The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (5 page)

I have a question to ask you. I look at the therapist to see if it is okay. She nods. Why do you work so much? You look surprised by the question. I don’t know, you say. I’ve always done it. I know this is true. I remember how, when we met, you were still selling life insurance—a lucrative job finagled from a friend of the family, by your mother—which you’d done for years, even though you were a law student and so young. You also taught swimming at the law school and took care of the pool. In fact, you were poor. You owned two pairs of slacks, one blue and one yellow, and the shiny hazel-colored suit in which you were married. You owned two ties and half a dozen shirts. Two pairs of shoes. I too could pack everything I owned, including my typewriter, in a couple of suitcases. When we finally moved in together, in your room overlooking Washington Square Park, there was an absence of clutter simply because our possessions were so few. A bedspread doubled as a tablecloth, a folding table doubled as a desk. Your single bed seemed fine and comfortable for the two of us. We shared a bathroom with your suitemate.

I wanted to scream at you, as I’d wanted to scream at my mother: Come back! Don’t go to work! I miss you! I am in danger while you are gone! But now it is too late to scream this, even though I finally understand this is exactly what I should have screamed. We were divorced seventeen years ago. I cannot stop the tears, however, and they roll down my cheeks, just as they did after you closed the door to our house, those lonely mornings
so many years ago. I take tissues from the box at my left. Glancing down as I wipe my face, I see your well-shod foot. The cuffs of your designer slacks. We have both done phenomenally well, materially. It strikes me suddenly as astonishing. Because it was never something we set out to do. Today I own large, beautiful houses, overcompensation for the shacks in which I was raised; and when I travel, my hotel suite is nearly as large as our old house. You have a powerful New York law practice, and the best of whatever Westchester County has to offer. There is a rumor that you play golf. I confess that I can’t quite imagine this. Both of us have been hard workers all our lives, and yet much of what we have today—at least speaking for myself—seems to have fallen into our laps. Or do all poor people who become successful in America feel like this?

What is this road on which there is so much beauty and so much pain? So much love and so much suffering? Such surprise. How can it be that we have lost each other all these years? That even though it took my mother thirteen years to die, you never sent her a card. It would have been easier for me to believe you murdered someone than that this could happen. Was it because, on meeting you, she hurt your feelings by identifying you with the only label her fundamentalist Christian upbringing gave her for Jews: Christ-killer. Or that she said, even though she knew better, because I had told her you were only twenty-two, that you seemed like an old man. Once again I look down at your stylish Italian leather shoes. Even your feet have changed, I think, recalling the black “space” shoes you used to wear because your Pisces feet (fish feet) were so tender and often sore. You appeared to roll a bit as you walked, in an attempt to alleviate the discomfort; perhaps this is what struck her as odd, as old. An
old man’s walk. But it was like her, in any case, to be critical of whomever I brought home. Except for Porter, the young man I fell in love with when I was six and became intimate with when I was sixteen. This was her son-in-law, the one she chose, the one she wanted, though he and I separated as friends when I was eighteen. She never said about him, as she did about every other boy or man: He has a homely face, you will soon tire of it; his feet are slightly splayed, his wrists are too thin, he will be bald before he’s thirty. I was dismayed, of course, that she could not really see you. That my father could not. My whole family could not. To them, you were for many years merely a white male blur wearing clothing. No matter how gentle you appeared, you struck an ancient terror in their hearts. To them, all white people had a vampire quality, they were seen as people who devour, who suck dry. They waited for this to happen to me. And there was the awful history of black women and white men.

Our Child is curious about her birth, though I have told her about it many times. She turns to you and says: I understand you were away somewhere when Mama went into labor. You tell her the story of being in court, when the word came. Of arguing a school desegregation case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Of being told by one of the judges that having planted the seed, you didn’t have to be present for the harvest. But that you hadn’t listened, but hastened home, to accompany me to the hospital. And that, while I was still in the hospital, your mother also came, and set up camp in our house. At last accepting that there was another woman in your life. But there was no one but you to visit me in the hospital—or am I forgetting someone? Perhaps our friend Barbara, perhaps the secretaries from your office? In any case, I only remember you.
Your pale, stricken face and fear at the sight of blood. Your apparent helplessness. My attention so focused on the pain that seemed about to drown me, that I could not offer anything except muffled silence. For my gynecologist I had chosen the only woman doctor—it was rumored she was lesbian—in the hospital. Her bedside manner turned out to be chilly and abrupt. She waited until the last possible moment to relieve me of pain—at the precise moment I felt the pain might be turning into its opposite, a completion for which my body has never ceased to yearn. Her hands had not an ounce of gentleness. Her episiotomy unnecessarily savage. No one could believe we were there together, married, to have our neither black nor white child. We were a major offense. And yet, the side of this experience that I have consciously remembered all these years is the look in Our Child’s eyes when she emerged into our world: a long, searching look at you, then an equally inquiring glance at me. It shocked us; it felt so much like an old acquaintance reentering a room we happened to be in. And I remember the red roses, dozens of them, behind which your beaming face, later in my room, appeared. The black nurses delighted in the discomfiture of the white ones, who could not, as the black ones could not, fathom such behavior. Most white fathers of black children in the South never even saw the mothers pregnant, not to mention actually saw the child after birth. The white nurses were soon captivated by your charm and good looks, casting you in the role of a contemporary Rhett Butler, but of course bemoaning the fact that you had chosen the wrong Scarlett. We were the nightmare their mothers had feared, the hidden delight generations of their fathers enjoyed. We were what they had been taught was an impossibility, as unlikely as a two-headed calf: a happy interracial
couple, married (and they knew this was still illegal in their state), having a child, whom we obviously cherished, together.

Did you ever wonder how we must have appeared to our mothers? I have often wondered this. Once, in the days following the birth of Our Child—for she would not speak of sex or childbirth before I had a child—my mother broke a self-imposed taboo to speak to me of rape. Or rather, of how she had avoided rape. I have a feeling now that she was the kind of woman who would have said a woman could not be raped: though her own light-colored face belied this, surely. People who are routinely violated over centuries make curious denials. But I would speak to her of rape, as I spoke to her of everything that mattered. And she told me the following story: That one day she and her sisters and brothers were walking down a deserted road, and white men began to make advances toward and then to chase the girls. Her brothers ran away, leaving the girls to fight or run as best they could. She understood their behavior, of course, but there was sadness in her telling of it. If they had tried to protect their sisters they would have been murdered without a thought. Luckily, she and her sisters were strong and fast; they simply outran their would-be rapists.

Do you remember how I used to suddenly develop passions? I am still that way. In Mississippi I began to crave arrowheads. It came upon me as suddenly as the desire, years before, to write poetry. I hungered for the sight of them. I ached for the feel of them in my hand. Now I think this was perhaps another beginning of the endless understanding of who I really am. In childhood I must have longed for pebbles, for certain tree leaves, for
the sight of the river. For the taste of earth. I remember that I placed an ad in the paper, and that there was a response. I began to collect arrowheads. A few wondrously whole, many broken or chipped. All precious to me. I even collected the stone from a tomahawk. I collected arrowheads for years, and then began the slow, deeply satisfying ritual of passing them on. And yet, since then I’ve never been without. On the kitchen table where I am writing this there is a small wooden bowl from Africa that holds a remnant of what was once a large collection. Our Child has never known her mother without arrowheads, without Native American jewelry, without photographs of Native Americans everywhere one could be placed. Craft and art and eyes steadied me, as I tottered on the journey toward my tri-racial self. Everything that was historically repressed in me has hungered to be expressed, to be recognized, to be known. And these three spirits—African, Native American, European—I knew I was bringing to you. In the early days I wrote you a poem about this. And now I wonder if these three spirits were fighting, some of the time I was so depressed. That the Native American and European, no less than the African, desired liberation. Exposure to the light. My sister, who looks more Cherokee than me, and more European, tells me the Cherokee great-grandmother from whom we descend was herself mad. She was part African. What did that mean in a tribe that kept slaves and were as colorist, no doubt, as the white settlers who drove them from their homes? I do feel I have had to wrestle with our great-grandmother’s spirit and bring it to peace. Which I believe I have done. So that now when I participate in Indian ceremonies I do not feel strange, or a stranger, but exactly who I am, an African-AmerIndian woman with a Native American in her soul. And that I have brought us home.

Collecting the arrowheads from white people who’d found them on their land caused me to think a lot about how empty of Indians Mississippi was. I felt I was walking through a land thick with two- and three-hundred-year-old sorrows, thick with ghosts. Indians are always in my novels because they’re always on my mind. Without their presence the landscape of America seems lonely, speechless. No matter how long we live here, I feel Americans will never know anything about it. In any case, it has been destroyed now beyond knowing.

Last night Harold and I took the kids and we went shopping at that big new supermarket out on Stribling Road. It is a wonderful place. Really huge, and with everything anybody could imagine to want or buy. From grits to lawn chairs. And the best part is that it stays open all night
.

So we got our two carts, me and Harold pushing one, the kids pushing the other, and we started down the aisles. Harold makes a real good salary, and he lets us buy anything we want. We bought a gallon of ice cream, after we’d bought all the daily kind of foodstuff
.

It was really funny, though, because ordinarily in Mississippi you never see interracial couples. Never. Though you see mixed-race children as much as you ever did. Mama says that’s not true; she said that, to let her grandmother tell it, it was during slavery that you saw more mixed-race children. Those were the ones by the masters that they had off the slave women. They would keep them or sell them, as they saw fit. Then during Reconstruction there were a lot of them because of all the white and black folks who worked together and fell in love, or in lust, or whatever. Anyhow, that’s kind of like now, I guess. But what
that means is that here in Jackson, if you want to see interracial couples, the place to do it is at midnight at this all-night supermarket
.

Folks stare at us so much in the daytime, you start to feel like your skin is crawling. But at midnight there’s nobody much at the supermarket. Just the silly clerks, and they’re too sleepy to be as mean as they’ve been brought up to be
.

We saw Ruby and Josh, and Ruby’s four kids. Josh always looks so outnumbered. Their own baby, Crissy, has light hair, but she’s as brown as her mom. And we saw Jerry and Tara; and I think she was drunk. She was wheeling that cart like it was Big Wheels. And then we saw the Lawyer and the Writer. Which is how Harold refers to them. I think he’s jealous, myself. He didn’t finish law school, and he claims women shouldn’t write about themselves
.

I asked him Why not? and he said that white male writers, like Faulkner and Hawthorne and Mark Twain, never wrote about themselves, and that they were masters at it. And I asked him whether this didn’t come out of a tradition of being a writer but needing to keep quiet about the slaving and gunrunning and Indian killing in your family tree. In other words, I said, if white men wrote truthfully about themselves, how could they continue to fool the rest of us?