This is the vision that has: Tim is sitting next to me on our living room couch. We are high, and he is schooling me. He abruptly stops talking and focuses on the television, where the notorious Clyde Barrow emerges from a Model B Ford, parked along a quiet country road. The camera pans a few feet away to a patch of shrubs and trees, which suddenly rustle, causing birds to burst from their nests seconds before the air fills with the gunfire of six concealed officers. The first shot hits Clyde in the shoulder, twisting his body full-circle before throwing it to the ground, and then the other bullets come, ripping into his flesh while his companion, Bonnie Parker, still sitting in the car, opens her mouth to scream, and the bullets find her too. By the time the silence resumes, the couple lie in motionless, ravaged heaps. I glance at Tim. He is staring at the young outlaws, his face frozen in rapt concentration, his head bobbing slowly, and I will always wonder if he was calculating the odds of his own premature death, weighing the mathematical probabilities of getting rich off the streets versus his life ending too soon.
And it did end too soon. But there were no riches. There was no notoriety. There wasn’t even any gunfire. All he got was a single officer, tapping on the window of his car.
EPILOGUE: CLOWNS
A man holding a fistful of money waved us into a parking lot, where another man pointed to an empty space between two minivans. I sped into the designated area and slammed on the brakes. I was unbuckling my seat belt when Dorian retched again, as he had twice during our race to Boston. The poor boy suffered from motion sickness, but fortunately it was triggered only when we were late for something and I was forced to weave at high speeds through traffic. Before we’d left the house, I’d had the foresight to grab a plastic grocery bag; half of Dorian’s face was buried in that now. Adrian sat looking at his little brother with heartbreaking concern, while Brenda sat looking at me with simmering anger. That was okay. All of this would be forgotten, I knew, once we got inside.
I hurried everyone from the car and we fell in with a stream of pedestrians, most of them children. After a quick glance at my watch I told Brenda we simply had to go faster. She hoisted Dorian into her arms, muttering something unpleasant as I reached for Adrian. She didn’t return my weak attempt at a smile before we started to jog. We shaved probably a minute off our time, every second of it vital, I knew, and well worth the pain in my knees and lower spine.
“We made it,” I said, once we’d entered the building and found our seats.
“We’re even a little early,” Brenda noted.
“You can’t be early for the circus, can you boys?”
“No!” they said in unison. They were happy and excited, just as I knew they would be. And Dorian’s color had returned. He and Adrian sat on the edges of their seats, staring, like the hundreds of people around us, toward the center ring, where at any moment the ringmaster would appear in a top hat perched upon, according to the program I’d just opened, an Afro. The blurb beneath his photo proudly proclaimed that he was the first African American to hold this position in the Ringling Brothers’ glorious history. That was interesting, I suppose, but I really didn’t care. I doubted anyone else did either.
The lights dimmed, triggering deafening, joyful shrieks. The auditorium filled with twirling dots of light from the handheld toys that were sold in the lobby. Dorian and Adrian twirled theirs. I twirled mine. Brenda looked at me and shook her head, though this time she returned my smile.
“Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages!” a voice boomed through the darkness. I faced the center ring. A beam of light poured down as if from the heavens onto the ringmaster, who stood with his arms extended, moving his body in a slow circle to greet us all. “Behold, the greatest show on earth!” Clowns rushed in from all directions.
And there I sat with my wife and sons, once a juvenile delinquent and now a college professor, experiencing my first circus.
Behold indeed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank the James A. Michener Foundation for support early in my career, as well as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop permanent faculty, James Alan McPherson, Marilynne Robinson, and the late Frank Conroy; its visiting faculty, Denis Johnson, Thom Jones, John Edgar Wideman, and Debra Eisenberg; and its staff, Connie Brothers and Deb West.
I am particularly grateful to Edward Homewood, for guiding me to the writer’s life. Thank you to Gerald Gross, for plucking me out of the blue, and to my agent John “Ike” Taylor Williams, for introducing me to my wonderful editor, Beth Rashbaum.
For their careful readings of various drafts of this work, I’d like to thank Lois Poule, my wife, Brenda Molife, and my mother, Mary Walker. I also received valuable feedback on the manuscript from Robert Atwan, Mary Dondero, Courtney Smith, Jamie Nelson, and Shaylin Walsh.
For their encouragement and advice, I’d like to thank Mira Vujovic, Patricia Friend, Mercedes Nuñez, Roger Dunn, Tara Sullivan, James “Jake” Jakobsen, Mary O’Connell, Howard London, Anna Martin-Jerald, Alan Comedy, Lou Ricciardi, Dana Mohler-Faria, Aeon Skoble, and Tom Curley.
For their enthusiasm and inspiration, I’d like to thank my students at Bridgewater State College.
In addition to Harold Washington Community College (formerly “Loop”), I’d like to thank all community colleges for the invaluable opportunities they provide.
Thank you to my brothers and sisters, for the life we shared. Most important, I’d like to thank my parents, for their boundless love and support, and for their example of how to persevere.
I gratefully acknowledge the following magazines and anthologies in which some of these chapters appeared, sometimes in slightly different form: The Iowa Review, “Workshopped” and “Dragon Slayers” (under the single title “Dragon Slayers”); The North American Review, “Scattered Inconveniences;” The Missouri Review, “The Mechanics of Being;” The New Delta Review, “Captain Walker;” The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Visible Man” and “Game” (under the title “Teaching, and Learning, Racial Sensitivity”); Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, “Sacraments of Reconciliation;” The Writer’s Presence, “Scattered Inconveniences;” America Now, “Game” (under the title “Teaching, and Learning, Racial Sensitivity”); The Best African American Essays 2009, “We Are Americans;” The Literary Review, “Two Boys.”
“Workshopped” and “Dragon Slayers” also appeared in The Best American Essays 2007 (under the single title “Dragon Slayers”), and “The Mechanics of Being” also appeared in The Best American Essays 2009.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JERALD WALKER is an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State College. Married and the father of two young sons, he lives in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays (2007 and 2009), Best African American Essays (2009 and 2010), the anthology Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, and Mother Jones, for which he profiled Chicago’s South Side.
Street Shadows is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2010 by Jerald Walker
All rights reserved.
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