Grace (17 page)

Yet it is because of a book, an anthology that contained his father’s poems, that he is teaching at a public college in Brooklyn. It is because he was witness to the power of his father’s poetry, to the influence it had on a young boy’s life, that he is there.

“How come you stay here?” Banks had asked him one day. “You could be teaching anywhere. You’re a Harvard Ph.D. for Chrissake.”

It began as an assignment. He was teaching at an Ivy League school, in New England, a place as far away geographically as it is temperamentally or ideologically from where he teaches now, when he was invited to join a committee that was designing a placement test for a public university system. Until that committee, he had not known there were eighteen-year-olds who graduated from high school without the ability to write a competent sentence or to decode the simplest of reading materials
above the seventh-grade level. Until that committee, he had not thought of race and poverty in this way, not as causative factors prohibiting the acquisition of the most fundamental of human intellectual activities.

He volunteered to teach in a literacy program at his public library. One day he overheard a boy, about thirteen, reciting lines to his friend that he recognized as his father’s. The boy was a troublemaker, the librarian had said. The class clown. He had repeated the fifth grade twice and had been threatened with having to repeat it again unless he joined the program.

He was showing off, rattling off the lines to the amazement of his friend, but he made a mistake. He left out a line. Later, as he was leaving the library, Justin stopped him and told him so.

“It’s James Peters, man. I got it right.”

Justin gave him the missing line.

“Says who?” the boy said. “You the authority on James Peters?”

Justin went to the stacks and brought him an anthology of poetry that included his father’s poem.

“Read it. See, see. It says so right there. See the missing line.”

But the boy could not see. He did not have the skills to see, to read the missing line.

Justin was astounded. The next day he volunteered to tutor the boy privately. The boy told him that if it were not for James Peters he would have been on the streets with the gangs. James Peters showed him he had more worth than to be a follower in a gang.

But how did he manage to memorize so many lines? Justin wanted to know.

Someone had taped James Peters at a reading and gave him the recording.

The following year Justin applied to teach at his college in Central Brooklyn.

JUSTIN HAD KNOWN his father’s story. His aunt, saddened by his outbursts each time a letter arrived from America, and fearing he would lose all love for his father, had told it to him. James Peters was not always a revolutionary poet. Before the radicals sent for him, before he became theirs, he was James Peters, the poet. It was afterward that he became James Peters, the
black
poet. James Peters, the angry
black
poet.

But this knowledge did not bring about the effect his aunt had hoped for. It pained Justin even more to know that his father had been willing to abandon him, his own son, for mere strangers. So as he grew older, he devised a way to ease the sting of his hurt and yet stoke his anger. He thought of his father not in personal terms, as the man he loved, the man he thought had loved him, but as the poet who had betrayed his sources, who had let race so define him that all he once loved, all that once inspired him, became anathema.

When James Peters was young, Wordsworth was his idol. Later, it was also Homer. He had won a copy of Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads
in an essay contest. By the time he was twelve, he had memorized half the poems. At thirteen, he was writing his own imitations. He continued to write them until one day,
his literature teacher (a very black man who was in a losing battle with the British colonial government over a cocoa estate he had inherited from his father—which the British had had no interest in until oil was discovered on it) read to the class a passage from the
Iliad.
It was the same passage Justin would read years later to his students in Brooklyn, with the same hope that it would stir in them, as his father’s teacher had hoped it would stir in his students, an unquenchable desire for qualities that make us human: dignity, courage, integrity, compassion, conviction.

This teacher, who had the misfortune of having a last name most suited to the color of his skin and a first name that suggested it, was the butt of jokes. Black Blake, the students called him, or Blakey Black, liking the way the alliterative
bl
rolled off their tongues, but James never joined them in their taunts behind his teacher’s back. Blake Black was a god to him, a man standing firm in the face of ridicule from the colonial powers.

It was not only the language of Homer, the story of Hector bravely confronting certain death at the hands of Achilles, that moved the young James Peters. It was the passion in Blake Black’s voice, the tears that welled in his eyes, when he read the lines
But now my death is upon me. / Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious.

The Jamaican poet Claude McKay, who immigrated to the United States, would make his fame on similar lines, though Justin is not certain he ever credited Homer. But neither did Winston Churchill credit McKay when he recited McKay’s sonnet to rally his troops to victory in England’s darkest hour, the
German squadrons hurling their death bombs on London:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.

But this was to be Justin’s point: Good literature has relevance to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, or gender.

When Blake Black committed suicide after the British warden seized his lands for nonpayment of taxes and threatened him with a prison term, James Peters stopped writing nature poems altogether and began writing poems about resistance and courage. His inspiration remained Homer, the
Iliad
as well as the
Odyssey
, Hector as well as Ulysses, but the ones who sent for him from America did not know that. Someone had chanced upon James Peters’s poems. The Movement wanted him.

It took a teenager to open Justin’s eyes. James Peters’s poems had value that transcended racial boundaries. The young man could barely read, but he had memorized ten stanzas of his father’s longest poem. He was no animal, he told Justin, even if those racist pigs treated him like one. James Peters’s poem reminded him he was human.

And if a poem had such power over a boy of thirteen, why not a book of poems and a comment about love tossed off carelessly by a professor who was admired and revered by a sensitive young man in the torment of love?

It is snowing again when Justin returns home, light flecks of white that dissolve the instant they land on his windshield. Parking is torturous though there is space in the street where he lives. But the trucks came early with their giant snow shovels and banks of snow are piled up in the area he had cleared that morning. Jim Grant watches him double park and take a shovel from the trunk of his car. He laughs.

“Still needing to use that brawn of yours, Peters?” Jim Grant has a theory about clearing snow in the city: If it snows for more than two days, take public transportation. “This ain’t the ’burbs. The sanitation department don’t care one hill of beans if you been digging all day to clear a space for your car. When they come with their snow shovels, they will bury you deep.” Jim Grant’s car is locked in at the curb, under a mountain of snow.

“I’m a hardhead, Jim.”

“All you young Turks are.”

Anna is there. Giselle runs to him and announces her presence.

“Aunt Anna’s in the kitchen. She says we can’t plant the seeds until the snow goes away. When will it go away, Daddy?”

Justin takes her hand and walks into the kitchen. He greets Sally and Anna. Sally responds but she remains bent over a container that Justin can see is filled with dirt.

“So when will the snow stop, Daddy?” Giselle is tugging his sleeve.

“I told her it will be spring soon,” Sally says.

“Anyway,” Anna says, “we’re still waiting for the seeds to root. Remember, Giselle: they sprout roots, then leaves and stem, and when they do that we’ll be ready to plant.”

“But what if the snow is still here?”

“What if? What if? You are full of what ifs, aren’t you, Giselle?” Anna tweaks her ear.

“But what if it snows?” the child insists.

“We’ll plant them in the little boxes Mommy made,” Anna says.

“Look, Giselle,” Sally says, pointing to the row of tiny plastic containers in bright primary colors turned over on the table. There is a red, green, yellow, blue, and white one, even a black one. “That’s why Aunt Anna helped you and Mommy put holes in the bottom.”

“For the water to drain out,” Anna says.

“I told you that, Giselle,” Sally says. “Did you forget?”

“Aunt Anna’s going to bring more dirt tomorrow,” Anna says. “We’ll fill them up together.”

A tight, self-contained triangle. This is what Justin thinks of them.

Anna kisses Sally. “I’m going to leave now,” she says.

“I hope not on my account,” Justin says.

She chooses to ignore him.

“Will you be okay, Sally? Will you be all right?”

They have talked. Sally has told her about their quarrel. The hiatus Mark’s near suicide triggered is over.

“I’m fine,” Sally says.

“Are you sure? Do you want me to call you tonight?”

“I’m fine. Really I am, Anna.”

“Then tomorrow?”

They embrace again.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER he has read a bedtime story to Giselle and after he and Sally have tucked her in bed, he approaches the subject again, the one they have left hanging in the air since their talk in the restaurant.

“I suppose you think I’m being unfair,” he says.

“I won’t be made a prisoner, Justin.”

“I’m not trying to imprison you.”

“Then what do you think you are doing when you say that you will not have Giselle live in two places?”

“I did not say that to imprison you, Sally.”

“Then what else? You know I cannot be without Giselle. I cannot leave her.”

“Neither can I.”

“It’s that West Indian macho stuff of spreading your seed and counting it,” she says bitterly.

“If you mean we don’t abandon our children, yes.”

The unspoken implication angers her. She strikes back. “And neither do African American men,” she says.

They have descended into the quagmire of ethnic squabbling. They have been there before. It took days, sloshing through accusations and threats thick as mud, for them to resurface. When they did, they vowed never again.

Sally unbuttons and then re-buttons the top of her blouse. She sits down on the armchair. Justin crosses the room, re-crosses it, and leans against the bathroom door. They must both cool down. They know they can be sucked again to the bottom of the quagmire by this difference between them, this cultural divide pried open by geography, by beasts not men, who dumped one ancestor here, the other there, like cargo, after that brutal crossing through the Atlantic.

It had not been their quarrel. They had not started it. One of Sally’s friends, male, a frustrated admirer no doubt, drunk, but not too drunk to be cruel, had called Justin a leech. “All you West Indians who took that banana boat to America,” he said, “you are leeches living off the blood of African Americans. If it wasn’t for us, you’d all still be there cutting cane. We changed the quotas for you; we got them to let you in.”

He was speaking of the Immigration Act of 1965 that came on the heels of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.

Justin said his brains got him here. A scholarship to Harvard.
Sally said nothing. It was that silence that hurt him more than anything her friend had said.

Days later, he and Sally reached a compromise. Yes, she agreed with him, he did it on his own. But Harvard, she said, would not have been so generous as to add a scholarship to graduate school to the undergraduate scholarship the Trinida-dian government had given him if Harvard’s doors had not been kicked down by black people in the Struggle.

What Justin chooses to remember most is what she said afterward. “You could have stayed in New England. They liked you there, but you came to Brooklyn to teach. I admire you for that,” she said. “I love you for that.”

Now he tries to soften his tone. “I won’t abandon Giselle.” He says this quietly, so quietly she does not hear.

“What?”

He repeats himself.

“I am not asking you to abandon her,” she says.

“You’re asking me to see her every other weekend, two weeks in the summer, every other Christmas and Thanksgiving. …” His voice has turned cold, hard as steel. “And to pay for her support,” he says. His eyes sweep the room.

“It’s the money. Is that it, Justin?”

“I simply won’t have my child, my own flesh and blood, rationed to me.”

“She’s my flesh and blood, too.” She folds her arms across her chest.

“Rationed to me like … like if she were some commodity that can be parceled out in bits and parts.”