American Histories

by John Edgar Wideman

  * * *

  On the bridge one dark day, thick clouds rolling in fast, sky almost black at two in the afternoon, I caught a glimpse of a man reflected in a silvery band of light that popped up solid as a mirror for an instant parallel to the walkway fence, a momentary but too, too crystal-clear image of a beat-up hunched-over colored guy in a beret, baggy gray sweats, big ugly sneakers scurrying across Williamsburg Bridge, an old gray person beside me nobody loves and he loves nobody. He might as well be dead. Who would know or care if he dies or doesn’t, and this man scurrying stupid as an ant in a box, back and forth, back and forth between walls it can’t scale, is me, a lonely, aging person trapped in a gray city, a vicious country, me scurrying back and forth as if scurrying might change my fate, and I think what a pitiful creature, what a miserable existence, it doesn’t get any worse than this shit, and then it does get worse. Icy pellets of rain start pelting me, but between stinging drops a bright idea—universe bigger than NYC, bigger than America. Get out of here, get away, take a trip, visit Paris again, and even before the part about where the fuck’s the money coming from, I’m remembering I detest tourism, tourists worse than thieves in my opinion, evil and dangerous because tourists steal entire lands and cultures, strip them little by little, stick in their pockets everything they can cart back home and exchange for other commodities until other lands and cultures emptied and vanish, tourists worse than thieves, worse like false-hearted lovers worse than thieves in the old song, you know how it goes, a thief will just rob you . . . ba-dup, ba-dup . . . and take what you have . . . but a false-hearted lover leads you to the grave. Tourists worse than thieves, like false-hearted lovers worse than thieves, but a false-hearted lover far worse than any worst thing you can imagine. So where to go, where to hide, what to do after seeing that ghost.

  * * *

  Once I had hopes love might help. Shared rapture once with a false-hearted lover. I’ll start with your toes, my gorgeous lover whispered, start with your cute crooked toes she says, your funny crooked toes with undersides same color as mine, skin on top a darker color than mine she grins and when I’m finished with your toes she promises my false-hearted lover promises I’ll do the rest.

  Hours and hours later she’s still doing toes, she’s in no hurry and neither am I. Enraptured. Toes tingle, aglow. How many toes do I own. However many, I wished for more and one toe also more than enough. Toe she’s working on makes me forget its ancestors, siblings, posterity, forget everything. Bliss will never end. I read War and Peace, Dhalgren, Don Quixote and think I’ll start Proust next after I finish Cane or has it been Sonny Rollins’s mellow sax, not written words, accompanying work she’s busy doing down there. Whole body into it, every tentacle, orifice, treacly inner wetness, hers, mine. I’m growing new toes or does one original toe expand, proliferate, bud, bloom, breed. Could be one toe or many, who knows who cares, she’s still at it and who’s counting.

  I floated miles above her, us, them, it, far removed from this “inextricable place,” as a favorite writer of mine named the world. Time stopped—yes/no—then here it comes. I hear it whirring, starting up again. No. Nobody turned off the time machine. I just missed a beat. Missed one tick or tock and fell asleep before the next tick or tock. Time only seemed to stop, as during a yawn, blink, death, rapture, as in those apparently permanent silences between two consecutive musical notes Sonny Rollins or Thelonious Monk brew, or between heartbeats, hers, mine, ours. A hiccuping pause, hitch, an extenuating circumstance like being tickled by my mom while I’m attempting to act grown-up, dignified, serious.

  Falling . . . slipped out of love. It’s afterwards and also seamlessly before she starts on my toes and she’s still in no hurry. No hurry in her voice the day that very same false-hearted lover tells me she’s falling . . . slipped out of love.

  Shame on me, but I couldn’t help myself, shouted her words back in her face—falling . . . slipped out of love. Who wouldn’t need to scream, to grab her, shake her, search for a reflection in the abyss of her eyes, in the dark mirror of whitespace. I plunged, kicked, flailed, swallowed water, wind, freezing rain.

  * * *

  Sad but true some people born unlucky in love, and if you’re jinxed that way, it seems never to get any better. No greeting this morning from my neighbor ghost, not even a goodbye wave. Can’t say what difference it might have made if she had appeared in her window. I simply register my regret and state the fact she was a no-show again this morning.

  I believe it’s her I speak to politely in the elevator. Her I nod at or smile or wave at on streets surrounding this vast apartment complex or when we cross paths in the drab lobby shared by the buildings we inhabit. When I moved into my fifteenth-floor, one bedroom, kitchenette, and bath, the Twin Towers still lurked at the Island’s tip, biggest bullies on the block after blocks of skyscrapers, high-rises, the spectacle still novel to my eyes, so much city out the window, its size and sprawl and chaos would snag my gaze, stop me in my tracks, especially the endless sea of glittering lights at night, and for the millisecond or so it took to disentangle a stare, my body would expand, fly apart, each particle seeking out its twin among infinite particles of city, and during one such pause, from the corner of one eye as I returned to restore the building, the room, my flesh-and-blood self, I glimpsed what might have been the blur of a white nightgown or blur of a pale, naked torso fill the entire bright window across the courtyard from my kitchenette window, a woman shape I was sure, so large, vital, near, my neighbor must have been pressing her skin against the cool glass, a phantom disappearing faster than I could focus, then gone when a Venetian blind’s abrupt descent cut off my view, all but a half-hand-high/thirty-inch-wide band of emptiness at the window’s bottom edge, increasingly familiar and intimate as years passed.

  What if she had known that today was her last chance. For a showing as in Pentecost. Jewish ghost to Gentile apostles, their eyes all a-goggle, flabbergasted, humbled, scared. Nobody’s fault it didn’t occur. No different this morning, though it’s my last. Her final chance, too. Sad she didn’t know. Sad she may have moved out years ago. Too bad I won’t be around tomorrow to tell her I’m up here today so we can be unhappy about it together, laugh about it together. Her name, if I knew it, on the note I won’t write and leave behind for posterity.

  * * *

  Posterity. Pentecost. With a phone I could review both etymologies. Considered bringing a phone. Not really. Phone would tempt me to linger, call someone. One last call. To whom. No phone. Nowhere to put it if I had one. Maybe tucked in the waistband of my shorts. Little tuck of belly already stretching the elastic. Vanity versus necessity. So what if I bulge. But how to manage a call if I had a phone and someone to call. Freeing my hands would mean letting go of the thick pipe/railing, an unadvisable maneuver. Accidental fall funny. Not so funny, not acceptable, not my intent. Would spoil my show. A flawless Pentecost this morning, please.

  Posterity, Pentecost, old-fashioned words hoisting themselves up on crutches, rattling, sighing their way through alleys and corridors of steel girders, struts, trusses, concrete piers. Noisy chaos of words graffitied on the pedestrian walkway: Dheadt Refuse—Eat Me—Jew York—Poop Dick Dat Bitch—Honduras. Ominous silence of highway free of traffic as it never is except rarely after hours and even during the deepest predawn quiet a lone wolf car will blast across or weave drunkenly from lane to lane as if wincing from blows of wind howling, sweeping over the Williamsburg Bridge.

  * * *

  Why the most outmoded, most vexing word. Staggering across Williamsburg Bridge one morning, buffeted by winds from every direction, headwind stiff enough to support my weight, leaning into it at a forty-five-degree angle, blinded by the tempest, flailing, fearing the undertow, the comic strip head-over-heels liftoff and blown away—goodbye, goody-bye, everybody—and I asked myself why the fuck are you up here, jackass, walking the bridge in this godforsaken weather, and that question—why—drum-drum-drumming in my eardrums, the only evidence of my sanity I
was able to produce.

  * * *

  Why not let go. Escape whitespace. Fly away from this place where I teeter and totter, shiver, hold on to a cold iron rail, thighs pressed together like sissy girls afraid of the dark, clinging, hugging each other for warmth and company, fingers numb from gripping, toes frozen stiff, no air in my lungs or feathers. If I possess feathers. If I possess wings.

  * * *

  Always someone’s turn at the edge, isn’t it. Aren’t you grateful it’s me not you today. I’m your proxy. During the Civil War a man drafted into the Union Army could pay another man to enlist in his place. This quite legal practice of hiring a proxy to avoid a dangerous obligation of citizenship enraged those who could not afford the luxury, and to protest draft laws which in effect exempted the rich while the poor were compelled to serve as cannon fodder in Mr. Lincoln’s bloody, unpopular war, mobs rioted in several Northern cities, most famously here in New York, where murderous violence lasted several days, ending only after federal troops were dispatched to halt the killing, beatings, looting, burning.

  Poor people of color by far the majority of the so-called draft riots’ victims. A not unnatural consequence given the fact mobs could not get their hands on wealthy men who had hired proxies and stayed behind locked doors of their substantial mansions in substantial neighborhoods protected by armed guards during the civil unrest. Poor colored people on the other hand easy targets. Most resided in hovels alongside hovels of poor whites, thus readily accessible, more or less simple to identify, and none of them possessed rights a white man required by law or custom to respect. Toll of colored lives heavy. I googled it.

  So much killing, dying, when after all, a proxy’s death can’t save a person’s life. Wall Street brokers who purchased exemption from death in the killing fields of Virginia didn’t buy immortality. Whether Christ dies for our sins or not, each of us obligated to die. On the other hand the moment you learn your proxy killed in action at Gettysburg, wouldn’t it feel a little like stealing a taste of immortality. Illicit rapture.

  If suicide a crime, shouldn’t martyrdom be illegal, too. Felony or misdemeanor. How many years for attempted martyrdom. Neither a life sentence nor capital punishment would have deterred Jesus. Terrorists not deterred either. Was Jesus serving time on Rikers Island when Sonny Rollins showed up. Did they jam together.

  * * *

  Sitting here today folded wings heavy as stone I can still imagine how it might feel to fly. I can imagine whitespace parting as wings, strokes, words enter it and form stories with beginnings, middles, ends. I can imagine such stories being written and printed, imagine myself and others inhabiting them, reading them, imagine how memories of what’s been said or written seem real, but I cannot imagine where whitespace begins or ends. White pages whir past and dissolve. Myself printed, my invisible colored ink pushed across blank space. Blind leading the blind.

  * * *

  When you reach the edge you must decide to go further or not, to be free or not. If you hesitate, you get stuck like the unnamed, fair-skinned, young colored man in Reisner’s photos. Better to let go quickly and maybe you will rise higher and higher because that’s what happens sometimes when you let go—rapture. Why do fathers build wings if they don’t want sons to fly; why do mothers bear sons if they don’t want sons to die.

  * * *

  On TV I watched the arm of a starfish float away from its body. The diseased fish captive in a huge tank in a lab so its death could be observed and filmed by scientists. Arm separates, glides away, leaves a hole behind where it had detached itself, a dark wound leaking vital fluids and fluttery shreds of starfish. Loose arm long and straight, slightly tapered at one end, a hard, spiky-looking outer shell, interior soft, saturated with suckers. Off it floats, slowly, serenely, as if motivated by a will of its own. I could have easily believed the arm a new fish foraging in the tank’s floodlit, murky water. Except an absolutely unimpeachable voice-over informed me the starfish is unable to regenerate lost limbs and a severed starfish limb unable to grow into a new starfish.

  * * *

  When I let go and topple backward, will I cause a splash, leave a mark. After the hole closes, how will the cops locate me. I regret not having answers, not completing my essay on whitespace. The plunge backward off my perch perhaps the last indispensable piece of research. As Zora Neale Hurston said, You got to go there to know there.

  * * *

  At the last minute for comfort’s sake, for the poetry of departing this world as naked as I arrived, maybe I will remove these boxers. Why worry about other people’s reactions. Trying to please other people a waste of time. At my age, I understand good and well my only captive audience is me. Myself. I. Any person paying too much attention to an incidental detail like shorts is dealing with her or his own problems, aren’t they, and their problems by definition not mine. Allowing other people’s hang-ups to influence my decisions gets things ass-backwards as the elders used to say. Perhaps people down below are my proxies—halt, lame, blind, broken-in-spirit, lost, abandoned, terrified, starving proxies saving me to live another day, ba-dup, ba-dup, buying time for me with their flesh-and-blood lives while I shiver and sway up here. Their sacrifices in vain, no doubt. I’m too close to the edge, too much whitespace to fall or fly or crawl across. I have no words to soothe other people’s pain, to quiet their cries drum, drumming in my ears.

  * * *

  Can’t seem to get underwear off my brain this last morning. Not mine, we’re finished with mine, I hope. Though a woman’s underwear in Paris, my undershorts today on Williamsburg Bridge surprisingly similar, both made of the same no-frills, white cotton cloth as little girls’ drawers used to be. I’m seeing a lady’s underwear and recalling another unlucky-in-love story. Last one I’ll tell, I promise. A civil war precipitated by underwear. Not a murderous war like ours between the States. A small, bittersweet conflict. Tug-of-war when I begin pulling down a lady’s underwear and she resists.

  I was young, testing unclear rules, slippery rules because of slippery eel me. Civil war waged inside me by my slippery parts. I wished/wish to think of myself as a decent person, an equal partner, not tyrant or exploiter in my exchanges with others, especially women. Which meant that whatever transpired in Paris between a lady and me should have been her show, governed by her rules, but I was renting her time, thus proxy owner of her saffron skin, slim hips, breasts deep for a young woman. Why not play. Wrap a long, black, lustrous braid around my fist, pull her head gently back on her shoulders until her neck arches gracefully and she moans or whimpers deep in her throat.

  I had asked her name and when she didn’t respond immediately, repeated my French phrase—comment t’appelles-tu—more attention to pronunciation since she was obviously of Asian descent, a recent immigrant or illegal, maybe, and perhaps French not her native language. Ana, I thought she replied after I had asked a second, slower time. Then I shared my name, and said I’m American, a black American—noir—I said in case my pale color confused her. I asked her country of origin—de quel pays—another slight hesitation on her side before she said—Chine—or she could have said Ana again or the first Ana-like sound could have been China, I realized later. Her name a country. Country’s name spoken in English, then French, an answer to both my inquiries.

  Anyway her eagerness to please teased me with the prospect that perhaps no rules need inhibit my pleasure. I assumed all doors open if a tip generous enough added to the fee already collected by a fortyish woman on a sofa at the massage parlor’s entrance on Rue Duranton. Only unresolved issue the exact amount of pourboire. I didn’t wish to spoil our encounter with market-stall haggling, so like any good translator, I settled for approximate equivalences and we performed a short, silent charade of nods, looks, winks, blinks, fingers to express sums and simulate acts, both of us smiling as we worked, hi-ho, hi-ho.

  I trusted our bargain had reduced her rules to only one rule I need respect: pay and you can play. Her bright, black eyes seemed t
o agree. Resistance, they said, just part of the game, monsieur. Just be patient, s’il vous plaît. Play along. I may pretend to plead—no no no no—when your fingers touch my underwear, but please persist, test me.

  Easy as pie for a while. Underwear slid down her hips to reveal an edge of dark pubic crest. Then not so easy after she flops down on the floor next to the mat, curls up knees to chest, and emits a small, stifled cry. Then it’s inch by inch until underwear finally dangled from one bobbing ankle, snapped off finally, and tossed aside. A minute more and not a bit of shyness. Time machine purrs, rolls on, da-bup, da-bup.

  Wish I could say I knew better. Knew when to stop, whether I paid or not for the privilege of going further. Wish I believed now that we were on the same page then. But no. Huh-uh. Like most of us I behaved inexcusably. Believed what I wanted to believe. Copped what I could because I could. No thought of limits, boundaries. Hers or mine. No fear of AIDS back then. Undeterred by the threat of hordes of Chinese soldiers blowing bugles, firing burp guns, ba-do-do-do-do-do as they descend across the Yalu River to attack stunned U.S. troops, allies of the South in a civil war, Americans who had advanced a bridge too far north and found themselves stranded, trapped, mauled, shivering, bleeding, dying in snowdrifts beside the frozen Chosin Reservoir.

  No regrets, no remorse until years later, back home again ba-dup, ba-dup, and one afternoon Sonny Rollins practicing changes on the Williamsburg Bridge halts me dead in my tracks. Big colors, radiant bucketfuls splash my face. I spin, swim in colors. Enraptured. Abducted by angels who lift me by my droopy wings up, up, and away. Then they let go and I fall, plunge deeper and deeper into swirling darkness.

  * * *

  Am I remembering it right, getting the story, the timing right, the times, the fifties, sixties, everything runs together, happens at once, explodes, scatters.