Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

Our mother was smiling when they brought her out. She was extremely surprised when she saw Ella. They made a striking contrast, the thin near-white woman and the big black one hugging each other. I don’t remember much about the rest of the visit, except that there was a lot of talking, and Ella had everything in hand, and we left with all of us feeling better than we ever had about the circumstances. I know that for the first time, I felt as though I had visited with someone who had some kind of physical illness that had just lingered on.

  A few days later, after visiting the homes where each of us were staying, Ella left Lansing and returned to Boston. But before leaving, she told me to write to her regularly. And she had suggested that I might like to spend my summer holiday visiting her in Boston. I jumped at that chance.

  That summer of 1940, in Lansing, I caught the Greyhound bus for Boston with my cardboard suitcase, and wearing my green suit. If someone had hung a sign, “HICK,” around my neck, I couldn’t have looked much more obvious. They didn’t have the turnpikes then; the bus stopped at what seemed every corner and cowpatch. From my seat in—you guessed it—the back of the bus, I gawked out of the window at white man’s America rolling past for what seemed a month, but must have been only a day and a half.

  When we finally arrived, Ella met me at the terminal and took me home. The house was on Waumbeck Street in the Sugar Hill section of Roxbury, the Harlem of Boston. I met Ella’s second husband, Frank, who was now a soldier; and her brother Earl, the singer who called himself Jimmy Carleton; and Mary, who was very different from her older sister. It’s funny how I seemed to think of Mary as Ella’s sister, instead of her being, just as Ella is, my own half-sister. It’s probably because Ella and I always were much closer as basic types; we’re dominant people, and Mary has always been mild and quiet, almost shy.

  Ella was busily involved in dozens of things. She belonged to I don’t know how many different clubs; she was a leading light of local so-called “black society.” I saw and met a hundred black people there whose big-city talk and ways left my mouth hanging open.

  I couldn’t have feigned indifference if I had tried to. People talked casually about Chicago, Detroit, New York. I didn’t know the world contained as many Negroes as I saw thronging downtown Roxbury at night, especially on Saturdays. Neon lights, nightclubs, poolhalls, bars, the cars they drove! Restaurants made the streets smell—rich, greasy, down-home black cooking! Jukeboxes blared Erskine Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, dozens of others. If somebody had told me then that some day I’d know them all personally, I’d have found it hard to believe. The biggest bands, like these, played at the Roseland State Ballroom, on Boston’s Massachusetts Avenue—one night for Negroes, the next night for whites.

  I saw for the first time occasional white-black couples strolling around arm in arm. And on Sundays, when Ella, Mary, or somebody took me to church, I saw churches for black people such as I had never seen. They were many times finer than the white church I had attended back in Mason, Michigan. There, the white people just sat and worshiped with words; but the Boston Negroes, like all other Negroes I had ever seen at church, threw their souls and bodies wholly into worship.

  Two or three times, I wrote letters to Wilfred intended for everybody back in Lansing. I said I’d try to describe it when I got back.

  But I found I couldn’t.

  My restlessness with Mason—and for the first time in my life a restlessness with being around white people—began as soon as I got back home and entered eighth grade.

  I continued to think constantly about all that I had seen in Boston, and about the way I had felt there. I know now that it was the sense of being a real part of a mass of my own kind, for the first time.

  The white people—classmates, the Swerlins, the people at the restaurant where I worked—noticed the change. They said, “You’re acting so strange. You don’t seem like yourself, Malcolm. What’s the matter?”

  I kept close to the top of the class, though. The topmost scholastic standing, I remember, kept shifting between me, a girl named Audrey Slaugh, and a boy named Jimmy Cotton.

  It went on that way, as I became increasingly restless and disturbed through the first semester. And then one day, just about when those of us who had passed were about to move up to 8-A, from which we would enter high school the next year, something happened which was to become the first major turning point of my life.

  Somehow, I happened to be alone in the classroom with Mr. Ostrowski, my English teacher. He was a tall, rather reddish white man and he had a thick mustache. I had gotten some of my best marks under him, and he had always made me feel that he liked me. He was, as I have mentioned, a natural-born “advisor,” about what you ought to read, to do, or think—about any and everything. We used to make unkind jokes about him: why was he teaching in Mason instead of somewhere else, getting for himself some of the “success in life” that he kept telling us how to get?

  I know that he probably meant well in what he happened to advise me that day. I doubt that he meant any harm. It was just in his nature as an American white man. I was one of his top students, one of the school’s top students—but all he could see for me was the kind of future “in your place” that almost all white people see for black people.

  He told me, “Malcolm, you ought to be thinking about a career. Have you been giving it thought?”

  The truth is, I hadn’t. I never have figured out why I told him, “Well, yes, sir, I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a lawyer.” Lansing certainly had no Negro lawyers—or doctors either—in those days, to hold up an image I might have aspired to. All I really knew for certain was that a lawyer didn’t wash dishes, as I was doing.

  Mr. Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He kind of half-smiled and said, “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person—you’d get all kinds of work.”

  The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It just kept treading around in my mind.

  What made it really begin to disturb me was Mr. Ostrowski’s advice to others in my class—all of them white. Most of them had told him they were planning to become farmers, like their parents—to one day take over their family farms. But those who wanted to strike out on their own, to try something new, he had encouraged. Some, mostly girls, wanted to be teachers. A few wanted other professions, such as one boy who wanted to become a county agent; another, a veterinarian; and one girl wanted to be a nurse. They all reported that Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged whatever they had wanted. Yet nearly none of them had earned marks equal to mine.

  It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.

  It was then that I began to change—inside.

  I drew away from white people. I came to class, and I answered when called upon. It became a physical strain simply to sit in Mr. Ostrowski’s class.

  Where “nigger” had slipped off my back before, wherever I heard it now, I stopped and looked at whoever said it. And they looked surprised that I did.

  I quit hearing so much “nigger” and “What’s wrong?”—which was the way I wanted it. Nobody, including the teachers, could decide what had come over me. I knew I was being discussed.

  In a few more weeks, it was that way, too, at the restaurant where I worked washing dishes, and at the Swerlins’.

  One day soon after, Mrs. Swerlin called me into the living room, and there was the state man, May
nard Allen. I knew from their faces that something was about to happen. She told me that none of them could understand why—after I had done so well in school, and on my job, and living with them, and after everyone in Mason had come to like me—I had lately begun to make them all feel that I wasn’t happy there anymore.

  She said she felt there was no need for me to stay at the detention home any longer, and that arrangements had been made for me to go and live with the Lyons family, who liked me so much.

  She stood up and put out her hand. “I guess I’ve asked you a hundred times, Malcolm—do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  I shook her hand, and said, “Nothing, Mrs. Swerlin.” Then I went and got my things, and came back down. At the living room door I saw her wiping her eyes. I felt very bad. I thanked her and went out in front to Mr. Allen, who took me over to the Lyons’.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lyons, and their children, during the two months I lived with them—while finishing eighth grade—also tried to get me to tell them what was wrong. But somehow I couldn’t tell them, either.

  I went every Saturday to see my brothers and sisters in Lansing, and almost every other day I wrote to Ella in Boston. Not saying why, I told Ella that I wanted to come there and live.

  I don’t know how she did it, but she arranged for official custody of me to be transferred from Michigan to Massachusetts, and the very week I finished the eighth grade, I again boarded the Greyhound bus for Boston.

  I’ve thought about that time a lot since then. No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.

  If I had stayed on in Michigan, I would probably have married one of those Negro girls I knew and liked in Lansing. I might have become one of those state capitol building shoeshine boys, or a Lansing Country Club waiter, or gotten one of the other menial jobs which, in those days, among Lansing Negroes, would have been considered “successful”—or even become a carpenter.

  Whatever I have done since then, I have driven myself to become a success at it. I’ve often thought that if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to “integrate.”

  All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.

  HARRY MIDDLETON (1949-1993)

  Because his father was a U.S. Army colonel, Harry Middleton was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He attended high school in Virginia and college in Louisiana; he earned an M.A. in American history at Louisiana State University.

  A journalist and writer, Middleton was a columnist for Southern Living. His books, all nonfiction, ran to trout fishing: On the Spine of Time (1991); The Bright Country (1993); Rivers of Memory (1993).

  The Earth Is Enough: Growing Up in a World of Trout and Old Men (1989) is Middleton’s memoir. As a boy of fourteen, he went to live at his grandfather’s farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. He got to know three contented, dignified, and rebellious old men: his grandfather Emerson, his great-uncle Albert, and their Sioux friend Elias Wonder, a World War I veteran.

  from THE EARTH IS ENOUGH

  Late spring had spread across the mountains before I found the courage to ask them one morning at the breakfast table. I spoke up just as they were piling their dishes in the sink, getting ready to head for the creek for an hour’s fishing before the sun topped the hills—the sign for them to exchange fly rods for hoes and wheelbarrows.

  “Could you show me?” I said weakly, my voice struggling to break the bonds of a whisper.

  “Show you what, son?” Emerson asked, pulling the wide, flat brim of his Montana hat down over his eyes. The hat was the dull silver color of a trout’s belly.

  “You know, teach me—” I stopped short because I was shaking badly and I wanted to sound serious and mature, someone worthy of instruction.

  Certain that something of consequence was at hand, Albert took off his hat, sat back down, and poured himself another cup of coffee. His hands trembled slightly, sending tiny waves of coffee over the lip of the cup onto the tablecloth. Albert looked at Emerson, his face a mixture of confusion and incredulity. Emerson returned a similar look, only his face was more distorted, as though he had just bitten into a sour grape.

  “Teach you what, exactly?” said Emerson in a low voice, the same voice he fell into whenever he felt a catastrophe was at hand.

  “Fly fishing,” I said.

  Silence, for a long moment. Canyon deep and cave perfect. It was as if all of us had stopped breathing at the same instant.

  Emerson took off the big Montana hat and scratched his head thoughtfully. His bright eyes fixed on me.

  “Teach you fly fishing!” he roared, a thundering sound that caused Albert to fling what was left of his coffee straight up in the air. “Why—why, that’s criminal. Tell him, Albert, for chrissakes. That’s criminal. Why, I’d get a lighter sentence lacing your root beer with paregoric. Teach you fly fishing, for chrissakes. Better you should ask me how to pick up eighty-year-old women. Fly fishing!”

  He sat back in his chair and the red drained slowly from his face. He and Albert were old washed-up mountain farmers, he told me. That and no more. Not teachers or scholars, and certainly not your typical old pipe-smoking, rocking-chair patriarchs, dispensing homespun wisdom to their kin, boring them with memories of the “good old days, which weren’t all that damn good,” and old folkways that were as suspect as they might be virtuous.

  Albert nodded. “Yeah, we’re a couple of old farts who want to see the younger generations screw up all on their own, with no help from us. Though we probably could steer them to disaster a good deal faster.”

  Emerson embraced a more serious tone. “We have nothing of lasting worth to teach you, son. That’s what it comes down to,” he said earnestly. And he told me coldly that he and Albert were of the belief that an old man, and especially a relative, should never teach a child how to fish—unless, that is, the old man had something against the child and was out to get even.

  Then Emerson leaned forward in his chair, so that his face was but inches from mine and I saw that there were endless flecks of blue in his gray eyes and that the lines that spread like dried-up creek beds in his face were cut more deeply than I had realized. “Why, to anchor you with what paltry knowledge the two of us have of fly fishing would make as much sense as a second-rate con man trying to teach his kid the ropes, the same crap that put the old man in the slammer in the first place.” He sighed deeply, as if searching for the next turn of his argument.

  Pools of sunlight began to fill the kitchen. Albert looked nervously out the back door toward the creek.

  “I’m fumbling about for the words,” Emerson mused out loud. “We barely know anything about angling ourselves. That’s it, that’s what I’m struggling for. Why, we’d just saddle you with a cartload of bad habits. Trout fishing is worse than alcohol or women.”

  “Well, maybe alcohol,” Albert said, smiling.

  “It’s a ruinous thing, an addiction more destructive than Albert’s habitual need for I.B.C. root beer. Fly rodding will consume your life. You’ll transform, become absolutely piscine. Look at Albert…” Emerson pointed his long, bony index finger at Albert, who dropped the smile and took on the grim aspect of a man about to be hanged. “…that salmonid smile, the cold, indifferent eyes, the constant pucker of the lips.”

  “The indomitable spirit,” said Albert, coming to his own rescue.

  “And he’s only been at it sixty years,” concluded Emerson. “Imagine what kind of pisciform monster a lifetime with a fly rod might create! The thought is frightening, son. Frightening. The rod and reel. Don’t ask me to damn my grandson to a life as a maladjusted piscator.” And he took a lo
ng pause, then added, “Anyway, your father did not send you here so that you might immerse yourself in fly fishing or quail, or mountain streams, or wild turkey, all of which are frivolous to him and to most of the civilized world. Save yourself some grief.”

  As he talked, I was thinking. About trout. About how the morning was getting late and how we should have been on the creek an hour ago. From my chair I could look beyond Emerson, out the back door. Sunlight cut into the forest in great shafts like faults through stone. Albert, too, had his back to the sunlight and he became a shimmering silhouette with a pompadour of ungainly hair.

  “Have you really thought this through?” Emerson asked, his words thick as though coated with molasses. “Again I say, look at us.” This time the bony finger went to Albert and then into his own chest. Albert squirmed in his chair, a man unable to keep a tight grip on neutrality. “Look at the way we live. Take a good, long look. These are the rewards of the outdoor life, son, sad and paltry as they are. Take up the fly rod and the shotgun, and before you know it, you’re an outcast, a social leper, rejected by your family, despised by your neighbors, mistrusted by your community. Unaware that your soul is quite safe, in the best of company, your church will pity you, pray mightily for your redemption from hideous sin. The final question is, should any man turn his back on ambition, profit, security, and a parking place in the city, just to pursue a fish!”

  Albert jumped up, shook his fist at the ceiling. “And look at Elias Wonder. Yeah, take a gander at that buzzard. Forty years ago he was happy, generous, charitable, tall, dark, and handsome. Then he took up the fly rod. Now consider him. Uglier than a fresh road kill. Evil-eyed, cantankerous, sullen, mean. An antisocial misfit that causes a groundswell of spleen wherever he goes. Consider him well. Should a man abandon success just to pursue a fish?” Then he bolted for the door, yelling, “Yes, but only if it’s trout!”

  Emerson’s face was turned away from me, but I could hear him chuckling under his breath. When he spoke again, it was only to say: “Amen. That’s the spiel, son.”