The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

by Kia Corthron

  At the funeral one of April May June’s longtime Gallaudet friends took me aside to express her condolences. I remembered the woman had had her own share of grief: three weeks after her teenage son earned his driver’s license, he was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. The woman wanted to express that she understood what I was going through, the utter pain of their absence from this earth, the frightening mystery of where they are now, if anywhere. I nodded my empathy, but in truth I was perplexed by her feelings of some sort of limbo regarding her son’s essence, or his complete oblivion. Other than Iona’s children’s choir concerts, I haven’t sat through a church service since I was expelled after singing too loudly and too deafly as a child, yet I’ve always believed in an afterlife, this Christian conviction reinforced by April May June’s readings on traditional African spirituality, the faith that our ancestors are active, watching over us. In that respect my young wife is now my ancestor. I speak with her often.

  Standing outside the hospital this bright, crisp October Sunday, I’m surprised to see the van pull up as I’d expected Iona would have come alone in her Prius. The doors open and the gang pours out. Nine-year-old Maurie and seven-year-old Ernest running to me, “Paw-Paw!” on their lips, their hands moving rapidly, each of them telling me so much I can’t keep up. Next to my grandson is his best buddy Vincent Cho, moving his own hands in wild imitation and desperately hoping they might mean something. Vincent has taught Ernest a few Korean words he learned from his grandparents, so perhaps I’ll suggest to Ernest that he return the favor in ASL. Fela walks over too, smiling broadly but hanging back with Scott, her fifteen-year-old boyfriend. They’ve been together a few months. What does a fourteen-year-old girl need with a boyfriend? I’d asked Iona as she folded laundry one afternoon. Oh, they’re not doing anything, Dad. Yet! I countered. She put the clean towels into a pile. I watched her, debating whether I should continue with what was really on my mind. And then I did: And must he be a white boy? I had had to put my hands in her eyeview as she was bent over away from me, and then I witnessed her entire body shaking in response. What? I demanded, What’s so funny! And now the hearing boy nervously signs his respectful greetings, trying to impress me. Well I do remember a few Sundays ago, when the younger children dragged him away from an NFL game on which he and Dex had been intently focused so he could play Chutes and Ladders with them. I was in the kitchen, Iona washing the dishes and me drying, and Scott didn’t know I was watching. Hard as it was to pull himself away from the fourth-quarter action, I could see he was willing to make the sacrifice because it made the children happy. I was touched, this white boy. Guess I’m getting liberal in my old age.

  Now Maurie takes my cane and grabs my right arm while Ernest clutches my left, marching me to the van, Vincent skipping beside us. Fela’s yelling something about not pulling too hard on Paw-Paw. Iona is outside the front passenger side of the vehicle, clearing the space for me, the inside always chaotic with the various discarded items of four kids. My daughter looks up and smiles, kisses her father. I’m a lucky, lucky man.

  We cross town, Iona expertly navigating the capricious Manhattan traffic. Just behind me Ernest and Vincent wrestle and laugh, I imagine a hearing person would say squeal, Iona periodically hollering at them to stop, which they always do for several seconds, a look of shock on their faces as if they had no idea they were being disruptive, before resuming the brawl. Next to them and behind Iona, Maurie reads a book. No one will ever know, but of the three older children she’s my favorite. A darker complexion, and she wears glasses while Iona never did, but otherwise the spitting image of her mother at her age. She comes to me often, initiating long manual conversations, but with verbal speech she’s reticent. She reads a children’s novel I gave her, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, a wonderful story about a black family from Michigan who eventually travel to my birth state in a volatile era. There was a time when I didn’t even want to talk about where I came from, but those days are long past. While Iona was still small, I’d even started accompanying my wife and daughter on their trips South to April May June’s family, having finally decided there was nothing healthy in my holding a grudge against my home region forever.

  Now my granddaughter looks up and, seeing me smiling at her, grins ear to ear. Someday I’ll take her to the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham which we visited after one of those South Carolina visits, a stunning museum built right across from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where the four little girls died in the bombing. I was overcome with emotion. Yes, Alabama has changed, and perhaps, in a small way, redeemed itself. I’ve never been back to Prayer Ridge.

  In the far backseat, Fela and Scott pass an MP3 player back and forth, discussing the songs and giggling. And I am reminded of when I first held her, a tiny infant in my hands, her mother telling me she shared her name with a Nigerian recording artist. And then Iona granting me the privilege of giving my firstborn grandchild her sign name: a variation of the sign for “music” with my moving right hand an F.

  Now Fela turns to affectionately touch the nose of her youngest brother in the baby seat next to her. The fourth pregnancy was a surprise to everyone, especially Dex and Iona, and she swears he’s her last. When the amniocentesis revealed the child’s gender, this one, my daughter informed me, would be Benjamin. What the amnio didn’t divulge, or perhaps the doctor missed it, is that, like his namesake, Benny would be deaf, a product of his genetic history. I sign now to the two-year-old who grins and replies. Babies, deaf or hearing, pick up manual language quicker than verbal, and my toddler grandchild already has quite an extensive vocabulary. I wish he could have met April May June. Well, I wish they all could have. When I show him her pictures he signs “Grandmother.”

  Early in the baby’s first year, I tentatively broached the subject of cochlear implants with Iona, the surgery that could cause Benny to hear and thus speak. She said that she and Dex had already had this discussion and that she categorically refused to put her perfectly healthy child through any major medical procedure, Dex more ambivalently coming to agree. While I’m sensitive to parents who struggle with this question and may choose differently, I couldn’t have been more pleased with Iona’s decision and knew April May June would have felt the same. In my wife’s last years she’d become quite apprehensive about the Human Genome Project. At a meeting in a city deaf school auditorium, April May June in her beautiful dreadlocks nervously stood and wrote “Deaf” on the board before signing her speech. There’s a reason when referencing the culture that “Deaf” is now capitalized, she began. How can we help hearing scientists resolved toward the elimination of deafness as a universal good—How can we make them understand that sign language and Deaf culture, Deaf people, should always exist? They talk of hearing as life-changing, and they’re right. If they could have made me hear as a child—and then I was startled when my wife turned to me in the audience. If they could have made you hear as a child, my husband, it would have affected you, your entire being. It would have made you a different person, the B.J. we know never would have existed. And what a loss to the world that would have been.

  On the van floor behind me, I notice the copy of Madeline I’d given my firstborn grandchild when she was very small, opened to the inside front cover: “To Fela April Ryland-Evans, Love, Paw-Paw.” Maurie and Ernest had adopted it later and there are scribbles throughout the pages, all of them knowing the story by heart. Their hyphenated surname is the legal appellation of the entire family, including Dex. There was a time when I would have been fine to have had the name Evans vanish with my generation, my family shame. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize how reductive it is to define an entire clan by one event, even if that event was a cataclysm of the first order. Or perhaps I just discovered that in the hospital, remembering how much my baby brother Randall had meant to me in our beautiful, innocent youth. Yes, we are never, ever too old to learn.

  Up to the West 40s and un
der the mighty Hudson, the Lincoln Tunnel. Ernest taps me and signs that he wants to look through my wallet. They’ve all loved going through my many pictures, especially of themselves at different ages. But this time, while showing the photos to Vincent beside him, Ernest asks, Is this your brother from the hospital? The eighth-grade picture of Randall with Pa. Yes, I tell him, it is. Then my grandson says, Paw-Paw, the picture of Mr. Campbell’s falling apart. Maurie says, Let me see Mr. Campbell!

  The Prayer Ridge Times photo of Eliot Campbell, October 1960, a handsome likeness of the young lawyer. I did not keep the image of his mutilated corpse. My daughter and, with the exception of the baby, all my grandchildren know who he was, though Iona and I have been ginger with the details for the smaller ones. When Fela began asking more incisive questions at twelve, we filled in the truth for her, and now I see the sadness in her eyes at the mention of his name.

  In 1960 Alabama my brother and Francis Veter and his nephews never would have been sentenced to death for killing a black man. I’ve always been opposed to the death penalty, and I’ve sometimes wondered if I could have testified had I thought my brother might possibly been handed any reprimand harsher than life imprisonment. (More likely single-digit years.) I suppose we all spend too much time considering the what ifs. I gently take the photo from Ernest. It’s been a long time since I gazed at it.

  I’ll get it laminated, Iona says. Or I bet I can google it, old newspaper, print a new copy. For the moment she ends her plans there because she knows not to speak at length to me while driving. Her unconscious lifelong habit of interpreting everyone’s utterance used to terrify me when she was at the wheel, barely touching it while both her hands fluttered rapidly. My wife had grown up in a deaf family and would have been unfazed, the Junes having always driven this way, but by the time I met April May June I was a public transportation New Yorker so I never became used to the practice, and I finally warned Iona if she kept it up I wouldn’t ride with her anymore. What I didn’t mention was that I appreciate the solitude, the time alone with my thoughts.

  We emerge from the tunnel, and now we are at my favorite part of the route. The panoramic view of Manhattan. The city I journeyed to fifty years ago, the city I have adopted as home. Iona frequently reminds me that when I’m ready there will be a room for me with her and Dex, and Dex has always enthusiastically seconded the invitation. But my daughter knows I love my apartment in Harlem, the neighborhood where I raised a child with my wife and partner. I’m still quite self-sufficient, so Iona doesn’t push the issue.

  I’ve never been a man of goals. Whatever life handed me I went with: the sawmill, the diner, the high-rise window cleaning, the superintendent job, the museum docent, the teaching, the church caretaker. But now at my advanced age I’ve decided on an objective. I plan to live to be a hundred. This is not so easily attainable as it may seem: as a babe of eighty-seven, I still have thirteen years to go. But I’ve made it my private ambition to be a part of that elite club I’ve dubbed The Centenarian Society. The beauty of this plan is if I achieve my aspiration, I will have seen three of my grandchildren graduate from high school and the fourth well on his way, perhaps even witness the birth of a great-grand. And if I fall short, well. All the sooner to be with April May June again.

  Win win.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I owe my undying gratitude to all the people who read my novel in an early draft—when it was even bigger than it is now!—and provided invaluable initial feedback, both in offering their thoughts and in patiently and readily answering all my questions. That list includes my sister (and fellow writer) Kara Lee Corthron, and my friends Jacqueline Kelly, Cori Thomas, Michael John Garcés, Marina Shron, Lisa Leaverton, Molly Porter, and Adam Kraar, whom I also would like to thank for introducing me to my terrific agent Malaga Baldi. Also, thanks to the email introduction by Maggie Sherrerd, I would like to express my huge gratitude to Iris Kinley, someone who didn’t know me at all and yet generously agreed to read my tome—my first Deaf reader and the first time I was able to hear thoughts from a complete stranger (though we are now certainly friends), both these perspectives proving beneficial beyond words.

  Two other early readers and respondents: Garrett Wright, an attorney with the Urban Justice Center and a member of the National Lawyers Guild, who provided both literary and vital legal feedback, and who accompanied me to court to observe; and Tomas Medina, another lawyer friend who answered questions about legal education and career, and who also was a wonderful firsthand source regarding 1983 gay San Francisco. And I want to thank my friend, lawyer and writer Cynthia L. Cooper, for advising me on the history of juvenile law, and for bringing me to the chambers of the Honorable Emily Jane Goodman, New York State Supreme Court Justice (since retired), who, along with her astute clerk Andrea Field, Esq., provided superb insights into the mid-twentieth-century legal world.

  I am grateful to my friend Joanne Jacobson for opening her home to me as a quiet space to write when the novel was the germ of an idea; and to my friend Naomi Wallace, another of my early readers and responders, who likewise invited me to work at the home she shares with her husband Bruce McLeod—and thanks to Caitlin McLeod for her room.

  A responder who came later in the process was Cory Silverberg, a friend who has been outrageously supportive of the book since he read it, and who brought it to the attention of his own publisher, Seven Stories Press.

  Much gratitude for the generosity of their time and advice with regard to the medical references to physician’s assistant Florentino Reyes on an early draft, and to Dr. Lucy Painter on a late draft.

  I must mention two other crucial guides: Michael Mejias, who read the long(er) form of the manuscript and shared his thoughts, as well as provided me with my first lessons regarding the profession of publishing; and editor Susan Dalsimer, who on a barter (I read her play and she read my novel) provided insightful impressions of a later draft.

  In Indianapolis, I’d like to thank Katharine Springer, State Data Center Coordinator, Reference and Government Services, Indiana State Library, as well as a young male librarian whose name I unfortunately didn’t get at the Indianapolis Public Library, Central Library branch. And by email, the IUPUI University Archives Specialists Greg Mobley and Mindy Marie Cooper.

  Over the time I worked on the novel I was very fortunate to have been awarded focused time at several outstanding artist residencies: the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts via its Wachtmeister Award(where the writing truly began in earnest), the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Dora Maar House (France), and three different stints at the MacDowell Colony, one of which resulted in my eternal gratitude to Blake Tewksbury for driving me to the computer shop in Keene after my laptop died on my very first day! I’d also like to acknowledge my month as Visiting Artist at the Siena Art Institute (Italy) where I was able for the first time to read a chapter in a public event, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland) for late-stage tweaking, and Bogliasco Foundation (Italy) where I received the ARC for the final proof.

  I would like to thank Amy Robbins for being a fabulous copy-editor. And I want to thank everyone at Seven Stories Press, in particular my wonderful editor Veronica Liu, someone who believed in the book from the start in all its massiveness, and whose thoughts expressed a deep understanding of everything I was trying to do. For a first novel, I couldn’t have been luckier.

  As a work of historical fiction,The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a product of my imagination founded in documented reality. My imagination is a product of my upbringing, so lastly I must acknowledge my immediate and extended family, and my hometown Cumberland, Maryland. A heck of a lot of my own memories, as well as recollections of the previous generation that have been handed down to me, appear herein, consciously and, probably much more frequently, not.

  REFERENCES

  The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a fictional narrative steeped in twentieth-century American history. I ut
ilized numerous sources, some to garner specific information, some inspiring in other ways. Below is an abridged list.

  Allen, James, ed. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000.

  Apel, Dora, and Shawn Michelle Smith. Lynching Photographs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008

  Aretha, David. The Trial of the Scottsboro Boys. Civil Rights Movement Series. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds Publishing, 2007.

  Aronson, Josh, dir. Sound and Fury, documentary. Aronson Film Associates et al., 2000.

  Bemelmans, Ludwig. Madeline. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.

  Berryman, Clifford Kennedy. “Oh, the old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be.” Cartoon, published December 26, 1943.

  Bullard, Douglas. T. Islay. Dallas, TX: TJ Publishers, Inc., 1986.

  Cameron, James. A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1982.

  Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991.

  Clinton, George, et al. “Tear the Roof off the Sucker (Give Up the Funk),” as recorded by Parliament. Casablanca records, 1976.

  The Code of Georgia of 1933. Adopted March 24, 1933; effective January 1, 1935. Prepared under the direction of the Code Commission by Orville A. Park and Harry S. Strozier. Atlanta, GA: Harrison Company, 1935.

  Collins, Bootsy, performing “Stretchin’ Out” on Night Music, NBC, episode 204, 1989.

  Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. New York: International Publishers, 1989.

  DeBruyne, Nese F. and Anne Leland. Congressional Research Service: American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics. January 2, 2015.