The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (2 page)

Its gate is the only thing left of the wooden fence we put up. The sweet gum tree that dominated the backyard and turned to red and gold in autumn is dying. It is little more than a trunk. The yard itself, which I’ve thought of all these years as big, is tiny. I remember our dogs: Myshkin, the fickle beloved, stolen, leaving us to search and search and weep and weep; and Andrew, the German shepherd with the soulful eyes and tender heart, whose big teeth frightened me after Our Child was born.

The carport is miniscule. I wonder if you remember the steaks we used to grill there in summer, because the house was too hot for cooking, and the chilled Lambrusco we bought by the case to drink each night with dinner.

The woman who lives there now, whose first act on buying the house was to rip out my writing desk, either isn’t home or refuses to open the door. Not the same door we had, with its three panes at the top covered with plastic “stained glass.” No, an
even tackier, more flimsy door, with the number 1443 affixed to its bottom in black vinyl and gold adhesive.

I am disappointed because I do want to see inside, and I want my lover to see it too. I want to show her the living room, where our red couches sat. The moon lamp. The low table made from a wooden door on which I kept flowers, leaves, Georgia field straw, in a gray crockery vase. The walls on which hung our Levy’s bread poster: The little black boy and “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s.” The white-and-black SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee) poster of the large woman holding the small child, and the red-and-white one with the old man holding the hand of a small girl that helped me write about the bond between grandfather and granddaughter that is at the heart of my first novel. There by the kitchen door was the very funny Ernst lithograph, a somber Charles White drawing across from it.

In Tupelo where I lectured I saw an old friend who remembered the house better than I did. She remembered the smallness of the kitchen (which I’d never thought of as small) and how the round “captain’s table” we bought was wedged in a corner. She recalled the polished brown wood. Even the daisy-dotted placemats. The big yellow, brown-eyed daisy stuck to the brown refrigerator door.

I wanted to see the nondescript bathroom. If I looked into the mirror would I see the serious face I had then? The deeply sun-browned skin? The bushy hair? The grief that steadily undermined the gains in levity, after each of the assassinations of little known and unsung heroes; after the assassination of Dr. King?

I wanted to see Our Child’s room. From the porch I could see her yellow shutters, unchanged since we left. Yellow, to let her know right away that life can be cheerful and bright. I wanted
to see our room. Its giant bed occupying most of the floor, in frank admission that bed was important to us and that whenever possible, especially after air-conditioning, that is where we stayed. Not making love only, but making a universe. Sleeping, eating, reading and writing books, listening to music, cuddling, talking on the phone, watching Mary Tyler Moore, playing with Our Child. Our rifle a silent sentry in the corner.

The old friend whom I saw in Tupelo still lives in Jackson. When we met two decades ago she had just come home from a college in the North where she taught literature. She’d decided to come back to Jackson, now that opportunities were opening up, thanks to you and so many others who gave some of their lives and sometimes all of their life, for this to happen. She hoped to marry her childhood sweetheart, raise a family, study law. Now she tells me she hates law. That it stifles her creativity and cuts her off from community and the life of the young. I tell her what I have recently heard of you. That, according to Our Child, you are now writing plays, and that this makes you happy. That you left civil rights law, at which you were brilliant, and are now quite successful in the corporate world. Though the writing of the plays makes me wonder if perhaps you too have found something missing in your chosen profession?

She remembers us, she says, as two of the happiest, most in love people she’d ever seen. It didn’t seem possible that we would ever part.

It is only days later, when I am back in California, that I realize she herself played a role in our drifting apart. This summer she has promised to come visit me, up in the country in Mendocino—where everyone my age has a secret, sorrowful past of loving and suffering during the Sixties time of war—and I will tell her what it was.

Maybe you remember her? Her name is F. It was she who placed a certain novel by a forgotten black woman novelist into my hands. I fell in love with both the novel and the novelist, who had died in obscurity while I was still reading the long-dead white writers, mostly male, pushed on everyone entering junior high. F.’s gift changed my life. I became obsessed, crazed with devotion. Passionate. All of this, especially the passion and devotion, I wanted to share with you.

You and I had always shared literature. Do you remember how, on our very first night alone together, in a motel room in Greenwood, Mississippi, we read the Bible to each other? And how we felt a special affinity with the poet who wrote “The Song of Solomon?” We’d barely met, and shared the room more out of fear than desire. It was a motel and an area that had not been “cleared.” Desegregated. We’d been spotted by hostile whites earlier in the day in the dining room. The next day, after our sleepless night, they would attempt to chase us out of town, perhaps run us off the road, but local black men courageously intervened.

Over the years we shared Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. Orwell. Langston Hughes. Sean O’Faolain. Ellison. But you would not read the thin paperback novel by this black woman I loved. It was as if you drew a line, in this curious territory. I will love you completely, you seemed to say, except for this. But sharing this book with you seemed everything.

I wonder if you’ve read it, even now.

Our Child was conceived. Grew up. Went to a large Eastern university. Read the book. She found it there on the required reading list, where I and others labored for a decade to make sure it would be. She tells me now she read it before she even left home, when she was in her early teens. She says I presented it to
her with a quiet intensity, and with a special look in my eyes. She says we used to read passages from it while we cooked dinner for each other, and that she used to join me as I laughed and sometimes cried.

What can one say at this late date, my young husband? Except what was surely surmised at the beginning of time. Life is a mystery. Also, love does not accept barriers of any kind. Not even that of Time itself. So that in the small house that seemed so large during the years of happiness we gave each other, I remain

Yours,
Tatala

Did I ever tell you about the woman who used to come begging at our door? I wonder if you met her? She was thin, somber, brown. Neatly dressed. About thirty-five, I would guess. Her head was always covered, and now when I think of her I feel there was something ascetic, religious, about her. She would suddenly appear, every three weeks or so, and she would ask if I had “a few pennies” to spare. I always gave her more, of course. But she would not accept dollars, only pennies and, reluctantly, it seemed, “silver money.” Each time she came I invited her in; she never accepted. You remember how hot it was in summer: I would offer her a glass of water; she always refused. I never saw her coming. I watched from the window as she left. I think she stopped at the Belts’ next door, but I am not sure.

Who was she? She was the only beggar I ever encountered in Mississippi, where family kinship networks were so strong.
Over the years this woman’s unrelenting begging—but with such stoic restraint!—has plagued me with questions. For I realize now that each time I opened the door, smiled at her and attempted to make her welcome, while I searched the house for coins, she regarded me with a coolness that I can only admit now was really hostility. Why? Also, no matter how hot the day, this neatly dressed beggar was never sweaty when she appeared at the door. Did she park an air-conditioned car just out of sight of our house? Was she, in fact, an agent of some sort, sent to keep an eye on us?

I could not bear to think of this then. I was home alone most of the time. Then, after the birth of Our Child, I was home with a small child. But now I realize, especially after visiting our old house, how odd it was to have a regular, well-dressed beggar appear at the door, obviously not that interested in money, and resentful of my kindness. I wonder now if seeing her there on my porch, begging—she held out one hand limply, carelessly, as she looked her hostile look—aroused my guilt at having a house, a husband who loved me, a child. Or was I always afraid that she was really me, or as I might become someday, out on the street, begging, with nothing but my—hopefully—clean rags of clothes.

This was at the same time that I was discovering the ancestors who’d died unsung and impoverished. I was uniquely placed to see how far the end could be from beginning and even middle. The writer I cared so much about, for instance, had died really poor. And yet, now that I am older, less easily frightened by images of poverty, now that I know poverty can also contain richness—deep friendship, for instance, or a faithful, devoted
love—I wonder more than ever about the inner life of those who have been up and now are down. There is always the outsider’s look at an impoverished life: it seems pitiful, a waste, a shame. Yet seen from within the poverty, perhaps a different reality might be sketched. A reality of lessons learned the hard, hard way that lessons
are
learned. Perhaps to finally know one or two true things about life makes up for the lumpy bed and chilly solitude.

And so I wonder now, if I asked you, if you would remember this woman? If, on my journeys away from home, she rang our bell and you answered the door? And what your take of her situation was. Did she accept only pennies and “silver money” from you? Did she refuse dollars? Refuse water. Refuse to temper her hostility.

Sometimes, in my wooden house in Mendocino, with its yellow pine, barnlike slanted roof, I think of her dignity, if she
was
a beggar. I think of her going from brick house to brick house, in our suburban neighborhood. Behind each door a striving black middle-class family. Men and women who would rarely own more than their own houses and cars in their lifetimes, and know this as success. Women who would feel fear, to think of this woman out on the street—a phenomenon associated entirely with big city or Northern living; men who would speculate, feel embarrassed and surely—one or two of them—prurient. Was this why she never smiled?

Her look, her manner, everything said very clearly: I will never work again. I prefer to beg. If, in fact, she was a beggar, and not an agent sent by the Klan, the White Citizens Council or other
white supremacy groups of Mississippi. I used to wonder who slipped “The Eyes of the Klan Are Upon You” cards in our mailbox, which was on the front porch. Could this have been her task? And if so, how had she been recruited? To whom was she, or her children—I always felt she had children—a hostage?

There is a bitterness that does not dissolve when I think of black women begging. I feel their rage, and it is mine too. I am here and you are there, we say to the well fed. Why are we both not on the side of plenty? That is what I want to know, as I look into the eyes of someone who has given everything, if only symbolically, and is left with nothing. And the black woman begging does not let me get away with giving more than is asked. Once, in New York City when it still shamed me deeply to see a black woman beg—not that it still doesn’t, but my emotions have been battered into a more bearable numbness—there was a woman on the corner who reminded me of the stiff-necked beggar who came to our door. She too asked for coins, for “silver money” only. In my shame and do-goodyness I offered a twenty-dollar bill. She chased me down the block to give it back. Grim, un-softening. In fact, clearly disgusted with me.

There has been no response to my letter, which Our Child dutifully delivered. And one is not required. You are someone else now; someone I do not know. It is as if the young man I knew is dead, and you have colonized his early life. I know you sometimes speak of that time in Mississippi among people who loved you, so far away from Brooklyn and the tiny, contentious house from which you fled; but you must realize that the person you speak of is not you. But perhaps this is too bitter. Perhaps it is
better to speak of the sadness one feels as the result of directly experiencing any sort of waste, whether in material or human terms. I miss you. We were good people. And together we were good. Allies and friends. Too good to have those years stolen from us, even by our grief.

How were we to know Langston would die so shortly after we refused him a ride with us? I remember introducing you to him as if he were my father. I was so proud. He was so seemingly at home in any world. The huge Central Park West apartment we were in, for instance, with its windows overlooking the Natural History Museum. How young we were! Sometimes, thinking of our youth, the image that sums it up is the back of your neck, just after you’d “taken a haircut” and your brown shiny hair was shaved close to the back of your head and abruptly, bluntly, terminated, leaving your neck extremely vulnerable and pale. For some reason, I was moved by this; it always made me think of you as someone who would, and did indeed, stick his neck out. Langston liked you from the start.

I was too shy to notice anyone else, or even to hazard a thought about the politics of the gathering. Writers and poets and agents and editors, I know now. Some famous, some not. But what was fame to me? It seemed too far away even to contemplate. It was winter, I was, as always, longing for a father. How odd life is: Now, one of my brothers is very ill. He tells me, when I visit him in the hospital, that the father I always wanted was the one he actually had. He remembers my father organizing in our
community to build the first consolidated school for blacks in the county, which was burned to the ground by whites. Then starting again, humbly, asking a local white man—who might indeed have been one of those who torched the first school—to let the community rent an old falling-down shed of his, until a second school could be built. He tells me my father traveled to other counties looking for teachers, because our county was so poor and black people kept in such ignorance there were no teachers to be chosen among us. It was my father who found the woman who would become my first-grade teacher. My brother’s words are both fire and balm to my heart. Now, in my fifth decade, I know what it is to be deeply exhausted from the struggle to “uplift” the race. To see the tender faces of our children turned stupid with disappointment and the ravages of poverty and disgrace. To think of the labor of Sisyphus to get his boulder to the top of the hill as the only fit symbol for our struggle. I am thankful that, when I went North to college, one of my teachers introduced me to the work of Camus. Sisyphus, he said, transcends the humiliation of his endless task because he just keeps pushing the boulder up the hill, knowing it will fall down again, but pushing it anyway, and forever.