “I told you we shouldn’t drive in the middle of the night.”

  “It’s only eight,” Brenda responded.

  I checked the clock on the dashboard. “Eight ten.”

  “Well, you could just slow down,” she said, “and let him go.”

  “Or,” I responded, “I could crush him.”

  “And injure your son in the process?”

  I glanced to my right. Adrian slept between us in his child seat, oblivious that we were being menaced by a fool and that his daddy, in certain situations, particularly those that involved motor vehicles and testosterone, was a fool, too. I tugged at his harness, confirmed that it was secure, then gunned the engine and lurched the truck forward. Brenda punched my arm. I lifted my foot off the accelerator and watched the speedometer topple from seventy to fifty-five, where I leveled off. For a few seconds there was a gentlemanly distance between us and the Chevy, and then it slowed, too, until it was again ten feet from our bumper. This time I held my ground. I could feel Brenda tensing. The man waved his hat some more. I lowered my window and gave him the finger, Adrian stirring as wind tore into the cab. Brenda called me a jerk, though not audibly. We’d been together long enough that the actual use of words, at times like those, was unnecessary.

  The Chevy suddenly braked and I had to as well to avoid a collision. My heart was racing now. I tried hard to believe that we weren’t dealing with something more ominous than a souse. We were in Indiana, a state I vaguely remembered hearing was a breeding ground for racists; perhaps the random sight of a black family had proved too irresistible, a cat straying into an angry dog’s view.

  But I had heard similar things about Iowa, only to experience no problems. No problems is not to say nothing, though, for there were what a black intellectual referred to as “scattered inconveniences”—women crossing the street or removing their purses from grocery carts at my approach, security guards following me in department stores. Once, while I was working out in the university’s gym, two young men, looking my way and laughing, began mimicking the walk of a gorilla. Silly, all of it, confirmation that the bigotry my parents faced no longer exists, that its sledgehammer impact has been reduced, for the most part, to pebbles pitched from a naughty child’s hand. I tell myself to find victory in encounters such as these. And I usually do. But sometimes I can’t because of one simple truth: I am a racist.

  Like a recovering alcoholic, I recognize that to define myself by my disease is in some way to help guard against relapse, that there is daily salvation in this constant reminder of who and what I am. My quest to be rid of all traces of this scourge has not been easy, though I have made good progress, considering some of the things I’d heard about whites since the time I was a child. Whites discriminated against us. Whites denied us decent housing. Whites caused us to have high unemployment and failed schools. Crack had come from whites, and so had AIDS. Whites, in some vague and yet indisputable way, made the winos drink and gang-bangers kill. I came to believe, at a very early age, that in order to succeed I would have to beat the system through the mastery of some criminal enterprise, or join it in the form of a Sambo, a sell-out, an Oreo. In other words, I’d have to be my brother Tommy.

  Tommy, who said things like “Whites aren’t an obstacle to success,” and “Only you can stop you.”

  We didn’t like Tommy.

  We watched him with disgust as he became a teenager and continued to speak without slang or profanity. He wore straight-legs and loafers instead of bell-bottoms and four-inch stacks, his only concession to soulful style an Afro, which could have been bigger. He held a job during high school and still earned straight A’s. After graduation he studied computers when his friends aspired to be postal clerks or pimps.

  After our father threw him out for fighting with Jimmy, it was many years before I saw him socially again, other than at church. I didn’t know where he spent his exile. I was not surprised, though, when he resurfaced in the 1980s in a Ford Aerostar with a Ronald Reagan sticker on his bumper. He’d rejected victim ideology his whole life, and so his emergence as a staunch conservative made perfect sense, as much sense as me, twenty years later, being tempted to crush a white man on I-80.

  The Chevy switched lanes again, this time to the right. The driver was shouting at us through his opened window. I ignored him. He blew his horn.

  Brenda asked, “What do you think he wants?”

  “Our lives,” I said.

  He blew his horn again.

  “I’m going to open my window,” Brenda replied, “and see what he wants.”

  “Do not do that!”

  She opened her window. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and Brenda was practically hanging out the window to hear him. I leaned toward them while trying to keep the truck steady. Brenda suddenly whirled to face me. Her eyes were filled with terror. “Stop the truck!” she demanded.

  “Why?”

  “The back door is open! The washer’s about to fall out!”

  We were towing our car behind us; the perilousness of the situation was instantly clear.

  I put on my right signal and began to work my way to the shoulder. The man tooted his horn and gave me a thumbs-up, then rode off into the night. Adrian was crying and I wondered for how long. His pacifier had fallen. Brenda rooted it from his seat and slipped it between his lips. He puffed on it fiendishly, like it was long-denied nicotine.

  We’d come to a stop. Our hazards were flashing. Cars and trucks rocked us gently as they hurled themselves east, toward the Promised Land. Before I opened my door, Brenda and I exchanged a quick glance. I did not have to actually say I was sorry. She did not have to actually say she forgave me.

  MY SISTER’S ROO
MMATE

  Somewhere near Oak Lawn, Tim began steering with his knee. Every once in a while a gust of wind would push against the car, causing it to veer left or right and his girlfriend to scream. Tim would tell her to relax as he grabbed the wheel, and I’d take another swallow of whiskey. Other than that we crept steadily along through the snow, our car the only one on the highway, our wipers making the only sound. I wished the radio worked. I wished I hadn’t come.

  I tapped Tim’s shoulder and handed him the bottle. He took a drink, chased it with his beer, and then reached above the visor to remove a small piece of paper. After turning on the cabin light, he passed the paper to Karen. I sat forward and watched as she unfolded the sides until the powder was visible. She scooped some up on a long, chipped nail and raised it to a nostril. She fed the other one before passing the coke to me. I’d never tried it before so I looked to Tim for reassurance; he nodded that it was okay. I took a hit and instantly knew invincibility. A two-hour road trip through a snowstorm, it was clear to me now, was a very reasonable idea.

  “So,” Tim began, making eye contact with me in the rearview mirror. “You excited to meet Linda’s new roommate?”

  I didn’t answer because I knew where this was headed.

  “You’ll like her,” he continued. “And she’ll like you. I told her about you the last time I was there. She was extremely eager to meet you. So, little bro’, looks like this will be your lucky night, unless you’re a sissy.” He faced Karen and added, “Jerry just turned sixteen and he still hasn’t had any pussy.” They both laughed and I hated Tim right then. But after another hit of coke, his teasing seemed reasonable too.

  At around 4:00 AM we were in Charleston, Illinois, where Linda was attending college, swaying on the porch of a duplex that Tim believed to be where she lived. Karen was leaning heavily against him, either to remain upright or to guard against the brutal winds, and I stood on his other side. I rang the bell. When no one responded, Tim rapped the door with his beer bottle. A moment later, in the window to our left, fingertips parted the blinds.