Grace (8 page)

For, as Justin sees it, racism will be a fact of life until we acknowledge our common humanity, until we admit that we are all in this together—rich, poor, black, white, yellow, and red— the inheritors of a legacy that was forfeited in Eden. And so Justin has committed himself to showing his students that they can find themselves in ancient Greek literature, that Shakespeare can be meaningful to their lives.

The students are waiting for him when he enters the classroom. Today they will continue Hamlet. They have reached act 4. Hamlet is on a plain in Denmark. One more time Hamlet is berating himself for his lack of courage. He knows that his uncle murdered his father. He has the proof: his father’s ghost returned from the dead to tell him all. He had actors stage a play about a king who was murdered as his father was murdered. He saw the guilt on his uncle’s face. Why has he done nothing? Why has he not avenged his father’s murder?

Justin reads the soliloquy aloud. Then suddenly, without warning, a thought sneaks up on him and plunges him into the dark tunnels of self-recrimination:
If Hamlet is a coward, then is he, Justin, a coward?

He clears his throat. “Is Hamlet a coward?” He poses the
question to his students, but it is the answer to the question about himself he wants. Surely he has sufficient evidence that Sally is having an affair. She no longer enjoys sex with him; she stays out late; she hangs up the phone when he enters the room; the phone clicks off when he answers it. Why is he so ready to accept her word, her bogus explanation? What more evidence does he need?

A chair scrapes loudly across the tiled classroom floor in the back of the classroom and refocuses his attention. He pushes Sally away and leans forward on his desk. He forces himself to remember his purpose: to make Shakespeare relevant,
Hamlet
meaningful to his students. But
Hamlet
has become relevant to him, relevant to his quarrel with Sally.

“Miss Clark,” he says. “You want to say what, Miss Clark?” Ordinarily, he does not address this student with such enthusiasm. Ordinarily he grits his teeth and does his best to cut her short, but now he wants a distraction. “What do you think, Miss Clark?”

He finds her intimidating, and not only because physically she is overpowering, a full-figured woman with big breasts, large thighs, and an ample backside; not only because she insists on Lycra, Lycra top and Lycra leggings (today, it is white top and black leggings that stretch over her voluptuous curves like the casing on sausage); not only because she has big hair, dark brown and auburn extensions rising above bangs across her forehead and falling in a thick mane to her shoulders; not only because she has hooked into her earlobes huge gold hoop earrings, two sets, the ones on the top larger than the others below them;
not only because she has plucked her eyebrows in thin streaks that arch menacingly above her eyes (menacingly is the way Justin sees them for he is ill at ease with women like Miriam Clark, women he senses know a world he is acquainted with only through books); not only because she has lined her full lips with a darker shade of the deep red lipstick she is wearing, but because, though she cannot be more than twenty-one, she is a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners woman. Weeks before, after a discussion about Bernardo, the husband in García-Márquez’s novel who returns his wife to her parents when he discovers she is not a virgin, he heard her say to one of the male students as she was leaving the class: “Yeah, let somebody just try to return me as if I was a bag of garbage!” Justin had no doubt then she would make chicken feed of such a man.

Now she is working her way to the front of the class.

“He a punk,” she says. “Hamlet’s a punk.” She is punching the air with her finger, jerking her head back and forth on her neck like a duck as if to the beat of one of those rap songs that blast eternally from boom boxes and cars all over the city. Her earrings clang against each other. “A plain, ordinary, punky coward. Yeah, that’s what he is. A cowardly punky punk. A punk.” Not even her lilting Jamaican accent can soften the harshness of her accusation.

The class titters with nervous laughter. Justin too is affected.
Is that what he is: a cowardly punky punk?

“A weak little man,” Miriam Clark says. She is standing next to Justin’s desk, facing the class.

“Preach, sister,” one of the women in the class urges her on.

Justin feels a discomforting need to defend Hamlet, to defend himself, but he does not want to be chicken feed. He tells himself that that is what Miriam Clark will make of him if he speaks now. He knows a terrible rage burns in her. Mark Sandler has told him that her boyfriend was picked up by the police for delivering a bag of cocaine to a friend in Harlem. He is doing six to eight years. She was left with two small children, a boy four and a girl three. She was in her second year when her boyfriend was sent upstate. He made her promise to finish college.

“Thing is he never took drugs. Didn’t even smoke weed,” said Mark. “He was what the cops call a mule. He just delivered the goods.”

“If he had any guts, he would off his uncle, Claudius, for killing his father,” Miriam Clark is saying. “He’s a weak crybaby making excuses. A mama’s boy, that’s what he is. Crying because his mama has a new boyfriend. A punk. I wouldn’t let anyone get off killing my father. You hurt the people I love, and it’s Good Night for you.”

Mark said there was nothing Miriam Clark could do. She had no money for lawyers and the lawyer the court gave her thought black boys should be penned upstate anyway. Or sent back to Africa.

“Yeah, Hamlet knows what he is. He’s right. He knows he has no balls. He knows he’s coward. How many times is he going to say that? Punk!”

Justin decides to let her wear out her anger. All for a bag of
cocaine, a delivery that is made every sixty seconds on Wall Street, Mark had said.

And then an older student raises his hand. He is close to sixty, older than Justin. Like the rest of the college, the students in his class are made up of young high school graduates, but older adults, too, returning to school, some after an absence of two and three decades.

“Mr. Blackstone?” Justin’s voice strains with anxiety.

“What I want to say, what I am going to say, may not please Miriam, but I want her to listen.”

“Miss Clark?” He turns to Miriam Clark.

Her chest is heaving, but she is consumed by private thoughts now.

“Can I speak, Miriam?” Mr. Blackstone asks her. A stately man with kind eyes, he is old enough to be her grandfather.

Miriam bites her bottom lip.

“Is it okay?”

She waves her hand in front of her face. She could have been brushing away a fly. Or a bad thought. Charles Blackstone takes it as a sign of consent.

“I’m a prison guard,” he says. “In Rikers Island.”

The students give him their full attention.

“Every day I see more and more hotheads come in the prison. Young Turks like you. No offense, Miriam. I don’t say this to insult you.” He glances in her direction. She is breathing normally. “I want to help you,” he says. “All of you. The professor here wants us to figure out what is Hamlet’s problem and if he
did the right thing. I say Hamlet did the right thing to take his time to figure out what to do. If the young boys I see in jail took their time to figure out things, they wouldn’t be in jail. You don’t always have to do something when you get mad, when somebody don’t do right by you.”

Nobody moves. Nobody makes a sound.

“I know it’s hard when the police treat you like you’re nobody. When they snatch you from the corner and all you’re doing is talking to your buddies. Or when they stop you in the street because you’re wearing a good leather jacket they think you shouldn’t own. But don’t challenge them. They have the power. Say Yes, sir; No, sir, even if you want to kill them. Say Yes, sir; No, sir. Give them what they want. They just itching for an excuse to send you upstate, don’t you know? A lot of the young men in Rikers Island wouldn’t be there if they knew how to say Yes, sir; No, sir. Think out things first. Don’t act when you’re hot and sweaty and you want to hurt somebody. You end up hurting yourself. Take time to think, cool off. Figure out how you can do something so that you don’t end up hurting yourself. Because that is all you do when you act with a hot head. You hurt yourself.”

Even Miriam Clark is still. The corners of her mouth twitch as if she is about to cry. She gathers her books and stuffs them in her bag. She rushes out of the classroom.

Minutes later, the period ends. The classroom is empty but Justin remains sitting at the desk.
Yes, Hamlet is not a coward.
He has his answer. Not only should he not do anything more, he should not have done anything at all. He should not have
said a word. He should have waited until he had spoken to Sally. He should have given himself time to think. He should not have jumped to conclusions. He should not have let a mirage of letters in the early dawn lead him to doubt her.

On his way home he buys a bunch of tulips. They are Sally’s favorite flowers. He gets pink ones with white scalloped edges. Pink is Sally’s favorite color.

The house is strangely quiet when he opens the front door. It is half past five. When it’s Sally’s turn to pick up Giselle, she is usually home by half past five. He calls out to her.

“Sally!” He walks into the kitchen. She is sitting quietly at the table sipping a mug of tea.

“Where’s Giselle?”

“Anna has her.”

“Anna?”

“She has taken her to the library.”

There is a storytime program for young children at the central branch of the public library on Grand Army Plaza. Around six, the librarian or some good storyteller reads a bedtime story. Some of the children come to the library already dressed for bed, wearing pajamas under their coats. Giselle loves this story-time program. Either he or Sally takes her when they can.

“I thought we needed to talk,” Sally is saying, “so I asked Anna to take her.”

He does not want this. He feels foolish now standing next to her, the bunch of tulips clutched in his right hand and pressed against his chest. He lets his hand fall and the tulips point downward, toward the floor. She notices.

“Where did you get them?” she asks.

He does not want to say he bought them for her. “It’s such a nasty day, I thought they would brighten up the house.”

She takes them from him and reaches for a vase. While she puts water in it, he tells her about Miriam Clark and Charles Blackstone’s response to her, how he turned
Hamlet
into a cautionary tale that seemed to scare the class. He is not conscious that he is telling her this because he wants her to come to his same conclusion: They need time to think. He should never have disturbed their calm that morning by asking the question:
Did you have something to tell me, Sally?
He is conscious only of filling spaces, of trying to ease the tension between them.

Sally knows about Miriam and sympathizes deeply with her. She knows where the tentacles of racism can reach. Right into your front yard, in the quiet of the morning, when you are turning in your sleep, when your father places an arm around your mother and draws her to him. Right in the bullet of a gunshot that triggers off a nightmare. Then your father is lying in a pool of blood, your mother is pulling her hair from the roots. Tufts of black balls fall softly to the ground, light as feathers. Your brother turns to stone and you try to move him. “Run, run,” you shout. “Go get help.” He is older than you. He should protect you. You scream, and his muscles soften, loosen. Urine rolls down his pants.

Sally used to live in Harlem, but not always in an apartment. When she was a child, she lived in an entire house, with four floors and a garden in the back, in a brownstone house on Strivers Row on 139th Street. Her father was a doctor, a graduate
of an Ivy League medical school who baffled his friends by returning to Harlem to open a practice. They could not understand: He had his life in front of him, a future that promised fame and fortune. But Dr. George Henry was a man of conscience. He wanted to practice medicine where he was most needed. His sister called him a foolish man. She said so with a tenderness that brought water to her eyes.

In the summer of 1965 Dr. Henry decided to make good on a promise he had made to his wife, Ursula Henry. He rented a house for the summer on a lake in Alabama, the state where his wife had spent her childhood. His plan was not to stay there the entire summer, of course. He would come when he could, every two weeks. Word got out about the big shot doctor from the North. The big shot, uppity Nigra doctor acting like white folks.

One night, August 15, a posse of men in white hoods and robes rode into their front yard. Sally’s father ran out with a shotgun. They killed him in self-defense, the Alabama police said. Her mother had a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered. Sally was four, her brother, Tony, was seven. He overdosed on heroin when he was twenty-five.

Sally told Justin this story just once, before they were married. She did not want his sympathy. She simply wanted to warn him about a major difference between them: He has not had the experience of growing up black in America. But she had read Khalil Gibran: Let there be spaces in your togetherness. Complete agreement, she said, is not a requirement for marriage.

Justin shares this view: the notion of two becoming one is
a fantasy, a myth. He married Sally because she understood this. She would give him room for his work. He did not think, when he proposed to her, that she would need room for her work. She taught primary school, little children learning primary colors.

“What Charles Blackstone says makes sense,” she says, “but sometimes you have to take the bull by the horns.”

Justin tries again. Perhaps he has not told it well. Mr. Black-stone had managed to quiet the class. Mr. Blackstone had calmed down the excitable Miriam.