The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart (6 page)

Sometimes I make him so mad
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The Lawyer and the Writer had their little chubby baby in their cart. And they were talking to her just like she was as grown as they were. No baby talk at all, and she’s still crawling. Do you want us to buy some eggs? they were asking her as we passed them. She said something back, like “goop,” and they thought that was yes, so they put some eggs next to her
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I think the Writer suspects Harold doesn’t care for her. She always speaks real warmly to me; but she leaves her husband the job of saying anything much to Harold. I even think she knows he talks about her. Because one time we ran into them at the picture show—also in the middle of the night—and this was just about the first time we met them, I think. Harold and the Lawyer were making small talk, looking just like two ordinary white men, anywhere. And then when me and the Writer walked back over to them—we’d been to the rest room—Harold turned around to her and said: I hear you’re a writer. Kind of smirking, the way he can do. Kind of sniffy. What kind of writer are you? And she looked him up and down and said, real firmly: A shameless one
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The Lawyer couldn’t help it. He loved his wife so much, anyhow. But when she said that, he just bust out laughing. His face turned as red as a beet. It is so funny to me that white people turn red like that. You can see all their blood. And she didn’t crack a smile, just turned on her boot heel and stalked off to the show. And after the show they were all hugged up on the way home, and the Lawyer was just kissing on her and she was kissing him back and everything about them said: Fuck Mississippi, this is good stuff
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Our Child is trying to figure out where she fit in during those years. Where was she, for instance, when we moved from Mississippi and bought “the ruin” in Brooklyn.

But here I shall do something I did often when we lived together: veer off into another world. A world of musing, of
speculation, of merged fact and fiction. The world of lives glimpsed, but glimpsed to the bone; the world in which one passing word might become a written life.

Do you remember Harold and Dianne? He was blond, from Idaho. She was a local black woman with children. I used to wonder why we were not closer to them; I envied them their raucous and colorful and child-battered household. And I remember that you always commented on the fact that Dianne was “so humorless” and you wondered what Harold “saw in her.” One day you said he’d told you: Her secret apparently was her expertise at oral sex. I had not warmed to Harold; now I knew why. Although it was Harold who one day said something I’ve thought about all these years: To stay alive to yourself, you must keep doing the thing that gets you kicked out. He had laughed, saying this. Every choice I make in life, he said, to my Republican family, is more abhorrent than the last. They’d almost committed suicide after meeting Dianne.

I could imagine him up there in Idaho, on the family ranch, six thousand acres wide, his eye pressed against the aperture of the television screen, lusting after the possibility of growing a wider internal, spiritual self that seemed, at the time, to be offered by black and white confrontation in the South. As far as he knew, there were no black people in Idaho, and, curiously, it was his love of the cattle his family raised, his empathy as they were loaded onto boxcars and shipped to a market back east, that made him think the blacks he saw being beaten up on television might be people too.

He was one of the white men who supplied me with arrowheads. It was from his ranch that the tomahawk came. He definitely thought no Indians still lived in Idaho. I think of him
whenever I give readings there, and Indians, some of them friends of mine, claim front-row seats.

Harold and Dianne are both dead now.

At a reading in Oxford, a shy son and daughter came up to me. I was busy hugging on Ned Bing, the indomitable white pastor whose house was firebombed and whose face was badly battered by members of the Klan. It had been years since we’d seen each other. He has no idea how much I love his face; and I didn’t tell him, as I should have, as we stood surrounded by half the town. However I did manage to kiss him just where they’d laid open his jaw, and I pulled on the big, bright pink ear that was stitched back on halfheartedly at the racist hospital, and that managed, out of sheer love, to hang on. And then I stepped back, and there they were, the grown children of Harold and Dianne. Black children, because she’d had them by someone else, some black high school sweetheart, long before Harold arrived. Big brown eyes, dimpled smiles, skin like warm silk. Hair in dreads.

We are the children of Harold and Dianne, they said in unison. Clearly a line rehearsed, since they’d anticipated being shy in front of me. Goddess, I thought, who are they talking about. And please ma’am, I pleaded with Her, let me soon remember. They were that impressive. I wanted to be worthy of them. My face, you always said, was completely readable. It must have been so then, as I rummaged through my Mississippi memory bank, because they laughed. Bust out laughing, in fact. And I saw Dianne’s lips, her rarely glimpsed dimple—and realized she’d almost never smiled—and what her hair would have looked like if she’d ceased to straighten it, and just let it grow. I even saw, especially in the boy, some of Harold’s supercilious cockiness. The
way, in Mississippi, he seemed arrogant even just standing on a corner. He was a hard white man for blacks to cotton to, so to speak. Ah, I said, seeing now what he might have looked like as a black man, and opened my arms.

They flowed into me, both of them, in an embrace that seemed to last forever. They flopped and draped, one to a shoulder, about my body, which met them as if it were a tree. Not a stiff tree, but one that just bends to the ground when there’s a wind. A weeping willow. Do you ever wonder, old lover of mine, where so much love comes from? I wonder this often, because no matter how distressing the world is, wherever I am, there never seems to be a shortage of love. Is this true, as well, for you? We hugged for so long, in fact, that Reverend Bing returned, and gathered the three of us close to him.

Maybe the love is there because of shared suffering? Maybe it rises up wherever we perceive that another human has survived. As human. In any case, the three of us left the throng that had filled the reading venue and went next door to a café that specialized in fried oysters and grits. The food was bad when we lived in Mississippi. Remember? We used to drive all the way to New Orleans, a four-hour trip, just to eat decent food once a month. But here, in the town of Oxford, a bicycle ride from Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s old plantation house, the food is exquisite, and I stuffed myself with oysters, while thinking of my father, whose taste buds I seem to have inherited, and who adored oysters, raw, stewed or fried.

Ernesto and Rosa ate heartily. I would not have guessed tragedy was such a part of their life if they had not hugged me so deeply, as if my body were a kind of raft.

You are one of the few people who knew our parents, said Rosa, after explaining that both she and Ernesto were completing degrees at the university.

We lost them, you know. Said Ernesto.

No, I said. I don’t know.

Reverend Bing looked at me quizzically. I shrugged. I have dropped out of so much of the world that I am aware I miss news I should have heard. Did you know of their deaths? Did you read about it in the paper? Did someone tell you? I pushed away the remains of my lavishly buttered grits.

Nowadays, when everywhere you look there is so much tragedy, so much sadness, whenever I am about to hear more of it, I scrutinize the person or persons who are about to speak. I am looking to see if they are still beautiful, regardless of the tale they are about to tell. And if they are still beautiful, before they say anything, I tell them that they are. This is because Greatness of Beauty is how I see God. God being the common name given by many people to that which is undeniably unsurpassable, obvious and true.

You could not be more beautiful, I said to them. And this is so.

Did you know that Dianne wanted to be a writer? I had no idea.

But that was the first thing Rosa told me. Ernesto chimed in to say that Harold had not permitted her to publish anything. Blinking a bit nervously he said Dianne had spoken admiringly of my work, but that Harold had ridiculed it. He thought, said Rosa, that because you wrote about your own life, that you were shameless. He was terrified to think our mother would write about herself.

And now we know why, said Ernesto.

Yeah, said Rosa, throwing her napkin over her plate.

You have always pestered me to tell you where I was the night before I moved in with you
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This first line from Dianne’s diary conjured up her face for me. It is a funny line, no? A great opening statement for the novel she might have written, had Harold let her.

How did I end up living with a white man from Idaho? The first time I saw you I hated your guts. I thought all blond people were stupid and that white skin looked diseased. We were taught that white people smell funny. Like wet dogs. But thank the Lord you didn’t have blue eyes, those hard glass eyes that might as well be playing marbles, and never show emotion and never even show fear. And you were busy trying to teach people how to vote and being impatient because, in their fear of you as a white man, they had a hard time hearing anything you had to say. If you’d cursed them and called them dumb niggers they would have heard you perfectly. But you were so polite, even while impatient, and called them Sir and Ma’am, and you just about shocked them out of their clothes
.

What was kissing you like, the first time? I remember feeling fear, because I was thinking Good Lord, where are this man’s lips? What must have happened to them? I mean long ago, maybe when the earth’s climate or something changed. I have kissed a lot of men in my life, and they all had lips, sometimes more than enough lips to tell you the truth. But kissing you I felt my mouth just kind of spreading all over your face looking for lips to match up to mine. I was seriously worried that I was
blocking your nose. But you just kept going ummm, ummm, ummm, and pretty soon I quit worrying about it
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Who would have thought? That very morning my daddy had reminded me that white men are lower than snakes. But he wasn’t too high off the ground his own self. And the black men who fathered my children didn’t exactly fly among the clouds. Still, it was with a black man, the father of one of my children, that I spent the last night of my life as a pure black woman. He was out on bail, or maybe he’d run away from the jail, black men often did; and he’d come to see me and the children and one thing led to another. He was the one my mama always liked; you know how mothers sometimes be. And she came by, just as nice, and took all the children over to her house. And Daniel and me just fell in the bed together and hugged each other a long time and just started crying. And he asked me if it was true that I was going out with a white man, and I said yes. And he asked me if I thought he and I could ever get together again, even though he was set to go to prison for twenty-something years, and I said I didn’t think so. And then he asked me if he could spend the night. And I said no. But then we cried so much we tired ourselves out and went to sleep. And then around midnight we woke up, and just started to make love. And we made love over and over for the next six or seven hours, until the children came back and he had to leave
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The next night I moved in with you. And I wouldn’t make love with you because I could still smell Daniel in my body. And the next night I said I had my period. And when we finally did make love, I felt like I had just given up
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Every time you got mad with me about something, you always yelled that I didn’t really love you. I think it upset you that all
my children were so dark. But you felt like this because until you were twenty-seven years old the thought of a black person’s life never entered your head. It was news to you that us poor black folks down in Mississippi had even survived. You thought we were just like the Indians you said no longer existed in Idaho. Sometimes, even when you were looking me straight in my face, I could see you were still surprised. I used to think I should gain a lot of weight and put on a head rag to make you feel more at home
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I knew you were jealous of black men. And envious at the same time. You’d heard things about black men, growing up. Sexual things, that made you feel inferior. And after you saw a picture of Daniel in the newspaper, after he’d escaped from prison and was thought to be hiding out in New York City, you were evil for weeks. I was happy he’d got away. Every day of my life it hurt me to think of him in a cage. But you never understood about prison in the South. That prisons were just the modern version of the plantation. That if someone like Daniel stole something because he was hungry, he shouldn’t be forced to work cotton for the rest of his life
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I feel somehow embarrassed, reading Dianne’s diary. I protested when Ernesto and Rosa (after Ernesto Che Guevara and Rosa Parks, of course) sent it to me. At first, I wouldn’t even open it; I was almost afraid. Afraid of what? Of seeing the writing self, my own, that might not have become. After all, there we all were, in Mississippi, at the same time, encountering the same violence, racism, sweltering heat. Only you supported me in the work I chose to do in the world. Harold did not support Dianne; though he was, apparently, a good father to her children. Whenever I think of Ernesto I actually see Harold; the way he used to
stand, legs spread, his arms folded across his chest, his glasses pushed up on his head, glinting in the sun atop his turbulent blond hair.

No, no, she wanted you to read what she was writing, even while she was writing it and you lived a few miles away! She was desperate for someone to share her writing with. This is what the children tell me. Rosa is herself thinking of writing a novel, just because Dianne never could. Ernesto thinks perhaps he will be a journalist for television.