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  For My Parents

  I

  JUST AS DROWNING IS SAID TO BE DELICIOUS WHEN ONE STOPS STRUGGLING, SO I TRIED TO REPRODUCE THAT DELICIOUS SENSATION.

  John Ashbery

  WHAT MEMORY IS NOT A “GRIPPING” THOUGHT.

  Lyn Hejinian

  EVERYTHING COMES TOGETHER IN A NOVEL, LIFE IS ANOTHER MATTER.

  Clarence Major

  NOTES, INSCRIBED INITIALLY IN THE NARROW, RUNNING MARGIN

  Such as it began in the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, on Fathers’ Day, you not some babbling prophet but another Negro child, whose parents’ random choices of signs would disorient you for years. It was a summer of Malcolms and Seans, as Blacks were transforming the small nation of Watts into a graveyard of smoldering metal. A crueler darkening, as against the assured arrival of dusk. Selma-to-Montgomery. Old folks liked to say he favored the uncle who died young, an artist. In that way, a sense of tradition was upheld, one’s place in the reference-chain secured. Digression. Brick houses uniform as Monopoly props lined the lacework of street for miles. Before there was Arlington, there was Palm, indeed a dimmer entity which burns in one’s memory like iodine. “Baltimore Law.” They eventually settled on a single-family detached, in the Walnut Park section of the city, after months of wrangling with the agent, as it was quite naturally assumed that they, like others who worked for a living, would eventually own their own property. The red cement porch, which Daddy painted at least one time, beneath the gray-greenish, slate-shingled eaves. The draperies had not yet begun to rot, nor had the ottoman relinquished a leg to leaning. Some of them were working at the post office then, though many were unionized auto-plant or factory workers. Cleverness in conformity often goes unnoticed. The block opened out onto the immense Calvary Cemetery that we had heard to be the haunt of vampire mummies, who would lie in wait beneath the headstones for children who failed to say their prayers. In the mirror, an admirer. You dreamed of romping there when older with the tougher boys, smoking cigarettes, copping feels, jumping out from behind trees, playing like an agent from “Dragnet.” Crossing the street was considerably more forbidding. Four, in hand. A home in which to watch the seasons pass, to grow old within a chosen “community.” Now names of most neighbors have shifted past his consciousness like afternoon shadows across the living room floor. Everyone, except the neighbors, marveled at the size of the basement. Then no one used heroin because they lacked for “family values,” even though they spoke so blithely of our “ghetto.” Pruitt-Igoe. Words, wildly uttered, acts unmitigated, emergence of their search for validation. Many backyards wore a chain-link garter that stretched out to the alleyway, and so whenever the rudipoots shattered their wine or soda bottles into smithereens of glass, it always fell to us to sweep them up. Now-or-Laters. Snoopy, the second in a cavalcade of pets, would parade regally about the screened-in back porch. Daddy soaked then bathed him in a pan of gasoline to strip his coat of mange, so that when we spoke of him at all, it was as “under quarantine.” Children often see with a clarity that adults ignore. Around the corner, down the hill, three blocks or so, until the fields of St. Catherine Labouré unreeled before us, as in the scenes in that movie usually broadcast during the “sweeps” preceding Christmas, the projector that lighted up the cinema of our childhood dreams. Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe. No better place existed to fly kites or box-crates, except Penrose Park, where, one supposed, the nuns never chanced to set habit. You assembled the frame and tail according to the package’s confusing directions, which required more than the recommended ten minutes. Junie aided him in getting his aloft, before it tangled and then plummeted with the others. The genius lies in the execution. The Ville, whose village. Shivering, you stood on the sunlight’s skirt, yet they laughed as they looked right through you. Shrieks of all sizes and colors would distort the evening air, rendering it opaque and virtually unreadable. Who would not beg to stay out past curfew, when the excitement usually began. “Catch the ball, boy, catch the ball!” as it rearranged the contours of our face. “Tag” became the game of choice, though we occasionally improvised with “Batman” or with “Jonny Quest.” Against form. Before the final closing of eyes and the “good night’s sleep,” the irrepressible march of twilight.

  A CHAIN OF INCIDENTS, ANTECEDENTS, THE VERY EVENTS THEMSELVES

  Memory, that vast orchard of myriad, variegated moments, appears to undergo an endless replanting. In the summer the heat would troll across the city like an immense seine, gathering every living and inanimate thing in its folds. This entails no notion of the “subject.” Being of Southern blood, nearly all of them could bear it, though not without some cavils and some grudging. Chatillon-DeMenil. Ardor, or another, made the man next door shoot his wife, though at the beginning there was little violence and still the white flight had begun. Contingency spells the death of certitude. Of course everyone had relatives in Arkansas and Mississippi who were on their way, since Negroes just two years before had finally won jobs at the Jefferson Bank. The impact of this pebble of history is barely felt nowadays, particularly by the generation that has benefited most. From West Florissant one could quickly reach the highway heading south to the riverfront, where the Arch and the river-boats reveled. Mill Creek Valley. Few of the homes had central air, a fact made obvious by a simple street review, as almost every other window distended with those plastic, wheezing boxes. This note: Baden sat less than a half-hour’s walk away. Somnambulant majority. Like his mother he was said to possess a “viper’s tongue,” a trait leaving all but the older teachers wary. Her family had washed north in several tides, the main ebbing occurring shortly after the First World War. Whether they came by train or by carriage bears important historical implications. Aos pés da cruz. By his time several of the city’s schools had been integrated, but the decisive court order lay decades away, and then how often would his parents repeat to him that Sumner High School, founded in 1875, was the “first comprehensive Black high school this side of the Mississippi.” St. Louis was spared the riots of that era, despite the anger burgeoning in the projects. Many of the protesters lived within a few miles of where the slaves had been manumitted, a fact particularly evident in Wellston. Well, you needn’t. Please print on the dotted line. This, as does each of these flares of intellection, takes note of the structural aspects of signification. Uncle Clarence and Aunt Emma stood guard before an armory of toys, a few of which were older than the century. Like most of the father’s family, they represented a higher social class and the products of vibrant miscegenation. Years before, someone, in a spirit one might now term enterprising, had sold the family farm in St. Charles that would have been their birthright. Portage des Sioux. You spoke up, as was usual, but they simply chose to ignore you, interested instead in their game of spades, with its rising, idle chatter. The kitchen of his body in which the fires of history were blazing. In the sword tree there were Osage whom we mistook for Cherokees, which seemed not an uncommon occurrence. Certain actions need no convincing. Veronica, who could tell better stories than one might find in library books, thus assumed the role of playmommy, teaching you how to sing and fight and whom to call “meshugenah.” Out of earshot, one heard talk of depression, accompanied by the occasionally unsubtle comment on her weight. Loneliness is solitude unfulfilled by its own presence. Their eyes fled this text, or perhaps its context, one infers, out of a fear of contamination. Mild and muddy springs, hot and humid summers, brief and balmy autumns, how they sabotaged one’s readiness for winter. We were admonished to wear caps to prevent an attack of heatstroke, since our heads, small lots of blacktop, proved extraordinary attractors of sun. Ring-A-Levio. Still, he grew dizzy and dropped to his bed of sedge, which they dismiss
ed as so much unnecessary drama. White reflects, relax. “Speak when you are spoken to and tuck in your lower lip, and save a big kiss for Maman,” which each, like well-reared little boys, would have done without the threat of a “whupping.” Night, a knowing not. Then you noticed the motorboat moored in the Deans’ backyard, and went home and dreamt that someone might eventually sail her. The thought alone is often worth the promise. Perhaps out near Lake St. Louis, or in Illinois on Lake Carlyle, or more likely on the Missouri or the Lake of the Ozarks, though the important point was that they could at least afford to. Religion then was but one current in the river of our lives. Poinciana. By adolescence, most of these reflections had lost their color, which adulthood later restored from its dull and pallid palette.

  LANGUAGE, KNOWLEDGE, A TEEMING RIVER OF IMPLICATIONS

  A small yet insubordinate squadron of impressions had laid siege to his consciousness since infancy. Everything reposed beneath a glaze of dew, which was each morning’s way of announcing its arrival. The slow greening of the daylight through the shutter slats, or evening, when the gangway grew sullen with darkness. Chances are. Shadows appeared to creep across the floor, until you focused to discover them ants. Photographs will substitute for a fully-sketched description. Waterbugs and spiders were really more common, rappelling down the tiles like mountaineers. In the jar, the aphids asphyxiated. With a view to pleasing the adults, you told no one. Moreover he could claim two godfathers, to everyone’s amusement, of whom one had served quite honorably in Vietnam. The violent tenor of the recollections, perhaps resulting from a delayed effect, far exceeded what everyone had expected. Your tongue, but a bat in its cavern of reassurance, would take flight when you least expected it. Montgomery, My Lai. Many of the children, except those whose parents were considered “strivers,” would walk to the neighborhood school. They first launched his punt at a Montessori Academy, which was thought to enhance a youngster’s chances in life. There we could play with Legos of innumerable colors, a pint-sized oven that actually baked, and the other kids, including Patty, who soon became enamored of the red-haired boy. This was before one gained a sense of the “body” and could picture oneself “in affliction.” Double talk. Eventually they took turns reading the “Negro” poets from those yellow-papered books whose covers had long ago disappeared. Usually we would sit and talk, or watch the TV set, or on warmer evenings walk several blocks with the dogs or alone for a “breath of fresh night air.” Nice work, if you can get it, and you might get it if you lie. At the corner store, nickel candy and a sody pop, but only if you had been sterling. There never was, consequently, any incentive to steal, since this course of action had not been fostered alongside some greater moral lassitude. Pilfer, for a pal. Occasionally we heard shooting, but most often it was shouting, which a battle of fists or blades would readily resolve. Our ears hammer impressions into audible jewels. Further down the boulevard sat the unimposing branch library, further still the artist’s studio. His wife, an artist in her own right, had sculpted the papier-mâché painting of Kali, which hung for years like a totem above the sofas. Chain of Rocks. You drew not only numerous studies of people, but a series of scenes to accompany them, yet they still denied that a child was capable of such work, convinced instead that you had traced or forged. Treemonisha. Just as well, heedlessness or laughter, a sure forgetting. The subsequent art teacher showed a mastery of the art of drawing lips and eyes, and thus encouraged us all to indulge in more identifiably “African” forms. Use a pen or pencil and answer all questions. A simpler example: a V with a circle on top, or a colorless ice-cream cone. Eugene Field House. Few things compared to culling lightning bugs live, since your mason jar theater became their nightstage. Roaches formed a different category altogether, like the stains that created a rusty crust upon the motel sheets, or that car that leapt the curb to cut the corner. “Em, eye, crookaletta, crookaletta, eye, crookaletta, crookaletta, eye, humpback, humpback, eye,” and thus one could always avoid utter embarrassment in any blackboard bee. The result, a fathoming beneath the flourish of so many notes, a veritable exigesis. Music is the obvious analogue, that inimitable California poet tells us, which, in the context of the life that you have lived so for, is as much truth as trope. Yes and no. Yet, whenever the icecream truck would come by, the first impulse was to run to the window and perform the dance of seven wails. Who would not relent, before such shameless displays of talent. These episodes ceased, however temporarily, in the presence of “company,” and at the family reunions, when all small ones were expected to be on their “absolute best behavior.” Eventually the blight of crime and drugs would subsume the entire area, forcing a capitulation to the prerogatives of personal safety. And so, as his cousin said more eloquently than the mayor and the experts, when officials speak of “Urban Renewal,” it’s the Black folks that got to go.

  ARRIVED AT BY RITES, BY RITUALS, A FINAL LINE OF DEFENSE

  In that house then, on that morning, as many in those families were Catholics, they were observed to interact in rhythms common to their faith and class, leaving abstract yet indelible imprints on the etching-plate of others. There who could ever truly “be a boy,” given the demands of such games of truth. Magnificat. The grandparents’ church sat on a street named Cote Brilliante, where the shade stood as still as the spire. They had become Presbyterians, a sect commensurate with a certain social standing. This preoccupation with the religious aspect points to a fuzzy, metaphysical nature. Natural Bridge. Several liquor stores sat in walking distance of that narrow, Negro crossroads, having reared and raised the men who owned them. Oh now, go to it, jazzmen. The excommunicated, like the divorced, were denied the most blessed sacrament, yet we refrained from overt comment on them as we had learned our contempt to be un-Christian. The paralyzing force of such inflexibility soon endeared you to certain Protestants, which only the testimony of succeeding years demonstrated the power to dispel. Underlining this were nuns who bore the names of exalted men, who taught their lessons in frowns and furrowed chins. In the end this disquieting descant left each child more unsure than before. His heart is a grotto bearing witness to others’ kindnesses. A sudden musicality of phrase, as when one hears the windowpanes humming. Louis the Conqueror, not High John. Although in our sepia book of saints we were usually drawn to the visage of St. Martin de Porres, our city had received its name from the patron saint of France. Pronounced phonetically, after the British fashion. Religion now plays such an ambiguous role in American children’s development. “Pass the plate, don’t keep us late,” which confirmed that he had originally been a Baptist. The priest, whose voice engraved these messages into our callow youth, would homilize before leading the whole congregration in song. Though his claps seldom managed to keep the beat, we thought them to be heartfelt. Nave of doves. A stranger terror lurked within the confessional, which was unlighted and reeked of sweat. Dance of the infidels. Aleikam salaam one replied to the man who peddled oils, incense, revolutionary tracts, and slender, mimeographed volumes of poetry. And so by the end of the Detroit riots they had chosen completely new names, thereby casting off another aspect of their heritage. Isis, Icarus, Iscariot, Idris. “I discovered that I could never remember how my favorite songs went,” she wrote as if in anticipation of your “problem.” Sunday-school lessons and softly spoken psalms had lodged in that crystalline realm of the mind which the swirl of adolescence would dissolve. To reach the building on Kingshighway required a half-hour drive from home, yet you could always sneak in through the side doors if late or you forgot your tithe, or beg for doughnuts if the culprits were gas and cigarettes. Something, however, points to behavior that is indisputably trifling. In the interim he flipped through the bulletins, which were troves of vital information. Memories, like cataracts, sometimes blind us to the present. All the cats come in. He prayed, kneeling solemnly on the rug’s sandpapery surface, but his prayers remained wholly unanswered. A call, as always, upon the authority of the ancestors, at a pitch such as might befit a cantilene.
Innumerable the issues they hid before the children, thinking them simply incapable of coping. Cousins who were Jehovahs argued that Jesus died on a tree, enlisting anecdotes and apocrypha as their proof. At Mass no one caught the spirit like those “Pennycostals” do. More baffling was why they called the holy bread the “host,” why it could not touch our hands, and why it resided hidden in the “sepulcher.” Would it melt in the mouth or turn to flesh again, and then how on God’s earth could someone swallow? Dim body, dazzling body. When the fun began it was frequently bedtime. Volubility unchecked in an imaginative child is a sure prescription for disaster. Although he tried to cloak these comments in a voiceless whisper, his voice dispersed the silence like a well-cast stone.

  TEXTS, CONTEXT, A FEAR OF CONTAMINATION

  Education, they counseled us, is the one, true key, yet the school was known less for its floors of tidy classrooms than for its gym with collapsible bleachers and that polished, hardwood floor. Promise-harness. The committee, comprising the clergy and the most prominent lay members, rechristened the complex after the first Black Catholic bishop, which provided even the most taciturn with an engaging topic of discussion. Simply naming, while powerful, never proves enough. He was usually charily chosen for the kickball teams, or last for any sport requiring aggression. A palpable terror, a shortness of breath. Consolation lay in the reading contests and the sketching assignments, when we could excel far beyond the expectations of both teachers and friends. My teeth cast a gleaming net for you, a white and wordless reply. Cardinal Ritter. “Poetry” served then as the recitative of bible-men and the pimp who stayed on the corner, or the huckster who with brio sold them a faulty vacuum cleaner. In those days we could recall the names and life stories of the major Black inventors almost as readily as our multiplication tables, though in truth a disjuncture persisted between their paradigms and how we perceived them, which neither teachers nor other adults sought to bridge. No one really slept at naptime. After the wedding, marked by a holy sacrament which he believed he understood, he and the other children brought Mrs. Orange her namesake fruit. In fourth grade, following a premise that defied “equality,” the classes cleaved into two distinct and ability-based homerooms, which garnered for the smaller, brighter class a rancor it little deserved. “Freedom School.” Thus that year proceeded by way of experimental groupings and methods, which sound nothing short of radical in the context of education today. Many the nuns who scored the names of saintly men in their heads until each was resurrected by reflex, and who, in daily sweeps past their desks, left a near-visible trail of camphor. With your hair cut so short, the older boys renamed you “Shine,” rubbing your head as though it were their own personal talisman. “Sensitive.” Yet who did not desire to follow their model, for they were more real than his idols. What little boys do. Behavior enough to gain us mention in the newspaper, where he spoke of his desire to be popular, or in the parlance of those days, the “Caped Crusader.” Ivanhoe, Pip, and Peter Pan led the list of childhood favorites, though it was hard to identify with that bespectacled, British “John.” His father would not hesitate to mine him for that single ore of truth, since this, he had convinced himself, was a father’s chief occupation. If you therefore were one who regularly lied, then your recollections might consist of the sum total of your childhood fictions. He waited but the invitations never materialized, so he learned to create small diversions for himself. A cleansing thus ensued, an art of remembering developed, a renewal undeniably the result. “Straight-A, Straight-A, nothing but a sissyboy who’s scared to play,” they screamed burning tracks across the playground, their faces brown, blazing globes of glee, as he crumpled near the swingset like a raveling, forgotten husk-doll. Repression’s effects assume manifold forms. One option proposed seriously was that of skipping a grade, though they feared that might warp her emotional development. In other words, neither parent had expected such a fragile character, though they bore the verdict better once they had bought it. Some children are badly suited to this world, though their elders rarely gather this fact until the dawn of the teen years, when the complement of options has shrunk to zero. Baldwins reclined between a Jong, several Cozzenses, and two Morrisons, but Michener’s opera had long held sway of the bookshelf. Neither Bolivia nor Paraguay has an ocean port, you learned from encyclopedias at the great-aunt’s house. A few of them so old that they crumbled between the fingers, others crinkled with that odor of never having been fully opened. The genius lay in the execution, or at least in how she kept the deception from becoming apparent. Ebony and Black Enterprise graced the marble coffee table, though Jet garnered everyone’s initial review. Our generation possesses only a cursory sense of the world that our ancestors braved, though the burdens of history bear unmovably upon us. Homer G. Phillips. Rollerskating in the summer around Steinberg Rink, or else in one of many indoor halls, and when he was old enough to wield a racket, tennis in O’Fallon Park. Sugarloaf Mound. One assessment: the chill cast the courts in a crepuscular light. Stan, who coached the older, lither players, sported a thick, beguiling mustache, while coiled hairs spilled from the V-neck of his jersey, leaving us with a sensation that we were yet unable to name. Ruby, my dear. “Swing, baby, lemme hear that ball sing and dance, serve, but not so much racket string, you got it, now, whoa, don’t fling it.” By perfecting a strategy, we learned gradually, we could organize and master almost any game, a lesson as applicable and valuable outside the court as on it.