As Lie Is to Grin

by Simeon Marsalis

  I grabbed my jacket from the chair, sending it crashing to the floor, and slid the notebook from the table before leaving. The moon was waning. I reached into my pocket to grab a cigarette. A gray oak was just behind me. I heard someone whisper your name. I looked down and regained composure.

  december 12, 2009

  After the last student had left the classroom, I approached Jim’s desk. “I enjoyed the switch to the second person,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  He shifted his weight to the desk. “I did expect you to have more, though, with all of the classes you missed, but I guess I can’t give you an F now, can I?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine, David. I think you have to develop the relationship between the protagonist and Melody now.” I nodded. “There is something in your writing. We just have to bring it out.” Jim clenched his fists and turned them inward, to indicate grabbing hold of the narrative. “If you can take another tier-three class, then I’ll see if we can’t get you into tier four at half price, for the summer semester.”

  At the station, I stared at the mosaic of dolphins until they appeared to be a random assortment of cones and circles. I got on the train. There weren’t many people there. My head rested against the wall of the car.

  “Chambers Street.”

  I jumped off as the train doors closed because I had been traveling in the wrong direction. People in transit brushed by me as I sat on the platform floor. I felt like the station was closing in on me, so I exited and began to walk along Warren Street, hoping that the fresh air would soothe me. I turned in to City Hall Park. Halfway down the path I turned left, making out Horace Greeley’s name on the statue next to Tweed Courthouse. I pulled the phone out of my pocket to type their names in, and saw this message from Melody.

  Melody: What are you doing for Christmas? 7:23 p.m.

  As I clicked on the Internet application, the phone ran out of battery. I was not sure where to go. I turned left at Centre Street, looking right to the Manhattan borough president’s office. I could only see the three brightest stars in Orion’s belt. All the buildings were colonial white; the streets were empty. It reminded me of some dream I had on a night long ago. I could not remember when it had occurred. Chambers Street, then Reade Street; I kept going north until there was a fork in the road. Figuring it would be smarter to go in the direction I was familiar with, toward the west side, I followed Centre Street up to Foley Square, and was not paying attention to the direction I had come from when I found myself in the shadows of hopelessness. The desire to write fiction had led me here. I tried to remember if it was rooted in something good from my past. Reach back and get it. Still, I could not discern what was good from my past if I continued to lie in the present. I began to think of my mother. When the weekends came and went, and I was back home, she never commented on where I’d been. Not once. First I had been bothered by it, and then I understood it was, whether she intended or not, the beginning of our necessary separation. I made a left on Duane Street, where I stopped at a security booth that appeared to be empty. I twisted my neck to the left and the image of a black slab, so smooth it seemed wet, caused my legs to halt. It was one story tall with the white outline of a sankofa.

  I could see the shape, though it was nighttime, because of how deeply the white paint was branded into the stone. It stood out against the tall metallic government buildings. As I walked toward the tablet, jumping the gate, I made out the words “For all those who were lost, For all those who were stolen, For all those who were left behind, For all those who were not forgotten.” It seemed to be a monument to the transatlantic slave trade. A walkway appeared in front of me. It spiraled downward, so I followed it, touching each of the panels that appeared to my left, each one bearing a religious symbol. The panels stopped at a map of the earth with Mauritania at its center. Though the monument appeared to be a stone slab, from this angle it opened like the mouth of a fish. I ascended the short flight of stairs inside of it. There was another hole in the cave’s ceiling about the size of the entrance. The sky was blank from that angle, each star removed by human pollution. I backed out of the enclosure to stare up, my ears pounded by what seemed to be the beating of sixty wings. As I exited the monument, the flaps turning to a hum, I saw the nyame biribi wo soro, which means that god is in the heavens. It was above the entrance.

  As I looked up, beyond the symbol, there was no bird in sight. I went over to the grassy mounds on the right and sensed that I was sitting above the bones of former slaves. Fear overtook me. Everything seemed out of place and time. I had become upset while looking at that monument—reach back and get it. I backed out of the site, hopped the gate, and headed toward the A train, knowing exactly where to go next.

  december 13, 2009

  The house had a new iron gate installed at the front door last April. It had arrived one month before I went to Melody’s school to deliver the note. There were six bars—five were vertical, one was twisted and bisected the frame horizontally. There were five sankofa, three below the crossbar facing down, two above it facing upward. My mother came to the door in her pajamas and looked beyond me. I followed her into the kitchen, took a cigarette from her bowl, and lit it by the window in the living room. She stopped washing the teakettle.

  “When did you start smoking?” No response. “You can’t hear me talking to you?”

  “No.”

  She smiled her condescending smile and continued to dry the kettle. “How was class?”

  “All right.”

  “Nothing new and exciting?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s interesting.”

  “Where did you get the gate?”

  Avoiding my eyes, she paused before putting the kettle on the plastic dish rack.

  “Why?”

  “I keep seeing sankofa in gates around New York City.”

  “San what?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. The symbol in your gate. It’s a sankofa.”

  She refilled the kettle with water before asking, “Are you going to keep smoking that cigarette?”

  “Would you prefer me to put it out?”

  The patients still arrived regularly in the summertime, though her winter appointments had begun to dwindle, and she was steadfast in her refusal to pay for more classes. That was the cause of my frustration, I thought, before seeing that this was one small reproach in a never-ending series I suffered at her hand. I put the cigarette out. “I keep seeing these West African symbols, and I can’t figure out the connection between the white architects and the gates.”

  Doris put the pot on the stove again, turning on the gas burner before wiping some crumbs from the counter into her hand. “Wrought-iron gates became fashionable in Europe during the eighteenth century,” she said. “Maybe the connection is between the Berbers and Masons, but I do not know.”

  “But the symbols are Akan. Why would Iberians or Continental Europeans have anything to do with it?”

  “Maybe the sankofa is not just an Akan symbol. Maybe it developed in conjunction with other styles of the time—maybe some northern Islamic cultures.” She chose every word carefully; her repetition of “maybe” was meant to irritate me. “Maybe ‘West Africa,’” and she raised her fingers, “is not a remote cultural island,” she said, acknowledging that she had known the sankofa. Her question, “San what,” was meant only to bide time for a response. I picked up the cigarette and lit it again. She did not acknowledge the smoke but grabbed two mugs from the cabinet, staying there, at the farthest possible distance from me, before asking, “When did you become so angsty?”

  “When did you start treating me like a patient, Doris?” She did not like that. “What’s wrong, Doris?”

  “Stop calling me by my first name.” I put the cigarette out again, feeling more childish this time. She took the chamomile tea from the cabine
t, then stared at me. I closed the distance between us to two feet.

  “You are my mother.”

  “I know that.”

  “Why do I have to call you Aunt Doris?”

  “That’s just when my patients are here.”

  “Why?”

  “Is that important?” She glided around me into the living room to turn the television on. “Do you call me aunt when it is only the two of us?”

  “No.”

  “So, what is wrong with you?”

  “This is not normal.”

  “A lot of shit isn’t normal.”

  “You—”

  “Do you pay the bills here? Did you pay for those writing classes? How do you think all of this is paid for? So you have to call me aunt sometimes, consider it the cost of living.”

  “I am your fucking son.”

  “You can’t afford to talk the way you do.” She picked up the remote and crept toward me. “Did you hear me?” Doris was in my face, pressing the plastic into the top row of teeth beneath my cheek. I stepped back, walked down the stairs to my bedroom, and bolted the door.

  A car pulled into the driveway, interrupting my sleep.

  december 23, 2009

  “I want to tell you the story of your birth again. Maybe I didn’t say it enough. Maybe you didn’t believe me. But I will say it again while we are both calm like this. I am Doris Tatum. I was born Doris Wesley. My parents are from Virginia. There is not much for me to tell you about that concerning yourself. I went to New York City as a twenty-something-year-old to get a degree in theology from City College. In my junior year, I met a man named Dennis Tatum on 130th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. He was about twenty-five years older than me. He had attended a service by Dr. Calvin Butts on Sunday, and he had too much to say about it. In between words, I could see he suffered from a loneliness I found endearing. Dennis had moved out to Long Island from Harlem, in order to start his own ministry. He would let me stay some weekends at his house without bringing much controversy to his congregation. We married in 1983, and I lived with him for five years before he passed away from colon cancer. In our time together, he got me interested in the other side of the Abrahamic tradition—extending back to Egypt—which I had not known, since our people were Protestant and militaristic, like most working-class black families from Virginia. He left this house to me. In the beginning, some of his congregants would give me gifts. In the beginning, it was like he was here, and then it was not. I never much liked the beach, and I wanted to go back to the city and finish my degree.

  “I got an apartment on 127th Street and St. Nicholas, which was like hell in 1989. Sometime in the winter, I began having these dreams about birth. It started with an image of Harriet Tubman coming from Dennis’s ear. Next was Isis the redeemer, and then Erzuli the beautiful, then Sophia, with her legs open, birthing the demiurge. I stayed up late and rose late but snapped out of my spell just in time to sign up for classes. Somewhere near the end of March 1990 I found someone to sleep with me. He was a student from Brownsville, Brooklyn. I didn’t love him past the small ways he reminded me of Dennis. That man was your father. His name was Jesse. That is your middle name, which I gave you so that you could never forget this story.”

  It was the explanation I’d heard throughout my youth, yet now there were questions I wanted to ask. “How did you choose him?”

  “He liked me, and he was younger.”

  “Why younger?”

  “So he could forget.”

  “Was he black?”

  “That doesn’t matter. Race is a construct. And you are my son, so you are black.”

  “But was he black?”

  “He was mixed. Is that all? Does that meet your standards of truth?”

  I shrugged.

  “Now let me tell you something else. After you graduate from high school, I don’t want you coming back here. You can come visit me but you will not live here during your school breaks, do you understand me?”

  december 24, 2009

  I gazed east, down the platform at Bridgehampton, awaiting the oncoming headlights of the Long Island Rail Road train. The sun shone dimly through a layer of cirrus clouds.

  Melody: Can you come over for Christmas? 12:48 p.m.

  Me: I’m coming over tonight. 12:49 p.m.

  In the train car, I sat next to a man who was wearing a blue pinstriped suit, his hair gelled back. He checked his phone from time to time, but rarely responded to messages. I got off at Penn Station and switched to the A train, traveling three stops to 125th Street, as I had done every Saturday morning since the beginning of September.

  Melody: What time? 3:43 p.m.

  I left the train and walked up St. Nicholas Terrace, to the eastern gate of City College, the university Doris purported to have attended. I tried to browse “City College architecture” on the phone, but the inquiry did not return any websites that seemed relevant. I entered the Wille Administration Building on Convent Avenue and looked up class records, 1978–1981 and 1989–1992. As I suspected, there was no Doris Wesley or Doris Tatum, so I left the building, walking downhill past the park and a cop car on 129th Street to 127th Street—the block I told Melody I was living on. Once there, I turned right, counting the building numbers, 356, 358, 360, as I had on the day I first visited, stopping to stare at the burned-down building, number 362. I smoked one of the four cigarettes I had stolen from Doris, as I always had. Then I went east to St. Nicholas Avenue and got on the A train at 125th Street.

  Me: Now. 6:13 p.m.

  Rick answered the door. “Are you still mad at me?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first, but I remembered that we had not seen each other since he gave me the key to the safe house.

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Of course.” He moved out of the way. “I didn’t mean to offend you. You know that, right?”

  “Stop harassing him, Rick.”

  “We were just talking.”

  “You know he’s my boyfriend.” Her father looked away from me as if he just realized I hadn’t come to see him.

  “Of course he is.”

  She took my hand in hers and asked him, “Can I borrow forty dollars? We want to eat dinner.”

  “Of course.” He reached into his pocket and gave her a hundred-dollar bill. We went to the Japanese restaurant across the street from her apartment, then to the Lincoln Square movie theater to see a romantic Bollywood film about a Mumbai teen on a game show who falls under investigation for knowing the answers. I wanted to talk to her about the things she had read in my notebook, which could lead me to telling her about my real life, but when I brought it up she pointed at the screen and said, “Art is art.” As we crossed Broadway after the film, there were still no words. When was the right time to tell the truth? The moment was always passing, the now becoming then, and the words I wanted to say could not change what she would do after I said them. Melody would leave me. I would be alone again—on Long Island with Doris. I tried to separate my desire for her from my desire for the world I wanted to be a part of. We didn’t have sex before going to sleep. In the middle of the night, I was staring at the side of Melody’s face. The shadows obscured her cheekbones, and from the side she appeared to be a black woman. I was disturbed to think that what she looked like to me now, asleep in the shadows, was what she always was. In the morning, I would tell her the truth.

  december 25, 2009

  When I rolled over, Melody was already in the bathroom. The daylight weakened my resolve. I forced out of my head the image of her screaming, her father calling the cops. She came to the bed and kissed me on the lips, then said we were supposed to meet Rick downstairs. I dressed quickly and we got into the elevator.

  A silver hatchback was waiting right out front at Fifty-eighth Street. Rick’s coat was
made of a mahogany fur; Melody’s was a snowboarder's jacket with lime-green trimmings. I wore a black peacoat. Snow flurries dampened my hair and neck. She hopped into the driver’s seat. As the car rolled past the Trump development, which was not the International Tower (although it was also on the Upper West Side), I had a memory of Doris driving me to Sunday school. I did not think the memory was real. We were both riding to church, and I asked Doris, “Mommy, how come Jesus is white?” She said, “Because we live in America.” I did not believe that we had ever lived in Harlem at all. Rick interrupted my thought. “I figured today we could do this kind thing for the Harlem housing authority and then we could figure the rest of it out.”

  “Figure what out?” I said. Rick threw up his hands. I looked at Melody to see her reaction, but she just sat forward, clutching the wheel. We rode uptown in silence, got off the highway, turning right on 145th Street to Seventh Avenue, turning back west, past St. Borromeo Church on 141st Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. Rick gathered some packages from the trunk and we walked to the entrance of the Drew Hamilton Houses. There were three young black men outside; they looked up at me. Once inside, I met an elderly man who was convinced I was his nephew Virgil. His daughter assured me he said that to everyone. I went to hold his three-fingered hand. It was callused, but his veins were soft like a rotten orange. He sat in a wheelchair, a rough, brown blanket covering his legs; no one had cut his hair in months. He held my hand for a few minutes as we watched them arrange under the tree the presents Rick had brought. He whispered, “I knew you’d be back, Virgil. I knew we would touch each other again,” and I tried not to be taken by his madness. “You were always such a handsome boy,” he said, his mouth bent into a small oval. He squeezed out his words. “Sweet and kind . . . black, bittery, and white cold.” His daughter said they were song lyrics by Charles Mingus. They passed through him from beyond.

  As we traveled farther downtown, 141st, 139th, 135th, and Adam Clayton Powell, stopping at different apartments, giving gifts to black and Latino families, I became nauseated. Rick kept repeating, “This is good, isn’t it? David, can you grab the door? My hands are full.” Although the people whose houses we entered stayed the same shade—somewhere between brown and beige—white families began appearing once we got below 135th Street. I looked to Melody, who seemed to be feeling better about herself with each passing home. We continued downtown, 133rd, 131st, crossing west to St. Nicholas Avenue. We neared the neighborhood from my past and present. Rick could see me becoming nervous. He said, “We’ve just got a couple more, and then we can stop by your mother’s house.”