by Kia Corthron
It quickly becomes apparent that the judge and defense attorneys wish to have the trial over before the Thanksgiving break. So on Tuesday the 22nd the jury is excused to deliberate, and B.J. packs his suitcase. When the police came to arrest Randall two hours after his brother betrayed him, their sister and their mother flew into hysterics, begging the firstborn to recant. He could never bring himself to believe they would condone such an act, and yet they neither seemed anxious for justice to be served once the act was committed. You have no proof! and What good would it do, ruin another life? and He’s your brother! What they never said because, B.J. believes, they didn’t want to face the truth of it themselves, was He didn’t do it! When he offered no reply to their beseeching other than to shake his head, his eyes barely, wistfully meeting theirs, they finally threw him out into the street.
Since then, two and a half weeks ago, he has been renting a room from an elderly woman near the center of town. He looks at the space one last time, the bed he made this morning that had afforded him barely a wink of rest since his arrival, the first time in his heavy-sleeper life he had ever struggled with insomnia. He clicks shut his valise, full of the few possessions he will take with him, and brings it, along with the two letters, downstairs to his landlady’s kitchen, the wood-burning stove she would sometimes ask him to help her light. The first missive was from the Klan, or so it claimed, guaranteeing a swift end to his life should he testify. There had been one incident that had put that threat into action. B.J. would go to court every day, enduring the anonymous shoves and sporadic punches on his way to sitting in the front row far right, close enough, as best he could, to read the lips of the witnesses. It had been an especially bleak day for the prosecution when a physician claimed that it was possible Eliot Campbell had committed suicide—the burns, amputations, castration self-inflicted, the broken bones and comprehensive organ damage the result of the body slamming against rocks after the man flung himself into the river—the motivation of which, the doctor speculated, could have been personal depression or some mad kamikaze effort to vilify Southerners by making his death look like a lynching. The lunatic’s proposition was met by gratified applause from most of the white spectators, and this was about all B.J. could take. At the lunch recess he found himself walking alone in a deserted alley, away from any sign of loathsome humanity. Someone with a crowbar running up from behind, apparently having assumed a deaf man would be an easy ambush but having not factored in the angle of the sun at that time of day nor anticipated the magnitude of his victim’s boiling inner rage. B.J. had glimpsed the shadow and turned around, seizing the weapon and with his bare fist struck the man down with one blow, instantly poising himself for the next. The goon-turned-target gathered his wits rapidly and sprinted away with a bloodied and likely broken nose.
Having lost his entire family, B.J. found the Klan-endorsed warning a dog with minimal bite. He’d been determined to live long enough to testify, and now there was nothing else left. Which isn’t to say he would wait around for those fools to come after him, especially if they were to send that incompetent crowbar clown again who would probably not kill but merely maim his victim in some irritating way that B.J. would then have to lug around for the rest of his days. He tosses the note in the fire.
The other note, like the Klan memorandum, had not come via the post but rather had been placed through the front door mail slot, no return information.
He would have known it was from his mother even if it weren’t so obviously her distinctive cursive. He’d planned to incinerate it as well, but for now, he slips it into the inside top pocket of his suitcase. Glancing out the window he notices people racing back in the direction of the municipal building, just two hours after deliberations began.
In the overflowing courtroom, B.J. stands downstairs against the right wall, nearest the door. It’s on the other side of the room from the jury but he wants to be able to leave quickly and, anyway, he will easily be able to tell from the crowd reaction what the verdict is. From where he’s situated he can see up into the colored balcony. He glimpses the man named Douglas and the other lawyer from the victim’s firm sitting next to three local NAACP men and two round middle-aged women. In the second row are the only whites, a young man and woman from Georgia with whom Eliot Campbell had been working, and directly in front of them in the first row center are the father and brother of the deceased as well as two women friends. B.J. remembers it being briefly mentioned in the paper that the young attorney’s mother had died just two and a half weeks before he had. He beholds the staggering exhaustion and horror in the faces of the survivors, especially those in the front, looking as though they have been through grief ten times over. When the foreman stands to read the verdict, they as one lean forward.
B.J.’s coach to Birmingham to Atlanta to Washington to New York City is not scheduled to depart until 8:33 tonight, and the bus terminal’s enormous round Roman numeral clock reads 4:16. The proceeds from the sale of his truck had covered his ticket and then some. Most of the surplus cash he had left in an envelope in his mother’s mailbox, no note. He’s brought with him Go Tell It on the Mountain, which he hears is a story of New York, but he can’t bring himself to take it out yet. He worries about Benja. The day after she tossed him out Aaron had materialized, moved back in. He remembers how his mother would hold him and sing to him and in his head he would hear her. He remembers walking around the yard holding Randall’s hand, little Randall grinning up at his twelve-year old big brother and suddenly B.J. is sick, races to the water fountain. After he has taken several drinks to clear his head, he stands up straight to read WHITE ONLY. He wants to rip the fountain out of the wall. He tells himself from here on out he will only drink from the colored fountain, but he doesn’t see any.
A Negro who had been sweeping comes up to him, looking right into his face and enunciating clearly. How does he know I’m deaf? “You alright?” B.J. nods. Then the janitor hands him a note. B.J. looks at it, then up at the man. “We all knew it be ‘not guilty.’ You did your best.” B.J. stares, and the man speaks again. “Thank you,” shaking B.J.’s hand before walking away.
He walks back to the bench near his luggage and sits. He reads the note a second time, then opens his suitcase, placing the paper safely into the pocket. In doing so he glimpses the message from his mother and, for reasons he’s unsure of, takes the Bible quote out and subtly leaves it folded on another bench, away from him, for someone else to find and ponder. His chest begins to rise and fall heavily. He takes out the New York novel, the book trembling violently in his hands as he glances at the mercilessly slow hands of the station clock.
2010
I am wide awake.
The heavy nurse with the honey-tinted hair pops her head in. “Everything okay, papi?” I hold out the drawing I have made of her, and she’s surprised and delighted. In my five days here I’ve sketched all the nurses and orderlies who have attended me, even the grouches, and when I hand them their portraits they are all touched.
I was not in any denial regarding the risks of surgery at my advanced age—even the simple removal of my kidney stones exposing me to perilous complications—nor was I afraid. Others may lament If only I had more time! and I’ll certainly take it if it’s offered, but I have been very happy for twenty-four years! so when my day comes: no regrets. Having said that, I’ll admit that in the past the various procedures of my senior citizenry—the hip replacement, the bladder tumor mercifully caught early, the triple bypass—have engendered something of a panic in me: not the fear of death, but of painkillers. The junkie’s nightmare! But by being up-front that I am an addict and demanding the bare minimal dosage (and often taking less), I have never become attached to any prescription medication. I still go to meetings though only on Wednesdays, and if I’m tired I skip them, no longer feeling undying commitment is my thin thread barrier between sobriety and the gutter. And many years ago I finally took the Twelfth Step: I’m a sponsor.
Ira, the most troubled of my sponsees, has been clean six months now. Milestone.
Three days post-op, a crisp beautiful mid-October Thursday, I’m feeling like my old self and eager for my release this afternoon. I glance at the journal on my table. Book 102: a lot of words since my first composition book back in ’82! I’ve been reflecting on my life since I woke this morning and, feeling rather contentedly lazy, have not been in the mood to write it down. Besides, these memories I needn’t document to keep.
After that trip back to Humble, I did phone Roof three times over the next month. Nurse Lem was there for the first two calls to hold the receiver up to the patient’s ear. I couldn’t help but be aware of how my heart pounded in the brief moments I spoke with the RN before and after my conversations with Roof, and my disappointment when he wasn’t there for the third call, though the female attendant was very courteous. The fourth, in early August, was from Lem to me, to let me know that the best friend of my boyhood had passed. I told Lem how much I appreciated his kindness. He replied that he had met many lovely people in Humble, myself included, but that it was time he was moving on: in September he would begin a nine-month commitment to Médecins Sans Frontières in Sudan. At the time I hadn’t heard of the organization and, as a matter of fact, since official U.S. participation didn’t commence until 1990 (when the NGO became known in English as Doctors Without Borders), Lem was an early-birder. I told him how I frequently had longed to see Africa and that I remembered his photographs of the Ethiopian orphans and asked him if he had specifically requested Sudan and if he would work in other African nations and what had inspired him to become a health provider and before I knew it we had been on the phone an hour, then two, and I gradually came to realize that this was not an official business call, that Lem was speaking to me from his home and that, though I shuddered to imagine something so miraculous, he was being generous with his time not merely because he was a sympathetic nurse but because he wanted to talk to me. And when three hours had passed and it had become late on the East Coast (I would have to wait until the next day to call Roof’s sister Lucy with my condolences) and I could hear Lem fading a bit—in that moment I quietly took a breath before asking if he would write me from Africa. He said Yes.
That summer was good for Rett and me. Eventually we did see the redwoods, did take a drive down the Coast. Three months after his May 31st arrival, I accompanied him back to the airport, and we checked in the kitten in her kennel. He and his mother would have a lot of time to talk over the fall, and in January he’d begin his full load at IUPUI in Indianapolis, living at home this time, receiving his B.A. at the end of the year. But on that late August afternoon, just before he boarded the plane, I kissed my brother’s son, fighting tears, and he smiled and surprised me by saying, “Hope it works out with Lem.” How did he know? Well. I suppose I had casually brought up the nurse’s name a few times. This would have to be the explanation as Rett had promised me the days of his eavesdropping on my handwritten innermost thoughts were over and, at any rate, Lem would not be suitable in my memory book as he was not a memory. Living in the present was something I had not done in a very long time.
The first letter came in late September, after Lem was settled and, I presumed, he had deemed an appropriate number of days so as not to appear overeager. I wrote back the same day, setting a precedent so that from then on our exchanges were frequent and increasingly longer. Following the stint in Sudan, Lem did some continent-hopping, fulfilling his duties as a nurse in one place for a few months before moving on: Cambodia, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Ethiopia. He elegantly described to me the places and the people. And eventually he told me about growing up in Detroit, the fourth of five children. His father was an autoworker and Sunday lay preacher: Bathsheba, Abraham, Isaac, Jerusalem, Rebecka. Lem never understood why he was the only child named for a city but he never questioned it, appreciating both his given name and its diminutive. The classic story: Lem’s expulsion from the family on the grounds of his sexual orientation, his mother and sister Sheba continuing to exchange letters with him on the sly. And eventually I told Lem about Keith, and about my mother and father, and about my addictions, and about Eliot.
I used to wonder if my own loving parents, like Lem’s, like Keith’s, would have disowned me had they been aware. And one day it occurred to me: They must have known, even if they never spoke it. It would explain why I was in my thirties and my mother never asked me about marriage, never questioned my preference for male friends. It would explain why my father was so accepting of Keith as a pallbearer for Mom, and then for Eliot. My dearest friend wasn’t sure when I’d broached him about my brother’s casket, if it was something Eliot would have wanted, and then I wasn’t sure myself, as I wasn’t sure of anything in those awful, awful days after that horrifying thing that was once Eliot had been dredged from that Alabama river. I finally called Andi over at the colored hotel near Benjamin Banneker School—she and Didi, in town for the funeral, were sharing a room there—and she said through a choked voice that in his last days Eliot had expressed to her how utterly grateful he was to Keith for granting him the privilege of his goodbye to our mother, that she believed if Eliot were here he would insist on Keith as one of his pallbearers. And so it was.
After four years of correspondence, of Lem living outside the country, one day I received a letter informing me that when his current assignment concluded at the end of the year he would be ready to settle in one place. Despite the very personal revelations in our missives, we’d never expressed any romantic attachment to one another, and of course had met only the one time at the hospital in Humble. But in reading this announcement, his desire at last to root himself, I wondered where in the world that might occur, on what continent, and how far from San Francisco, my heart beating a bit faster. As I read further, I garnered the answer was New York City, and then: “Would you consider living there?”
He met me at JFK. It was the spring of ’88, and he had been living in the city a few months. I was fifty-nine, seven years clean, he a fit forty-seven. I was there for a visit. I may have nurtured all manner of fantasies but I was no naïve kid, to think this was for keeps. It was in fact our first date. We were both nervous, initially shaking each other’s hands, then he effecting an awkward hug. Reticent in the taxi after the loquaciousness of our letters that would sometimes run on to twenty pages. Then the cabbie dropped us off in his quiet Brooklyn neighborhood. His home was the third floor of a four-story brick townhouse he called a “brownstone.” There were many of these on his street, and although they reminded me of the undesirable row houses of Baltimore, I came quickly to learn that in New York they were quite coveted. He paused a few moments before going inside, then said softly, “I brought something back with me from Ethiopia.”
We entered, climbing the stairs. A very dark woman in her thirties sat in Lem’s living room reading a book. She looked up at us and smiled. For a moment I thought I’d misinterpreted everything! That he had brought back a wife from Africa, and had asked me about living in New York because, what. He had wanted a little something on the side?
“This is my friend Grace. She lives downstairs. And this is my friend Dwight.” It was strange to hear him introduce me this way, we who barely knew each other and who knew everything about each other.
“He’s sleeping,” Grace said. I detected no accent but perhaps a little Brooklynese. We quietly stepped into a bedroom. An infant of about a year old lay asleep in his crib. “This,” said Lem, “is Dawit. My son.”
It was my first true glimpse of Lem the Negotiator, Lem the Tactician. How he, a single middle-aged gay man, somehow managed to talk his way into the authorization of this legal adoption by both countries. His committed work certainly must have proved a factor with the African documentation. The baby woke then, staring up at us, especially at Lem, and began waving his arms and legs, his dark eyes twinkling, wonder and pleasure.
I was welcome to stay as long
as I liked, and two weeks later I moved from the guestroom to Lem’s room, and three months after that, throwing all mature caution to the wind, he asked me to stay and I said yes. The toddler called us both “Daddy” from the start, but it took seven years to make Dawit legally our son.
Though I was conflicted in a thousand ways, I decided without consulting Lem to sell Keith’s wonderful San Francisco apartment. We flew to the Bay Area where I rented a van, and as Lem and I were filling it I became emotional, as if I were saying goodbye to my first love again. Then I got behind the wheel of the vehicle, seated next to my second love, and was suddenly nervous that the cross-country drive back might reveal that we weren’t quite so compatible after all. On the contrary: the trip sealed the deal.
So we had money in the bank, and Lem continued working in a Brooklyn clinic. And how would I spend my days? Soon I found myself on the corner of 55th and Madison or 125th and Malcolm X sketching the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Apollo Theater, Times Square. But usually, and most gratifying for me, my clients, strolling folks impulsively drawn to a street artist, ask me to portray themselves. Their nervousness, wondering how I may caricature them, then their relief and delight in seeing how I could create something that is both flattering and true. Allowing them to see their own beauty.
