What Really Happened
Madge McKeithen
FROM TriQuarterly
FIND THE NORTH CAROLINA Department of Correction Public Access Information System website. Enter the name of the offender. Write down the seven-digit offender ID number. Click on the box to see the photograph. Or you can do this later.
Write down the name of the correctional institution in which he is incarcerated. Write down the name of the corrections officer who will coordinate your visit. If you are invited.
Ask a friend who is a lawyer to search the record to make sure the offender is not insane. Write down the name and telephone number of the lawyer who handled the offender’s appeal and who is now a judge. Call him. If you must leave a message, say I am considering visiting . . . and use the offender’s name . . . Say I am a friend of . . . and use the victim’s name. Say you would appreciate his thoughts on what to expect, given his knowledge of the offender’s mental state. Be direct (others have called before you with similar questions).
Answer the phone courteously at 8:30 on a summer Saturday evening. Thank him for calling back. Listen to the judge say You should go. Listen to him say that once you’ve been incarcerated twelve years, most visitors, even mothers, stop visiting. Listen to him say Murderers are not like the shark in Jaws, they are not monsters, usually and They are more like you and me than we may want to know.
Thank the judge and walk quickly outside because you know walking in the city helps everything. Walk to the river. Walk along the river for a while. Watch normal people doing normal things. Find balance.
Return home. Take a note card from the desk by the front door and write the request for an invitation to visit. Be direct. Make it three sentences.
Remember that you knew the offender. Remember what he has done. Remember he can invite you or he can refuse. Remember her.
Use sincerely to close. Put the note in an envelope and address it. Put a stamp on the envelope and look again at the address. Check the seven numbers after his name. Make sure you have them right. Leave the envelope by the door to be mailed Monday morning.
Tell one person you trust that you are requesting an invitation to visit a murderer you know in prison. Say Yes, life sentence. Say No, no chance of parole. Listen when your friend asks Why are you going? Listen to yourself when you say Because I loved her.
Early on Monday walk to the post office two blocks away and drop the card in the inside mail slot.
Wait for a response.
Call the other two who knew her well when you did. Talk together. Mention her freckles, her strawberry blond hair, how good she was in math, how well she danced, how much you laughed together, what a ringleader she was, an instigator, how she was the first among you to have sex but not by much, how you went over every detail she would give up that night at the Pizza Inn all-you-can-eat buffet. Say you have been thinking about her because you are all turning fifty. Do not bother them with your thoughts of visiting prison.
Wait for an invitation.
Find the Christmas cards with family photos she sent each year. Look at the two of them and their three children on the beach, costumed, poised, staged, fun—one year in ski clothes, another in Mickey Mouse ears. Look at her children. Count back—estimate five, eight, twelve that morning. Count forward—estimate nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-five now. Probably older.
Look at the newspaper clipping your mother sent of the first-born’s wedding. Look at the old photos of her wedding. Call the other two friends again. Call her mother. Do not leave a message. Remember more high school silliness, a little college silliness, the long blank of the years after. (Note: remembering a blank may leave you quiet.) Ask yourself why you get to be alive.
Take the long envelope fat with pages out of your mailbox. Read the tiny handwriting pressed hard into the notebook paper on two sides. Twenty pages. Notice the putdowns. Notice the excess verbiage. Imagine that he has little else to do. Notice no kindness.
See the invitation to visit the offender in prison. Notice his words. Put the pages back in the envelope and look at the calendar. Find three dates. Write back. Receive a response. Choose a date. Rent a car. Drive 528 miles to Bayford Correctional Institute. Think of her first car—that red Triumph Spitfire. Remember her energy, the curves of her body, her hands.
Drive all day. Do not call anyone. Be quiet. Listen to music. Be quiet. Drive down the Delmarva Peninsula, the out-of-the-way place that it is, especially at the southern tip. Drive over the Bay Bridge Tunnel. Keep driving. Do not stop.
Arrive in Oriental at the B&B you booked. Let yourself in. Follow the instructions left on the table by the door. Find your attic room. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Go to bed. Stare at the ceiling.
Hear You are there for her . . . to see, ask, hear . . . because she isn’t.
Sleep. Awake and find the muffin and coffee at the base of the stairs to the attic room. Dress in clothes that cover. Notice the rain on the rental car. Notice that the town is still quiet. Notice that there are more sailboats than cars in this town called Oriental. Follow the MapQuest directions to the prison. Notice it is all gray and wet—the building, parking lot, fence, razor wire.
Look at the official visitor instructions that came in the mail. Take only your car keys, four dollar bills, your lip balm, and your driver’s license. Lock the car. Wait with the others outside the kiosk that looks like a Cineplex ticket booth. Look neither worried nor curious. Do not look directly at the other visitors.
Wait for the loud buzzer to sound. Line up. Show ID. State the name and number of the offender. Sign your name. Go through metal detectors. Pass through automatic doors that open and shut with a Star Trek-like whoosh. Continue inward. Wait for more automatic doors to open and close—two of them. Enter what looks like a cafeteria.
Hear the guard say The offender must sit facing the clock. Sit in the chair with its back to the clock.
Look at him when he enters. Show nothing. See how much older he looks. See that he has no teeth. Listen for two hours.
Notice he always says The tragedy that happened. Notice he never says I killed. Ask Why could you not just let her go? Why leave the children with neither parent? Hear I had come to believe they would be better off with her mom. Hear It takes courage to do difficult things. Hear Like the men who flew into the World Trade Center towers. Hear no remorse. Hear no regret.
Buy a soda from the vending machine as the visitor instructions permit. Hand it to him. Sit back down.
Wait for the time to be up. When the time is up, walk to the door. (Note: You may feel oily, dark, in need of a Brillo pad to scour off everything that has come toward you in these hours, and the feeling may be physical and metaphorical.) Drive north through the Great Dismal Swamp. Keep driving. Drive home.
Receive the hundreds of pages of letters he sends over the next six months. Save them for a while. Keep thinking of her. (That part is not hard.) Write from her son’s perspective. Write it as fiction. Write from her perspective. Listen.
Ask. Where are her words?
Shred his.
Wait several years. Attend a wedding. Be sociable. Hear the charming man next to you talk about his four children, his wife, that his father killed his mother when he was small, his career, his hopes for his children, his love for the grandmother who raised him. Talk to him about family and fun and food and New Orleans. Laugh. Dance with your man.
Hear her now. Hear Love life. Hear Love especially those who have no need for the word “lugubrious.” Hear That’s it.
Say back What really happened is your life.
Rude Am I in My Speech
Caryl Phillips
FROM Salmagundi
PERHAPS THE MOST ARRESTING MOMENT in the first act of Shakespeare’s Othello occurs when the soldier is asked by the Duke of Venice to respond to the accusation that he has “beguiled” Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona, away from the protection and safety of her father’s house. The soldier is an outwardly confident man, full of pride
and bombast, and hugely aware of his celebrity in Venice. He addresses the Duke. “Rude am I in my speech,” he says, then spins a masterfully persuasive narrative full of lyrical eloquence which the Duke acknowledges would have ensnared his own daughter too. The poised, silver-tongued soldier is vindicated and the play can proceed. What is firmly established in this first act is that Othello is an outsider both racially and socially. In this thoroughly demarcated Venetian world where Michael Cassio is simply “a Florentine,” the “old black ram,” although he claims to be descended from “men of royal siege,” is regarded as little more than an “extravagant and wheeling stranger.” For the full length of the first act, what Shakespeare does not allow us to see is that for all Othello’s public success there is at the center of his personality a kernel of self-doubt, a tight knot of anxiety, which is eventually exploited by his ancient Iago. During this first act the soldier appears to be in control. He plays games, protesting that he has a clumsy tongue even though his language betrays no hint of rudeness or foreign taint. If Othello possesses any self-doubt, or inner discomfort, its origins are not rooted in language. What if he had begun his mellifluous speech with, “Rude am I in my visage”? Would this self-assured black migrant to Europe have had the confidence to stand before the Duke of Venice and play fearlessly with notions of identity and belonging that are rooted in race as opposed to language, or would this be to trespass too close to the source of his well-hidden self-doubt?
Almost ten years ago, I arranged to meet my father at lunchtime in a hotel in Manchester. The night before I had given a reading at a local bookshop, and that afternoon I was planning to move on to Liverpool and give another reading at the university. My father lives maybe an hour away from Manchester, and so this seemed an opportune moment to get together. What made the meeting unusual was the fact that we had not seen or spoken with each other for some years. I came down into the hotel lobby a little early, but there he was, already sprawled out on a sofa and watching the news on the television. He saw me and stood up. I was glad to see him. He had not changed much, and we hugged and I suggested that we go to another hotel around the corner, which had a nicer restaurant. There were very few people in the place and the hostess seated us and gave us our menus. She asked if we would like a drink to start with. My father ordered a Scotch and I asked for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and, having informed us of the specials, the hostess left us alone. Five minutes later a waitress arrived with our drinks. As she withdrew we raised our glasses and clinked, and then I sipped and grimaced. My father asked me if there was a problem and I said that the wine was not Sauvignon Blanc. It tasted like Chardonnay. I signaled to the waitress and then I saw a flicker of panic pass across my father’s face. He asked me if I couldn’t drink it. I said, “Why, it’s not what I ordered.” The waitress came over and I explained the situation. She shrugged her shoulders and took up my glass. There was no apology, but there was no surliness either as she disappeared from view. My father remained quiet and I could see that he was uncomfortable. For a few moments I made inane conversation; at last the waitress returned with the new glass of wine and I tasted it. Better, I thought, so I nodded and thanked her and she left us alone. However, this incident caused the atmosphere between father and son to become strained.
First-generation migrants to Europe, from wherever they may originate, have to learn quickly how to read the new society in order to successfully navigate their way forward. Sometimes this involves learning when to remain quiet, and somewhat compliant, and not risk causing offense. When West Indians first arrived in England in the 1950s, countless pamphlets were thrust into their hands which explained to them the ways of the English. They were instructed that they must line up at bus stops in an orderly fashion, and not keep working when their fellow laborers were on a tea break, and it was suggested that they should try to join a trade union, and perhaps they should not bring food that smelled “foreign” to work. In common with many immigrants, they were being taught how to tread carefully, the unspoken contract being that in time they would learn the rules and become familiar with how the society worked; so much so that one day they might be considered domesticated. Whether they would ever become fully fledged insiders was not discussed, but for many first-generation migrants this was not something that was necessarily desired. The hope on both sides was for some vestige of tolerance and respect.
There are, of course, two places where new immigrants can find some relief from these anxieties of belonging. First, at home with their families, where the rules are of their own making and no local person can prevent them from being kings and queens in their own castles. Behind closed doors they can cook their own food, listen to whatever music takes their fancy, and curse the locals in whatever tongue or dialect they choose. And then of course there is the world of the pub, or the club, or the café, where immigrants gather together socially and over a drink compare notes with others of their own tribe. The home and the social gathering place constitute zones of psychological relief for immigrants. In such spaces one doesn’t have to be called Sam or Son, or take aggressive orders from ignorant people half one’s age. In the kingdom of the home, or in the citadel of the club, first-generation migrants are free to be whoever they imagine, or remember, themselves to be, and there is no expectation that they should perform the shapeshifting dance that immigrants often have to execute in order to safely negotiate a passage from sunup to sundown. Of course, the more successful the immigrant, the more difficult it can be to keep in touch with the “club.” Upon assuming a white-collar job as a foreman, or an executive role in a company, the rules become more complex, for there are now men and women above you and men and women below you, and with the job comes a salary increase and perhaps a move to a new neighborhood where there are less of you and more of them. To keep contact with fellow migrants one has to now travel further, both physically and psychologically.
During the first, Venetian act of Shakespeare’s play, before the action moves off to Cyprus, it is clear to us that Othello, this “extravagant and wheeling stranger,” is a man who is a long way from home. In Venice he is an exotic celebrity, and as such the Duke is inclined to overlook the social and cultural transgression of not only an interracial marriage but a secret one, therefore allowing Othello to indulge in behavior that would almost certainly be frowned upon if attempted by a noncelebrity. This being the case, this extravagant stranger appears to be untroubled by the fact that he has recourse to neither home nor club as places to which he might retreat and recuperate from the daily fatigue of living a performative life, and he appears content to veer dramatically between rhetorical swagger and self-deprecating bluster like a kite snapping in the wind. Apparently he feels that his success is such that there is no need for him to be aware of the unwritten Venetian rule book which tells him that he must line up in an orderly fashion for a gondola, and don’t even think about cooking chickpeas or couscous, and whatever you do don’t mess with the local ladies, especially the titled ones. Our celebrity migrant considers himself above and beyond such restrictive nonsense. By the end of Act One the newly married man truly believes that he has crossed over into full acceptance, but the truth is, without family or peer group, and without societal knowledge born of vigilance and judicious interaction, he is incapable of making sound decisions about something as basic as knowing who to trust. It soon becomes lamentably evident that, far from being in control of the situation and participating as an insider, our black first-generation migrant to Europe is about as unmoored as any man can be.
My father is no Othello. He may have polished up a few words and phrases here and there, and done a little studying of the dictionary, but to this day he remains admirably rude in speech. But then again he has never been a vital or essential cog in British life and occupied the role of supermigrant. What West Indian immigrant has? In fact, what immigrant has? As a first-generation migrant he has always been aware of the home and the club as zones of sanity in which he can be himself. Like most s
econd-generation children, I have at times been puzzled and frustrated by his dependence upon one form or another of the “club,” and irritated by the taciturn manner in which he often exercised his authority in the home; not that he was always wrong. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I remember one Saturday night standing upstairs in front of the mirror and preparing myself to go out to the church discotheque. Eventually I ventured downstairs wearing tight blue nylon bellbot-toms, black platform shoes, a pink shirt with a huge collar that was trimmed in brown piping, and a black-and-white-checked jacket. My father was sitting at the kitchen table and he looked up at me over the top of his newspaper. He shook his head and said, “Somebody tell you that shit matches?” The second generation was stepping out into England with a confidence and brashness that, in retrospect, could have used a little more of his cold water being poured upon it. It was his house and he was trying to tell me something about how to look and comport myself out there on the streets, like the time a year or two later when I passed my driving test and he told me that I must be very careful if I was out driving at night with a white girl in the passenger seat. He warned me that I should be prepared to have the police stop and harass me for no other reason than the fact that I was with a white girl. Again he was passing on knowledge which was meant both to help prepare me for life in England and to reaffirm who he was when in his own private sphere. I listened, and I assumed that my father knew what he was talking about, for at the time he had a white wife.
The Best American Essays 2011 Page 18
