by Owen Thomas
“What the hell happened to your head,” I ask. He looks up and touches the top of his head, winces, then casually inspects his fingertips.
“Mmm. I’m fine. It’s nothing.”
“What happened?”
“Working out.”
“Working out? You work out? What, like at a health club?”
“MmmHmm. Several days a week.”
“Mom too?”
“No. No, just me.”
“Really? I had no idea. For how long?”
“Mmm. Quite a while, now. Quite awhile. I have a regular work out that I do.”
“On your head?”
“Mmm,” he touches the top of his head again. Winces. Inspects his fingertips. “I just bumped up against the side of the pool. It’s fine. It’s about healed. Anyway,” he turns his shoulder to me and faces Cait, “as I was saying, Freedom Summer was not just in Mississippi with Frances Hackman.”
“Gene,” I snap. “Gene Hackman. Frances McDormand.”
“Mmm. If you say so. Anyway… it was throughout the Deep South but it was not only in southern states. Cleveland had its own version of Freedom Summer and just like Mississippi, Cleveland put together a Freedom School program to coincide with a huge boycott of the public school system. Instead of attending classes, Cleveland kids went to one of the Freedom Schools where they learned about equality and human rights along with the regular subjects. Hundreds of teachers and parents got together and came up with a curriculum and set up a hundred or more schools scattered all over the city. It was a very big deal. The UFM, or CORE, or the N-double-A, one of those organizations, I can’t keep them straight, put on a huge public relations show. Banners and signs and leaflets and cars with loudspeakers rolling up and down the streets. And, of course, Grace Watson was very involved in this effort. And they needed all the people they could get.”
“And so Dillon,” Cait points to an imaginary seating chart floating in the air in front of her, “who was secretly seeing Minnie Watson, who was Grace Watson’s daughter, brought three of his clueless friends, you and Stinky and Alice, to one of the organizing meetings.”
“Right. Well, he tried anyway. We all got hauled into the police station. We missed that meeting. But we made the next one. Well, Naughty and I did anyway.”
“You did?” I almost don’t recognize my own voice.
“MmmHmm.”
“You.”
“MmmHmm. When I showed up with Dillon that day, Minnie recruited me on the spot. I couldn’t turn her down. She marched me right into the kitchen to talk to her mother. And Grace was sitting there at the kitchen table behind a stack of papers. She didn’t even look up at me for about a minute and a half. So I sat there at the table and waited and finally she looked up. Called me baby. She called everybody baby. Just a minute, baby. One minute, baby. What can I do for you, baby? She had these big black horn rims on her face. She was an intense, ferocious looking woman. Arm still in a cast. I told her that Minnie had sent me in for a schedule and an assignment. So she pulled out a few pieces of paper, circled the things she wanted me to do and where I was supposed to go and that was it. I was in.”
“You.”
“MmmHmm. Me. So hard to believe?”
“You’re… yeah… you’re a banker, Dad. Establishment. You’re… I just can’t see you… you know, marching and chanting. I’m not sure I can imagine the words Hell no, we won’t go coming out of your mouth. Or peace. Or groovy. Or pig. Or Mary Jane.”
Cait laughs. Dad gives me his most unnerving enigmatic smile.
“What the hell did you do?”
“Oh, you know, went to a bunch of organizing meetings. Carried a sign that said Ghetto Schools Must Go. Put fliers on windshields that said McCallister Must Go. He was the School Board President. Let’s see. I Marched. Taught some of the classes.”
“What? You …” He is nodding, eyes closed, lips pursed, before I can finish.
“MmmHmm.”
“You taught classes.”
“MmmHmm.”
“But … you were barely out of high school.”
“MmmHmm.”
“You weren’t a certified teacher.”
“They weren’t certified schools. All kinds of people were teaching.”
Cait pulls her knees up to her chin. “What did you teach?”
“A little math. A little English. Mostly history.”
There is a reactive pang pulsing from somewhere hidden. Somewhere deep inside. I feel it but I do not comprehend.
“A lot of history,” he says.
A moving vascular constriction. A bubble of new suffering finding its way.
“The Freedom Schools were all about history.”
It finally surfaces, like a distress buoy launched from a foundering sub, and suddenly I understand. My entire body winces with the message: My father was once a history teacher.
I watch him as he speaks, his lips shaping words like silent, harmless soap bubbles. My brain, answering to a sporadic and underused instinct for self-preservation, has cut the audible feed. I can hear only a muffled and distant ringing, a molecular resonance with the Big Bang, as though my entire being is a tuning fork. The moment stretches on, prolonging itself, stretching itself across the event horizon and into infinity.
Suddenly I am exhausted. Suddenly I can feel every last moment of this day, each second daisy-chained to its predecessor all the way back to the moment I first opened my eyes at three o’clock this morning in a Columbus jail cell, my head on the crumpled suit jacket I had donned two days ago so as to impress a judge that there has been a terrible mix up; that a miscarriage of justice is looming.
And now this.
My father… was once… a history teacher.
It would have been more than enough for today to learn the rest of it. To learn that he was a bonafide, sign-carrying, hand-billing, marching, slogan-shouting civil rights protester – if, in fact, any of that is actually true and not simply my father’s apocryphal twitch rising to the occasion of conquering a new admirer. That revelation alone is enough to fry the circuits. But, Hollis the teacher of history…
I want to sit down on the driveway. I want to walk around the corner of the vanbulance, across the lawn that still remembers the contours of my face from last night, and into my fetid home, where I can close and bolt the door and lie down in the hallway, among the sloppy detritus of a ruined undersea kingdom, and go to sleep. Maybe I will dream. Maybe the dreams will explain what it means that, years before I was born, my father planted a flag on the landscape of my chosen profession. A profession I chose, at least in part, for the very absence of his footprints. It does not matter, apparently, that he was not a history professional, or that his foray into the teachers’ lounge was exceedingly brief. He was here. His flag snaps and waves with authority over the hills of my vocation, as it does over this goddamned condominium. He has a claim, it would seem, to all the places I inhabit. Even, apparently, the role of history teacher, a place on the continuum of meaning that I had captured for myself. A place that I thought was all mine. A place for which I believed he had only an irrepressible disdain, rising not from any personal experience, but only out of an ill-considered, constitutional prejudice. His disapproval had long betrayed to me a certain …what … a certain uninformed superficiality. A shallowness that actually, strangely, underscored the importance of this place – this land of high school history instruction – where the coin of the realm was not money or influence as so enthralled the land of commercial banking, but rather, simply a love for honoring human experience by remembering it. Talking about it. Teaching it. That was the biggest part of me. The part he could never understand. The part that made me … what…a person apart; a person … different than.
But this place, suddenly, is not mine. I am not a person apart. I am not different than. The fucker got here first. I am Christopher Columbus and my father is the goddamned Chinese, ruining a perfectly good textbook. I am the late-comer, the disreputable scourge,
the despoiler of innocents, now on the verge of dishonor and banishment in the eyes of History. Well, not just the eyes of History. There is also Principal Roberts. And a gaggle of angry parents. And the School District. And the Columbus Police Department. And the State of Ohio. There are many eyes that would see me dishonored and banished.
My father, on the other hand, is the one who was here first. The first Chinese sailor sent by the Emperor Zhu Di, a full century before Columbus; stepping off the prow of some sea-battered junk and down into history. He is the Chinese explorer who chose to leave this land, for his own reasons, with his honor finely burnished and with the natives healthy and happy and still sporting their virginity and all of their appendages. He has been home for centuries now, with his feet up, drinking a cup of rice wine. America? He says. MmmHmm. Been there. Done that. You can have that ol’ history thing, I’ll take the entire financial infrastructure. Including this condo. Payment is late again, by the way.
His lips are still moving in their silent, underwater way. Cait is nodding agreeably. I realize that I, too, am nodding in agreement, although I have no idea why I am nodding or what in the hell he has said that is so agreeable. Something about the heroics of the people who stepped up when needed. Not necessarily him, he declaims. Not just the ones who staffed the Freedom Schools. The others. The ones who suffered. The ones who died. A white preacher flattened into East-Cleveland earth by a bulldozer.
“Not just me,” he says. He has the modesty of a hero.
“So, did Dillon teach too?” asks Cait.
“MmmHmm. Although Dillon and Minnie as I recall spent most of their time in the heavy-duty organizing. I think Grace worked them to an inch of their lives. They did everything together.”
“True love,” says Cait, nodding.
“Well, young love anyway. Maybe it was true love. Intense, that was for sure. Forbidden.” He opens a hand in my direction. “I’ll leave true love to Hollywood.”
“Did they stay together?”
“They did. Yeah. Far as I remember. I lost touch with them eventually. I didn’t spend much time in Cleveland after all of that. But I saw Dillon two or three times a year, and he was always with Minnie, so… In fact, they went down to Mississippi for awhile. I lost track of him.”
“I’ll bet that sat well with Dillon’s dad.”
“No. Dillon’s dad – Darius.” He snaps his fingers and points at nothing in particular. “Darius Knotty. That was it. That was his name. Boy, I must be gettin’ old. I guess I should feel lucky to remember my own name. Darius Knotty. Great big guy. Not fat, just, you know, big. Big frame. Shoulders. Like a rock, this guy. Pushing a lot of air. Darius Knotty. Hmm. Anyway, no, Darius didn’t take it so well. The plan didn’t work. It backfired. Dillon never renounced his lowly associations. Far from it, after a week in jail, Dillon was more resolved than ever. He threw himself into the fray, courting Minnie Watson of all people, and helping to organize Cleveland blacks in a war against the school district and the police department.”
“Aiding and comforting the enemy.”
“Oh, you better believe it. Like I said, Darius was a Franklin County prosecutor. Dillon was spittin’ in the face of the king.”
“I’m sure that made for a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner.”
“I don’t think Dillon really went home after that. I don’t know, of course. Just a guess. I don’t really see how he could have gone home. Not and stayed. All I know is that maybe two or three years later Darius Knotty hung himself.”
Cait gasps. “Really? Over Dillon?”
“Who knows.”
“Did he leave a note, or…”
“Mmm…” He shrugs. “Don’t remember. No question though. He did it to himself.”
“Because of Dillon and Minnie.”
“MmmHmm. Had to be lots of reasons, I guess, to do something like that. But I’d think Dillon was one of those reasons. Had to be. Found his body in a tree up near Lionshead Creek, which is right inside Dillon State Park. Maybe that was a message.”
“Pathetic. That’s what I think.”
He looks over at me, responding to the disgust in my voice.
“Self-destruction always is, David.”
There is a pendulum between us, marking off uncomfortably empty beats, each slicing off the years until I am a boy again, listening from across a table of dirty plates to my father who somehow knows everything about me that I do not want him to know. I blink. I swallow. I shrug uncomfortably. I sense Cait shifting her weight. Ben sits up and stretches like he is Rip Van Winkle.
“I was sleeping in the ambulance, Dad,” he says.
But my father does not respond. Does not turn and look. He is not through with me. There is more. I wait to be excused from the table and to take my plate to the kitchen, my mother’s refuge. He pulls out the receipt. It is not a receipt. It’s a square piece of paper. A page from a phonebook or newsprint. He opens it. Folds it. Puts it back in his pocket. Thinks. Ponders the air.
“Well… here is what I think. I think that we’ll set ourselves on fire just to keep the picture in our head from burning.”
He falls silent, letting Darius Knotty hang out there in the dark air, burning now, like a torch. Like a moral. I don’t ask. The explanation is coming. The deeper meaning to it all is coming. Like the rising sun, it is coming. I glance at Ben, who is fiddling with his earphones, and Cait, brow furrowed, almost painfully, as she tries to figure it out.
“I think Darius had a picture in his head,” he says slowly. “A picture of his son. Of Dillon. Who he was. What he stood for. What he represented. An old picture, from before Dillon was even born. And I think the picture in his head was not just a picture of the son, but simultaneously, a picture of the father. Of Darius himself. Because that’s just how it is with parents and children. Fathers and sons. It’s the same picture. I think you have to be a parent to know that.”
Yes, of course, I am not a parent. I get it. I have not procreated. I am disqualified. What a colossal disappointment I must be.
“Dad…”
“Just a minute, Ben. And I think...”
“Hey Dad…”
“Just a minute, Benny. … And I think Dillon no longer resembled that picture in his father’s head, which meant that Darius, too, no longer resembled the picture. And every day that his son disappointed him, charging down this other path, arm in arm with Minnie Watson, arm in arm with the exact opposite of Darius Knotty, was another day that Darius felt like an alien in his own skin. He was suddenly different than the man he thought he was. Than the man he wanted to be. Suddenly, Darius was not immortal. Suddenly, the father looks at his son and realizes that he is not immortal. The son will not take up the father’s life. The son will live his own life. And I think that must have hurt. I think that must have been a special kind of pain and a special kind of suffering for him. But that,” he smiles a little and puts his finger in the air as if testing the wind, looking for direction, “that takes us right back to the Buddha.”
I shoot Cait a glance laden with agony – my best, Oh, for the love of God, not The Buddha look. But Cait is not looking at me. She is looking at him, enthralled.
“Hey, dad,” Ben says, growing restless.
“The Buddha said that pain is inevitable and that suffering is simply resistance to pain. You can’t avoid the pain. You can’t. But you can avoid the suffering. You avoid suffering by accepting the pain as just a part of living. Because it is. Pain is part of living. It’s not going anywhere. Life is change and Life is pain. Eventually, if you let yourself live through it, you learn to accept that the picture in your head,” he taps his temple with his forefinger, “is a fraud. A lie. You aren’t who you think you are. The people in your life aren’t who you thought they were. Aren’t who you hoped they were. And all of that hurts. All of that hurts. And you just have to let it hurt. Or you will suffer. If you try to preserve the fiction, if you try to resist the pain, the Buddha says that you will suffer. Darius Knotty couldn’t let
go of the picture in his head. That picture of purity. So he put an end to his own suffering. Hung himself. Dillon Park. Death by disappointment. Death by dissonance.”
“Hey, dad…”
“Yes, Benny.”
“When is… hey, Dad…”
“Yes, Ben.”
“When is Tilly coming home?”
“Oh, I suppose whenever Tilly is good and ready to come home and not before.”
“Will she bring presents?”
“Mmm… when she comes, if she comes, Tilly will bring Tilly. That’s about all we can really count on Ben-O. You ready to head on home?”
“Ready to go home like a mo-fo, Dad.”
“Hop on outta there then. Give your new friend here, Ms. Lewis, a hug and let’s round ‘em up and head ‘em out.”
Ben stands and stoops and hugs Cait awkwardly around her neck from behind. Cait does her best to reciprocate, twisting backwards and laughing. Dad steps forward and extends a hand. Ben ignores the offer, jumping from the back of the vanbulance.
“Later-on bro,” I say, hi-fiving first the left hand, then the right as is our custom.
“After awhile mo-fo crocodile!”
Cait and I laugh as Ben disappears heavy stepping – like Godzilla stepping on buildings – around the back of the vanbulance. Dad is still pondering. There is more. Much more. Hours more. But I can see in his face that it is over for now. I am relieved to be out from beneath the Buddha.
“Anyway,” he says, quietly. “Food for thought.”
“I’m a mo-fo crocodile,” I say to Cait, proudly. She laughs. Dad smiles but abstains from any encouragement of Tilly’s corrupting influence.
“Cait,” he says with a sudden mock formality, “it was a very great pleasure to make your acquaintance and to talk your lovely ears off.”
“Pleasure was all mine, Hollis.” She stretches out her hand and they shake.
“Dad,” I say, even as a wiser part of me is shouting in my brain: no, no, no, don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, let him go, don’t ask. “Why are you here, anyway?”
