The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (22 page)

Hum, huh. Said my dad.

They do that every evening, said Aunt BabySis. Sure as clockwork.

Seem to do you good? asked my dad.

There was no reply from Uncle.

I slip him some valerian, I do, from time to time, said Aunt BabySis, meekly, in a whisper.

Dad looked at me.

I wonder what they pray about? I said.

He chuckled as an amused look crossed his face. One I remembered occurring frequently during my years of growing up. You always ask just the right thing! he would say with delight. For a moment I felt an intense surge of pity for my father. No matter what I did, it seemed, he couldn’t help but like me. It shocked me to think his separation from my mother might have had something to do with me.

Uncle’s tired eyes swung slowly upward in alarm. I saw them widen with fear.

Now, now, said my father. You’ve known Hannah since she was a tot. She’s the same person. Just like your son.

The fear seemed to grow.

You all hear much from Harry? asked my father, patting Uncle’s shoulder and looking behind him to see Aunt BabySis.

Well, you know how he is, said Aunt BabySis. He always love his daddy. He used to come all the time when he found out his daddy was sick. That was in the beginning. But his daddy chased him away. Got out of his sickbed to run him out of the yard. Yes he did. All I could do was cry.

You could have tied his sick old ass to the bed, said my father, jovially, squeezing Uncle’s wasted arm. That’s what you could have done.

Brother, hush. Said Aunt BabySis.

It was a sight, I can say that for it, said my father, on the way home.

I was staring out the window of his truck thinking about life in general.

You know, when we was growing up, no white people would even speak to you in a decent tone of voice if they saw you on the street. It was either fake polite or downright mean. So to drive up to Brother’s door and see all white people trailing into his sickroom.… Well, it was a sight, for sure.

And these were white folks you all knew from before? I asked.

Yes, said Dad. We knew ’em when they was Methodists and Baptists. Pentecostals and Faith Healers. But now they’re the Brotherhood, and they claim now they believe every man is created equal. ’Course, they didn’t seem to know they could believe this till the laws changed.

And women? I asked.

Still don’t talk much about that subject, said Dad.

He turned into the wild, overgrown lane that led to his paradise.
I reached out the window to touch the branches of trees that scraped against the truck.

But women do come to pray? I asked.

Yes, they do, said my father. Old and young.

I tried to imagine it. What would it feel like, for an old colored man like Uncle who had grown up desperately afraid of white people to find them grouped round his bed as he lay dying.

I laughed.

What’s funny? asked my dad.

It could be something out of Faulkner, I said.

Yes, said my dad. You know, I like to listen to him on tape.

I knew you would, I said. He had flaws, like we all do. But he was so miserable a lot of the time he couldn’t help but tell the truth. I thought, but didn’t say: Faulkner, an alcoholic, wrote like a man with PMS.

You bring me anything else to listen to? asked my father.

Yes, I said. I brought you a tape about African medicine.

I bet it’s different from the medicine here, said my dad.

They use a lot of herbs, I said.

That’s what BabySis wants to use with Brother, he said. You hear her mention giving him valerian? But the Brotherhood is against it. Called it acting like a witch.

Oh, God, I said.

I heard ’em pray one time, he said, as he got out of the truck.

And? I said.

He laughed.

Oh, he said, you can imagine what they would sound like when they pray. Like they visualizing a real big
mean
somebody they hope can’t visualize them back.

I laughed.

Brother was scared out of his mind, but didn’t want to let on.
He didn’t want them to know they scared him. They’d finally come to try to do some good, bringing those young white girls too, so near to his bed, and all he could do was tremble. The idea of these white folks doing a poor black man good! I bet he wet himself.

So what’s the scoop on Harry?

He went up North, the way so many of our children do. Then people say the children leave because of the white folks. But Harry never would have left home if his daddy hadn’t throwed him out.

Because he’s gay?

I don’t understand that kind of thing myself, he said, after a silence.

You want me to try to explain it? I asked.

Naw, he said. I don’t feel like I’m quite old enough.

You’re old enough, I said.

Not ready, then, he said.

There was a pause.

Life is funny though, he said. Got a sense of humor, sure as you please.

How’s that?

Soon as segregation was finished, and the white folks was worried about the safety of their girls, Harry started being seen all over the place with one of the Brotherhood of the Saved’s people’s sons.

No, I said.

Yes, he said.

So how’d that play with the Brotherhood?

Oh, said Dad, the white boy eventually sickened and died, so his daddy felt some relief. But Harry didn’t die, and for a long
time didn’t even leave town. You remember Harry. The children used to tease him and say he looked like a girl, but he was stubborn and as often as not could beat the shit out of them. I always liked him, myself. But my brother said God wanted him to stay away from his own son, ’cause what he was doing with men was evil in His sight.

He paused, thoughtfully.

Well, he said, everybody always said I was a sinner, anyhow. Rather fish than do anything else on a Sunday, the only day the colored used to have off. I told Brother, Something must be wrong with God’s eyes, if seeing Harry offended his sight. That boy was loyal as the day was long. Loved his folks.

So the two daddies have something in common to pray over, I said.

Shameful children, he grunted.

I don’t wonder that Brother can’t sleep at night, he said, as he watered some plants that grew in a couple of old car tires just before the trailer steps. He falls asleep, screams like somebody’s killing him in his dreams, wakes up shaking like a leaf. How you going to cut your own child out of your heart and not scare yourself to death?

Did you ask Mom that question? I said.

He looked startled.

I just want to know, I said.

The day she mentioned her congregation advised her to stop letting you come home or talking to you on the phone, and she didn’t say she’d told them to go to hell, I moved out.

I sat on the steps of the trailer in the blinding sun, thinking about the mystery of parents and their eternally unfathomable ways.

Well, I thought,
whatever
. I didn’t send for my parents. My parents sent for me. But then I thought: What do I know. Maybe we sent for each other. Nobody knows how this stuff, Life, really works.

Hey, said my father, bringing me out of my reverie, you want some watermelon? He was lugging a huge dark green one out of the trailer. He’d grown it himself and was clearly proud.

Yes! I said, springing up.

It was the perfect thing.

As we ate this most beautiful of fruits, cool, thirst-relieving, delicious, I remembered there had been a time,
in my lifetime
, when black people were ashamed of watermelon, though they loved it with a passion. They would never want to be seen with or near a watermelon. They certainly never wanted to be seen eating one. If you’d photographed a black person eating watermelon in those days they probably would have considered killing you.

My father and I ate until we were stuffed, then we each claimed a sagging porch couch for a midafternoon nap.

We sure have come a long way, I said, drowsily, thinking of taking a sweet, juicy hunk of melon back to town for Mom, who, when I was growing up, would enjoy the deep pleasure of eating watermelon only in the privacy of her own kitchen, while leaning gluttonous and guilty over the kitchen sink.

But my father, his silver beard stained pink with watermelon juice, was already asleep.

To the Husband of My Youth

It is the sixteenth of July 1999. John Kennedy Jr.’s body has been found in waters off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. They say he “hit a square” while flying his small aircraft; a situation in which it is impossible to tell up from down or earth from sky and that he lost his way. I’ve never heard this description before, and I don’t immediately believe this is what happened to him; I am more inclined to think “sabotage” or “preemptive assassination,” but I like it immensely. Instantly I think of all the “squares” I have hit. I think of you, from whom there is no word. No response to my call expressing concern for you after your mother’s recent death.

Thinking of your mother, who never had the faintest notion what to make of me, non-Jewish, non-repentant, I know it is time to lay the past to rest. I say that, but am stunned to feel the absence, not of your mother, whom I rarely saw, but of a
young man I never knew. Someone I never thought that much about. Saw only fleetingly on television or in the news, though his image was, apparently, everywhere, selling television, selling news. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of him; I just never pried into his life. The look I remembered came from thirty-five years ago when he was wearing snowsuits. The little face behind the smart military salute as his father’s coffin rolled by. I look at his picture now and see someone who looks, above all,
decent
. A young man with good eyes and an open, honest face. Someone who barely noticed his own press.

I wonder how you are feeling about this? Did you gaze, as I did, at the faces of the three who died, trying to see if they had, before death, succeeded in finding the secret of life? To live it boldly, fully, without stinginess to the self? To find love and hold on to it until it walks away? To know that today is all we have, and maybe only a fraction of today? And that living life to the hilt is the best praise of it?

We have seen so many deaths! Our battered, trying to do our best with the mess we were left, generation. By now, not unlike the Kennedys, I imagine we are almost at the point of viewing the relentless approach of the Grim Reaper among those we love, coming ever closer to ourselves, as farce. We’ve wept so much. Up begins to rise in us something of the absurd.

I certainly feel this. I also feel, as someone I know has said, that these are the losses that mature us. They are also the losses that make us old. Did any of us expect to outlive the boy we called, as we assumed his family did, “John-John”? Many of us never
expected to outlive his father or his uncle or his cousins. It feels “old” that we have. Remember how Bobby Kennedy came to Mississippi to find out for himself that black children were starving? And that he cried? And that he too, dying, was young?

We are no longer young, Stranger who was the husband of my youth. It is as elders that we are left behind by the young who are everywhere dying ahead of us, whether from starvation, war, assassination, or hitting “squares,” of all forms. My heart aches for them.

We are not even the only ones not speaking to each other. Across America elders are not speaking to each other, though most of us will find we have a lot to say, after we’ve cried in each other’s arms. We are a frightened, a brokenhearted nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusory “safety” of skin color, money or the nineteen fifties. We’ve never seen weather like the weather there is today. We’ve never seen violence like the violence we see today. We’ve never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We’ve never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil.

And yet, Stranger who perhaps I am never to know, the past doesn’t exist. It cannot be sanctuary. Skin color has always been a tricky solace, more so now that the ozone has changed. After Nature is destroyed, money will remain inedible. We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything that is truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience.
Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. That healing begins where the wound was made.