American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  Your asshole clerk, I will say. Deal with him. Your way, Teresa. Marry him. Murder him. Whatever. Your way, I will reiterate. Then I must be careful to add, Please ignore my crazy digressions, my playful revisions. They are not as innocent as the baby fists in your story.

  * * *

  Inside my head I see empires of my desire, empires of my revenge topple and kick up clouds of dust around my feet as they bury themselves, words spoken and unspoken. I suppress my dream of power, a fantasy I might possess an idea to improve myself or society, let alone possess the means to show any single person what she should or shouldn’t do next. I revise. Lean closer to my student for emphasis.

  * * *

  Your clerk, Teresa. This is the point or rather he’s the point where for me the energies within your story converge, crackle, glow. He’s about your age, your social and economic class more or less, your color more or less, a color, wisely or not, unspecified by your story but hardly irrelevant, I’d guess, since you imply his color inspires his ugly reaction to the young colored woman.

  * * *

  I think or rather my opinion or rather what I feel is that the clerk is you, Teresa. Something about you, about your father, your mother, me. We’re all inside that young guy and he’s inside us and that’s what allows him to be able and willing to marshal hundreds of years of history, of pillage, blood, suffering, and squash someone or maybe not try to squash, maybe just contain, maybe just loosen a little or sometimes just squeeze the wraps slightly tighter to test, to practice controlling them. Exercising them to make sure they are in place. To be certain they include, surround, protect us. Like the bonds of a story that hold it together and make sense of everything. Of a moment in which the clerk finds his job compels him to serve a young colored female who by God should expect nothing from him, who on the contrary should be serving him or grateful to him for whatever service she receives, who should make it apparent to him, always with humility and deference, that she’s well aware that the invisible strands permitting her to believe she has a right to ask him for help also license him, as he performs his numbing job, to despise her, abuse her, despise himself as he pretends to help so empire won’t crash down on both their heads.

  * * *

  Deal with him, with that, Teresa. As I must deal with my responsibilities. Teacher and elder. Subject of empire. Inventor of fictions.

  * * *

  Should I also share with my student an unsettling image that intrudes these days when I attempt to situate myself within this nation we inhabit. How I see young people returning from war. Daily, coast to coast, they are landing here and there in small airports and large, in bus depots, unpatrolled spots along interstates, smell of war still in their clothes, in their nostrils, blood dark on hands they furiously, secretly, silently scrub and scrub like Lady Macbeth, wasn’t it, I think. Think maybe I’ll teach Macbeth next semester or something from Shakespeare, anyway. Tempest, perhaps, or Melville’s Benito Cereno or narratives from Chernobyl a Russian woman recorded or Ellison’s Invisible Man because what else to say to them, how to help.

  * * *

  A few of these young people may receive a government bounty for school and a few of that few might migrate to a class like yours, Teresa, this class in which you seek help to write a story. A story to help others, story for a class in which my job is to help. The prospect terrifies me.

  * * *

  Whether or not any survivors of war wind up in my creative writing classroom, where are the rest. The ones I think of as veterans returning, and the ones killed in action, and the appalling number who die here inside our country each week by their own hands.

  * * *

  How many alive only an instant in these killing fields before they are gone forever. How many does it take to disturb the frozen quiet, black glisten of empire. To penetrate, agitate, produce movement. Not the empire’s dead invisible carcass thrashing darkly. Something else moving I try to detect in your eyes. In your story.

  * * *

  Where do they go. The ones coming back from combat, jails, exile, from being forgotten, tortured, ignored, from being buried alive. Not spoken of. Spoken for. Your young colored woman, her baby, that kid working at the hospital desk. You. Me.

  * * *

  I poke out a hand to break silence as we both rise. We shake shyly. Our chairs groan chair noise. See you next week, Teresa.

  WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE

  * * *

  Quick trip yesterday so today I’m certain and determined to jump, though not in any hurry. Why should I be. All the time in the world at my disposal. All of it. Every invisible iota. No beginning. No end. Whole load. Whole wad. All mine the moment I let go. Serene, copious, seamless time.

  * * *

  How much of it do you believe you possess. Enough of it to spare a stranger the chump change of a moment or two while he sits on Williamsburg Bridge, beyond fences that patrol the pedestrian walkway, on a forbidden edge where a long steel rail or pipe runs parallel to walkways, bikeways, highways, and train tracks supported by this enormous towering steel structure that supports us, too, sky above, East River below, this edge where the bridge starts and terminates in empty air.

  * * *

  To be absolutely certain, I rode the F train yesterday from my relatively quiet Lower East Side neighborhood to Thirty-Fourth Street and set myself adrift in crowds always flailing around Penn Station and Herald Square. To be certain of what. Certain I had no desire to repeat the experience. Certain that experience consists of repetition and that what repeats is the certainty of nothing new. Short subway ride uptown in dark tunnels beneath New York’s sidewalks, twenty-five, thirty minutes of daylight aboveground, among countless bodies shrieking, shuddering, hurtling ahead like trains underground, each one on its single, blind track and I was certain once more of the sad, frightening thoroughness of damage people inflict upon themselves and others, of a fallen city embracing us, showcasing the results of a future beyond repair. Certain I was prepared to sit here a short while and then let go.

  * * *

  I believe I heard Sonny Rollins playing his sax on Williamsburg Bridge one afternoon so many years ago I can’t recall the walkway’s color back then. Old color was definitely not what it is now: pale reds and mottled pinks of my tongue as I wag it at myself each morning in the mirror. Iron fences with flaking paint that’s cotton-candy pink frame the entrance to the bridge at the intersection of Delancey and Clinton Streets where I stepped onto it today for the very last time, passing through monumental stone portals, then under a framework of steel girders that span the bridge’s 118-foot width and display steel letters announcing its name.

  * * *

  Just beyond shoulder-high, rust-acned rails, a much taller crimson barrier of heavy-gauge steel chicken wire bolted to sturdy steel posts guards the fences. Steel crossbeams, spaced four yards or so apart, form a kind of serial roof over the walkway, too high by about a foot for me to jump up and touch, even on my best days playing hoop. Faded red crossties overhead could be rungs of a giant ladder that once upon a time had slanted up into the sky but now lies flat, rungs separated by gaps of sky that seem to open wider as I walk beneath them, though if I lower my eyes and gaze ahead into the distance where the bridge’s far end should be, the walkway’s a tunnel, solid walls and ceiling converge, no gaps, no exit, a mauvish gray cul-de-sac.

  * * *

  Tenor sax wail is the color I remember from the afternoon decades ago I heard Sonny Rollins the first and only time live. Color deeper than midnight blue. Dark, scathing, grudging color of a colored soldier’s wound coloring dirty white bandages wrapped around his dark chest. An almost total eclipse of color while dark blood slowly drip drop drip drops from mummy wrap into the snow. A soldier bleeding, an unknown someone testifying on a sax and the chance either one will survive the battlefield highly unlikely.

  I don’t want to weigh down my recollection with too much gloomy symbolism so let’s just say it was a clear aftern
oon a sax turned blacker than night. Color of all time. Vanished time. No time. Dark smudge like I mix from ovals of pure, perfect color in the paint box I found under the Christmas tree one morning when I was a kid. Unexpected color with a will of its own brewed by a horn’s laments, amens, witness. That’s what I remember, anyway. Color of disappointment, of ancient injuries and bruises and staying alive and dying and being born again all at once after I had completed about half the first lap of a back-and-forth hump over the Williamsburg Bridge.

  * * *

  Walking the bridge is an old habit now. One I share with numerous other walkers whose eyes avoid mine as I avoid theirs, our minds perhaps on people down below, people alive and dead on tennis courts, ball fields, running tracks, swings, slides, benches, chairs, blankets, grass plots, gray paths alongside the East River. Not exactly breaking news, is it, that from up here human beings seem tiny as ants. Too early this morning for most people or ants, but from this height, this perch beyond walkway fences, this railing or pipe along an out-of-bounds edge of Williamsburg Bridge, I see a few large ants or little people sprinkled here and there. Me way up here, ants and people way down there all the same size. Same weight. Same fate. Same crawl. Inching along inside the armor of our solitary-nesses. Hi-ho. Hi-Ho. Off to work we go.

  * * *

  So here I am, determined to jump, telling myself, telling you that I’m certain. Then what’s the fool waiting for, it’s fair for you to ask. My answer: certain an old-fashioned word in a world where, at best, I’m able only to approximate the color of a bridge I’ve walked across thousands of times, a world where the smartest people acknowledge an uncertainty principle and run things accordingly and own just about everything and make fools of the vast majority of the rest of us not as smart, not willing to endure lives without certain certainties. In this world where desire for certainty is a cage most people lock themselves in and throw away the key, I don’t wish to be a victim, a complete dupe, so I hedge my bets. I understand certainty is always relative, and not a very kind, generous, loving relative I can trust, especially since the uncertainty principle enfolds everybody equally, smart or dumb, no matter. Which is to say, or rather to admit, that although I’m sure I’m up here and sure this edge is where I wish to be and sure of what I intend to do next, I can’t be truly certain, only as close to certain as you or I will ever get, before the instant I let go.

  * * *

  Many years passed before I figured out it had to be Sonny Rollins I had heard. Do you know who I mean. Theodore Walter Rollins, born September 7, 1930, New York City—emerges early fifties, “most brash innovative creative young tenor player”—flees to Chicago to escape perils of NYC jazz scene—reemerges 1955 in NYC with Clifford Brown, Max Roach group—nicknamed Newk for resemblance to Don Newcombe, star Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher—produces string of great albums before he withdraws from public again—practices on the Williamsburg Bridge “to get self together after too much fame, too soon”—returns with new album, The Bridge—another sabbatical, Japan, India, “to get himself together” . . . thinks, “it’s a good thing for anybody to do” . . . etc. etc.—all this information available at Sonny Rollins website—although cocaine addiction, a year he did at Rikers for armed robbery are not in his website bio.

  * * *

  Once I’d become sure I had heard Sonny Rollins playing live, my interest, my passion for his music escalated. As did my intimacy with the Williamsburg Bridge. Recently, trying to discover where it ranks among New York bridges in terms of its attractiveness to jumpers, I came across AlexReisner.com/NYC2 and a story about a suicide in progress on the Williamsburg Bridge that Mr. Reisner claimed to witness. Numerous black-and-white photos illustrate his piece. In some pictures a young colored man wears neatly cropped dreads, pale skin, pale undershorts, a bemused expression, light mustache, shadow of beard, his hands curled around a pipe/rail running along the outermost edge of the bridge where he sits. Water ripples behind, below to frame him. His gaze downcast, engaged elsewhere, a place no one else on the planet can see. No people there, no time there where his eyes have drifted, settled. His features regular, handsome in a stiff, plain, old-fashioned way. Some mother’s mixed son, mixed-up son.

  * * *

  If I could twist around, shift my weight without losing balance, rotate my head pretty drastically for a chronically stiff neck and glance over my left shoulder, I’d see what the pale young man probably saw, the superimposed silhouettes of the Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridges downriver, grand cascades of steel cables draped from their towers, and over there if I stay steady and focused, I could pick out the tip of the Statue of Liberty jutting just above Brooklyn Bridge, Miss Liberty posed like sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the winners’ stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, her torch a black-gloved fist rammed into the sky: Up yours. We’re number one. Stadium in an uproar, Go boys go. I see a fuming Hitler grab his cockaded, tricornered hat and split like he did in ’36. In the haze where sky meets sea and both dissolve, a forest of tall cranes and derricks, arms canted at the exact angle of the Statue’s arm, return her victory salute.

  Dawns on me that I’ll miss the next Olympics, next March Madness, next Super Bowl. Dawns on me that I won’t regret missing them. A blessing. Free at last. Dawns on me I won’t miss missing them any more than all the sports I won’t be watching on TV will miss me.

  * * *

  If I still have your attention, I suppose I should say more about why I’m here, prepared to jump. It’s not because I won or didn’t win a gold medal. Not up here to sell shoes or politics. Nor because my mom’s French. Not here because of my color or lack of color. My coloring pale like the young colored man in website photos who sat, I believe, precisely on the spot where I’m sitting. Color not the reason I’m here nor the reason you are here, whatever you call your color. Mine, it appears, gives an impression of palish sepia or beige. The sprinters’ black fists, taut arms holler forget about it. Forget the yes or no, misfortune or fortune, lack or surplus of pigment your skin displays. Ain’t about color. Speed what it’s about. Color just a gleam in the beholder’s eye. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  On the other hand, no doubt, color matters. My brownish tinge, gift of the colored man my mother married, confers added protection against sunburn in tropical climates and a higher degree of social acceptance generally in some nations or regions or communities within nations or regions where people more or less my color are the dominant majority. My color also produces in many people of other colors an adverse reaction as hardwired as a worker ant’s love for the nest’s queen. Thus color keeps me on my toes. Danger and treachery never far removed from any person’s life regardless of color, but in my case, danger and treachery are palpable, everyday presences. No surprise at all. Unpleasantness life inflicts, no matter how terrible, also glimmers with confirmation. Told you so, Color smiles.

  Gender not the reason I’m here either. A crying shame in this advanced day and age that plenty of people would tag my posture as effeminate. See a little girlish girl on a couch squeezing her thighs together because she’s too shy in company to get up and go pee. A suspicious posture for a male, especially a guy with pale cheeks and chin noticeably shadowed by stubble. Truth is with my upper body tilted slightly backward, weight poised on my rear end, arms thrust out to either side for balance, hands like the young man’s in the photo gripping a fat pipe or rail, I must press my thighs together to maintain stability. Keep my feet spread apart so they serve as bobbing anchors.

  Try it sometime. Someplace high and dangerous, ideally. You’ll get the point. Point being of course any position you assume up here unsafe. Like choice of a language, gender, color, etc. People forced to choose, forced to suffer the consequences. No default settings. Like choosing which clothes to wear on the Williamsburg Bridge or not wear. I’ve chosen to keep my undershorts on. I want to be remembered as a swimmer not some naked nut. Swimmer who has decided to swim away, dignity intact. Homely but perfectly respectable box
ers serving as proxies for swimming trunks. Just about naked also because I don’t wish to be mistaken for a terrorist. No intent to harm a living soul. Or dead souls. No traffic accidents, boat accidents caused by my falling body, heavier and heavier, they say, as it descends. No concealed weapons, no dynamite strapped around my bare belly. No excuse for cops to waste me unless they’re scared of what’s inside my shorts, and I sympathize with their suspicions. Understand cops are pledged to protect us, guarantee our security. We live in troubled times. Who doubts it. Who can tell what’s in the mind of a person sitting next to you on a subway or standing at the adjacent public urinal. Anyway, either way, gunned down or not, I’ve taken pains to situate myself on the bridge’s outermost edge to maximize the chance I hit nothing but water, no collateral damage.

  * * *

  And contrary to what you might be thinking, loneliness has not driven me to the edge. I’m far from lonely. With all the starving, homeless people on the planet, don’t waste any pity on me, please. In addition to my undershorts I have pain, grief, plenty of regrets, dismal expectations of the future to keep me company, and when not entertained sufficiently by those companions I look down below. Whole shitty world’s at my feet.

  My chilly toes wiggle like antennae, my chilly thighs squeeze together not because of loneliness. They move with purpose like my mother’s hands forming a steeple. You might think she’s about to pray, but then she chants: Here’s the church/See the steeple, words that start a game Mom taught me in ancient days. Hand jive. I can’t stop a grin spreading across my face even here, today, when she begins rhyming and steeples her pale, elegant fingers. I’m a sucker every time. Here’s the church/See the steeple. I close my eyes—cathedrals, towers, castles, cities materialize in thin air—la-di-da . . . la-di-da. I drift entranced till she cries: Open the doors/Out come the people. Then her fingertips hordes of tiny wiggly people who poke, tickle, grab, nibble, pinch. I giggle, and she laughs out loud. I double over to protect my softest, most ticklish spots. Her nails dig into my ribs, fingers chase me up under my clothes. My small body squirms, thrashes every which way on her lap. No escape. Stoppit. Stoppit. Please, Mom. Stop or I’ll fall. Please don’t stop.