Street Shadows

by Jerald Walker

  He confessed everything then, eager, like a serial killer at last confronted with evidence of his crime, to have the details of his awful secret revealed. And when pressed about why he hadn’t said anything sooner, he mentioned his master plan: He would make his sight get better by ignoring, as much as possible, the fact that it was getting worse.

  For gutting out his fading vision in silence, Mama Alice called him brave. His father called him a fool. His teachers called him a liar. His astonished friends and siblings called him Merlin. The doctors called him lucky. The damage was reversible, they said, because the clots that had formed on and now pressed against his occipital lobes could be removed. But they were wrong; those calcified pools of blood were in precarious locations and could not be excised without risking immediate paralysis or worse. The surgeons inserted a metal plate (my father never knew why) and later told Mama Alice that the clots would continue to grow, not only destroying the little sight he had left but also killing him. They gave him one more year to live, but they were wrong again.

  They were wrong, too, in not predicting the seizures. He’d have them the rest of his life, internal earthquakes that toppled his body and pitched it violently across the floor. I remember these scenes vividly: As a young child, I would cower with my siblings at a safe distance while my mother, her body clamped on top of my father’s, tried to put medicine in his mouth before he chewed off his tongue. My father was a big man in those days, bloated on fried food and Schlitz—one wrong move of his massive body would have caused my mother great harm—but she rode him expertly, desperately, a crocodile hunter on the back of her prey.

  I always expected one of those attacks to be fatal. But their damage would be done over five decades rather than all at once, slowly and insidiously eroding his brain, like water over stone. So we knew it wasn’t Alzheimer’s when he began forgetting the people and things that mattered and remembering the trivia of his youth. He knew it, too. That’s why, at the age of fifty-five, he retired from teaching, moved with my mother to an apartment in the suburbs, and waited, like we all waited, for the rest of his mind to wash away. By the time I began teaching, when he was in his midsixties, he had forgotten us all.

  According to the American Foundation for the Blind, every seven minutes someone in this country will become blind or visually impaired. There are 1.3 million blind people in the United States. Less than half of the blind complete high school, and only 30 percent of working-age blind adults are employed. For African Americans, who make up nearly 20 percent of this population, despite being only 12 percent of the population at large, the statistics are even bleaker.

  There are no reliable statistics for the number of unemployed blind prior to the 1960s, but some estimates put it as high as 95 percent. Most parents of blind children then had low expectations, hoping only that they would find some more useful role to play in society than selling pencils on street corners or playing a harmonica in some subway station, accompanied by a bored though faithful basset hound. Usually the blind were simply kept at home.

  Mama Alice expected to keep my father at home for just a year, but even that was one year too many. She was elderly, diabetic, arthritic, and still mourning for her daughter and other accumulated losses. Now she had to care for a blind boy who spent his days crying or, when his spirits lifted, smashing things in his room. His school had expelled him, his friends had fled, and his sister and brothers had not been moved by his handicap to develop an interest in his affairs. And so on the second anniversary of his predicted death, Mama Alice packed up his things, kissed him good-bye, implored him to summon more bravery, and sent him to jail.

  My father never told any of his children about this. I read about it in his chart at the Sight Saving School, in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he’d been transferred after fifteen months in juvenile detention. In 1994, the same year he and my mother moved to the suburbs, Brenda and I paid a visit to that school.

  Sixteen years later the trip for me is a blur, punctuated now and then with random vivid images. I cannot see the face of the principal who greeted us, and I cannot visualize the office we were escorted to, but my father’s chart is seared in my mind, a black three-ring binder with THOMAS KELLER WALKER handwritten on the top right corner. Before I read it, the principal gave us a tour of the facilities. It was an enormous complex that included basketball courts, a baseball diamond, a swimming pool … and classrooms. We were taken to the library, which was a museum of sorts, where the history of blindness was laid out in pictures and graphs behind glass cases. We ate lunch in the cafeteria where my father had eaten lunch. We went to the dorm room where he’d slept. Outside, we walked on the track where, cane in hand, my father learned to run again.

  After the tour, the principal took us back to her office and left us alone with his chart. It contained his height, weight, vital signs, and a summary of his academic performance before he lost his sight, which I cannot recall, though my guess is that it was exceptional. I also cannot remember the progress reports during his two years there. What I do remember is a description of him as “traumatized.” That seemed about right to me. He’d lost his mother, his sight, and his freedom. The only person who’d consistently showed him love had put him in prison. He was sixteen. I thought about my own life at sixteen, my delinquency and lack of purpose, and I suddenly felt as disappointed in myself as I know he must have been.

  When we arrived back at our home in Iowa City, I typed up my notes from the trip. I decided not to call my father to ask about being put in juvenile detention; he’d had a reason for keeping it a secret, and I figured I should probably honor it.

  In 1997 my parents moved again. My father was having difficulty with his balance and could not manage the stairs to their second-floor apartment. They bought a house in Dolton, a suburb south of Chicago; its primary appeal, besides being a single-level ranch, was its screened-in porch. For two summers they pretty much lived in that porch, crowding it with a swing set, a glider, a card table, on which sat an electric water fountain, and four reclining chairs. My father was in one of those chairs enjoying a refreshing breeze and the faint sound of gurgling water when he had a grand mal seizure, the worst in years. For two weeks he was in intensive care on a respirator. When he was finally able to breathe on his own, he was moved to a regular room, and a month later, when he could finally speak, he asked everyone, including my mother, his wife of forty-two years, who they were. While he languished in this state of oblivion, struggling to recall his life, I finished the first draft of my book, having him die peacefully in his sleep. Wishful thinking. Another massive seizure put him back in the ICU.

  A month later he was transferred to an assisted living facility. Speech therapists helped him talk again, and occupational therapists showed him how to move with a walker. But no one could fix his brain. His thoughts were in a thousand fragments, floating in his skull, I imagined, like the flakes of a shaken snow globe. His filter gone, my father, this intensely private man, from whom I’d had difficulty extracting just the basic facts of his life, was now a mental flasher. My mother called me on occasion to report what he’d revealed.

  “Mama Alice arrested me,” he announced to her one day.

  “I drink too much,” he said on another.

  “That Lynne can sure fry some chicken,” he mentioned as well. After my mother relayed this last comment, there was a long pause before she asked me, “You do know about Lynne, don’t you?”

  Lynne was the woman he’d left her for. That was in 1963, thirteen years after my parents had met at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind, an organization that, among other services, provides employment for the visually impaired. My father was there assembling clocks while home on summer break from the Sight Saving School, and my mother had been hired to do the same. They were seventeen when they met, eighteen when they married, and at twenty-five the parents of four children. My mother was pregnant with me and my twin when my father moved out. That was all I knew, told to me one day by my brot
her Tim when I was in my midteens.

  My parents had never discussed any of this with my siblings or me. My mother spoke openly about it now, though, and then she segued into talking about the man she’d dated during the two-year separation and about the son they’d had together. Her story I knew more about because when my twin and I were ten or so, her son, our half brother, would come to our house to play with us. Occasionally he’d be accompanied by his father, a lanky blind man who chain-smoked and had a baritone voice that made me think of God. These attempts at civility lasted two summers before suddenly coming to an end. I never again saw my mother’s son. And I never met my father’s. I had not even known that he and Lynne had one, in fact, until three years ago, when my brother Tommy mailed me a newspaper clipping from the Chicago Sun-Times detailing his murder. His girlfriend had stabbed him thirty-one times. In the margins, next to his picture, Tommy had in scribed, “He looks just like you!” At first glance, I had thought it was.

  I made no mention of my half brothers in the novel, nor did I write about my parents’ separation, even though my mother, after speaking about this tumultuous period in their lives and of the resilient love that saw her and my father through it, suggested that I should. But at the time these details seemed peripheral to my point, too far astray from the topic at hand, not so much character development and depth, in my view, as dirty laundry. After chronicling how he’d lost his sight, I’d described how my father had navigated the sighted world: his learning to walk with a cane, his mastery of public transportation, how he’d earned his college degrees with the help of student and technological aides, his purchase of a Seeing Eye dog. Chapter after chapter focused on the mechanics of blindness when I should have focused on the mechanics of being. I should have explored my father’s life beyond his handicap, just as, when I set out to write my own story, I should have explored my life beyond the trials common to inner-city black males. The unpublished novels I had written said no more about the range of my father’s experiences or mine, no more about the meanings we had shaped from the chaos of our lives, than the newspaper clipping had said about his murdered son’s.

  I realized this while at my father’s funeral. He died in September 2005, fifty-six years after the surgeons predicted he would, succumbing not to the blood clots after all, but rather to pneumonia. Brenda and I left Dorian and Adrian with her mother and flew to Chicago to attend the service. We sat in the second pew, just behind my mother, whose shoulder I would reach forward to pat as we listened to the organist play my father’s favorite hymns. A cousin of mine read scriptures, a family friend recited a number of poems, and then the pastor gave the eulogy, a thorough account of my father’s accomplishments punctuated by the refrain: and he did this while blind. It was while I listened to him try to convince us that sightlessness was the core and sum of my father’s existence that I understood why my novels had failed.

  At some point during the eulogy, when I could no longer stand to listen, an incident I had long forgotten came to mind. I was probably thirteen years old, and my father, as he had so often before, asked me to take some of his clothes to the dry cleaner. Ordinarily this wasn’t a big deal, but I had plans to join some friends at the park, so I whined and complained about being called into service. A mild argument ensued, which I lost, and a short while later I stormed out of the house with a paper bag full of his things. At the cleaners, I watched the clerk remove each article of clothing, my boredom turning to horror as her hand, now frozen midair, dangled before us a pair of my father’s boxers. The clerk, very pretty and not much older than me, smiled and said, “We don’t clean these.” I couldn’t believe that my father had made such an unpardonable mistake, a blunder of the highest order, and the more I thought of it the more upset I became. Halfway home, swollen with anger and eager to release it, I started to run. When I arrived, out of breath, my hands clenched by my sides, my father wasn’t in the living room, where I’d left him, but sitting on the porch. The second I barked, “Daddy!” he exploded in laughter, his large stomach quivering beneath his T-shirt, his ruddy face pitched toward the sky. I could not, despite my best effort, help but join him.

  I rose after the pastor finished his eulogy and told this story to the congregation. If I ever attempt to write another novel about my father, this is where it will begin.

  WHEN LOVE SPEAKS

  I wasn’t homeless, per se; it’s just that none of the homes was mine. They belonged to various girlfriends, some of whom are as blurred to me now as the substances I abused. Most of these women were substance abusers themselves, though some were merely depressed or afflicted with self-esteem so low that having me stay with them, even for brief periods, struck them as a good idea. I did not love these women, it is fair to say, and it is fair to say that they did not love me.

  I knew very little about love in those days. But I knew a great deal about hatred, and most of what I experienced was my own hatred of me. That’s how I ended up with Pam. She was aggressive, rude, domineering, and deceitful, traits that even in my confused state I did not care for, and yet I stayed with her for two long years, following her from apartment to apartment whenever she got the urge to move.

  There were separations during those periods, times when one of our frequent fights sent me cramming my worldly possessions into a duffel bag and sleeping at a former girlfriend’s house or, if it was warm, in my car, a fifteen-year-old Lincoln Continental so large that the backseat was in essence a small bed. But invariably I’d end up back at Pam’s door, admission guaranteed, I knew, if I returned with coke in hand.

  After one of those departures, which lasted only three hours, since I could find no one to let me stay with her, and since it was winter, I returned to Pam’s apartment just as a man was leaving. I watched him from the end of the hall as he walked a few feet away, removed a key from his pocket, and entered another unit. A moment later I found Pam in our bedroom, her nude body floating along the waves of her waterbed, her left hand holding a cigarette. When she heard the floorboard squeak beneath my feet, she slowly turned in my direction. “I hope you brought some coke,” she said. It occurred to me, then, that I needed a home of my own.

  But that was easier said than done; I’d filed for bankruptcy two years earlier when I was nineteen, so I knew the odds of someone granting me a lease were slim. This was proved true over the next several months. I was rejected by every place I applied, often right on the spot, forcing me to remain at Pam’s apartment, where I slept on the couch with her three mangy cats. Her “boyfriend” visited her openly now, occasionally letting himself in with his own key. I would leave, then, sometimes driving to the medical center to sleep in the parking garage until my shift began.

  Oddly enough, Pam and I got along better then than ever, our contempt for each other morphing into something that resembled, if not friendship, then a truce between combatants. When my car finally died of complications associated with old age, it was she who drove me to the apartments to fill out applications. It was because of her, in fact, that I got my first place.

  It was in a high-rise on the Near South Side, right in the thick of a ghetto, with housing projects as far as the eye could see, though the complex itself was decidedly upscale. The lawns were nicely maintained, there was a swimming pool and tennis courts, and the views of the city were worthy of some posh hotel. The property had been recently constructed, a part of an attempt to revitalize the area. Surely, a guy in bankruptcy wasn’t the kind of tenant they sought. The building manager, a matronly black woman with steel-gray hair, told me that in so many words while Pam and I sat in her office. My credit report was in the manager’s hand, and as she delivered the bad news, I noticed that she kept sneaking glances at Pam and shaking her head.

  “I don’t know what that old bitch’s problem was,” Pam said as we drove back to her apartment. “Did you see those looks she kept giving me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I definitely picked up a bad vibe.”

  “Bitch,” Pam spat. “I
’m glad you didn’t get that place. No need to be giving that hussy your money.”

  I agreed, just for the sake of being agreeable, and then I put the manager out of my mind, until she called me the next day at work and asked me to come see her alone.

  When I arrived, I saw that my credit report was still on her desk. “I’m going to talk to you now,” she began as I took a seat, “not as a building manager would to a client, but as a mother would to a son. First, I want you to tell me how old you are?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “And your lady friend?”

  “Thirty.”

  She shook her head. “You have no business with that woman. She’s no good; I know that like I know my own name. Just looking at you sitting there with her yesterday nearly broke my heart. You’re a good person—I can sense that. I know you’ve made some mistakes; taking up with that woman was one of them. But the fact that you’re trying to get away from her is a sign that you’re aiming to do better, and I don’t want to go to my grave thinking I could have helped you and I didn’t. So I’m going to take a chance on you, son. I’m going to take a gamble. Now you have an opportunity to start over. Make good use of it. Don’t let me down. Now, come on,” she said, breaking into a smile as she rose from her chair. “Let’s go take a look at your new home.”